The Opening Shots
by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj

In 1939, two years into the Second Sino-Japanese war, the economist Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter wrote a prescient essay in Pacific Affairs, about the possible effects of international sanctions against Japan. If the imperial power were cut off from its general supply of raw materials, she argued, it would not simply capitulate, because “partial sanctions will not stop a nation prepared to make every sacrifice for what it looks upon as its national existence”. Schumpeter warned that sanctions would fuel Japanese militarism and lead to an expanded conflict, in a kind of vicious cycle. “Strong sanctions applied after a nation is deeply involved will, in all probability, lead to war,” she concluded. “Strong sanctions are simply another weapon of war.”

Eight years ago, during his first term, President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions that targeted every facet of the Iranian economy. The measures stymied the country’s growth, devalued the currency and spurred inflation. While Iran avoided outright economic collapse, its middle class was undermined, its society became more unequal, and its state more dysfunctional and corrupt.

In the face of rising precarity and poverty, Iranians mounted frequent and intense national protests, including in 2019, 2022 and 2025. Most of the protest waves began as small mobilisations by groups with specific economic grievances, then grew as people took to the streets to voice deeper anger with the Islamic Republic’s sclerotic and repressive political establishment.

In December last year, protests broke out after a sharp devaluation of the rial. Iranian security forces responded by killing thousands of protesters. In the aftermath, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, took credit for the catastrophe. “This is economic statecraft,” he told an audience at Davos. “No shots fired.” Bessent was repeating a favourite fiction of American policymakers: that sanctions are a nonviolent means of enacting pain on enemy countries, even when protesters are killed in the streets. Evidently the pain was not enough. Now the US and Israel have instigated a massive aerial campaign against Iran: at the time of writing, hundreds of airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 civilians, including more than 160 girls at a primary school in Minab.

A version of the maximum pressure sanctions were originally imposed by Obama, reimposed by Trump and sustained by Biden. Throughout this period, US civilian agencies like the Treasury Department and State Department were directed to continually ratchet up the pain on Iran; they began to view the country’s economy through the prism of targets and threats. Just as military planners use intelligence to prepare “target packages”, sanctions practitioners did the same to designate more than 1,000 Iranian individuals, companies and institutions (these were in addition to sanctions on whole sectors of the economy). So long as an economic activity could be linked to broad dangers defined by the President in executive orders, including proliferation or terrorism, entities could be sanctioned, often multiple times. In this process, critical institutions such as the central bank were redefined. In the view of US policymakers, the Central Bank of Iran is not merely enmeshed in a state that funds a nuclear programme, it is an agent of nuclear proliferation. It is not merely connected to financial flows that support terror, it is itself a terrorist entity.

Meanwhile, as Iranian policymakers scrambled to “resist” the sanctions onslaught, they were forced to cede authority to parts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and opaque business networks, which engaged in systematic sanctions evasion. Routine economic functions – such as producing and selling oil, importing industrial equipment and processing international financial transactions – became highly sensitive operations with a direct impact on national security. Once securitised, the workings of Iran’s economy began to seem more nefarious than they really were.

Iran’s economic resilience under sanctions seemed to validate the worst fears of American officials: that the Islamic Regime was funneling money towards activities that threatened US national security. But Iran’s military spending remained modest, especially relative to the size of the national economy. Tehran continued to dither on producing nuclear weapons. Seeking deterrence, it instead developed ballistic missiles and drones, and patronised proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Ultimately, these investments counted for little. US and Israeli forces have run rampant, revealing that the Islamic Regime never posed a significant threat. Iran looked far more menacing when viewed through the fog of economic war.

The harms associated with economic weapons, which mainly afflict ordinary people, have raised the moral question of whether the ends justify the means. But the true moral failure of the Iran sanctions is that the means have justified the ends.

