Prioritize Our Enemies

The enactment of new penalties against foreign firms investing in Iran or Libya will heat an already simmering quarrel between America and our closest allies. President Clinton, who signed this legislation Monday, is likely to slow its implementation just as he suspended similiar new measures aimed at Cuba. But that leaves only a short time to avert a rupture over the issue of secondary boycotts against rogue regimes. We should offer the allies this deal: Join us in putting the screws to Iran and we will back off on Cuba and Libya.

Morally and logically, we have the better of the arguments in these trade disputes: The regimes we wish to penalize are all deeply repugnant, and our allies’ devotion to free trade would be better demonstrated by fully opening their markets to the new democracies of Eastern Europe. The goal of leadership, however, is not to be better and wiser than those we wish to have follow us but to find common ground while bringing them along as far as we can.

We need to convince our allies that Iran’s brutal theocracy poses a unique threat to Western security and values, one that cannot be mitigated by appeasement. It will be easier to do if we highlight the distinction between the Iranian and other obnoxious regimes.

Four things set the Iranian regime apart. It is the leading source of international terrorism; it is undertaking a broad-based program to acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them over long distances; it is the center of an international ideology that challenges the basic precepts that bind the Atlantic alliance and it is the single main agent thwarting the Middle East peace process.

In 1992, the European Union adopted a policy of “critical dialogue” with Iran, persuaded that this would prove more effective in altering Iranian behavior than any tighter economic penalties. Under this rationale, European states have extended large trade credits to Iran; they have rescheduled more than $11 billion of Iranian debt at government-subsidized interest rates--far below what the market would charge--and some, notably the Germans, have made lavish demonstrations of goodwill toward Iranian officials.

After four years, the only return on this policy that European leaders can point to is the suggestion by Tehran that it will not send its own employees to murder writer Salman Rushdie even though it steadfastly refuses to lift either the fatwah inviting all Muslims to carry out this murder or the

$2-million reward that has been offered for the deed by a foundation linked to the regime.

After four years, even the EU is beginning to recognize the failure of its policy. In a statement adopted last March, it said: “If the critical dialogue is worth continuing, it must show some progress and convergence of views on such fundamental issues as the Middle East peace process and terrorism.” Not a scintilla of such progress has appeared.

It is time for Washington to deploy its full powers of persuasion to get our allies to recognize that their policy of appeasement has failed. We should put on a full-court effort to win them over to a policy of tight sanctions against Tehran. These sanctions would include refusing new credits and loans and any new investment in Iranian energy resources. Iran’s economy is already reeling under years of revolutionary mismanagement. Coordinated sanctions might well help to bring down the mullahs’ regime or at least curtail its capacity to finance terror and its ambitious military projects.

In exchange for their cooperation on Iran, we should suspend or repeal the new laws that apply secondary boycotts to Cuba and Libya. These are ugly tyrannies, but they are relics that today pose relatively little threat. We should appeal to our allies not to prop them up, but we should not try to force conformity to our views.

Achieving a coordinated response to Tehran would be an important step in making the Atlantic alliance effective and coherent in addressing post-Soviet threats.

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of “The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism” (AEI Press, 1996).