Last week I argued that that there are essentially two major concerns driving Turkey’s Iran policy: (1) the fear that the Western/Euro-Atlantic path will incrementally lead to war, as it did in Iraq; (2) the urge to contain Iran’s ascendancy in the greater Middle East.
Before I get to the second factor – how and why Turkey wants to contain Iran – let me once again briefly summarize the first factor that I tried to explain in my previous column. In essence, Ankara believes economic sanctions never work. Turkey is not alone in that stance. Most of the scholarly literature and evidence on sanctions point to the same conclusion: Sanctions are an extremely weak policy instrument in terms of achieving desired outcomes. In fact, they most often have unintended consequences and create the opposite impact, such as strengthening the very regime you want to weaken.
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