Given Tehran's defiant response to the European and American effort to constrain its nuclear program, it is time for bolder diplomacy out of Washington. U.S. President George W. Bush should take a page from the playbook of Ronald Reagan, who negotiated with an evil Soviet regime--competing in the war of ideas, but addressing the enemy's security concerns through arms-control agreements.

Iran's intransigence is both deeply unfortunate and perfectly predictable. It is unfortunate because Tehran's refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment operations immediately--as demanded in July by the U.N. Security Council in a legally binding resolution--suggests that Iran is moving more quickly than expected toward a nuclear-weapons capability. Tehran has now turned the nuclear crisis into a test of the whole U.N. Security Council system. And Russia and China's current position, threatening to veto any biting sanctions against Iran, suggests that the Security Council may well fail this crucial test.

Tehran's response is predictable, however, because the offer on the table contains both inadequate economic carrots and barely credible threats of sanctions and military force. The carrots appeared impressive at first glance--in return for a suspension of enrichment we reportedly promised to provide light-water nuclear reactors and to help Iran with civil aviation and telecommunications technology. But we did not offer the one incentive that might possibly work, security guarantees that could reduce Iran's desire for nuclear weapons.

This omission is striking. The Iranian government can't talk openly about their security concerns because that would blow their cover story that the nuclear program is only for energy production. And Washington does not want to discuss such worries because it wants to keep open the possibility of removing the regime by force. "Security assurances are not on the table," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice too cleverly argued this spring: "It is a little strange to talk about security guarantees ... I thought the Iranian position was that they weren't developing a nuclear bomb."

This is partly a crisis of our own making, as the Bush administration has practiced the reverse of Teddy Roosevelt's maxim--speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. Think about how Tehran reacted when Bush stated (in his second Inaugural Address), "The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: 'Those who deny freedoms to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." Or when Bush dramatically told reporters last April that "all options are on the table," in direct response to a question about whether he was considering a nuclear attack against Iran. Such statements only encourage Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent quickly, before the United States can carry out its perceived aggressive intent. Last month, Iran's National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani pointedly complained about such rhetoric. "How can a side that wants to topple the regime also attempt to negotiate?"

Given the current vulnerability of U.S. forces in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and the lack of Israeli success against Hizbullah, Iranian officials seem confident that they face no immediate threat of a U.S. military assault. But they are clearly worried that Bush just might attack Iran right before he leaves office in January 2009, or that his successor might do so once U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq.

The best way to prevent a nuclear Iran is for Washington to offer the kind of security assurances that might reduce support in Tehran for building a nuclear arsenal. It will be hard to make such assurances credible, but a public U.S. promise to take forcible regime change off the table, and a U.N. Security Council commitment to protect the "political sovereignty" of Iran could help. Involving the Security Council could also pull China and Russia back into the nonproliferation coalition and enhance the U.N.'s legitimacy.

There is very little time left, which means negotiations should begin despite Iran's unfortunate opening position. Tehran's response reportedly indicated a willingness to negotiate all aspects of its nuclear program, so working out an agreement for Iran to limit itself to low-level uranium enrichment might still be possible. This would work only if Tehran accepts full IAEA inspections and a freeze on future centrifuge construction. Will they? The one thing that might cause Tehran to do so, and that would compensate for any loss of face, would be an assurance that the United States will not launch another preventive war, as it did in Iraq, to remove the Iranian regime. If in turn we get a nuclear-free Iran, that's a good deal for the West as well.

Yo-Yo Ma sat on the edge of the small stage at the Art Institute, his cello resting across his lap.

"See this fingerboard?" the acclaimed cellist asked the audience. "It is made out of ebony, which comes from Africa."

"The red varnish," he said, massaging the body of the instrument, "comes from as far away as Malaysia."

"The hair on the bow comes from Mongolia and the wood of the bow can be found only in Brazil," he said.

Ma's multicultural cello seemed the perfect metaphor for his most recent endeavor: bringing the rich artistic and cultural history of the Silk Road to Chicago Public Schools students.

The Silk Road, the ancient network of trade routes that crisscrossed Eurasia through the 1500s, served as the main conduit for the cultural exchange of goods, art and music. And when Ma sat down and played a soulful partita by Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, he showed that cultural exchange enriches the world.

"This is a global instrument," he said. "And by bringing the world together ... beautiful music can be made."

Ma was in town Monday as part of Silk Road Chicago, a yearlong citywide celebration inspired by the art, music and culture along the historic road that stretched from Japan and China through central Asia and into the Mediterranean. The Chicago series is part of the larger Silk Road Project, a multiyear, multicity odyssey created by Ma.

