By Qamar Bashir
Press Secretary to the President (Rtd)
Former Press Minister, Embassy of Pakistan to France
Former Press Attaché to Malaysia
Former MD, SRBC | Michigan, USA
Military strikes, economic strangulation and an open-ended American deployment risk turning pressure on Tehran into collective punishment of ordinary Iranians—and dragging the entire Middle East deeper into war.
The United States and Israel appear to be constructing two arms of the same pressure campaign against Iran. Israel threatens overwhelming military destruction if Tehran again attacks it, while Washington is tightening Iran’s economic isolation and maintaining a formidable military presence across the Middle East.
One attacks the state’s physical capacity; the other squeezes its financial oxygen. Between them stand nearly 90 million Iranian citizens who will ultimately bear much of the cost.
Washington describes its strategy differently. The Trump administration argues that sanctions, blockade and selective military pressure are intended to force Tehran to change its behavior and return to negotiations. Yet the scale and duration of the campaign increasingly raise a disturbing question: at what point does pressure on a government become collective punishment of a population?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has used unusually uncompromising language about America’s economic objective. Washington has launched an intensified campaign against Iran’s international financial and commercial lifelines, targeting shipping, aviation, technology, gold, digital assets and financial networks. Foreign companies and banks dealing with sanctioned Iranian entities face the enormous leverage of America’s dollar-based financial system.
The strategic objective is clear: deprive Tehran of revenue, foreign currency and international commercial access until economic pressure forces political concessions. But economies are not governments.
When oil revenue collapses, ordinary citizens lose purchasing power. When a currency depreciates, food, medicine and imported necessities become more expensive. When companies cannot trade, workers lose jobs. When banking channels close, families and legitimate businesses suffer alongside the institutions Washington actually intends to punish. Economic warfare may produce fewer dramatic television images than missiles, but its human consequences can penetrate every household.
That is why the language of economic strangulation is so troubling. Iran’s leadership may be the declared target, but Iranian families inevitably become part of the battlefield. A pensioner purchasing medicine, a mother buying groceries or a worker trying to support his family cannot isolate himself from inflation, shortages and economic contraction merely because sanctions were designed to influence his government. Meanwhile, military pressure is not disappearing.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended major American deployments in the Middle East into 2027. Approximately 50,000 U.S. military personnel and 19 warships remain positioned across the region, supported by fighter aircraft, air-defense systems and other forces. The deployment unmistakably demonstrates that America is preparing for a prolonged confrontation. That creates an extraordinary contradiction.
President Donald Trump speaks about limiting military involvement and relying increasingly upon economic pressure, while the Pentagon maintains the infrastructure required for blockade enforcement, missile interception, protection of commercial shipping and renewed offensive operations. This is not disengagement. It is military readiness combined with economic warfare.
Israel adds another dimension. Israeli leaders have again threatened devastating attacks against Iranian military and other strategic infrastructure. After months of conflict, the danger is that the distinction between military pressure and destruction of the economic foundations sustaining civilian life becomes progressively blurred.
Recent American strikes demonstrate how quickly civilians can become victims even when governments insist that they are attacking military targets. Iranian authorities reported civilian deaths and injuries following the latest U.S. operations, including casualties associated with a reported strike near a wedding gathering. Washington says it does not intentionally target civilians and is investigating that incident. But for the dead and wounded, intention does not reverse the consequences.
The greater danger is what happens if economic strangulation and repeated military destruction continue simultaneously. Iran possesses one of the Middle East’s largest populations. It also occupies perhaps its most strategically consequential geography. The Strait of Hormuz sits beside its coastline, while American bases, Gulf oil installations, shipping routes and some of the world’s largest energy facilities lie within the broader theater.
Iran cannot match the United States conventionally. It cannot match Israel’s combination of advanced aircraft, intelligence capabilities and sophisticated missile defenses. But it can retaliate asymmetrically. That retaliation would not fall primarily upon the American homeland thousands of miles away. It would fall upon the Middle East.
This is the strategic nightmare now developing. If American and Israeli pressure devastates Iran, Tehran may respond by expanding attacks against military facilities, shipping and infrastructure throughout the Gulf. Iran could be destroyed while simultaneously inflicting enormous damage upon neighboring economies. Everybody loses.
The assumption that sufficient suffering will automatically produce a government favorable to Washington is equally dangerous. Iranian history should discourage such confidence. Foreign intervention helped overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. A quarter-century later, the Shah—Washington’s principal regional ally—was swept away by a revolution that produced a government dramatically more hostile to the United States.
Destroying today’s Iranian state would offer no guarantee that tomorrow’s Iran would be moderate. The opposite could occur.
If central authority fractures, organized government and conventional armed forces could give way to militias, underground networks and radical organizations.
A centralized adversary can negotiate, sign agreements and enforce them. A fragmented landscape of armed groups may produce decades of asymmetric warfare. Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan should have taught the world that destroying institutions is much easier than constructing stable replacements. There is also a moral question America cannot escape.
For generations, the United States presented human rights, civilian protection and international law as essential elements of its global leadership. American influence came not only from aircraft carriers and dollars but from universities, technology, culture, diplomacy, alliances and the belief—sometimes justified, sometimes contested—that American power represented certain universal principles.
That soft power is an enormous strategic asset. Every civilian casualty, every image of devastated infrastructure and every Iranian family pushed toward desperation risks consuming another portion of it. The Muslim world therefore cannot remain a spectator.
Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, the UAE and other influential states should urgently seek an emergency session of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
The purpose should not be rhetorical condemnation. It should be the construction of a serious diplomatic initiative demanding both Israel and USA to stop this unfortunate war of choice otherwise face kinetic, economic, investment, trade and diplomatic offensive from all the Muslim states whether small or big.
The Middle East is approaching an escalation trap in which every strike supposedly justifies another strike, every sanction invites countermeasures and every temporary pause becomes an opportunity to replenish weapons and identify new targets.
Sooner or later, somebody must interrupt that cycle.
If diplomacy fails and military destruction combined with economic suffocation, history may judge that Iran was not the only casualty. The victims could include regional stability, the global economy, America’s soft power and the possibility of a generation of peace in the Middle East.
The time to prevent that outcome is now—before pressure intended to change Iran ends up destroying far more than Iran.
