The July 2015 nuclear deal officially ended Iran’s isolation and economic punishment, but the comprehensive sanctions that the country had endured for nearly a decade continued to take a toll.
Those sanctions have profoundly damaged the Iranian economy. The government — hemmed in by domestic opposition and its own corruption — has done little to repair it. There have been encouraging signs of life since the nuclear deal, but they turned out to be short-lived.
President Trump announced on Tuesday that he would withdraw from the nuclear agreement and reinstate sanctions that had been lifted as part of it. This is not just a potentially fatal blow to the accord between Iran and five world powers. It is a damaging blow to average Iranians. The only beneficiaries here will be the hard-liners in government and the corrupt elite.
The news on Tuesday wasn’t a surprise. Since his campaign, Mr. Trump has expressed a strong, irrational distaste for the nuclear deal. In March, when he appointed John Bolton, who has called for regime change in Iran, as his national security adviser, it was clear which direction things were headed.
Iran has been divided over the nuclear deal. The elites have reacted with either steely reserve or fiery anger. Vice president Eshaq Jahangiri said that Mr. Bolton’s appointment “will change nothing in Iran.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Mr. Trump’s moves “shallow and ridiculous.” Members of Parliament burned an American flag.
But among most people — average Iranians — the news elicited feelings of bitterness and resignation. At dinner tables and in bakery lines and taxi pools, people across Iran are discussing their traumatic memories of life under punishing sanctions. Iranians now experience the disturbing prospect of crippling inflation, budget cuts, delayed payments and shortages of basic goods, especially imported medication upon which many lives depend.
We have friends with young children and relatively secure jobs who are abandoning a lifetime of work and leaving the country. We know people who are doing everything they can to transfer their assets overseas because they believe their money would be safer anywhere but Iran. Many parents we know are striving to send their families abroad.
This includes people at the highest levels of government. In the event that Iran-United States relations deteriorate further and Mr. Bolton and his allies push forward with their plans for war, the most powerful people in Iran are the ones who can most easily leave the country. According to news reports, about 100 high-level officials in government have American green cards. Many others have Canadian or British citizenship. These people can easily transfer money to Canadian and American banks and go to best hospitals in the West when they are ill. They frequently travel abroad to join their children, thousands of whom live and study in Western countries.
Meanwhile, the warmongers in the Trump administration are effectively enablers for the most conservative elements in the very government they want gone. A powerful faction in the government in Iran justifies domestic oppression by referring to American bellicosity.
rapped between the Trump administration and the local authoritarians are ordinary people. Amazingly, even under tremendous pressure, Iranian society has remained dynamic. In fact, the whole country is abuzz with peaceful struggle these days. Women are protesting against the mandatory head scarf, but this is just one example of dissent. On March 28 alone, Radio Zamaneh, an Amsterdam-based Persian-language radio station, reported five gatherings, rallies and strikes across the country over issues ranging from mass layoffs and the distribution of water to a pipeline being built through a town.
The recent phase of activism is impressively creative: Farmers in Isfahan Province have turned their backs on imams during Friday prayers in protest against the government; small-business owners in the town of Marivan rolled out a long stretch of empty tablecloths on the street to symbolize poverty. BBC Persian has estimated that about 17 protests and strikes per day are organized by labor unions and activists across the country.
More than it will hurt the government, Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear deal will affect these grass-roots movements. It will damage political activism and peaceful, creative expressions of will to change.
For the working class and for low-income people, new sanctions and renewed isolation will mean fewer jobs, less security and more poverty. As a result, the poor will be forced to change their priorities: The time and energy they could dedicate to peaceful protests will be consumed by struggling to provide bread. Or things could take another turn: Extreme poverty may create such high levels of frustration that people turn to violence, eventually strengthening the hand of the oppressive state.
As for the middle class and people in large cities, renewed sanctions — especially alongside the talk of war — present an existential threat to the meager well-being they have worked so hard to cobble together. The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the nuclear deal may well make the middle class more conservative, as they fear economic collapse and chaos, they will move closer to the government. They will give up demands for equality and justice in order to protect their hard-earned relative comfort.
As for the government itself, especially the faction intent on ruling with an iron fist, the sanctions will not hurt much. As the Obama years proved, sanctions never forced the Iranian government to cut back its security and military budgets. Instead, a choked-off economy and its accompanying black markets allowed a group of the powerful people to monopolize the economy, giving rise to a mafia-like class that funneled wealth to the top or transferred it overseas, and deployed all its political and military capital to protect it.
Those are the people who thrive under the sanctions. They are probably celebrating Mr. Trump’s decision.
Amir Ahmadi Arian is professor of literature and creative writing at City College of New York. Rahman Bouzari is a journalist in Iran.