On the Discipline of Economic Coercion

The CNBC report tells us that President Trump wishes to attach tariffs on Iran to a bill already aimed at sanctioning Russia and those aiding its war against Ukraine. I will not pretend to have lived through the events that produced this moment — the nature of that conflict, the full architecture of present international agreements — but I understand the shape of the problem, and that shape is familiar to anyone who has negotiated an instrument meant to bind sovereign parties.

Two distinct objects — Russian sanctions and Iranian tariffs — are here proposed for a single legislative vessel. That is precisely the habit of construction most likely to produce an instrument that is neither fish nor fowl. When I negotiated what became the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1794, the great danger was not the failure of will on either side but the failure of precision: a clause that meant one thing in London and another in Philadelphia was no clause at all. A bill that simultaneously punishes Russia's conduct of war and Iran's trade posture conflates two separate legal and diplomatic rationales. The parties against whom such measures are directed — and the allies whose cooperation we require — will read the confusion and conclude, not unreasonably, that the authors did not know their own minds.

On the substance of Iranian economic pressure, I will offer only this: the CNBC report itself notes that trade between Iran and the United States is, by the president's own description, "trivial." A tariff on trivial trade is less a commercial instrument than a signaling device. Signaling is not without value in diplomacy, but it must be distinguished from obligation. A tariff imposed on negligible commerce will inconvenience American importers — however few — without materially constraining a foreign government. If the goal is to constrain, the instrument should be designed to that end, with specificity about what conduct is to be altered and what relief is available when it is.

The deeper question is one of treaty comity — that is, the principle that nations observe the legal framework they have joined, and that departures from it are made deliberately, not incidentally. Iran exists within a web of multilateral agreements touching nuclear activity, and any unilateral economic measure by the United States carries consequences for those frameworks. I cannot trace those consequences in detail; the engineering of modern sanctions and the financial instruments through which they operate are beyond what I could have known. What I can say, from long experience at the negotiating table, is that measures joined in haste to satisfy a passing political appetite tend to foreclose options that patient diplomacy would have preserved.

What should be done? The Senate, in its constitutional role as the body most fitted — by its longer terms and its treaty function — to deliberate on foreign affairs, ought to insist that the Russian sanctions bill be considered on its own merits, and that any Iran measure be drafted as a separate instrument with its own stated rationale, its own conditions for relief, and its own alignment with existing multilateral obligations. Joining the two may produce a bill that passes; it is less likely to produce a policy that works. Precision is not pedantry. In the language of statutes and treaties, a word poorly chosen today becomes a precedent poorly cited for a generation.