Is there really a rebellion going on in Iran against the regime, as the anti-Iran crowd has been dreaming about for decades? Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, Professor of Economics of the Middle East at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) and the School of Business and Economics at Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany, argues in a commentary in Middle East Eye, that the economic collapse in Iran has been driven by a Western-imposed economic siege. That siege has created conditions inside Iran which makes a legitimate reform of the Iranian system impossible.
“What we are witnessing is not a political revolution, but the desperate gasps of a society whose economic buffer, the middle class, has been systematically hollowed out by an inhumane, punitive policy of international isolation,” Farzanegan writes. “The primary driver of this economic death spiral,” he says is “The U.S. weaponization of the global financial system, imposing the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and targeting Iran’s oil exports” which “has effectively hit at the life savings of every Iranian teacher, nurse, and small business owner.”
“Between 2012 and 2019, our study using synthetic control methods found that sanctions led to a staggering average annual reduction of 17 percentage points in the size of Iran’s middle class,” Farzenagan reports further. “This wasn’t just ‘economic pressure’; it was a structural demolition. Millions of people who once formed the stable, moderate centre of Iranian society have been demoted into the ‘newly poor.’
“When basic items, from antibiotics to food staples, become luxuries, the social contract is not just strained, it is broken by external forces.
