The notion that sanctions work is an illusion

People shop at a local market in Tehran on April 28. Iran has been under extensive U.S.-led financial sanctions since 2012, with additional measures imposed since the start of the most recent U.S.–Iran confrontation earlier this year. | WANA / via REUTERS

By Jamal Ibrahim Haidar — Seyed Mohammad Karimi
Project Syndicate

Sep 25, 2026

BEIRUT/LOUISVILLE, Kentucky – When governments impose economic sanctions, like the “economic D-Day” U.S. President Donald Trump is now imposing on Iran, they portray them as a precision instrument — a scalpel rather than a sword — capable of pressuring ruling elites while sparing ordinary citizens.

That narrative has been used to justify some of the most sweeping acts of economic coercion in modern history. The only problem is that the central premise is untrue.

The case against sanctions is not merely strategic — that they rarely achieve their stated foreign-policy objectives — but also moral. Sanctions, particularly financial ones, do not fall equally on a population. They fall hardest on those least able to bear them: low-income, wage-dependent and publicly employed people. Thus, anyone who claims to care about the ethics of coercive statecraft must confront its distributional realities with the same rigor applied to questions of military tactics.

In a time of both misinformation and too much information,
quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.