 I'm the director for the project on nuclear issues here. This is our ninth year. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Next year will be our 10th year. Hopefully for several more years after that. Pony is not just a program where staff sort of do research and come together to do the typical things we do at think tanks. It's really an organization that has three missions that have evolved over time. The first was to create a network community of young professionals across the nuclear enterprise. Then it was to generate new thinking about nuclear issues from this younger community. And then finally, we've developed a series of sort of leadership development. So we try to help facilitate the development of the next generation of leaders in this area. People are familiar with this issue. This event, Pony debates the issues. We also have a blog that's pretty well used. Not by me, I have to admit, because I'm a troggledite when it comes to these kind of things, or a luddite, I guess, is the more appropriate word. I've never really gotten into blogging because I've always felt like if I can't look somebody in the face while I'm trying to yell them down, I've lost a comparative advantage during that time. But we have a very active blog, Pony Debates the Issues. We do a conference series where we do three smaller conferences that lead to an annual conference at STRATCOM, where the best presentations are made to the STRATCOM leadership at that time. And we have a number of young nuclear scholars, programs, as well, a next generation working group that sort of functions as a commission and others as well. So it's a fairly broad range of activities. But this Pony Debates the Issues has been one of the most popular ones. Mark Janssen, who is the deputy director for Pony, will introduce the speakers. And he's going to moderate today's debate. Even though he's from a conflict resolution background, we're assuming that he knows how to foster a debate rather than to resolve differences between the debaters. But his fellow colleagues, all of whom are debaters, will be the judge of that. Mark, over to you. Thanks, Clark. My name is Mark Janssen. I'm a deputy director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at CSIS. Thanks all for coming out tonight for this evening's event, a live debate on US policy towards Iran. I think all of you understand that the US and Iran have been at loggerheads over the nuclear issue for quite some time. But I think that tonight's debaters would even agree that US policy thus far has failed to achieve its primary purpose of bringing Iran into full compliance and cooperation with the IAEA. However, I think that they disagree on why it has failed. Recently, the US and European partners have imposed extensive sanctions on Iran in order to pressure it to exceeding to certain demands and cooperate more fully with the IAEA. There is debate, however, among our participants tonight as to whether or not this is the right approach or whether it is, in fact, counterproductive. That brings us to tonight's resolve statement, which is that the new sanctions placed on Iran will make it more difficult to achieve diplomatic solution to the dispute over its nuclear program. Arguing the affirmative on my right is Dr. Suzanne Maloney, senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution. Arguing the negative is Mr. Michael Rubin, who is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Both have written extensively on Iran and on US policy on the nuclear issue. Each participant will make opening remarks of 10 minutes. They will then be given an opportunity to cross-examine each other. I will follow up with a few questions. After that, we will open it up for audience Q&A. And then both debaters will be given an opportunity to make closing remarks at the end. With that, Dr. Maloney, I'll turn it over to you, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Mark. And thanks to CSIS for organizing this event and bringing together a good group of people on a Monday night when you all could be home watching the red carpet analysis of last night's Oscars. Thank you all for T-vowing that and agreeing to come and listen to something a little bit more serious. I am going to start off by just stipulating that despite the fact that Michael and I have been disagreeing on Iran for probably more than a decade, starting, I think, on a bus from Tehran to Qashan back in 1999 when we both were in Iran for a summer of Persian language study and doctoral dissertation research, we don't disagree on necessarily everything. So let me just stipulate a couple of assumptions so that we don't necessarily waste our time or that you don't presume that you have the diametrically opposed views of all things on Iran here tonight. First, let me just stipulate that I'm not here to debate whether or not Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. I think the circumstantial case that has been made in the public is sufficiently compelling for all those with the exceptions possibly of Belarus and Cuba to acknowledge that Iran's nuclear program is not one that has a purely civilian dimension to it. Let me also stipulate that pressure is necessarily part of any U.S. diplomatic strategy for dealing with the array of threats that Iran poses to the international community, to American interests, and to regional security in the vital area of the Persian Gulf today. But I do think that this question of the current U.S. sanctions, which in effect have almost been lost in the kind of hype that we hear and see on television and in the media about the question of the prospect of war. Whether or not these particular sanctions, the decision to designate the Iranian Central Bank, the subsequent decision by the European Union to launch a boycott or embargo of imports of Iranian crude and more recent measures to effectively excise Iran from the international financial system are likely to produce the outcome that the U.S. government and its allies, China, Russia, and the European Union plus Germany have suggested that they are intending to produce, which is a negotiated resolution to Iran's nuclear ambitions. I do not believe that these measures are likely to be effective in doing so. Let me just suggest the reasons why I believe that. First of all, I think it comes down