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Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

This was, then, the context in which the 1995
Resolution on the Middle East was adopted. It was a world
in which dramatic progress in codifying WMD-elimination
seemed finally to be possible as a result of rapid
movement by affected states in resolving many of the
underlying security problems that had divided them and
impeded such movement for many years. At the time, it
seemed reasonable to expect that further movement in
institutionalizing WMD-elimination arrangements - such
as by setting in place a Middle East Zone free of WMD and
their delivery systems - might be possible as favorable
trends in the security environment continued.

Ill. Fast Forward: Challenges for the 2020 NPT
Review Cycle

Unfortunately, those happy trends did not continue.
The reasons for the failure of the broader peace process
and the region’s continuing instability are beyond the
scope of this paper, but movement on the Middle East
Zone itself seems to have run aground in part because the
international community’s desire to institutionalize a
process outran actual progress in working through
security challenges. ACRS, for instance, stalled over
Egypt’s desire to front-load WMD-free-zone issues on the
regional agenda - which was unacceptable to Israel in
advance of more progress being made on regional
security. And so the Middle East Zone shifted gradually
from being a locus of optimistic and aspirational
diplomacy into little more than a vehicle for accusatory
recriminations and reciprocal blame-shifting.

By the time the current U.S. Administration came into
office at the beginning of 2017, diplomatic posturing over
the Zone had already destroyed chances for agreement
upon a consensus Final Document at the 2015 NPT Review
Conference (RevCon), and prospects for progress along
the traditional lines argued by Zone advocates such as
Egypt seemed dim indeed. Quite apart from the dynamics
of NPT discussions, moreover, an even more fundamental
challenge was that by the beginning of 2017, the once-
hopeful situation in the Middle East had been in
retrograde motion for years and looked nothing at all like
1995 anymore.

It had been reported by the IAEA in 2011, for instance,

that Iran had maintained a structured military nuclear
weapons program until 2003, including activities related
to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, and

Volume I, Number 15 | August 4, 2020

that some nuclear weapon-related activities may have
continued after 2003. Even though Iran had accepted
temporary limitations on the size and scope of its fissile
material capabilities in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), Tehran continued to deny the existence of
its past weapons program and had refused to divest itself
of whatever items, materials, and capabilities had been
part of it. Iran had also kept many of the personnel from
its prior weapons program working together on closely
related dual-use technologies, and indeed under the same
man who had previously run the program. Even before the
Israelis revealed to the world in 2018 extensive records
and data the Iranians had been secretly preserving from
that weapons program, in other words, Iran was clearly
maintaining the option of resuming its pursuit of nuclear
weapons should it choose to do so.

With certain limits set by the JCPOA set to expire ina
few years’ time and others by 2025 or 2030, Iran would
thereafter be free to pursue unconstrained material
production and stocks of enriched material - just the sort
of capabilities it would need if it decided to reactivate its
weapons work using the personnel and know-how it had
retained from that program. By early 2017, therefore, this
was not only a tremendous nonproliferation and regional
security problem that had yet to be solved, but also one
that the very existence of the JCPOA made it more difficult
to solve - since the nuclear deal lifted just the kind of
pressure on Iran that would be needed in order to elicit
Tehran’s acceptance of more enduring nuclear limits.

It was also painfully clear by early 2017 that Iran’s
rapidly-developing ballistic and cruise missile programs
were presenting radical new threats to stability in the
Middle East, well beyond the mere fact that Iran had
worked for years to develop a nuclear warhead for its
Shahab-3 ballistic missile. Iran had built up the largest
and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East, and
under the JCPOA its behavior worsened, with new missile
from such provocations. Iran was taking rapid steps to
improve the accuracy and lethality of its missiles even
while exporting rockets, missiles, and missile technology
to non-state actors such as Lebanese Hizbollah terrorists
in Lebanon, Shi’ite militia groups in Iraq, and Huthi militias
in Yemen. Israel was under constant and growing threats
from this proliferation, lranian-supplied rockets were
periodically used against U.S. military and diplomatic
facilities in Iraq as the number of lran-backed militia forces


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Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

downward over time into hyperbolic recriminations that
will further poison the atmosphere for constructive
engagement, especially as it becomes increasingly clear to
its participants that the Conference will not actually move
Zone issues forward. We shall see.

