U.S. Sanctions on Iran Failed—So Why Do They Continue?
Last month, the United States convened a symposium in Prague with representatives from roughly 40 countries to coordinate “more robust” enforcement of six reimposed United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran. The measures, restored on September 27, 2025 following what Washington described as Iran’s “significant non-performance” of its nuclear commitments, will strengthen a long-existing sweeping sanctions regime aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile development, arms trade, and banking system. Taking their usual cues from the U.S. government, EU leaders responded by approving without any debate a new round of sanctions targeting Iranian government officials and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and moved toward formally designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
But it remains unclear what new sanctions are meant to achieve that decades of prior economic warfare have not already failed to deliver. The effectiveness of that sanctions regime depends entirely on how one defines “success”; there is a difference between their economic effects and their political outcomes.
“There is a consensus in the academic literature that politically, sanctions do not work,” said David Siegel, a political scientist who studies U.S. sanctions policy. “The economic devastation is not supposed to be the goal. Economic pressure is supposed to produce a political outcome.”
The “maximum pressure” campaign, originally designed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton during the first Trump administration, was intended, as NBC News reported at the time, “to squeeze [Iran’s] economy until its leadership was forced to curtail its aggression in the region and concede to U.S. demands to dismantle its nuclear program,” none of which has happened.
As John Mearsheimer has argued, even direct U.S. military action failed to deliver those results. After U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, President Donald Trump claimed the program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” But a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded the attack had set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. That assessment was dismissed by the administration, but no detailed public accounting of the damage to Iran’s enrichment facilities or uranium stockpiles has since been released. As Mearsheimer points out, “one would think that if everything had been destroyed, as the president claims, the tag team [Israel and the U.S.] would be advertising that fact and backing up its claims with at least some data.”
Rather, the Israel Firsters who demanded maximum pressure sanctions, and who now lobby for a U.S. bombing and regime change campaign in Iran, argue that Iran is more emboldened and aggressive than ever. “Iran’s recent round of ballistic missile tests underscores the determination of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to replenish its weapon stockpiles,” said Tyler Stapleton of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, citing continued missile development and alleged sourcing of materials from abroad. Another FDD senior fellow, Behnam Ben Taleblu, argued that Iran’s missile forces have become even more central to its security doctrine, writing that they were “the only element of its security architecture that proved effective” during last year’s fighting and that “the regime continues to invest in these systems.”
Those pro-Israel hawks admit that years of sanctions have failed to curtail Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions. What they have succeeded in doing, U.S. officials now acknowledge, is crippling the Iranian economy and forcing that country to rely upon what the U.S. government calls a “shadow fleet” for its exports.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly described the sanctions campaign as a deliberate effort to do so, outlining that plan publicly at the Economic Club of New York in March of last year, where he committed to “Making Iran Broke Again.” “I know a thing or two about currency devaluations,” Bessent said at the time, adding that this was precisely what the United States intended to do to Iran.
Bessent claimed the administration’s goal was to drive Iranian oil exports, then estimated at 1.5 to 1.6 million barrels per day, “back to the trickle they were when President Trump left office.” He acknowledged that Iran had already developed “a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet” to generate hard currency, and said U.S. policy was designed both to force reliance on that system and to target it.
Speaking again at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Bessent celebrated how that policy had “worked,” crediting U.S. sanctions with collapsing Iran’s economy, triggering bank failures, devaluing Iran’s currency, and causing protests. As Bessent explained to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, “In December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.”
“This,” says Bessent, “is why the people took to the streets.”
His admission raises the question of whether the sanctions regime is truly intended to change Iranian state behavior or if it is simply designed to manufacture an economic crisis that can be politically exploited by Israel and the U.S. government, who attempted to stage a color revolution in that country last month. To achieve that end, U.S. and Israeli involvement went beyond merely crashing Iran’s economy. An official Mossad account posting in Farsi urged Iranians to take to the streets, declaring, “we are with you in the field.” Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo echoed that message publicly. Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 14 correspondent Tamir Morag wrote that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons,” which he said was “the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.”
We have been told, by the same outlets and publishers who denied the Gaza genocide, that the Iranian government’s crackdown on those protests has killed tens of thousands of people in a mere two weeks, with Time magazine estimating the death toll at 30,000 people, with “the only parallel offered by online databases occur[ing] in the Holocaust.” Though, as Time was forced to admit, it has “been unable to independently verify” those numbers, and therefore there is little reason to believe them at all.
What is undeniable, however, is the effect that economic sanctions have had on Iran for decades, blocking that country’s access to the global banking system and depriving its population of life-essential medicines and goods. If sanctions neither dismantle Iran’s nuclear program nor curb its behavior in the region, yet reliably immiserate the population and generate unrest that foreign governments seek to weaponize, then the question is no longer whether sanctions “work,” but why Washington continues to pursue them—and how that policy serves our own interests rather than just Israel’s.
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