to Iran's long experience with sanctions. Iran has had 31, 33 years now of experience with American and to some extent, multilateral sanctions. The regime is very well reversed in a variety of mechanisms to mitigate the impact of sanctions, to evade through smuggling and other measures the impact of sanctions, and of course, to threaten and to effect retaliation for sanctions. And as a result, they have been able to insulate at least the government and its stability from the direct impact of these sanctions over many years. And that is why you have seen the sort of response that you've seen from the Iranian leadership over the course of the past two months, a response which is both defiant in the suggestion that sanctions will have no impact. But also quite threatening in the discussion of the Iran's ability to close the Straits of Hormuz through which much of the world's oil exports pass on a daily basis. These issues, this Iranian comfort level with sanctions, in fact, the Iranian embrace of sanctions, which is another dimension of the response, are key to the reasons that I believe that sanctions will not produce the result that we're looking for. The second reason, and I'm going to kind of flag these and go into a little bit of greater detail at the end to the extent that I have time to do so, is the shifting patterns of trade. If, for example, we had been able to achieve the level of multilateral cooperation that we have today on Iran, if, for example, we had been able to achieve a European embargo first of new investment in Iran's energy sector, and more recently, of course, the decision to embargo imports of Iranian crude a decade or more ago, then one might have been able to argue that it would have had a sort of devastating blow on the Iranian economy. But today, with Iran's economy more increasingly dependent and interlocked with Asian economies, and in particular China, the impact of these sanctions, even if they're fully enforced on the most willing partners of the United States and its allies, is likely to be somewhat moderate and somewhat muted. And for that reason, again, it feeds into the Iranian sense of defiance and confidence that they can, in fact, survive these sanctions. It also, unfortunately, makes us more reliant on the cooperation of a wider variety of allies today. Whereas, in the late 1990s, European threat to simply remove their diplomats from Tehran and the aftermath of the Mykonos verdict had really, I think, a jolting effect and helped to produce some changes in Iranian behavior. Today, the Iranians are quite persuaded that they can live without Europe, and they may not be wrong in that belief so long as they're able to continue to do business with their primary trade partners today in Asia, and again, in particular in China. It means that U.S. measures, if they do not produce cooperation from allies, if they, in fact, lead to greater dissension among the alliance, will be less effective and create more difficulties, because we rely on that ability to coordinate effectively among the P5 plus one. Let me just say the third reason, and I think the most important reason, is that today, unlike any other point in Iranian history, we are faced with the most conservative, consolidated regime that we have ever seen. And I say this with a sort of sense of frustration and a sense of realism that, of course, you all hear daily about the factionalism and the differences, and with the upcoming elections, what this may mean, the fights between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But ultimately, it's a fight between hardliners and other hardliners. There are no pragmatists in this Iranian regime, and that is unlike any other point in Iranian history. In particular, the two points in Iranian history when Tehran, in fact, did prove capable of making significant reversals on its security policy. The decision to compromise and come to a conclusion of the hostage crisis, ultimately, in 1981, and the decision to accept the poison cup of chalice, the poison chalice in 1988, as Khomeini described it, and end and accept the ceasefire with the war with Iraq. Those are both points at which there was an active debate among the relevant decision makers of the Islamic Republic, points at which pragmatists won out over hardliners. Today, the pragmatists have ultimately no relevance to Iranian decision making. And in fact, what we see within Iran is a body of decision makers who are bent, who are entirely convinced of the belief that the international community, and in particular Washington, is out to get them. This paranoia is deeply entrenched, and when we have US officials describing the intent of US policies as the collapse of the Iranian economy, we have, in fact, confirmed their deepest paranoia. And so as a result, I think this regime is completely incapable of making the sort of compromises of coming to a negotiating, negotiations process in a serious and meaningful way, and that that unwillingness has been more deeply entrenched as a result of the sanctions that have been enacted over the course of the past two months. Finally, let me just make two final points so that we can get on to the discussion and the debate. I think the timeframe of the sanctions is terribly problematic. It's quite positive that we saw the implementation of these sanctions deferred over a six month period for a variety of reasons, to give a number of states an opportunity to find alternative suppliers, to allow oil markets to adjust, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately what it means is a very short window of opportunity before the US elections for us to understand if these sanctions have had any impact. It means that an American administration is going to have to make a decision to either launch some sort of military strike or support some sort of military strike over a very short period of time. Finally, I think the manner of the sanctions is deeply problematic, the way in which they were enacted clearly with the gun to the head of the administration by the Congress with a hundred to zero vote in the Senate and similar ratios on the House side. The fact that the administration was unwilling to do this, the fact that you've seen a sort of crescendo of measures that have where we've seen almost no opportunity for the impact to be