By Kevin Rackham
One of the big questions of President Obama’s second term is how his foreign policy will change, especially with regard to Iran. Obama indicated during the presidential debates that he thought sanctions imposed on Iran were successful, and he would continue pushing for them if Iran didn’t suspend its enrichment program.
Imposing harsher sanctions on Iran is a bad idea.
First of all, statements from Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak and Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Benny Gantz show that they don’t believe Iran has decided to create a nuclear weapon yet. And Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran’s nuclear material hasn’t been diverted for military use. The country’s uranium enrichment program, however, seems to be the reason we keep sanctioning Iran and assuring everyone that we’d have Israel’s back. Still, the U.S. intends to keep to its current path.
Americans seem to think that Iran is simultaneously a big threat and no threat at all. We all remember John McCain’s lovely “Bomb Iran” ditty from 2008, which seemed to typify how a lot of people feel about the nation. We seem to think we could easily take Iran, as long as it doesn’t have nukes.
Iran getting nukes is a big deal, but Iran without nukes is easily dismissed. This is a stupid attitude.
Iran has the sixth-largest active army in the world and the eighth-largest reserve army. It produces thousands of its own missiles, planes and weapons. Iran isn’t the kind of place we can just fly over and bomb into submission like McCain suggested. It’s one of the strongest nations in the Middle East and could be considered a threat in its own right even without nuclear weapons.
It doesn’t make sense, then, that so many people seem intent on setting us on a path that would lead us directly to war with Iran.
Romney called for even stricter sanctions during the debates, and that seemed to be one of his and Obama’s few points of agreement. Right now there’s a bipartisan committee in Congress working on rolling out new sanctions.
Crippling Iran’s economy isn’t going to solve anything, though. Sanctioning Iran’s trade isn’t going to make the people in charge of the government or the enrichment program back down from what they’re doing.
As we see over and over again, the people most affected by a bad economy are the middle and lower classes. They aren’t the ones pushing for more enrichment or more hostility. They are the ones who occasionally take to the streets over massive human rights violations and are violently taken down. Sanctions against Iran are only going to make their lives worse.
The regime in place in Iran is objectively bad. They used child soldiers to put down the Arab Spring demonstrations in Iran. They’ve engaged in across-the-board censorship and denied their citizens many basic rights.
But they’ve also been successful in improving living conditions, they’ve used their enriched uranium in a medical reactor and they’re (sort of) allowing elections again.
Despite its many flaws, the Iranian government has become more open to diplomacy in the past few months. It was one of the few nations that agreed to participate in upcoming talks in Helsinki to make the Middle East a nuclear-weapon-free region.
Iran should be allowed to keep its enrichment program.
Sure it has oil, but we know that becoming dependent on oil doesn’t work out too well. Rather than bringing Iran’s economy to the ground because they might be developing nuclear weapons, we should be working with them to make sure they still aren’t and don’t have a reason to.
We shouldn’t be letting our dedication to Israel blind us to the opportunity of finding a diplomatic solution with Iran while one is still possible.
Above all, we shouldn’t be using sanctions to punish a nation for things we disagree with, because that gives the nation even more reason to dislike and distrust the U.S. It’s time to back down and find a solution that will actually work.