VI. Conclusion: Where Now?

Given the amount of political energy and attention
that Egypt and other Arab League states have put into the
new U.N. Conference process, it is likely to continue to
dominate Arab efforts on this issue for the foreseeable
future, making it less likely that they can be persuaded to
support more constructive initiatives - even if those other
efforts are pursued in parallel to, rather than in place of,
the U.N. process. Since Israeli views on this Conference
process are also unlikely to change, an important question
for the future is whether, or the degree to which, the Arab
Group will make any constructive effort to give Israel any
incentive to participate or seek to meaningfully address
legitimate Israeli concerns about a process seemingly
designed to exclude its participation and minimize its
security concerns. If the Arab Group is, that would be a
hopeful sign. If not - or if the Arab Group turns instead to
more divisive tactics, such as following the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) model of
corralling true believers to draft a treaty text and then
demonizing non-signatories - the Conference process
could be especially damaging and counterproductive.

As for a genuinely better path forward, the passage of
two years has not made the recommendations we made in
the 2018 U.S. Working Paper any less salient. Those
interested in reading that paper in detail can find it on the
United Nations website. For present purposes, suffice it to
say that in trying to find a more viable way to implement
the 1995 Resolution, we suggested seven principles, which
| paraphrase here:

1. All States should remember that the primary
responsibility for advancing a Middle East Zone lies
with the states of the Middle East itself. We all should
support and encourage them to come together for
this purpose, but the task is one they must themselves
lead - and which cannot succeed if they are not
willing to engage directly with each other.

2. Regional dialogue on the Zone cannot be divorced
from the political and security dynamics of the region,

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and efforts to implement it cannot succeed if they
ignore that security environment.

3. Efforts to implement the 1995 Resolution that focus
on process over substance are unlikely to succeed.

4, The NPT review cycle can lend its support to realistic
efforts to establish a Zone, but is incapable of solving
Zone problems or imposing a solution on regional
states. Efforts to address Zone concerns in the NPT
context will not bear fruit, and will only threaten
progress on other issues in that review cycle.

5. Because success in implementing the 1995 Resolution
is closely linked to developments and trends in the
Middle East security environment, supporters of a
Zone should encourage regional states to find
practical ways to establish there a security, political,
and diplomatic environment that is more conducive
to progress.

6. All NPT States Party should support and encourage
regional states to act on these principles in working
toward a Middle East Zone.

7. The United States is firmly committed to supporting
regional states in making conditions in the Middle
East more conducive to progress toward a Zone than
they are at present, and we will support any path
forward that has support from all the regional states.

These principles remain important today - and, if
anything, they are more so now than ever. The United
States remains dedicated to encouraging the regional
states to move toward a process that is genuinely
inclusive, that takes into account the security concerns of
all parties, and that provides an opportunity for
cooperative work to address real-world security
challenges along the road to finally implementing the 1995
Resolution and making the Middle East Zone a reality. As!
observed in remarks at the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies last August, moreover, the
emergence of the CEND initiative and the Warsaw Process
that was begun in February 2019 at the Ministerial to

- both of which are now well underway and incorporate a
broad range of regional states, including Israel and Arab
League states - are positive signs that such dialogue is
indeed possible, and may offer useful models for progress
in the future.


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Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

IV. The New U.S. Approach

In hopes of taking advantage of any opportunity for
creative new thinking that might be opened up by the
failure of past efforts to establish a Middle East Zone and
the apparent bankruptcy of traditional approaches, the
United States was determined to address these challenges
with fresh eyes. By 2017, all participants in prior efforts
had arrived at an impasse, and a general sense of burnout
seemed to prevail. (The Israelis, in particular, saw
themselves as having been ill-treated, both by the United
States and by other diplomatic interlocutors. Jerusalem
had taken substantial risks in participating at a high level
in five rounds of informal regional consultations in Glion
and Geneva despite legitimate concerns regarding joining
an NPT-originated process to the creation of which Israel
had not originally been party, and it now felt frustrated
that this good-faith effort had not been met by greater
flexibility by Arab states.) At the 2017 NPT Preparatory
Committee (PrepCom) meeting, Zone efforts seemed very
much to be in disarray, with some in the Arab Group and
Russia simply trying to double down on the failed
Glion/Geneva process, but Egypt calling for what it
described as “new and alternative mechanisms” without
yet publicly offering any specifics about what it had in
mind.

