First, as I predicted earlier, the Obama Administration's dropping plans to deploy a nuclear missile defense shield in Eastern Europe has apparently won him points with the Kremlin. Medvedev went so far as to say that "in some cases, sanctions are inevitable." Quite a different tone than what was coming out of Moscow just last year.
China, however, is still not on board. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said during this week's meeting of the UN General Assembly that his government would not currently support increased sanctions on Iran as a means of curbing its nuclear program.
But that was before yesterday's shocking development: Iran has been secretly constructing a second uranium reactor, hidden in the hills of Qom on a Revolutionary Guard base. The timing of the release of this information - which has for months been a closely guarded secret of U.S. intelligence agencies - was a brilliant maneuver in the game of diplomatic chess. With the Obama Administration's test-case of engagement coming up, Iran is now clearly framed as a deceptive state actor. Russia even sounded alarmed, with Medvedev demanding that the IAEA "immediately investigate" while voicing his "serious concern."
The Iran talks will be a win-win for Obama. In the less likely scenario, he wins some real and significant concessions from the regime and his push for diplomacy will have triumphed. Or, in the more likely alternative, Iran will remain recalcitrant but now in the face of new damning evidence that it is pursuing a nuclear weapon. Diplomacy will have been tried, and it will have failed. Russia and China would thus have no further reason to put off sanctions any longer.
Which goes back to China. Close attention should now be paid to what signals are coming out of Beijing, both before and after the upcoming Iran talks taking place in early October. As the New York Times shrewdly points out, "Mr. Obama is planning to visit Beijing and Shanghai in early November, just around the same time that a sanctions resolution is expected to be introduced at the Security Council."
But should China join Russia and signal a willingness to impose new sanctions on Iran, the effectiveness of such sanctions remains another question. Trita Parsi writes:
While diplomacy may be a long shot, the proponents of sanctions have an even more difficult task. Unlike diplomacy, sanctions have a clear, decades-long track record of failure. In 1995, before Iran had any enrichment plants, comprehensive trade and investment sanctions were imposed on Iran to curb its nuclear activities. Nearly 15 years later, Iran’s nuclear program continues to advance. The only thing that has been curbed is the belief in sanctions as an effective stand-alone instrument to address this problem.