Specifically, Ma spent the day helping introduce a new Silk Road school curriculum to Chicago Public Schools teachers.

Through a collaboration with the Art Institute, 80 Chicago teachers will spend the week discovering the Silk Road and learning how best to explain its importance to students.

"It's sometimes difficult to get students to engage in something that seems so far removed from their lives," explained Gary Mukai, from Stanford University, who helped develop the Silk Road curriculum. "We hope we can help students make a link to their own lives by engaging them musically, mathematically and artistically in the Silk Road history."

Through the lesson plan, students can trace the history of Asia and the West through the important innovations that migrated along the Silk Road. Students will learn that gunpowder, the magnetic compass, lacquer crafts and, of course, silk, flowed from East and West and back.

Musical forms and instruments also traveled the Silk Road, as string, wind and percussion instruments from the East and the West influenced each other. Cymbals were introduced into China from India. The Chinese gongs traveled to Europe. And the Persian mizmar, a reed instrument, seems to have been the ancestor of the European oboe and clarinet.

Ma implored the teachers to reach out to students and help create a "spark" that will open their minds to the "amazing cultures around them."

"As teachers, you are incredible guides into a world that you can make a most exciting place," he said.

The Silk Road is a metaphor that "joins us together not only in material things but in spiritual ways," he said. "You can translate that to your students."

Don Gibson, a music teacher from Dyett High School on the South Side, said the Silk Road will help him incorporate history lessons into his music courses.

"Through the Silk Road music lessons, I can broaden their understanding of cultures and the history of those cultures," Gibson said. "To be inspired by the music, sometimes, you have to know its history."

READER CONNECTION
Would you like to learn more about the Silk Road Chicago events? Visit the Silk Road Project.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University has concluded its second year of Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. This year's fellows - 26 outstanding civic, political, and economic leaders from 21 countries in transition - were selected from more than 800 applications.

The summer fellows program brought leaders from important, transitioning countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia to Stanford for three weeks (this year, July 31 to August 18). The new summer fellows included presidential advisers, prominent journalists, key figures in human rights and democracy movements, academics, and representatives of international governmental and non-governmental organizations. The fellows participated in morning seminars with leading Stanford faculty, including CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Larry Diamond, Avner Greif, Erik Jensen, and Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper. In the afternoons, fellows attended talks by keynote speakers and led class sessions themselves, sharing insight into how reform progressed (or failed to progress) in their home countries and exchanging ideas for positive change. This year's keynote speakers included Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy; Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org; Marc Pomar, president of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX); and Judge Pamela Rymer, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) seeks to promote innovative and practical research to assist transitioning countries design and implement policies that will foster democracy, promote balanced and sustainable growth, and advance the rule of law. It supports specialized teaching, training, and outreach to assist countries struggling with political, economic, and judicial reform, constitutional design, economic performance and corruption.

PESD director David G. Victor testifies to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the U.S.-India nuclear deal currently being debated by Congress could have a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and be a major step towards engaging developing countries in the fight against climate change.

David Victor shows that by displacing coal-fired electricity generation, the U.S.-India nuclear deal could realize carbon dioxide emission reductions that rival the European Union's efforts under the Kyoto Protocol and far exceed previous efforts to engage developing countries in combating climate change.

WASHINGTON - Despite its threat of severe consequences, the Bush administration has little leverage to use on North Korea to keep it from testing a long-range missile and few ways to punish the nuclear-armed nation if it proceeds.

The United States has no diplomatic or economic ties with North Korea, the rudimentary U.S. missile-defense system is untested in real-world conditions and Pyongyang is regarded as having a right to test missiles, making any American attack to forestall a launch an act of war with potentially explosive consequences.

"The United States could try to shoot down the rocket, but good luck,'' said Wonhyuk Lim of the Brookings Institution, a policy-research organization in Washington.

The dearth of options illustrates the limits of the administration's pre-emption strategy and its need to rely on the cooperation of others -- especially given the strains on the U.S. military from Iraq and Afghanistan -- to contain threats.

Washington hopes that the world's only Stalinist regime will heed demands by the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to uphold a self-imposed 1999 moratorium on missile tests and rejoin talks on curbing its nuclear program in return for security guarantees and economic and political benefits.

At the same time, the administration is reviewing its options should the Kim Jong Il regime test-fire what U.S. officials describe as a multi-stage Taepodong-2 missile, thought to be capable of reaching Alaska.

"The launch of a missile would be a provocation,'' Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman said Thursday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. "If such a launch took place, we would seek to impose some cost on North Korea.''

Rodman declined to say what Washington would do. Experts said that even the imposition of sanctions by the United States would be largely symbolic.