Prolonged economic warfare made military conflict inevitable, by eroding the divisions between civilian and military parts of government, in both the sender and target countries. When diplomats and finance officials are conditioned to think like war planners, and when routine economic functions are recast as nefarious threats, the civilian parts of government can no longer act as a check against those calling for military escalation.

The shots had already been fired. They had been ringing out for eight years.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is the Founder and CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation. He teaches about the effects of sanctions at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Iran’s Fearless Intellectuals
by Naghmeh Sohrabi

Before the bombs fell, I had started an archive of debates taking place inside Iran in the aftermath of the January protests and the massacre that followed. It seemed to me that a cacophony of voices from outside the country was drowning out a surprising development from within. In intellectual circles – which include journalists, activists, scholars, artists, essayists, novelists, poets, and students – people were coming together not only to mourn but also to imagine what might be built from their grief and despair. The fact that these voices have gone silent since 28 February, when the US and Israel began “Operation Epic Fury,” makes remembering them even more urgent.

While the US has given several (often contradictory) rationales for its preemptive attack, its goal, stated or not, is clearly to pulverize Iran’s infrastructure, to turn it into what some suggest will be a failed state. Unable to stand.

But this war also stands to destroy ideas. In the weeks following the winter protests, the Western press presented Iranians as one of three things: protestors, mourners or dead bodies. But inside the country, Iranians demanded to be seen in another light: as writers and thinkers imagining a different future, one that might break from the tired binary of the Islamic Republic on one hand and the Pahlavi monarchy on the other.

On 8 February 2026, just a month after the protests had been crushed, Azad, an online platform that describes itself as “media specializing in dialogue”, livestreamed a much-storied 5-hour debate titled “Bloody Dey and the Future of Iran”.¹ Three men sat in a nondescript room, with a view of Tehran’s rooftops in the background; Hesam Salamat, Sajjad Fattahi and Milad Dokhanchi represent a secular republican, secular monarchic, and reform of the Islamic Republic viewpoint respectively. They at times annoyed, disagreed, and talked over and around each other. Nonetheless, they found ways to communicate. Azad, which has been around for several years, has devoted much of its post-protest programming to similarly lively debates. This one, despite its length, has so far garnered over half a million views.

On Telegram and Instagram, people were contemplating potential paths forward. Some made the case for Reza Pahlavi as the best alternative to the Islamic Republic. Others asked “what is a republic and what do republicans want?” In questioning the male-dominated frameworks within which many of these conversations were happening, the journalist and anthropologist Mahzad Elyassi wrote about “The dominant political imaginary and the delaying of the question of women.”

Meanwhile, within the traditional media, Shargh, a daily newspaper, has been publishing some of the most courageous reporting. In September 2022, Niloofar Hamedi was one of the first journalists to break the Mahsa Amini story; she was jailed for 17 months. This January, she wrote about the high bails set for those arrested during the protests – so high that many struggling families found them impossible to pay. Sounita Sarabpour covered the country’s miserable economic situation: describing, for instance, a once-bustling Tehran shopping mall that was now silent. The dead and their mourning families were even profiled on the newspaper’s front page.

It’s not that the conditions of repression had changed. Nor had the Islamic Republic tried to reconcile with the people it had so deeply traumatized. Rather, it seemed as if Iranians had become fearless. On her personal Instagram, Shahrzad Hemati, Shargh’s first female editor-in-chief, wrote an astonishingly brave and heartfelt post that took both the Islamic Republic and the pro-monarchy, pro-war sides to task:

“We’ve been censored for years. They said there has to be a war because you who are here don’t totally understand, and are sellouts, and war will bring democracy. We stayed silent…About the only movement [Women Life Freedom] that has to some degree been able to break the dictatorship at its edges, they said: its time has passed. Again we stayed silent. On the other side, the story was different. They said terrorists killed [people in January]. We watched the videos and stayed silent…We went to Behesht-e Zahra cemetery and beat our chests and struck our heads and faces but said nothing. Someone constantly came behind us saying: “Hush! Do not speak. Now is not the time.”

