Donald Trump did not bomb Iran in a policy vacuum. By the time he ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani in early 2020 and authorised strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, the United States (US) already possessed one of the most sophisticated legal‑economic coercive machines in history – a web of extra‑territorial laws, sanctions regimes and reporting mandates built to pressure hostile elites without crossing into open war. These ‘instruments of foreign policy’ were meant to give presidents a legal escalatory ladder between a démarche and a drone.Kinetic force causes irreversible consequences, including civilian casualties, regional destabilisation, a rally-round-the-flag effect and widespread anger. The tragedy is that force was used despite an exceptional set of coercive legal tools specifically designed for adversaries like Iran. Resorting to war was less a show of strength and more a sign of strategic impatience. It may also have reflected a deeper problem. Washington’s own coercive regime was sputtering against Iran, especially once Tehran carved out non‑dollar lifelines.In America’s arsenal were three prominent laws. For ‘systematic, ongoing and egregious violations’ of religious freedom, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), 1998, permits the president to designate “Countries of Particular Concern”. It mandates escalating actions such as private démarches, opposing World Bank loans, denying export guarantees, banning export licenses, blocking US bank credits and barring officials involved in abuses from the US.The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), 2000, which annually rates governments into three tiers regarding modern slavery and forced labour, kept Iran at Tier 3, withholding non-humanitarian aid and adding it to the block on IMF and World Bank loans.The third, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, 2016, allows the president to freeze assets and impose visa bans on individuals without imposing sanctions on entire countries. Several Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, intelligence officers and businesspeople have been designated, cut off from the dollar system and barred from the West. Overlay these tools with the Iran sanctions framework, including the Iran Sanctions Act, the Iran Non-Proliferation Act, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) and relevant executive orders, to find an intricately woven extra-territorial lawfare sanctioned by the US Congress.Despite these sanctions and designations, the Iranian regime remained largely unaffected, developing alternate survival strategies and distancing itself from the dollar-dominated financial system in favour of the yuan and rouble. By the mid-2020s, these tools had become less effective, not because of weak laws, but because the US failed to build an international consensus for enforcement. If applied consistently and under UN-approved sanctions, these laws could have maintained legal and financial pressure across the global economy.In 2018, US imposed additional measures after withdrawing from the nuclear deal. However, Iran’s resilience persisted as it continued to acquire dual-use technology and materials and secretly sold oil to Russia and China through its dark fleet, beyond US influence.Collateral damage to allies from such an overarching coercive regime, or from a descent into energetics, is significant. New Delhi has already had to handle US secondary sanctions when buying Iranian and Venezuelan oil, investing in Chabahar, or pursuing connectivity with Afghanistan and Central Asia. And when Washington subjects rapid kinetic escalations, the result is strategic whiplash. Oil prices surge, shipping and insurance costs increase, corporate earnings and invisible flows diminish, suffering spreads from farms over fertiliser to homes over gas to cars over fuel, while dissatisfaction with a strategic ally deepens.Strategically, Mr Trump’s approach felt out of step with an era in which America’s power had shifted from gunboats to courtrooms and clearing houses. Coercive legal regimes were built precisely to make war less necessary, but by bypassing prior international approval and applying sanctions selectively, Washington weakened one of its few real advantages – the ability to turn law into predictable leverage.In the process, it eroded decades of work to build a credible alternative to war. Instead of rebuilding a broad Iran sanctions coalition with Europe, Japan, South Korea, Gulf partners and key financial centres, updating UN mandates to tie human‑rights and trafficking findings to banking and energy obligations, and cutting even limited deals with Beijing and Moscow, the US administration failed to multi-lateralise pressure at the very moment it mattered most.Washington did, however, lean on a different kind of multilateralism by pushing Iran onto the blacklist of the largely opaque Financial Action Task Force (FATF), tightening the screws on its banking transactions. Yet FATF’s closed plenaries and unrecorded deliberations, unlike the UN’s open, consultative process, made it a shadowy instrument of financial warfare. Iran still adapted by using non‑dollar channels and deepening partnerships with Russia and China, blunting that pressure as well.Why, then, the sledgehammer? Perhaps it was political theatre, a call from a friendly capital or simple frustration at the visible failure of an uninternationalised coercive regime. Having once campaigned on ending foreign wars, Trump has ended up treating military force as a primary instrument of statecraft rather than the final rung on an escalatory ladder where law, finance, diplomacy and the UN were meant to do the heavy lifting.Safi Ahsan Rizvi is a risk analyst specialising in national and climate security, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and former banker who has served in the IPS, IB and NDMA. This post, originally published on his substack, Risk and Resilience, is being republished with permission.