SeekerBlog

Excellent analysis by The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan:

FOREIGN Minister Stephen Smith announced ramped-up sanctions against Iran in parliament this week.

They are important in themselves and demonstrate that the Rudd Government judges Iran to be one of the two or three most important and urgent geo-strategic issues today.

The Labor Government is right in this judgment. However, the sanctions decision is also highly significant for what it tells us of Kevin Rudd’s foreign policy more generally. On this central decision, Rudd and Smith have decided, quite deliberately, to move beyond the authority of the UN.

This is an important and seminal moment. If John Howard had done this, there would be predictable outcries from the usual suspects – international relations academics, non-government organisations and the Left more generally – that this was a rejection of multilateralism and a sign of cowboy diplomacy in thrall to the neo-conservative militarism of George W. Bush.

Rudd and Smith, and Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, seem to have hit the Left with a giant tranquilliser dart. The Rudd Government also has managed deftly foreign issues that could have given it trouble on its own party Left, moving one step at a time and with maximum international consultation.

There are significant UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iran’s nuclear defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. These resolutions provide for modest sanctions. China and Russia, while they allowed the earlier resolutions to pass, made it clear they would not support any further sanctions. The US has extensive sanctions, far beyond those provided by the UN, against Iran. The European Union, while not going as far as the US, also has imposed extensive financial and trade sanctions. Australia’s new position gets close to the European position. In other words, on a critical geo-strategic issue, Australia is moving beyond the UN to join the US and Europe in a coercive action born out of security necessity. This is where all intelligent governments end up, whatever the pieties may be about the UN.

Virtually all Middle East analysts believe that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. However, because its economy is so ramshackle and poorly run, Iran is vulnerable to trade sanctions. Iran is authoritarian rather than totalitarian. There are still elements of civil society, a partly independent business community and diverse centres of power.

In other words, the Iranian Government has to think twice before alienating all sectors of its society. Therefore, international hardheads, Rudd among them, believe there is at least a chance that a tough sanctions regime, combined with the offer of full normalisation if Iran abandons its nuclear weapons quest, may just work.

The new Australian sanctions target 20 Iranian individuals and 18 organisations that Smith says contribute to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. These include the Iranian Melli and Saderat banks.

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