As demonstrators flood Iranian streets in ongoing protests which began late final month, United States President Donald Trump has threatened navy intervention, arguing that he desires to “assist” protesters.
He wrote in a submit on his Reality Social platform on Saturday: “Iran is taking a look at FREEDOM, maybe like by no means earlier than. The USA stands prepared to assist!!!” He has since echoed these sentiments in different public statements.
However ignored in his claims of wanting to assist Iranians is a reality: many years of US-led sanctions in opposition to Iran, together with ones that had been toughened underneath Trump, have performed a central function within the nation’s financial crises that had been the first set off for the present spate of protests.
We unpack the impression of US sanctions on Iran and whether or not its observe report within the nation has been one among serving to folks.
What’s going on in Iran?
The protests in Iran began from Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on December 28, 2025, after the rial plunged to a report low in opposition to the US greenback. Shopkeepers shuttered their companies to rally in opposition to rising costs in Iran.
The protests have since unfold to different provinces and have snowballed right into a broader problem to the nation’s management.
On Monday, the rial was buying and selling at greater than 1.4 million to the US greenback, a pointy decline from about 700,000 in January 2025 and roughly 900,000 in mid-2025.
The plummeting foreign money has triggered steep inflation, with meals costs 72 % increased than final yr on common.
What are the US sanctions in opposition to Iran?
Iran is among the most heavily sanctioned international locations on the earth.
In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years of exile in Iraq and France. Following a referendum, Iran was declared an Islamic republic.
The US first imposed sanctions on Iran in November 1979, after Iranian college students stormed its embassy in Tehran and took Individuals hostage.
The 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew the shah, or monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose forces notoriously used repression and torture to maintain him in energy, and not using a democratic mandate.
The US, which backed Pahlavi, had additionally helped topple Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 in a coup supported by US and British intelligence businesses.
Additionally in 1979, Washington halted oil imports from Iran and froze $12bn in Iranian property. Iranian merchandise had been banned from import into the US aside from small presents, informational materials, foodstuffs and a few carpets.
In 1995, then-President Invoice Clinton issued govt orders stopping US firms from investing in Iranian oil and fuel and buying and selling with Iran. He banned US commerce with Iran and funding within the nation. A yr later, the US Congress handed a legislation requiring that the US authorities impose sanctions on international corporations investing greater than $20m a yr in Iran’s vitality sector.
In December 2006, the United Nations Safety Council imposed sanctions on Iran’s commerce in nuclear-energy-related supplies and expertise and froze the property of people and corporations concerned in actions pertaining to it.
The sanctions had been primarily an effort to curtail Iran’s rising nuclear capability, however whereas programmes to counterpoint uranium had been stopped in 2002, they restarted in late 2005. In subsequent years, the UN toughened the sanctions and imposed extra sanctions on Iran. The European Union additionally adopted go well with.
In 2015, Iran signed a nuclear deal – the Joint Complete Plan of Motion (JCPOA) – with the US, EU, China, France, Germany, Russia and the UK.
The deal banned uranium enrichment at Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility and allowed solely peaceable improvement of nuclear expertise for vitality manufacturing in return for the entire lifting of sanctions.
Iran agreed to chorus from any uranium enrichment and analysis into it at Fordow for 15 years. It additionally agreed to not maintain any nuclear materials there however as a substitute to “convert the Fordow facility right into a nuclear, physics and expertise centre”.
Nevertheless, in 2018, throughout his first time period, Trump introduced the US withdrawal from the nuclear treaty and reimposed all sanctions on Iran that had been lifted underneath the treaty.
In 2019, the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a Overseas Terrorist Group. Moreover, he imposed sanctions focusing on petrochemicals, metals (metal, aluminium, copper) and senior Iranian officers. The intensifying sanctions had been a part of Trump’s most stress marketing campaign in opposition to Iran.
On January 3, 2020, the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the top of the IRGC’s elite Quds Drive, in a drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq. The US additionally imposed further sanctions on Iran.
The Biden administration, in energy from 2021 to 2025, saved in place most US sanctions in opposition to Iran.
In September 2025, the UN sanctions had been reimposed on Iran over its nuclear programme when the UNSC voted against completely lifting financial sanctions on Iran.
How have these sanctions impacted Iran?
Incomes: Iran’s gross home product (GDP) per capita fell from greater than $8,000 in 2012 to about $6,000 by 2017, and to slightly above $5,000 in 2024, in line with World Financial institution knowledge.
