June 16, 2017
President Trump says the Islamic Republic would have collapsed by now if his predecessor had not handed it a lifeline by agreeing to the nuclear deal and lifting punitive sanctions.
The fact-checkers at The Associated Press looked at that claim last week and rated it unreasonable.
Speaking in Jerusalem last Monday, Trump said of Iran, “I think they would have failed, totally failed, within six months. We gave them a lifeline and we not only gave them a lifeline, we gave them wealth and prosperity. And we also gave them an ability to continue with terror and with all of the things they’ve been doing.”
The AP said predicting the future with certainty is never possible, but “such an imminent collapse of Iran’s economy was highly improbable. International sanctions on Iran in response to its nuclear program had indeed driven its economy into crisis earlier this decade. But even before the nuclear deal, Iran had cut budget expenditures and fixed its balance of payments. It was still exporting oil and importing products from countries such as Japan and China.”
The AP pointed out, “International economists as well as US officials did not foresee an imminent economic collapse.”
It quoted Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as saying, “There is no evidence to suggest that the Islamic Republic would have fallen within six months.”
And Patrick Clawson, who heads the Iran program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, called Trump’s claim an exaggeration. “I don’t know what ‘totally failed’ means in terms of an economy,” Clawson said.
The AP further said, “Trump also exaggerates in suggesting the deal has made Iran prosper. While the government is buying planes from the likes of Airbus and Boeing, and wooing other big foreign companies, Iran is still struggling to attract international investment. A major theme of its recent presidential campaign was the lack of economic benefits that ordinary Iranians are seeing from the agreement.”