Austin Sarat ScheerPost
On September 8, the Trump Administration announced a new round of sanctions targeting aviation and companies that service some of Iran’s privately owned airlines. This followed last month’s declaration of economic warfare against that country.
Dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent labeled it “an unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its enablers.” He likened it to “D-Day,” which marked the invasion of Europe in World War II.
“Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone…”
Economic sanctions of the kind Bessent trumpeted involve the “withdrawal of customary trade and financial relations for foreign- and security-policy purposes. Sanctions may be comprehensive, prohibiting commercial activity with regard to an entire country…. or maybe targeted, blocking transactions by and with particular businesses, groups, or individuals.”
And the United States uses them more than any other country. Trump is not the first president to use them in Iran, but whoever uses them needs to acknowledge that, as Notre Dame’s George Lopez observes, “Even targeted measures can become collective punishment depending on the scope of economic deprivation that already exists in a society. “
In his announcement of new sanctions on Iran, Bessent was careful to say that the sanctions regime was targeting Iran’s “tyrannical regime,” a regime that he was right to label in that way. But what the administration is doing is inflicting great suffering on Iranian civilians who have no role in that regime or in the war that the president launched in February.
And make no mistake, the administration regards the imposition of its new sanctions as a wartime tactic.
While international law clearly forbids trying to kill civilians during wartime, there is no comparable protection for them against being victimized by economic sanctions. Since the imposition of such sanctions has become a crucial tool of modern warfare, it is time to extend the existing protection of civilians during armed conflict from being victimized and made to suffer with economic weapons.
“According to an uncontroversial principle of customary international humanitarian law…,” Professor Marco Sassòli writes, “parties to an armed conflict must distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives…. The first rule regarding attacks (by acts of violence) is that the intended target must be a military objective.”
“Once a military objective is the target…, “ he continues, “the attack may nevertheless become illegal if excessive collateral damage affecting civilians or civilian objects must be expected.”
We should keep this principle in mind as we think about what the president is doing in Iran. As Professors Nathanael Tilahun and Obiora Okafor put it, international humanitarian law “is animated by the dialectic between military necessity and the demands of humanity. In this sense, the law and discourse on economic sanctions could be said to be well behind IHL’s trajectory of humanizing war.”
It is clear that Trump’s economic warfare, including sanctions and the naval blockade, is causing great suffering for the Iranian people. NPR quotes one woman who said, “’My neighbor, his father has cancer and they can’t find the medicine he needs…A couple of the hospitals they visited couldn’t admit the old man for chemotherapy because of broken medical equipment they haven’t been able to replace since nothing is entering the country.’”
Whether that man dies because America has made it impossible for him to get the care he needs or because of a bomb dropped on his home makes little moral difference. Either way, he would/will be a casualty of a war in which he is a non-combatant.
And he would not be alone.
Last year, the Center for Economic and Policy Research reported that “Broad economic sanctions, most of which are imposed by the U.S. government, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year — disproportionately children.” It said that the death toll was “about 564,000 annually over a decade. This is comparable to the annual deaths around the world from armed conflict.”
What is happening in Iran will surely add to that number.
Israeli policy in Gaza offers a compelling and disturbing illustration of what happens to civilians under a sanctions regime. And it is not a pretty picture
But deaths from economic warfare are often much less visible than when civilians are killed in violent conflict. Recall the bombing of a school in Iran that killed more than one hundred students.
It provoked international outrage.
For example, in April, over one hundred experts in international law published an open letter expressing their concern about “reported strikes on civilians and civilian objects such as political leaders who have no military role, oil and gas infrastructure….(and) water desalination plants. They added, “We are seriously concerned about strikes that have hit schools, health facilities, and homes.”
Or how about the swift condemnation that followed the president’s March 26 post on Truth Social saying, “If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island…which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
Would the death of children or others from malnutrition or inadequate health care resulting from economic warfare provoke similar outrage and condemnation?
It should.
Bessant may want Americans to believe that it is the Iranian regime that will bear the costs of Operation Economic Outcast and that any spillover to the civilian population is an unintended effect. However, as Harvard University Professor Stephen Marks observed more than twenty-five years ago, “’the amount of information available today on the devastating economic, social, and humanitarian impact of sanctions no longer permits [policymakers] to entertain the notion of ‘unintended effects.”‘
What was clear then should be even clearer today.
Marks cites a member of the United Nations Security Council who declared that “’it is disingenuous to talk of ‘unintended side effects’ when everybody knows that the sector most affected by sanctions, as presently applied, are precisely civilian populations. There is nothing surprising or unintended about it.’”
One gets a sense of the effects of the Trump Administration’s economic warfare from what a taxi driver in Tehran told the AP. “’The people won’t be able to continue living like this…We’re simply breathing, surviving, and trying to make it from one day to the next.’”
Administration officials like Secretary Bessant may be pleased to hear that, thinking it will spur an uprising in Iran. But the rest of us should not be.
It is another sign of the cruelty that has become the defining feature of American foreign and military policy.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.