The Value of Sanctions
Two weeks ago, one senior Iranian official was quoted in Reuters, optimistically declaring that Iran was entering a “new chapter… a new time for talks without limitations or preconditions,” on matters of energy, regional security, trade relations, and nuclear power.
A few days later, it appears that chapter had ended. Last Monday, the UN Security Council approved a new round of Iranian sanctions, in response to recent IAEA reports of Tehran’s non-compliance with enrichment regulations. By Tuesday, President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would no longer deal with the UN on issues of nuclear energy and security. In the same breath, he also severed the open-ended Iran-EU dialogue on the issue of cooperative nonproliferation strategy.
The blustery and inconsistent rhetoric emanating from Iran continues to thwart Western efforts at cooperative policymaking. However, it would be wrong to view our efforts with Iran as a zero sum game. Multilateral diplomacy is kaleidoscopic, requiring us to respect the windfall effects created by a single action.
How then do we tally the score after this latest tete a tete? Financially, Iran’s economic ministers insist that sanctions will probably not damage the national economy in terms of either trade finance or investments. A glance at Iran’s oil revenues makes this statement seem eminently plausible. At the OPEC conference in Vienna Wednesday, Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari added that the sanctions would not affect Tehran’s oil production, which is slated to rise 4.3 to 4.5 million barrels per day over the next two years.
From a policy perspective, many US news sources speculate that the politics of the NPT continue to widen the rifts between permanent UN members and the developing nations of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). States such as South Africa, Indonesia, Libya, and Vietnam have grown increasingly unwilling to vote in favor of Iranian sanctions. The NAM effectively blocked a separate but parallel resolution written by the EU Three and brought to the IAEA against Iran this week. This week’s events highlights the deep, unresolved issues the NPT commands, and how far we remain from achieving consensus on a vision of international nuclear security.
Whether these events strengthen the US position within the UN, or within the international community more broadly is a much larger question, and it would be premature to attempt to answer it now. Certainly, it is auspicious that the EU has stepped into the US’s position of enforcer on this particular issue, and with this particular rogue state. It makes Iran unable to implicate and estrange the US in international circles on the nuclear issue.
However, we must be careful in our estimation of political victory in this context. The EU’s aggressive role in securing sanctions appears to be a direct product of their newfound fears. IAEA reports, released in late February, indicated that Iran was seeking to build a nuclear warhead, as well as developing long range missiles, easily capable of hitting Western Europe.
This knowledge is not meant to marginalize the role US Public Diplomacy plays in driving and implementing US foreign policy. It should only serve as a reminder that political alignments are ephemeral. For this reason, we must capitalize on these moments of consensus by pushing ambitiously towards larger scale policy objectives in the sphere of international nuclear nonproliferation.
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