Iran V: Sanctions
March 13, 2012
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willing to criticize a leadership he sees as political rivals. Still, Iran’s economic woes cannot be written off as partisan wrangling between the country’s conservative and more conservative camps. As just one indicator, Iran’s currency, long held artificially high by a regime that could afford to subsidize it, has nose-dived and lost 35 percent of its value between September 2011 and early January 2012.11 Implications for US Policy As Chapters III and IV have discussed, the US must be ready for contingencies that could trigger a significant clash or conflict in the Gulf, Israeli preventive strikes, and even serious US military action that escalates to the point where the US might have to strike at Iran’s overall base of asymmetric forces, conventional forces, or nuclear and missile forces. While the US should pursue sanctions and diplomatic options, it must also begin to make hard longer-term choices regarding the possibility that sanctions and diplomacy fail. This means choosing between containment and preventive strikes, and doing so on the basis of the kind of classified analysis of future options that require full access to both intelligence and military planning data. The choice between bad options should always be as objective as possible, and based on the best information and modeling, and many of the key variables are now so highly classified that outside analysis is severely limited. Key Near-Term Choices In the near-term, the US needs to do everything it can to ensure that sanctions lead to successful negotiations. This means pursuing the following options:
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The US should do everything possible to create UN, multilateral, and national sanctions that are as effective as possible. The time for gradual approaches is over. If there is to be a peaceful outcome to this aspect of US and Iranian competition, it must come before Iran tests a nuclear device or deploys a nuclear weapon. It must come before Israel takes preventive action or the region becomes locked into a nuclear arms race, and Iran creates a technology base so advanced that current IAEA inspection methods cannot guarantee that it is not developing more advanced capabilities to produce fissile material and the other components of a nuclear weapon covertly or under the guides of carefully compartmented research and develop in areas like advance centrifuges and weapons design.
Make it clear that the US and its allies also offer Iran incentives to halt, and explain sanctions continuously. Show other countries that the US and the 5+1 offer Iran real incentives to halt nuclear weapons related activities, and explain and justify sanctions in terms that nations in other regions can fully understand. Sanctions alone are not enough. Iran needs to see that the US and the rest of the 5+1 will offer incentives in terms of enrichment, fuel supplies, a rapid lifting of sanctions, trade, investment, and energy development. If sanctions are the “stick,” the US must act to ensure that there are real and immediate “carrots”.
The US must work closely with its European, Gulf, and Israeli allies. The US cannot assume its allies will follow or trust it if does not communicate, consult, and treat them as partners. This is an area where it must be transparent enough to convince the world it is not repeating the mistakes it made in going to war in Iraq, that it will not act precipitously, and it will listen as much as it attempts to lead.
Make a convincing case to the Iranian people, its allies and the world that Iran is seeking to obtain nuclear weapons and could be a threat to the global economy. It is not enough to cite the IAEA and keep up diplomatic pressure. The US must continue to work with the IAEA and key allies like Britain, France, and Germany to show the dangers in Iran’s actions and make the threat it poses fully convincing. The US should explain how a crisis in the Gulf could threaten all countries – including the developing countries
“Iranian currency slides under latest U.S. sanctions”, Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, January 2, 2012.
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