Thwarted ambitions
The efficacy of sanctions as a tool of coercion has often been criticized within the US establishment. In 1997, Robert Pape’s hallmark article, “Why Sanctions Do Not Work,” argued that even the most severe sanctions often fail to achieve their own objectives, running up against a nation’s capacity to adapt and protect elite ambitions. His findings, though influential among the political establishment in the US, have had little bearing on actual policy, and the use of sanctions as a coercive foreign policy tool has only increased. Responding to such developments, more recent research has focused on particular case studies, looking at sanctions’ impact on targeted countries.
How Sanctions Work fits squarely within this emerging research agenda, presenting one of the first in-depth studies of an especially important country case. The four authors, who are first- and second-generation Iranians based at top US academic and policy institutions, are interested in understanding how sanctions, especially those imposed since the Obama and Trump presidencies, have impacted Iran’s “society, politics, and economy.” Each of the book’s six empirical chapters cover different themes, including the history of sanctions against Iran, their economic or social impact in Iran, and the impact of sanctions in the rest of the world.
Taken as a whole, the book’s main argument is that sanctions have had a profoundly negative impact on Iran’s economy, society, and politics without accomplishing Western sanction objectives. Indeed, in critical ways, sanctions only further distanced Western policymakers from their goal of weakening the Iranian state, especially the Revolutionary Guards and businesses connected to the regime. The authors find that, in response to sanctions, the Iranian state “has become more militaristic.” Going further, they argue that “prolonged, comprehensive sanctions on Iran” have amounted to “a hardening of the political sphere. These trends have only accelerated since the imposition of maximum-pressure sanctions in 2018.”
According to the authors, all sections of society have been impoverished under sanctions, with the exception of the Revolutionary Guard and those businesses and individuals aligned with it—i.e. the very institutions and groups that the sanctions sought to target. Sectors like health and education are under massive pressure, while business owners with ties to the regime are profiting. Far from bringing down the state or weakening the regime, the authors argue, sanctions have worked to make civil society more dependent on the state. By securitizing and hardening Iran’s political culture, sanctions have also had the effect of individualizing and atomizing society, to some extent promoting what the authors call an “everyday life of resignation.”