The Race against Time in Iran Policy

The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2010 – My latest Capital Journal column looks at where Iran policy is headed:
Iranian forces launched a big military exercise in the Persian Gulf Thursday, thereby underscoring a grim reality: The strategy for stopping Iran’s nuclear program is turning into a race against time before options turn from mediocre to bad to worse.
The goal of American policy right now is to slow down the clock-that is, to stretch out the time Iran needs to become nuclear-arms capable.
The hope is to buy time to give other kinds of pressure a better chance to work before military options move to the fore.
That’s why the current foot-dragging in adopting new economic sanctions at the United Nations Security Council is so troublesome. In an ideal world, and in the Obama administration’s original vision, a U.N. resolution imposing new economic penalties would have been passed two months ago.
So now, here’s where things are headed: American officials say they hope a U.N. resolution will pass in the next few weeks.
That would clear the way for step two, in which the U.S. and its European allies, with some help from Japan, would layer on additional sanctions of their own with more bite, clamping down on Iran’s access to the international financial system and squeezing its Revolutionary Guards, the real power behind Iran’s nuclear program.
Getting this economic squeeze in place is crucial. The hope is that when Iran’s leaders see that economic pressure has moved from possibility to reality, they will return to negotiations over their nuclear program, which they contend is for producing energy, not weapons.
It’s worth pausing here to note that having a credible military threat on the table is useful for both prongs of this strategy-getting biting sanctions, as well as getting Iran to take its predicament seriously.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while feuding with the Obama administration on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, is extremely useful on this front.