As demonstrators flooded the streets of Iran in ongoing protests that began late last month, US President Donald Trump claimed he wanted to “support” the protesters and threatened military intervention.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, he wrote, “Iran wants freedom more than perhaps ever before. The US is ready to help!!!” He subsequently expressed similar sentiments in other public statements.
However, it is true that his claims to help Iranians have been ignored. Decades of U.S.-led sanctions against Iran, including those tightened under the Trump administration, have played a central role in the country’s economic crisis, which was a major trigger for the current wave of protests.
We uncover the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iran and whether Iran’s track record in Iran has helped people.
What is happening in Iran?
Protests in Iran began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on December 28, 2025, after the rial fell to a record low against the dollar. Shopkeepers have closed their shops to combat rising prices in Iran.
The protests then spread to other states and snowballed into a broader challenge to the country’s leadership.
As of Monday, the dollar was trading at more than 1.4 million rials, a significant drop from around 700,000 rials in January 2025 and around 900,000 rials in mid-2025.
The plunging currency has caused soaring inflation, with food prices on average rising 72% over last year.
What are the US sanctions on Iran?
Iran is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world.
In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years in exile in Iraq and France. After the referendum, Iran was declared an Islamic Republic.
The United States first imposed sanctions on Iran in November 1979 after Iranian students attacked the embassy in Tehran and took American hostages.
The 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew the shah, or monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose forces were notorious for using repression and torture to maintain power without a democratic mandate.
The United States, which supported Mr. Pahlavi, also helped overthrow Iranian democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup sponsored by American and British intelligence services.
Also in 1979, the US government suspended oil imports from Iran and froze $12 billion in Iranian assets. Iranian products were prohibited from importing into the United States, except for small gifts, information materials, food items, and some carpets.
In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued an executive order banning U.S. companies from investing in Iranian oil and gas and doing business with Iran. He banned trade between the United States and Iran and investment in the country. A year later, the US Congress passed a law requiring the US government to impose sanctions on foreign companies that invest more than $20 million annually in Iran’s energy sector.
In December 2006, the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran’s trade in nuclear energy materials and technology and froze the assets of individuals and companies involved in related activities.
Although the sanctions were primarily an effort to curb Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities, its uranium enrichment program was halted in 2002 but resumed at the end of 2005. In the years that followed, the United Nations tightened sanctions and imposed further sanctions on Iran. The European Union has also followed suit.
In 2015, Iran signed a nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the United States, the European Union, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
The deal banned uranium enrichment at Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility and only allowed the peaceful development of nuclear technology for energy production, in exchange for the complete lifting of sanctions.
Iran has agreed to refrain from enriching uranium and research at Fordow for 15 years. They also agreed not to store any nuclear material there, but instead to “convert the Fordow facility into a nuclear, physics and technology center.”
However, during his first term in 2018, President Trump announced the US’ withdrawal from the nuclear treaty and reimposed all sanctions against Iran that had been lifted under the treaty.
In 2019, the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization. It also imposed sanctions targeting petrochemicals, metals (steel, aluminum, copper), and Iranian officials. The increased sanctions were part of President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran.
On January 3, 2020, the United States assassinated Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, in Baghdad, Iraq, in a drone strike. The United States also imposed additional sanctions on Iran.
The Biden administration, which was in power from 2021 to 2025, maintained most of the U.S. sanctions against Iran.
In September 2025, the Security Council voted against permanently lifting economic sanctions against Iran, and UN sanctions were reimposed on Iran over its nuclear program.
What impact have these sanctions had on Iran?
Income: Iran’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita fell from more than $8,000 in 2012 to about $6,000 by 2017 and to just over $5,000 in 2024, according to World Bank data.
The steepest decline coincided with the Trump campaign’s reimposition and tightening of U.S. sanctions since 2018, which squeezed oil exports and access to global finance.
