What is hopefully clear from this brief skim through the history of Iran in the hundred years prior to the revolution of 1979 is that Iran’s enormous wealth in resource terms has rarely ever been deployed in a way that has benefitted the broader populace. It is eminently far from unique in that aspect. Equally it should be obvious that the history of persistent foreign intervention has fostered a deep mistrust. That Iran was then involved in a war with a brutal war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988, in which Iraq under Saddam Hussein was backed financially at various times by Egypt, the GCC, the Soviet Union, the USA, Britain, France, Germany and even Brazil and China, has only served to deepen that mistrust. Sadly once it ended, there followed a period of months in which the clerical government systematically executed thousands of political prisoners and opponents in what has become known as the Iranian massacre.
So let us flash forward to the current situation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal) was never going to be a magical wand that simultaneously reduced the risk of nuclear conflict, and started to re-integrate the Iranian economy into the global economy. It was always at best a very small stepping stone. However the discussion around the President Trump’s decision to exit the agreement focuses rather too much on the differing perspectives of the US and the other signatory countries, and far too little on what has happened in Iran since the inception of the JCPOA in 2015 and now.
As has been the case since the era of the Great Game, Iran’s vast resource wealth continues to be deployed primarily to bolster the ruling nomenklatura of whatever ilk, above all on defence and military, and with very little on improving domestic infrastructure, in the very broadest sense. As such the hope that the reduction in sanctions might not only bring in a wave of much needed foreign investment has not been realized, with unemployment remaining high at around 12% (made all the more pernicious by the fact that roughly half of the 80 million population is under 35 years old) and only reducing inflation to around 10% from its peak of 40% in 2013. Corruption within the ruling clerical oligarchy is rife, the local heavily under-capitalized banking system faces collapse, and while the economy has recovered since the JCPOA, the broader population have felt no benefit. As such it should come as no surprise that the wave of strikes since March has widened from the bazaaris (shopkeepers) to farmers and truck drivers, with the primary point of complaint that so much money is being spent on the regime’s interventions all around the Middle East, while the domestic economy founders. If regime change is to happen in Iran, it is this that will be the driver rather than the interventions of any foreign regime.
Marc Ostwald E:
marc.ostwald@admisi.com T: +44(0) 20 7716 8534
8 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | May/June 2018
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