They think that North Korea would not have readied the missile for flight unless it had decided it could live with the consequences.

"It probably means they are not worried about the American reaction,'' said Daniel C. Sneider of Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. "There is nothing that the United States can do to them.''

The United States has no diplomatic relations or financial assistance it can threaten to cut, and it suspended contributions to international food aid for North Korea last year.

The administration has moved against Pyongyang by trying to halt its missile sales to other countries, its alleged international narcotics trafficking, and its alleged counterfeiting of U.S. currency, cigarettes and over-the-counter drugs.

Under American pressure, banking regulators in February froze North Korean accounts at the Banco Delta Asia, a Macao bank that the U.S. Treasury Department accused of laundering North Korea's ill-gotten gains.

Other banks, anxious to avoid American scrutiny, reportedly have curtailed business with North Korea.

David L. Asher, a former Treasury Department official who oversaw the crackdown on North Korea's alleged illicit dealings, said the United States could respond to a test with an intensified campaign against Pyongyang's alleged international criminal activities that would hurt the ruling elite.

"Do not underestimate the impact of the financial pressure we could put on them,'' said Asher, a scholar with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a policy-research organization.

Washington is counting on Japan, which also is threatened by Pyongyang's nuclear arms and missile programs, to react to a launch by closing ports to North Korean ships and shutting off remittances by ethnic Koreans to relatives in North Korea. But those measures are expected to have limited impact.

A North Korean missile test in 1998 prompted Japan to boost missile-defense cooperation with the United States, and experts said a new launch probably would prompt Washington and Tokyo to forge even closer military ties.

The only nations that could tighten the screws significantly are China and South Korea, North Korea's main foreign trading partners and aid donors.

But while Seoul and Beijing would be outraged, because a missile test would effectively kill hopes of restarting talks on containing North Korea's nuclear arms program, they are unlikely to take any step that could rock Pyongyang.

Both are anxious to avoid destabilizing their neighbor of 26 million people. China doesn't want to be overwhelmed by North Korean refugees, and South Korea would be unable to bear the economic and social costs of sudden reunification.

They also fear that Kim's government could lash out with its million-member army against the South, igniting a conflict that would drag in the United States and devastate the Asian-Pacific economy.

"China and South Korea fear instability more than they fear a nuclear North Korea,'' said Marcus Noland, an expert at the Economic Policy Institute.

Moreover, Beijing probably would be unwilling to jeopardize the budding commercial ties it has been pursuing with North Korea.

"China opposes sanctions on North Korea because it believes they would lead to instability, would not dislodge the regime but would damage the nascent process of market reforms and harm the most vulnerable,'' said a February report by the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization.

South Korea has been pursuing a policy of economic engagement and political exchanges with North Korea.

The United States has been consulting with members of the U.N. Security Council on a response to a North Korean test. But North Korea has the right under international law to test-fire missiles, making it tough for the United States to win more than words of chastisement of North Korea from the council.

Japanese politics have long been driven by patronage and pork. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has managed to add personality to the mix. Issues, when they mattered at all, were deeply domestic -- the last election, for example, focused on deregulation of the postal savings system.

So it is a bit of a shock to find Japan embroiled in a political struggle with foreign policy topping the agenda. The contest to succeed Koizumi has become a surrogate battleground for a debate over how to repair Japan's tattered relations with its Asian neighbors, China and South Korea.

Put simply, this war of ideas has two schools -- Conservative Realists and Assertive Nationalists.

The Realists fear that Japan has become dangerously isolated from Asia, its influence waning to the benefit of China. Constant tensions with China and South Korea put Japans economic recovery at risk, they worry. The Realists blame Koizumi for his provocative visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan's war dead and worry he tilts too far in his embrace of Bush and his policies in places such as Iraq and Iran.

The Nationalists see China as the principal national security threat to Japan. Their priority is to strengthen the alliance with the U.S., even at the cost of ties to Asia. They believe it is crucial to stand up to what is seen as Chinese bullying, symbolized by Beijing demanding that the Yasukuni visits stop as a price for high-level contacts.

This debate harkens back to the Meiji era and Japan's emergence as a great power. But the tortured history that ensued has left a clear legacy -- both camps accept the U.S. alliance as the foundation of Japanese security. The issue now is one of balance and relative independence in the formation of Japanese policy.

Each camp has a champion in the unofficial campaign for the September vote to replace Koizumi as president of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party -- a post that carries with it the premiership. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the frontrunner and Koizumi's preferred successor, represents the Nationalists. Yasuo Fukuda, who served as chief cabinet secretary for four years, until 2005, carries the Realist flag into battle.