appreciated and for Iranian reactions to be gauged, I think has not contributed to a very measured approach and an opportunity to draw the Iranians back to the table. Finally, I would just say, look at oil markets. Oil markets have not reacted vociferously. We have not seen a price spike because ultimately the markets believe that Iran's barrels will get out there somehow. They will come at a deep discount. The Iranian regime will pay a steep price. But remember, of course, that Iran in 2010 made $73 billion in oil revenues. They're predicted to make quite a bit more this year were they not facing these sanctions. This is a regime that fought an all-out war with Iraq on less than $6 billion a year of oil revenues. So don't believe that 20 or 30% off $100 a barrel is likely to bring this regime to its knees, not given the political character, not given the shape of their international trade today. Thank you. It's right on time. Mr. Rubin, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much. Suzanne began by saying and listing what we agree on. Let me just add one thing, which I think both of us agree on, that we both ultimately want a diplomatic solution to the conflict between the United States and Iran. The question today is framed in terms of sanctions, but it could just as easily be framed in terms of setting the right circumstances for diplomacy to succeed. And so I start with that assumption in mind. Military strategists often talk about the dime paradigm where every coherent and comprehensive strategy should have a diplomatic and informational, a military and an economic component to it, and that those components... Oil and so as a result, Iran, there's a utilitarian dimension to it. Iranians threaten the straits with much of the world recognizing that they're unlikely to do that because they're at least as dependent on their ability to export and import through the Gulf as any other country in the region, if not more so, but it does have a psychological impact on the markets, and so you see a small spike and as they do this, particularly at key moments, it has some impact. What I come back to is the reality that there just are no low-cost, high-impact ways of changing a country's security policy when that country has such a significant role in the international economy. If the world international community says we are so outrageously offended by Iran's actions that we are willing to simply ban any contact with Iran's oil from the marketplace, we are willing to accept $10, $15 a barrel, a gallon oil at the pump in order to deal with this urgent threat to the international community, then I think you would see some greater impact on Iran's bottom line, but I think as it is, we're trying to have it both ways. We're trying to effectively devastate their economy while ensuring that Americans still have the ability to go to the pump and pay a relatively low price for oil, and I just don't think that that's possible. One other quick question for you. There's another benefit, so to speak, of sanctions that's sort of come up a little bit in the analysis recently, and that is that it is now beginning to have effects on Iran's ability to acquire and pay for equipment, more advanced equipment that advances their nuclear enrichment program. If you assume that the sanctions now are having that effect of delaying Iranian modernization and development of their nuclear program, is that time that's being bought by these sanctions worth it? If not, then why not? I think sanctions have always had an impact on slowing the program, and Michael mentioned that. There is more than simply changing the leadership's calculus that gets into the objective of sanctions there, and there has always been an argument that the sanctions create choices and create new impediments, and ultimately have some deterrent effect on the ability to make progress with the scope and scale of the program that they're trying to attain. I haven't seen any evidence that the central bank sanctions in particular are making it more difficult, and ultimately this is a leadership that has the capacity as a result of the continuing, and one would presume, future oil revenues that come into its coffers to insulate itself. They can spread the, ensure that the Revolutionary Guard has all the resources that it needs while putting the primary burden of the sanctions on the less relevant elements of the Iranian regime, and so there's going to be a balance made because they're also interested in trying to ensure some degree of domestic peace, but we have not seen a sort of public willingness to come to the streets, and that's another dimension of the sanctions as you heard people talk about the central bank, even as you heard people talk about the refined petroleum, there was talk of there will be massive riots in the streets, you know what, never happened. Absolutely never happened, whether it's because Iranians are too politically disillusioned by the disappointment in their own revolution, or whether it's because the regime has been able to buy off key constituencies, I think it's still not clear, but ultimately I think that there, you know, there is, the regime has enough cash to continue its nuclear program at a pretty good clip, and the population does not yet, and is unlikely to feel the impacts such that they're willing to go to the streets in a way that will bring down the regime. Thank you. Michael, a couple of quick questions for you as well. You've written and sort of discussed Iran's, interest in manipulating negotiations for the purpose of just sort of stalling and misleading the U.S. But, you know, this interest in manipulating the United States doesn't come from nowhere. I mean, the U.S. has been openly hostile with Iran for several decades, you know, as you know. As we keep up the sanctions regime, how do we mitigate Iran's incentive and desire to manipulate these negotiations at some point, even if pressure works, we're going to have to negotiate with them on some level. We have to be prepared to sort of trust them to some extent. How can the U.S. make its diplomacy credible while it still is intent on ratcheting up pressure on Iran? How do you resolve that dilemma? Well, ultimately I'd object a little bit to the question because I'd say it's a little bit of naval gazing to suggest that the