Opinion: Why Tariffs Are Not the Way to Effect Regime Change in Iran

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

As part of his strategy for isolating the radical mullah-ruled government of Iran in the world community, President Trump has announced plans to issue a 25% tariff against all countries that continue to do business with the current Iranian regime.

This is a counterproductive approach for three reasons.

First, and most immediately, this kind of threat hurts the Administration’s case in defending its program of IEEPA tariffs, the country-by-country process of negotiating trade deals based on the “reciprocal tariff” approach that the President came up with in 2025.

As revolutionary and unanticipated as that idea was, it has produced a number of terrific results, such as getting numerous countries to commit to dropping trade barriers against American goods, getting those countries to invest heavily in the building of new manufacturing plants in America, and getting the American purchasing world to diversify, reducing our dependence on China while “sharing the wealth” with the many other “low cost countries” that China has frozen out for so long, as well as increasing domestic production here at home.

All these deals are conditional upon the President having the power to negotiate them. The Supreme Court is seriously considering an effort to curtail this power, in a case to be announced any day now. Part of the reasoning for banning the IEEPA tariffs is said to be that if they don’t draw the line here, the White House may think it has the power to keep using random tariffs, conceived at a whim, anytime they want. The Trump Administration has not been really been cavalier, but it has looked that way sometimes, to the casual onlooker, so this a lever that the Left desperately wants to remove from the Oval Office.

This proposed 25% tariff on countries that do business with Iran could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on this subject. The challenges of 2025 were hard on many American businesses, but the results have had many positive effects that will continue for years; it would be tragic if suffering through all these trade challenges turned out to have been for naught.

We often speak of the lame duck nature of a president’s second term; nothing would make him more of a lame duck, truly knee-capping his next three years, as much as retroactively overturning the President’s negotiating authority this way, at this point.

Second, there is a largely unknown but still very important element of U.S. law that plays a role in this discussion: the anti-boycott legislation of the 1970s, which has been part of the American business world’s obligations for half a century now.

For the past 50 years, the Arab League has carried on a formal boycott against the nation of Israel. Gradually, over the years, a number of members of the Arab League have dropped their participation in this boycott (especially thanks to President Trump’s own work on the Abraham Accords in his first administration), but there are still many countries that enforce it, so the Arab League boycott of Israel remains a serious pain in international commerce.

The Arab League’s anti-Israel boycott is unusual. Most countries have sanctions against other countries, and there’s nothing wrong with that; sanctions are generally considered preferable to a shooting war, so we all have sanctions in place against our enemies. Such sanctions usually ban not only the government, but also all businesses and individuals in a country, from doing any business with the named enemy nation.

We ourselves have such absolute sanctions against Iran and North Korea, and near-absolute versions of these sanctions against Syria, Russia and Belarus, among others. So we have nothing against sanctions, as such.

However… we do not view the Arab League’s sanctions against Israel the same way, because they are far more expansive than ours.

The Arab League’s sanctions against Israel have always been designed to go after not just their enemy country, but also against members of their enemy’s ethnicity, and also against companies that do business with their enemy country, even business that doesn’t involve the sanctioning Arab nation or the transaction at hand, at all.

If an American company sells a product to a foreign customers, say, in Belgium or France or Singapore or South Africa (none of these are Arab nations, officially at least, you’ll note), the company’s legal department must check their customer’s proposed contract to make sure it doesn’t include any clauses committing to support of the Arab League boycott of Israel, because the foreign customer might have agreed to the boycott to please their own arab clients. U.S. law has forbidden American business participation in that boycott, that way, for 50 years. It’s a fundamental part of the U.S. Export Controls.

Why? Because the Arab League’s boycott against Israel includes a ban on a company having Jewish ownership, or Jewish employees, or using Israeli components, or doing unrelated business with Jewish companies, or using carriers that call Israeli ports, or a host of other offensive and intrusive demands that have no business being in a normal foreign policy based sanction program.

The American policy has always been that a country has a right to ban doing business with another country, but has no right to force such bans on unrelated foreign third parties for unrelated transactions. It just goes too far. So we ban the support of the Arab League’s boycott.

And the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has enforced this rule through the office of Anti-Boycott Compliance in Washington (a division of the Department of Commerce) for some fifty years now.

For us to recommend that other countries not do business with Iran makes perfect sense.

For us to remind other countries that Iran is an incredibly undependable partner, especially since we expect its government to fall any day now, so any deal they cut will be unlikely to succeed anyway, also makes perfect sense.

And for us to remind them that we’re basically shutting down the banks that would pay them, and that their currency is in freefall, so there’s no point in trying to do business with them, also makes perfect sense. And ought to be enough to convince them to stay away!

But to actually go so far as to punish our trading partners from doing business with Iran – unrelated business that the USA has no part in – is a violation of the very reasoning that we’ve depended on for fifty years to justify our own position on the Arab League’s boycott of Israel.

Undermining your own logic, unnecessarily and unhelpfully, is never a good idea.

Finally, the third reason not to use a tariff threat is simply the fact that we have better ways of supporting the Iranian people right now.

There are drone factories, munitions stores, missile launch sites, and military bases that the US Armed Forces can and should be obliterating in the coming days.

If we want to knock off Iran’s vile, malicious, homicidally maniacal government and help the revolution succeed, we can and should do that by focusing directly on Iran, not by involving other countries and starting new and unnecessary tangential fights both here and abroad.

See Dr. Rebecca Grant’s proposed list of targets in Fox News this week, for example. And there are probably plenty of other places to hit as well, that the government knows better than we do.

Thousands of people have been killed in the streets of Iran in recent days, over ten thousand by some reports, sometimes by random machine gun firing into crowds, by a psychotic government that has grown ever more desperate as the revolution has grown.

It’s time to act against Iran, not against our other trading partners.

We need to keep our eye on the ball. Getting the mullahs out of power and returning Iran to its once-proud position as a western-facing, secular, capitalist, modern nation, is the goal.

Divisive tariffs against other countries is not the way to get there.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo