July 9, 2026 | The National Interest
Why Iran Sanctions Relief Wouldn’t Have Stopped Iran
As the United States and Iran trade blows again, it’s important to remember that sanctions relief would have only allowed the Islamic Republic to finance its war machine.
July 9, 2026 | The National Interest
Why Iran Sanctions Relief Wouldn’t Have Stopped Iran
As the United States and Iran trade blows again, it’s important to remember that sanctions relief would have only allowed the Islamic Republic to finance its war machine.
Excerpt
Déjà vu is a funny thing. Washington was on the verge of reliving a familiar chapter of its Iran policy before Tehran reminded it of where that road leads. The recently negotiated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Iran and the United States this June offered the Islamic Republic a meaningful economic opening predicated on a flawed but familiar assumption: that sanctions relief will moderate Iran and potentially “transform” the Middle East.
At least for now, that assumption is overshadowed by Iranian attacks on commercial shipping and US partners in the region and the US retaliation. President Donald Trump now believes the short-lived ceasefire to be “over.” As the Trump administration pivots, it remains an open question whether the United States is heading back to a policy of maximum pressure or seeking a new negotiating framework. But history should be the administration’s guide. Offering sanctions relief of any kind will both fail to moderate the regime and will only finance threats that America will have to address later.
To be clear, there is a world of difference between the surrounding strategic context, the characters who helped produce it, and the content of the fatally flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the more recent MoU aimed at opening the Strait of Hormuz. But the operating philosophy of pay-to-delay and pay-to-play remains the same.
After Aleppo, the Islamic Republic’s Shia foreign legion became beneficiaries of the regime’s largesse. In June 2016, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah publicly announced, “As long as Iran has money, we have money…the rockets, the food, the drink, the salaries, the expenses, the weapons.” US official estimates of Iranian financial support for Hezbollah were estimated at the time to be the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Janatan Sayeh is the Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Behnam Ben Taleblu is the senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC.