President Trump’s revival of the maximum pressure campaign against Iran led to a record decline in the value of the Iranian currency. A key component of the Trump administration’s coercive strategy involves the use of economic sanctions. In fact, since the 1990s, economic sanctions have become a convenient weapon of choice for successive US administrations. Proponents argue that sanctions are cost-effective, non-violent, and a productive tool to realize U.S. strategic goals.
How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare critiques this flawed operational logic of sanctions by examining the Iranian case. The book shows that sanctions often fail to achieve intended behavioural changes in the targeted country and, in fact, prove counterproductive to policy objectives. Specifically, it evaluates Iranian sanction in terms of their socio-political impacts, economic repercussions, and costs to the U.S., Iran, and the wider global community.
Notably, the authors highlight how decades of sanctions have profoundly shaped Iran’s worldview and foreign policy. The Islamic Republic perceives itself as the target of a global shadow war, both internal and external. This acute sense of threat fosters a meydaan (battlefield) mentality, encouraging a more defiant, belligerent, and confrontational foreign policy posture. Rather than persuading Iran to abandon its anti-Western stance, sanctions have often led to blowback.
The sanction regime against Iran has significant humanitarian, economic and socio-political impacts. Instead of turning the Iranian middle class against the regime by inducing scarcity, U.S. economic statecraft causes increased securitisation and militarisation of Iranian politics that suppresses dissenting views. By inadvertently strengthening business enterprises linked to the Iranian state apparatus at the cost of the private sector, economic sanctions stifle the emergence of a potentially pro-West moderate business constituency.
The repeated reliance on sanctions also presents a strategic dilemma for U.S. policymakers. Paradoxically, the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions is predicated on economic interdependence fostered by the U.S.-led liberal international order. But their repeated use undermines the very foundation of the interdependent economic order as states seek to detach from the U.S.-centred globalized network to escape the American economic coercion.
Trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns, U.S. policymakers face a paradox: the more sanctions are used, the less effective they become. Once envisioned as a peaceful alternative to war, sanctions now freeze problems without resolution and are reduced to an instrument of punishment, often proving worse than war itself.Combining counterintuitive analytical insights with a rich account of lived experiences, How Sanctions Work provides a compelling analysis of a prominent case study of an economic statecraft measure that is in vogue in the age of great power rivalry. While the book will appeal to readers of geoeconomics and geopolitics, it is especially valuable for policymakers and analysts seeking to refine their national geoeconomic strategies.
