A more patient but steady sanctions policy on Iran would have been far more preferable to war.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States has tried both sanctions and strikes to impose its will on Iran. Recent months of fighting, tens of billions of dollars, countless strained alliances, and a global energy crisis make it clear that the return on investment from sanctions far exceeds that of armed coercion. Donald Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign yielded an apparent operational-level military success but a bitter strategic failure. 

Some believe the war has ended with the memorandum of understanding (MOU), but wars do not end with vague memoranda. They end with detailed treaties generally negotiated by professionals with the expertise to understand the second- and third-order effects of what they are signing. Israel, Iran, and even the Republican Party seem unlikely to go along with all the vague provisions. In the meantime, routine passage through the Strait of Hormuz will remain uninsurable.

Sanctions have often been considered a substitute for war—less risky and costly than force, but, others contend, also less effective. While wars can be decisive, sanctions rarely are. However, wars impose costs on both sides, whereas sanctions concentrate costs on the target, while the costs of a victory in war may exceed its value.

US and international sanctions on Iran have affected every aspect of Iranian civilian, military, and economic life to modify Iranian behavior toward its neighbors and the United States. Like many authoritarian governments, the clerical regime has shifted the costs of sanctions onto its civilian population while insulating critical state organs vital to regime survival. Although Iran has displayed considerable economic resilience, there is no doubt that US and European sanctions have caused near-mortal damage. Iran’s efforts to boost agricultural output contributed to a nationwide water shortage on the eve of the war that threatens to make Tehran uninhabitable.

But wrecking Iran’s economy and environment was not the objective of sanctions. The objective was first, non-proliferation, and second, degrading Iran’s capacity to wage war. For a brief moment, this seemed within reach.

In 2015, US and European sanctions got Iran to the bargaining table to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which took force in January 2016. The agreement promised to relieve some nuclear-weapons-related sanctions in tandem with verifiable Iranian steps to cease high-end uranium enrichment. This process had only just begun when the first Trump administration pulled out of the agreement in 2018 on the promise to deliver something better through the application of “maximum pressure” with even tougher sanctions that compounded the collateral damage on Iran’s suffering civilian population.

This new policy did not improve Iranian behavior. Iran’s installation of advanced centrifuges essential for weapons-grade fuel skyrocketed. The abrogation of JCPOA undermined Iranian moderates’ political credibility and empowered hardliners who considered the United States an existential threat to the Islamic Republic. The latter fear was in fact justified when the United States and Israel began the 2026 war by decapitating Iran’s clerical and military leadership.

With nothing to lose, given the threat of imminent assassination, Iran’s leaders escalated, closing the Strait of Hormuz, striking its neighbors, and imposing massive costs globally. The results have been widely reported: US Gulf state partners have lost large sums in oil revenues and, even with the strait apparently reopening, face huge costs and long timelines to repair their war-damaged energy infrastructure. These shocks have reverberated throughout global markets, making the United States the architect of the misfortunes afflicting dozens of countries without any direct connection to the events in the Gulf.

Militarily, the war has weakened the United States, which now faces a protracted shortage of several crucial munitions. It has discovered that big ships can close narrow seas, but cannot open them. Wars have also closed the Suez Canal, but a long way around from either entry remained. In contrast, Hormuz serves as a cork, with no alternative sea route. Convoying is prohibitively expensive and entails large ship losses, while just the threat of mines or shore fire costs little. This has enabled Iran to determine when the Strait will open and at what price.

Now, with a campaign that failed to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program by force; an emboldened Islamic Republic, whose hardliners have been vindicated in their claims that the US poses an existential threat; and a US administration bending to the political pressure of an unpopular war leading up to midterm elections, a deal improving on the JCPOA seems improbable. Presumably, Iran wants nuclear weapons more than ever. Even the memorandum of understanding is no deal, just a proof of discussions.

In On War, Carl von Clausewitz argued that evaluating a strategy requires comparing the available alternatives. If the other choices are more costly, less effective, or assume higher risk, then even a partially effective strategy may be best. The war in Iran has proved far more costly than the prior strategy of sanctions. Hormuz has yet to fully and sustainably reopen, and no one yet knows the ultimate price for what used to be free.

Sanctions did lasting damage to Iran’s economy, acting as economic chemotherapy by diminishing the lethality of the threat Tehran posed to the world. When combined with international diplomacy, it was sufficient to cajole Tehran into accepting JCPOA, which at least forestalled the development of a nuclear weapon.

Critics of JCPOA fumed that the agreement did not cover Iran’s support for proxies in the Middle East or its ballistic missile program. Still, war has neither mitigated those threats nor delivered a partial victory in the form of holding back Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or more. JCPOA was hardly a resounding success from Iran’s perspective, as it did little to alleviate the sanctions burden. With the latest talks in Switzerland, Iran seems poised to get the sanctions relief it has long sought, plus a huge slush fund nominally for rebuilding but easily diverted to nefarious purposes. However flawed, the JCPOA, which a comprehensive sanctions strategy delivered, will be superior to what is emerging from this war.

Many international issues are not fully solvable, such as the Islamic Republic’s innate hostility to the United States. Such issues require constant management at acceptable cost and risk. Sanctions, for a time, allowed the United States to constrain Iran’s malign activities at an acceptable cost. The main cost was political: the feeling of failure to solve a situation that could not be solved, only managed. Thus far, the war has produced no benefits, only steep costs to allies, neutral states, and American taxpayers, including several months of war, tens of billions of dollars for military operations, a depleted US arsenal, weakened forces in the Asia Pacific, and an energy crisis that could yet become an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. For US-Iran policy, sanctions far outperformed war as a tool of statecraft.

About the Authors: Anand Toprani and Sarah Paine

Anand Toprani is a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a professor of strategy and policy at the United States Naval War College. Before joining AEI, Dr. Toprani served as a historian with the US Department of State, an intelligence analyst at US Central Command, and a visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Dr. Toprani is the author of Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and Germany, 1914-1945 (2019).

Sarah C. M. Paine is professor emerita at the US Naval War College. She was previously the William S. Sims university professor of History and Grand Strategy and also held the position of Ernest J. King professor of Maritime History. She is the author of The Wars for Asia 1911–1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 

The authors are the co-editors of The Strategy of Sanctions: From Antiquity to the 21st Century (Michigan, 2026).

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