Post #5616

Sanctions Didn’t Break Iran. They Taught It Accounting. For years, Washington sold sanctions as economic suffocation. What they actually built was a parallel trade machine. Iran has traded with more than 170 countries since 2019, shifted harder toward China, its neighbors, and Asian markets, and exported more than $120 billion in non-oil goods over that stretch, according to the New York Times’s analysis of Harvard trade data. China is the main shock absorber. In 2024, it bought about 90% of Iran’s oil exports, paid in renminbi, and helped keep trade moving outside the dollar system and outside U.S. banking pressure. That is not sanction evasion as a side effect. That is a business model with state backing. The more interesting part is not oil. It is everything sanctions were supposed to stop and instead reorganized. Iran diversified into chemicals, metals, construction materials, food products, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and a large non-oil export mix running through Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, Central Asia, and beyond. Shell companies, frontmen, barter, non-Iranian banks, rerouted shipments — the sanctioned state did what sanctioned states do: it professionalized opacity. Then came the war, and the fairy tale collapsed again. The same Iran that was supposed to be isolated still had enough economic weight to help push oil above $100, threaten China’s supply chain, and remind everyone that a country can be half-bombed, half-blockaded, and still remain expensive to destroy. That is the real scandal. Sanctions did damage Iran. Inflation, unemployment, shortages, and unrest were real. But sanctions also taught Tehran how to live without Western approval, how to route around the financial system, and how to make globalization serve the blacklist. The West called it pressure. Iran treated it as a forced MBA. #Iran#sanctions#China#oil#trade#geopolitics 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