The Squeeze and the Tree

You ever notice how some folks will declare war on a problem with grand gestures and capital letters, while the simplest, most human truth sits right there, waiting to be acknowledged?

I was thinking about this the other day watching Old Man Jenkins go at his tractor. Hours he spent, taking the thing apart piece by piece, when all along it was just a loose connection. One wiggle and she fired right up. He looked at his hands, then at the pile of parts around him, and said something I can't print in a family publication.

Reminds me of how Washington handles international disputes.

Secretary Bessent announced a new round of sanctions on Iran last week, calling it the "single greatest financial offensive ever." The President called it an "economic D-Day." That's a lot of capital letters for what amounts to the same squeeze we've been applying since before some of these Treasury secretaries were knee-high to a grasshopper.

Now, Chamberlain's Bend has its own version of international disputes. Aunt Vi has run the church kitchen committee for seventeen years, and there's a faction that wants to rotate the responsibility. They've got some sound arguments. Their method, though, is something else. They voted to stop reimbursing Vi for supplies unless she submitted itemized receipts within 48 hours. They moved planning meetings to Tuesday afternoons, which everyone knows she can't attend because she drives the Meals on Wheels route on Tuesdays. They were trying, in short, to make it impossible for her to function.

Here's what the faction didn't understand about Vi. You can't squeeze a person like her into submission. You can only squeeze her into being more Vi. She showed up the next Sunday with a three-ring binder containing every receipt she'd kept since 1987. She stood up during announcements and read them aloud, in order, for forty-three minutes. Reorganized the pantry while she was at it. By the time she finished, the faction had retreated so far back into their pews you could barely see them, and Vi had more control over that kitchen than ever.

There's a former diplomat named Alan Eyre who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal back in 2015. He told NPR that the United States has already targeted, and I'm going to quote him here because he said it better than I could, "the low-hanging fruit, the mid-hanging fruit, the high-hanging fruit, the tree." His point was that there aren't any new sanctions left that would actually change the Iranian government's behavior. What you're left with is the squeezing motion itself, performed for its own sake.

I understand the thinking. You see a regime doing things you can't stomach, you want to cut off every lifeline it has. Secretary Bessent wrote that the objective is to "sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone." He's talking about going after the countries that still trade with Iran, mostly China, which buys about 90 percent of Iran's oil.

But here's what forty-one years of writing about grain elevators and church kitchens has taught me about how people behave when they're cornered.

When you cut off every economic lifeline a country has, the government doesn't collapse. It gets desperate. And the people who suffer are the ones who didn't have a say in any of it. The Iranian rial has already dropped to a record low. Inflation is running close to 90 percent. NPR spoke to a woman in Tehran who said she's buying groceries on credit at her corner store because she doesn't have cash. Couldn't afford tomato paste to make pasta. Insulin has gotten too expensive for people who need it to stay alive. Power cuts, rising unemployment, the whole picture.

For my non-Midwestern readers, buying groceries on credit at a small store doesn't mean a card or a formal loan. It means the woman at the register writes your name in a spiral notebook and you settle up when you can. It runs on trust and the knowledge that you'll see each other again. It's not a system built for indefinite strain.

Iran's new security chief has promised a "seismic" retaliation. He's threatened that "not even a single drop of oil will leave the region." The Strait of Hormuz has already been effectively closed for months. Energy exports from the Gulf have suffered the biggest disruption in their history.

I don't pretend to know the right policy for Iran. That's above my pay grade and probably above yours too, if I'm being honest. But I do know what happens when you squeeze something until there's nothing left to squeeze. The pressure goes somewhere. Earlier this year, Iranians took to the streets over the economic conditions. The government cracked down hard. That's what desperate governments do. They turn inward.

Aunt Vi didn't fold when the faction came after her. She got stronger and more entrenched. The Iranian government, facing the same kind of pressure, is doing the same thing governments do, which is dig in and make ordinary people pay the cost of the standoff.

The county fair has been "next month" since 1991. Nobody in Chamberlain's Bend thinks it's actually coming. But we still talk about it, still plan for it, still hold out that someday the Ferris wheel will arrive and everything will be different. There's something in human nature that insists the squeeze will eventually produce the result we want, even when all the evidence says otherwise.

You can announce an "economic D-Day" as many times as you like. You can call it the "single greatest financial offensive ever." But the woman buying pasta on credit in Tehran doesn't care about the capital letters. She just needs to feed her family.

The tree is still standing. It's the people underneath it who keep falling.

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