Why The "Iran Model" may not scare Putin
It didn't stop the Iranians
Sanctions on Russia, in the words of a senior administration official in a February 27 background briefing, follow "the Iran model" in cutting Russia out of the U.S. - dominated international banking system. To anyone who know the true story of Iranian sanctions, this must seem a curious analogy.
The truth of the matter is that Iran sanctions totally failed to curb Iran's uranium enrichment program, the proclaimed object of the entire exercise. The reason the Obama Administration agreed to serious negotiations with the Tehran regime in 2013 was because Obama realized this, and agreed to a key concession demanded by the Iranians: the right to enrich uranium - something the U.S. had always steadfastly rejected.
This is of course not the officially-approved version of events, which is that Iran, bowing under increasingly heavy sanctions, finally agreed to negotiate a nuclear deal with Obama, and that Iran, in the words of foreign policy blobista Suzanne Maloney, is "the exemplar of successful sanctions." The true story has been unearthed and spelled out by Trita Parsi, a well-informed and objective observer of U.S. - Iranian relations. In his book Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, Parsi lays out how it dawned on Obama and his senior advisors that so far from hindering Iran's production of enriched uranium - potential material for a nuclear weapon - the steadily stiffening sanctions had been matched with steadily increasing enrichment, a process clearly leading to the dreaded point of "breakout" - the moment when the Ayatollahs would have enough material on hand to build a bomb. The shorter the interval till a projected breakout, the less time the U.S. would have to do anything about it. "In 2012, the 'breakout' time was estimated to be twelve months," Parsi told me in a recent conversation. "A year later, it had shrunk to twelve weeks. That's why they went back to Oman (where there had already been one round of secret talks) and conceded the Iranians core demand, the right to enrich uranium, which the U.S. had previously and absolutely rejected."
There followed the tortuous negotiations that produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement that freed Iran from some of the sanctions, and limited, but certainly did not halt, its enrichment program. Ironically, the agreement effectively turned the clock back no further than 2012 in terms of the estimated time to breakout, should Iran opt to abandon the agreement. "In 2012 the time to breakout was twelve months, then it went to twelve weeks," Parsi reminded me. "And after years of negotiations, the JCPOA got breakout back to twelve months!"
As we all know, Trump abandoned the deal. Iran continued to observe it for a year before putting the pedal to the mettle on enrichment, unimpaired, it seems, by Trump's reimposed sanctions. Now the Biden Administration is reportedly very close to a fresh agreement with Iran. Given the soaring price of oil attendant on the Ukraine war and consequent sanctions on Russia, Biden has an added incentive to get Iranian oil back on the international market, which leaves us with one more irony: the U.S. will again abandon the "Iran model" as applied to Iran so as to make it easier to apply it to Russia. But the "model" was originally dropped because it didn't work.