Iran: Are the sanctions working?

Our “economic war” on Iran is finally having an effect, said Bloomberg.com in an editorial. Strict sanctions by the West on Iran’s oil exports and banking industry—designed to dissuade Iran’s leaders from pursuing their nuclear program—have thrown the country’s economy into free fall. The value of the Iranian rial has plunged by 40 percent against the U.S. dollar in just two weeks, inflation is at 70 percent, and food is scarce and expensive. Iranians rioted outside Tehran’s shopping bazaar last week, and a “wave of strikes” has buffeted the country since the summer. There’s “increasing talk of a possible Persian Spring,” said the New York Daily News. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing for a new, more serious round of sanctions, rather than a military attack. Iran will escape this tightening vise only “after the mullahs step away from the enriched uranium.”

Don’t count on that happening, said Yousaf Butt in ForeignPolicy.com. The regime will never buckle to the West’s conditions, so the sanctions are really intended to put such crippling pressure on the starving Iranian people that they “demand regime change.” But ordinary Iranians blame the U.S. and the West for their current misery, not the regime. Besides, the ayatollahs care little about “domestic public opinion” or the hardships of their people, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. These fanatics see the world in black-and-white, and they would view an abandonment of their nuclear program as a defeat. Only the likelihood of a military attack will deter them.

In fact, the sanctions may actually backfire, said Patrick Smith in TheFiscalTimes.com. Yes, Iran is now “in a partial state of collapse.” But it’s not the ruling clerics who are hungry and without money—it’s millions of Iranians. “We are well on the way to creating a 21st-century Cuba in the Middle East.” The U.S. has maintained punishing sanctions on Castro’s Cuba for more than half a century, and its people eat poorly, live in crumbling housing, and drive ancient cars. And to what end? The autocratic government blames America for the people’s poverty, and “Cuba goes on being Cuba.” If we rely on sanctions alone to break the Iranians’ will, without another attempt at negotiations, we’ll get a similarly unsatisfying outcome: “a lot of misery, a lot of national pride, and nuclear capability as a work in progress.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up