In response to this general rudderlessness, and in
hopes of seizing an opportunity to direct years of stilted,
formulaic, and unproductive discourse in directions that
were both more constructive and more likely actually to
lead eventually to the creation of a Zone, the United States
prepared a new working paper for the NPT Preparatory
Committee (PrepCom) in April of 2018. This paper rested
on several key principles, which are closely related to the
lessons | described above and are also visible in the text of
the 1995 Resolution itself.

First, as we approached this question, it was very clear
that exogenous diplomacy was no substitute for
seriousness by the states of the Middle East themselves.
We were willing to support inclusive, consensus-based
initiatives that emanated from the region, but the desire to
achieve a Zone had to come from the region, and could not
simply be projected upon it by outsiders. As the U.N.
Disarmament Commission itself recognized in April 1999,
in fact,

“(t]he initiative to establish a nuclear-weapon-free
zone should emanate exclusively from States within

Volume I, Number 15 | August 4, 2020

the region concerned and be pursued by all States of
that region. ... All the States of the region concerned
should participate in the negotiations on and the
establishment of such a zone on the basis of
arrangements freely arrived at among the States of
the region concerned.”

This seemed to be at least as true in 2018 as it had
been in 1999. To our eyes, it was a losing game to try to
coerce regional participation or generate political will for
the parties involved where none existed.

Second, we were not interested in simply doubling
down on previous approaches and reenacting prior
processes that had consistently failed to produce results.
To us, such an approach sounded too much like the
witticism often (if perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Albert
Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results.”

Third, we wanted our approach to be grounded in
arealistic assessment of the actual political and security
situation in the region, and to offer some intelligible path
toward alleviating the underlying problems that had
stymied progress toward a Zone in the past, and which
had been in recent years becoming even more
worrisome. For anyone trying to create a Zone free of all
forms of WMD and their delivery systems, for instance, it
was absurd to ignore the region’s worsening problems of
CWC noncompliance, unaddressed Syrian and Iranian IAEA
safeguards problems and nuclear proliferation threats,
destabilizing proxy warfare, and the rampant
development and proliferation of ballistic and cruise
missiles of all sorts. Any serious effort to establish a Zone
would have an enormous amount of work to do in bringing
this broad array of problems under control, and in this
context, simply prolonging a diplomatic process the
principal objective of which seemed to be simply to isolate
and stigmatize Israel over refusing to join the NPT would
be profoundly unproductive.

Finally, as the 1995 Resolution made clear one should,
we wanted to focus upon practical steps, particularly
those that could be accomplished in the near term. After
all, creating a WMD-free zone in any region, much less one
as troubled as the Middle East, is an extremely ambitious
goal that cannot be achieved overnight. Rather than
simply trying yet again to organize a Zone conference - or
more absurdly, presuming to negotiate the text of a treaty
- in advance of actual agreement by the relevant regional


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there had swelled into the scores of thousands, and Huthi
batteries had by the autumn of 2016 even begun to launch
lranian-supplied cruise missiles at U.S. warships inthe
region.

Meanwhile, Syria - which had shown itself to be an
acute nuclear weapons proliferation threat and violator of
reactor at Al Kibar that was destroyed by the Israelis in
2007 - had by 2017 already been stonewalling IAEA
inspectors for years over the nature and extent of its
nuclear program. Egregious instances of chemical
weapons (CW) use by the Asad regime in Damascus during
the ongoing Syrian Civil War had led to a Russian-brokered
deal for Syria’s accession to the CWC in 2013 and the
internationally-assisted destruction of Syria’s declared
chemical weapons stockpile, but by mid-2014 Syria had
resumed using its undeclared CW arsenal against its
opponents. By mid-2016, the OPCW-United Nations Joint
Investigative Mechanism had found Syria responsible for
multiple CW attacks had occurred during 2014-15.

