Crescent International
Economic warfare has always been the primary US weapon against Iran since 1979.
The major difference is that Donald Trump is foolish enough to say it out loud.
Nevertheless, this raises an important question: can economic pressure succeed where military and political coercion have failed?
Based on the Syria experience, the answer is yes: economic warfare can work, particularly when it is combined with other forms of political, military, and diplomatic pressure.
However, Iran is not Syria.
The Syrian analogy does not apply to Iran’s case on many levels.
There are important limits to the Syrian case.
Syria entered its prolonged conflict with a much smaller economy, weaker industrial and military base, limited strategic depth, and much greater dependence on external assistance.
Most importantly, Iran’s Islamic system possesses far greater internal support, along with strategic depth and a network of regional partnerships and asymmetric capabilities through which it can impose costs on its adversaries.
While even proponents of US imperialism acknowledge serious limitations in the strategy of economic warfare against Islamic Iran, Tehran is unlikely to underestimate the threat or take the intensification of economic pressure lightly.
The central question, therefore, is: what will Tehran’s strategy be?
One thing is increasingly clear: since the onset of open US and Israeli aggression against Iran in February 2026, Tehran has recalibrated its policies toward a more offensive posture, including in the economic sphere.
This means that Iran is unlikely to respond to economic warfare with economic measures alone.
Instead, Tehran is likely to seek to impose significant costs on western economies and the GCC states through the use of hard power.
As the global economic situation continues to deteriorate, this strategy is becoming increasingly evident.
Time, however, is also a factor working against all sides, but more against the US and Israel.
For Tehran, the challenge is, therefore, to synchronize its economic policies in a way that minimize the burden on the Iranian population.
Iran cannot afford to drift into a prolonged state of limbo, as Syria did.
Instead, its strategy will likely be designed around a simple principle: deny the enemy what it wants and force it to confront what it seeks to avoid.
If Washington and Tel Aviv are counting on economic pressure to weaken Iran while avoiding the costs of a wider confrontation, Tehran’s response will ensure that the economic warfare itself generates precisely those costs—through sustained disruption, heightened risks, and pressure on the economic, political and military interests of the US, Israel, and their regional vassals.
A key element of Tehran’s strategy will be to recognize that the economic and military dimensions of the conflict are now inseparable.
If the US and Israel expect Iran to avoid military confrontation simply because the primary battlefield has shifted toward economic warfare, they are likely to get a rude shock.
From Tehran’s perspective, economic pressure depends heavily on the logistical and military infrastructure that sustains US and Israeli power in the region.
Consequently, Iran will seek to impose costs on the broader regional architecture rather than confining its response to the economic sphere.
The central objective would, therefore, be to demonstrate that a strategy of economic siege cannot be pursued without consequences in the military arena.
Any attempt to squeeze Iran economically is likely to trigger sustained pressure against the infrastructure supporting US and Israeli military operations in the region.
In this sense, the economic battlefield and the military battlefield become tightly intertwined, making it far more difficult for Washington to impose an economic siege while insulating its regional military presence from retaliation.
This dynamic would ensure that the costs of the strategy are not borne by Iran alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment