Robert Reardon: Sanctions, Inducements, And How To Handle Iran

“This is, without a doubt, the best place that I have worked.  I’ve probably gotten more useful feedback on what I’ve written or the ideas I’ve had than anywhere else.  There’s really nowhere else that has a concentration of people like this that work on nuclear issues.”

This ringing endorsement of the Belfer Center comes from postdoctoral fellow Robert Reardon, who is using his time at Belfer to expand his work on sanctions and positive inducements in the global nonproliferation regime, specifically as they apply to the Iranian nuclear program.

With crippling sanctions beginning to take their toll, the election of the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new President, and the possibility for diplomatic engagement after nearly thirty-five years of radio silence and missed opportunities, Belfer’s hub of nuclear scholarship is the ideal place to work on this pressing foreign policy and international security concern.

As a result of Iran’s intensification of its nuclear program, positive versus negative inducements in nonproliferation efforts are widely discussed in American domestic policy circles.  Often, however, attempts to communicate this incredibly nuanced issue to the American public turn into muddled, contradictory statements or gross oversimplifications.

Reardon points to two complicating factors that disrupt this line of communication: the dual-use nature of Iran’s nuclear technology and domestic efforts to confine discussion to a “good guys vs. bad guys” narrative.   “I think the dual use aspect of nuclear technology is a problem when you’re explaining this to the general public,” he says.  Iran’s clandestine efforts to develop its program suggest illegal weaponization, not legal development of peaceful nuclear technology to which it is entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Because completely legal nuclear technologies can also be used to weaponize, the American public focuses solely on the specter of an Iranian bomb.  Therefore, any Iranian development of nuclear technology is politically dead in the water in the United States, especially considering the political weight of the Israel lobby.

The tendency to squish the Iranian nuclear program into a right vs. wrong narrative further complicates the issue.  Reardon explains, “You run into this problem where saying something like ‘You need to understand their point of view’ or trying  to explain that there’s a lot of nuance is interpreted as defending or agreeing with them [Iran].”

He argues this negatively impacts American policymaking.  “Policy should be crafted under conditions of as much information as possible,” he says, “and a critical piece of information is better understanding how your adversaries view the world.  That should be a priority in our government, hiring people capable of doing that and getting decision-makers to understand how the other side thinks.”

As the United States pursues a diplomatic approach to the Iranian nuclear program, Robert Reardon’s research on sanctions and positive inducements becomes all the more relevant.  To know which of these to apply and when, it will be critical in his view to understand how Iran views itself and the world.