Things would get even worse with further Syrian CW
atrocities over the course of 2017, but even as the new U.S.
Administration came into office it seemed clear that the
Middle East’s WMD problems were clearly only
accelerating. Nor, as Syria’s CW use continued, did it
escape anyone’s notice that the Middle East Zone’s most
fervent diplomatic advocate, Egypt, itself had a history of
CW use during the North Yemen Civil War in the mid-1960s,
had an active ballistic missile program and had refused to
join the CWC. By mid-2014, moreover, the good faith and
bona fides of the People’s Republic of China - longa
free zone in the Middle East - also seemed to be called
somewhat into question with press reports claiming that
Beijing had provided ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia. In
short, progress in creating a region free of all forms of
WMD and their delivery systems seemed perhaps farther
off than ever.

Progress on the dream of a Zone had been difficult
enough back in the halcyon 1990s, but in such a new
context of regional deterioration, it was hardly surprising
that regional states had never been able to agree upon
terms for the Zone-focused international conference
called for in the 2010 NPT RevCon Final Document, and
that subsequent informal consultations in Glion and
Geneva in 2013-14, while initially promising, had not
produced agreement. Together, these diplomatic failures

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clearly demonstrated the problem with assuming that
multilateral declarations from outside the Middle East can
substitute for concrete progress by the countries within it,
and with pretending that one could jump directly to some
kind of disarmament without bothering to alleviate
underlying (let alone worsening) security tensions. If
there still existed a way forward, therefore, it was clear by
2017 that such path would have to be a different one than
the by now traditional diplomatic cycle of trying to use
multilateral conferences elsewhere as replacements for
constructive intra-regional engagement.

If there was any silver lining in all this from the
perspective of the new U.S. Administration in 2017 - and
there wasn’t much - it was that we at least hoped Zone
issues would not damage multilateral NPT diplomacy
during the 2020 NPT review cycle as much as they had in
2015. In part, this was because the evolving “facts on the
ground” of the worsening Middle East security situation
had revealed traditional approaches to Zone advocacy as
being almost ludicrously out of touch with reality. This
presumably made it more difficult, we assumed, for any
serious person to suggest that the right answer was simply
to double down on those failed approaches.

We also imagined, however, that the events of 2015
had demonstrated to all concerned that holding the NPT
process hostage to Zone-based demands was a losing
gambit that would not, in fact, lead to anything
constructive in implementing the 1995 Resolution. To be
sure, fearful of being accused of “failure” at the 2010
RevCon, the Obama Administration had sharply broken
with its Israeli allies and agreed, over Israeli objections, to
call for the convening of a Zone-focused conference in
2012. But the Obama Administration had itself drawn the
line when the Arab Group, supported by Russia, had tried
to repeat that accomplishment by also holding the 2015
RevCon hostage, in an effort to further impose their own
terms for a conference upon the region by international
fiat. Since even President Obama’s diplomats had not
given in to such extortion in 2015, however - and at a time,
moreover, when U.S. and Israeli officials were reported to
have a distinctly frosty relationship — it certainly seemed
to make no sense for anyone to attempt such a ploy with
us in 2020. And that, we hoped, might help keep the Arab
Group from trying, even while opening up diplomatic
space for a new approach - one more alive to the actual
security problems facing the region and thus more likely
ultimately to permit progress toward the Zone.


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of the month-long meeting of the U.N. First Committee,
which voted in favor of the draft. We attempted to
persuade the Arab Group to withdraw this proposal, and
understand that Israel conveyed the same message. (We
both also made it very clear that we would oppose the
establishment of such a conference and would not
participate in it if it were established, and that this process
risked undermining the consensus support that certain
other related U.N. General Assembly resolutions had long
enjoyed.) It was, however, to no avail. Posturing, it would
appear, had now decisively triumphed over substantive
progress, for it was clearly more important to some in the
Arab Group that they have a conference in which they
could set the terms and venue of debate than it was to
have a conference that all regional states could attend or
that might actually advance the cause of a Middle East
Zone.

Many states clearly shared our concerns, and the vote
total reflected a deep ambivalence among U.N. Member
States. Whereas the cause of the Zone itself had long
elicited enormous majorities, or even consensus decisions
in the past, the December 22, 2018, General Assembly vote
on the Arab Group’s proposed resolution to establish the
U.N. Conference yielded only 88 in favor, with four
opposed, and a remarkable 75 abstentions. The effort to
drive it forward over the objections of one of the parties
whose involvement in implementation of any future Zone
would be absolutely essential also did much to poison all
Zone-related issues in that forum, leading the United
States — as we had warned - to break consensus on one of
the First Committee’s otherwise unobjectionable and
quite traditional resolutions in protest.

