You don’t need an insider’s view of Iran’s nuclear program to know that there are several big problems with the Obama administration’s presumptive sanctions strategy.
In interviews, Mr. Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.
If Iran qua corporate actor is incapable of responding to international outreach, there’s little reason to believe that sanctions will generate the kind of far-reaching and fulminant challenge that might force Iran to give a little. The idea of Iran as a corporate actor no longer makes sense now that internal strife has exacerbated factional rivalries and paralyzed foreign policy making. In such a fractured domestic environment, new sanctions become a matter of influencing the balance of power among the factions. Weakening the Revolutionary Guards might only have the effect of further paralyzing domestic decision making by raising other parties to relative parity.
Then there are the usual difficulties with targeting the Guards particularly. They have their money hidden and their reach is extensive. The Iranian political economy has incorporated and worked around sanctions, and its fundamentals remain more or less the same.
However, the biggest problem with sanctions is that the threat Iran’s nuclear activities pose is not political. Iran’s enrichment efforts are dangerous because they’re still happening. Centrifuges are running and undergoing fine-tuning and long-term testing. Uranium is being produced. And stockpiled. The reason the TRR deal was so ingenious was because it removed Iran’s big pile of uranium (the threat) from the picture and allowed everyone some room to breathe. With the right safeguards and verification efforts, this threat can be managed and minimized.
But organizational inertia being what it is, sanctions will most likely have no effect on the progress or product of Iran’s nuclear activities. Political intervention can, but political action is exactly what is not happening in Iran right now. So while the mullahs dither and the P5+1 debates new sanctions, the threat grows because scientists and engineers will do what they do until some big-wig tells them otherwise.
One slightly more interesting part of this report, if true, is something that has been circulating in press reports for the past few weeks.
In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems.
Arms Control Wonk has repeatedly pointed out that while the number of operating centrifuges varies, the number of machines undergoing installation has steadily increased. Covert action and technical problems might be having an effect on the rate of installation, but since the centrifuges themselves are in place, if off, this only kicks the can down the road a little. A related indicator of progress might be the rate at which uranium is getting fed into the machines, but even variations here don’t mean much in the long run.
Brian




