President Bush apparently convinced European leaders to support additional sanctions against Iran during his farewell tour of Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, said that “one cannot exclude another round of sanctions.” Bank Melli and other Iranian financial institutions would be the main targets.
That’s good news, but the difficulties inherent in sustaining this coalition inevitably raise the question of far Germany and other European countries are willing to go to keep the pressure on Iran—and what the United States can do to help sustain transatlantic unity.
On the one hand, there seems to be something approaching a consensus in Europe on the need to constrain Iran’s nuclear program and even for the European Union to flex its muscles a bit in pursuit of that objective. For example, the European Union has reportedly agreed on what action to take against Bank Melli, even if (contra Gordon Brown’s embarrassing assertion yesterday) the EU has not in fact agreed on when to take action.
Still, with energy prices soaring to record levels and the global economy on a downturn, the chances of mobilizing international support for sanctions targeting Iran’s economic lifeline, its oil and natural gas exports, are slim to none. But there is still plenty that can be done on the sanctions front, particularly in the financial sector.
What does seem clear, however, is that President Bush’s saber-rattling towards Iran—his stock reminder that “all options are on the table”—is singularly unhelpful. It rattles politicians in Europe more than it gives pause to mullahs in Iran, who know that the United States is uniquely vulnerable to retaliation so long as there are 150,000 American troops in Iraq.
Why Bush insists on repeating this swashbuckling mantra at every turn boggles the mind. Everybody knows that military force is always hypothetically available, so why keep trumpeting it when the practical result is to put our allies in an exceedingly awkward spot: how to sell a foreign policy of putting pressure on Tehran to domestic audiences while at the same time distancing oneself from Bush’s bellicose (and failed) policy towards Iran?
Consider the plight of Chancellor Merkel. She’s comparatively hawkish by European standards—her political party recently endorsed missile defense installations in Europe. But her ruling coalition, comprised of the Social Democratic Party and her Christian Democratic Union, is beginning to fracture due to internal disputes ranging from minimum wage policy and health care reform to German foreign policy on China’s human rights record. National parliamentary elections are scheduled for fall 2009, but one cannot dismiss the possibility of early elections.
Now consider this in light of the fact that European publics—and I’m not joking here—tend to regard Bush’s policies as a greater threat to world peace than Iran’s. For example, nearly half of the German public, according to a recent poll conducted by Stern, a German language weekly, sees the United States as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a leading German newspaper, noted that even Russian President Putin received a warmer farewell from Europe before he left office.
Small wonder, then, that Merkel has bent over backwards to make it clear that the UN in New York, and not the White House in Washington, will remain the center stage for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, and why she insisted on thorough implementation of the latest round of UNSC sanctions before moving on to harsher measures.
Sanctions are almost always effective in the sense that they hurt the target country. That is certainly true in Iran’s case, where sanctions have exasperated conditions in its already dysfunctional economy. But sanctions are seldom successful in actually changing the target government’s policies unless the international community—or at least the United States and Europe—is committed to the endeavor over the long term. Sustaining this commitment in the case of Iran is difficult enough, but Bush’s saber-rattling only makes it harder.
Fabian Lieschke, a graduate student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service interning with me for the summer, co-authored this piece and was the driving force behind it.

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