No equal talks under siege: The contradiction at the heart of US policy on Iran

The latest direct exchange of attacks between the United States and Iran has returned the region to an old and dangerous rhythm: Washington fires, threatens further punishment and then leaves the word “diplomacy” hovering above the wreckage. At almost the same moment, Tehran has again placed a negotiated route on the table. The contradiction could hardly be starker. Talks conducted beside missile strikes and an economic siege do not offer peace on equal terms. They extend war into the negotiating room.

The administration presents sanctions as leverage, as though they were a clean instrument that pressures officials without touching families. Its own documents tell a less sanitised story.

The White House has directed US agencies to intensify economic pressure and drive Iran’s oil exports towards zero. In May, the Treasury Department went further and openly described this policy as a “blockade”. That is not the language of patient diplomacy. It is the language of organised deprivation.

Nor does the pressure stop at America’s borders. Washington has warned foreign financial institutions that dealings connected to Iranian oil may expose them to secondary sanctions. In practice, this forces banks, insurers, ports, shipping companies and trading partners to choose between ordinary commerce with Iran and access to the US financial system. American power thus becomes a global checkpoint, controlling transactions between countries that have not authorised Washington to police their trade.

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Sanctions may begin in a Treasury office, but they end in pharmacies, factories, kitchens and pay packets. When banks fear penalties, even lawful payments become difficult. Importers struggle to finance medicine and medical equipment. Producers pay more for machinery, components and raw materials. Food costs rise as transport, insurance and currency pressures accumulate. A humanitarian exemption on paper offers little comfort when no bank will process the payment needed to use it.

A blockade does not become humane because spreadsheets, licence forms and risk models administer it instead of soldiers at a border. Its violence is quieter, but no less deliberate.

This is not speculation. A UN special rapporteur found that unilateral sanctions and over-compliance had obstructed access to medicines and medical equipment, affected food security and placed disproportionate burdens on vulnerable people in Iran. The International Court of Justice had already ordered the United States to remove impediments affecting medicines, foodstuffs, agricultural goods and civil aviation safety. Washington’s insistence that humanitarian goods remain technically exempt cannot answer the evidence that the surrounding financial restrictions make those exemptions unreliable.

The moral evasion rests on a fiction: that an economy can be crushed without crushing the people who live inside it. Oil revenue pays wages, sustains public services, supports production and supplies foreign currency for essential imports. Restrict the revenue, freeze financial channels and intimidate buyers, and the shock inevitably travels through the whole society. When civilian pain becomes the mechanism intended to extract political concessions, “targeted pressure” approaches collective punishment in everything but name.

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The government that acts in my name cannot outsource responsibility to a sanctions notice or a bank compliance department. If Washington knowingly creates the conditions in which lawful trade becomes commercially impossible, it owns the predictable consequences.

It cannot celebrate falling revenue as proof of success, then treat rising prices, medicine shortages and lost livelihoods as accidental side effects. Those outcomes form part of the leverage. That is precisely why the policy is indefensible.

History also exposes the strategic failure. Washington withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement in 2018 and replaced reciprocal commitments with maximum pressure. The International Crisis Group later documented that the campaign inflicted severe economic damage without producing a new agreement. Repeating that method, now alongside direct military attacks, does not strengthen diplomacy. It teaches Iran that Washington regards agreements as temporary pauses while coercion remains permanent.

Iran’s stated position makes the available alternative plain. President Masoud Pezeshkian has said that Iran will reciprocate immediately if the United States returns to its commitments under the June memorandum. That is a concrete diplomatic opening based on mutual performance. It also reveals the central obstacle: not the absence of a path to talks, but Washington’s refusal to leave behind the assumption that it may negotiate while bombing, blockading and dictating the economic conditions of everyday life.

A credible American approach would cease military attacks, honour existing commitments and lift the measures that obstruct oil sales, banking and lawful civilian trade. It would treat reciprocal compliance as the basis of an agreement rather than as a concession to be extracted under duress. Most importantly, it would recognise Iranians as people with rights, not pressure points on a policy chart.

Diplomacy cannot share a table with siege and remain diplomacy. If Washington genuinely wants an agreement, it must choose persuasion over punishment and reciprocity over domination. Peace begins when the threat to make an entire society pay no longer serves as America’s opening offer.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.