Tehran Feels the Pinch
Let's not ease up on the Iran sanctions just as they are beginning to bite.
This weekend's nuclear talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany were noteworthy not for their predictable collapse but for Tehran's demands to lift sanctions as a precondition for restarting negotiations. It was the clearest admission yet that the economic pressure on Iran is beginning to bite.
Some advocates of a "critical dialogue" with the Islamic Republic like to argue that sanctions would be counterproductive, giving Tehran another excuse for belligerence while doing nothing to stop its quest for nuclear weapons. They're right, at least to the extent that economic sanctions alone are unlikely to force Iran's leaders to change course.
But strong sanctions, properly enforced, can also impose steep marginal costs on Tehran. As Iranian journalist Amir Taheri described on these pages yesterday, an October report by Iran's own central bank shows oil revenues, imports and infrastructure projects all down. The regime has been forced to curtail 30-year-old energy and food subsidies. Public protests that forced the regime to shelve previous attempts to cut these handouts could flare again and perhaps revive a weakened, if not yet beaten, opposition Green Movement.
None of this means the threat posed by Iran has declined, and desperate regimes are prone to take desperate gambles. But they're more likely to take those gambles if they sense weakness on the part of their adversaries, as Argentina's generals did in 1982 on the eve of the Falklands invasion. With the Iranians, the West needs to take care not to send its own signal of weakness or ambivalence by easing up on sanctions as a way to lure them back to the table for another round of fruitless negotiations.
Yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that he understood the stakes, insisting the West "must reinforce the sanctions." Yesterday, too, Stuart Levey, the U.S. Treasury Under Secretary who is largely responsible for the current sanctions regime, announced his resignation after seven years on the job. We're confident Mr. Levey's successor, David Cohen, is up to the challenge, assuming the White House provides the political and diplomatic support he needs.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 11
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