Iranians distrust and the lack of their sincerity is a result of American hostility. After all, dating back to the Carter administration, we had relations with the Islamic Republic. That's why nine months after the revolution, we had an embassy there to seize. Perhaps the issue is more one of setting the right circumstances. Carter's national security advisor, Brzezinski, had perhaps what could in hindsight be seen as a premature handshake in Algiers when he met with the Iranian prime minister. That photo was what precipitated the student radicals taking the embassy for reasons that had much more with internal Iranian power struggle than anything else. When we had the Iran Contra affair, today it's remembered for the illegalities of trying to bypass Congress and aid the Contras, but when that episode first started, it was about trying to gain leverage inside Iran to influence the succession of Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, who exposed it? It wasn't the New York Times or the Washington Post. It was the power struggle inside Iran between Rafsanjani's camp and Mehdi Hashmi's camp, the brother of the son-in-law of Grand Ayat, of Khomeini's deputy Hussain Ali Montezeri. Ultimately, my fought with American diplomacy is a tin ear to setting the right circumstances. We've even had President Obama say that one of the reasons why diplomacy hasn't worked in both Iran and North Korea is because of the popular discord, the factions which exist and so forth, but this assumes that the supreme leader or the great leader really care that much for public opinion. Ultimately, so long as you have a revolutionary vortex going on, sometimes premature diplomacy can make the situation far worse by allowing radicalization. Sorry to rabid on, but just one other example. Early on during the negotiations, during the Carter administration, we approached, I think, Ibrahim Yazdi, the interim foreign minister, and he gave us Iran's demands, but he was out after a couple of weeks, and then we had Sadat Khubzadeh, and Sadat Khubzadeh, in order to prove his own revolutionary credentials, added a bunch of demands, and then he was out, and his successor then added demands, so the more we actually push diplomacy, the greater a hole we dug for ourselves in order to have a resolution to the Iranian-American diplomacy. Quick follow-up then to that question, then how will we know that Iran is truly ready to negotiate seriously? What are the indicators that you would look for so that you would know, okay, now the time is right to engage diplomatically? What are the triggers that you're looking for? Well, ultimately, if we look back at history, it's an issue of the Iranians acknowledging the cost to themselves was too great. That would be the case in 1981. I mean, we had any number of mediators, which we empowered, from the PLO to the Algerians, at a cost to our own interests, but it was ultimately Khomeini's decision. Likewise, Suzanne referenced the speech of Khomeini drinking a chalice of poison. When we see that sort of response from the Iranians, then perhaps we will know that the situation is right, but until then, while we have to keep the door open to diplomacy, we also have to augment the economic pressure and the military pressure along the periphery of Iran to give the Iranians an incentive to have useful diplomacy. Iran is a tinderbox. Right now, the government is better than the opposition at putting out the sparks, but ultimately, we've got to either raise the cost of the Iran of its international isolation or set a situation where the Iranian people will demand greater accountability for themselves, because I also think Suzanne and I would both agree that the Iranian people tend to be far more moderate than the government inside the Islamic Republic. Okay, with that, I'd like to open it up to audience questions. We have a number of people here. A lot of them, I'm sure, are very knowledgeable on these issues. Right down front. Could they identify themselves? Yes, and if people who are asking questions could identify themselves in their organization affiliation, I'd be appreciated. Hi, I'm Shreya Gargal Palliam from Transparency International. Said a couple of quick questions. I think you both have built a very robust historical framework. How do you see recent events die into that when you look at the bombings of the Israeli diplomats, which it could be from Tehran or not. You look at the fact that Ahmadinejad is basically said to the six European countries that he would preempt their embargo by cutting off all exports beforehand. To me, it seems like they are getting a little more desperate. They are getting a little more unpredictable, the Iranian regime. So I was just wondering, how do you see that playing out given, how do you see this bluffing game playing out given the past history? Do you see that Iran is just falling apart and will hence, because of the increased cost to actually come to the table? Or do you see it as, they might take this to the logical extreme and actually provoke an attack and hence, potentially gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people? I'll go first. I'll start. I think the Iranian response has been entirely predictable because we have had three decades of experience with sanctions. There's a pattern to the way they respond. It's defiance, retaliation, mitigation, innovation. And we've seen defiance and we're starting, I think, to see some retaliation. Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, said back in November in a widely noted sermon that Iran would respond to threat with threat. