Using Positive Sanctions to End International Conflicts: Iran and the Arab Gulf Countries

Efforts by the Gulf Co-operation Council to persuade Iran to end its war with Iraq in exchange for access to a large amount of capital during the late spring of 1982 were not only ignored by the Iranian government but also met with greatly increased demands for reparations on the part of Iranian leaders. This event raises at least two important questions regarding the use of positive sanctions as a way of ending inter-national conflicts: under what conditions an offer of positive sanctions will be made and under what conditions such an offer will be accepted or refused. These questions can be addressed from at least two very different perspectives. In domestic political terms, small principalities such as those on the Arab side of the Arab/Persian Gulf have a variety of incentives to use rewards in their dealings with more powerful neighbors, particularly if they have a reservoir of fungible resources from which to draw. In structural terms, when the distribution of capabilities in a region such as the Gulf is changing from a bipolar to a multipolar one, countries whose situation is improving will have several incentives to try to bring regional conflicts to an end using positive sanctions. Thus there is little basis for choosing between these two perspectives as a better explanation for why rewards were offered to Iran to end its war with Iraq during June 1982. But structural features of the Gulf region provide a considerably better explanation for why this offer was rejected than domestic political factors do. Domestic-level arguments explaining the rejection of rewards contradict the logic according to which their having been offered in the first place is explained. Structural aspects of the situation in the Gulf in early 1982 not only predict that smaller countries should have tried to use rewards to settle conflict in the area but also suggest why larger combatants will not accept such an offer. This finding indirectly supports Kenneth Waltz’s argument that conflicts in a multipolar world will be both more likely to occur and more difficult to solve. 1