The sanctions on Iran were working...yet we've abandoned them while getting next to nothing in return, for the simple reason that Obama was determined to make a deal at almost any price. Emanuele Ottolenghi in the Sunday Times (£):
The agreement is excellent for Iran: in exchange for a cash windfall, the end of international isolation and even access to western nuclear know-how, it must only postpone and partially mothball its nuclear programme.
In September 2013, after a decade of stonewalling, Iran responded to international economic pressure by agreeing to engage in serious negotiation.
This followed the creation of a joint US-EU sanctions regime that short-circuited the Islamic republic’s financial system, grounded its shipping and reduced its oil and petrochemical exports by more than half.
It was not easy: it had taken years of tenacious diplomacy to prod a reluctant international community into agreeing, enacting and expanding the restrictions launched in 2007.
By September 2012 Iran’s currency was in freefall, its foreign currency reserves depleted, inflation soaring and unemployment out of control.
The sanctions worked so well that when Hassan Rouhani became president the following June, he had the money to pay government salaries for only five more months before declaring bankruptcy.
With Iran on its knees, western negotiators could have squeezed the ayatollahs more. Instead they have relieved Iran of economic pressure in exchange for limited and fully reversible nuclear concessions. How did this happen?
There is a principal reason why, instead of extracting significant concessions from Tehran, the world powers prematurely capitulated: for the Obama administration, details were less important than the deal itself.
The president had sought dialogue with Iran’s clerical leaders since the early days of his presidency, believing a nuclear deal could unlock decades of mutual enmity and, in the process, start a moderate trajectory in Tehran. Obama even refrained from supporting democracy activists protesting against the fraudulent 2009 presidential elections for fear of harming his outreach to Tehran.
The president’s entire Iran strategy was based on using a nuclear deal to engineer an epochal change in its relations with the West. Supporting peaceful democratic change stood in the way.
To test this theory, the White House and its European allies have now struck a risky bargain: one that relinquishes all economic leverage upfront and gets little in return.
Jonathan Spyer, in the Jerusalem Post, makes a similar point:
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are unmatched in clandestine and proxy warfare, having effectively created an alternative armed force for Assad when his own army became unreliable in 2012. This force, the National Defense Forces, has plugged the gap in manpower which is the regime’s greatest vulnerability. But in addition, Iran has channeled others of its proxies, including Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi’ite militias and lately increasing numbers of Afghan Hazara Shi’ite “volunteers,” toward the Syrian battlefield.
In Iraq, the Iranian-supported Shi’ite militias of the Hashd al-Shaabi are playing the key role in defending Baghdad from the advance of Islamic State. These militias are trained and financed by the Revolutionary Guards and organized by Soleimani and his Iraqi right-hand man, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, also thought to be an IRGC member.
In Yemen, the Iranians are offering arms and support to the Ansar Allah, or Houthi rebels, who are engaged in a bloody insurgency against the government of President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
Among the Palestinians, Tehran operates Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a client/proxy organization, and is in the process of rebuilding relations with the Izzadin Kassam, the powerful military wing of Hamas.
All this costs money. In a pattern familiar to the experience of totalitarian regimes under sanctions in the past, Iran has preferred to safeguard monies for use in service of its regional ambitions, while allowing its population – other than those connected to the regime – to suffer the consequent shortages.
Still, in recent months, things weren’t going so well. Assad has been losing ground to the Sunni rebels. Hezbollah has been hemorrhaging men in Syria. The Shi’ite militias were holding Islamic State in Iraq but not advancing. Saudi intervention was holding back further advances by the Houthis in Yemen. Hamas was looking poverty-stricken and beleaguered in its Gaza redoubt.
The sanctions, plus these many commitments, were bringing the Iranian regime close to an economic crisis that would have confronted the regime with the hard choice of lessening its regional interference or facing the consequences.
No longer. The deal over the nuclear program is set to enable Tehran to shore up its investments, providing more money and guns to all its friends across the Middle East, who will as a result grow stronger, bolder and more ambitious.
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