Not long after the ongoing protests in the Islamic Republic began, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times expressed sympathy for the demonstrators while arguing that the U.S. should loosen its sanctions on the country. After all, the commonplace argument goes, sanctions only increase the hardships of ordinary Iranians. Shay Khatiri explains that, to the contrary, economic pressure has weakened the regime, paving the way for the present unrest:
The sanctions’ negative effect on the material wellbeing of Iranians is collateral damage. . . . The half-Communist, half-kleptocratic, fully corrupt structure of the economy has much more to do with Iranians’ economic struggles than the sanctions.
Case in point: the economic wellbeing of Iranians deteriorated after the enactment of the Iran nuclear agreement, which eased some sanctions. In fact, the unemployment rate rose from 11.2 percent to 12.6 percent after the deal. Child labor and beggary kept peaking. In 2017, the last year of U.S. compliance with the agreement, Iran’s GDP grew by 2.8 percent, far behind the 8-percent inflation rate. The first major anti-regime, violent protests in Iran happened in 2017 and were triggered in response to high prices and corruption.
Meanwhile, sanctions have helped Iranians exercise more social freedoms. They bring alcohol from home to restaurants and cafés and drink in public. There are even instances of public dancing. Literally and metaphorically, observation of the hijab law is becoming looser and looser. Regime apologists outside of Iran would claim that this was because of the reformist administration of Hassan Rouhani, who served as president from 2013 to 2021. But in reality, the regime hasn’t had enough money to hire sufficient high-quality law enforcement agents. . . . The regime has been trying to compensate for its personnel shortage with increased brutality.
The impoverishment that sanctions have imposed on the regime is now an obstacle to cracking down on protests for the same reason.
Read more on Dispatch: https://thedispatch.com/article/sanctions-are-freeing-iran/