As diplomacy around a possible US-Iranian nuclear deal enters a critical phase, Naftali Bennett, Israeli minister of economy, religious services, and Jerusalem and diaspora affairs, traveled to Washington last week to lobby key members of Congress. His goal was to persuade them not only to resist any relaxation of sanctions on Iran, but indeed to ratchet them up. Speaking at the Brookings Institution on Nov. 14, Bennett made a powerful argument whose potential resonance with lawmakers makes it worthy of closer scrutiny.

Iran, he said, is like a boxer who has been knocked to the mat, gasping for air as the referee counts, "Six, seven, eight ... " Why, then, should we help him to his feet just as we are about to win the match? Furthermore, Bennett asked, does anyone really believe that relaxing sanctions will lead to more leverage over Iran six months down the road when trying to extract further concessions and close the deal? Of course not. It is a simple matter of logic that we would have less leverage and thus that Iran would wiggle off the hook and continue along the path to a nuclear weapon.

Speaking the same evening at the Middle East Institute's annual conference, in Washington, US national security adviser Susan Rice made an equally important and powerful counterargument. Iran, she said, will not be bouncing rapidly back to economic health as a result of the very modest sanctions relief on the table with the current deal. Any economic relief would be “limited, temporary and reversible,” and crucially, “the amount of revenue that Iran will lose during the next six months would far exceed any amount of relief they might obtain as part of a first step agreement.” In other words, in Bennett’s analogy, even if Iran were slightly less groggy, it would remain punch-drunk on the mat.

A serious look at Iran’s economic situation shows this to be the most likely outcome. The reason that Iran’s economy has been so paralyzed is not only the extreme severity of the sanctions applied by the US-led coalition. Of equal importance is the eight years of inept economic management by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that exacerbated the Iranian economy’s deep structural flaws and primed it to be uniquely vulnerable. As Dariush Zahedi and I have argued elsewhere, Iran’s downward economic spiral will continue unless there are serious and sustained reforms, which cannot be magically implemented overnight, even in the absence of sanctions. A slight relaxation of sanctions will only slow the rate of decline, not initiate a burst of economic recovery that might lead Iran’s leaders to resume their intransigence. Iran will be on the mat for a long time to come.