All carrots, no sticks

Despite claims to the contrary, the use of force by the United States to prevent the mullahs in Teheran from possessing nuclear weapons is now effectively off the table.  During the presidential campaign, President Obama assured the American people that an Iranian atomic weapon would be “unacceptable,” but unless Israel takes action, the President has entrapped himself in negotiations that will not move these hardened jihadist revolutionaries but will only provide them enough time to enrich the uranium they need for their first atomic weapon.

Even if eschewing military action were not a matter of conviction among Obama’s foreign policy mandarins, the Iranians know that President has become so heavily invested in negotiations that it is now up to them whether other, incompatible policy options have been irretrievably excluded, especially the resort to war by the U.S. and possibly even Israel.

The Administration has made noises about tougher sanctions, but in all likelihood they’re a pro forma display for our allies amounting to little more than the phantom sensations of a lost limb or the twitching of a dying corpse. 

While “carrots and sticks” is attractive rhetorically, they are a crude and unwieldy device.  Moreover, there are no carrots more appealing to the Mullahs than possession of nuclear weapons, and the sticks of harsher sanctions might only be perceived by the Administration as potentially jeopardizing negotiations.  In any case, sanctions have only worked — and worked over the course of many years — in the unique cases of Rhodesia and South Africa, when the Communist world happily supported a guilty, moralistic West in ending white minority rule.

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