Sanctions on Iran were first rolled out soon after the suspension of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington on the heels of the 1979 hostage crisis. These measures have effectively segregated Iran from the international financial and banking sector, sidelined it from the world oil market, and helped make the Iranian rial one of the world’s most worthless currencies. 

The kaleidoscopic varieties of punitive measures have been inspired by a fixed set of rationales, and, theoretically, the average Iranian citizen doesn’t find them entirely objectionable, either. All primary and secondary sanctions have been enforced with the goal of inducing Tehran to curb its nuclear bravado, end its funding of militant proxies, respect the human rights of its people, and act as a responsible global player, including by dropping its senseless anti-Americanism. 

President Donald Trump has issued a memorandum reinstating the “maximum pressure” campaign that followed his May 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear nonproliferation agreement codified in UN Security Council resolution 2231. In a press briefing with the visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 5, Trump said he will bring Iran’s oil exports to zero through “the most aggressive possible sanctions.”

During the same event, he said, “I want Iran to be peaceful and successful,” adding that he “hated” imposing the sanctions, offering negotiations to overcome the deadlock instead. “Incredible people. Industrious, beautiful, just an unbelievable group of people in Iran. And I know them well. I have many friends from Iran and many friends that are Americans from Iran,” he continued.

That Iran has refused to unclench its fist in the face of signals betokening an appetite for engagement is odd. The ayatollah is so stubborn that he didn’t appreciate Trump firing the arch-Iran hawk Brian Hook or parting ways with John Bolton and other neoconservatives who would have otherwise drawn up his Iran policy.

Washington orthodoxy treats sanctions as a silver bullet, and, by a narrow measure, they have been successful. Over time, sanctions have been multiplied to the extent that there’s almost no official trade happening between Iran and the outside world. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iran was the world’s most sanctioned country. Russia has now nominally replaced it on the list, but for a host of reasons, Russia’s experience in no way reflects what Iranians have lived through. (The nuances include the majority of Iranians being opposed to their government yet still being economically throttled.)

Iran’s ravaged aviation industry, which some scholars say is a shorthand for the health conditions of the establishment itself, has been haunted by decades of neglect and embargo. The average age of commercial planes is almost 28 years, which is believed to be double the global standard. Some of the planes carrying Iranian civilians can potentially be vintage items in transportation museums—they include a 40-year-old Airbus A300 still operated by Iran Air.

But the lack of ingenuity in crafting strategies commensurate with the social developments of Iran mean not much has been done to incentivize a revisionist state to change course. With a few exceptions, almost every U.S. president after the inception of the Islamic Republic came to office with the promise of keeping “all options” on the table, intensifying the economic pressure and ensuring a valid military threat remained in place.

The cheerleaders of strangulation, including the exiled opposition leaders vying to replace the Islamic Republic, have held the same line. The diasporic political culture has been receptive to the trope of sanctions being an elixir. The sanitized explanation for austerity inflicted externally is that for an ailing nation like Iran, sanctions function like chemotherapy. The patient endures extended pain but is eventually cured of a chronic illness. 

Citizens of other nations in Iran’s neighborhood, including even crisis-stricken Afghanistan or landlocked Armenia, cannot be expected to relate to the experience of living under sanctions—it’s a unique burden in a hyperconnected world. For Iranians, mundane errands have become Sisyphean tasks. Submitting an online college application, subscribing to a newspaper in a different country, ordering English-language books, or booking hotel rooms for an overseas vacation are missions that cannot be accomplished routinely. If you turn to middlemen who specialize in each area, there’s a chance of success with extra effort and investment. 

But these aren’t the barriers to development the government is necessarily unhappy about or determined to eliminate at any cost. Sanctions don’t impinge on the theocracy’s reactionary elements, the constituencies feeding off corruption, or the ruling elite in general. If they are bothering the middle class, who cares? Ranking commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have suggested several times that dealing with sanctions is not as difficult as some say. 

In November 2010, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, commander of the Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed, known as the Basij, said he believed sanctions accelerated the nation’s progress: “I thank God that our country is under sanctions. We should pray that sanctions increase every day.”

As foreign minister, the current vice president Javad Zarif had argued in 2018 the United States had become addicted to sanctions. Reciprocally, Iran has become addicted to sanctions-evasion. In 2019, Tehran lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi said people in the conservative camp were lobbying to award up to 30 percent of the government budget to individuals and companies assisting with sanctions evasion.

For the consequentialists fixated on disposing with the autocracy, sanctions are a benign alternative to a war of attrition. For years, doomsayers have ruefully conjured Iraq as a regime-change accomplishment that has not been replicated in the Iranian laboratory, but basic geographical knowledge dictates that carpet-bombing a country almost four times the size of Iraq with a population of 85 million sets the stage for a humanitarian disaster. Yet it is time for the proponents of the narrative of “crippling sanctions” and “maximum pressure” to engage in an honest introspection and ask substantive questions. What has changed about the Islamic Republic’s regional conduct, its nuclear adventurism and its human rights record?

If the goal is to stop the nuclear program, the results are lackluster. It is documented that it was only after the sanctions were eased following a solid non-proliferation pact with proper safeguards that the Islamic Republic slowed down its nuclear program. When the restrictions were restored and the JCPOA shelved, Iran rolled back its commitments, curtailed United Nations inspections and rushed to the perilous milestone of 60 percent uranium enrichment in 2021.

If the goal is to spark Iran’s implosion, there is enough precedent to believe the kleptocracy will acquiesce to the long-term starvation of its people for the sake of survival. Ali-Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is on the record saying in 2018 that people of Yemen were an example of resilience, and that Iranians must learn to subsist by consuming dry bread and wearing loincloths if needed. This mentality is popular among the state loyalists who are convinced they are resisting injustice through economic self-flagellation.

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It’s no surprise that since 2018, the government’s efforts to accept the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to ratify the countering of terrorism financing and anti-money laundering conventions have been consistently stonewalled by Tehran’s worst radicals. These are individuals who won’t be found in uniform but appear on TV screens as suited, bespectacled “experts,” MPs, and members of amorphous committees of the Expediency Council. The objective is to perpetuate the financial monopoly the sanctions have awarded to the Guards. There is no need for any masks to be taken off. Those gaining from the sanctions and those paying for it are known. 

It is the failure of sanctions to spark regime change that is most glaring. Iran’s most unprecedented excesses, including facilitating the Hamas attacks against Israel in October 2023 and then squaring up to Israel directly with a risky exchange of missiles, happened at a time when its economy was squeezed under the worst sanctions provoked by the late President Ebrahim Raisi. 

Further, sanctions have converted the drivers of social change, namely young, middle-class Iranians, into an apathetic, feckless constituency. They are trapped between external pressure and domestic repression. To the powers mandating sanctions without minding the human toll, Iranians are footing the bill for their government’s intransigence. For the government whose intransigence exacerbates their plight, it is acceptable for them to be kept on a tight leash. When Ali Khamenei said in 2013, “I am not a diplomat, I’m a revolutionary” he didn’t necessarily mean to disparage the work of diplomats. In 2020, he said, “Cowards don’t have the right to talk about rationality.” Similarly, this didn’t inevitably mean that he looked down on logic as such. On those occasions, and today, his message is that he is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of his people only to make a point: His ideas, however unaffordable, overpower everything that defies the revolution he inherited. Sanctions cannot touch that.