Will Sanctions Work?

The New York Times reports a deal on international sanctions on Iran here. 

Although the jury is still out on whether or not sanctions "work," (some say yea, some say nay, and for a range of different reasons), one thing that we know is that, if sanctions work, they are most likely to work before they're imposed.  That is, sanctions work primarily as a threat, ahead of time.  If a target of sanctions--Iran, in this case--is going to cave, they'll do so after threatened with sanctions, but before sanctions are imposed, to avoid the potential costs.

One problem is that countries (like Iran) might be threatened with sanctions in private, ahead of time.  So it's often to know if private threats of sanctions work in changing the behavior of targeted countries.

However, if there's one thing that democracies are good at, it's clearly signaling their intentions; in this case, to punish Iran for pursuing nuclear power.   Unfortunately, the United States probably isn't the critical player in this case of sanctions, and the most important players--Russia and China--aren't democratic.  So we'll see what happens.

For what it's worth, I do think that sanctions work sometimes, and are worth trying before stepping up to something else (like, say, cruise missile strikes or something like that).  I would also argue that an important normative consideration is for us to reduce our own nuclear stockpile, which is something we're already doing under the Obama administration.  That's probably helpful, if you believe in soft power, the power of persuasion, and the teaching of appropriate norms to "deviant" states.