German Marshall Fund Senior Transatlantic Fellow and former Bush Administration State Department official David Kramer explains why – unless there is some secret agreement we don’t know about – it is highly unlikely that Russia or China will support American efforts to impose further sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
In light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Kramer questions how Secretary Clinton could say that if sanctions become necessary “we will have support from Russia,” unless there is some clandestine deal between Clinton and her Russian interlocutors.
From the article:
Russian and Chinese resistance to sanctions is certainly not new. Several U.N. resolutions against Iran passed during the Bush Administration were severely watered down at the insistence of Moscow and Beijing. Now, those capitals don’t even want to talk about the possibility of taking U.N. action against Tehran. It would be “premature,” in the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Added Prime Minister Vladimir Putin several thousand miles away in Beijing: “There is no need to frighten the Iranians” with talk of sanctions. “If now, before making any steps we start announcing some sanctions,” Putin said, “then we won’t be creating favorable conditions for talks to end positively. This is why it is premature to talk about this now.”
Despite this crystal clear rejection from Russia, Clinton voiced optimism in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that if sanctions become necessary, “we will have support from Russia.” Her optimism apparently is based on what U.S. officials claim she was told by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday. These same officials got carried away when Medvedev, in New York for the U.N. General Assembly session last month, criticized sanctions but said they might be inevitable anyway. Alas, for those of us no longer working in the government, we can rely only on Lavrov’s and Putin’s public comments to divine Russia’s position. And based on those comments – and the fact that it is Putin, much more so than Medvedev, who is calling the shots in Russia on issues of this importance – Clinton’s optimism seems sadly misplaced.
You can read the entire article here.
– Ben Katcher
