Financial Transparency Coalition

While Iran claims its nuclear ambitions are benign—Tehran continues to maintain it is perusing nuclear power for "energy purposes"—the rest of the world has remained skeptical. For years, the international community has grown increasingly alarmed by Tehran's growing ambitions. Mostly they watch, sometimes they speak, and occasionally they act with adequate decisiveness. Among OECD countries, the United States has been the most willing to act. In fact, the United States has maintained some kind of sanctions on Iran—with varying degrees of severity—since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. These have, largely, been to no avail. Analysts generally agree that previous...

With some notable exceptions, most scholars and politicians believe the world should limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For the overwhelming majority of countries, this is not a problem. Most countries do not have the resources—or more importantly the aspirations—to gain nuclear capabilities. But the problem with nuclear weapons is that even one of these weapons in the wrong hands could inflict overwhelming injury to thousands. Which is why the world doesn’t just need a majority consensus; it needs a complete consensus. The international community has a few tools to limit nuclear proliferation. The most notable of these is...

Nearly 5 years ago the international community, led by the United States, imposed the first in a line of increasingly harsh economic sanctions on Iran in the hopes of ending the country’s nuclear ambitions. Despite some signs of success, consensus on the effectiveness of the sanctions remains elusive. However, what is becoming clear is that sanctions are contributing to an explosion of corruption and funneling billions of dollars to Iran’s fastest growing group of kleptocrats: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, is like an amalgam of the Iranian CIA, Marines, Mafia and Fortune 500....