Global Issues 2021 Edition. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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      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.”

      Has the expansion of Iranian influence shifted the balance of power in the Middle East?

      Since its 1979 revolution, Iran has sought to fill the various power vacuums that emerged from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and ongoing upheavals in the region.

      Iran’s moves into these troubled areas reflect not only a drive for greater regional influence but also the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle for supremacy within Islam between the Shiite sect, centered in Iran, and the Sunnis, led by Saudi Arabia. And layered on top of their religious rivalry are the long-standing ethnic tensions between the region’s Arab populations and the predominantly Persian Iranians.

      Analysts say Iran has expanded its influence relatively cheaply by cultivating mostly Shiite militias across the region to resist the Sunni-led Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf, which have been aided by the United States and Israel. In Syria, Saudi Arabia tried unsuccessfully to blunt Shiite proxies by backing a hard-line coalition of Sunni extremist groups that included Jabhat al Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda.¹⁴ Iranian-supported militants now form a network of formidable proxy forces, extending from Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea, across the vast Levantine steppe of Syria and Iraq and down to Yemen on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

      “They’re building these militias, training them, arming them, making sure there’s a certain degree of loyalty to Iran,” says Trita Parsi, author of several books on post-revolutionary Iran. “These alliances have a common religious bond and a strong ideological bedrock. They’re more than just temporary political marriages based on money.”

      Saudi Arabia’s efforts to counter Iran by financing its own proxy forces have largely failed because many of those groups, such as al Qaeda, also want to overthrow the Saudi monarchy, Parsi adds. “Within six months, those forces are using those funds to attack Saudi Arabia,” he says.

      But Iran and its proxies have yet to prevail over Israel. “The Iranians have a healthy respect for Israel’s ability and willingness to respond militarily to Iran’s provocations,” says Jarrett Blanc, a former senior State Department official who oversaw implementation of the 2015 nuclear accord. “So they often pull back their proxies in Syria and Lebanon” when they come under Israeli attack. Such redeployments appear to be tactical retreats, aimed at preserving resources to fight another day, he says.

      Michael Connell, director of the Iran studies program at the U.S. government’s Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, said Tehran’s support of proxies stemmed from its recognition after the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war that its regular army, hobbled by international sanctions imposed after the 1979 Iranian revolution that prevented military modernization, was no match for technologically superior enemies. So Iran cultivated Shiite proxies to confront common enemies, teaching them what Connell called a “deterrence based model of attrition-based warfare,” characterized by suicide bombings and small attacks to raise opponents’ risks and costs.

      “The goal is to inflict a psychological defeat that inhibits an enemy’s willingness to fight,” Connell said.¹⁵

      Iran has armed and trained these proxies in:

       Lebanon—Hezbollah (Party of God), СКАЧАТЬ