December 21, 2018
Officials of the Trump Administration have explained over and over again that the goal of their new Iran sanctions policy is to squeeze the Iranian economy so painfully that the regime will be denied the funds it needs to pursue its policies in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere across the Middle East.
But this is a kind of illogical reasoning that ignores reality.
If every dollar Iran earned from oil sales went to fund Hezbollah or pay for weapons for the Houthis in Yemen, then reducing Iran’s oil exports would clearly impact what Iran could do with Hezbollah and the Houthis.
But that isn’t how the world works—not even in the Islamic Republic.
All the revenues that accrue to the Islamic Republic go into a giant pot. The regime then sets its priorities—just as the US government and the Japanese government and all other governments set their priorities. Funds are then drawn from the pot—and, when the funds run out, the lowest priorities don’t get funded.
It has been clear for years—going back to the days of the stiff international sanctions from 2012 through 2015—that the regime’s lowest priority is development projects. They got axed then and they are being axed now. Clear evidence of that is the flight of Afghan refugees from Iran, reported on Page One of this issue. The Afghan workers dominate the construction industry—but there is so little work for them that they are leaving Iran at unprecedented speed.
Another low priority would appear to be teachers’ pay. The regime continues to resist giving teachers a decent pay scale.
Welfare is another apparent low priority. The collapse of the rial has meant that the monthly welfare payment of 455,000 rials per person per month is now worth less than $4. When the system was started in 2010 and that payment was set, it was worth about $40. The regime’s refusal to raise it shows that it puts a much higher priority on saving Syrian President Bashar al-Assad than on saving Iran’s poor.
Setting priorities is what government’s do. And extending the Islamic Republic’s reach deep into the Arab world is clearly a top priority of the regime. (The Number One priority is staying in power.)
Of course, Trump’s throttling of the Iranian economy could prompt the regime to change its priorities. That’s possible. It is much more likely, however, that the economic pinch will prompt the hardliners who run the system in Iran to double down on their current priorities. If so, it will take a major public uprising to force a change in priorities. That hasn’t happened yet. However, it is clear that many people in Iran see the regime’s international goals as the cause of their problems.
The frequent chants heard at protests since last December saying that the “enemy” of Iran is in Iran, not in the United States, shows that many people beyond the intellectual fringe perceive that it is the regime’s ambitions that are throttling Iranians.
While the Trump Administration says its goal is not regime change, but behavior change, and while it talks daily about denying the Islamic Republic the funds it needs to fiddle in other countries, many in the Administration are smart enough to know that crimping the Iranian economy won’t really prompt a change in national priorities.
The real but unspoken hope is that the Iranian public will take matters in their own hands and topple the regime—something it did twice in the 20th Century. The anticipated outcome then is that Iran becomes a full-fledged democracy and a beacon to the Islamic world.
But that is not a certain result. And, as former Secretary of State John Kerry warned a few weeks ago, it isn’t even the likely result. It is more likely that the Pasdaran would take full control if the regime crumbled, get rid of the Majlis and the limited democracy that exists today, and start a crackdown on dissidents that would make the coercion of recent decades look delicate by comparison.
