Читать книгу Global Issues 2021 Edition - Группа авторов - Страница 27

Ali Safavi, an exiled Iranian opposition figure living in Washington, D.C., insists the clerical regime in Tehran is close to collapse.

“Today, the Iranian regime is at its weakest point,” says Safavi, a member of the Mujaheddin e-Khalq, the oldest and best organized Iranian opposition group. “It is extremely vulnerable.”

He attributes the regime’s fragility largely to Trump’s economic sanctions, which ban any individual, company or country from doing business with Iran from the United States. Trump has said his goal is to block Iran’s oil exports, viewed by Washington as the lifeblood of the Iranian economy. And over the past year, Trump has steadily intensified those sanctions, targeting Iran’s Central Bank, the country’s leaders and its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s most powerful military organization but branded by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization. Iran’s long-standing problems of corruption and malfeasance compound the impact of the sanctions, experts say.

The resulting inflation and weakening of the rial sparked widespread anti-government protests and strikes in 2017 and 2018, Safavi says, eroding the Iranian leadership’s grip on power. Videos from last year’s street demonstrations captured angry mobs hurling insults at police and chanting “Death to inflation! Death to unemployment!”¹¹

But an NPR report from Tehran last August told a different story. “Morning Edition” program host Steve Inskeep said: “Stores are well-stocked, though prices have soared through inflation. New stores and restaurants have opened to serve the elite, even if they’re not always full of customers. New buildings are under construction, even if the progress on some has been slow.” The government appears firmly in charge, Inskeep said, and he saw no anti-government protests while he was there.¹²

Iran experts say the country’s economy is a mixed picture. Trump’s sanctions have hit hard, they say, denying the government billions of dollars in oil export revenues and drastically limiting Tehran’s ability to pay subsidies and fund public projects. Major foreign companies operating in Iran, such as German automaker Mercedes Benz and France’s Total gasoline company, have fled the country. The sanctions also have denied Iran access to the global financial markets, where the U.S. dollar is the premier trading currency.

Spikes in inflation and unemployment have hit ordinary Iranian households the hardest, economists add. The Peterson Institute’s Mazarei says food inflation is running at about 60 percent, significantly weakening Iranians’ ability to purchase chicken, meat and other basic food items. He says rents have risen sharply. And while salaries have gone up around 20 percent over the past year, Marzarei says, the raises offset only half of the overall inflation rate of 42 percent, resulting in a significant loss in real income.

Description

Iranians’ View of U.S. Worsens

The share of Iranians who view the United States unfavorably rose from 71 percent in July 2014 to 86 percent in August 2019, a year after President Trump imposed new sanctions on Iran. The share of Americans who view Iran unfavorably has generally remained above 80 percent since 2001.

Sources: Colum Lynch, “After Three Years of Trump, Iranians Believe America Is a ʻDangerous Country,ʼ” Foreign Policy, Oct. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxfkrm2v; “Iran,” Gallup, February 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y22mxs2d

“The issue now is going to be how the government finances itself and its deficit from domestic sources,” Mazarei says. “They’ve had to borrow considerably from the commercial banks and from the Central Bank. But eventually, the sustainability of this operation will require the printing of money in significant amounts, and therefore higher inflation. And that means further reduction in real income.”

Some independent analysts believe Iran’s economy risks collapsing into Venezuela-style hyperinflation and serious social unrest if sanctions continue into a second Trump term.

“If Iran has to deal with the current economic situation for another year or so, that’s one thing,” says Ariane Tabatabai, an Iran analyst at the RAND Corp., an independent think tank that works closely with U.S. policymakers. “But if Trump is re-elected and Iran has to deal with the sanctions for another five years, that’s going to be a big problem. The current economic situation is not sustainable for another five years. Eventually, the Iranians will have to strike a deal with the United States if [Iran is] going to get its economy back on track again.”

Other analysts agree the sanctions have hurt Iran badly, but question predictions that it is headed for economic collapse. Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran project at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, notes Tehran has roughly $100 billion in foreign currency reserves and negligible foreign debt. More importantly, she says, the regime reduced its heavy dependence on oil exports in the 1980s—from 90 percent to 30 percent today—by increasing exports of petrochemicals, manufactured goods and agricultural products. Those exports are expected to bring in an estimated $40 billion this year, Mazarei says, thanks largely to Iranian expertise at smuggling, honed during 40 years of various international sanctions regimes.

Iran also continues to export oil to China, which is defying Trump’s sanctions by using its renminbi currency as payment. Analysts tracking the movements of Iranian tankers say Tehran also is believed to be selling its oil to Turkey and Syria, illustrating the challenge Trump faces in zeroing out Iranian oil exports.¹³

“Iran is the most experienced country in the world in resisting sanctions,” says Sayed Hossein Mousavian, an Iranian policymaker and nuclear negotiator and now a visiting research scholar at Princeton University.

Iranian manufacturers and merchants have eased the impact of the sanctions somewhat by finding other suppliers willing to risk doing business with them, says Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an economist and publisher of Bourse & Bazaar, a London-based Iranian business journal. The government also has been able to stabilize the currency and slow inflation, he adds, by creating financial mechanisms that encourage Iranian exporters to repatriate their dollar earnings from abroad.

“The economy is much more resilient than Washington would have us believe,” says Batmanghelidj. “The question is not whether there’s an economic crisis today; it’s whether that crisis remains in place a year from now. Only then will we know whether the sanctions are going to have a full impact on Iran’s decision-making.”