Treasury Secretary Urges Squashing Iran's Economy

The working family in Oldham will notice this in the price of the loaf before they notice it in any newspaper, for when a great power sets out to squash another nation’s economy, the first casualty is always the oil beneath the ships, and the second is the flour in the sack. That is where the analysis begins.

The US Treasury secretary has asked the allies of America to help squash the economy of Iran. I note the word, because the word is unusual. Governments do not usually speak so plainly. They speak of “sanctions regimes” and “economic pressure mechanisms” and “coordinated fiscal measures,” phrases built to put a wall of syllables between the policy and the person it lands on. But here the word chosen is squash - a word a child uses for a beetle underfoot, a word with no Latin in it at all, a word that tells the plain truth about what is intended. And I confess this troubles me more than the euphemism would have, for a man who reaches for a plain word usually does so because he has stopped thinking of the object of his sentence as a person capable of being addressed in polite language. You do not ask your allies to help you “adjust the fiscal trajectory” of a farmer in Isfahan. You ask them to help you squash him. The word is a confession.

Here is the plain-English translation of the request, since the request itself is already plain: the Treasury wants every ally - every government that buys from America, borrows from America, or fears America - to cut off the money that reaches ordinary Iranians, so that the pressure on Tehran’s rulers becomes unbearable. The mechanism is old and it is not mysterious. Squeeze the oil trade, and the currency falls. When the currency falls, the price of bread in Tehran rises for the baker’s family exactly as it will rise, by a different road, for the baker’s family in Oldham. Sanctions do not descend on presidents. They descend on markets, and markets pass their grief downward, the way water finds the lowest room in the house.

And here is the part the Treasury secretary did not need to explain, because everyone in the room already understood it: the allies asked to do this squashing are not being asked as an act of charity. They are being asked to choose a side, and choosing has a price of admission - continued access to American markets, American credit, American goodwill, none of it dispensed freely. So the government of, say, a European ally weighs the diplomatic bill against the certain domestic cost of higher energy prices, for Iran’s oil does not vanish from the earth when its sale is squashed, it merely becomes scarcer on the exchange, and scarcity is the oldest tax there is, collected without a vote, without a receipt, and without mercy for the man who did not choose it.

I have said before that I distrust the word “economy” spoken by a man who has never missed a meal, and nothing in this affair changes my opinion. Iran’s economy, viewed from the Treasury building, is a lever to be pushed or eased. Viewed from a kitchen in Isfahan or Shiraz, it is whether there is oil for the lamp and rice for the pot. The families there did not vote for the enrichment programme that provoked this policy, any more than the family in Oldham voted for the fuel bill that will climb quietly upward as the shipping lanes grow nervous. Both sets of families will be told, in due course, that the sacrifice was necessary, and both will be told this in the gentlest possible language, for that is where the euphemism returns - it is not spent on the enemy abroad, who gets the honest word squash, but saved carefully for the citizen at home, who will be told only that prices reflect “global energy volatility.”

Somewhere tonight a family is stretching one loaf over two days, and no communique from any Treasury will tell them why.