The sharpest declines coincided with the reimposition and tightening of US sanctions underneath Trump’s marketing campaign from 2018 onwards, which squeezed oil exports and entry to world finance.
Oil exports and income: Iran’s oil exports fell by 60-80 % after US sanctions had been reimposed, stripping the federal government of tens of billions of {dollars} in annual income.
Iran was exporting about 2.2 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil in 2011. The exports fell sharply after 2018, to an all-time low of simply greater than 400,000bpd in 2020.
Exports have regularly risen to about 1.5mbpd in 2025, however stay under their pre‑2018 ranges.
Foreign money crash: The Iranian rial has collapsed in worth. Within the mid‑2010s, a greenback purchased only some tens of hundreds of rials on the open market. Nevertheless, by 2025, it purchased a number of hundred thousand. Now, it may purchase greater than 1 million rials.
A devalued foreign money may help a rustic in selling its exports, however sanctions have lengthy blocked a bulk of Iran’s exports. In the meantime, the foreign money disaster has made imports costlier, contributed to elevated inflation, and lowered investor confidence.
The sanctions have additionally crippled Iran’s entry to {dollars} from monetary markets, making it tougher for it to take part in worldwide commerce.
Aviation: One of the crucial seen victims of the sanctions on Iran has been its aviation sector. After the preliminary sanctions in 1979, the federal government was unable to import new planes. Iran suffered from a spike in lethal plane accidents via the Eighties, 90s and the early 2000s.
Between 1979 and 2023, airplane crashes killed greater than 2,000 folks within the nation, in line with the Geneva-based Bureau of Plane Accident Archives (B3A).
Corruption: The sanctions on Iran spurred a “sanctions economic system”, or the actual manner its elite have profited from them and reshaped the nation’s economic system round sanctions.
Sanctions create alternatives for corruption, forcing commerce and finance into gray and black channels. As an illustration, oil needs to be offered via intermediaries, corresponding to entrance firms or shadow fleets. Imports and exports go via casual channels. Public details about commerce offers is sparse.
“Sanctions have actually had a grave impression, however I imagine it’s the best way the corrupt elite have benefitted from them that has harm atypical folks most,” Maryam Alemzadeh, an affiliate professor in historical past and politics of Iran on the College of Oxford, instructed Al Jazeera.
“They’ve created new alternatives for corruption and given rise to – typically anonymous and faceless – moguls which have swallowed the nation’s economic system.”
How does this impression folks?
Iran’s center class – widespread folks – have paid the best value, say consultants.
In a research paper revealed final yr, Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, an economist at Germany’s Marburg College, and Nader Habibi, an economist at Brandeis College, constructed a “digital Iran” utilizing knowledge from comparable international locations for instance the impression of the sanctions between 2012 and 2019.
They discovered that beginning in 2012, Iran’s center class started to shrink dramatically.
Through the interval, the sanctions induced a mean 17 percentage points gap between the potential and precise dimension of Iran’s center class.
After Trump launched his most stress marketing campaign in opposition to Iran, the center class shrank much more dramatically. The center class was now 28 proportion factors smaller than it could have been within the absence of sanctions.
Farzanegan instructed Al Jazeera that sanctions are what have led to the collapse of the rial. “This decimated the buying energy of fixed-salary earners like academics and civil servants, lots of whom fell from the center class into the class of ‘working poor’.”
Buying energy is the worth of cash, measured by the amount of products and companies a unit of foreign money should purchase.
“As formal companies contracted, employees had been pushed into ‘weak employment’ and casual labour, characterised by decrease pay and an absence of social protections,” Farzanegan added.
A research article revealed in 2020 reveals that UN sanctions are instantly related to a marked drop in life expectancy: on common, sanctioned international locations lose about 1.2 to 1.4 years, with ladies bearing a disproportionate share of this decline.
The impression on Iran is in step with the broader lethal impression of sanctions: since 1970, US and EU sanctions have killed 38 million people – equal to the inhabitants of Ukraine or Poland – in line with analysis revealed final yr.
Sanctions have disrupted drugs imports in Iran, main to cost spikes of as much as 300 percent for some important medicine corresponding to anti-seizure drugs, in line with analysis revealed in 2023.
Sanctions have additionally taken a toll on the setting in Iran. Farzanegan defined that sanctions have hindered the adoption of cleaner gasoline requirements and slowed inexperienced innovation, resulting in increased ranges of air air pollution in cities like Tehran.
“This has had a measurable destructive impression on kids’s cognitive skills.”