Oil Exports and Revenue: After the reimposition of U.S. sanctions, Iran’s oil exports fell by 60 to 80 percent, costing the government tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Iran exported about 2.2 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil in 2011. Export volumes have declined sharply since 2018, reaching an all-time low of just over 400,000 barrels per day in 2020.
Export volumes gradually increased, reaching approximately 1.5 million tons per day in 2025, but remain below pre-2018 levels.
Currency collapse: The value of the Iranian rial has collapsed. In the mid-2010s, $1 could only be bought for tens of thousands of rials on the open market. But by 2025, it has purchased hundreds of thousands of units. Now you can buy it for over 1 million rials.
Currency devaluation helps the country boost exports, but sanctions have long blocked most of Iran’s exports. Meanwhile, the currency crisis increased the prices of imported goods, contributing to higher inflation and reducing investor confidence.
Sanctions also prevent Iran from obtaining dollars from financial markets, making it difficult to participate in international trade.
Aviation: One of the most visible victims of sanctions against Iran is the country’s aviation sector. After the first sanctions in 1979, the government was unable to import new aircraft. Iran suffered from a sharp increase in fatal aircraft accidents during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.
More than 2,000 people died in aircraft accidents in the country between 1979 and 2023, according to the Geneva-based Air Accidents Documentation Bureau (B3A).
Corruption: Sanctions on Iran promoted a “sanctions economy,” a specific way in which Iranian elites profited from sanctions and restructured the country’s economy around them.
Sanctions create opportunities for corruption and push trade and finance into gray and black channels. For example, oil must be sold through intermediaries such as front companies and shadow fleets. Imports and exports are carried out through informal channels. There is little public information about trade agreements.
Mariam Alemzadeh, an associate professor of Iranian history and politics at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera: “Sanctions have certainly had a serious impact, but I think what’s hurting ordinary people the most is that corrupt elites have benefited from them.”
“They have created new opportunities for corruption and created sometimes anonymous, faceless tycoons who swallow the country’s economy.”
How will this affect people?
Experts say Iran’s middle class, or ordinary people, are paying the highest price.
In a research paper published last year, Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, an economist at Germany’s Marburg University, and Nader Habibi, an economist at Brandeis University, used data from similar countries to construct a “virtual Iran” to explain the impact of sanctions from 2012 to 2019.
They found that starting in 2012, Iran’s middle class began to shrink dramatically.
During this period, sanctions created an average gap of 17 percentage points between the potential and actual size of Iran’s middle class.
The middle class shrank even more dramatically after President Trump launched a maximum pressure campaign against Iran. The middle class is now 28 percentage points smaller than it would have been without the sanctions.
Farzanegan told Al Jazeera that sanctions led to the collapse of the rial. “As a result, the purchasing power of fixed salary earners such as teachers and civil servants has been drastically reduced, and many of them have fallen from the middle class to the category of “working poor.”
Purchasing power is the value of money and is measured by the amount of goods and services that can be purchased with a unit of currency.
“As formal enterprises contracted, workers were forced into ‘vulnerable employment’ and informal work, characterized by low wages and a lack of social protection,” Farzanegan added.
According to a research paper published in 2020, UN sanctions are directly associated with a significant decline in life expectancy. Life expectancy has fallen by around 1.2 to 1.4 years in countries subject to sanctions, with women bearing a disproportionate share of this decline.
The impact on Iran is consistent with the far-reaching and lethal effects of sanctions. Since 1970, U.S. and EU sanctions have killed 38 million people, the equivalent of the population of Ukraine or Poland, according to a study published last year.
According to a study published in 2023, sanctions have disrupted medical imports in Iran, driving up the price of some essential medicines, such as anti-epileptic drugs, by up to 300%.
Sanctions are also hurting Iran’s environment. Farzanegan explained that sanctions are hindering the adoption of clean fuel standards, slowing green innovation and increasing air pollution levels in cities like Tehran.
“This has a measurable negative impact on children’s cognitive abilities.”
