Word: iran
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...instance, in March of 2005, President Bush decided to offer economic incentives including membership in the World Trade Organization to Iran if they agreed to abandon their desire for nuclear power. A year later, after Iran had successfully enriched uranium, the United States, working multilaterally with Britain and France, threatened Iran with harsher actions if they failed to suspend their uranium enrichment. Then, only a few weeks later, the U.S. retracted the stick and presented the carrot offering to engage in direct talks with Iran if it agreed to abandon its uranium enrichment program...
...United States’ primary strategy in attempting to rein in Iran has been economic sanctions. Unfortunately, these sanctions have had only a small effect on the Iranian economy as evidenced by the growth in its 2008 GDP by a strong 6.4 percent...
...truly effective economic sanctions they must be multilateral and, most importantly, include China and Russia. He has recently discussed economic sanctions with both Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Both nations have proven unreliable on this issue in the past and furthermore, if Iran is truly only a month, or perhaps months, from developing nuclear warheads, then even economic sanctions from every developed nation would be rendered irrelevant...
Likewise, offering positive incentives to Iran may be too little too late at this stage in its development of nuclear technology. Of course, I am not advocating that we all start singing renditions of “Bomb Iran,” but military action should not be disallowed on principle. In fact, I would argue that our reliance on soft power without the implicit threat of true hard power is the fundamental reason why both North Korea and Iran have comfortably duped...
President Obama must either immediately convince international leaders that a nuclear-armed Iran is a grave danger to international security and implement broader economic sanctions, or plan for military action. Or we can continue to stutter through weak narrow trade restrictions while providing excuses until Iran finally joins the nuclear club. Let’s hope Obama chooses one of the first two actions—our safety depends...