Book Chapter — Using Law as a Weapon Against Nonproliferation and Terrorism: The U.S. Government’s Financial Lawfare Against Iran

In December 2022, Oxford University Press published a chapter by Orde titled, “Using Law as a Weapon Against Nonproliferation and Terrorism: The U.S. Government’s Financial Lawfare Against Iran.”  The chapter is included in a book titled Between Crime and War: Hybrid Legal Frameworks for Asymmetric Conflict.

Orde’s chapter describes, analyzes, and draws lessons from, a particular case study: the remarkably impactful pre-JCPOA U.S. financial lawfare against Iran.   With Iran’s nuclear weapons program now advancing closer than ever to a nuclear arsenal, the lessons the chapter derives from its case study should be rapidly applied to halting Iran’s program before it is too late.

The chapter demonstrates how pre-JCPOA U.S. financial lawfare provided the U.S. with considerable leverage over Iran, including by costing the Iranian economy tens of billions of dollars without causing disproportionate humanitarian harm.  The impact of the U.S. government’s pre-JCPOA financial lawfare on Iran disproved the dominant paradigm in the scholarly literature regarding sanctions, which derides unilateral sanctions as inevitably ineffective in a globalized economy.

The chapter also demonstrates that notwithstanding concerns that U.S. financial lawfare would undercut the primacy of the dollar, the percentage of relevant foreign transactions which involve the dollar has remained stable since the U.S. began waging financial lawfare over a decade ago.

The chapter suggests that to the extent pre-JCPOA U.S. economic lawfare fell short of achieving its ultimate objective of halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the result might well have been different if the lawfare had been even more vigorous and combined with a stronger U.S. negotiating stance and a more credible threat to halt Iran’s program by force if all other options failed.

There are numerous steps the U.S. could take today to both ramp up its economic lawfare against Iran and credibly threaten to halt Iran’s program militarily.  The chapter strongly bolsters the case for the effectiveness and wisdom of taking such steps now.