[E]ach American administration since 1979 has been driven to such distraction by Iran that it has had to continually revise its own policies. Can a new president do better? He will inherit few effective tools. Diplomacy is, at the moment, going nowhere. Efforts in the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency have done little to prevent Iran from growing ever closer to acquiring the capacity to manufacture nuclear fuel. At the same time, there is very little genuine enthusiasm in Washington today for a military option in Iran. Other endeavors have had limited impact. … What remains, in one form or another, is the idea of sanctions. … But each effort has fallen short. … And sanctions are slow to take effect.
One new concept, however, has begun to get Tehran’s attention. In January 2006, Stuart Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department, was having breakfast in Bahrain when he noted a local newspaper article about a big Swiss bank that cut off business with Tehran. He clipped the article. It gave him an idea. Governments traditionally focus on actions they can enforce themselves. Reading about the Swiss bank, Levey decided it was time to mobilize the private sector, starting with the world’s banks, to join the effort to sanction Iran. … Since that breakfast in Bahrain, he has managed to persuade the U.S. government to back his project; he has also made a lot of enemies in Tehran and created a policy legacy that the next president will have to deal with. …
Levey’s campaign may have had a broader punitive impact than any other action against Iran. But sanctions take time. … The clock on Iran’s nuclear program is ticking faster. Rival projections suggest Tehran might be able to develop a nuclear capacity between 2010 and 2015. The clock on sanctions is moving much more slowly. Levey acknowledged huge hurdles. “But sitting in my place, we have an obligation to use every tool available to us to solve this problem peacefully, and that’s what we’re doing.” Access the full article>>
