To Show Solidarity with the Iranian People, End the Economic War

The chief victims of broad sanctions are innocent Iranians.

Bret Stephens likes collective punishment:

It’s good that the Biden administration, which has done so well in standing up to Putin, has now thrown its weight behind Iran’s protests, including by trying to keep Iranians connected to the internet via Elon Musk’s Starlink boxes. It can do even better by withdrawing from the nuclear talks, on the principle that a regime that will not give relief to women deserves no relief from sanctions.

Iran hawks do not and have never cared about the plight of the Iranian people. That has been obvious for a long time. That is why it is more than a little tiresome to watch as they seize on the latest protests over the outrageous abuses of the Iranian government to justify their ghoulish support for broad sanctions that do nothing but hurt the Iranian people. The Iranian government should be held accountable for the deaths of innocent protesters and for the outrageous death of Mahsa Amini, but that has nothing to do with the negotiations over the nuclear deal and it should not be an excuse to keep cruel and inhumane broad sanctions in place.

Denying Iranians sanctions relief in the name of opposing their government’s authoritarian abuses is the sort of stupid and destructive thing that Iran hawks specialize in. The Iranian people have enough to endure from their own government without having to suffer under our government’s pointless sanctions as well. Punishing an entire population for its government’s actions seems particularly dimwitted when so many of those people are protesting against their government’s abuses. If you respect what the protesters are standing for, you should oppose our government’s own abusive sanctions policy that also causes them harm.

The chief victims of broad sanctions are innocent Iranians. Iranian women bear the greatest burden of the conditions created by economic warfare. They are the ones that stand to benefit most from sanctions relief, and by opposing Iran hawks declare themselves to be hostile to the welfare of ordinary Iranians. Refusing to give them relief in order to spite their government is as twisted as it gets.

As broad sanctions have devastated Iran’s middle class, they have harmed middle-class Iranian women even more. Azadeh Moaveni and Sussan Tahmasebi wrote about this last year:

The slump is tearing away at their fragile gains in employment, upper management positions and leadership roles in the arts and higher education, while reducing their capacity to seek legal reforms and protections.

A country under the siege of economic war becomes more repressive and constricted, and so it has been in Iran. If you wish to see Iranians enjoy greater freedoms and improved social and political conditions, you cannot honestly advocate for keeping “maximum pressure” sanctions in place. These sanctions make everything more difficult for Iranians that desire political change, and they aid the government in tightening its grip. Anyone that advocates for such sanctions reveals himself to be a supporter of collective punishment and a false friend to the people of Iran. Support for broad sanctions is despicable, and using the suffering of Iranian protesters to oppose sanctions relief is appalling.

I wrote something a couple weeks ago about the destructive effects of broad sanctions and how they cause nothing but misery in the targeted countries. This is what I said then:

If Americans want to show solidarity with the long-suffering peoples of sanctioned countries, the first and best thing we can do is to get our government to stop standing on their necks.

The U.S. has been waging an economic war on the Iranian people for a long time, and it is time that our government put a stop to it. Broad sanction smother and strangle tens of millions of people by making their lives harder and by making them poorer. The very least that the U.S. could do is to cease making so many innocent people miserable for no good reason.