How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare by Narges Bajoghli et al. Stanford University Press, 2024, 197 pp.
How Sanctions Work explores the history and effectiveness of economic sanctions against Iran. Authors Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi- Isfahani, and Ali Vaez offer their expertise as Middle East, economics, and international affairs scholars and professors from Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech. How Sanctions Work is a collaborative history and monograph that outlines the comprehensive economic sanctions imposed by the United States and partner nations with ultimately a negative assessment of their effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes in Iran. The book is also an argument against enduring economic warfare, as exemplified by the sanctions against Iran—one of the most sanctioned nations in the world—and the corresponding failure to achieve US policy outcomes in the region.
The book’s thesis is that the sanctions employed against Iran—from the economic blockades in the 1950s to the Islamic Revolution in 1979 through those imposed within the last several decades—all constitute a form of economic warfare that is failing to achieve desired objectives while disproportionately affecting the civilian populace. The authors support this thesis by comprehensively analyzing the sanctions by the United States government, numerous nations, and even individual American states. Such sanctions—which include bans on weapons, energy, technology, and luxury foods—sporadically interrupted the flow of medical and humanitarian supplies to Iran, depending on the presidential administration and the state of international affairs.
Against this backdrop of wide-ranging sanctions, the authors present the impacts on Iran through a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures. This includes economic and trade data spanning decades to show the scale of the sanctions and the relative impact on Iran’s economy and the Iranian population. Supplementing this approach, the authors utilize qualitative assessments through their analysis of social media and Persian-language media as well as oral history interviews of 80 Iranians living in Iran—including academics, business owners, political and social activists, and blue- and white-collar workers—to understand how everyday lives changed across the 55-year period.
Recent history demonstrates that as both the quantity and scale of the sanctions against Iran have increased, the Iranian government would employ increasingly harsh measures against its population while subverting international pressures and remaining influential on the international stage with proxy forces and global influence. The authors assert that sanctions “have not forced Iran to stagnate” but have instead “actually forced Iran to innovate, just not in ways that are amenable to the West” (7). They argue that these wide-ranging and enduring sanctions constitute an innocuous form of economic warfare that seems victimless but is in fact not only harmful to civilians but also ineffective as a whole. Identifying the actual effects of the sanctions, the authors observe that instead of suffocating Iran into submission, they “only encourage [the] nation to fight back” (149). Tacit to this conclusion is the argument that the United States must pursue different approaches in dealing with Iran while ending the indiscriminate and enduring sanctions.
This monograph provides a well-researched and cohesive approach that discounts the simplicity of sanctions and captures the real impacts on the Iranian population over time. Furthering this approach, the authors present how the Iranian government can subvert the sanctions and retain national power while increasing the suffering against the Iranian people. This makes a compelling case against economic warfare as countering desired policy objectives.
Published in 2024, the book is limited in perspective as it could not take into account the recent changes in the region relative to the Crisis in the Levant sparked by the attack on Israel by Hamas in October 2023 and the dynamic international relations including that between Iran and the United States. Yet despite this limitation, How Sanctions Work provides insightful context that validates the underlying argument that all forms of warfare have victims and that all policies require assessment, reframing, and adjustment to ensure desired outcomes over time.
How Sanctions Work is worth reading for military and civilian leaders and planners alike. The book is a short read with a clearly understandable chapter format and language. The data does not inundate the reader but instead flows logically to bolster key points. While its depiction of the lives of the Iranian people and their culture as well as its historical analysis of the economic sanctions taken against Iran inform all readers, the book also provides key insights particularly for military practitioners. Furthermore, the lessons learned in Iran of the consequences and limitations inherent to economic warfare apply beyond this region. By understanding this environment and these lessons, military and civilian strategists can better influence operational environments, assess policy effectiveness, and build viable options to optimize the utility of the instruments of national power to pursue US interests in the future.
Colonel Matthew Wunderlich, USAF