Treasury Secretary Urges Squashing Iran's Economy

Before we speak of squashing an economy, let us ask what an economy, even one governed by men whom we have every reason to distrust, actually is: it is not a machine that may be crushed and rebuilt at will, but a fabric of expectation, credit, and daily arrangement binding together millions of persons who did not choose their rulers and cannot easily unbind themselves from them. The Treasury secretary who asks our allies to join him in this design speaks the language of leverage, and I do not doubt the grievance beneath it. Iran’s conduct in the region has given cause enough for firmness, and no man who has read of the seizure of vessels, the arming of proxies, the long insolence toward its neighbours, will accuse me of tenderness toward that government. The question I press is not whether Iran deserves pressure. It is whether the mechanism proposed - a coordinated squeeze upon the whole economic body of a nation of some ninety million souls - answers to the grievance, or merely answers to the appetite for a visible instrument of resolve.

Sanctions of this general and encompassing character have a history, and it is not the history their advocates tell. When a regime’s foreign reserves are frozen and its currency starved of markets, the palace does not go hungry; it is the shopkeeper, the pharmacist, the young family pricing bread in a currency that has lost half its value in a season, who absorb the first and heaviest blow. The latent function of a targeted sanction - one aimed at a Revolutionary Guard commander’s bank account, at a shipping network moving weapons - is that it disciplines the guilty while leaving the innocent their daily bread. The latent function of a sanction aimed at “the economy” entire, urged upon allies as a collective undertaking, is different: it disciplines everyone, and in disciplining everyone it does something the American Treasury secretary has not accounted for, which is that it hands the Iranian government its most reliable instrument of legitimacy - the claim that the suffering of its people is not the fruit of forty years of misgovernment but the deliberate cruelty of a foreign power. I have watched governments in Paris justify terror by pointing to the coalition of crowned heads arrayed against them; a threatened people, rightly or wrongly, forgives its own rulers before it forgives the men who besiege it.

There is a second mechanism worth tracing, concerning the allies themselves, for they are not called upon merely to disapprove of Iran but to arrange their own commerce, their own banking relationships, their own diplomatic postures around an American design. An ally is not a vassal, and the wisdom accumulated in genuine alliance - the kind that held together through the long exhaustions of the last century - lies precisely in the distinction between shared purpose and demanded obedience. Ask a partner to share an assessment of a threat and you strengthen the partnership. Ask a partner to subordinate his own economic judgment to your instrument of choice, on your timetable, and you teach him something else: that the alliance is a hierarchy wearing the costume of a friendship. I have seen ministers mistake a demand for a request before, in dealings between the Crown and its colonies, and I have watched the goodwill drain out of the relationship long before the formal breach was ever declared.

None of this argues for indulgence toward Tehran, whose government has earned every suspicion turned upon it. It argues that the men who now urge a general squeeze upon a nation’s economic life have described the target with great precision and the consequence not at all - as though a physician, asked to treat a fever, proposed to drain the patient of all his blood and called it treatment because the fever, at least, would certainly end. The fever may end. So may a great deal else that no memorandum from the Treasury has troubled itself to name, and it is the unnamed casualty, always, that returns to trouble the diplomacy of the following decade.