The Spreadsheet

The Treasury Secretary told Congress he engineered a dollar shortage in Iran to trigger protests. The institution controlling the nuclear program gained market share. Six million patients lost access to treatment.

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“What we have done at Treasury is created a dollar shortage in the country.”

That is Scott Bessent, the United States Secretary of the Treasury, telling Congress and the World Economic Forum in early 2026 how America’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran operates. Not: we imposed sanctions. Not: we restricted oil exports. We created a dollar shortage. The grand culmination, he said, came in December, when “one of the largest banks in Iran went under, the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded.”

He added: “We have seen the Iranian leadership wiring money out of the country like crazy. So the rats are leaving the ship.”

This is not a leak. The Treasury Secretary told Congress, on the record, that his department engineered the economic collapse of a country of eighty-nine million people in order to produce civilian unrest. He described the currency freefall as evidence of success. He used a metaphor — rats leaving a ship — that acknowledges the ship is sinking while expressing satisfaction that it is.

The question is not whether the strategy is effective. The question is what it is.

What the dollar shortage looks like

The rial trades at 1,750,000 to the dollar — the lowest value in the currency’s history. In January 2025, it was approximately 700,000. The currency has lost sixty percent of its value in twelve months. The FAO reports that forty-one percent of Iranians suffer from moderate or severe food insecurity. Thirty-six million people cannot afford a healthy diet. Food prices have risen seventy-two percent year on year. Iran’s parliamentary research center found that average daily caloric intake fell below 2,100 calories — the threshold for extreme poverty.

Then the war started. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. The rial, already in freefall from the sanctions architecture Bessent described, dropped to its historic low. The civilian population now absorbs the food crisis and the bombing simultaneously — different mechanisms, different legal frameworks, different levels of visibility.

The bombs are visible. The rial’s collapse leaves a spreadsheet.

The humanitarian exemption

Pharmaceuticals and medical equipment are formally exempt from US sanctions on Iran. The Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains General License 8A, which authorizes humanitarian trade transactions. The exemption exists on paper.

It is inoperative.

The sanctions on Iranian banks are comprehensive enough that international banks will not process any Iranian transaction — humanitarian or not — because the risk of triggering secondary sanctions exceeds the incentive to process a legal humanitarian shipment. The Lancet documented what this produces: price spikes of up to three hundred percent for antiepileptic drugs. Thirteen of twenty-six essential non-communicable disease medicines with reduced market availability. More than six million patients with cancer, epilepsy, thalassemia, hemophilia, and multiple sclerosis foregoing high-quality treatment. The UN snapback sanctions reimposed in September 2025 compounded the effect — no mechanism was mandated to verify that humanitarian exemptions were functioning, no panel assessed access to medicines or health outcomes.

Farzanegan, Gibson, and Moradi-Lakeh, writing in Al Jazeera, named the structural mechanism: overcompliance — “one of the most insidious and least accountable aspects of modern sanctions regimes, quietly cutting off access to life-saving care while allowing policymakers to deny responsibility.”

The humanitarian exemption constrains a category — “sanctions on medicines” — that does not exist. What exists is sanctions on the financial system through which medicines are purchased. The exemption protects the named category. The banking blockade destroys the operational pathway. The government claims, simultaneously, that medicines are not sanctioned and that the financial architecture through which medicines reach patients has been deliberately collapsed. Both statements are true. Together they describe a system in which the legal protection and the practical harm coexist without contradiction, because they operate on different layers of the same architecture.

Where the pressure lands

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls between forty-five and fifty percent of Iran’s economic activity — oil exports, telecommunications, agriculture, banking, real estate, construction. When Western sanctions drive foreign firms from the Iranian market, the IRGC fills the vacuum. When the formal banking system is blockaded, the IRGC uses informal trade routes, cryptocurrency networks, and shadow finance. Sanctions have, paradoxically, entrenched the economic system they were meant to weaken.

