Dr. Hossein Jahansouz, Biochemist and a Leading Scientist and Industry Executive in the United States for Over Three Decades
When the United Nations snapback sanctions on Iran took effect on September 28, 2025, it was not just another diplomatic maneuver. It was the reawakening of global resolve. After years of deception, uranium enrichment far beyond JCPOA limits, and open defiance of international inspectors, the regime in Tehran had run out of excuses. The E3 nations, France, Germany, and the United Kingdo, formally triggered the mechanism on August 28, citing “significant non-performance.” Thirty days later, every major UN sanction suspended since 2015 automatically returned: arms embargoes, restrictions on ballistic missile programs, travel bans, and asset freezes for key officials.
The effect was immediate. Oil exports, already under strain, fell by more than 40 percent within weeks as shipping insurers and buyers pulled back. The rial lost another 25 percent of its value by mid-October. Inflation, officially around 45 percent, surged even higher in real terms as food and fuel prices skyrocketed. The stock market, dominated by regime-linked conglomerates, plummeted. What looked like an economic tightening from abroad quickly became an earthquake at home.
Yet this new wave of sanctions is not a punishment for the people. It is a pressure test for the regime. Iran’s rulers have thrived on crisis, but their resilience depends on three fragile pillars: coercion, corruption, and propaganda. Snapback hits all three. It cuts the flow of foreign currency that fuels patronage networks. It exposes the vast corruption behind Iran’s “resistance economy.” And it strips away the illusion that the regime can outsmart the world.
In recent years, even before snapback, Iran’s economy had been deteriorating. The World Bank estimated zero growth in 2024, with youth unemployment above 27 percent. Over 60 percent of Iranians live below the poverty line, and the regime spends more on the IRGC and foreign militias than on education or healthcare. The snapback magnifies these contradictions. For ordinary citizens, the message is clear: this is not a government under siege from abroad but one collapsing under its own weight.
Sanctions alone do not bring freedom. But they change the political weather. When financial isolation deepens, the regime must choose between paying soldiers or subsidizing bread. When its elites can no longer move assets abroad, internal rivalries sharpen. These pressures weaken the repressive machinery that keeps people silent. In 2023 and 2024, protests over wages, water shortages, and corruption spread across dozens of cities. Now, with snapback in place, discontent has become nationwide, cutting across class and ethnicity.
The regime will try to frame the sanctions as collective punishment. It will claim that medicine and food are blocked. Yet humanitarian exemptions remain intact, and the real obstacles are the regime’s own smuggling networks. The IRGC’s front companies control much of Iran’s import system. They profit from scarcity. In truth, sanctions reduce their ability to steal from the nation. Every tanker they can’t sell, every deal they can’t launder, narrows the circle of privilege that sustains tyranny.
The leadership also faces an uncomfortable external reality. Russia and China, while rhetorically opposed to snapback, are unlikely to risk secondary sanctions or supply banned technologies openly. European enforcement is being coordinated through revived regulations and monitoring systems. Even regional neighbors, long hesitant to confront Tehran, are recalibrating. The regime’s isolation is near total — political, financial, and moral.
Inside the country, something deeper is shifting. The same generation that chanted for “woman, life, freedom” now sees the regime’s failures written on every empty shelf and every dry riverbed. The sanctions do not create that anger; they give it focus. Each rial that collapses, each project that halts, becomes proof that the system cannot reform itself. For many Iranians, the snapback is not an attack from the outside but an act of alignment with their own struggle.
This moment also strengthens the hand of the democratic opposition. Activists, intellectuals, and labor organizers can point to the regime’s isolation as evidence that the world is finally listening. It creates space , however small , for international cooperation, digital outreach, and moral solidarity. And it undermines the regime’s claim that it represents Iranian nationalism. When the same rulers who cry “sovereignty” stash billions abroad and send their children to Europe, the hypocrisy becomes impossible to hide.
Critics warn that sanctions may push the regime toward nuclear escalation or greater repression. But history shows that pressure and exposure, not appeasement, open cracks in totalitarian systems. The 1980s Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, and Milosevic’s Serbia all buckled under a mix of external sanctions and internal awakening. Iran’s ruling clerics are not immune to that pattern.
For the Iranian people, the road ahead will be difficult. Prices will rise, and hardship will deepen before relief comes. But hardship under a weakening regime is different from despair under an entrenched one. The snapback has rebalanced power. It has restored leverage to those who demand change.