On April 13, Iran launched an unprecedented retaliatory drone and missile attack on Israel, causing the United States and its allies to once again use their favorite weapon of war – sanctions.
According to academic research, this knee-jerk reaction is predictable but also unfounded.In Nicholas Mulder’s 2022 paper Economic Weapons: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern WarfareHe traces the history of sanctions, from the blockades of World War I to today’s economic sanctions.Mulder in conclusion “The historical record is relatively clear: most economic sanctions have not worked.”
Mulder’s paper was followed by this book Backfiring: How sanctions are reshaping the world and harming U.S. interests Author: Agathe Demarais. Drawing on his experience as an economic policy adviser in the diplomatic corps of the French Ministry of Finance, Desmarais observed that sanctions tend to unite rather than isolate countries with disagreements with the United States and its allies, thereby transforming the geopolitical landscape and global economy into a “positive one.” countries that benefit the United States and its allies.” damage U.S. influence.
The case of Iran particularly illustrates these points.in the recent How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic WarAuthors Vali Nasr, Narges Bajoghli, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Ali Vaez present a detailed study on the long-term impact of economic sanctions on Iran. Nasr is an Iranian-born distinguished professor of international affairs and Middle Eastern studies, a veteran diplomat and a member of the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Policy Council. He and his collaborators studied economic data and conducted long-term oral history interviews with 80 Iranian residents. The authors demonstrate that decades of Western sanctions, including the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign in 2018, have neither changed Iran’s international behavior in the way policymakers intended nor contributed to any form of regime change.
On the contrary, sanctions have caused severe suffering for ordinary Iranians. The number of middle-class people has shrunk significantly from 45% in 2017 to 30% in 2020. estimate The death toll from sanctions-induced humanitarian disasters, such as food shortages and the collapse of critical medical systems, has reached “hundreds of thousands.”
By imposing sanctions, the United States is trying to destroy Iran’s economy and make life difficult for Iran. For ordinary Iranians, they will rise up and either change the regime’s behavior or Completely overthrow it. However, this strategy is based on the assumption that Iranians will blame their own government for their suffering rather than those who imposed sanctions. Rather than blaming the government, Iranians experienced the classic “watchdog effect” in which sanctions inadvertently solidified support for the regime. By creating hostility toward the United States, sanctions have turned Iran’s wounded middle class into de facto or de jure supporters of Iran’s leaders.
This is reflected in interviews conducted by Nasr and his colleagues. Respondent Hamid, a disaster management expert in Iran’s civil society sector, said of the sanctions: “All they do is make the Revolutionary Guards more powerful. Those of us in civil society feel suffocated.”
Disappointed university professor Reza echoed Hamid’s concerns: “If it’s not a nuclear issue, it’s a problem with our ballistic missiles. If it’s not a problem with our ballistic missiles, it’s a human rights issue. If it’s not a human rights issue, [the U.S.] will find another reason [to sanction Iran]”.
Furthermore, Nasr and his co-authors argue that sanctions have forced the Iranian government to adopt a more defensive and aggressive posture—the very actions that prompted the United States to impose sanctions on Iran in the first place. This behavioral pattern of sanctioned states becoming more militaristic and risk-taking is well documented and consistent with economic theory’s predictions of actors with “nothing to lose”. William L. Silber in ” The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and the Military BusinessIn it he illustrates how the extreme pressures of “war” can lead states to take bold, often reckless actions.
It’s clear that the sanctions package is riddled with failures — not just in Iran, but in Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and most recently, Russia.Despite their poor track record, Treasury’s 2021 report show Since 2000, the use of sanctions has increased by a staggering 900 percent.
If the goal of the United States and its allies was to create a more moderate Iran or to change the Iranian regime through sanctions, they have failed. What is needed is a more nuanced and effective foreign policy that is grounded in diplomacy and does not inadvertently reinforce the very behaviors and institutions that the United States aims to change.
