As the volatile situation in the Middle East has been pushing up the global oil price, the gasoline price in Seoul has just passed, for the first time, the 2,000 won per liter mark. What is more concerning is that the volatility is likely to remain high in the short term.
Believing that diplomacy and economic sanctions have run their course, Israel is now seriously touting the idea of a military strike against the nuclear development facilities inside Iran. A concerned United States is trying to talk Israel out of the bold plan, reasoning that economic sanctions need more time to work. But the word forbearance is not in the Israeli dictionary at the moment.
Another military conflict in the Middle East would be a disaster for President Barack Obama who is otherwise looking at a seemingly easy re-election thanks to the slowly recovering economy and the splintered Republican nomination. The recent escalation of tension in Afghanistan rising from the burning of the Quran shows what thin ice President Obama is walking on. He certainly cannot afford another conflict in the Middle East at this juncture, at least not until the November presidential election.
Theoretically, the March 5 summit meeting in Washington between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an occasion where the two countries attempted to straighten out their differences, but Israel seemed determined to pursue its course of action over U.S. objections.
The Israeli plan is taken seriously because of its track record under similar circumstances. In 1981, Israeli fighters bombed the nuclear reactors in Osirak, Iraq to derail Baghdad’s nuclear development program. It was Syria in 2007 that became the target of Israeli warplanes when the Arab state was suspected of building nuclear reactors.
Israel has characterized all these prior military actions against foreign nuclear development facilities in the region as preemptive self-defense. Preemptive self-defense concerns a situation where a country is justified to take preventive military action to deter imminent armed aggression from another country.
It is not uncommon that this concept is invoked by a country resorting to military action since this is the only way to legally justify such action absent authorization from the U.N. Security Council. A key barometer for this concept is the imminence of the presumed attack; in other words, this concept requires showing that the enemy attack is indeed imminent. Whether the Iranian situation satisfies the legal threshold is not clear at all. If history has any bearing, the said Osirak bombing of 1981 was unanimously condemned by the U.N. Security Council as a direct violation of the U.N. Charter.
But that was more than 30 years ago and under a different context. How the U.N. and the international community would evaluate the present situation is anyone’s guess. Depending on whom you ask, you will probably have different answers.
What is at least clear, however, is that any military action would be responded to in kind by Iran (if Tehran has not been bluffing), which might then bring the region into a spiral of military conflict.
Any conflict in the region would deliver a devastating blow to the slowly recovering global economy. The International Monetary Fund warns that the potential cessation of Iranian oil exports due to a military conflict in the region would increase the global oil price by 20-30 percent. Worse yet, if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz as retaliation against the West, the impact would be immense for countries such as China, Japan and Korea, whose crude oil shipments are shuttling through the strait.
There was a sense of complacency when Korea just secured an exemption from the U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iran for its bilateral trade of non-petroleum products with Tehran. That sigh of relief is premature given how quickly the situation could get out of hand in the Middle East and how harsh the impact on the global economy would be. Sadly, Korea has been among a group of countries that takes the brunt of the impact when the global economy hits a road block as we saw in 1997 and 2008. Do we have a contingency plan this time?
By Lee Jae-min
Lee Jae-min is a professor of law at the School of Law, Hanyang University, in Seoul. Formerly he practiced law as an associate attorney with Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. ― Ed.