Sanctions on Iran

My friend Djavad Salehi-Isfahani thinks about sanctions on Iran over at Brookings. I am always impressed at how Djavad's knowledge of Iranian internal politics enriches and changes my views about policy toward Iran.

More generally, US policy discussions often proceed as if the citizens of other countries frame international issues in the same way that we do and as if their domestic politics are irrelevant to their interactions with the US. Neither of these views is correct, for Iran or for any other country.

Have sanctions ever worked? Certainly not on Cuba. Not on Iran to date. Not on Iraq either before the first Gulf war or between the two Gulf wars. Not on North Korea. There is a literature on this in international relations but I am guessing that I know the answer from casual empiricism, which is that sanctions are really all about domestic audiences, and not about changing behavior.

Iran

1. A photo gallery.

2. A video of students being shot at.

3. A video of a female victim.

I hope my friends there are safe and I hope all this bloodshed has a payoff in positive change.

Iranian election

My friend Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (an economist at VPI and an Iranian expatriate) writes from Tehran that maybe the good guy (or relatively less bad guy) did not actually win the election.

Things the US and Iran have in common

It turns out that there is much concern in both the US and Iran about high ratios of women to men among undergraduates. I am not sure how worried I am in the US case; in the Iranian case having more educated women around seems sure to be good. Nonetheless, it is surely a phenomenon worthy of study in both cases.

Here is a piece by my friend Djavad Selehi on the situation in Iran.

As an aside, my experience in getting to know Djavad and his Iranian co-authors as a result of being their econometrics advisor for a project sponsored by the Global Development Network has been really interesting and valuable. It has changed my views on the value of personal contact with people in places that are our enemies of the moment. Back in Cold War days I used to scoff at people who thought some good could come from cultural exchanges between the US and USSR. I am more sympathetic now.