By Punishing Iran, Trump is Weakening America – with Abraham Newman

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complained about Republicans in Congress who were grandstanding for harsher sanctions on Iran. Now, he has joined the grandstanders, announcing that the Trump administration is stepping up its maximum pressure campaign against Iran by ending waivers that had allowed some states to import Iranian crude oil.

This may have significant consequences for global oil markets. It will have bigger consequences for U.S. power. Trump administration unilateralists, together with their Capitol Hill supporters and anti-Iran lobby groups, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, think they can use sanctions as a tool of regime change. They are wrong. The increasingly desperate efforts of the United States to ratchet up sanctions are likely to backfire, hardening the resolve of the Iranian regime and driving both allies and competitors away from the U.S.-dominated global financial system.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “By Punishing Iran, Trump is Weakening America,”, Foreign Policy (online), April 24, 2019.

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

The Panama Papers and Thomas Piketty: How the Leak May Transform Politics

The Panama Papers—the massive collection of leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that helps set up offshore shell corporations—have already had political consequences. Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned after the leak revealed that he had partly owned an offshore firm. David Cameron, the British prime minister, is facing criticism over ...
Read Article
Essay

Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics with Sean Aday, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly and Ethan Zuckerman,

In this report from the United States Institute of Peace’s Centers of Innovation for Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding, and Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, a team of scholars from The George Washington University, in cooperation with scholars from Harvard University and Morningside Analytics, critically assesses both the “cyberutopian” and “cyberskeptic” perspectives on the impact of new ...
Read Article