Egypt had been calling for “new and alternative
mechanisms” to advance the cause of a Middle East Zone,
but the establishment of a U.N.-sponsored Conference
under these circumstances at best amounted merely to
using a new forum to do much the same thing that had
already repeatedly failed elsewhere. If anything, this new
effort was worse, however, for at least Israel had been
involved in prior discussions in the ACRS process and at
Glion and Geneva. Now, Israel’s objections had been
pointedly ignored, predictably guaranteeing its non-
participation. The U.N. Conference was an effort to force
upon states within the region purported solutions that had
been developed without their participation and against
their wishes. In this respect, it would be hard to imagine a
process more alien to and inconsistent with the 1999
recommendations of the U.N. Disarmament Commission

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on how to create nuclear-weapon-free zones - nor a
process more likely to drive apart (rather than bring
together) those whose cooperation would be needed to
bring a Zone to fruition.

The Arab Group may have succeeded in
“weaponizing” the United Nations in its campaign to
isolate and stigmatize Israel and to engage in Zone-related
virtue-signaling, in other words, but the Conference effort
was a significant step backwards for efforts to implement
the 1995 Resolution. After the U.N. vote, the only real
question was how much damage this process would do to
hopes of actually getting a Middle East Zone.

To be sure, we were pleasantly surprised that the
initial meeting of the new Conference process in
November 2019 was not as fixated upon criticizing non-
participants as we had feared it would be, and that there
was at least some discussion of chemical weapons and
ballistic missile threats in the Middle East. That much is
good, and we understand this was due in large part to
extensive preparatory work on the part of some key states.
We appreciate their efforts in this regard.

Nevertheless, it is still too early to know just how
much damage the Conference process will do. Its
proponents had promised that establishing a U.N.-based
process for considering a Middle East Zone would serve as
a “pressure release valve” to keep Zone issues from
damaging the NPT review process, as they had in 2010 and
(especially) in 2015. Perhaps these sponsors will keep
these promises now that they have succeeded in
establishing a conference. Nevertheless, since the 2020
RevCon has not yet occurred - having been postponed due
to the COVID-19 pandemic - the jury is still out on whether
the Arab Group will attempt to hold the Review
Conference hostage over Zone-related issues yet again.

As for the chances of actually creating a Zone, it is also
too early to tell what damage the new Conference will do -
although it has surely already done some. Now that the
Conference process exists, there will inevitably be a
tendency in some quarters to view any other initiatives —
such as the kind of security-focused CEND-style dialogue
the United States has suggested, or intra-regional
engagements focused upon CBMs — as being ones that
compete with the new U.N. Conference, perhaps eliciting
resistance to such badly-needed steps. However
temperate its first meeting may have been, moreover, it is
also easy to imagine the new Conference spiraling


Arms Control and International Security Papers
Volume || Number 15
August 4, 2020

Evolving Approaches to the
“Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

by Christopher A. Ford

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
accessible format compatible with “social distancing” during the COVID-19 crisis.



Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume |, Number 15 | August 4, 2020
Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

Arms Control and International Security Papers

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
accessible format compatible with “social distancing” during the COVID-19 crisis.



Arms Control and International Security Papers
Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

parties on its merits and modalities, we thought it would
make sense to promote intra-regional dialogue on such
things as how to address security problems and develop
regional confidence-building measures (CBMs). We did
not want to be overly prescriptive in how such a process
might be structured, but thought it good to start with an
open dialogue about how to create a regional
environment in which a Zone finally actually became
feasible.

It also seemed clear that because the deterioration of
the Middle Eastern security environment since the days of
the 1995 Resolution has been such a central factor in the
failure of prior Zone-related efforts, any success in
resolving Middle Eastern problems we might have in other
aspects of our regional diplomacy would likely be
conducive to progress in implementing the Resolution. If
we could succeed in placing enduring limits upon Iran’s
nuclear program and reining in its missile threats, for
instance - or in finally holding Syria accountable for its
chemical weapons atrocities - these steps would likely do
much more to increase the odds of a Zone actually being
established than any number of conferences bringing
diplomats together to read speeches at each other in
pleasant hotels in Glion, Geneva, or New York.

