The United States’ “maximum pressure” sanctions have clearly failed, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei said on Sunday, citing the US State Department.
Khamenei called the sanctions an “economic attack” and said they caused some suffering to the people, “but production did not collapse,” and the US State Department spokesman openly and explicitly stated a few days ago that the US State Department’s policy maximum pressure has become a humiliating defeat for the USA.”
Khamenei quoted the Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying Ned Price, who said in his January 25 press conference“The maximum pressure campaign was a miserable failure,” he added, adding that former President Donald Trump’s policies have not changed Iran’s behavior.
Iran’s economy took a nosedive in 2018 when Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal and imposed tough sanctions. Inflation skyrocketed and government budget deficits skyrocketed. The sanctions also affected Iran’s proxy forces in the region, but they continued their destabilizing operations even though they could have been more effective without the sanctions.
In a speech to managers of Iran’s industrial and business sector Khamenei reiterated his ideology of self-reliance and called for “economic jihad” despite the sanctions, although he admitted that Iran’s economy had performed very poorly over the past decade. At the same time, he called for a victory against US sanctions, which he believed were aimed at fueling popular discontent.
But as usual, the Supreme Leader blamed the presidential administrations, and not the political and economic systems he presides over, and his own policies of constant confrontation with the West and regional countries that have good relations with the United States.
Iran is centralized Economy plagued by corruption and mismanagement and under pressure from oil export sanctions has not grown over the past decade. Even before nuclear sanctions came into force from 2011, its growth had been anemic at under 3 percent on average since the early 1980s.
But Khamenei, in power since 1989, has increasingly relied on loyal hardliners, resorting to political persecution and rigged elections rather than allowing a more accountable political system to take root. At the same time, insiders and the military took over the state economy and used the oil export revenues to sustain an unproductive system while enriching themselves.
In his speech, Khamenei expressed his disappointment with the country’s low GDP growth, lack of investment, rapidly growing liquidity problem leading to inflation and other serious problems. However, he stressed that these difficulties are not only due to sanctions, but also to “wrong decisions or lack of effort”.
He then mentioned a number of issues facing Iran’s domestic manufacturing sector, such as: B. the low quality of the products, and highlighted the auto industry, which has been blamed for many deaths in road accidents recently. Nevertheless, he affirmed that independence should be the motto.
Khamenei and other insiders in the Islamic Republic system do not understand or acknowledge that a modern economy can only grow with less government interference, more interaction with other economies, investment and competition. But the Supreme Leader’s domestic drive to reward supporters and pursue a confrontational foreign policy, as well as a nuclear program with military ambitions, bar the path to economic success.
