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<font size="1"><a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/08/biden-iran-envoy-starving-civilians-pain-sanctions/">https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/08/biden-iran-envoy-starving-civilians-pain-sanctions/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Biden Iran envoy boasted of depriving
civilians of food, driving up Iranian inequality in sadistic sanctions
manual<br></h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Max Blumenthal · March 8, 2021</div>
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<br><h3>Richard Nephew has taken personal
credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment
rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous
success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.</h3>
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<p>The Joseph Biden administration has named <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/05/biden-middle-east-team-pentagon-state-department-nsc/">Richard Nephew</a>
as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of
sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took
personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their
automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.</p>
<p>Nephew has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a
tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was
still plentiful in the country’s capital despite mounting US sanctions.</p>
<p>Nephew’s 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.</p>
<p>After coordinating Obama’s sanctions regime against Iran, Nephew left the administration for a position at the <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1305019596055994373?s=20">energy industry-funded Center on Global Energy Policy</a>
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.</p>
<p>Entitled “The Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,” the book’s
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.</p>
<p>With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about
“targeted sanctions” that exclusively punish “bad actors” and their
business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.</p>
<p>The application of pain to a country’s civilian population is central
to Nephew’s sanctions strategy. As he explains in “The Art of
Sanctions,” for the unilateral coercive measures to succeed, they must
impose significant pain to a state’s most vulnerable sectors, shatter
the state’s political and social resolve, and ultimately force the state
to cry uncle in the face of Washington’s demands.</p>
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Nephew-pain.png?resize=546%2C648&ssl=1" alt="Richard Nephew The Art of Sanctions" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="364" height="432">An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions
<p>Nephew detailed how, as JCPOA negotiations got underway in January
2012, he led a process to reduce Iran’s oil revenue and starve its
economy.</p>
<p>After the Obama administration successfully pushed for a wholesale
reduction in oil exports and other unilateral coercive measures, Iran’s
economy went from a period of growth to a sudden and staggering
contraction, while the value of its currency tumbled.</p>
<p>Nephew pronounced the economic assault he engineered to be “a tremendous success.”</p>
<img src="https://i1.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-06-at-4.27.20-PM.png?resize=900%2C468&ssl=1" alt="Richard Nephew The Art of Sanctions" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="432" height="225">An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions
<p>Nephew also patted himself on the the back for tripling the price of
chicken “during important Iranian holiday periods,” thereby
“contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years
of financial restrictions.”</p>
<p>Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent
Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars.
“Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this
sanction,” Nephew wrote.</p>
<p>There were some goods that Nephew wanted Iran to import, however. In
hopes of fomenting social unrest, he said Washington “expanded the
ability of US and foreign companies to sell Iranians technology used for
personal communications” so they could “learn more about the dire
straits of their country’s economy…”</p>
<p><img src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-06-at-4.33.05-PM.png?resize=1126%2C554&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="432" height="213"></p>
<p><img src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EhxP4iyXcAAkkTk.png?resize=478%2C627&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="329" height="432"></p>
<p>During a December 6, 2017 <a href="https://youtu.be/ShfJdn5UoDo?t=1510">panel discussion</a>
about his book at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy,
Nephew detailed with a chilling smile how he not only sabotaged Iran’s
automotive industry, but targeted “things like unemployment, to try to
drive that up and make things a little more sticky.”</p>
<p>In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that “the main
target” of the sanctions regime he designed was “the oligarchs.” But his
book on “The Art of Sanctions” tells another story.</p>
<p>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 Iran’s working-class majority while ensuring that “only the
wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran’s
continued connectedness,” he wrote. As “stories began to emerge from
Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,” Nephew pronounced
another success.</p>
<p>As he made clear, the rising inequality “was a choice” that
Washington “made on the basis of helping to drive up the pressure on the
Iranian economy from internal sources.” Nephew went on to claim credit
for October 2012 protests brought on by the devaluation of Iran’s
currency.</p>
<p><img src="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EhxRNtbWkAIvpp9.png?resize=443%2C531&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="360" height="432"></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img src="https://i1.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EhxSxOKXsAEYQqV.png?resize=440%2C348&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="432" height="342"></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 – “hardly a level of pain” that was necessary to
bring the Kremlin to heel.</p>
<p>He <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1305019593476509702/photo/2">called</a>
to “develop 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.”</p>
<p><img src="https://i1.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EhxT4OgWoAEpMWl.png?resize=443%2C473&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="405" height="432"></p>
<p>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 America’s adversaries from Beltway think tank panels?
The reality is much more banal.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In an administration filled with fun-loving, ethnically diverse characters who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqb7AQ3u2x8">moonlight as rock guitarists</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/JakobJohnston/status/1368552597003599873?s=20">decorate the walls</a> of their homes with Haitian art, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JQC3uHSVTA">bob their heads to Tupac</a>, and even <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKMwua-_jlQ">enjoy an occasional toke</a>,
all while keeping the gears of a ferociously violent empire grinding
along, the tattooed sanctions artist seems like a perfect fit.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Iran, where a leading daily recently portrayed Nephew
as Keanu Reeves in the horror film The Devil’s Advocate, his elevation
to a senior diplomatic role is viewed as a sign of more pain to come.</p>
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