Iran’s deepening economic misery portends a revival of the mass protests which shook the Islamic republic over the new year. But don’t bet on those protests leading to some seismic shift of power towards the more-moderate political faction under President Hassan Rouhani.
As the BBC’s Instagram channel attests, residents of Tehran are furious about the plummeting value of their rial currency and the prospect of a near-term resumption of U.S. sanctions. Shopkeepers are refusing to open for business, and the government seems incapable of making things better. But the data is the best indicator of why public anger is rising. Consider this chart from XE.com which shows the the Iranian rial’s value against the U.S. dollar.
That collapsing value makes it almost impossible for Iranian business owners to buy the parts they need to sell their goods.
While it’s increasingly clear that the Trump administration wants Iran’s economic condition to birth protests that lead to the regime’s collapse, I don’t expect the (somewhat) moderates to win out. While tensions between the more-moderate Rouhani bloc and the hardliners aligned with the revolutionary guards are significant, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is supporting the IRGC over Rouhani. In the context of European opposition to Trump’s policy, it is hard to see how the West can exert enough economic pressure to allow the protest movement to seize power.
It’s not just about outside pressure. While the more-moderate bloc will eventually overthrow the Islamists, the hardliners currently retain the guns and economic power to dominate the protesters and buy-off security officials on the fence. Until that changes, and changing that balance of power is a top CIA priority in Iran, it’s hard to see how these protests will change things.
Instead, the Iranian revolutionaries will again paint their ideological colors with their fellow citizens’ blood.
