Biden Iran Envoy Boasted of Depriving Civilians of Food, Driving up Iranian Inequality in Sadistic Sanctions Manual
Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as âa tremendous success.â Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.
The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obamaâs State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.
Nephew has described the destruction of Iranâs economy as âa tremendous success,â and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the countryâs capital despite mounting US sanctions.
Nephewâs appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.
After coordinating Obamaâs sanctions regime against Iran, Nephew left the administration for a position at the energy industry-funded Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. There, he published a book outlining in blunt terms how he honed the craft of economic warfare and applied it against Iran.
Entitled âThe Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,â the bookâs cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government. Its contents read like a list of criminal confessions, detailing in chillingly clinical terms how the sanctions Nephew conceived from inside an air-conditioned office in Washington immiserated average Iranians.
With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about âtargeted sanctionsâ that exclusively punish âbad actorsâ and their business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.
I just read @RichardMNephew's "The Art of Sanctions."
Nephew, ex-Obama State Dept sanctions coordinator, clinically & chillingly details how pain is the essence of the US global sanctions regime.
Unfortunately, he hasn't been honest about the contents of his own book. Thread: pic.twitter.com/r5y9bc93eU
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 13, 2020
The application of pain to a countryâs civilian population is central to Nephewâs sanctions strategy. As he explains in âThe Art of Sanctions,â for the unilateral coercive measures to succeed, they must impose significant pain to a stateâs most vulnerable sectors, shatter the stateâs political and social resolve, and ultimately force the state to cry uncle in the face of Washingtonâs demands.
Nephew detailed how, as JCPOA negotiations got underway in January 2012, he led a process to reduce Iranâs oil revenue and starve its economy.
After the Obama administration successfully pushed for a wholesale reduction in oil exports and other unilateral coercive measures, Iranâs economy went from a period of growth to a sudden and staggering contraction, while the value of its currency tumbled.
Nephew pronounced the economic assault he engineered to be âa tremendous success.â
Nephew also patted himself on the back for tripling the price of chicken âduring important Iranian holiday periods,â thereby âcontribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.â
Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. âIranâs manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,â Nephew wrote.
There were some goods that Nephew wanted Iran to import, however. In hopes of fomenting social unrest, he said Washington âexpanded the ability of US and foreign companies to sell Iranians technology used for personal communicationsâ so they could âlearn more about the dire straits of their countryâs economyâŚâ
During a December 6, 2017 panel discussion about his book at Columbia Universityâs Center on Global Energy Policy, Nephew detailed with a chilling smile how he not only sabotaged Iranâs automotive industry, but targeted âthings like unemployment, to try to drive that up and make things a little more sticky.â
While discussing his book, "The Art of Sanctions," @richardmnephew boasted with a wide grin that the economic warfare tactics he devised drove up unemployment rates in Iran.
Nephew was just appointed as Biden's deputy Iran envoy.
My full story here: https://t.co/FWTYO7Ab4G pic.twitter.com/m5431czF8i
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 8, 2021
In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that âthe main targetâ of the sanctions regime he designed was âthe oligarchs.â But his book on âThe Art of Sanctionsâ tells another story.
Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration destroyed the economic prospects of Iranâs working-class majority while ensuring that âonly the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iranâs continued connectedness,â he wrote. As âstories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,â Nephew pronounced another success.
As he made clear, the rising inequality âwas a choiceâ that Washington âmade on the basis of helping to drive up the pressure on the Iranian economy from internal sources.â Nephew went on to claim credit for October 2012 protests brought on by the devaluation of Iranâs currency.
In a fairly stunning admission, Nephew admits at one point that despite providing Iran with supposed humanitarian exceptions on US sanctions, the economic war he helped design caused a catastrophic shortage of medicine and medical devices, largely because average Iranians could not afford them.
Despite acknowledging the heavy toll of human suffering brought on by the sanctions he personally conceived, suggesting they could have prompted high numbers of excess deaths, Nephew appears to be devoid of contrition.
During a December 2016 trip to Moscow, he complained that despite the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, food was still widely available at local restaurants â âhardly a level of painâ that was necessary to bring the Kremlin to heel.
He called to âdevelop a strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on those areas [of the Russian economy] that are vulnerabilities and avoid those that are not.â
So who is Richard Nephew? Does he lurk in the shadow world of intelligence intrigues and spook wars, keeping a low profile while he waits to strike the enemy? Or is he a fire-breathing hardliner bellowing threats against Americaâs adversaries from Beltway think tank panels? The reality is much more banal.
When he is not snatching chicken from Iranian kids during their winter holiday, Nephew is spending quality time with his own, amusing them with his tattered dad rock t-shirts and flashing arms adorned with tribal tattoos.
Boom!
Immediate reaction
Wife: âOh lord.â
Son: âyou look like a pirate!â
Daughter 1: âhow old is that shirt?â Told answer. âOh that makes sense.â
Daughter 2: softly, âoh my god.â pic.twitter.com/TyhdHEr0tK— Richard Nephew (@RichardMNephew) March 18, 2020
In an administration filled with fun-loving, ethnically diverse characters who moonlight as rock guitarists, decorate the walls of their homes with Haitian art, bob their heads to Tupac, and even enjoy an occasional toke, all while keeping the gears of a ferociously violent empire grinding along, the tattooed sanctions artist seems like a perfect fit.
Meanwhile, in Iran, where a leading daily recently portrayed Nephew as Keanu Reeves in the horror film The Devilâs Advocate, his elevation to a senior diplomatic role is viewed as a sign of more pain to come.
Vatan-e Emrooz highlights Richard Nephewâs appointment as deputy special envoy for Iran.
The outlet highlights the fact that he was one of the designers of the Iran sanctions regime pic.twitter.com/vZHJlJIqU4— Omer Carmi (@CarmiOmer) March 2, 2021
Featured image: Entitled âThe Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,â the bookâs cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government.
(The Grayzone) By Max Blumenthal
OT/OH
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on Americaâs state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
