The real collapses: the economic price that Iran is paying for the war

On the other hand, the son of the president of Iran and his advisor, Yusef Pazkhian, claimed that Tehran is dealing with damages, but has also “achieved credit and international standing”, and a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Jafar Asadi, added that a renewed escalation is a reasonable possibility.

Bottom line, about 25 days have passed since the establishment of the cease-fire in Operation “Harry’s Roar”, and it is clear that neither side is reluctant to resume fighting, but progress is towards this possibility. Israel was and remains part of the trend, and on Friday Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided that there is an “emergency situation” that justifies bypassing Congress by way of an immediate sale of 992.4 million dollars of AML to Israel.

Yikki Dayan, former consul of Israel in Los Angeles, believes that there are two scenarios that will move Trump to military action: a situation in which Israel will say that the commander of the Revolutionary Guards Ahmed Vehidi is the only one still in the crosshairs; Or, that the president of the USA will get tired of the negotiations that lead nowhere – and say “go strike.”

According to him, “this has two problematic consequences. The first, oil prices may soar to $200-150 per barrel; and the second, they know how to get in, but don’t know how to get out. Now he is facing pressure from Congress. There are mid-term elections coming up soon, and even before that the World Cup. All these things illustrate that for him the least bad choice is economic. Therefore, every day Treasury Secretary Scott Besant tweets about economic actions against Iran”.

The economic interest leads

The reason why all parties try, nevertheless, to find an equal footing, is the economic interests: the Central Bank of Iran admitted that they estimate the damages in the Islamic Republic at about 270 billion dollars, and the work of reconstruction in 12 years. For comparison, the last Iranian annual budget is about 45 billion dollars. On the American side, the Pentagon claimed that the scope of the investment in the operation amounted to about 25 billion dollars, about eight times the operation with a dog.

However, senior American officials claimed to the CBS network that the real estimates are about 50 billion dollars. The large gap is explained by the Pentagon’s reference to armaments expenditures, and their disregard for the heavy damage to the American bases in the region in general and in the Gulf in particular. Therefore, the Trump administration continues to try to find from the threshing floor and the winery a way that will lead to an optimal agreement on the aspects of the Ayatollah regime’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran still hopes that they will be able to collect revenue from Hormuz in the future as well. Since mid-March, the Revolutionary Guards have charged $2 million for the safe passage of each ship. In order to circumvent the sanctions on Tehran, they did so through payments in Chinese yuan and cryptocurrencies. Despite this, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the US Treasury Department warned last week that any payment to the Ayatollah regime for safe passage is prohibited under US regulations. OFAC is the body responsible in Washington for enforcing the sanctions, which include financial fines and criminal cases depending on the scope of the violations, the value of the transactions and their severity, and it is the biggest concern of those who pay the Revolutionary Guards for avoiding the attacks on the ships.

The Revolutionary Guards are not only a body responsible for causing crises outside of Iran, but no less than that for internal corruption: the water shortage crisis began in the Islamic Republic even before Operation Hari’s Roar or even Operation with a dog in June of last year. Despite the damage to the country’s waterways, since 2021 countless water diversion projects and dams have received funding from the state. In a way that is not at all surprising, the main beneficiaries were Hatem al-Anbiya, the engineering branch of the Revolutionary Guards, which is responsible for the establishment of strategic infrastructures in the country, including in the energy, mining and communications sectors.

On the streets of the cities, people are troubled by much more acute problems: the prices of medicines have jumped by 380% in the last few weeks, under the influence of the prolonged collapse of the real. The Iranian currency reached another low on Saturday, with a rate of 1.83 million to a single dollar, under the influence of the American blockade. For the purpose of comparison, during the Islamic revolution in 1979, 70 riyals per dollar were enough; At the time of Trump’s decision to leave the nuclear agreement in 2018 – about 42 thousand; In January last year, 810 thousand riyals, while in January this year – 1.4 million riyals.

“Iran is in kamikaze mode”

“The Iranians are in a kamikaze situation,” says Benny Sabati, an Iran researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). “Pride and honor may lead them to commit suicide. This is rooted in Iranian history, about 250 years ago there was a king who thought he would conquer territories from the Russians, and in the end they actually had to give up more territories to the Russians. A military regime does not care about income, because they only spend. Today, Iran has become a military regime of the Revolutionary Guards. Bottom line, they do not care about the public. I am waiting for a moderate in the regime, for example Hassan Rouhani, Let him come and make a comprehensive agreement – especially when Khamenei the father is gone.”