TODAY, LIKE MOST DAYS, talk about Iran is talk about sanctions. Politicians and policymakers are drawn to sanctions because they offer an alternative to the unpleasant choice of war or surrender. Sanctions are also good politics, especially with a regime whose president questions the Holocaust and whose recent election brought both protesters and prison sentences. No one wants to start another war in the region, and sanctions provide the satisfaction of “doing something.”
But will they work? Will they force Iran to abandon its nuclear program? Research on the effect of sanctions is difficult to assess, but some scholars conclude that sanctions work about half the time. They are most effective when applied over a long period of time on small countries that are dependent on the outside world Iran is a big country with oil, and it can build centrifuges faster than the international community can impose sanctions. The Islamic Republic is also a proud country, the kind for which sanctions are as likely to elicit defiance, as they are cooperation. Indeed, the Islamic Republic has been under one kind of sanction or another since its founding 30 years ago. Any objective assessment would have to conclude that sanctions have completely failed to alter Iran’s nuclear policy.
This is not to suggest that they are without merit. They add cost and inconvenience, especially when the price of oil is low and the level of domestic economic mismanagement is high. But are they enough to induce Tehran to reverse its very public commitment to uranium enrichment? That seems highly unlikely, no matter what sanctions are imposed (and this assumes Russia and China sign up for unprecedentedly harsh sanctions).
A wise government hand once told me (when talking about North Korea) that “they will never change their nuclear policy in the face of sanctions, and they will never change their nuclear policy without sanctions.” The key to this nonproliferation koan is that sanctions give a country an incentive to alter their policy but that public in-your-face sanctions and finger waving only make governments dig their heels in. Sanctions create incentives for negotiation not capitulation.
The same is true for Iran: the more public the chastisement, the more likely that the answer will be resistance, no matter what the cost.
In short, a policy based primarily on sanctions will fail, as it has so far. The inconvenient verities of international relations still apply: countries are rarely forced to change behavior against their will. They have to see that it is in their interest to change course. Insuring that Iran’s enrichment program does not fuel a nuclear weapons effort requires diplomacy, a face-saving out for the clerics in Tehran, benefits for compliance, as well as costs for transgression.
That may be hard for many Americans to swallow, when the understandable urge is to punish Iran for is words and deeds. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, he does not have the luxury of indignation. He has to solve the problem: prevent Iran’s nuclear program from drifting to weapons, bring peace to Iraq and Afghanistan with Iran on their border, and avoid a war with Tehran that will strengthen al Qaeda and cost this country for decades to come. If he is to be successful, sanctions can help, but they are also a political temptation. If they become the centerpiece of American policy, they will result in failure and with it, an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.