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Whether it suggests a sort of command structure that is beginning to devolve a greater level of desperation or whether it suggests that Iran has fully abandoned the sort of pretense of repairing its relationships with its immediate neighbors and using political liberalization as an argument for greater economic interaction with the world, I think remains, to some extent, to be seen. You could make both those arguments at this stage. But I think we're going to see more of the same and I don't think that it effectively signals that they're more prepared to engage in a serious negotiating process. Let me take a broad stab at that and then just disagree or put a different perspective on what Suzanne said. One of the reasons why I think policymakers are taking the Iranian nuclear development so seriously is that there's a belief that if Iran develops its own nuclear weapons capability or nuclear weapons that they will feel so confident behind their own deterrence that they can lash out for ideological reasons with much greater frequency than perhaps they have in the last couple weeks. And that we might see a return to the 1980s with regard to the so-called export of revolution and so forth. Now, with regard to whether, to the chicken and egg argument whether they're lashing out in response to sanctions, I'd point out that there's a great deal of hope inside Iran for moderation. After Ayatollah Khomeini died, Rafsanjani and Khomeini came to power and after the Iran-Iraq war ended. And yet, what did we get? We got the Gossam-Lew assassinations in the heart of downtown Vienna. Likewise, shortly after Klaus Kinkel started talking about this critical engagement, we got the Mekanos assassinations inside downtown in Berlin. And then in 1994, we had the Buenos Aires bombings of the Jewish Cultural Center, which suggests that it's not, and this was before, in fact, it was the precipitating reason for much of Bill Clinton's unilateral sanctioning, the executive orders and so forth on Iran. What a lot of people forget, and it's the irony when we get caught up in the political debate in Washington, is by far the administration which took the most robust and coercive measures against Iran was the Clinton administration when we look back at the history. But ultimately, this is one of the reasons. Are the Iranians lashing out because of sanctions? Will they lash out? Certainly. Two questions there. Is it because of sanctions? I think we could debate that. And the other issue is, would it get worse? Would the status quo be fundamentally different if Iran develops nuclear weapons? Other questions? One over here on the right. Thank you. My name's Dan Rosenstein. I'm from the National Endowment for the Humanities and this question is for Suzanne. Given the innate sort of distrust and paranoia that's come to be one of the hallmarks of the arch conservatives in Iran, Khomeini being one of them, are there any realistic carrots we can offer that would have a more realistic chance of altering their calculus more so than the pressure track? Well, pressure is a stick, not a carrot. And of course, this administration abandoned those words. This was one of the seminal measures of the early diplomacy to change the vocabulary because the Iranians were offended by the donkey metaphor that is implied by carrot and stick. I reference this because I think it's one of the areas where the administration focused on style and not substance. And so carrot and stick are words we all have to use because they're just easier to say than pressure and persuasion or inducements and punishment or however you wanna phrase it. I don't think that there are any clear, there are no rewards that are going to suddenly make this regime stand up and alter its basic. I think fundamental conviction that it needs some kind of a nuclear program, both for its own domestic legitimacy because they have wrapped themselves around it so tightly over the course of the past decade, but also for some kind of a strategic deterrent against what they see as an international community that is bent against them. One that did not defend the Islamic Republic that did not even go to the UN and protest the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. And this is all part of their psychology. So I don't think that there is something that we can just dangle in front of them that is going to lead us to a compromise. I think ultimately we're going to have to engage in the kind of messy work of diplomacy, which is finding a mechanism however it might be. And it has to start with the P5 plus one because that has proven to be useful to us in all sorts of fashions in terms of ensuring that there is a multilateral dimension to our diplomacy. But it can't end. It can't be about P5 plus one meetings in Vienna or Geneva or Istanbul that are heavily covered, heavily hyped in which the Iranians come and give prefab speeches that never touch on the nuclear issue. It's got to be a mechanism for sitting down and finding the Iranian interlocutors. And there's got to be some identification on the part of the Iranian leadership that they are themselves willing to invest in a process. And we haven't yet seen that. So I don't mean to argue that it's out there and if we just grab it, I do think we're going to have to be willing to make concessions. And that's something that's going to entail a tremendous amount of leadership from any administration. Getting into any negotiating process and offering anything to the Iranians because we're asking them to give stuff up. I mean, they have plenty of incentive to do so. But it's going to mean looking at what sanctions we can relax in exchange for particular concessions. And it's not clear to me. It's another one of the difficulties that I have with the central bank sanctions. They're not conditioned on enrichment suspension. And it's entirely conceivable to me today that if you're on where to come to the table and say, here's all our LEU, here's our centrifuge manufacturer program, here's everything, that you would still see 100 to zero vote to maintain the central bank sanctions. To say, look, they're working. Let's keep them on until they give up Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestine, Islamic jihad until they do, and this is the sort of psychology that the Iranians have. And so they're not entirely wrong that there's likely to be a cascade of pressures that sanctions, once they're put in place, are always very, very hard to undo. And I remember sitting in this very room among companies looking at how they would get into Iraq six months after the liberation of Iraq and the sanctions program still in place. So it becomes very difficult. And so our ability to offer even the relaxation of sanctions as a potential inducement to the Iranian leadership is incredibly slim. Actually, just a very quick point and just to enhance something Suzanne said, when it came to the whole carrots and sticks metaphor, it didn't take long to just look at the history of Iranian