How to explain America’s failure, after 20 years of efforts, to impose genuinely crippling sanctions on Iran? Start with the penchant of the executive branch—from Presidents Clinton to Obama—for excluding Congress from the process.
Last month, the New York Times reported that President Obama planned to bypass Congress on any final deal with Iran, directly violating a pledge by Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this year that the administration would “of course” consult with lawmakers about the future of sanctions. “We’d be obligated to,” he said, “under the law.”
At the same time, the administration maintains that it feels perfectly copacetic with its current slate of sanctions anyway—no need to rush for more. Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew said shortly after the implementation of the interim agreement that the United States—thanks to “President Obama’s leadership, congressional actions, [and] American diplomacy”—had “put in place a historic sanctions regime, and Iran now finds itself under the greatest economic and financial pressure any country has ever experienced.”
At first glance, Lew’s narrative seems compelling. After a decades-long campaign, sanctions have clearly exerted a devastating impact on Iran’s economy under the Obama presidency. They have cut off Iran from the global financial system, leading to mass unemployment, lowering precipitously the value of the rial, significantly raising the cost of food, and spurring multiple countries to cut oil imports. Making matters worse, Iranians have rioted in the streets in protest.
Yet more than 20 years after Congress passed its first nuclear-related sanctions, Iran continues to defy the international community. It has refused to accept any limits on its centrifuge production. It has refused to explain the possible military dimensions of its program. And it has refused to make a meaningful offer during negotiations that would end its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Sanctions may have weakened Iran’s economy, but they have not weakened Tehran’s determination to acquire the bomb. They have received multilateral support, but not comprehensive multilateral enforcement. They have upset the regime, but not jolted it into submission.
On one level, Tehran’s intransigence stems from habit: It has a long history of exhibiting greater concern for its Islamist agenda than for its people’s economic woes. As early as 1993, long before America sought to sanction Iran’s economy aggressively, the New York Times reported, “the Iranian revolution has failed to achieve either prosperity or sustained hope.” Iranians face “mounting unemployment, high inflation, housing shortages, and a state-run economy that has driven industry to the ground.”
But on another level, the problem also springs in part from years of U.S. dysfunction in its sanctions policy. Since Congress passed its first nuclear-related sanctions in 1992, the campaign has unfolded protractedly and haphazardly, featuring inconsistent enforcement by the executive branch that enabled Tehran to adapt, sporadic diplomacy that led nowhere, and opposition from much of the international community, including key Iranian trading partners such as Russia and China.
For example, one of the earliest and most important bills, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 (renamed the Iran Sanctions Act in 2006), authorizes sanctions against any foreign company that invests more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector—the lifeblood of its economy. Yet successive administrations failed to sanction a single foreign company under the legislation until 2010, citing vociferous objections from capitals overseas.
At the same time, even when European countries finally adopted sanctions in recent years, Tehran has received economic lifelines from other nations. In one of the more dramatic examples of this dynamic, Turkey and Iran late last year engineered a deal that allowed Ankara to purchase as much as $13 billion in oil and natural gas from Tehran.
Worst of all, presidents have often opposed the passage of sanctions legislation at the outset, undermining the image of U.S. resolve and complicating an already cumbersome legislative process. In his first term, President Obama repeatedly resisted congressional efforts to impose new penalties, including—among other initiatives—the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 and an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 that authorized sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. Both nonetheless passed Congress overwhelmingly—and the administration, recognizing the popular support they commanded, later took credit for them.
On the other hand, in early 2014, the White House successfully pressured Congress to shelve the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, which would have imposed sanctions-in-waiting pending the outcome of the nuclear talks. That opposition continues today.
“The [Iran sanctions] bills that we pass become interesting historical documents but not really bills that have been implemented” by the executive branch, said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in December 2010, just a month before assuming the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “And so we want to put an end to that. Can we do it? We can’t force the administration to do it.”
Indeed they cannot—and they cannot, for that matter, save the administration from unforced diplomatic errors either. In perhaps the Obama administration’s greatest blunder, it agreed—in return for minimal concessions on Iran’s nuclear program—to bestow billions of dollars in sanctions relief as part of the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA). As a result, Iran has achieved a moderate economic recovery in the past year, according to an October 2014 report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Roubini Global Economics.
What’s more, judging by the compromise proposals reportedly under discussion, Tehran may yet get the best of both worlds as part of a final deal: more sanctions relief and the preservation of its nuclear infrastructure.
The United States is nearing a moment of truth. If the P5+1 emerges from the talks with a bad deal, no deal, or an extension (a good deal seems hard to envision at this stage), the Obama administration must fulfill the untapped potential of previous sanctions campaigns by restoring the pre-JPOA sanctions architecture, closing loopholes, enforcing all penalties already on the books, and preparing even more crippling new ones.
Lawmakers, for their part, are ready to act. In July 2014, Ros-Lehtinen joined 343 of her House colleagues in sending a bipartisan letter to President Obama urging him to consult with Congress on a final deal with Iran. But if past is prologue, analysts may someday look at that missive as an interesting historical document.
Tzvi Kahn is a senior policy analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative.
