The Sanctions Age
The Sanctions Age is a podcast that explores how sanctions are changing the world.
Twenty years ago, the U.S. Department of Treasury had imposed sanctions on fewer than 1,000 companies and individuals. Today, more than 10,000 entities have been targeted.
Leaders around the world are imposing sanctions in response to wars, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights violations, and technological competition. As a result, a growing list of countries are targeted by sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions, including China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Syria.
The Sanctions Age invites the people who understand sanctions best—economists, historians, lawyers, policymakers, and journalists—to explain their use and significance. Understanding sanctions is the key to understanding politics and economics today.
We are living in The Sanctions Age.
The Sanctions Age
Why the U.S. and Iran are Struggling to Reach a Deal
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Ali Vaez on the fraught negotiations between Washington and Tehran.
In late February, the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran—a war that killed the country’s supreme leader, closed the Strait of Hormuz, pushed the global economy to the brink, and brought the Middle East closer to all-out conflagration than at any point in a generation.
Now, amid a ceasefire that has held without ever being formalized, a draft framework for a comprehensive agreement between Washington and Tehran is reportedly taking shape. The deal that emerges—if it emerges at all—will make clear limits of sanctions pressure, the price of war, and whether transformative diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran is even possible.
Ali Vaez is Senior Adviser to the President and Project Director for Iran at the International Crisis Group. He is one of the foremost experts on the Iran nuclear file, having spent the better part of fifteen years in direct contact with Western, regional, and Iranian officials, and among a long list of other achievements he is a co-author of the excellent book How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.
The Sanctions Age is hosted by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Josefine Petrick.
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