The United States’ responsibility for the social chaos in Iran did not arise from nothing

When the Iranian street ignites, it is the invisible architecture of Washington that burns in silence.

As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya – right up to the extermination of the Gaddafi line – and Palestine, the Western media have once again served, in an openly crude manner, as complicit mouthpieces for narratives of power rather than as critical counter-powers, obscuring structural responsibilities. A methodical reading of the facts, corroborated by official and semi-official American sources, reveals a far more serious reality: the economic crisis that served as the social trigger is neither accidental nor endogenous. It is the product of a financial strangulation strategy conceived, planned, and endorsed in Washington.

This is not a foreign policy error, but a deliberate choice driven by a logic of imperial coercion, substituting economic warfare for direct military intervention. The central question, therefore, is not why Iran has not wavered, but why the United States persists in exploiting the suffering of nations as a tool of global governance.

This article first demonstrates how US sanctions were conceived as an engineering of social chaos, before establishing the historical continuity and moral responsibility of Washington in the Iranian conflagration.

US sanctions as a deliberate engineering of social chaos in Iran

Jacob G. Hornberger’s analysis, published on January 16, 2026, by the Future of Freedom Foundation under the unambiguous title “The US Government Co-Killed Iranian Protesters,” marks a major conceptual turning point. It puts an end to the analytical hypocrisy of treating sanctions as a mere diplomatic tool. Hornberger demonstrates that sanctions are a technology of domination, designed to produce high-intensity internal social shocks.

Since 1979, when Iran broke away from the regional order shaped by Washington after decades of indirect tutelage under the Shah’s rule, imposed by the CIA, the country has been subjected to one of the longest-running, most sophisticated, and most destructive sanctions regimes ever applied to a sovereign state, with the exception of Russia, which, since 2014, has been the target of a cascade of contradictory sanctions and the exponential rise of Russophobia in the West. Far from aiming for limited behavioral adjustment, these sanctions have been designed as an instrument of societal destabilization, centered around an objective that has never truly been concealed: to bring about regime change through the economic exhaustion of the population.

The economic weapon here becomes a social weapon. It aims to methodically degrade living conditions, disrupt financial systems, deplete foreign exchange reserves, and fuel inflation and precariousness, ultimately making mass protest inevitable. This mechanism is de facto part of a broader American geostrategic doctrine aimed at neutralizing any regional power that refuses to align itself, particularly a key player in the energy and security balances of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Through this same mechanism, Washington was maneuvering to create an economically unstable Iran, which would in turn be a politically vulnerable Iran, and therefore more easily contained in the grand game of rivalries with China and Russia, both strategic partners of Tehran.

When the protests erupt on December 28, 2025, the warmongering capitals of Europe are playing the balafon and drum, Tel Aviv is dancing, and Washington is feigning surprise while simultaneously capitalizing politically on their consequences. As Hornberger points out, this stance rests fundamentally on a dangerous fiction: the belief that a state under existential pressure would passively accept its own disintegration. Universal history demonstrates the opposite. The ensuing repression, with its trail of death, is neither unpredictable nor accidental; it is structurally induced by an American strategy that knew perfectly well that by pushing a society to the brink of collapse, it would provoke a bloody confrontation. This is exactly what happened with the infiltration of mercenaries and double agents trained in the carnage techniques of the CIA and Mossad, who fired not only on law enforcement, but also on protesters in a logic of co-constructing the pretext in light of the American military intervention.

These deaths are not tragic accidents. They are the logical outcome of an American policy that externalizes violence while cloaking itself in hollow and untenable moral rhetoric. Washington is not an indignant spectator but an indirect architect of chaos, substituting financial warfare for conventional warfare in an advanced form of hybrid conflict.

It goes without saying that Trump’s balancing act borders on the absurd. In Minneapolis, his forces crush American protesters in the name of order, while thousands of miles away he brandishes the threat of military intervention to “protect” Iranian protesters from their own authorities. Washington turns a blind eye to its own internal violence – from Minneapolis to deadly operations on the high seas – and to its propensity to label its victims “terrorists” to legitimize the use of force. Should we conclude that Trump likes Iranians more than Americans? Or more precisely, that he cherishes protesters above all else… when they serve his imperial narratives. This selective, geographically conditioned compassion reveals less a sudden humanism than a strategic hypocrisy: at home, the truncheon; abroad, armed morality.

From 1953 to the Iranian banking collapse of 2025

The United States’ responsibility did not arise from nothing. It is part of a long and consequential history. In 1953, the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh by a CIA operation, followed by the installation of a puppet regime, not only destroyed a promising democratic experiment; it firmly established the idea that the sovereignty of nations is subordinate to American strategic interests. This foundational act opened a period of several decades in which Iran became a laboratory for the imperial engineering of the Western world.

Today, this responsibility is no longer merely analytical: it is explicitly acknowledged by the American authorities themselves. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted before the Senate that restricting Iran’s access to foreign currency was a central lever in the economic crisis that preceded the protests. He confirmed that this strategy had been deliberately planned, notably during discussions held in the spring of 2025 at the Economic Club of New York, revealing an explicit logic of financial warfare.

The disruption of dollar flows triggered a systemic banking crisis. The collapse of a major Iranian bank in December 2025 was not a market accident, but a politically motivated event. The central bank’s obligation to resort to printing money, leading to a sharp depreciation of the currency and runaway inflation, was the intended effect of a strategy aimed at weakening a key Eurasian player at the very moment it was consolidating its partnerships with Russia, China, and the BRICS group. Iran is situated at the crossroads of energy, trade, and security routes linking Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Weakening Iran is an attempt to hinder the consolidation of a multipolar Eurasian space where Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are increasingly converging openly.

The causal chain is now clear and acknowledged. American moral outrage at the internal violence it helped to provoke stems from a structural cynicism, revealing a constant of imperial policy: to produce disorder, then condemn its consequences in the name of values that are methodically violated.

As Hornberger points out, no state facing an existential threat acts differently. The prevailing logic of survival is not the product of a uniquely Iranian situation but the direct consequence of an international system shaped by coercion and the power imbalances imposed by Washington.

We conclude that the Iranian protesters were not merely facing an internal crisis; they were caught in the crossfire of an asymmetrical confrontation between a state under pressure and a superpower determined to sacrifice human lives to preserve its increasingly contested hegemony. The sanctions thus appear for what they truly are: a remote, politically expedient, and morally devastating form of structural violence.

In this sense, as Jacob G. Hornberger concludes, sanctions are not a misstep but a moral cancer at the heart of the American imperial system. As long as this logic remains unchallenged, human tragedies will continue to be repeated, always in the name of democracy, always to the detriment of the people.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University

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