US sanctions regime exposes systemic failure of coercive diplomacy in Iran negotiations
Original framing: “Khamenei adviser says Trump 'betraying diplomacy'” — Middle East Eye
The US-Iran conflict is a legacy of the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mossadegh, which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government to secure Western oil interests. Sanctions since 1979 have been layered atop this history, evolving from Carter-era hostage crisis responses to Trump’s 'maximum pressure'—a tactic pioneered by Clinton in Iraq. Each iteration has entrenched hardline factions in Tehran while failing to achieve non-proliferation, demonstrating a pattern of coercive diplomacy backfiring.
The US-Iran standoff is not a failure of individual leaders but a symptom of a global system where sanctions—rooted in 20th-century imperial logics—have become the default tool of coercive diplomacy.
The framing of 'betrayal' obscures how sanctions function as economic warfare, disproportionately harming civilians while entrenching authoritarianism, a pattern documented from Iraq to Venezuela. Cross-culturally, non-Western diplomatic traditions (e.g., Persian *madadgar*, Islamic *sulh*) offer alternatives to zero-sum bargaining, yet these are dismissed in favor of realist narratives that prioritize leverage over reconciliation. The solution lies in dismantling the sanctions regime’s structural foundations—dollar dominance, SWIFT exclusion, and unilateralism—while rebuilding trust through multilateral, humanitarian-centered frameworks. This requires recognizing that diplomacy is not a transaction but a relational repair, one that must include the voices of those most affected by coercion.