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The Negotiation Delusion: Iran Talks Fail Again

(Weekly Standard) John Bolton - The latest negotiation charade between Iran and the P5+1 is the culmination of 10 years of innumerable diplomatic endeavors. These efforts rested on the erroneous premise that Iran could be talked out of its decades-long effort to build deliverable nuclear weapons. Sanctions neither restrain Iran's nuclear program nor effectively advance the goal of replacing the mullahs with a regime that would truly forswear nuclear weapons. What would a negotiated deal look like? Our goal is to deny Iran nuclear weapons; Tehran manifestly wants the opposite. What is the compromise? Iran gets to keep a small nuclear weapons program? Today there simply is no effective, enforceable sanctions regime that will compel Iran to abandon its nuclear aspirations. The piecemeal deployment of antinuclear tactics has simply provided Iran space to adjust and deploy countermeasures. We are told the latest round of oil and financial sanctions is different, but already analysts see them failing, because of extensive Obama administration waivers, lax EU enforcement, and massive fraud, deception, and misinformation by Iran. Iran took advantage of the oil price runup starting in the early 2000s to accumulate huge foreign currency reserves. It has designed and deployed worldwide money-laundering capabilities, creative but entirely false statistics, and oil-smuggling techniques that would make drug cartels envious. The writer, U.S. ambassador to the UN during 2005-06, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
2012-07-11 00:00:00
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