Iran

Sorry pundits, there's little the United States can do about the protests in Iran. Better to plan for when the dust settles.

By Suzanne Maloney

If anyone needs another reminder of how minimal Americans' understanding of and access to Iran has become, the discourse in Washington over the past week certainly provides one. As scenes of Iranian bravery and bloodshed have unfolded, American pundits and politicians have fixated on President Obama's syntax and inflection. Although a passing familiarity with Iranian history, as well as Iranians' appeals for Washington not to meddle in their nascent movement, buttress the case for caution, the tempest over presidential semantics is at best a pointless exercise and at worst a distraction from the serious question ahead: How will Iran's internal crisis will impact U.S. policy?

The fact is, no matter how much Americans like to think they are the ones shaping events in Iran, it's just not true. The dramatic events in Iran have been wholly internally driven. They are the product of three decades of semi-competitive Iranian elections, a sophisticated population that warily guards its limited rights and freedoms, the tensions of a longstanding elite power struggle, and the ever-important force of unintended consequences -- among other factors. Better for the United States, then, to focus on those areas where it actually has some capacity for influence: namely, its own Iran policy, and more specifically, how Washington can move forward with engaging Tehran in light of the dramatic changes of the past 10 days.

As profound as recent events have been, engagement remains the only path forward for Washington. Whenever the dust settles in the tumultuous battle on the streets and behind the scenes, direct U.S. diplomacy continues to represent the most viable mechanism for addressing Iran's nuclear ambitions. After all, Obama's interest in engagement was never about the Iranian leadership, and until very recently, most experts expected a second Ahmadinejad term. Instead, the case for engagement was - and still is - rooted in the urgency of the world's concerns about Iran's ambitions and the even-less promising U.S. policy alternatives, such as military action or externally sponsored regime change.

Even if the upheaval in Iran does not inherently alter the rationale for engagement, however, it will likely exacerbate the potential pitfalls of implementing it. One line the administration is floating on engagement now -- that the consolidation of power under Iranian hard-liners will create incentives for a quick resolution of the nuclear standoff -- is certainly conceivable. But given Tehran's uncompromising rhetoric and recent resort to violence, this argument sounds suspiciously like wishful thinking. More likely, the United States is going to have to deal with an increasingly paranoid and dogmatic Iranian regime, which is preoccupied by a low-level popular insurgency and a schism among its longstanding power brokers.

This begs a lot of questions, foremost of which is: How can Washington get an even more thuggish theocracy to make meaningful concessions and credible, durable commitments to its historical adversary when Iran's own power structure is still shifting considerably? Fortunately, this is not an insurmountable hurdle, and a little history can help us clear it.

From 1980-81, the United States conducted hard-headed diplomacy with a revolutionary government in Iran, when the country was still in a state of unrest, to secure the release of American hostages seized from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. This challenge was at least as daunting as that of today. The Carter administration's negotiators faced an array of implacably anti-American interlocutors whose authority, credibility, and interest in resolving the crisis remained an open question throughout the dialogue. Moreover, Tehran's ultimate goals seemed unclear, possibly even unknown to its leaders, who often employed the negotiating process as a means of prolonging the crisis rather than resolving it.

An agreement to end the hostage crisis was ultimately reached. But it took months of intense work and many false starts, as well as a variety of tools, including secret negotiations and a third-party mediator and guarantor for the eventual agreement. Whether or not this kind of hard-won success can be replicated now is unclear. If anything, the stakes today are higher and the Iranian political dynamics are less promising, at least in the very short term. Still, charting a path forward for diplomacy is certainly the most constructive use of U.S. political capital and energy at this juncture.

But what about Iran's burgeoning democracy movement? And what useful role can and should the United States can play in advancing it? Given recent events, it was inevitable that some American pundits and policymakers would renew their calls for additional U.S. democracy assistance programs for Iranian reformers. This would be precisely the wrong move - not because it would compromise the climate for nuclear negotiations, but because Iran's own activists have consistently rejected such funding. They don't want it, and elections-related news such as the massive reformist vote monitoring effort suggests they don't need it. Better for Washington to focus efforts on where it can be both useful and welcome, such as last week's timely intervention to encourage Twitter to defer network maintenance during a crucial moment of the protests.

The first chapter of Iran's next great social movement has begun. Now it is time for Americans to put aside futile squabbling over the righteousness of their indignation and move on to more practical deliberations of where Iran and the United States go from here. In short, stop talking about talking and start talking with Iran.

Suzanne Maloney is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

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Economic sanctions haven't been able to stop human rights abuses and they won't stop Iran's nuclear program.

By Dursun Peksen

After some encouraging early signs of greater diplomatic engagement between the United States and Iran, there are now renewed calls for the Barack Obama administration to get tough with the Islamic Republic. Typically, "getting tough" means yet another round of sanctions. A new report, whose authors include senior Obama advisors Dennis Ross and Gary Samore, recommends a range of new sanctions to deter Iran's nuclear program. Last week, France, Germany, and Britain drew up a list of Iranian targets for new sanctions, seemingly designed to give Obama a "big stick" to wield as he moves into negotiations.

