While visiting Jerusalem earlier this week, the French foreign minister pledged that he would push for new multilateral sanctions against the Iranian nuclear program. Congress, meanwhile, has included significant new economic measures against Iran in its recent package of national-security bills. And since last month’s drone and missile attack, even the White House has shown signs of moving away from its tacit policy of minimally enforcing existing sanctions. But Sever Plocker, one of Israel’s most prominent economists, is skeptical:

Despite thousands of Iranian officials, from regime leaders to field commanders, being blacklisted by the U.S. and the European Union, Iran’s economy continues to function and progress. There is considerable doubt that the bombastic announcements of additional U.S. and European sanctions heard [last] week will change the situation.

Firstly, Iran maintains intricate and developed economic relationships with countries that do not see themselves bound by the sanctions regime, including Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Secondly, even the most comprehensive sanctions tend to unravel and weaken over time, as gaps within them widen. Meanwhile, the international community’s political will to enforce them diminishes; the validity of a significant part of the sanctions on Iran naturally expired at the end of 2023 and was not renewed due to a lack of consensus in the UN Security Council.

The diminishing effectiveness of the sanctions has pushed decision-makers in Tehran to launch a military campaign against Israel and could lead them into a prolonged war against us—a war they perceive as an escape from a volatile domestic political situation and a means to maintain their regime. . . . While Hamas could have been and still can be coerced economically to release our hostages, challenging and blocking Iran’s Middle Eastern imperial aspirations with another round of sanctions is unlikely to be effective.

Roger Zakheim believes the U.S. has taken the wrong approach to the Israel-Hamas war, and to the fate of the five Americans currently being held in Gaza:

For more than seven months the secretary of state and director of central intelligence, along with other senior officials, have treated the Gaza war as if it were a conflict between state actors, employing shuttle diplomacy and negotiating with both sides. They have indulged in the conceit that you can negotiate with a terrorist organization by treating it as an equal party. The Biden administration has continued to allow Qatar to give Hamas’s political leadership sanctuary in its five-star headquarters in Doha, on the theory that if they can talk with Hamas leaders, a resolution is more likely.

It is long overdue for the United States to shift the paradigm. Over the past twenty years, the United States has developed an array of intelligence, economic, and military tools and techniques that can pressure and destroy terrorist networks. They should be deployed against Hamas.

We should also unleash our military and intelligence community’s world-class targeting and strike capability that killed Osama bin Laden and Qassem Suleimani, and has rescued hundreds of hostages held by terrorists. . . . Instead of fully utilizing this exquisite capability, only a handful of military advisers are whispering advice to Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv. . . . As one IDF special operator told me, “Your Delta forces would be a game changer.”