Sanctions Are Only a Stop-Gap
Tehran is Negotiating, But That Isn't Enough
Article Summary and Author Biography
Sanctions have succeeded in bringing Tehran back to the negotiating table, but they are a tactic, not a strategy. Any long-term policy has to aim for a democratic Iran.
PATRICK CLAWSON is Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author or editor of numerous books and studies on Iran.
Snapshot
The new sanctions regime places the United States' tactics and objectives -- a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear ambitions -- at odds. In effect, the administration has backed itself into a policy of regime change, an outcome it has little ability to influence.
At a bazaar in Tehran. (Raheb Homavandi / Courtesy Reuters)
To judge the effectiveness of Western sanctions against Iran, it is important to first establish their purpose. U.S. officials and their European counterparts have set out a number of different goals for the sanctions regime, including deterring the proliferation of nuclear technology across the Middle East, as other countries imitate Iran, and persuading Iran to comply with the UN Security Council’s orders to suspend all nuclear enrichment. The sanctions have met some of those aims and failed to meet others. But for the Obama administration, they have succeeded in one crucial way -- bringing Iran back to the negotiating table. The question, then, is not whether sanctions have worked but whether the strategy they serve is correct.
To begin with, Tehran’s decision to reenter discussions about the future of its nuclear program represents a dramatic about-face. During the January 2011 round of negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5 plus 1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany), for example, Tehran rejected any talk of its nuclear program. For the next 15 months, it refused to meet until the P5 plus 1 accepted the precondition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium. In new talks in Istanbul this past March, however, Iran agreed to discuss its nuclear efforts and dropped its precondition...
