Derek Davison calls attention to the effects of the economic war on Iran:

Because the United States has the power—through its effective control of international financial networks—to levy penalties against foreign, as well as U.S., individuals and companies for trading with Iran, the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign amounts to an economic blockade. And an economic blockade is, under international law, an act of war.

The effect of the campaign is also akin to war. Missiles may not be striking Iranian cities, and U.S. soldiers may not be landing on Iranian beaches—yet—the Iranian people are suffering nevertheless, for lack of basic human needs like medicine and food. The Trump administration continues to insist that its sanctions are not meant to apply to such humanitarian goods, but their practical effect has been to block the sort of financing that Iranian importers would need in order to pay for the importation of critical items. And despite repeated warnings about the impact of its sanctions on the Iranian people, the administration continues—seemingly with malicious intent—to make it harder for them to survive.

The U.S. has the power to inflict tremendous economic harm on a smaller country if it wishes, and for more than a year the U.S. has been waging a relentless, escalating economic war on Iran. The first victims of that war are the poorest and most vulnerable and the sick that need rare and advanced medicines, and the entire population suffers from shortages and skyrocketing prices for everything. Our policy puts a country of more than eighty million people under the modern equivalent of a siege, and then the administration feigns shock when the Iranian government reacts to this assault. Strangling a country economically is not an alternative to war. It is a kind of war itself, and the president is the one responsible for starting it. It inflicts death and destruction in less obvious and visible ways, but it is an act of aggression all the same.

The most recent sanctions imposed by the Trump administration illustrate Davison’s point. While Iran’s central bank was already sanctioned before, there were exemptions for facilitating humanitarian trade. The new measures effectively destroy those exemptions. Tyler Cullis explains:

Successive administrations, as well as the U.S. Congress, have recognized the centrality of the Central Bank of Iran to humanitarian trade. That is why, when Congress imposed correspondent and payable-through account sanctions on foreign banks conducting significant financial transactions with Iran’s central bank, it created a broad exception for transactions involving the sale of agricultural commodities, food, medicine, or medical devices to Iran. That is also why the Obama administration ensured that such humanitarian exceptions remained in place when it promulgated regulations—the Iranian Financial Sanctions Regulations—codifying this humanitarian exception. Even the Trump administration—following its re-imposition of sanctions on Iran and its issuance of Executive Order 13846—published Frequently Asked Questions clarifying that humanitarian-related transactions involving Iran’s central bank were not sanctionable.

That exception has been eviscerated by the new designation. Foreign banks engaged in humanitarian transactions involving Iran’s central bank may now be cut off from the U.S. financial system, as there is no similar humanitarian exception for Iranian banks designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Supporters of the economic war will often try to hide behind humanitarian exemptions in order to claim that their policy is not aimed at hurting the Iranian people. That wasn’t credible before, and it is completely untenable now. Many Americans are so used to seeing our government impose sanctions willy-nilly all over the globe that it doesn’t register how obnoxious and harmful this behavior is. If we wish to have a foreign policy of peace and restraint, that means rejecting these terrible weapons of collective punishment against innocent populations. We need to recognize that seeking to suffocate another country into submission is a massive abuse of our government’s power. The economic war needs to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Only then will there be an opening for genuine diplomacy.