By JARRETT BLANC
The administration’s new Iran sanctions are symbolic. But that’s not the problem—it’s the message they’re sending.
Jarrett Blanc is a senior fellow in the Geoeconomics and Strategy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was previously the State Department lead for the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Trump administration’s announcement this week of plans to impose new sanctions targeting Iranian leaders and organizations—including the Supreme Leader and his office, military commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif—will have little practical effect, according to sanctions experts. Senior Iranian officials and their organizations are very unlikely to use international financial institutions or hold substantial assets abroad, and those are the major pathways through which the United States exerts coercive economic pressure. In other words, the new sanctions are more symbolic than effective.
This is not a bad thing. Symbolism is useful in international affairs, especially between adversarial countries like Iran and the United States, which lack formal diplomatic relations and need to find other ways to communicate. Intermediaries can be one option, symbolic measures another.
The problem with these new sanctions is not that they are symbolic, but that the messages they convey to Iran and the rest of the world are foolish and dangerous, and will fail to advance U.S. interests.
Here are three messages the Trump administration sent to Iran this week:
First, targeting the Supreme Leader and his office sends a message that Trump is pursuing regime change. “Supreme Leader” is a somewhat misleading title. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is very powerful but must still balance competing political currents in Iran. (Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Reagan-era regime founder Trump mistakenly named in announcing the sanctions, was more powerful but also not all-powerful, and the cultural embarrassment of mixing up two similar names pales compared with the embarrassment of this poorly executed power politics.) Still, Khamenei is both the most important and most symbolic part of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership, the “Vali-ye faqih,” or “guardian jurist,” on whom the regime’s Islamic ideology rests.
Trump has said he is not seeking regime change in Iran, perhaps intuiting that if Tehran interprets his admitted belligerence through this maximalist lens, the Iranians will have little incentive to give him the pageant-like summit meetings he so nakedly craves. His policy, though, is hard to understand as anything but an effort at regime change. Trump has tried and failed to settle those fears with rhetorical flourishes rather than changes in policy. Adding more aggressive attacks on the face of the Iranian regime will not help.
Second, the new sanctions appear to confirm widely held Iranian beliefs that the United States is out of effective economic measures and is scraping for new tools. With Iranian oil sales down to 300,000 barrels per day (from 2.5 million before sanctions were reapplied) and Iran’s economy suffering, the United States has effectively cut Iran out of international commerce already. Washington might have a few effective moves left, but a continued maximum-pressure economic campaign will now be more about sustaining than increasing costs to Iran, largely by making sure companies and countries grudgingly abiding by U.S. restrictions continue to do so. The real signal Iran will take from the new sanctions is that the Trump administration either does not understand this reality or cannot come up with a more effective option to improve upon it.
As is often the case with this administration, the rollout was confused, with the president and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claiming variously that the designations were a response to Iran downing a U.S. drone or targeting commercial shipping last week, or were already expected before those provocations, or both. But it is hard to see the sanctions as anything but a tit-for-tat reaction, and that is how Iran will interpret them. That means that, if the United States wants to respond to future Iranian moves, whether increases in Iran’s nuclear program or proxy attacks in the region, Trump will be increasingly limited to military responses. The effect of this is to ratchet up tensions with no strategic outcome in mind, pointing us toward a confrontation simply for lack of a better idea.
Third, the new sanctions suggest that this administration is not looking for a negotiation. For some reason, the administration only said that foreign minister Zarif will be designated for sanctions but didn’t yet do designate him as such, which is, to say the least, odd. If the Treasury Department believed he had any assets abroad, this warning would allow him to move them (of course, he does not—the whole thing is symbolic). Washington’s Iran hawks consider Zarif a reprehensible avatar of a repugnant regime. But if you want to negotiate, the other side needs a representative. Iran has chosen theirs in Zarif, and targeting him will not ease the way to the table. Even more, targeting Zarif will lay bare the eroding limits of U.S. influence. European and Asian governments will happily continue to meet with him, facilitating his visits in the face of whatever financial pressure Washington applies. Each of these visits will be a measure of U.S. isolation.
What is Trump really after? He says he wants negotiations with Iran and has repeatedly sought a summit-level meeting. If that’s indeed what he wants, then the approach demonstrated with these new sanctions is misguided. He will not achieve talks with more belligerence, or with a sanctions regime that confirms Iranian fears of U.S. intentions and Iranian hopes of U.S. isolation and limited options.
If the administration is serious about a negotiation with Tehran, it needs to send a whole different set of signals—one that demonstrates unambiguous de-escalation. The options for such messages are limited only by Washington’s creativity, and many of them would not require showy public moves that Trump might find humiliating or hard to swallow.
For example, announced U.S. military deployments to the Gulf could be quietly pulled back or slow-rolled. U.S. forces in the region could take subtly less active postures in ways that the Iranians would be likely to detect, without any public announcements or tweeting. Trump could leave sanctions in place but let Allies and partners know that, in defined areas, they will not be actively enforced. Trump will see the remaining participants in the Iran nuclear deal at the G-20 meeting in Tokyo this week and can encourage them to offer accommodations that keep Iran in compliance with its nuclear deal obligations (or return Iran to compliance if it violates nuclear limits this week, as threatened). Europe could finalize the financial mechanism designed to facilitate humanitarian trade with Iran without further histrionic threats of U.S. sanctions.
Trump and his administration are inarticulate and cacophonous in much of what they do, both foreign and domestic. It is not surprising that their inability to communicate extends to subtle symbolism and diplomatic signaling. But it matters. The messages Trump is sending make negotiations with Tehran less and less likely and increase the chance of another ruinous war of choice in the Middle East.
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