MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
President Trump is pondering military action in Iran. His administration has already been engaging in economic warfare. Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that strategy has been successful and took credit for setting up the conditions that collapsed Iran's economy and triggered protests. Iran's response to those protests left at least 7,000 people dead. NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Shortly after starting his second term in office, President Trump renewed his so-called maximum-pressure campaign against Iran, placing crippling sanctions on the country which severely impacted an already troubled economy.
ADNAN MAZAREI: Most recently, the inflation rate has been about 40-some percent. Food price inflation has been about 70%.
NORTHAM: Adnan Mazarei is with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. He says the U.S. wanted to bring Iran's oil sales down to zero and make sure it could not get access to the international banking system.
MAZAREI: Such that even if it does manage to sell oil, it cannot repatriate the oil revenues back to the country.
NORTHAM: In December, Iran's economy collapsed, triggering widespread protests throughout the country. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the maximum-pressure campaign worked.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SCOTT BESSENT: It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. There was a run on the bank. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.
NORTHAM: Bessent made similar comments to Fox's Maria Bartiromo at the World Economic Forum in Davos a couple of weeks earlier.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BESSENT: So this is economic statecraft - no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.
NORTHAM: In both settings, Bessent said nothing about the thousands killed by Iran's authoritarian regime during the protests. When NPR asked about the secretary's comments, a Treasury spokesperson said the Iranian regime chose to use its resources to, quote, "fund terrorist organizations and murder its own people." Gissou Nia is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a human rights lawyer who works on Iran.
GISSOU NIA: To sort of speak about this in such a cavalier way without even acknowledging the, you know, tens of thousands of Iranians that were massacred because of these events is what was really striking to me.
NORTHAM: Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a London-based think tank focused on Iran's economy. He says one idea behind the maximum-pressure campaign is that it could create such economic pain that ordinary people will rise up and challenge the regime. But Batmanghelidj says it's unlikely that the administration would have factored in the deaths of thousands of people.
ESFANDYAR BATMANGHELIDJ: One issue that exists within U.S. sanctions policy is that there's actually very little internal capacity in the Treasury Department and State Department to really evaluate the likely outcomes of U.S. economic coercion. Not only the likely economic impacts, but also the likely political and social impacts.
NORTHAM: Still, Batmanghelidj says the bloodshed in Iran should not come as a surprise to anyone.
BATMANGHELIDJ: Any U.S. administration would know from history that the Islamic Republic does crack down on protests violently.
NORTHAM: Edward Fishman, director of the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says every president in the 21st century has increasingly used economic pressure to try to advance U.S. foreign policy goals.
EDWARD FISHMAN: I think what's different about the current Trump administration, and certainly this is reflected in Secretary Bessent's remarks, is the degree to which they show very little concern about the humanitarian impact of sanctions.
NORTHAM: But Fishman says previous administrations tried to ensure that sanctions did not have undue impact on civilians.
FISHMAN: I'd say they weren't always successful at that, but at least in their aims and in their rhetoric they tried to separate the fact that sanctions were targeted at the regime in power as opposed to everyday people.
NORTHAM: Fishman says sanctions can be a great tool and better than military force because they don't risk escalation into a full-blown war. He says the problem is that the Trump administration has set out the most ambitious goal possible for sanctions, which is regime change. He says the track record of achieving that by economic pressure alone is incredibly poor.
Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
