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Source: https://jcfa.org/how-to-close-irans-escape-routes/
How to Close the Leaks in Iran's Economic Siege
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Shlomi Michaels - The chokehold on Iran is failing because leaks function as a pressure-release valve for the regime. The leaks in America's economic siege on Iran include the Turkish land corridor, the Iraqi backdoor, and the crypto shadow ledger. Revenue from Turkish trade, Iraqi transshipment, and crypto liquidity does not merely offset the sanctions. It is disproportionately captured by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), allowing the regime's most powerful internal factions to insulate themselves from the scarcity that the rest of the Iranian economy experiences. Turkey remains the single largest overland leak in the siege. It persists because individual U.S. sanctions designations have not been backed by consequences the Turkish financial and political establishment actually fears. The objective is to convert isolated enforcement actions into structural risk policed by Ankara's own banking sector. To neutralize the Iraqi backdoor, the objective is to make Baghdad's continued access to U.S. security and economic support conditional on measurable interdiction of this specific corridor. Indicators that the strategy is working will be signs that scarcity is reaching the regime's core. This memorandum lays out the specific U.S. agency-assigned work required to convert a rhetorical siege into an operational one. When the leaking valves are actually closed, the pressure starts becoming something the regime's own factions have to fight each other over. That fight, not a foreign hand, is what ultimately changes what comes next in Tehran. The writer is a former senior Israeli security official and adjunct professor at Columbia University.