Perhaps most remarkable have been Iranian university students. On 16 February, the Professional Sociology Association of Tehran University, a student organisation, announced the return of discussion groups: “We need to be next to each other and mourn the dark days that we have experienced. We need to be next to each other to have a dialogue about decisive and heartbreaking questions that the events of January of 2026 have put in front of us. The agenda is clear: We will mourn but we will not retreat.” And they did just that. A reading group on “Women Studies” was reconstituted. Another on “Radical Republicanism” was free and open to all. In-person debates featuring a diverse set of oppositional voices were planned.

On 24 February, the students hosted Mohammad Maljoo, a left-leaning economist who as recently as November 2025 had been detained and questioned about his work, as part of a larger roundup of progressive academics. He had been writing about how to turn the aftermath of the January massacre into “the beginning of a new era,” while not allowing “anger to turn them into a mirror of the very logic of repression.” Alongside him was the sociologist Mohammad Fazeli, a former advisor to President Pezeshkian, who had been expelled from his university post years earlier for expressing critical views. The topic was “a dialogue about Iran’s future.” These two men, with their differing views – one calling for a complete break with the Islamic Republic and the other for reform – debated for over two hours.

The next meeting of the Association was scheduled for Monday, 2 March, 5 pm Tehran time. That meeting, which was to take on communism and Pahlavism, never happened. On Saturday morning, the start of the work week, the attacks began and Iran returned to a total internet and communications blackout. The students were nonetheless able to post one last message on their Telegram channel: “Our association’s get togethers and circles will not be taking place for the time being. We hope for an end to these dark days and we hope that we can get together again.”

Naghmeh Sohrabi teaches history at Brandeis University and is the author of Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe.

Vichy Europe
by Dominik Leusder

Just over a month has passed since the United States threatened to annex the sovereign territory of a European Union member state. L’affaire Groenland had galvanised the European establishment into a rare demonstration of power; its concerted decision to raise the cost of escalation ultimately compelled Trump to relent. Yet the renewed impetus behind Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ has since largely dissipated. The right wing of Atlanticism seems to have prevailed against its opposition, led by lame duck Emmanuel Macron, the defiant but embattled Pedro Sánchez and the technocratic grey eminence Mario Draghi.

NATO head Mark Rutte, who ran the Netherlands as a childless schoolmaster before becoming chief imperial emissary in Europe, instantly torpedoed any ideas of military independence. “If anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union […] can defend itself without the US: keep on dreaming,” he said shortly after meeting his “daddy” Trump in Davos. “You can’t. We can’t. We need each other.” In the weeks that followed, ‘Merzoni’ – a new alliance between Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni – stymied any attempt to finally drag the cart of European politics out of the mud. This Italo-German incarnation of the ancien régimeshot down proposals to issue more joint debt, deepen political integration and wean the continent off its dependence on US tech services. The brief neo-Gaullist moment passed.

In view of the renewed Israeli-American violence, this failure to cut the umbilical cord might well prove costly. A drawn-out conflict with Iran and an attendant energy crisis would further erode Europe’s ailing industrial base and empower the far right. In fact, no country is more vulnerable than Germany. And yet Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, his power-grabbing Christian Democratic colleague who leads the European Commission, have arguably been the most vocal in supporting war.

Conventional accounts of elite failure do not quite account for tenacity of European supplicancy at a moment when both American power and the benefits of submitting to it are waning. Why does the old regime persist?

Part of the explanation is sociological. Most European leaders are part of a Cold War generational cohort that was irreversibly socialised into the idea of American primacy. This view of the world is both Panglossian (empire is inherently more stable than multipolar alternatives) and civilisational (Iranian bombs on civilians are barbarous, while ‘ours’ are just the collateral damage of liberation). A boomer and conservative country bumpkin like Merz struggles to imagine a geopolitical order in which America doesn’t call the shots – even when the shots are aimed at him. In their self-terminating Atlanticism, Merzoni et al resemble an ant mill: separated from their colony and having lost their pheromone trail, they follow each other in a continuously rotating circle until they perish from exhaustion.

