How Not to Undermine Our Negotiating Leverage with Iran

How should the administration respond to the new President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, and his expressed desire to work with the international community to lift the sanctions? 

For starters, I agree with my Shadow Government colleagues when they warn  that the administration should not be naïve. So far in this latest round, I think it is fair to say that the administration has not been naïve. Team Obama appears to understand that Rouhani is doubtless sincere in his desire to see the sanctions lifted, but Iranian hardliners remain adamant that they will not quickly do the one thing that would guarantee rapprochement: verifiably abandon the nuclear weapons program. Rouhani may be more pragmatic than his predecessor was, but that is so low a bar to clear that the prudent emotion should be wariness, not giddiness.

Yet, I am not sure I go as far as my other Shadow Government colleagues do when they call for increasing sanctions now, even before diplomatic overtures have been attempted. I understand the logic for additional sanctions. Iran will likely only accept a painful compromise that would guarantee President Obama’s stated policy of prevention — i.e. preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapons capability rather than containing Iran after it has developed a nuclear weapons capability — if all other policy options are deemed to be even more painful. Ratcheting up the pain of Iran’s status quo path thus could contribute to a diplomatic solution.

However, it is also true that the Iranian regime will only verifiably abandon its nuclear ambitions if it believes the United States will honor its side of the deal, namely lifting the sanctions and welcoming Iran back into the international economic community after Iran lives up to its obligations.

This is the dilemma of coercive diplomacy. For it to work, the threatening state (United States) must convince the target (Iran) of two opposite potential futures. First, the state must convince the target that continued defiance will receive continued (painful) punishment. Second, the state must convince the target that acquiescence will receive a lifting of the punishment. In other words, coercive diplomacy requires simultaneously threatening and reassuring one’s opponent.

Coercive diplomacy can fail if either the threat or the reassurance is undermined. As I have explained before, if the target gets sanctions relief too soon — say, for merely entering negotiations — then it is unlikely the target will actually compromise. Why should they when they get what they want — sanctions relief — without giving up anything?  Failed reassurance frustrates diplomacy in the opposite way: if the target believes it is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t make a deal, it will refuse to compromise.

The history of negotiating with Iran is a history of the international community being too concerned about reassurance and consistently failing to maintain the pressure side. We have repeatedly pursued negotiations with inadequate sanctions pressure and then given into well-meaning calls to ease the pressure with "confidence-building measures" aimed at bolstering reassurance.   

It is also the case that multilateral sanctions are only as tough as the weakest link. The Iranian regime has proven masterful at exploiting weak links in the international community and thus the net effect of sanctions has often been less pressure than the sanctions would seem to promise on paper.

A good case could be made, therefore, that Iran knows only too well that the West would like to give up the sanctions and welcome Iran back into the global economy. Reassurance is the easier side of the equation, the one we are more likely to default to when inertia sets in. Thus, if we are going to err, better to err on the side of too much rather than too little pressure.

I am sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but it is also the case that presently Iran is subject to more painful sanctions than it has endured heretofore in the nuclear negotiations era. This pain is clearly evident in Rouhani’s messaging. Whether it is enough pain to produce a deal is uncertain, but given the stakes it may be worth exploring with another round of negotiations — provided that we can simultaneously threaten and reassure.

That is why I think that Congress may have handed the Obama administration a gift when the House passed substantially ramped-up sanctions — provided that Obama handles this deftly. 

If the Senate passes this and Obama signs it into law, it would likely cause negotiations to fail even before they begin. Maybe later, after the new sanctions have taken hold and the pain becomes intolerable, the Iranians might come around and float other diplomatic offers, but in the near-term the Iranians would view the additional sanctions as a rebuff to Rouhani — and some key U.S. partners might even sympathize with them on that point. It could even backfire and result in international partners isolating U.S. policy, rather than joining U.S. policy to isolate Iran.

But if the Senate passes these new sanctions with a national security waiver, and if Obama exercises that waiver but keeps all of the other preexisting sanctions, we might just enter into negotiations in the coercive diplomacy sweet spot: Obama will have provided the requisite gesture of reassurance, waiving the new harsh sanctions, without undermining the prevailing economic pressure that has driven the Iranians to the current inflection point.

Of course, even sweet-spot coercive diplomacy may be inadequate to the daunting task of convincing the Iranians to verifiably abandon the nuclear weapons’ option. But the alternatives — negotiating with an Iranian regime that believes it has already won the prize of sanctions relief or negotiating with an Iranian regime that believes the United States will not honor any deal — face even less of a chance of working. A deft Obama administration would take advantage of the gambit that Congress is providing.