rssIf You Factor Out 30 Years of Failure, Unilateral Iran Sanctions Work Great
Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 10:13 am
- 5 Comments
Laura Rozen has a good post on some Harvard war games about new unilateral sanctions on Iran ultimately proving counterproductive to getting the Iranian regime to accept greater transparency on its nuclear program. You would think the war game would stop after someone said, “We’ve had unilateral economic sanctions on Iran for 30 years and it’s had absolutely no benefit for U.S. interests” and then everyone could break for lunch. But apparently not.
Still, the message of this war game seems to be to discourage the sorts of sanctions packages moving through Congress in favor of the Obama administration’s planned multilateral sanctions. Gary Sick, a Columbia professor and longtime Iran scholar, participated in the war game and said that the path to those multilateral sanctions is fraught with peril:
The US team went to work with a vengeance to get a consensus on sanctions. This didn’t bother the Iran team in the least. We didn’t think they could put together a package that would hurt us in any serious way, and that proved to be true. But more important, in the process they managed to offend all of their ostensible allies and wasted so much time and effort that Iran was better off at the end than they had been at the beginning. Since this represents a version of actual US strategy (and its results) over now three administrations, I think there is a lesson there that is ignored at our peril.
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5 Comments
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Comment posted December 23, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
“getting the Iranian regime to accept greater transparency on its nuclear program???? WHAT RUBBISH!!!!
Iran has already offered “greater transparency on its nuclear program” and in fact has offered more transparency than other many countries with similar nuclear programs (Brazil, S Korea, Argentina, Egypt) for example by offering to open their nuclear program to multinational participation and limiting enrichment (see Iran's offers which are totally ignored at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/05iht…)
This isn't about “greater transparency” — this is about the US trying to deprive IRan and other developing nations of their inalienable rights under the NPT to make their own nuclear reactor fuel under the guise of fighting weapons proliferation. Remember, the US goal has been “zero enrichment” not “greater transparency”
Comment posted December 23, 2009 @ 8:02 pm
“getting the Iranian regime to accept greater transparency on its nuclear program???? WHAT RUBBISH!!!!
Iran has already offered “greater transparency on its nuclear program” and in fact has offered more transparency than other many countries with similar nuclear programs (Brazil, S Korea, Argentina, Egypt) for example by offering to open their nuclear program to multinational participation and limiting enrichment (see Iran's offers which are totally ignored at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/05iht…)
This isn't about “greater transparency” — this is about the US trying to deprive IRan and other developing nations of their inalienable rights under the NPT to make their own nuclear reactor fuel under the guise of fighting weapons proliferation. Remember, the US goal has been “zero enrichment” not “greater transparency”
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