The Financial Times reports on the impoverishing effects of Iran sanctions ahead of the reimposition of more sanctions next Monday:

But analysts do not see a popular uprising as likely. Instead, they point to increasing social problems such as drug addiction, as well as a rise in suicide attempts.

“Iranian people are historically aware that protests aimed at changing the [political] establishment could be detrimental to them,” says Hossein Raghfar, an economist who specialises in poverty. “We will not see a revolution. But we will see growth in poverty and misery.”

Inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population in an attempt to force political or policy changes in another country is profoundly wrong. To make things even worse, it is just going to cause widespread hardship and suffering without producing any change in regime behavior for the better. Punishing tens of millions of people for policies they aren’t responsible for is simply cruel, and it is naturally going to drive more people to support their government in reaction against the measures that the U.S. is using against their country. Regime officials and loyalists will be the least affected, and the poorest and most vulnerable Iranians will suffer the most. “Maximum pressure” will fall hardest on those that have no power to change anything, and it will further enrich and empower hard-liners in the regime. If you were trying to design an Iran policy that is thoroughly unjust and liable to backfire, the Trump administration’s bankrupt Iran policy is the one you would create.

Ordinary Iranians bear the brunt of Trump’s Iran obsession:

Malak, a Tehran housewife, has long struggled to feed her family with the meagre salary her husband earns as a factory driver. But since US President Donald Trump moved to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran, her task has become even harder.

“It’s horrendous,” says the 41-year-old mother of two, complaining that inflation has made red meat and fresh fruit unaffordable. “We are being tortured, little by little, day by day.”

The daily torture that these people are experiencing will only get more severe when additional sanctions go into effect next week. No American interests are served by tormenting Iran’s civilian population, and no one is made more secure by making it harder for them to obtain basic necessities. It is senseless punishment carried out against an entire nation, and nothing good can come from it.