This is apropos a letter to the Editor titled “The human cost of economically outcasting Iran” by this writer, which was carried by the newspaper on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and yesterday.
The contradiction becomes sharper because American officials have repeatedly distinguished the Iranian people from their government and portrayed US 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 percent, 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.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a former Press Secretary to the President, An ex-Press Minister at Embassy of Pakistan to France, a former MD, SRBC Macomb, Detroit, Michigan