Iran: Economic Sanctions Success Story?

Economic sanctions don't always get the best rap. Frustrated Middle East watchers and myriad Obama critics point to Iran as proof that sanctions aren't coercive, but the detractors may have spoken too soon.

FP's The Cable blog (which, incidentally, has impressed me with its coverage of the Syrian chemical weapons story) put up a new piece this Friday on the reputation of Hasan Rouhani, Iran's new president, in the US intelligence community. Former IC officials who met Rouhani during the Reagan administration say he struck them as a genuine moderate.

If they're right, his election could be a first step toward real progress on ending Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. But the article also mentions another contributing factor: the UN sanctions regime.

The international sanctions against Iran have often been lambasted as ineffective or counterproductive, and are a common example held up by those who argue that sanctions in general just don't work.

Admittedly, it did get pretty old hearing the Obama administration claim every five minutes that the next round of sanctions would be unprecedented in its scope and severity. It was an inherently relative, input-focused metric, and no matter how unprecedented each new round was, none of them seemed to have much effect on Iranian policy.

But sanctions can't be expected to work instantly, especially on an economy where confounding variables like the price of oil have such outsize importance. Discussing potential progress in US-Iranian relations, the insiders interviewed by The Cable attached as much weight to the squeeze of the sanctions as to Rouhani's personal politics.

What does this mean for the other big-name nuclear weapons sanctionee, the DPRK? Probably not much. Even "unfree" countries such as Iran have to take their people into account sometimes.

North Korea, however, has a long history of indifference to political and economic isolation and the suffering of its citizens. There's no "pinch" the West can use that the Kim regime can't ignore, especially with China's continued support. If Western sanctions were going to have any real coercive effect on the DPRK, we'd have seen it by now.

Then again, pundits said the same thing about Iran sanctions for quite a while.