Source: New York Times

Can Sanctions Work Against Iran?President Obama and the leaders of Britain and France on Friday accused Iran of building an underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel and hiding the operation from international weapons inspectors for years.

The leaders gave Iran gave two months to comply with international demands or face increased sanctions. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said the international community “has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.” Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denied that the plant was a secret.

What kinds of sanctions would work in this situation? What strategies might be deployed against Iran now?

Define and Isolate

Iranian leaders insist they do not want nuclear weapons. That is good. The United States and others should not assert otherwise. Rather, the focus should be on defining what are peaceful nuclear activities, which are all that Iran says it wants to pursue, and what are military nuclear activities.

Iran acknowledges it has no right to do the latter so we should cooperate with Iran in peaceful nuclear activities. For example, we could offer to help it build a small new reactor to produce medical isotopes without using highly enriched uranium, once Iran has answered all the International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions and restored international confidence.

At the same time we should define with Russia, China and other Security Council members a list of nuclear-related activities that have no non-military purposes. These activities would, in effect, define weaponization and mark the firewall between peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. If Iran, despite its pledges, undertook one of these specified weaponization-related activities, Russia, China and other Security Council members would be committed to the strongest possible sanctions.

Defining the line between peaceful and military nuclear programs would apply to all countries. However, some activities — like uranium enrichment — can be done for peaceful or military purposes. To give confidence that they are peaceful, states that want to undertake those activities would have to adopt reporting and transparency requirements at least as robust as the I.A.E.A. additional protocol.

U.N. Security Council members should clarify that cat-and-mouse games like Iran is playing with the agency are not consistent with purely peaceful nuclear programs, especially if the activity in question has inherent military applications.

What deters Iran from going too far is isolation — not only from the West, but from the East, North and South. Such isolation would strengthen the breadth and depth of sanctions to come. As important, it would further delegitimize the rulers who put the country in this embarrassing situation. Iranian nationalism is now wedded to resistance against anyone forcing it to abandon a peaceful nuclear program.

But if Iran’s leaders have been caught lying about their program, and will not make an accommodation to end their isolation by foregoing military nuclear activities, frustration with that leadership will mount.