Washington Just Bought Five More Years of Iranian Poverty and Called It Leverage

On Friday, Donald Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, locking in the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 through 2031. The White House frames it as pressure on "the regime." It is nothing of the sort. Sanctions regimes do not touch the men who run Iran's prisons, its Revolutionary Guard conglomerates, or its oil-smuggling networks — those actors adapt, profit, and entrench. What sanctions touch is the exchange rate ordinary people buy bread with.

The mechanism is not abstract. Cut a country's banks off from SWIFT, throttle its oil exports, and you don't starve a government — governments have foreign reserves, discount deals with China, and printing presses. You starve importers of medicine, manufacturers who need spare parts, and households buying rice. Iran's inflation rate has spent six of the last ten years above 30 percent, cresting past 44 percent in 2023. That is not the price of theocracy. That is the price Washington has attached to defying it, paid in the currency of ordinary Iranians' savings.

The bill's own advocates don't pretend otherwise. Coverage of the signing quotes Treasury boasting about "Operation Economic Outcast" — a program explicitly built to cut off revenue streams, not to discriminate between the IRGC's smuggling networks and a Tehran pharmacist's import license. Forty-five years of this policy, through hostage-crisis-era freezes, the JCPOA's brief thaw, and "maximum pressure" 1.0 and 2.0, has never removed a single Iranian government. It has produced, consistently and predictably, a population whose real wages collapse in step with each sanctions escalation, while the state that controls oil, gas, and a captive black-market currency exchange finds new intermediaries and keeps functioning.

This is also not a story that ends at Iran's border. The same law bundles in a fresh round of sanctions and tariff threats aimed at Russia and its energy buyers, explicitly built as leverage in the Ukraine negotiation. Sanctions have become Washington's default foreign-policy instrument precisely because they are cheap for the sanctioning state and devastating for populations with no vote in either capital. No US soldier dies enforcing an Iran sanctions act. No US taxpayer notices the line item. The cost lands entirely on people who never chose their government's nuclear program, its regional proxies, or its blasphemy laws — and who now, thanks to a signature in the Oval Office, are locked into another five years of it whether or not any actual diplomacy happens in the meantime.

Solidarity with Iranians resisting their own state's repression — and there is plenty to resist, from morality-police killings to the crushing of the 2022 uprising — has to be separable from cheering on a sanctions regime that immiserates the same people. The Islamic Republic's brutality and Washington's sanctions are not opposing forces; they're a pincer, and ordinary Iranians are what's caught between them. An antifascist politics that only tracks state violence when it wears a uniform its own government dislikes isn't internationalism. It's just picking a side in an inter-imperial argument and calling it solidarity.

Sources

The National: Trump signs Lindsey Graham Russia-Iran sanctions bill into law
Jerusalem Post: Trump signs Lindsey O. Graham sanctions act into law
World Bank / Wikipedia: Iran annual CPI inflation, 2015-2024