The IRGC controls Iran’s nuclear program. The sanctions are designed to pressure the institution that controls Iran’s nuclear program. That institution is the one best positioned to operate under sanctions.

The civilian population absorbs the economic damage. The IRGC absorbs market share.

The December 2025 protests — over two hundred cities, all thirty-one provinces, 7,007 confirmed dead — demanded economic relief and political reform. They did not produce a change in Iran’s nuclear posture. They could not. The institution controlling that posture is constitutionally, operationally, and economically insulated from civilian political pressure. Article 110 gives the Supreme Leader the nuclear program. Article 113 gives the president the economy. The sanctions hit the economy. The nuclear program continues.

Bessent’s stated mechanism — dollar shortage, currency freefall, protests, political change on the nuclear question — requires a bridge between these two governments. The Islamic Republic’s constitution was designed to prevent that bridge. The protests cross the street. The nuclear program is behind a wall the protests cannot reach. The dollar shortage floods the street. It does not reach the wall.

The counterexample

This is not an argument against all economic coercion. South Africa defines what makes it legitimate.

International sanctions against apartheid South Africa targeted a specific political economy. The white business class controlled both the economic engine and the political system. The mechanism was coherent: economic pressure on the empowered population, political pressure within the empowered system, policy change. The population experiencing the coercion was the population with access to the political lever that could relieve it.

The ANC endorsed the sanctions — despite the disproportionate harm to Black South Africans, who bore the heaviest economic cost while possessing the least political agency under apartheid. They endorsed the mechanism because it could work, and because the endorsement was theirs to give. Mandela, asked whether sanctions helped end apartheid: “Oh, there is no doubt.” The consent of the people bearing the cost legitimized the instrument.

The distinction is between coercion and hostage-taking.

When you impose economic costs on a population that controls the behavior you want changed, that is coercion — potentially justified, potentially effective, always costly. When you impose economic costs on a population that has no mechanism to change the behavior you want changed, as a signal to the institution that does, that is hostage-taking. The civilians are not the pressure point. They are the demonstration. Their suffering is not the pathway to policy change. It is the proof that you are willing to inflict it.

No representative organization of the Iranian civilian population has consented to being the instrument of American nuclear nonproliferation policy. The December protesters demanded economic relief. They did not demand that the IRGC change its nuclear posture, because they understand what the United States Treasury apparently does not: they have no leverage over it.

The classification

International humanitarian law prohibits starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Additional Protocol I, Article 54: it is prohibited to destroy objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population “for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value.”

The prohibition applies in armed conflict. Sanctions are classified as economic pressure, not as a method of warfare. The classification exits the constraint. The mechanism that produces forty-one percent food insecurity, three hundred percent drug price spikes, and a currency in deliberate freefall operates outside the legal framework designed to protect civilian populations from precisely these conditions — because it is called something different.

The Lancet Global Health found that countries under UN sanctions experience a reduction of 1.2 to 1.4 years in life expectancy, with women disproportionately affected. That is an aggregate finding across all sanctioned states. In Iran specifically, the combination of US unilateral sanctions, UN snapback sanctions, and active warfare has produced a cumulative civilian toll that no single legal framework captures — because the sanctions fall under international law on countermeasures while the war falls under IHL, and neither framework addresses the compound effect on the same population at the same time.

The bomb leaves a crater. The dollar shortage leaves a medical chart. The thalassemia patient whose drug supply was interrupted because no international bank would process the transaction exists in a legal category called “overcompliance with sanctions.” It is not governed by IHL. It is not subject to Geneva Convention protections. It is not prosecutable. The patient is equally untreated.

Bessent told Congress the rats are leaving the ship. The leadership has foreign accounts. The IRGC has cryptocurrency networks and informal trade routes. The institution that controls the nuclear program — the one the sanctions are supposed to reach — operates on the other side of the blockade it navigates without difficulty.

The passengers have the rial.

Sources

- Solen