In important respects, our thinking on how to advance
the objective of a Middle East Zone owed a great deal to
the United States’ parallel initiative on Creating an
Environment for Nuclear Disarmament (CEND). CEND, too,
was an effort predicated upon a realization that past
approaches had failed and that diplomatic discourse
needed to be redirected in more constructive directions
alive to the ways in which disarmament progress hinges
upon progress in addressing problems in the security
environment rather than pretending one can sidestep real-
world problems of security simply by holding meetings,

drafting idealistic treaty texts, and engaging in moralistic

. With both
CEND and the Middle East Zone, it was precisely our
fidelity to the disarmament objectives in question that led
us to reject failed approaches that ignore real-world
security challenges, and to explore ways to bring countries
together in search of new thinking and creative ways to
start ameliorating such problems in ways conducive to
disarmament progress.

As noted, as applied in the Zone context, this new U.S.
thinking came together in our Working Paper for the 2018
PrepCom. In setting forth these ideas - which focused

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upon the central role that must be played by regional
states acting by consensus, and upon the need to
ameliorate security conditions that made progress difficult
- we recognized that the reaction from some corners of
the region was likely to be negative. To be sure, we did not
predict the degree to which some would try to depict our
call to explore how to make regional conditions more
favorable to progress as some kind of malevolent effort to
“set preconditions” for diplomatic engagement on a Zone.

We did come to appreciate, however, that the
emotion behind such willful distortions simply grew out of
irritation at our willingness speak openly about what was
in fact already obvious - namely, that prior approaches no
longer had meaningful prospects for success. In
retrospect, we should perhaps have expected that our
bluntness about the problem would be frustrating and
embarrassing for those who had fervently advocated these
failed approaches for many years (and who still did so).
We hope they understand now, however, that we meant
no offense, that our initiative had nothing to do with
setting “preconditions” for progress but instead focused
on how to create an environment in which progress would
be easier, and that the thrust of our diplomacy was - and
remains - to find a better way forward precisely because
we continue to strongly support the 1995 Resolution.

V. The U.N. Conference Process

Unfortunately, our suggestions for a more creative
and productive discourse on the Middle East Zone came
too late. As Egypt had signaled even as early as the 2017
NPT PrepCom with its talk of “new and alternative
mechanisms,” Cairo was already preparing to shift its
attention to the U.N. General Assembly in search of a
resolution - by majority vote, so that failure to involve
relevant regional players would no longer be a procedural
obstacle - that would establish by fiat the same kind of
Zone-focused international conference that had for so
many years failed to win consensus support in the region.

We had heard inklings of such a move for years, but it
was deeply disappointing to see this effort materialize in
the Arab Group’s draft conference decision in September
2018. Its contents were not surprising, for they reflected
views long held by some other Arab League states, but it
was disheartening that the drafters had made no efforts to
address well-known Israeli redlines, and had not even
attempted to socialize the idea with us or Israel in advance


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pretending that sweeping new ones can be successfully
implemented atop damaged foundations.

Il. The Early Years

The idea of a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in the Middle
East goes back at least to 1974, when the U.N. General
Assembly passed Resolution 3263 (XXIX), which noted that

concerned” was a measure that could contribute to
halting the proliferation of such weapons and contribute
to disarmament. Various disputes over whether and how
to implement such an idea, however - all in the context of
regional security dynamics that remained notably fraught
- prevented progress for many years.

By the time of the 1995 Resolution, however, things
looked notably different, at least for a while. In the
broader global context, the world-imperiling nuclear
standoff and geopolitical rivalry of the Cold War had
ended, the United States and Russia seemed to be finding
anew and cooperative relationship, and steps were being
taken to reduce the enormous nuclear weapons stockpiles
that had accumulated as NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced
off against each other. With implementation of the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by then
already having succeeded in eliminating an entire class of
nuclear-capable delivery systems - destroying a total of
nearly 2,700 missiles by June 1991 - the Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty (START) was signed between the United
States and the USSR, and entered into force in 1994.
Under START’s provisions, the two former Cold War
adversaries would remove from service and dismantle
perhaps 80 percent of the strategic nuclear weapons then
in existence. With the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of
1991 and 1992, furthermore, Washington and Moscow also
began dramatically to scale back their deployments of
non-strategic nuclear weapons.