Abe and Fukuda are cast from almost identical molds. Both are veteran politicians, scions of famous political families, even members of the same faction within the party. Yet they offer remarkably contrasting positions on Japan's diplomatic path in Asia and, less visibly, on how to manage relations with the U.S.

Abe, at age 51, is considered a representative of the younger generation. Like Koizumi, he has personal appeal, at ease on television and able to speak directly and emotively. Abe is the son of a former foreign minister and grandson of former Premier Nobusuke Kishi, a towering figure in post-war conservative politics.

Fukuda, who turns 70 in July, is an old-style Japanese politician, more comfortable working behind closed doors than in front of the TV cameras. "Fukuda is cool, rational, calculating, practical, nonideological and noncommunicative," comments William Breer, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Japan. Fukuda, too, is the son of a major conservative leader, former Premier Takeo Fukuda.

Abe is the front-runner, scoring well in polls and among party members. But Fukuda's star has risen in recent months, tied largely to the rise of tensions with China.

"Fukuda looks more mature, serious and experienced," says Breer. "People want better relations with China, though not at any cost. Fukuda can probably deliver that. Abe may not."

The starkest gap between the two men is over Yasukuni. Fukuda led an effort five years ago to create a secular memorial that would allow a prime minister to honor the war dead while avoiding the issue of the 14 Class A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni and the unabashed lack of remorse over the war displayed at the shrine's museum.

Fukuda decried the defiant rhetoric in Japan surrounding the shrine, which has become a symbol of defying Chinese pressure. "Discussions in Japan have escalated too far," he said in a speech in late May. "Voices raised here reach China and South Korea, creating a vicious cycle."

Abe, like Koizumi, sees China's interference on Yasukuni as the problem.

"China's diplomacy is high-handed," Abe said recently. "If we permit China to engage in such diplomacy, China will also take a similar attitude on other issues."

But recently Abe pointedly avoided directly answering the question of whether he would continue the shrine visits. That has led some to speculate that Abe may want to find a way out of this cul-de-sac.

The Japanese public, according to recent polls, is evenly divided on the question of whether the next prime minister should visit Yasukuni. They overwhelmingly support the goal of improving relations with Japan's Asian neighbors, but a majority is also sympathetic to Abe's stance against Chinese pressure on Yasukuni.

Beyond Yasukuni, the two men offer contrasting visions of Japan's relationship to Asia and response to growing regional integration.

Fukuda points to the example of the "Fukuda Doctrine," a 1977 initiative by his father that responded to rising anti-Japanese sentiment by declaring that Japan would not become a military power and would try to build relations in the region as an equal partner.

In a series of recent speeches, Fukuda advocated integration of the region through an economic partnership agreement and called on Japan, China, and South Korea to cooperate toward this end. He visited South Korea in March along with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and met with the South Korean president.

Abe, in contrast, echoes the Bush administration in calling for a strategic dialogue with India, Australia, and other democracies in Asia, as well as the U.S., unifying on the basis of common values -- widely interpreted as a thinly disguised attempt to counter China's rise.

They differ on other issues. Abe is a hardliner on North Korea, while Fukuda has pushed for negotiations. Abe puts revision of Japan'a antiwar constitution at the top of his priority list. Fukuda warns about hasty steps that would alarm Japan's neighbors.

When it comes to managing the U.S. alliance, the choice is subtle. Both have strong ties to the Bush administration. Fukuda played a key role in forging the Japanese rapid response to the September 11 attacks, including the decision to send ships to support the war in Afghanistan. Both supported the dispatch of peacekeeping troops to Iraq.

"Fukuda, however, might be a little more honest in evaluating U.S. foreign policies," suggests Breer. "He might not be as pliable as Koizumi."

Abe remains the favorite to win, particularly among LDP members. But Fukuda's fortunes may have been aided by the emergence of Ichiro Ozawa as leader of the main opposition party. Ozawa, a remarkable political operator and former LDP leader, believes in issue-based politics. He visited China this week and met with Hu Jintao, which suits his clear Realist agenda.

Other events could shape the fight. Koizumi has signaled his desire to visit Yasukuni on August 15, the anniversary of Japan'a surrender. Some analysts suggest that could strengthen Fukuda's appeal. Alternately, the North Korean test missile launches could consolidate Abe's bid for power.

Whatever the outcome, this succession fight will likely mark a turning point for Japan. It could slow -- or perhaps accelerate -- the slippage toward Sino-Japanese tensions. And it will mark the re-emergence of a Japan that looks outward. It is time for the rest of the world to pay attention to Japanese politics.