rhetoric and see how often they use the phrase carrots and sticks before they decided to manufacture a grievance out of it, just as a bit of a side note. Clark, you had a question? Hi, Clark, we're at CSIS. One thing that both of you said is that you were in agreement that what we needed was a negotiated solution. It's a diplomatic solution, which needs a negotiated solution. I wonder if we're debating the issue of sanctions according to the wrong metro. And that is that if you say that we're trying to manage a dilemma on the concept of corporate strategies, but the difference is between solving problems and managing dilemmas. Perhaps in the case of Iran, what we're trying to do is avoid some worst outcome. Worst outcome like Israeli attack, worst outcome like nuclear capable Iran. Maybe under when you're managing a dilemma that you can't really solve, kicking the can down the road doesn't look so bad anymore. So that you apply sanctions not because you think they're gonna work in the sense of receiving your diplomatic solution. You apply sanctions because it inkeys pressure, it creates a status quo, you can extend the status quo, it evinces people who are still non-coercive ways of solving this problem. And if you look at it from this perspective, the acceleration of sanctions that we've seen recently, just shorten our time span. If you wanna kick the can down the road, you don't create circumstances. Put a president in a situation where he can't kick the can down the road. Let me respond to that quickly. Just a couple of thoughts in answer to what I thought was an excellent question. One of the reasons why I would object to what I would call policy procrastination, if you will, is because we simply don't know how much time is left on the clock, although there seems to be an increasing consensus that however much time is left on the clock, it's running out. While what always grates at me is the press, if you will, almost backhanded celebration, when we see that Iran has photoshopped its last missile test or so forth, or that there's been some problems in the centrifuges, because quite frankly, we can learn, I mean anyone can learn just as much from a failure as they can from a success. The other question, and this relates just as much to an argument that sanctions can give delay for maneuver as a military strike could give a delay at tremendous cost, but a delay nonetheless in the nuclear program, is what policy do we have in place to take advantage of that delay? And ultimately, this is where I'll be provocative and say the problem, in my perspective with Iran, isn't just the nuclear weapons, it's the ideology of the regime that would wield them. And in that case, I would argue that we need not just to have an economic strategy, a sanctioning strategy, but also a strategy that empowers in some way or another the Iranian people to force the government to answer to the people. This is why I've been so interested in the development of independent trade unions inside Iran and so forth, but we can save that for another debate. I'll just leave it with that little provocative note. I think you articulated ultimately where US policies headed better than anyone from the current administration has, or perhaps more honestly than anyone from the current administration has. Although I genuinely... Is there a projection of working with you? Or more honestly? I genuinely believe that the administration and all elements of the administration really want to get to a negotiated solution. That is their aim, but I think that they have kind of stumbled through the backdoor inadvertently into a policy of long-term containment and regime change in the hope that the degradation of the regime's economic infrastructure will ultimately lead to the collapse of the regime. My concern about that is multifaceted because we have no idea where that leads because there are worse outcomes, as Michael highlighted, if I can just finish, as Michael highlighted in the sense of the growing power of the Revolutionary Guard, and we have very little opportunity or capacity to influence political trends within Iran in a positive fashion. We seem to have a great deal of capacity to influence them in a negative fashion. And so I worry about a policy that is in effect implicitly and not explicitly predicated on the expectation at some point this regime is going to collapse. This has been the expectation for 33 years now and it hasn't yet produced the outcome that we're looking for. And so, simply trying to wear down this regime in much the same way that we looked at wearing down Saddam Hussein's regime through comprehensive international sanctions, it did not lead to a sort of flourishing Iraqi democracy even after US military intervention. I am not hopeful that a long-term strategy of crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime is going to produce an Iranian Thomas Jefferson. So, where are you going to sell me food? Question in the back, and then one more up front. Thank you. I'm Tom Wood. I'm a non-proliferation policy analyst at Pacific Northwest National Lab. I want to go back to the question of cost of the nuclear program increased by sanctions versus value, perceived value of the nuclear program. Dr. Maloney asked this question during the debate and I didn't hear a direct answer to it, but it seems to me where we are is we have demonstrated that even for very severe and almost unanimous sanctions regimes, the cost of those regimes to the Iranian economy will not be sufficient to force them economically to curtail the nuclear program. The cost of the program is simply too small in relation to the economy and in relation to the oil export revenue. I think the more salient question is this question of the value of the nuclear program as perceived by the Iranian regime. And I'd like to ask both panelists or both debaters, under what circumstances could we hope to diminish the value of the nuclear weapons program to the regime? Fundamentally, I think that the greatest value of the program is with regard to Iran's prestige and we can debate what that value is. Ultimately, I don't think this is about indigenous energy security because when you actually look at Iran's own internal uranium reserves, you enrich that to low-enriched uranium and then you figure Iran having eight or 10 nuclear