The Human Cost of Economically Outcasting Iran

We are squeezing the Iranians like they have never seen,' United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared while the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly was underway in New York. Claiming that 80 to 90 per cent of Iran's external flights had been shut down, he said he was unsure how the Iranian representatives attending the United Nations would get home. His remarks came one day after President Donald Trump used the General Assembly podium to threaten that he could 'annihilate the Islamic Republic' if no agreement were reached, while calling upon other nations to join the United States in economically isolating Iran. Placed alongside Operation Economic Outcast-the whole-of-government campaign announced by the Treasury Department on August 24, 2026-these declarations reveal the intended scale of the pressure: not merely sanctions against selected officials, but the economic, financial and physical isolation of a country whose ordinary people will inevitably bear the consequences. These measures raise an unavoidable question: can an economy be isolated so extensively without placing the principal burden upon people who do not control the government, the IRGC or military decisions? An economy cannot be neatly divided between a government and its population. An economy cannot be neatly divided between a government and its population. When oil revenue contracts, currency depreciates and banks lose access to international settlement, the effects travel through wages, savings, pensions, prices and employment. Restrictions on shipping and aviation affect commercial supply chains as well as government movement. Even when food and medicine are formally exempt, banks, insurers and transport companies may avoid lawful transactions because they fear penalties. The United Nations human-rights system has examined the resulting effects on access to medicines and the right to health in Iran. Behind every economic indicator is a household. Iran has roughly ninety million inhabitants: children requiring milk and medicine, patients dependent on imported treatments, workers needing functioning businesses, and parents responsible for food, rent and education. They do not decide upon missile launches, direct military operations or determine which regional organisation receives Iranian assistance. They cannot morally be treated as responsible merely because they live under a government accused of objectionable conduct. This distinction is central to the principle against collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective penalties against protected civilians for acts they did not personally commit. Its underlying principle-individual responsibility rather than punishment by identity-illuminates the humanitarian problem created when economic pain is deliberately spread across an entire society. International humanitarian law also prohibits using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The legal threshold is not established merely because sanctions produce hardship; the conflict context, conduct and intent must be proved. But the rule makes one point unmistakable: food, water, medicine and objects indispensable to civilian survival cannot legitimately become weapons against a population. Where sanctions, blockades or financial restrictions obstruct those essentials, humanitarian exemptions must work in practice, not merely appear in official documents. The contradiction becomes sharper because American officials have repeatedly distinguished the Iranian people from their government and portrayed U.S. policy as supporting their freedom. Yet a policy intended to produce a subsistence economy inevitably reaches far beyond officials and commanders. Powerful institutions possess privileged access to hard currency, protected supply networks and state resources. Low-income families, small businesses, pensioners and patients have no comparable protection. For ordinary Iranians, Washington's declaration that their country must become an 'economic outcast' is not an abstract foreign-policy slogan-it is a sentence imposed upon everyday life. Economic warfare, sanctions and the naval blockade are crushing the value of wages and savings, driving inflation above 80 per cent, producing shortages of gasoline and electricity, and pushing the rial to historic depths. Families are abandoning meat and fruit, watching the price of traditional bread multiply, selling possessions to meet household expenses and giving up the ability to plan even the most modest future. The cruel reality is that an economic campaign publicly presented as pressure upon Tehran's leadership is reaching most deeply into the kitchens, medicine cabinets and empty pockets of people who neither formulate state policy nor command its military forces. Declaring Iran an economic outcast therefore means casting millions of innocent human beings outside the protections of normal economic life-depriving parents of security, children of nutrition, patients of treatment and an entire generation of hope-in order to extract political concessions from a government far better equipped than its population to survive the punishment. The United Nations General Assembly is presently giving deserved attention to civilian suffering in Gaza and to developments in the occupied West Bank. The same universal principles require close examination of harm to Iranian civilians. Human rights cannot depend upon the nationality of the victim or the geopolitical alignment of the government under which that person lives. Concern for a hungry child in Gaza is not diminished by concern for a child in Iran whose family cannot obtain food or medicine. Consistency strengthens humanitarian law; selective concern weakens it. International organisations should document prices, nutrition, medicine availability, household income and access to transport. Such safeguards would not settle the political disputes, but they could prevent civilians from becoming instruments through which pressure is applied to their government. The Iranian people have no control over the confrontation between Washington and Tehran. They did not decide to impose sanctions, launch military operations or close the avenues of diplomacy. Yet they are the people most exposed to collapsing purchasing power, unemployment, shortages of medicine, restricted travel and the daily struggle to place food on the table. They deserve the same concern extended to every population subjected to oppression, collective hardship or economic strangulation. Human dignity cannot be protected selectively, according to nationality, political convenience or strategic alliance. The suffering of Iranian civilians must therefore become a sustained subject of discussion within the United Nations, international humanitarian organisations, human-rights institutions, academic forums, civil-society platforms and the global media. Their hardship must be documented, debated and placed before the conscience of the world. International institutions should develop practical measures to protect access to food, medicine, remittances, transportation and other necessities of life, while pressing for diplomacy capable of ending the confrontation. Silence would leave millions of innocent people trapped between a powerful external campaign and a government whose decisions they do not control. The international community has a legal, humanitarian and moral obligation to speak for them, to examine the consequences of the measures being imposed and to seek remedies that mitigate their suffering. Iranian civilians are not instruments of war, bargaining chips or economic leverage. They are human beings, and their pain deserves the same recognition, urgency and protection demanded for suffering populations everywhere. The writer is a former press secretary to the president; former press minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France and former MD (SRBC).