Sharper Talk, if Not Action, on Iran

NYTimes

PARIS — If the Obama administration wants to lead from behind in imposing sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear weapon drive, it shouldn’t look for France to play the convenient associate.

That’s not the way the French would describe their role in the world. Rather, the fact is that France, in many respects, led the United States into battle in Libya and provided much of the willpower leading to a victory over the Qaddafi regime that is shared by the Americans, British and others.

Now, the International Atomic Energy Agency has published a remarkable report detailing credible evidence of Iran’s attempt to a produce a nuclear warhead to be carried by a ballistic missile.

Coming after four sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions against the mullahs since 2006, the report suggests a lengthening sweep of fairly futile countermeasures — ones that have a kind of multilateral kinship with Europe’s inability to deal head-on with its potential financial implosion.

The New York Times, in a report from Washington last week, described the White House’s reaction to the implications of the report (the I.A.E.A. calculates the Iranians now have enough fuel on hand to produce four nuclear weapons) as “strikingly muted” — or what President Barack Obama’s critics might call leading from behind at its faintest.

By contrast, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, spoke in Paris of the necessity of responding with “sanctions on an unprecedented scale.” Their purpose, he said flatly, was “making Iran bend.”

Is that a very cautious division of labor among allies, although not a fully articulated one?

Most certainly, it is a reaffirmation of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction that an Iranian nuclear capability or bomb is the single greatest threat to the world’s security.

This involves France’s consistent toughness on the issue. For example, it chided Mr. Obama’s “outstretched” hand to Iran as hopeless in view of what Mr. Sarkozy now calls its “obsessional desire” for nukes. And the French jog or goad the administration when its resolve to put an end to the mullahs’ atomic fixation seems to flag.

The jogging is not without nuance. For instance: While the U.S. secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, talked (very reasonably) last week about the dangerous ramifications of an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, his French counterpart, Defense Minister Gérard Longuet, was placing emphasis on the “catastrophe” for humanity represented by Iran’s “continuing on the path” to a nuclear weapon. According to Mr. Longuet, Israel, in the context of a discussion of a preventive strike, was “within its role to pull an alarm signal.”

The Sarkozy government, in my read, obviously does not have the pretension to make U.S. policy or to somehow assume Western leadership on Iran. But neither does it have a domestic political imperative — French Socialists would find little yield in calling the president a wimp (or a war-monger) on Iran — in claiming the sanctions to date have been a marked success.

Mr. Obama, in his own defense, spoke over the weekend of “the enormous bite” of measures now targeting Tehran.

If that’s the case in relation to specific U.S. sanctions on foreign companies that sell refined fuel to Iran, then how puzzling that Iran’s gasoline imports, which provide about 40 percent of its automotive fuel, rose more than 21 percent in October, according to a Reuters report.

The French are particularly interesting at this juncture because there are people here focused on Iran who see an opportunity for putting conclusive brakes on its rush toward a bomb.

Jean-Jacques Guillet, a Gaullist and rapporteur for a newly published study on Iran by the French National Assembly, is one of them.

In a conversation, Mr. Guillet described the U.S. administration as very hesitant on new energy sanctions. He spoke instead of an Iranian “regime without a compass,” and what he called “a delicate situation” in the country.

“If we press the regime strongly,” he said, “there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime’s implosion, not more talk.”

Mr. Guillet pointed in this context to possible sanctions involving Eutelsat, a French-owned communications satellite used by Iran for its internal audio-visual networks. He said there were judicial means, involving human rights issues, for joint European action to close down Iran’s access to the satellite, blocking its internal transmissions.

Precedents for such a step exist in action taken regarding satellites used by Serbia during its conflict with NATO, and Hezbollah.

“Can the United States and France function as ‘accomplices for good’ on Iran?” Mr. Guillet asked. His answer: “It would be a great advantage.”

He didn’t suggest it, but if the United States pressed the issue, Europe could substantially reduce Iran’s revenue from petroleum sales.

According to Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, which tracks sanctions against Iran, Europe accounts for 20 to 25 percent of Iran’s daily energy-export income. That share, he says, represents only five percent of Europe’s daily overall usage — an amount easy for the Europeans to replace, but not Iran.

Mr. Dubowitz complains that the “administration’s successes with sanctions come in slow motion. It’s in a sanctions sleepwalk, prioritizing process over short-term results. It’s as if it has gone into containment mode.”

With the I.A.E.A.’s report offering a new bulwark against Iran’s denial of its nuclear aims, France may see its role as an advocate of urgency.

It cannot credibly be the military actor of last resort that the United States would constitute. But the French can press the sanctions process outside the Security Council (China and Russia are unlikely to cooperate) in a way that serves as encouragement, if not cover, for Mr. Obama choosing much sharper persuasion.

That persuasion could bring to bear the extent of the United States’ strength, short of war, to make Iran bend, as Mr. Juppé puts it.

For the American president, these circumstances contain a choice: leading with more force, or rolling the dice on a 2012 election campaign against a rival insisting that the incumbent doesn’t have the will — or the world’s trust — to push the mullahs back from their “obsessional desire.”