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Iran Sanctions Yield Little
Not supposed to. Euros have too much business with Iran to let sanctions get in the way. Ditto Russia.In its latest proposed set of tougher United Nations sanctions on Iran, the U.S. is again relying on asset freezes as one tool to pressure the country not to build nuclear weapons. But a close look at how much Iranian money has been frozen to date in the U.S. under existing sanctions shows that the total amount is surprisingly small, less than $43 million, or roughly a quarter of what Iran earns in oil revenue in a single day. Other countries also haven't frozen very much, despite freezes implemented by the European Union and the U.N., interviews show. Switzerland, for example, has frozen only about $1.4 million in Iranian assets--a tiny fraction of the $712 million Swiss companies exported to Iran last year. "It's peanuts," says Jeremy P. Carver, a British attorney who has advised governments on implementing sanctions. "It's not going to really change a thing." U.S. officials do not dispute that current amounts of frozen Iranian assets seem small. In some cases, Iran has shifted the money outside the U.S. or EU to avoid sanctions. The officials emphasize that their strategy is not to seize many assets, but to pressure Iran to change its ways by making it extremely difficult for it to do business. "The strategy is not to freeze as many assets as we can," says Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department official who has headed the U.S. sanctions initiative during both the Obama and Bush administrations. "That alone, without the full range of measures we can bring to bear, would be a failing strategy." Posted by: Steve White 2010-04-05 |
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