Ignatius: Trump's pressure play on Iran could backfire on U.S.

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran assumes that economic sanctions are weakening the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps; and that more sanctions will make the IRGC weaker still. The problem is that U.S. and European intelligence analysts don’t think this forecast is accurate.

“Re-imposition of sanctions in 2018 has played into the hands of the IRGC,” warns one recent Western intelligence assessment. Rather than turning Iranians against the corrupt IRGC leadership, in other words, the U.S. economic squeeze is instead giving Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and his allies greater control over the Iranian economy.

The Iran sanctions paradox deepened this week with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the U.S. will designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. But as Pompeo warned Monday, the IRGC’s leaders are masters of “nationwide con artistry and corruption … which they perpetrate against the regime’s own people.”

History has shown that these operatives find illegal ways to escape pressure, and that the economic vise instead tightens for the Iranian people.

Like so many Trump administration foreign-policy gambits, the Iran squeeze looks like a tactical campaign that’s in search of a strategy. Does the administration want negotiations? If so, why has it effectively banned the U.S. from contact with Tehran’s power brokers? “We’ll preclude ourselves from talking to the people who matter,” warns Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/ignatius-trumps-pressure-play-on-iran-could-backfire-on-u-s/