It was an extraordinary period, in which controlling
and even rolling back WMD threats seemed at last to be
possible. At the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in
Geneva and elsewhere, diplomats were hard at work
trying to take advantage of this optimistic new era and
bring to fruition long-stalled hopes for new global
instruments to rein in WMD threats. Work on the CWC had
been underway since 1980, but the post-Cold War era
provided a chance to bring negotiations to closure, and by

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the end of 1993 the Convention had been opened for
signature, the first meetings of the CWC’s Preparatory
Commission held, and a Provisional Technical Secretariat
established. Similarly, negotiations on a Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) began in 1994, reaching their
conclusion in 1996. Building upon the U.S. suggestion of
such a step in 1991, the U.N. General Assembly called in
1993 for a treaty banning the production of fissile material
for nuclear weapons, thereby setting in motion a new
process at the CD to negotiate a Fissile Material Cutoff
Treaty (FMCT). At its 1995 Review and Extension
Conference, moreover, the NPT was transformed froma
time-limited instrument into an enduring feature of the
international community’s response to nuclear
proliferation challenges and fixed in place permanently as
the cornerstone of the global nonproliferation regime.

In the Middle East, things also then looked promising
in ways unseen for decades, if ever at all. To be sure, the
Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had been revealed by the
1991 Gulf War to have had dangerously advanced WMD
programs, but by mid-decade Iraq was subject to a
stringent system of international inspections intended to
find any last remnants of such programs and implement
their elimination. More dramatically, progress seemed to
be being made in resolving the poisonous antipathies and
endemic violence of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, with
agreement being reached on the Oslo Accords of 1993 and
1995, which created the Palestinian Authority in parts of
the West Bank and Gaza and set up a framework for
permanent-status negotiations that it was hoped would
lead to final resolution of the conflict.

At the time, there also seemed to be hope for progress
in resolving broader Middle East security problems.
Multilateral discussions in Madrid in 1991 had led to the
formation of multilateral working groups covering
economic development, water, refugees, environment and
Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) to complement
bilateral negotiations between Israel and its neighbors.
Under ACRS, participants - including not only Israel and a
Palestinian delegation, but representatives from 13 Arab
states - met beginning in 1992 to discuss possible
confidence building measures (CBMs) for the region,
including exchanges of military doctrines, incidents at sea
agreements and hot lines. Due to progress in the bilateral
Israeli-Palestinian peace process, ACRS venues moved
from outside the region to locations within it, another
hopeful sign.


Arms Control and International Security Papers
Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

forgotten by some diplomats along the way. To my eye, a
serious reading of the Resolution suggests five key lessons
to bear in mind as we work to make such a Zone a reality:

e — First, although many Zone proponents act as if the
issue pertains exclusively to nuclear weapons - in the
manner of a traditional Nuclear Weapon Free Zone
(NWEFZ) of the sort established in Latin America by the
Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1968 - this is far from the case.
As clearly spelled out in the Resolution itself, the
stated objective is a Zone free of all forms of WMD.
The achievement of a Middle East Zone will therefore
require not merely resolution of longstanding regional
challenges related to nuclear proliferation and to the
adoption and observance of state-of-the-art nuclear
safeguards, but also success in ending Syria’s flagrant
violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention
(CWC), and bringing about uniform regional
adherence to both the CWC and the Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC).

e Second, the 1995 Resolution calls for ridding the
Middle East not only of WMD, but also of delivery
systems capable of carrying WMD. As we will see
below, especially when read together with the first
point above, this has enormous implications for a
path forward in today’s missile-studded Middle East.

e Third, the Resolution makes clear that a Middle East
Zone must be verifiable. This might seem a
commonplace observation, since it would surely be
madness simply to accept at face value countries’
declarations that they are free of all forms of WMD and
WMD-capable delivery systems. When taken seriously,
however, the requirement of verifiability is a
challenging one, especially in the contemporary
context of a region that today contains countries that
are in violation of their NPT, nuclear safeguards,
and/or CWC obligations, that have refused to adopt
state-of-the art nuclear safeguards in the form of a
Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and
adherence to the IAEA Additional Protocol, and/or
that refuse to cooperate fully with international
inspectors from the IAEA or the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) charged
with verification responsibilities under such
instruments - and one where chemical weapons have
been used repeatedly, to horrific effect, in recent
years,

