Lifting sanctions on Iran during the pandemic could both “ease tensions in the (Middle East) region” and win “favour among the Iranian population”, insisted Lowy Institute research fellow Rodger Shanahan on this page last week. He is wrong on both counts.

Past is precedent. In 1992, the then ­German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, argued the best way to better human rights in Iran and reduce its regional aggression was through “critical dialogue”. It didn’t work. The Iranian government responded by launching an unprecedented terror campaign: assassinations in Berlin just weeks later, a truck bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, and another targeting an American barracks in Saudi Arabia two years after that.

The theory that easing sanctions and increasing trade would moderate Iran and benefit ordinary Iranians, however, was one that European diplomats refused to abandon. Between 1998 and 2005, European Union trade with Iran almost tripled. Over the same period, the price of oil rose five-fold. That hard currency windfall coincided with Iran’s ballistic missile and then-covert nuclear push.

Nor is there any truth to the ­belief that increasing trade can bolster the fortunes of Iran’s so-called reformers over its hardliners and benefit ordinary Iranians. In reality, the dichotomy between hardliner-versus-reformer is less real than a deliberate good cop, bad cop strategy.

Speaking at Gilan University in 2008, for example, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, former spokesman for the “reformist” president ­Mohammad Khatami, explained: “We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence-building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the (military) activities.”

Perhaps the greatest reason why sanctions relief does not help ordinary Iranians is Khatam al-Anbiya, the economic wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Rather than lose their privileged status at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the Revolutionary Guards decided to move into the civilian economy. Now, 32 years later, they dominate manufacturing, trade, and all major industries, and control perhaps 40 per cent of Iran’s economy. Just as the North Korean regime regularly diverted food aid and fuel to its army as its citizens suffered, so too do the Revolutionary Guards today. This is why, when the World Health Organisation donated diagnostic kits and 7.5 tonnes of medical equipment to Iran to combat the coronavirus, the Revolutionary Guards diverted it. It is also the reason why ordinary Iranians felt no benefit from the unfreezing of assets or the investment boom after the 2015 nuclear deal.

The simple facts are that “maximum pressure” both works and is not to blame for Iran’s dire situation. It was maximum pressure and isolation that forced Iran’s revolutionary regime both to release US hostages and accept a ceasefire to end the Iran-Iraq War. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini said as much when he likened peace to “drinking a chalice of poison” from which he had no choice but to sip given the ­financial toll on Iran.

While some activists today cite last October’s Human Rights Watch report blaming sanctions for poor Iranian health, they both ignore that this report predates the establishment of a humanitarian channel to allow Iran to import medicine and that Human Rights Watch conducted no in-country research as the Iranian regime ­refused access to investigators.

The simple fact is Iran has ample resources to better the lives of its citizenry. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei controls a multi-­billion-dollar business empire and the Revolutionary Guards’ expensive destabilisation campaigns in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq.

Shanahan is also wrong that pausing sanctions would win over Iranian hearts and minds. Iranians from all walks of life have risen in protest over the past three years — not against the US, Australia, or the West in general, but rather against the corruption and oppression of the regime under which they suffer.

To pump money into a Revolutionary Guards-dominated economy would be to pay the opp­ressors and deny hope to those who suffer the most.

Australia has always been a moral light to other nations. It should use its standing to demand that Iran’s leaders prioritise the health of their own people over the murder of others whose only sins are being Sunni Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Baha’i. If Iran needs medical assistance, let them accept the direct medical assistance already offered by the US and other Western countries. To lift sanctions, however, would incentivise not only Iran, but every other dictatorship to point a gun at the heads of their own citizenry and demand cash from the West.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.