Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Follow Carnegie
- Search
- Global Resources
Global Centers
Languages
The following are excerpts from the prepared remarks by Patrick Clawson, deputy director at The Washington Institute, on "Iran's Motives and Strategies: The Role of the Economy" delivered at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on May 17, 2006. Click here to access his full testimony.
The Limitations of Economic Instruments
Economic instruments alone are unlikely to be sufficient to persuade Iran to freeze its nuclear program. The principal levers of power in Iran are in the hands of revolutionaries who are not motivated primarily by economic concerns, while those who care about the state of the economy do not have sufficient influence on their own to persuade the real power-holders to change policies. Success at influencing Iranian policy is much more likely if action on the economic front is combined with action on other fronts...
Much as pressure should be applied on several fronts rather than just on the economy, so inducements offered Iran should take multiple forms rather than only being trade and investment incentives. Indeed, economic inducements look suspiciously like bribes paid for bad behavior. Besides being odious, such bribes give the impression that bad behavior is more profitable than good behavior...
A much more appropriate form of inducement would be security inducements. Such security inducements should be designed to counter the argument that Iran needs nuclear weapons for its defense. There are many confidence- and security-building measures and arms control measures that would provide gains for both Iran and the West, similar to the way such steps reduced tensions between the old Warsaw Pact and NATO during the Cold War. One example would be an agreement to reduce the risk of incidents at sea between the U.S. and Iranian navies.
A further security inducement which the United States could offer would be to address the reported concern that the Bush administration's real goal is regime change in Iran and that the Bush administration will use force to that end. Such complaints sound peculiar coming from an Iranian government whose president lectures President Bush on why the United States should abandon its liberal democracy and who sponsored a conference last fall on theme "The World Without Zionism and America"...
It would of course be inappropriate for the U.S. government to offer any security guarantees to the Iranian or any other government; what government is in power in another country is up to the people of that country to decide. But what Washington could offer Tehran would be a "conditional security assurance" -- jargon for the simple proposition, "We will not attack you if you do not attack us." (Read More)
A country's borders should not be confused with those familiar dotted lines drawn on some musty old map of nation-states. In an era of mass migration, globalization and instant communication, a map reflecting the world's true boundaries would be a crosscutting, high-tech and multidimensional affair.
The debate over the nuclear deal negotiated by the Bush Administration and the government of India is too narrow, focusing on the nonproliferation aspects of the deal and leaving larger strategic questions relatively unexamined. This is ironic, as the best argument for the deal is that it advances big strategic goals.
The international community should stand back and reflect on the lessons learned from the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) experience in implementing safeguards over the last decade, particularly in North Korea and Iran. Such review and reflection suggests that just when safeguards are getting better, the political will to use them effectively seems to be waning.
The agreement on civil nuclear cooperation that presently exists between the United States and India was the only accord possible because it remains the only framework that protects the core national security interests of both sides.
Missile defenses have come to reflect both an example of, and a means toward, the steady improvement in U.S.-Indian ties occurring in recent years. A deepening bilateral relationship has become part of New Delhi's larger solution to increasing India's capacity to defeat those threats requiring active defenses in the future.
China’s investments in Sudan and Burma have come under harsh criticism of late. Energy-hungry China will need to be convinced that bad governance in places like Burma or Sudan fosters instability that is bad for Chinese investment before it will rein in its rogue client states.
Stay connected to the Global Think Tank with Carnegie's smartphone app for Android and iOS devices