The United Nations is poised to reimpose sweeping snapback sanctions on Iran after the Security Council rejected a last-minute effort by Russia and China to stall the move.
Barring an unexpected breakthrough, the measures will take effect at 8 p.m. EST on September 27.
The sanctions include a conventional arms embargo, restrictions on ballistic-missile activity, a ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing, as well as global asset freezes and travel bans targeting Iranian individuals and entities.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, discussed the UN decision and its broader implications with RFE/RL.
RFE/RL: If snapback goes forward, what specific UN measures and restrictions would actually come back into force?
Ben Taleblu: Barring any last-minute unforeseen Hail Marys by the Russians or Chinese or a massive concession by America or the Europeans, snapback is basically on track.
What snapback does is it restores the six UN Security Council resolutions that previously existed governing Iran's nuclear program between 2006 and 2010 and that were actively enforced up until 2015. So it restores all of the multilateral pressures, prohibitions, sanctions, you name it, that were contained in those six resolutions.
By way of example, there's stuff related to the nuclear program that calls on Iran not to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium.
There's a lot of political attention paid to getting inspectors back into Iran. There are sanctions against Iran's missile and nuclear infrastructure. There are permanent arms transfer bans. There are permanent ballistic-missile testing and transfer bans. And then there's also travel prohibitions, as well.
RFE/RL: If the snapback moves forward, what should we realistically expect to happen next inside the UN system?
Taleblu: Because there are a whole host of entities, like the European Union, for example, that built up their own sovereign sanctions authorities on the back end of the toughest UN Security Council resolution on Iran...those entities now would be obliged to go back and update their council resolutions to account for the new facts on the ground.
One of the good things about those older resolutions is that they had something called a "panel of experts" -- because it had sanctions, it had to monitor sanctions implementation and enforcement as well as violations.
What I'm looking for as an Iran watcher is: How will the Trump administration fight these bureaucratic battles in the UN system...to get the most juice out of snapback?
Once you restore those older penalties, they have to be incorporated into a diplomatic strategy by the West. So they don't just kind of exist in their own right. One should do something with them.
The Russians have been instrumental...in preventing current UN Resolution 2231 from even having a panel of experts and then working to gut other panel of experts that exist when it relates to North Korea or Mali, for example.
My eye will be on: Will the Trump administration and the Europeans be able to recreate a panel of experts to deal with sanctions enforcement in 2025?
RFE/RL: Why is the UN track so important for the US when it comes to pressuring Iran, and how does this tie into the broader competition with Russia and China?
Taleblu: The goal is to now use the UN system as much as possible, which is why it's imperative that the Trump administration see this through the prism of great-power competition.
This is much bigger than just Iran and the Middle East. It’s imperative for the Trump administration...to actually have an international organization strategy -- to actually have a diplomatic ground game -- and to actually be able to work with its European partners with and through the UN system.
The goal now is not to just have to rely on the US, but it's to have to benefit from the multilateralization of max pressure, and that's how I will judge if the snapback is a success. It's not about this bureaucratic fight. It is about the bureaucratic fights yet to come.
RFE/RL: Does snapback undermine the possibility of negotiations, or could it actually strengthen the diplomatic track?
Taleblu: Those who say that this effort closes the door to diplomacy and guarantees conflict forget the chronology of how we got the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] in 2013 and the JCPOA of 2015 because they followed the resolutions that came in from 2006 to 2010.
By the sheer chronology of it, these resolutions did not shut the door for diplomacy; if anything, they helped to make a more serious and vigorous case for using diplomacy to deal with the nuclear program.
The regime is just trying to do everything it can to avoid pressures and oversight, particularly when it is exposed and weak, as it has been in the post 12-day-war world.
RFE/RL: What leverage does the US have over Iran at this point, especially with Europe no longer firmly in Tehran’s corner?
Taleblu: Tehran understands now that the limited military option is on the table vis-a-vis the Israelis and the Americans. And now they've lost the Europeans in a world where the Europeans fought [President Donald] Trump tooth and nail after Trump left the [nuclear] deal in 2018.
They no longer even have that diplomatic card as well to play. The art of the deal for the president is how best to take advantage of this situation and actually flesh out and capitalize that Iranian sense of weakness for maximum political gain.
The Iranians don't want to be seen as compromising. But now, compromise is the only thing that actually could open the door for the regime, because if they do things like they've threatened in the past in response to snapback, which is leaving the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], they now understand -- or I think they now understand -- that that would trigger a potential use of force by Israel or America.
That's why the regime, in the past few months, even though it's still dangling this threat of NPT withdrawal, has kind of tried to walk back some of that rhetoric at the same time.
RFE/RL: Can Russia and China help Iran overcome the impact of the snapback?
Taleblu: Well, the fear here is that both legally and politically the Russians and Chinese would be the bureaucratic knife-fighters, and then economically, particularly the Chinese.
Bureaucratic knife-fighters within the UN system carry water for them at the IAEA, fight the US and the Europeans every nook and cranny when it comes to enforcement of the penalties that exist in those previous sanctions resolutions, delay or prevent things like the panel of experts from coming back.
The one fear here is that they could nest the Iran issue deeper into the great-power competition issue, forcing America to have to trade off.
I'm mentioning China here specifically because there are reports about China actually wanting to import more Iranian oil. They may try to keep the Islamic republic afloat through other measures that would then test the West's will at every juncture in the crisis. Will you enforce it? And how will you enforce it?
