President Obama’s ability to sell any nuclear deal with Iran depends heavily on the idea that sanctions could quickly be “snapped back” if the agreement is violated, restoring the leverage needed to bring Tehran back into line.
Iran is insisting on the immediate termination of the complex array of sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and the U.N. Security Council as its price for agreeing to limits designed to impede the development of a nuclear weapon. But that’s a tough sell in Washington, where most members of Congress see sanctions as the only effective leverage to prevent Iranian cheating and are skeptical that the framework for a final deal announced April 2 will meet the goal of preventing Iran from ever becoming a nuclear-armed nation.
But experts have noted that once the complex web of restrictions crafted after more than a decade of effort is unraveled, it may be impossible to effectively re-create it amid a wave of lucrative new business opportunities made possible by Iran’s reintegration into the global economy.
History can be a guide. Both Iraq and North Korea were able to outlast the will of the international community to maintain sanctions amid evidence they were cheating and evading verification requirements on their nuclear program and others involving weapons of mass destruction. While in Iraq’s case, the evasion was a ruse designed to fool Iran into believing Saddam Hussein’s regime continued to possess such arms, North Korea was able to develop nuclear weapons that U.S. military officials now admit are capable of hitting the United States.
“I call the ‘snap-back’ sanction a delusion,” said Mark Dubowitz, an analyst who has written extensively on the issue of Iran sanctions. “It will run into a wall of human greed.”
Furthermore, sanctions designed to punish Iran for illicit nuclear work are intertwined with those meant to impede its support for terrorism, ballistic missile development programs and its abysmal human rights record — issues that the Obama administration has deliberately excluded from the nuclear talks but are nevertheless central to Tehran’s status as a threat to U.S. interests.
Administration officials say they’re confident they can restore the sanctions quickly if Iran cheats, pushing back against concerns that the U.S. will need to rely on convincing other countries, most notably Russia, of the need to do so once the International Atomic Energy Agency, which would monitor the deal, determines Iran has violated it.
“The fact of the matter is that we have been able to build an international consensus that Iran building a nuclear weapon would be extraordinarily dangerous to the region and the world,” Obama told NPR in an interview aired Tuesday.
“And — we are absolutely convinced we can do it again, in part because the way we are trying to design the snap-back provisions is that they’re not dependent on absolute consensus in the Security Council, for example — but that they are triggered by an IAEA identification of a very real problem there, and that a majority of the countries who are concerned, who are involved, have identified this as a real problem.”
Indeed, one provision in the fact sheet released by the State Department notes that “the architecture of U.S. nuclear-related sanctions on Iran will be retained for much of the duration of the deal and allow for snap-back of sanctions in the event of significant non-performance,” an indication that the administration plans to waive sanctions by executive action, rather than asking Congress to repeal them.
“What the president envisions is essentially leaving the sanctions architecture in place so that if we did detect that Iran was circumventing the agreement or not living up to it in some way, that the president would with the stroke of a pen reimpose those sanctions,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday.
The most recent, and toughest, sanctions, enacted in 2010 and enhanced in 2012, have isolated Iran from international oil markets and its banks from the international financial system. Though Obama initially opposed the sanctions, he signed them into law after legislation imposing them passed by veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress. The administration now credits them for having brought Iran to the bargaining table.
The U.S. sanctions have been mirrored by the European Union and the U.N. Security Council, which still officially maintains that Iran is not allowed to conduct nuclear enrichment, though international negotiators from the five permanent members and Germany already have conceded that point in the talks.
Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that although the most recent sanctions did not keep Iran from developing its nuclear program, it did bring the country’s economy to the brink of collapse. Eliminating them too quickly would make a nuclear deal impossible to enforce by reducing international leverage on Iran’s economy, he said.
Meanwhile, any attempt to snap them back into place could backfire on the United States, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz — both veterans of past arms-control talks — wrote in an April 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“Restoring the most effective sanctions will require coordinated international action. In countries that had reluctantly joined in previous rounds, the demands of public and commercial opinion will militate against automatic or even prompt ‘snap-back’,” they wrote.
“If the follow-on process does not unambiguously define the term, an attempt to reimpose sanctions risks primarily isolating America, not Iran.”
Even before sanctions might be snapped back, U.S. policymakers will face the question of how to keep in place other sanctions related to Iran’s support for terrorism and human rights violations as the nation’s allies race to do business with the regime in Tehran.
The Treasury Department, for example, has designated Iran’s entire financial system as a threat, not just for the funding of nuclear proliferation activities, but also for money laundering and financing of terrorism. Lifting those restrictions without addressing all those concerns would reward Iran for bad behavior.
“Most of the sanctions that target Iran are hybrid sanctions,” Dubowitz said. “They cover the whole range of Iran’s illicit behavior. You can’t separate them.”
