United States foreign policy is often driven by what Washington insiders call “common sense” ideas. These are policy ideas that enjoy widespread, bipartisan support and persist over time, with little serious scrutiny or evidence as to their efficacy beyond the policy’s staying power. Few other policies better illustrate the circular logic of this “common sense” approach than US sanctions policy, and specifically US sanctions policy toward Iran.
Iran is the most sanctioned country in the world (5). The United States alone has imposed sanctions against the Islamic Republic for over forty years. They were expanded under Obama and intensified under Trump to include nearly every major Iranian economic sector, along with targeted sanctions against most of the country’s ruling political and security class. In addition, the United Nations, European Union, and other countries have added their own sanctions at various moments. But if Washington’s goal in using this “economic weapon” is to somehow moderate, shift, or curb the Iranian government’s behavior at home or abroad, or even more ambitiously, to usher in the collapse of the Islamic Republic, then, by all possible measures, US sanctions have failed. And yet the sanctions keep coming. As late as December 2024, Biden announced his administration would be imposing yet another round of sanctions on Iran for its alleged election interference in the United States.Footnote 1
In How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez directly tackle the faulty logics and untested assumptions that continue to drive US sanctions policy against Iran. Drawing on different disciplinary methods and sources, the four scholars measure the effects of sanctions on Iran’s society, politics, economy, and foreign policy. They also interrogate the broader moral and geopolitical costs of sanctions for the United States and the world.
Their core finding is that comprehensive sanctions—or what the authors call “maximum pressure sanctions,” after Trump’s strategy of maximum pressure on Iran—have further empowered the Iranian government’s security apparatus, consolidating the Revolutionary Guard and the hard-liners’ economic, political, and geopolitical power. At the same time, these sanctions have caused the Iranian people increasing social and economic hardship and closed the space for their political dissent and mobilization against the government. In short, sanctions have not led—as many in DC have expressly hoped—to ordinary Iranians successfully overthrowing the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, as the authors write, “despite palpable and growing popular discontent, maximum pressure sanctions have actually weakened the Iranian population and made it more dependent on the state” (13).
To make these arguments, the scholars draw on diverse sources. The first two chapters are largely ethnographic, centering the voices of Iranians from varying socioeconomic and political backgrounds. For example, we hear from single mothers struggling to make ends meet; activists and artists who have risen up against the government at great personal cost; and professors and even Hizbullah fighters who support the government’s most hard-line policies. Although differences abound among these Iranians, the scholars make clear that they are all responding to shared conditions of economic hardship, political disaffection, and corruption at home, and broader violence and conflict in the region.
Chapter 3, in turn, describes the legal and political history of the US-led sanctions regime against Iran, specifically tracing the four rounds of sanctions that culminated in the maximum pressure sanctions placed during Trump’s first term, which Biden’s administration maintained. The fourth chapter shifts our focus to the economic effects of sanctions inside Iran, citing a range of sources, including economic survey data from Iran. This chapter is particularly useful in explaining the many economic contradictions that sanctions produce inside Iran. For instance, despite the well-measured pressure these economic weapons have placed on Iran’s middle and lower classes, the Iranian economy has yet to collapse. This chapter helps us understand the Iranian government’s adaptive, rather creative, monetary, trade, and other macroeconomic policies that have allowed its so-called resistance economy to endure in the face of increasingly crippling sanctions.
Chapters 5 and 6 review the geopolitical impact of sanctions policy on the United States, Iran, and the broader world. Both chapters directly challenge the popular view in Washington that sanctions are a “cost-free” alternative to war. In these chapters, the authors show the extent to which sanctions have further fueled conflict between the US and Iran and made the possibility for future negotiations and de-escalation less likely. Finally, in the conclusion, the scholars highlight the moral implications of sanctions, which create a “permanent siege” on the Iranian people. Here I was reminded of Lisa Bhungalia’s concept of “asphyxiatory violence” as the type of hidden, slow death imposed on populations through economic policies such as sanctions.Footnote 2 As the authors of How Sanctions Work write, “prolonged comprehensive sanctions regimes distribute pain and death so widely that they function as an invisible war” (147). This idea that sanctions are yet another type of warfare is an essential takeaway from this book.
Given the overall strength of the book’s analysis, it also is important to acknowledge that its authors had to overcome serious challenges to do this type of research on Iran—ranging from protecting the identities of their interlocutors from Iranian government surveillance to navigating the very sanctions regime they are analyzing as US-based researchers. These challenges placed some limitations on their analysis—a point the authors acknowledge at various points. For instance, because of the lack of transparency from Iranian government sources on the economy, they admit that it is difficult to precisely parse how much of Iran’s economic downturn over the last decade is due to sanctions, and how much is caused by the broader challenges of neoliberalism on one hand and Iranian government mismanagement and corruption on the other. Critics of the Iranian government that support sanctions policy will use this ambiguity to question some of the book’s economic findings. A related limitation is that we rarely hear from Iranian interlocutors who support US sanctions policy—a position that gained some traction, particularly online, during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022. The analysis would benefit from a contextualization of these pro-sanctions views from particular factions without legitimizing their political stance.
Ultimately, the primary audience of How Sanctions Work should be the very policy community that develops and legitimates US sanctions policy toward Iran. Few of these policy elites have the necessary language skills, access to Iranian society, or academic training to do this type of rich analysis on their own. It helps that Bajoghli, Nasr, Salehi-Isfahani, and Vaez also are deeply knowledgeable about Washington’s policy establishment and its assumptions about Iran. They present their findings in a way that will be legible to these readers, while retaining the necessary nuance about the many contradictions of contemporary Iranian politics and economics, and a society under sanctions. For this reason, critical scholars and students of Iran also have much to gain from reading this monograph. The book offers us a model for how to effectively conduct research on contemporary Iran—with all of its present political and security challenges—through a multidisciplinary, multiscalar lens. Given what is at stake in the escalating tensions between Iran and the United States, especially under the new administration, the book serves as a guide for similar future research that will be acutely needed.
