New FT Piece by Hossein Mousavian on Iran Sanctions Effectiveness

See the article here.

In this piece, friend of ACL Hossein Mousavian persuasively demonstrates the fallacy of arguments claiming that Western sanctions have been a success because they forced Iran to the negotiating table. As Mousavian, who was intimately involved in Iran’s earlier nuclear negotiations with the West, correctly points out, the negotiating history between Iran and the West includes a number of occasions stretching back a decade, during which Iran was willing to offer significant concessions in order to conclude an agreement. These serious attempts at negotiation by Iran occurred long before Western sanctions reached their recent abusive levels, and were in several cases only unsuccessful because of a failure on the part of Western negotiators to present a unified front and negotiate seriously and reasonably. As Mousavian summarizes:

[T]he idea that it is sanctions that have brought Tehran to the table is wrong. The real cause is the desire of new President Hassan Rouhani to reach a rapprochement with the US, the EU, its neighbours and other world powers, alongside the fact that the US red line has changed from “no enrichment of uranium” to “no nuclear bomb”.