There is a peculiar kind of whiplash in watching the same administration ease sanctions on Vladimir Putin's Russia while threatening military action against Iran's nuclear facilities in the same news cycle. One adversary reportedly receives energy concessions; the other faces threats of airstrikes. Both nations are, by Washington's own stated logic, rogue actors: one is waging a war of aggression that has killed tens of thousands and leveled Ukrainian cities, the other is suspected of advancing toward nuclear weapons capability. Yet one is being economically rewarded while the other is being threatened with military force. This is not a contradiction born of incoherence alone. It is the logical endpoint of a decades-long transformation of sanctions from a tool of collective principle into an instrument of pure transactional leverage.

A Deal Dressed as Diplomacy

The reported facts are straightforward and striking. As Ukraine's forces press gains in occupied Donetsk, the Trump administration has reportedly facilitated a diesel-supply arrangement that eases sanctions pressure on Moscow. Russia, meanwhile, continues to strike Ukrainian regions, deliberately targeting power infrastructure as winter approaches, a strategy designed to break civilian morale by denying heat and water to millions. Volodymyr Zelensky, watching Washington soften its stance toward the government bombing his country's grid, has pivoted to Europe, requesting €70 billion in emergency funding and calling the American posture "weak." Ursula von der Leyen has responded by declaring that EU support "matters more than ever."

Set this against the Iran picture. Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have recovered to elevated levels as of recent months, though reports suggest they remain below pre-conflict peaks. Tehran's capacity to choke global energy markets appears to be constrained, which makes it, paradoxically, a safer target for threats. Iran's foreign ministry has denied nuclear activity at disputed facilities and dismissed American warnings as baseless, but the saber-rattling continues regardless, part of a pattern of US-Israeli operations against Iran that has run for years.

The asymmetry is the story. Russia, a nuclear-armed power waging an actual war in Europe, reportedly gets an energy deal. Iran, a regional actor whose nuclear program remains contested, faces threatened military action. The common denominator is not principle. It is leverage, and whose compliance is currently useful to Washington.

Sanctions Were Never Pure, But They Were Collective

It is tempting to romanticize an earlier era when sanctions reflected something like international consensus. That romance does not survive contact with the historical record. When Mussolini's Italy invaded Abyssinia in October 1935, the League of Nations did impose sanctions, but deliberately excluded oil from the list of banned goods. By April 1936, Abyssinia had fallen, the League's authority was terminally damaged, and Mussolini had been pushed into Hitler's arms. The lesson then was not that sanctions don't work. It was that half-hearted, self-interested sanctions, applied by nations more worried about their own trade than about the precedent of aggression, simply advertise the weakness of the enforcers.

The apartheid-era sanctions against South Africa tell a similar story of selective will. The UN voted for an economic boycott in 1962, but the measure was toothless because the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany kept trading regardless. It took until 1986, nearly a quarter-century later, for the Commonwealth to impose real sanctions, and even then Margaret Thatcher's Britain opted out. The US Congress had to override Ronald Reagan's veto to impose its own sanctions regime. Desmond Tutu's 1984 Nobel Peace Prize reflected moral clarity that took governments decades to catch up to. Sanctions, in other words, have rarely been the product of unified conviction. They have always been hostage to the commercial interests of whoever is doing the sanctioning.

What is different now is not that self-interest has crept into sanctions policy. It is that the pretense of principle has been largely abandoned. The 1935 League at least felt the need to look like it was punishing aggression, even as it carved out the oil loophole that let Mussolini's war machine keep running. Today's reported diesel deal requires no such cover story. It is openly framed as energy diplomacy, a transaction, not a moral judgment suspended for practical reasons.

Iran's Lesson, Learned the Hard Way

If Tehran wanted evidence that international rules bend according to who is useful to whom, it has had decades to collect it. Historians of Iran's nuclear program note that Iran fought its war with Iraq in the 1980s while the international community stayed largely silent about Saddam Hussein's invasion and his subsequent use of chemical weapons, with the US and most Arab states tacitly backing Baghdad. It was in this climate of abandonment that Iran likely launched its covert weapons program, having concluded it could trust no external power to protect it. The current threats against Iranian nuclear facilities are, from Tehran's perspective, simply confirmation of a pattern three decades old: international law is enforced selectively, and self-reliance, however dangerous, is the only durable security strategy.

This is the same bitter arithmetic that drove the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Stalin did not trust the British and French to protect Soviet interests against Japan in the east or Germany in the west; London's diplomatic effort consisted of sending a low-level envoy on a slow steamer while Berlin dispatched Ribbentrop on Hitler's personal aircraft. The lesson of 1939, like the lesson of Iran's nuclear calculus, is that when great powers signal through action rather than rhetoric that they view smaller states as expendable or merely useful, those smaller states respond by hedging, arming, and trusting no one. Sanctions regimes and their selective application are one of the clearest signals available.

The Gulf War Counterfactual

It is worth remembering that sanctions backed by genuine, broad coalition resolve have worked, at least partially. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush assembled a coalition of more than 600,000 troops from over 30 nations, applying trade sanctions before issuing an ultimatum. When the January 1991 deadline passed, Operation Desert Storm expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait within four days, at a cost of fewer than 400 allied casualties. That episode is often cited as sanctions' great success story, but it is worth noting what made it work: near-universal international buy-in, a clear redline (the invasion of a sovereign state), and a credible threat of overwhelming force behind the economic pressure. Saddam, notably, remained in power regardless; sanctions alone, even backed by war, did not achieve regime change.

Compare that unity to today's fractured picture. There is no coalition behind the reported diesel deal with Russia. There is no UN resolution, no Security Council consensus, just a bilateral arrangement struck over the heads of Ukraine and its European backers, who are left scrambling for €70 billion to fill the gap. The Gulf War model required collective will; the current moment substitutes bilateral convenience and calls it strategy.

What History Actually Teaches

None of this means sanctions are inherently hypocritical or useless. It means they have always been a reflection of the sanctioning power's priorities, dressed up, with varying degrees of sincerity, as principle. The question worth asking is not whether today's selective application of pressure against Russia and Iran is unprecedented. It is whether the gap between stated principle and actual practice has grown so wide that it no longer serves even the sanctioning power's own interests.

Mussolini drew the correct lesson from the League's oil loophole: that the international order would tolerate aggression if enforcement was inconvenient. Stalin drew the correct lesson from Britain's halfhearted courtship: that smaller or warier powers would be abandoned when the moment required it. Iran has spent 40 years absorbing the same lesson about American and international commitment to consistent rules. Today, watching Washington reportedly ease pressure on Moscow while rattling sabers at Tehran, Beijing and Moscow alike are drawing their own conclusions about what the United States actually values: not international law, not nonproliferation, not the sovereignty of invaded nations, but leverage, framed and reframed to fit the deal of the week.

Zelensky's pivot to Europe, and von der Leyen's declaration that EU support "matters more than ever," may be the most honest geopolitical signal of the moment. It suggests that Europe, at least, understands what history keeps demonstrating: that sanctions divorced from collective, consistent principle are not policy. They are leverage with better public relations, and leverage, as Abyssinia and apartheid-era South Africa both taught the world in their own ways, eventually fails the people who are counting on it most.