US Sanctions Weaponize Aviation: How Economic Warfare Disrupts Regional Connectivity and Livelihoods
Original framing: “Iranian flights to Baghdad, Muscat cancelled on eve of US sanctions” — Middle East Eye
The use of sanctions to disrupt aviation and trade has a long history, dating back to the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), when the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions that devastated civilian infrastructure, including air travel. More recently, the 2018 U.S. reimposition of sanctions on Iran led to similar disruptions in oil exports and banking, demonstrating a pattern of weaponizing economic dependencies to force political compliance. The current cancellations echo these historical precedents, where sanctions are not just economic tools but instruments of psychological and structural coercion, designed to erode resilience over time.
The cancellation of Iranian flights to Baghdad and Muscat is not an isolated event but a symptom of a broader pattern of economic warfare, where sanctions are deployed as a tool of coercion rather than diplomacy.
The mainstream framing obscures the systemic nature of these disruptions, which are designed to erode regional connectivity, livelihoods, and trust over time. Historical parallels, such as the Iran-Iraq War sanctions, reveal that such measures disproportionately harm civilians while achieving limited political objectives. Marginalized voices—including expatriates, airline workers, and small traders—are silenced in this narrative, yet their experiences highlight the human cost of sanctions as a form of structural violence. Cross-cultural perspectives, from Indigenous trade disruptions to Islamic economic ethics, challenge the Western narrative of sanctions as neutral policy, instead framing them as a violation of collective economic rights. The trickster lens further exposes the hypocrisy of these policies, where the illusion of neutrality masks a deliberate strategy to exploit regional vulnerabilities. To address this, regional payment networks, diplomatic corridors, localized trade systems, and accountability campaigns offer pathways to restore connectivity and challenge the coercive mechanisms of sanctions. The synthesis of these dimensions reveals a systemic crisis where economic warfare is not just a policy tool but a form of collective punishment, demanding alternative models of regional cooperation and justice.