The Iranian regime is on the brink of an economic abyss, and only the Houthis are still threatening

The regional impact of Iran It disintegrated almost completely after 15 months of war, but above all, the internal vulnerability of the Islamic Republic was exposed in the last year.

Economic crisis as a result of Western sanctions, military failures bGazabLebanon and inSyriaa hated regime and a weak president, who according to the opposition media website “Iran International” found himself awaiting a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin In the Kremlin, because the latter “wasn’t ready yet”.

The Ayatollah regime is caught between the nuclear program, which is in its most advanced stage, and the need to increase the defense budget by 200% for the next Persian year (on March 20), to 30.9 billion dollars in view of the failure in defense, and this while striving to prevent a public uprising.

For four and a half years now, citizens have been dealing with an annual inflation rate of 30% or more, according to the Iranian Bureau of Statistics. About 32 million people live below the poverty line, the Iranian rial continues to crash and now stands at a rate of 810,000 rials to the dollar (during the Islamic revolution in 1979, 70 rials to the dollar was enough). In addition to all these, they have to live with power outages that last for many hours in the winter.

An energy crisis in a country so rich in natural resources only indicates the long-term neglect of infrastructure. After the Minister of Oil, Mohsen Pekanjad, recently admitted that in order to close the chronic energy shortage, an investment of 45 billion dollars in the gas infrastructure is required, the President Masoud Pazkhian On Monday he referred to the widespread burning of fuel oil, a particularly polluting fuel, the use of which often results in the closure of state institutions and schools in Iran due to public health concerns. “We are not supposed to burn fuel oil at all, and we said so. But we got stuck,” said the president. “If we didn’t use it, we would have to cut off the gas supply to households, because our consumption is much higher than other countries. To prevent the problems from recurring next year, we started creating plans.” Pazkhian did not specify the nature of the plans, but they may include a substantial cut in energy subsidies.

Benny Sabati, an Iran researcher at INSS, is sure that precisely because of the internal situation in Iran, an Israeli attack at the present time would be a mistake. “We see the dominoes falling, just this week two Supreme Court judges were killed, so why should Israel be guilty of something and divert the discourse from the cost of living in Iran? A natural process is now taking place in which the regime is on the brink of the abyss. The way to push it there is through sanctions, Support for human rights and direct information to the Iranian people in the Persian language.”

The Houthis removed “sanctions”

A success that was recorded to some extent for the Ayatollah regime is the activity of the rebelsHouthis. The world initially referred to the emissaries of Iran bYemen Canceled, but starting with the hijacking of the “Galaxy Leader” ship in November 2023, they realized that this was a real danger. Since the situation worsened, merchant ships were routinely attacked in the Red Sea, so they changed the route to include a detour through the Cape of Good Hope and added at least two weeks to the voyage.

With the help of more than 134 attacks against ships, the Houthis managed to brand themselves as the masters of the Red Sea, all the more so when the coalition established by the Biden administration in favor of preserving the freedom of navigation was an abject failure. And now, they are taking advantage of their new position in favor of delivering an updated message. The center for the “coordination of humanitarian operations” of the Houthi regime in Sana’a announced the “stopping of the sanctions imposed on ships registered on the list of prohibitions”. That is, the shipping giants that continued to sail to the State of Israel, and ships whose flag state is the USA or Great Britain. On the other hand, they left the “sanctions” against ships owned by Israel or whose flag state is Israel.

Although, according to the shipping newspaper Lloyd’s List, in the last 14 months the volume of goods that crossed the Red Sea dropped by 60%, Elad Barshan, an expert in international shipping and customs, co-founder of SlickChain, points out that the shipping giants have not yet responded to the Houthi message. “The major companies are in no hurry to return to the Red Sea and continue on the route around Africa. From past experience, we predict that it will take time for the change to happen. The assessment stems from the fact that the largest shipping company in the world, Maersk, was the first to return already on December 24, 2023, but within a week its ship Hangzhou was attacked – and since then there has been no change.”

In “The Economist” it was reported that a panel of Security Council of theUnited Nations He found that shipping companies purchased “safe passage” certificates from a company linked to senior Houthi. According to UN estimates, Iran’s emissaries generated $180 million per month from these approvals, or $2.1 billion per year.

“Since the outbreak of the war until today, the international supply chains have already adapted themselves to the new equilibrium that has been created in terms of transport times and prices. This is added to the fact that the major insurance companies are reluctant to insure the ships for their goods when passing through the canal,” Barshan explains about the angle of the shipping giants. “Therefore, until the big companies receive sufficient guarantees for the safety of their vessels passing through the channel and the insurance companies do not return to insure the passage through the canal, the situation is not expected to change.”

political stabilization

Unlike the Houthis, who are in the worst situation ever are Hezbollah. From a terrorist organization that has a country, all of its leadership has been eliminated, the infrastructure in southern Lebanon has been destroyed, and its Iranian cash pipelines through Syria have been cut off due to the fall of a regime Assad. Moreover, the political crisis caused by the organization is on the way to a solution, when Joseph Aon has already been appointed president and about a week ago Nawaf Salam received the mandate to form a government.

The ceasefire agreement states that at the end of the first phase, this coming Monday, Israel is supposed to complete a withdrawal from Lebanon, while the Lebanese army is supposed to take control of the south of the country – while enforcing Resolution 1701 which states that Hezbollah will not be present south of the Litani River. Although, it is estimated that both sides will not take the required steps in time, but the trend of political stabilization, as well as the decline of Hezbollah, reduce the likelihood of a renewed escalation. The Shiite terrorist organization is working these days to find ways to transport cash from Iran, in part through Iranian diplomats who carry luggage on flights to the airport in Beirut – a method that Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah Refused to promote widely until eliminated. However, at that time, Nasrallah managed an annual budget of close to a billion dollars, and now according to a report in Al-Sharq al-Awast, Hezbollah allocated about a billion dollars to aid the Shiite families affected by the war, with each of them receiving 12 thousand dollars. In the bottom line, the reality is that Hezbollah will be forced to divert funding from AML to social needs.