reactors which is what they've declared they want. Then you have energy security for about 15 years where at about one-third the price of that, you could upgrade your gasoline, your refineries and so forth, your pipeline network and provide indigenous energy security for more than 100 years. Now, with regard to the cost, I do think, I just want to say I disagree with you, when you have parliamentarians talking about the cost and wanting a close debate, when you have, in the course of a week after the currency has crashed, a 70% drop in Iranian tourists to Turkey according to Hordiyat Daily News, that ultimately suggests that there's a cost going on. Much more significantly, you have the issue of the head of Qatam al-Anbiyah, the IRGC's, I mean, think of it without drawing moral equivalence as a combination between the Army Corps of Engineers and Bektal all rolled up into one. That suggests that perhaps the sanctions are having more bite than we give credit for. Ultimately, what I'm interested in doing, given that Iran is a tinderbox, is trying to perhaps blow a little wind on the embers and we'll see what happens then. One of the policy questions, which we haven't really debated around about sanctions, but it's a broader question, is you always have a trade-off between very targeted sanctions, as we've tried against IRGC members, proliferators and so forth, and broader base sanctions, which impact ordinary people a little bit more, but if you go too far, then you irreparably damage the economy and add a great deal more corruption like what occurred in Iraq. And so ultimately the question for policy makers is to have, how to have that balance where you maximize cost, you have enough costs to facilitate grassroots movements and ultimately create a situation where the Iranians will feel that even if they have oil revenue, what goes up comes down, that ultimately the isolation just isn't worth it anymore. I think you raise a really interesting point on reducing the value and again, no easy answers here. And I think I'll highlight something Michael has said, which is the sort of ideological perspective of this regime. I don't know at this stage in the history of the Islamic Republic that it would be possible to provide an alternative sense of security that replaces what they perceive as the security value that they achieve with some sort of nuclear program. And ultimately I think the final resolution to our concerns about the Iranian nuclear program will only come when we see a change in the character of the leadership. It may still be called an Islamic Republic, it may still feature some of these same faces. I believe that there is the capacity for hypocrisy and for moral conversions just as there were among former communists. I think we will see former Islamic Republic officials who suddenly see the benefits of a different sort of a regime. But I do think that we will not see a shift in the commitment to the nuclear program and the perception of the value of the nuclear program and until and unless we see some sort of change in this regime. And again, ultimately I just think we have a limited ability to affect that from outside. Last question and first row down front here. Diane Perlman, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason. First of all, I wasn't gonna say this, but Johann Gautung in 1967 referred to what he called the naive theory of sanctions, which is we're gonna apply the sanctions then the population is going to change their, you know, make the change in the regime. So sometimes it may be more likely to provoke defiance, increase the popularity of hardliners and have the opposite effect and increase the value of sanctions. So I'd like to also talk a little bit about the relationship and the idea of second order change where first order changes you deal with a symptom in the program versus the relationship and just to remind us that after 9-11 that a million Iranians had candlelight vigils for us, they helped us with intelligence, with al-Qaeda. They had a proposal in 2003 that, you know, they were rejected and called the axis of evil. So it gets to be disheartening when it overtures and also the intervention from Turkey and Brazil during the NPT. So every time they do something, it kind of gets dist. So in terms of like a third way or dealing with mediation or perhaps bringing in Turkey or thinking of things like giving a face-saving way out, something creative or mediation might be more promising. It's actually an interesting point you bring up because while Iranians had a candlelight vigil, both the Supreme Leader and Tehan newspaper and the official organs were quite active in actually doing the opposite from what the Iranian people had promoted spontaneously and this is ultimately the problem in the regime that the regime tends to be a lot less moderate than the people and this is fundamentally the reason for the distrust with regard to the nuclear program. The 2003 issue, there was a court action based on a liable suit in which the person who promoted this theory of the 2003 Graham Bargain's emails were exposed in the discovery process and what was determined was that he had sent an email to the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations saying what was the origin of this was an Iranian and the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif said no, it didn't come from us and so there's a great deal of dispute even among proponents of engagement like Richard Armitage about the legitimacy of that but ultimately yes, I mean, if there's going to be a solution, perhaps it will come when there is a new formula that's discovered but what I would put forward is after 33 years and almost 33 years of constant attempts at diplomacy that both sides are very clear on what each other's positions are that if there was a magic formula it would have already been discovered and I'm not sure whether hoping that there's some magical third way without empowering the Iranian people or making the Iranian government a little bit more accountable to their people is gonna bear any success and also just lastly with regard to the theory of sanctions I would say that, I mean, I'm trained as a historian rather than a political scientist so I'm looking at it from the ground up whatever it is in other countries I would argue that