Volume I, Number 15 | August 4, 2020

e Fourth, the 1995 Resolution makes clear that although
all NPT States Party should “exert their utmost
efforts” to support the creation of a Zone, that zone
must be established “by regional parties” themselves.
The rest of us should support this process as best we
can, in other words, but it is the “States in the Middle
East” who must actually create the Zone. Forgetting
this - such as by pretending that distant institutions in
places such as New York can somehow substitute for
regional states engaging directly and constructively
with each other, or that votes or pronouncements in
such places can make regional security challenges
disappear, or make up in volume and fervor for the
exclusion of key players - is a great mistake.

e — Fifth, and in some sense most fundamentally, the
1995 Resolution makes clear the importance not
merely of taking just any steps ostensibly dedicated to
creating a Zone, but rather of taking practical ones.
The objective is clearly to make actual progress in
making the Middle East a more peaceful place, and
one less at risk of exploding into conflict that could
quickly escalate to the use of WMD. It necessarily
follows from this that efforts to establish a Zone
should be assessed on the basis of their practicality in
contributing to this end. The Resolution points us to
the obvious conclusion that this should not be
primarily an arena for political posturing and
diplomatic virtue-signaling, but rather one in which all
parties focus upon devising and implementing
measures effective in helping work through whatever
concrete security problems stand in the way of
progress.

Read together, these five points help illustrate the
embeddedness of the Zone problem in the regional
security context of the Middle East, and why trying to
create a Zone without addressing those broader regional
problems is doomed to failure. Most specifically, they
suggest why finding a viable path forward is likely to
require a new and different kind of dialogue that both: (1)
starts with involving all regional states in exploring ways
to address security challenges, rather than imagining that
some deus ex machina of exogenous diplomatic
exhortation can resolve things on which relevant parties
have yet to engage directly with each other; and (2) seeks
to salvage and repair existing institutions and mechanisms
for WMD prohibition and proliferation control that are
currently under threat throughout the Middle East before


Arms Control and International Security Papers
Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-Free Zone”

Volume I, Number 15 | August 4, 2020

Evolving Approaches to the “Middle East WMD-
Free Zone”

by Christopher A. Ford:

In this AC/S Paper, Assistant Secretary Ford looks back at the history of efforts
to implement the Middle East WMD-Free Zone called for in the Resolution on
the Middle East adopted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Review and
Extension Conference in 1995, outlining how traditional ways of trying to
achieve this goal have become irrelevant or counterproductive, and calling for
a new approach based around trying to ameliorate challenges in the security
environment and develop good-faith engagement between all regional states.

The “Resolution on the Middle East” - one of the
a Revi E .

f f -Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1995 - called upon all States in
that region “to take practical steps in appropriate forums
aimed at making progress towards, inter alia, the
establishment of an effectively verifiable Middle East zone
free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical
and biological, and their delivery systems.” It also called
upon States Party to the NPT to promote “the early
establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone
free of nuclear and all other weapons of mass destruction
and their delivery systems.” Over the ensuing decades,
the 1995 Resolution has been a symbol of the international
community’s aspiration to keep weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems out of one of
the world’s most volatile and troubled regions. It has also,
however, often been the object of sometimes bitter
diplomatic contestation.

This paper looks back over the history of that
contestation in order to put debates over the Middle East

WMD-Free Zone - often unpronounceably abbreviated as
MEWMDEFZ, but which | will therefore describe herein
simply as the “Middle East Zone” or “Zone” - into their
geopolitical context. This exploration will help explain
why most current efforts to create a Zone, which revolve
around a United Nations-sponsored conference process,
are unlikely to succeed, and why a new approach is badly
needed. Properly contextualizing these longstanding
debates is critical to finding a better path forward, for
Zone debates in recent years have drifted unproductively,
and perhaps even dangerously, in directions that are
inconsistent with what was called for in the 1995
Resolution itself, and which are likely to preclude success
without some change in course.

I. Learning from the 1995 Resolution Itself

The modern statesman who looks back to the 1995
Resolution to find guideposts for how to confront the
challenges of creating a Middle East Zone will find much to
draw upon - including points that have apparently been

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and is additionally performing the Duties of
the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior
Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff.