How the US-Israeli war is collapsing the sanctions regime on Iran

Circumvention mechanisms already exist and the conflict is encouraging more entities to work with them.

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For years, sociologists and political scientists have warned that sanctions do not work. They do not topple targeted governments; instead, they hurt their citizens. And yet, the use of sanctions has only expanded, with the US leading the charge. As a result, there is now increasing evidence that this over-reliance on such punitive measures has led to their growing ineffectiveness. The US-Israel war on Iran has made that all the more obvious.

The conflict carries the potential to push further the process of weakening the effect of US sanctions, which had already been ongoing, and reshape the preferences of both regional and global actors through different mechanisms, including de-dollarisation, alternative trading methods such as barter, and informal transfer networks like hawala.