Ignorance, too, is no doubt part of the equation. European elites accept and internalise their vassalage because they overstate their weakness while overlooking the real leverage that mutual dependency affords them. It is a two-way street, and the demand side is often at an advantage. Yes, in the absence of Russian pipeline gas, Europe has become dependent on expensive imports from the US. But as shale production approaches a plateau and the sector becomes increasingly reliant on exports to Europe, Trump is unlikely to risk unemployment in the politically crucial oil patch and the fracking counties of swing-state Pennsylvania. Besides, Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels should further caution it against supporting a war in the region that hosts the largest alternative natural gas reserves.

Nor is American financial hegemony all it is made out to be. Europe has jurisdictional control over key parts of the global payment infrastructure, and a substantial share of foreign-held US government bonds are in custodial holdings in Luxembourg, Belgium and the UK. These could be frozen, as Russia’s assets were in 2022. The euro is already a reserve currency; issuing joint euro-denominated debt at scale is the one realistic route to supplanting the dollar globally. Eurobonds would also unlock government spending power for large-scale industrial policy or defence programmes, not to mention a decarbonisation effort that could relieve dire energy dependencies. And then there are Europe’s critical chokepoints in high-tech manufacturing supply chains: from optical equipment to telecommunications to the lithography machines required for the chips powering the data-centre boom on which the US economy currently relies.

It is true that replacing US military capabilities in Europe would take time. But the urgency may not be so great. When it comes to Russia, the Atlanticists have tended to indulge in threat inflation. The war against Ukraine has been a miserable failure and the Russian state is in its financial death throes. If anything, the current conflagration in the Gulf, through its effect on oil and gas prices, could be a fiscal shot in Putin’s arm. The other front of threat inflation is, of course, China. Following Merz’s recent visit to Beijing, CCP officials have made it clear that a desperately needed ‘reset’ of bilateral trade relations would require one thing above all: ditching the Americans.

The case for a political uncoupling from the US makes itself. But becoming alive to these realities might not be enough to wrest the EU from their ‘self-imposed immaturity’. Much like in the UK, sections of the European political elite are concerned primarily with maintaining their own proximity to imperial power. In the spirit of Vichy, many believe that collaborationism is the only way to guarantee some autonomy going forward. They too underestimate the nihilism of the new order they are hastening in the process. So far, the only rewards for obedience have been humiliation and coercion.

Reverting course on Atlanticism requires more than courage. For many European leaders, it will entail political suicide. “Every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts” Aimé Césaire argued in his “universal law”. “It is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs”.

Dominik A. Leusder is an economist and writer based in London.

A Neoconservative Dream
by David Klion

In 2007, during a 45-minute private meeting with George W. Bush and Karl Rove, the neoconservative writer and editor Norman Podhoretz made the case for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bush and Rove nodded along, made no firm commitments, and left the White House two years later without having taken his advice.

Podhoretz, one of the foundational figures of neoconservatism, died this past December at 95. He had been fulminating against Iran’s Revolutionary Islamic regime in the pages of his influential magazine, Commentary, more or less constantly since Ayatollah Khomeini became Supreme Leader in 1979. He didn’t quite live to see Donald Trump, whom he unabashedly admired, bring the neocon dream of a joint US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic to fruition. But he must have known that it was a live possibility, not least because the movement he championed for much of his life remained unexpectedly relevant in American politics at the end of it.

