Sanctions and Resource-Based Economic Pressure

Economic sanctions targeting a state's resource exports have become one of the principal instruments of coercive statecraft short of war, precisely because oil, gas, and mineral revenues often fund the very governments being targeted. The most extensively studied contemporary case is the sanctions regime imposed on Iran over its nuclear program: successive U.S. and UN sanctions from 2006 onward, tightened sharply by the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration between 2010 and 2012, targeted Iran's central bank and oil exports directly, cutting Iranian crude exports by roughly half and contributing to the economic pressure that brought Tehran to negotiate the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA); the Trump administration's 2018 withdrawal from that agreement and reimposition of sanctions again sharply curtailed Iranian oil exports, though Iran has since developed extensive sanctions-evasion networks, including a "shadow fleet" of tankers disguising the origin of its crude, illustrating the adaptive character of sanctioned resource trade.