IAEA: Straddling the Geopolitical Divides of Ukraine, Iran and Aukus
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its head will spend much of 2023 straddling the ever-growing geopolitical gulf between its member states over crises from Ukraine to Iran, and in the debate over the Aukus military arrangement between the US, UK and Australia that has prompted China to unprecedented levels of engagement in Vienna.
The Aukus proposal to share US and UK nuclear-powered military submarine technology with Australia, and negotiations with the agency over a safeguards arrangement that might enable such an arrangement, have infuriated Beijing, which views Aukus as an explicit threat. How China's fury plays out in the coming months may ripple through to other crises and to the agency itself, particularly as Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi's initial term as director general ends in December.
"The Chinese are going to intervene at a level we’ve not seen," Mark Hibbs, a Germany-based expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Energy Intelligence, "in part informed by the Chinese view that for several decades, when most of the fundamentals of IAEA policy were set down, the Chinese were not in the room."
China is of course now a superpower, and it will very much be in the room in the leadup to March, which marks the end of the 18-month consultative period following the September 2021 announcement of the Aukus initiative. Over the past year and a half, the three partners have been discussing with each other what Aukus might look like operationally. As recently as September 2022, US National Nuclear Security Administration head Jill Hruby told journalists in Vienna that "it is not yet determined who is building the ships and the reactors" or "how many there will be," and that this was "all being discussed in a very active way."
Parallel discussions have been ongoing with the agency over what a safeguards arrangement with Australia might look like. Similar talks were launched last summer with Brazil, which has long been developing its own indigenous nuclear naval propulsion program. Brasilia was likely motivated to start talks "so that they don't get stuck with the precedent negotiated by someone else," one source close to the agency told Energy Intelligence. At issue in both negotiations is paragraph 14 of InfCirc 153, the 1972 model for the comprehensive safeguards agreements with the agency that both Brazil and Australia have signed. That paragraph allows for the "non-application of safeguards to nuclear material to be used in non-peaceful activities" in non-nuclear weapons states. Such "non-peaceful activities" have historically been interpreted to include nuclear propulsion.
Board Fights?
The agency's talks with the Aukus parties over what a new safeguards arrangement with Australia might look like have enraged Wang Qun, China's ambassador to the IAEA, and both he and senior officials in Beijing have waged a furious campaign against the talks. "China has come to entertain serious concerns about the Director General's approach to the Aukus issue," Wang said during November's IAEA Board of Governors meeting, and Grossi "cannot arrogate to himself the right to draw so-called 'conclusions' on his own by going beyond his well-defined role and mandate."
What might play out this year, therefore, is a battle over whether the board must approve any arrangements with member states on this issue or whether it must simply be notified of those arrangements. One eagle-eyed observer noted that the 2022 Safeguards Glossary — a door-stopper index of IAEA terminology meant to "facilitate understanding," but with "no legal status" — explained that any arrangement pursuant to paragraph 14 "will be reported" to the board, whereas the 2001 Safeguards Glossary, the most recent previous version of the document, said that such an arrangement "be submitted" to the board "for prior approval."
Grossi is therefore walking a very thin line: he's trying, on the one hand, to facilitate an enormous push from some of the IAEA's most powerful members, while on the other, trying not to further enrage Beijing. Should China perceive that Grossi and the secretariat are attempting an end run around the board on the Aukus issue, Wang may throw a wrench in the works of many other issues, from the agency's annual budget to a second term for Grossi, whose current term ends Dec. 2. By tradition, directors general are not opposed for a second term, but there's no guarantee that Beijing will honor such a tradition if it blames Grossi for enabling what it sees as a major geostrategic threat.
For the moment, China has been unable to assemble a broad coalition of other member states sharing its concerns over Aukus, but that could change — particularly if things go south in the other key issues facing the IAEA.
Further Challenges
Few believe there's any chance of success at this point for Grossi's long-pitched nuclear safety and security protection zone around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. IAEA officials have been able to monitor all of Ukraine's major nuclear sites, including Zaporizhzhia, and while that plant remains in the middle of a war zone, the Russian occupiers have had some success fortifying Zaporizhzhia's spent fuel pools, and nobody appears to be targeting the facility. But that status quo is unlikely to remain fixed all year, and there's considerable room both at Zaporizhzhia and in how talks play out in Vienna for the situation to go south.
And then there's Iran's nuclear program, which will only produce ever-greater amounts of high-enriched uranium after talks to restore the 2015 nuclear deal collapsed last year. The IAEA comprehensive safeguards agreement with Iran — and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it helps implement — is now the only legal mechanism restraining the Iranian nuclear program that Tehran recognizes, meaning that in some ways the agency's role in Iran has only grown in importance. But the longer Iran flirts with being a nuclear weapons threshold state, and the greater its stockpiles of fissile material, the more likely things shift to the military sphere, and to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, either secret or overt.
Any three of these key issues — Aukus, the safety of nuclear facilities in Ukraine, and Iran's nuclear program — could explode this year, in some cases quite literally. Preventing this will be an enormous challenge for Grossi and the IAEA, and even if worst-case scenarios are avoided, it will be a struggle to maintain some sort of diplomatic comity in Vienna as the world's geopolitical fissures deepen.