Regardless what you think of the tactics, the sanctions are an economic vise -- a negotiating tactic to leverage a position -- it has nothing to do with race.
A tactic that takes 80 million people as hostages. Just as a side note: you can not give back Iranian citizenship (if that would be possible most Iranians in the West I know would do it). This concept does not exist. So even if you are the most western, fully integrated European which happens to have some Iranian roots you are still treated in a racist way because those new sanctions are so totally all-encompassing that you get fully subjected to it even if no practical connection to Iran exists.
You can totally "accidentally fail to declare" it. That's what I'd do living anywhere in Europe. For the most part, Europe won't put you in prison for ticking the wrong box on a form.
It is an objective fact that this president made the central issue of his campaign portraying two groups - Muslims and Hispanics - as a threat to the United States, and his two key differentiating policies from his peers in the republican primaries reflect that - respectively his "Muslim Ban" and "The Wall".
It is absurd to characterise this president's foreign policy on Iran as separate from that background.
I think you're getting caught up in semantics here. If you want to tie this back to the 'actual racism' you're inferring, the prejudice of the US polity towards the Iran people is what enables this policy to be enacted without any serious counter of moral concern from the populous. This actual racism is what permits the foreign policy, that ruins the lives of innocent people in far off countries. Further to that, if someone is okay with their government using this tactic on the innocent people of one foreign country vs another, you can tease apart their actual racism from nationalism.
Yes, PNAC's plan to dislodge the middle east was formed in the '90's. Their strategy and tactics included a series of kinetic wars that culminated with Syria, which they viewed as the most politically challenging situation. In contrast, Trump's strategy and tactics is based on economic force rather than kinetic wars. For economic force to work, the Iranian people must rise and act. Sanctions put the Iranian government into a weakened position and provide an opportunity for the people to act. The globalists don't believe in this strategy and will likely return to their strategy of kinetic war in the next administration if this doesn't work. The Iranian people are in a strong position to choose to act and prove the globalists wrong and kinetic wars are obsolete.
I think part of the problem is the fact that there's a real phenomenon that's important to talk about and describe, but rather than invent a new term, that the word 'racism' has repurposed to describe it instead.
200 years ago, everyone would have understood "racism" to mean what you have implied it means: conscious individual racial prejudice. And of course, one problem that (say) blacks in the US face is widespread, individual, conscious racial prejudice.
But there's yet another problem blacks face: the mechanisms of society as a whole disproportionately cause problems for black people, even when nobody involved is consciously prejudiced. When this was pointed out, people would respond, "But nobody in this organization is prejudiced". Well, it doesn't matter if the people are prejudiced or not, the emergent property of the system as a whole affects black people as though it was set up by people who are racist; and so the system is called "racist", even if nobody in it is trying to be racist.
I think the argument here is the same: Iranians are facing persecution for no other reason than the country they were born in. It doesn't matter if people making the policies of the US government is prejudiced against Iranians as individuals or not; the net effect is the same.
(FWIW I think the concept of "institutional racism" is useful, but the overloading of the term 'racist' to describe it is counterproductive in the long run.)
Surely the right term for what you describe is “discriminatory”. All forms of undesirable -ism fall within the broader, general purview of “discrimination”.
Perhaps it makes more sense if I phrase it thusly: the consequences of the decision do not depend upon why the decision was taken. It certainly sounds like a discriminatory practice, based on what is indicated. For sure, even if it had a decorous reason behind it, the consequences thereof are no less severe and irksome.
In this case, it seems that the companies are following a reasonable interpretation of the law of the land in which they operate. I don't the vast asymmetry of "break this law, do a [relatively] small amount of good for a [relatively] small number of people, put a substantial amount of the company at risk" makes any kind of logical business sense.