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Iranians organize their daily lives around the scarcities brought upon them by sanctions on basic goods, including life-saving medications.
It was September 2017, and I was back home in Iran. A few weeks earlier, I had received a phone call that my father had fallen critically ill. He had for a year successfully managed a rare, incurable neural disease. Soon, he was hospitalized after a series of extensive brain hemorrhages and, while in the ICU, would develop a pulmonary infection that would ultimately claim both of his lungs. Treatment was not out of the question, but he urgently needed drugs that were distributed by European and American companies.
Over the course of several days, my family would search in vain to secure his medication. Time and again, we were told that recently renewed American sanctions had made it impossible to procure many types of specialized drugs. Unrelenting, my mother reached out to friends, family, and strangers, hopeful someone could lend a helping hand—even if it meant pointing us to distributors on the black market. There were Iranian variants of the same drugs, but as my father’s doctors would politely inform us, “The Iranian alternatives will not give us the results that we need.”
After a second stroke, and a series of unsuccessful operations, my father died on October 23, 2017. Two years later, I cannot help but wonder: Would my father’s life have been spared if American sanctions had not made access to life-saving drugs impossible? It is entirely plausible that he could have survived, but I want to restrain myself here from speculating about the past. Rather, I offer this painful story because it is one that many Iranians are intimately familiar with.
Iranians organize their daily lives around the scarcities and strains brought upon them by Western-imposed sanctions—economically punitive measures that over the years have severely constrained access to various basic goods, including life-saving medications. Since 1979, the United States has levied periodic economic sanctions on Iran, as an alternative to military confrontation. Sanctions are a standard in the playbook of American foreign policy, a tool of applying maximum economic pressure in place of full-blown military action. As Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin put it recently at the Doha Forum, “the reason why we [the United States government] are using sanctions is because they are an important alternative for world military conflicts. And I believe it’s worked.”
But neither of these claims is factually true.
In the last two years alone, the stranglehold of sanctions has had a massive toll on the lives of ordinary Iranians. A direct result of the reemergence of crippling economic sanctions, as Ahmad Jalalpour notes in The Nation, is that the inflation rate for foodstuffs in Iran has skyrocketed in the last few years. Rent for housing units has similarly increased by 94 percent. In the years 2017–2018, nearly 30 percent of the total population of Iran was living in absolute poverty—living, that is, on approximately $1.08 a day. And this situation has deteriorated even further in the last year, as the Americans continue to ratchet up economic pressure on Iran. According to a report recently published by the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center, by the end of the current Iranian calendar year, which ends in March 2020, nearly 57 million Iranians will be living in poverty. And sanctions are an important contributing factor here, due to the rising rates of inflation, which daily wages are massively incommensurate with.
In this sense, the claim that economic sanctions are a peaceful alternative to military warfare is simply untrue. For one, the comparison is somewhat of a “category error”—military action and economic sanctions are categorically different kinds of interventions, and thus the comparison is ill-conceived to begin with. But even if we grant a claim like Mnuchin’s—namely, that sanctions are intended as the peaceful alternative to military confrontation—the suffering that both forms of action produce are similarly extensive. This observation was borne out in Iraq. In the 1990s, American experiments (carried out by the United Nations) with economic sanctions against Iraq resulted in a death toll of around 576,000 Iraqi children. This is a ghastly and staggering number, comparable in proportions only to the destruction and death that takes place during military incursions.
On the other hand, if the point of sanctions is merely to enforce international discipline and rule-following, then such economic pressure rarely “works.” According to a recent comprehensive survey, sanctions achieve their intended disciplinary results a mere 34 percent of the time—hundreds of thousands of lives can be destroyed for odds worse than a coin toss. In the case of Iran, for instance, every round of sanctions in the last two years has only bolstered the Iranian regime’s determination to stand up to the West. And similar effects can be observed in Venezuela, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea. What is unmistakable, then, is that targeted sanctions often grossly miss their targets, resulting instead in humanitarian crises that hurt innocent civilians.
In short, when politicians say sanctions are the most reliable means to achieving international peace, we shouldn’t believe them.
This raises a difficult question: If we know sanctions are not worth the human cost, how do we compel our lawmakers to stop relying on them? How do we ensure that our elected officials are alive to the brutal realities of life under sanctions? In my own case, what can I do to protect my family and friends from the hardships of everyday life under an aggressive regime of economic scarcity imposed by the United States?
In the short term, we have to demand that our lawmakers reassess the use of sanctions as a disciplinary instrument, and insist on legislative oversight and accountability. In the slightly longer term, we can hope to ensure such forms of accountability through exercising electoral influence. For instance, we can rally around politicians like Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), who have been vocal critics of indiscriminately using sanctions to punish errant states. As Omar noted in a recent op-ed, sanctions more often hurt, rather than help, people whose governments we want to hold accountable. Like Omar and Lee, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has in recent years demonstrated an occasional unwillingness to vote with the Democratic orthodoxy on sanctions. In fact, in 2017, Sanders singly opposed renewed sanctions against Iran, citing both practical and moral reasons behind his decision to do so. Along these lines, we can demand that future progressive candidates model their foreign-policy approach after the anti-sanction stances of these progressive lawmakers.
That said, the notion that sanctions promote peace is central to the thinking of mainstream American foreign policy, and thus a difficult one to challenge. But practical and moral appraisals of this idea suggest that such measures fail more often than they succeed, and that in the process they produce humanitarian crises that injure everyday, working-class people. The story of my family attests to the price that innocent citizens often pay under the pressures of economic sanctions. But it is also extremely dubious that sanctions serve the practical ends that they are supposed to. Addressing these failures, and ensuring that we don’t repeat them, requires that we propound a coherent leftist foreign policy that rejects the use of economic sanctions, emphasizing in their place the need for multilateral cooperation and dialogue.