there's been no evidence that the Iranian people blame the West for the economic hardships which they've had far more effective than sanctions has been Iran's own massive mismanagement of their own economy and just with regard to social science in general I mean, there's been a lack of history of predictive accuracy on all sides of the issue but it certainly does raise good questions and so for that I thank you. Yeah, surprisingly, Mike Lynn I have a little more agreement here. I think, you know, we're here in Washington it's very easy to, you know it's my job to find fault with the current administration otherwise I'm just an echo chamber whatever that administration might be and so we criticize the administration's actions and it's always Washington's fault when engagement doesn't succeed and it's always Washington's fault when somehow, you know, a kind of reformist moment in Iran and it was a genuine serious and sustained one transforms into something much, much, much uglier and more problematic but ultimately it's not always our fault, you know really we had limited ability to affect the complexion of the Iranian political sphere and so, you know, whether the phrase axis of evil was used did not manifestly alter the trajectory of Iranian politics and the overtures of 2003 were hypothetical offerings by several officials in collaboration with the Swiss ambassador and they never represented a serious, legitimate, endorsed offer from the Iranian regime on high and I know this from people who were involved in the process on the Iranian side so I think that, you know, we tend to focus on the failures because it's easy for us to criticize our own government and over there it's a little bit more opaque but let's be clear, there's plenty of fault for both sides in the way that this is played out. I would disagree in the sense that I think that there is a, you know this is a bit like the peace process we all know what the shape of a solution might look like at this stage because we've had people on both sides talk a little bit about what that might look like it's a kind of Japan model here a model under which Iran would retain considerable civilian right to enrichment as is their right under the NPT under severe constraints and restrictions and inspections with, you know, a lot of distrust and a lot of unhappiness but at least some greater ability to verify what is the nature of the program and greater ability to move around the country and see it would not be perfect it's not an ideal solution from our perspective and as to why in 2003 when it might have been possible to achieve just that kind of a solution the Bush administration wouldn't even consider it today from the Iranian side it's not clear that they would consider it but I think that on both sides there is a sort of outcome it's just getting to that outcome it's creating the sort of political environment in which the negotiations that can go on and you can arrive at the solution that both sides probably not surely not happily but probably could live with and that would be ultimately something that the international community would benefit from and I think, you know, when I say we could all live with it I say it because I recognize that Iranian politics is always changing and that by the time we get to that solution we're probably going to be in a better place of Iranian politics but with that let me just move on because I know you don't want to get to the next phase Right, right, I think we're now at the point where I want to give both of you an opportunity to wrap up and make final remarks and then you, Dr. Maloney, saying why you think sanctions are counterproductive and then you, Mr. Rubin, saying again why you think they're ultimately aiding the U.S.'s cause and U.S. policy towards Iran. One minute or less, I'll just repeat what I started with I think there are a number of reasons why the sanctions are not leading us to a negotiated solution the sanctions may lead us to a long-term containment and degradation of the regime but that's ultimately what we say we don't want sanctions are not going to produce a greater Iranian willingness to come to the negotiating table they're not going to produce moderation Iran is more insulated, more capable of evading and mitigating the sanctions and the political character of this current regime makes it impossible for them to concede on an issue of this significance to their own security and so ultimately I think we have produced the very outcome that the Obama administration hoped to avoid which is a situation in which diplomacy cannot succeed. I'd argue that the key issue we need to address is how to raise the cost of the sanction cost of Iran's nuclear program so high that the Iranians will ultimately choose to decide that the price simply isn't worth it perhaps that can't be done solely through sanctions one of the side benefits of this however is that the greater pain that Iranian government feels the more incentive they have to negotiate to lift that pain. I don't understand if I will just concluding very briefly how 1920 UN Security Council 1929 could be working and then suddenly by having more unilateral sanctions suddenly it's not perhaps the issue was that the sanctions hadn't gone broad enough in the first place. Diplomacy without preconditions is very very problematic we can talk about all the gain to having sanctions but when President Obama said we will negotiate without preconditions about uranium enrichment suspension and so forth and effect what he did was unilaterally cancel three very hard fought UN Security Council resolutions. The last issue which we haven't addressed as much but ultimately is the determinant what will work or not is the role of ideology because multiculturalism isn't just being about going into a sushi restaurant and ordering a mojito fundamentally it's about different people thinking in very different ways and we need to recognize that the Iranians when they approach this issue are approaching it with a very different calculus and very different style than perhaps the Americans are. Like all of you to join me in thanking our debaters I think you've had a very informative and new round of applause. Okay and the bar remains open for a little while and you guys can clean up whatever food is left over. Thank you all for coming.