It's a stick Obama should think twice about using. Economic sanctions not only typically fail to induce authoritarian regimes to change their policies, but they are also counterproductive tools that deteriorate human rights conditions in the sanctioned countries. The Obama administration would be more likely to accomplish its goals for Iran and other regimes by lifting sanctions and seeking an alternative, noncoercive policy as part of a greater strategy of engagement.

The recent history of sanctions against Iran-as well as against countries such as Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and Zimbabwe-shows that rather than putting pressure on leaders to capitulate to U.S. demands, economic sanctions typically consolidate the coercive authority of authoritarian governments. Savvy leaders are able to use economic sanctions as a strategic tool for manipulating access to the resources that the sanctions regime makes scarce. By doing this they simultaneously enhance their authority and weaken the opposition's ability to mobilize against the regime.

Foreign economic pressures also create incentives for authoritarian leaders to become more repressive toward opposition groups in order to preserve their hold on power. They often surmise that conceding to foreign pressure would make them look weak domestically and might result in the loss of their legitimacy and popular support. To mitigate any possible domestic costs caused by concessions to external economic pressure, authoritarian leaders have greater incentive to be less conciliatory to coercive threats and put greater pressure on opposition groups to demonstrate their resolve.

My research into the effect sanctions have on human rights conditions in authoritarian regimes shows that more abuses typically occur with sanctions in place and that the number of abuses is greater when sanctions regimes are more extensive. If sanctions can't pressure Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe into respecting the political rights of his people, why should they deter Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from seeking a nuclear weapon?

Thankfully, sanctions are not the only option. An alternative course of action in the form of engagement-dialogue, regular diplomatic communications, and economic incentives such as foreign aid and/or provisions of low-interest loans-might be more effective in advancing human rights, democracy, and, in Iran's case, cooperation with international nuclear protocols. These policies will be less costly to those groups seeking greater rights and political reform, and make target regimes more conciliatory toward external demands.

There are promising early signs that the Obama administration might be favoring such an approach. In her four-country tour of Asia last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted at reviewing the economic sanctions against Burma, which has been ruled by a military junta for more than two decades. Clinton admitted publicly that the sanctions against Burma had virtually no impact on weakening the military regime. Similarly, with a new power-sharing deal and the formation of a unity government in Zimbabwe, the African Union recently urged the United States and other Western countries to lift the harsh economic sanctions against the country.

A plan of engagement that includes the lifting of sanctions would be the best possible way of helping these long-suffering countries move toward more political freedom. In the case of Iran, it might just prevent a nuclear showdown.

Dursun Peksen is assistant professor of political science at East Carolina University. His research interests focus on foreign policy, international political economy, and, in particular, economic sanctions.

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Iran's nuclear program is cause for concern, but not for the reasons you think.

By Jacqueline Shire

There are plenty of reasons to pay close attention to Iran's nuclear progress, but the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report showing that the country has accumulated 1010 kg of low-enriched uranium is not at the top of my list.

That's not to say that this milestone is insignificant. We now know that Iran has accumulated enough low-enriched uranium (LEU) to yield sufficient high-enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon should Iran decide to seize the material, which is under IAEA safeguards, further enrich it, and in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, use the material in a nuclear warhead. Luckily, given the international crisis this action would certainly provoke, Iran is unlikely to attempt the feat.

We've also learned that Iran has achieved its objective of successfully operating several thousand centrifuges. This has been a gradual process that began in earnest two years ago.

The report generated further concern because of a discrepancy in the accounting of Iran's uranium. According to senior U.N. officials, the discrepancy, which resulted in the underreporting of LEU in the November 2008 report by 209 kg, was an engineering miscalculation on Iran's part and not a deliberate attempt to mislead the IAEA. The net effect is that Iran crossed the so-called breakout threshold a few months earlier than expected. 

While legitimate cause for worry, these headlines obscure other equally important developments. One is that although Iran has installed upwards of 5,400 centrifuges, it continues to operate just under 4,000 of them, bringing into operation only one additional cascade of centrifuges since November. Is Iran suddenly more attuned to the optics of its nuclear program? Hard to say, especially given that it continues to stonewall the IAEA on access to a heavy water reactor under construction at Arak, and refuses to even discuss a set of documents that allegedly show research into nuclear warhead design.

Potentially more troubling is Iran's refusal to allow IAEA inspection of nuclear facilities not covered under traditional safeguards, in particular places where centrifuges are manufactured and stored. The consequence is that the IAEA has little knowledge of how many centrifuges Iran is manufacturing and where they are. It is conceivable therefore that Iran could make centrifuges that are not destined for the inspected site at Natanz, but for a clandestine facility. Because of another change that Iran unilaterally made to its safeguards relationship with the IAEA, it has declared that it will only inform the IAEA of new nuclear facilities six months before they become operational.

These are the fine-print details of Iran's relationship with Vienna that don't garner flashy headlines, but are the real reason to keep a close eye on Iran's actions. 

Jacqueline Shire is a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security and a widely cited expert on Iran's nuclear program.

Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images