17 Items

The Bavand, one of two stranded Iranian vessels, sits anchored at the port in Paranagua, Brazil on July 25, 2019. In defiance of U.S. sanctions, Brazil's top court ordered state oil company Petrobras to supply fuel to two Iranian vessels that were stranded off the coast of Parana state since early June (AP Photo/Giuliano Gomes).

AP Photo/Giuliano Gomes

Journal Article - Washington Quarterly

A Financial Sanctions Dilemma

| Winter 2020

Over the last two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of financial sanctions as an instrument of US foreign policy to address security threats ranging from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation and terrorism to human rights violations and transnational crime. Washington’s policymakers have prized these tools for their ability to rapidly apply pressure against foreign targets with few perceived repercussions against American business interests. The problem, however, is that Washington is ignoring a growing tension between financial sanctions designed to support economic statecraft (with non-financial goals) and those designed to protect the international financial system. Confusing the two sends mixed signals to adversaries as well as allies and undermines US credibility and commitment to upholding international banking rules and norms. If Washington cannot reconcile these competing processes, it is unlikely that future administrations will enjoy the same foreign policy levers, leaving the United States at a significant disadvantage.

A Chinese bank clerk counts renminbi banknotes at a bank in Kaifeng city, June 23, 2010. The U.S. Treasury Department again declined to label China a currency manipulator in a long-delayed report issued late on June 24, 2010.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - The Journal of Turkish Weekly

The Dollar and the Dragon

| July 12, 2010

"Judging whether economic interdependence produces power requires looking at the balance of asymmetries, not just at one side of the equation. In this case, interdependence has created a "balance of financial terror" analogous to the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union never used their potential to destroy each other in a nuclear exchange."

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (8th from left) and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (7th from left) at the 14th G-15 Summit, in Tehran, on May 17, 2010. Iran's Nuclear Program will also be discussed.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - Iran Review

G-15 Challenges World Powers' Monopolies

| May 15, 2010

"In today's world, nations' access to middle or advanced range technologies such as car industries or nuclear technology, their increased national defensive and deterrent capabilities and thus their more regional political and economic clout, enable them to sway more influence on international and regional public opinion, and thereby express their ways of progress and national confidence. This can challenge the hegemony and power monopoly of great powers such as the United States and pave the way for creating new opportunities to establish regional coalitions by rising states."

Magazine Article - The American Interest

Size Matters

| July-August 2008

"As the American political system hurtles toward its quadrennial encounter with the oracle of democracy, it is worth our while to take stock of the country's place in a world beset by bewilderingly rapid change. (Heaven knows none of the candidates will bother to do this.) I want to suggest that an old yet generally neglected subject remains particularly relevant: the relationship between the size of political units and the effective scale of systems of economic production and exchange. Another way to describe this relationship is by recourse to the hoary scholarly phrase "political economy", a term of art that has unfortunately gone out of style...."

Announcement

Nuclear Fuel Supply Concept Developed by Debra Decker and Erwann Michel-Kerjan is Featured in the Global Risks 2008 Report of the World Economic Forum

| January 22, 2008

"A truly innovative concept has been proposed by a joint team from the Wharton Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School: "insure to assure." The proposed solution — complementary to the efforts of the IAEA and others — would create a partnership between financial industries and governments to create the world's first international nuclear fuel insurance fund."