What's new with UN Security Council Iran sanctions
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The U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations Susan Rice speaks to the media after the United Nations Security Council meeting at the UN headquarters in New York, the United States, June 9, 2010. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany on Wednesday reiterated a call for "an early negotiated solution" to the Iranian nuclear issue. The appeal was made in a joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of the six countries on Wednesday's adoption of a new UN sanction resolution on Iran.[Shen Hong/Xinhua] |
"It imposes a comprehensive cargo inspection regime to prevent Iran from continuing to smuggle contraband cargo," Rice said. "It is something that Iran fought very hard to prevent passage today. The effort, the time, the money, and the poise that they employed, to try to prevent this resolution's passage only underscores their understanding, that this is a major blow."
Travel and financial restrictions also were imposed on more officials and institutions, and the resolution has a qualified call for the boarding and inspection of ships heading for Iran. That can be carried out only if the country whose flag the vessel flies agrees to inspections.
But Chris Wall, a U.S. assistant secretary of commerce from 2008-2009 and a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine, does not necessarily agree with Rice's evaluation of the measure's effectiveness.
"Previous sanctions were very narrowly focused on activities that specifically related to the nuclear weapons program," the senior international trade partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLC in Washington D.C., told Xinhua in a telephone interview after the vote.
"This is broader in the sense that it includes not only those kind of sanctions, but also allows ships to be stopped where there is intelligence indicating that they are carrying prohibited weapons," he said.
"Saying that they are broader and stronger than before is not really saying very much and it doesn't mean that the sanctions actually will have an impact," Wall said.
"I think that they will make life a little more difficult for the regime," he said. "They will create complications in terms of financial dealings, drive them in terms of commercial relationships into the arms of Russia and China. It will provide some protection, some cover, from countries that want to improve sanctions."
"European member states will be able to implement stronger sanctions because of the UN resolution," Wall said. "The United States will implement stronger sanctions regardless, they would have done it anyway. But in the long run because the world needs Iran's oil, China in particular, and Iran needs foreign investment in order to develop its petroleum resources and other industrial infrastructure projects, I think those kinds of things will continue and the sanctions will not have a significant impact on them."
Added the former Commerce Department official: "Will it get Iran to change its strategic calculations, will it change its whole approach to dealing with the IAEA in allowing fuller inspections? I doubt it. I just don't think it will have that impact."
