By Iran Review
Iranian
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says extremism and insecurity cannot be
contained in a single locality, country or continent.
File Photo: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif speaking to Media /
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Zarif
described how the world today has transformed into a globalized environment
where nothing can be confined to a particular location.
He explained
how news and emotions, among other things, can quickly reach widespread
audiences throughout the world, defying borders of time and space.
“One thing
that we have failed to recognize,” he said, however, “is that our security is
globalized, that you cannot live in a secure world where others are suffering
from insecurity. There can no longer be islands of security.”
“And if anybody
had any doubts, September 11, 2001 proved that even the greatest military power
on the face of the earth could not live securely when others, perverted as they
may be, found the logic of force, the logic of power not serving their purpose,
and reversed that logic in order to create terror.”
“All of us
need to recognize that in our world, today, you cannot gain at the expense of
others, you cannot be secure when others are insecure, you cannot be prosperous
when others are in poverty,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
Zarif drew
attention to the policy of some countries in believing that they can have
violence in the Middle East burn the region out, and said the consequence of
such a policy has only been the spread of terror.
“There is
nothing that can be localized, look at our region,” he said, “Some
unfortunately believe that extremism, radicalism could be contained in Iraq and
Syria, that radicals, extremists and the Syrian soldiers could kill each other
off. Now we see the consequences, we see that extremism cannot be contained in
one locality, one country, one region, one continent.”
“Once you have
extremism in one corner of the world, extremist forces all over the world will
be energized and will be motivated to breed insecurity and to provide breeding
ground for further extremism,” Zarif said.
He said
statesmen have to realize the “simple fact” that phenomena have wide-reaching
impacts beyond the region where they exist.
“We tried to
do it with the nuclear issue,” he said, in reference to the Iranian
administration’s attempts to resolve a long-running nuclear dispute over its
nuclear program.
He said the
United States had defined the nuclear dispute “in a zero-sum way.”
“The United
States, during former President George W. Bush, had defined the nuclear issue,
the Iranian nuclear program, as a program that needed to be stopped,” he said.
“Our objective
was ‘this is our right, Iran has a right as an NPT member to develop nuclear
technology for peaceful purposes and no one can question us,’” Zarif said.
“And that’s
how we managed to hurt each other,” the top Iranian diplomat said.
He referred to
how the negotiations took a shift toward the resolution of the dispute and said
Iran started to redefine the problem by working on a manner of resolving the
issue that everyone could consider their own.
“Therefore, a
simple equation, which we can apply everywhere: zero-sum games do not exist in
a globalized world, we cannot have a zero-sum game, every zero-sum game
produces negative-sum results. We all end up losers,” he emphasized.
