Yesterday, Eric Trager thoughtfully argued that the most recent Iran sanctions resolution, to be enacted by the Security Council in the near future, represents progress. He is right in that the five permanent Security Council members are tightening existing restrictions, sending a symbolic message to the mullahs, and, in Trager’s words, creating “a diplomatic platform for future resolutions, as necessary.”
And future resolutions will indeed be necessary. The U.N. has already imposed two sets of sanctions, the first in December 2006 and the second last March. Yet Iranian leaders have barely missed a beat as they issue increasingly defiant statements and continue to install centrifuges. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday, any Security Council resolution would be “ineffective.”
He knows that because he has the support of Moscow and Beijing. Yesterday, Iran received its sixth batch of nuclear fuel from Russia—11 tons of enriched uranium— for its Bushehr reactor. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that China National Offshore Oil Corp., a state energy company, is set to sign a deal to buy 10 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas from Iran’s North Pars field. This comes on the heels of last month’s $2 billion contract between Beijing’s Sinopec Group and Tehran’s oil ministry regarding the development of the Yadavaran field.
By now it is clear that Russia and China will not permit any Security Council resolution to interfere in their growing economic ties that sustain the country’s hardline theocrats. As Yin Gang of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says, “China hopes it can achieve a resolution that raises pressure but does not risk serious economic fallout.” Yet the whole idea behind sanctions resolutions is that economic fallout will be serious enough to convince Tehran to give up its nuclear program.
“We are not giving up on diplomacy and we will not give up as long as there is a chance it can succeed,” the State Department’s Nicholas Burns said yesterday. I can’t argue with that general proposition, but almost six years after Iranian dissidents revealed Tehran’s covert nuclear program it is clear that the American diplomatic strategy has not and cannot succeed. At one time, it might have made sense to accept lowest-common-denominator solutions to maintain a show of unity, but Iran is too close to obtaining the knowledge and expertise to build a nuclear weapon. The agonizingly long process of adopting weak U.N. sanctions is giving the mullahs the one thing they need most to weaponize the atom: time. China used the same delaying tactics to permit North Korea’s Kim Jong Il to build his weapon.
So diplomacy carries a high cost. U.N. resolutions against Iran will never be enough as long as we allow Moscow and Beijing to water them down. It’s time to consider Western sanctions against any nation that supports the Iranian regime. If that doesn’t work, the next stop, whether we like it or not, will be war.
