Sanctions undermine Iranians' quest for freedom

The Woman, Life, Freedom protests that challenged the foundations of the Islamic Republic may have receded for now, but Iranians inside Iran continue to defy authorities and chart out new steps for meaningful change. Unfortunately, outside of Iran, few policymakers and political actors have contemplated any meaningful change in their approach. Instead, they are calling for more and more of the same: sanctions that weaken ordinary citizens far more than they weaken the regime.

From the dawn of the Islamic Republic, the United States has imposed sweeping sanctions aimed at changing the regime’s behaviour, if not changing the regime itself. From trade embargoes that first went into place in 1979, to extraterritorial sanctions that have been US law since 1996, to sanctions on Iran’s central bank in 2012, to designating first the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force as terrorists in 2007 and eventually the full IRGC as a terrorist organisation in 2019 – every play in the sanctions playbook has been considered, implemented and steadily ratcheted up to ‘maximum pressure’ over the past four decades. There is almost literally nothing left to sanction.

The result? Ordinary Iranians are poorer and more isolated than ever. Iran’s middle class – a critical base for democratisation – has collapsed as the elites of the Islamic Republic and the IRGC are wealthier and more powerful than many could have ever imagined.

Far from bringing about democracy, sanctioned countries consistently suffer from an erosion of human rights and become less democratic. This is because broad sanctions concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the elite, while depriving ordinary people of resources. As has been the case with Saddam, Castro and the Kim family, broad sanctions have never forced Khamenei to go to bed without his supper, but they have taken food from the mouths of the populace he rules over.

Leading Iranian democracy advocates have outlined how these broad sanctions have undermined Iranians’ struggle for human rights. They’ve articulated how broad sanctions have punished Iranian society and strengthened the most hardline and anti-democratic forces in the country while robbing Iranians of the resources and capacity to organise politically. Even some of the most prominent proponents of sanctions today, such as the son of the former Shah Reza Pahlavi, said in a 2015 talk at Arizona State University that he supported the JCPOA conditionally because it would have eased sanctions. “Empowerment doesn’t mean making the Iranian people starve more,” he said at the time. “Anything that gets our fellow compatriots more means to be able to demand more is in the long run in the advantage of the Iranian people and not necessarily in the advantage of the regime.”

In a glaring example of how sanctions have undermined the movement for change, there were numerous calls for labour strikes as the next phase of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement to truly turn the screws on the regime. Such strikes were a critical element of the movement that collapsed the Shah’s regime in 1979. Yet today, with the state of Iran’s economy, and most Iranians unable to risk losing their already meagre salaries by participating in strikes, these efforts failed to reach a nationwide scale in scope or demands.

When sanctions were briefly paused five years ago as the JCPOA was being implemented, this trajectory began to change. Inflation in Iran dropped to single digits for the first time in years, according to World Bank data. But the reimposition of sanctions with the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 triggered the return of hyperinflation to levels never seen before – rising to greater than 40% and even 50%. The consumer price index rose a staggering 85% over the two years after the snapback of sanctions, as reported by a 2022 case study prepared by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, Founder and CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation.

Rather than simply doubling down on sanctions in place that have so demonstrably failed, policymakers should be identifying how to rebalance existing sanctions so that they empower rather than harm Iranians seeking to hold their government to account.

One example of such action was the recent US issuance of General License D-2, carving out exemptions from the sanctions that otherwise bar tech companies from allowing Iranians to access online communication and circumvention tools. Additional measures to consider must include enabling Iranians in the diaspora to send remittances to Iran.

But while such measures would help, they would still not likely be game changers. Ultimately, comprehensively easing sanctions that broadly impact the Iranian economy, while leaving targeted measures in place against Iran’s government, would do far more to empower the people of Iran than any other actions the US and Europe could contemplate.

Unfortunately, the West’s Iran policy has focused so much on figuring out how we can pressure the Iranian government that it comes at the expense of empowering the Iranian people to do so themselves. Transformative efforts to ease external restrictions on Iranian society are dismissed out of hand if there is any risk that they could reduce sanctions that marginally impact the regime. Sanctions have become sacrosanct while the Iranian people are treated as collateral damage. It must be the other way around. As the Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrated – it is the people, not the sanctions, who are the best and only effective agents for change in Iran. And it must be the people, rather than the sanctions, who come first in our policy decisions.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.