Iran’s Despair Is U.S. Policy

Western sanctions helped kill Iranians’ earlier hopes of their country’s transformation from within.

By Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

February 4, 2026

https://archive.ph/7BoV7#selection-3469.0-3487.82

Something unexpected has begun to surface in the familiar rhythm of Iranian protests: Alongside the chants for freedom and an end to clerical rule, there is now a growing call for U.S. military intervention. What only a year ago would have been considered by many as treason can now openly be heard not only among exiled opposition figures but also from inside the country itself. Whether this sentiment represents a desperate minority, a growing plurality, or merely the loudest echo of despair is difficult to measure. But its very emergence marks a profound shift, suggesting that for some Iranians, desperation now runs so deep that the fear of foreign bombs is being eclipsed by the hopelessness of life in the Islamic Republic.

Perhaps, at first glance, this isn’t surprising. When thousands of people are killed in the span of three days, while the state pulls the plug on the internet and seals the country off from the world’s gaze, calls for outside military intervention may be the natural response to a system that both has grown ever more ruthless and is the root of the Iranian people’s misery.

But if desperation is the obvious answer, it only sharpens the harder question: How, and by whom, were Iranians pushed to a point where they began to look with envy at the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—the prime examples of the disastrous track record of U.S. military interventions?

Clearly, the Iranian theocracy bears primary responsibility for the despair. Even limited demands for reform have been treated as existential threats. The regime has systematically narrowed the space for incremental change, criminalized dissent, and hollowed out the economy through corruption, patronage, and chronic mismanagement.

Yet, while the clerical government is the main culprit, this depth of despair was not produced by it alone. Exiled opposition groups and Western governments have also pursued strategies with the explicit intent to foreclose alternative paths to change and push Iran’s internal political and economic conditions toward collapse. Their pressure campaign helped pauperize the country’s traditional engine of peaceful change: the middle class, particularly middle-class women. In doing so, they have—hand in hand with the most repressive elements of the theocracy—helped transform pressure into paralysis, sabotaging possibilities for peaceful change while betting on rupture instead.

For more than two decades, Iranians have sought—repeatedly and at significant personal risk—to transform the system from within. They turned out in large numbers at the ballot box, organized peacefully, elevated reformist candidates, and mobilized in the streets when those efforts were thwarted. Yet this reform project has failed to register meaningful gains for most Iranians, especially the younger generation. The economy is weaker, political space has contracted, and the atmosphere today is more restrictive than it was under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency. By nearly every measure that matters to daily life, Iran has moved backward rather than forward.

Thus, when the Mahsa Amini protests erupted in 2022, they carried no language of reform. The demand was regime change, and the imagined path to it was revolution. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement did achieve a profound cultural shift, effectively forcing the state to scale back enforcement of the mandatory hijab. But it fell short of regime change, leaving many of its supporters disillusioned.

By 2026, though the protests initially focused on economic grievances, a segment of the population immediately demanded regime change—not through revolution but rather through foreign military intervention. The Islamic Republic is too entrenched to be removed by the Iranian people alone, whether through reform or revolution, the argument went. It can only be removed through the intervention of the United States or Israel.

Consequently, an option that would have been unthinkable only months earlier is now presented by its advocates as the sole remaining path to change. An advisor to the son of the former Shah—the exiled would-be prince who now openly calls for U.S. military intervention, despite years of professed opposition to war with Iran—has written confidently, and approvingly, that military action under Donald Trump is now “inevitable.”

This point was not reached by accident. Though the hard-liners always were intent on stymying reform, the question was never whether they would allow it but whether society would grow so strong that the hard-liners would have no choice but to acquiesce to it—just as they acceded to the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Here, U.S. sanctions played a key role in helping the hard-liners.

While Tehran’s mismanagement and incompetence created a corrupt and inherently unhealthy economic system, U.S. sanctions were deliberately designed to crush that economy and push the population into a state of utter despair. When Trump imposed sweeping sanctions under his “maximum pressure” campaign, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told BBC Persian that if the Iranians “want[ed] their people to eat,” they would have to heed U.S. demands. Trump’s current treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, publicly credited Iran’s protest movements to the effects of U.S. sanctions, citing economic collapse, bank failures, currency shortages, and import disruptions as evidence that pressure was “working”—and describing the resulting unrest as a “very positive” development.

For years, a false debate has persisted over whether sanctions or domestic mismanagement bears primary responsibility for Iran’s economic crisis. The latest research places the weight of that responsibility squarely on sanctions, showing that absent their impact, Iran’s middle class would have expanded by an estimated 17 percent. But the debate misses the deeper point. The intent of the sanctions was to drive the economy into the ground, decimate the Iranian middle class (between 2011 and 2019, 9 million middle-class Iranians were pushed into poverty), and generate the kind of mass desperation that makes rupture—rather than reform, elections, or gradual change—appear to be the only remaining option.

Iranian reformists long understood that without sanctions relief, meaningful reform was impossible and the economy unsalvageable. And without an agreement with Washington on the nuclear issue, sanctions relief was unattainable. This recognition drove President Hassan Rouhani’s heavy political investment in the JCPOA. Against considerable odds, the agreement was reached, and during the two years it remained in force, Iran’s economy grew by roughly 6 to 7 percent annually. That opening was short-lived. When Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, he removed the single condition most essential for reform to take hold: sustained economic growth and a strengthened middle class capable of exerting pressure on the state. In the eyes of many Iranians, the entire reform project was delegitimized by this failed investment in a deal with the United States—and the weak response of the Rouhani government once the state unleashed new waves of repression against the population.

Had the United States remained in the JCPOA, Iran’s economy would likely have continued to grow, expanding the middle class that has historically served as the engine of political change. A larger and more confident middle class would have strengthened civil society and enabled sustained pressure on the state from a position of leverage—rather than demand revolution or military intervention born of desperation.

Iranians have been trapped between a repressive theocracy and external actors whose policies were deliberately designed to create despondency. The irony is stark: The same voices who helped close off avenues for peaceful dismantlement of the theocracy now present themselves as saviors, offering foreign military intervention as the only path to deliverance—an offer that would have found no buyers had the population not been driven to despair in the first place.