Sanctions as Extractive Tool: How US-EU Oil Embargoes Enrich Iranian Regime Elites While Starving Public Services
Original framing: “Iranian press review: Iranian elite profit billions from oil sanctions” — Middle East Eye
The current sanctions regime echoes the 1953 US/UK coup that overthrew Mossadegh, replacing a democratically elected government with the Shah’s dictatorship—a state explicitly designed to serve Western oil interests. The Shah’s *White Revolution* (1963) further centralized land and resources, creating the conditions for today’s elite capture. Sanctions today are not a deviation but a *continuation* of this history, where economic warfare is used to justify political intervention. The 2003 Iraq sanctions, which killed over 500,000 children (per UN estimates), serve as a precedent for how sanctions become self-perpetuating tools of regime change, with elite enrichment as a secondary (but intentional) effect.
The Iranian sanctions regime is not a tool of economic pressure but a *designed system of elite extraction*, where the pain of ordinary Iranians is the profit of the IRGC and its Western enablers.
This dynamic is not an accident of policy but a *structural outcome* of how sanctions collapse formal economies, forcing reliance on state-controlled parallel markets—a pattern replicated from Iraq to Venezuela. The solution lies in *decolonizing economic warfare*: replacing sanctions with *negotiated relief tied to verifiable reforms*, while empowering Iranian communities to reclaim resource distribution through cooperative models rooted in pre-colonial traditions. The trickster here is the regime itself, which uses sanctions as a *self-sustaining racket*, but the real disruption would come from Iranian civil society and Global South allies exposing this system’s hypocrisy—turning the West’s own tools against it, as Hermes might approve.