Neoconservatism took form in the 1960s. It started out as a reaction by a group of predominantly Jewish liberal intellectuals against the expanding Great Society welfare state and the perceived cultural depravities of the New Left. But by the time of the September 11 attacks, the original neocons and their disciples had become better known for advocating a muscular foreign policy that would closely align the US and Israel. The Bush administration had extensive formal and informal ties with many of them. David Frum helped craft the president’s 2002 State of the Union address in which he linked Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in an “Axis of Evil”. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith all played key roles in launching the invasion of Iraq. Bush even awarded Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the two neocon godfathers, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Since US public opinion turned against the war in 2005, conventional wisdom has been that neoconservatism was universally discredited; its imperial hubris cost thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. When Trump first campaigned for the presidency in 2016, he denounced the Iraq War (which he had supported at the time) and ran against the legacies of Bush and neocon favourite John McCain. Trump’s impertinence alienated many prominent neocons, including Bill Kristol (Irving’s son), Robert Kagan and Max Boot.

After Trump’s re-election in 2024, The New York Times reported that some likely members of his foreign policy team, notably Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, had repudiated neoconservatism in favor of “America First” nationalism. They were apparently going to pursue a less interventionist foreign policy, one that would prioritize domestic welfare over global hegemony. According to the Times, neocons had become totally marginalized in Washington.

Barely a year later, the US and Israel are pursuing the war generations of neocons have fantasized about. At Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint command, they have killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and many of the regime’s most powerful figures, rained missiles upon Tehran and other cities, murdered over a thousand civilians, sacrificed American servicemembers, imperiled the security of US allies throughout the Persian Gulf – all while urging Iranians to rise up against their rulers. Yet the neocon reaction has not been universally rapturous. By now, the movement has split into two camps, with diametrically opposed views on Trump’s aggression.

One faction of neocons – the so-called Never Trumpers – has consistently opposed the president since he first came to power. They have expressed skepticism of his latest war. “Trump hasn’t gone to Congress for authorization to attack Iran,” Bill Kristol opined online on the eve of Operation Epic Fury. “He hasn’t explained the necessity or urgency of preemptive action by us. I’d very much like to see regime change in Iran, but Trump hasn’t explained how we intend to help achieve that goal. Congress: Just say No.”

Beyond his general distrust of Trump, Kristol intends to draw a contrast with the lead up to the Iraq War, which he championed. The Bush administration famously spent the better part of a year seeking support from both parties in Congress, a coalition of allies, mainstream media elites, the United Nations and, most significantly, the American public, 73 percent of which initially supported overthrowing Saddam Hussein. No such support exists for Trump’s war. A Reuters poll, taken days into the campaign, showed a mere 27 percent of Americans in favor.

The other, more successful faction is led by Bari Weiss, who came to public attention over two decades ago, as an undergraduate campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia. She subsequently gained notoriety as a staunch Zionist and antiwoke firebrand in US media, initially at The New York Times and more recently at her website The Free Press and as editor-in-chief of CBS News, which she has turned into a propaganda outlet for Israel and the Trump administration. On her watch, the storied news network has relentlessly pushed for regime change in Iran. Star experts include diaspora dissident Masih Alinejad, British neocon Douglas Murray, Israeli diplomat Michael Oren and hawkish Senator Tom Cotton.

Weiss was installed in her current role by the ultrawealthy Ellison family, which has provided considerable financial support to the Israel Defense Forces and to Netanyahu. At the time of writing, the Trump administration looks set to approve the merger of the Ellison-owned Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros-Discovery. If that happens, Weiss is expected to play a decisive role at CNN, whose coverage is already leaning pro-war and pro-Israel; it even features some of the same voices as CBS. No neocon has ever wielded remotely as much direct influence over mainstream media as Weiss does now.

Kristol and Weiss represent the two divergent trajectories of neoconservatism. One wing is engaged in a rearguard defense of the unipolar US-led “Free World”; in this regard, it aligns closely with the Democratic Party leadership, who are nostalgic for the so-called rules-based liberal international order. The other is all in on populism, unilateralism, military adventurism and the blatant prioritization of Israeli interests. Ominously for the whole world, free or otherwise, the latter is ascendant.

David Klion is a columnist for The Nation and a contributing editor at Jewish Currents.

1. Dey is December/January in the Iranian calendar.