To appear in La Opinion, October 2, 2005

George A. Lopez

After a September of intense bargaining about the development of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea and Iran, the Bush Administration has in each case failed to seal a deal that would eliminate these dangerous programs. Not even staunch Bush bashers can place full blame on the US for the lack of resolution in these crises. After all, both the Koreans and Iranians have strong internal political reasons to continue to hold the US at bay and to retain weapons production. And each nation has a leader determined ‘to win’ in negotiations with the West.

But the Bush foreign policy team does bear responsibility for recognizing much too late what it takes to produce a stable weapons reduction bargain. Two narrow minded Administrative perspectives have come back to work against them. First, as The New Republic editor, Peter Scoblic, has deftly argued, the Bush Administration has had nuclear non-proliferation policy in Iran and North Korea as only a distant policy goal. Rather, the neo-conservative team saw regime change in each nation as their preferred goal. Sobered by the disaster of regime change in Iraq, they now must catch-up in on-going negotiations in which their role is treated skeptically.

Secondly, and more problematic for the substance of deal-making, the Administration has only now acknowledged that to stem the spread of deadly weapons, policymakers have just three primary tools at their disposal: economic sanctions, economic incentives, or war. Among these three, history shows that an astute mixture of the first two, sticks and carrots, is what ultimately stifles the development of the bombs.

When deployed properly in singular form, sanctions and incentives have a relatively effective record of proliferation control. Such carrots and sticks are even more effective when mixed astutely. But this calculation has eluded Washington, as evidenced by Bush’s insistence to vote UN sanctions against Iran in the coming weeks, even though the past two decades of US punitive sanctions against Iran have not changed that nation’s behavior.

What should recent history have taught the Bush Administration that could help their dealings with North Korea or Iran? Regarding sanctions we know that the more multilateral the support and the more focused and targeted on specific arms development sectors the sanctions, the more effective they will be. In most cases an engaging, interactive dialogue with the target government - that is a bargaining model of coercion, rather than a punishment model - produces success.

If incentives are to be offered, they should be combined with sanctions, or at least the latent threat of sanctions. Incentives should be applied consistently, linked to concrete reciprocal acts of restraint, and targeted to constituencies that are most likely to support denuclearization policies. With both sticks and carrots, the structure of imposition must be clear and credible, so that a target is confident that compliance in weapons reduction will bring a lifting of coercive pressure and the promised benefits.

Positive economic incentives – the carrots – have a more effective means of changing regime behavior and enhancing international security than is widely understood. In Ukraine and Kazakhstan’s decision to give up the nuclear weapons on their soil at the end of the Cold War, in South Africa’s disavowal of the bomb, and in creating the nuclear restraint agreements of Argentina and Brazil, inducements and mutual conciliatory gestures were more important than coercive pressures.

Although not popular to recognize in Washington, the truth is that the thirteen years of sanctions against Iraq were decisive in containing Saddam Hussein and preventing the regime’s re-armament. The case of Libya shows that sanctions sometimes exert bargaining leverage that may help to influence regime behavior, especially when coupled with the prospect of positive incentives.

In December 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi surprised many observers by announcing his government’s decision to disclose and dismantle its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and to allow international inspectors to verify compliance. Some U.S. officials tried to credit the war in Iraq with forcing Libya’s hand. But in truth the catalyst for Qaddafi’s decision was prompted both by the weight of the sanctions and by their desire to be reintegrated with the world economy.

U.S. nonproliferation policy in South Asia offers a classic case of how not to use sanctions and incentives. Washington’s attempts to keep South Asia non-nuclear over the course of three decades were erratic, inconsistent, and ultimately ineffective. Not only did India and Pakistan develop and test nuclear weapons, but the Abdul Qadeer Khan network, headquartered in Pakistan, has emerged as a global proliferation nightmare.

The same erratic US pattern has emerged after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The United States relied heavily on Pakistan’s military government as a principal ally in overthrowing the Taliban regime and continues to need its help in the fight against al Qaeda. This has made Washington reluctant to challenge Islamabad’s nuclear policies, or to press for more accountability and transparency in shutting down the Khan network.

But the most ineffectual US use of sticks and carrots has been in the cases of Iran and North Korea. This is due mostly to terrible inconsistency and a failure to meld pledges of military and political security into the economic mix of actions.

The U.S. imposed unilateral comprehensive sanctions on Iran in the wake of the 1979 hostage crisis, and it has maintained a consistently hostile policy toward Tehran ever since. In 1996 Congress passed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, placing additional restrictions on U.S. interactions with Iran and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign companies that invest in Iran.

The history of flawed sanctions against Iran illustrates the complexity of using economic policy across diverse issue areas and the folly of relying on sanctions that have no support from other significant actors. It also points to the need for dialogue and incentives-based diplomacy as means of influencing Iranian behavior, even when Iranian leadership itself vacillates on exactly which incentive package it considers in its national interest.

North Korea’s nuclear history shows both some of the promise and some of the pitfalls of positive incentives. In the 1994 Agreed Framework, Pyongyang halted its nuclear production and reprocessing activities and permitted on-site monitoring to confirm its compliance. In exchange, the United States, South Korea, and Japan agreed to provide the North with fuel oil, new less-proliferation-prone nuclear power reactors, and the beginnings of diplomatic recognition.

The Agreed Framework was successful in the beginning as international monitors verified the freeze on Pyongyang’s plutonium production program. But the sustained commitment of both parties—initially the United States and later North Korea—was lacking. The United States fell behind in its deliveries of fuel oil. The construction of new reactors lagged, and a political backlash in the United States from a newly empowered Republican congressional majority undermined support for incentives.

After North Korea attempted to test a long-range ballistic missile in 1999, many in the United States decided that Pyongyang was not committed to the terms of the 1994 agreement, and the Bush Administration echoed this when evidence surfaced of its undisclosed uranium-enrichment program. Ironically, what finally emerged in the negotiations of last month is an agreement which looks a lot like that of 1994.

Now both the Korean and Iranian processes stand at a cross-roads. A well-crafted nonproliferation policy is within the Administration’s reach. But it must be incentive focused, engaging and non-punitive, and come with a commitment to consistent attention to achieve and maintain an agreement – even when prospects of success appear dim – and especially when the other side continues to grumble about the deal.

George A. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame

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