Delegations from around the world have been meeting in Geneva over the past two weeks to debate how to keep alive the 45 year-old compromise between the nuclear haves and have-nots known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and it has not gone all that well.
The second week of the Preparatory Committee meeting, PrepCom, was dominated by the Egyptian delegation's dramatic walkout on Monday in protest about the lack of progress on one of the most burning issue: the holding of a conference on a Middle East WMD-free zone, known by the folksy acronym, MEWMDFZ.
The zone idea dates back to 1974, and it only became a serious proposal in 1995 when the nuclear states promised to work towards a nuclear-free Middle East as the price of maintaining continued faith of the Arab states in the NPT while living next door to a nuclear-armed non-signatory, Israel.
The US, UK and Russia were given the job of making it a reality, but nothing happened for the ensuing 15 years until the NPT came up for its latest review in 2010, when Egypt and other Arab states forced a resolution calling for a UN conference on the zone by the end of 2012. A Finnish diplomat, Jaakko Laajava, was given the unenviable task of arranging it.
With little more than a week to go before the deadline, the US pulled the plug on the conference as a way of protecting Israel from the diplomatic pressure building up around it.
The Egyptian walkout this week was a protest against that US move, but the Egyptians do not appear to have consulted their allies in the Arab League before staging it, with the result that the Arab group ended up as irritated with Egypt as it was with the US.
Paul Ingram, the executive director of the British American Security Information Council BASIC has been in Geneva over the course of the past week and has a more detailed account here, along with some recommendations on how to escape from the present impasse, and get Israel, the Arab states and Iran to come to the table this year.
