U.S. policy toward Iran is frequently sold as a reaction to urgent threats. In practice, it behaves more like a system: narrative escalation, economic coercion, covert pressure, and then the steady normalization of “military options.” The pattern repeats because it is institutionally convenient. It compresses debate, rewards maximal claims, and makes restraint look like failure.
Start with the information environment. On Iran, the line between verified reporting and advocacy often collapses. Casualty figures circulate fast, harden into “fact” faster, and then become emotional fuel for punitive policy. In the current cycle, official Iranian sources have cited a death toll around 6,000 during unrest, while Iran International has promoted numbers in the tens of thousands, including claims around 36,500. A gap that large isn’t normal uncertainty. It should trigger basic questions about method, sourcing, and incentives.
A serious media culture should demand transparent sourcing and methodological clarity from any outlet circulating extraordinary claims about Iran – because inflated or opaque reporting narrows debate and makes coercive policy feel inevitable.
Once the narrative is locked in, the next step is usually sanctions, marketed to Americans as a humane alternative to war. That framing is false. Sanctions are a form of economic warfare, and their most reliable impact is not “behavior change” among elites but predictable harm to civilians: disrupted medicine supply chains, overcompliance by banks and vendors, inflation shocks, and the slow deterioration of public health. Human Rights Watch has documented how “maximum pressure” sanctions and financial restrictions undermined access to essential medicines and threatened Iranians’ right to health, despite nominal humanitarian exemptions.
The United Nations has also been unusually explicit that sanctions’ human impact is often amplified by overcompliance – companies and financial institutions refusing lawful transactions out of fear. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that unilateral sanctions and overcompliance pose a serious threat to human rights in Iran, and U.N. experts later highlighted cases where overcompliance affected access to life-saving medicine.
The most damning evidence is quantitative. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet Global Health estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths (with wide confidence intervals) over its study period. Even if readers debate model assumptions, the core implication holds: economic strangulation can be war-like in its human cost. If Washington wants to claim human rights as a guiding principle, it cannot treat sanctions as morally clean simply because suffering arrives through shortages and delayed care rather than explosions.
This is also why the sudden humanitarian vocabulary that often accompanies pressure campaigns should be treated skeptically. U.S. officials can speak the language of women’s rights and freedom while advancing tools that predictably intensify hardship, increase polarization, and reduce the space for negotiated outcomes. But the incentives driving U.S. pressure campaigns are often material as well as ideological: leverage over energy, trade, and strategic geography. Venezuela is a useful reminder of how quickly “moral” narratives can sit alongside resource-centered outcomes – Washington simultaneously charged Venezuela’s leadership with “narco-terrorism” and related crimes, while U.S. policy in practice increasingly moved toward controlling Venezuelan oil flows and distribution. That is not a critique of women’s rights. It is a critique of instrumentalizing rights language as branding for coercion.
Covert pressure belongs in the analysis as well, not because it explains everything, but because it changes the incentive structure around instability. Israel’s history of clandestine activity targeting Iran’s strategic capabilities is widely reported, including sabotage and covert operations designed to weaken defenses and increase vulnerability. The Associated Press has described multi-year preparations, including smuggled systems and data-driven target selection, and ProPublica has reported on efforts to recruit Iranian dissidents for inside-Iran missions.
None of this proves that every protest or every violent incident is “foreign-made,” and it would be analytically sloppy to claim that. But it does establish a sober baseline: when unrest erupts, sophisticated actors have both capability and incentive to exploit volatility, intensify chaos, and steer events toward outcomes that make diplomacy harder and punitive policy easier to sell.
Terrorist violence is part of this landscape too. Iran has suffered mass-casualty attacks claimed by the Islamic State; Reuters has reported on ISIS’s claim after the Kerman bombing, and has also covered ISIS-linked cases and prosecutions. Recognizing violent opportunism does not negate real grievances or economic pressures. It simply prevents Washington from laundering coercion as “solidarity” while ignoring the covert and violent tools that cluster around flashpoints.
The strategic logic behind Washington’s “hardball” is not mysterious. Realist analysts like John Mearsheimer have argued that U.S. leaders understand the risks of direct confrontation with peer competitors such as China and Russia, and therefore often seek demonstrations of resolve against states they assume are more pressure-sensitive. Whether one agrees with Mearsheimer or not, the warning is relevant: when Washington needs an arena to perform strength, the Middle East is repeatedly treated as available – and Iran is framed as a permanent emergency rather than a state with which negotiation is possible.
This is where war talk becomes reckless. A conflict with Iran would not be “surgical.” It would be systemic. One reason is energy and shipping risk. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration has documented comparable figures for recent years. Even limited escalation can spike risk premiums, shipping costs, and inflation. A wider conflict would create incentives for retaliation and miscalculation that pull in multiple countries and damage infrastructure.
Americans should ask who pays – not in slogans, in invoices. War and war-footing politics expand executive power, widen surveillance, and turn “emergency” into governance. Randolph Bourne’s old warning remains intact: war is the health of the state. A foreign policy that normalizes coercion abroad reliably produces coercion at home.
The alternative is not naïve idealism. It is restraint. It means treating inflated claims with skepticism and refusing to let unverifiable extremes collapse debate into inevitability. It means acknowledging that sanctions are not a humanitarian tool but a coercive one with measurable civilian harm. And it means prioritizing de-escalation and durable diplomacy over the ritualized march from narrative panic to economic warfare to military options.
Iran is not an “emergency” that requires Americans to suspend judgment. It is a country Washington can choose to negotiate with, or choose to pressure until conflict becomes self-fulfilling. That is a political choice. The costs, if we choose wrong, will be paid by civilians first and by liberty eventually.
Sophia Gonzalez is an American activist and political analyst focusing on U.S. strategy, Middle East affairs, and global security. A peace and human rights advocate, she writes to challenge interventionism and promote diplomacy. Find her on X (@SophiaGnzlz) or contact her at Gonzalez.initial@gmail.com.
