For decades, Washington has wielded economic sanctions against Tehran not as a blade to cut down a government, but as a weight to slow its ambitions — making every missile component costlier, every oil shipment more treacherous, every strategic goal harder to reach. Kerri Bitsoff, a former Treasury official who spent years tracing weapons procurement networks, argues that this distinction is not merely semantic: sanctions that are mistaken for regime-change tools are sanctions that will always disappoint. The real measure of their effectiveness lies not in the length of designation lists, but