Since last week, Iranian naval craft have been harassing American warships in the Persian Gulf, coming dangerously close to them at high speeds. To critics of U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic, these hostile maneuvers demonstrate that the Trump administration’s policy of economic pressure has only made Tehran more combative. Bobby Ghosh disagrees:
To understand the true impact of the sanctions on Tehran’s behavior, imagine how much more dangerous and provocative Iran would have been in their absence. Without the economic sanctions, Iran’s rulers would by now have had access to tens of billions of dollars in assets and revenues from trade with the world, the economic dividend it was promised, in exchange for limiting its nuclear program, in the 2015 deal with the world powers.
Given the regime’s longstanding ambitions for dominance of the Middle East—as well as its paranoia about the Western presence there—much of this windfall would have gone into military spending. This is no mere supposition. In the first year after the nuclear deal was signed, Iran’s military budget spiked—by anywhere between 30 percent and 90 percent. (The regime conceals its true spending.)
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, [whose boats were involved in the latest incidents], would have had to wait until later this year to procure advanced arms from abroad, including fighter aircraft and coastal defense systems; the United Nations embargo on such purchases ends this October. In the meantime, it would have injected cash into its indigenous manufacturing of missiles, military drones and naval mines. Imagine how much more aggressive those . . . speedboats could be if they were backed by more lethal firepower.
And for precisely this reason, Ghosh concludes, Europeans governments, instead of turning a blind eye to Iranian misdeeds, should be supporting American efforts to extend the embargo.
Read more on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-22/iran-s-naval-stunts-would-be-even-deadlier-without-u-s-sanctions