Safeguards, Strategic Behavior, and Great Power Competition: The IAEA’s Board of Governors as an Instrument of Leverage for Potential Non- Compliers

This paper takes a critical view of the prospective ability of the IAEA to be an essential contributor to a stable international nuclear order and prevention of nuclear proliferation, given that it is an international governmental organization. The Agency is considered to be characterized by the ambiguities of a more or less autonomous bureaucratic and technocratic organization led by the Secretariat. Furthermore, it is considered an intergovernmental arena of state actors for decision-making on the political consequences of breaking Safeguards rules with the Boards of Governors as a quasi-upstream body of the UN Security Council. As is typical for IGOs one can therefore expect it to ultimately be an instrument of states’ foreign policy interests which reflects the overall situation of the international system and its prevalent power structures and conflicts. Especially in times of power transition and a revisionist dissolution of an established international order this may lead to rivalling great powers’ acting according to their strategic priorities and protecting states that fail to fully comply with nuclear safeguards obligations, instead of providing for effective implementation of non-proliferation measures. As a consequence, this instrumentalization of the IAEA policy making bodies by leading powers’ strategic interests might enable unreliable countries to avoid diplomatic pressure or sanctions for clandestine cheating or even to whitewash their nuclear programs. By looking at the cases of Iran, South Korea, Egypt and Libya, we find that alliance politics and strategic behavior may indeed hamper the effectiveness of the IAEA as the global nuclear watchdog. Consequently, at least from a realist and strategic studies perspective, the IAEA and the nuclear nonproliferation regime face an ever-increasing structural challenge in the current context of aggravating great power competition.