The Divestment Trap

John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies and head of the Persian Gulf Initiative, has a new Op-Ed in the Boston Globe on "The Divestment Trap." Tirman writes of a pending bill in the Massachusetts Legislature on divestment: "Because of the broad, longstanding, and punitive sanctions on Iran, the divestment bill will have virtually no practical effect. The likelihood that any possible investment in Iran's energy industry would not already be prohibited by US law is low. In the globalized economy nowadays, such strategies are less effective anyway, because tracking the flow of money and goods is increasingly difficult." Read the full editorial here.