For years, Washington has leaned on sanctions to contain Iran’s most dangerous capabilities.
Tehran’s drone and missile programs didn’t just survive under pressure, they adapted, scaled, and in many ways thrived, fueled in part by Western-made components slipping through global supply chains.
The result: a procurement network that’s harder to disrupt, more resilient, and still very much intact.
Now, Tehran isn’t just building for itself. It’s exporting the model — arming Russia in Ukraine, supplying proxies across the Middle East, and even laying the groundwork for drone production in places like Venezuela, putting parts of the United States within range.
So the question isn’t whether sanctions work — it’s whether we’re hitting the right targets.
To break all of this down, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by Kerri Bitsoff — a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) who has been called a ‘secret weapon’ in the fight against Iran's weapons procurement.
