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      Trump’s October announcement that he was implementing his decision last year to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria has created yet another political vacuum for Iran’s Shiite proxies to fill, say Arab affairs analysts. Obama had deployed around 2,000 U.S. special operations forces to northeast Syria in 2014 to help Kurdish forces fight the Islamic State. The U.S. pullback will give the Iranians “the operational space to expand their growing network of Shiite foreign fighters, who can be mobilized and moved throughout the Middle East,” the RAND Corp.’s Tabatabai and her colleague Colin P. Clarke said after Trump first announced the Syria withdrawal last year.⁶⁰

      At Issue

       Will U.S. sanctions force Iran to the negotiating table?

       Yes

       Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

       Professor of Economics, Virginia Tech

      Written for CQ Researcher, November 2019

      Since May 2018, Iran’s economy has taken a serious beating due to U.S. sanctions. After contracting by 4.9 percent in 2018, Iran’s economy will contract by 9.5 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Since 2012, sanctions have cost a total of about half a trillion U.S. dollars, nearly the same as Iran’s GDP.

      Iranian leaders are under increasing pressure to restore economic growth. But they believe the Trump administration’s primary objective is Iran’s capitulation or regime change, and the leadership is divided on the benefits from dialogue with the United States and on how badly Iran needs to end the sanctions.

      Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been advocating a “resistance economy” for 10 years, sees proximity to the West as undermining Islamic values. He is optimistic that the economy can function with—and even benefit from—very low oil exports. Employment data for the first half of the Iranian year (March 21 to Sept. 20) support his optimism: About 800,000 more people are working in Iran now than when sanctions began in 2018, and the unemployment rate has dropped by 2 percentage points.

      The jump in jobs and output is not surprising, because the economy has unused capacity that is being used to replace imports. Devaluation in 2018 also raised average prices of imported goods by 2 to 3 times, making local production more profitable. But such recovery has its limits.

      Pressure from U.S. sanctions is unlikely to abate, at least not until 2021 and then only if Trump loses the 2020 election. Serious obstacles to long-term recovery remain. Investment as a share of GDP has declined, from about 20 percent in 2011 to about 14 percent in 2018. This level of investment is barely enough to keep up with depreciation of existing capital. Having lost its major source of revenue from oil, the government is unlikely to take the lead in an investment-fueled recovery. The equally cash-strapped private sector cannot count on much help from the banking system, which is still recovering from a decade-long crisis of insolvency.

      Unless the government can overcome these challenges and the economy begins to bear fruit soon, pressures from the decade-long stagnation will strengthen those who argue for re-engaging with the West. But this may not be enough to bring Iran to renegotiate the nuclear deal anytime soon.

       NO

       Esfandyar Batmanghelidj

      Founder, Bourse & Bazaar

      Written for CQ Researcher, November 2019

      The Trump administration has been adamant that its “maximum pressure” sanctions are bringing the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse. But even as the country grapples with the harsh realities of a 9.5 percent contraction in GDP in 2019, the pending recovery of the Iranian economy is easy to demonstrate across four basic datasets.

      First, Iran’s foreign exchange market has stabilized. Since early May, the Iranian rial has regained around 30 percent of its value against the dollar. The value of the rial has remained stable after the Central Bank of Iran implemented new oversight systems, even as geopolitical tensions reached new highs this past summer.

      Second, while inflation remains high and continues to erode the purchasing power of Iranian households, the recent recovery of the rial has seen inflation grow at the slowest pace since the reimposition of sanctions 18 months ago. The consumer price index rose at an annual rate of only 6.1 percent in September. As economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani recently observed: “Price stability is necessary for economic recovery, and the trend in inflation is in the right direction for Iran.”

      Third, Iran’s purchasing manager’s index, which measures whether the manufacturing sector is expanding or contracting, has exceeded 50 in five of the last seven months. An index greater than 50 reflects an expansion in manufacturing activity compared to the previous month. Iran’s assembly lines keep whirring, and Iran continues to produce goods for export.

      Finally, Iran’s non-oil exports are projected to reach a record level this year—more than $40 billion—exceeding oil exports for the first time. Oil exports will be limited to around $10 billion in 2019 after the Trump administration revoked key sanctions waivers. The recourse to non-oil trade means Iran will continue to earn vital foreign currency, further reducing dependence on an oil industry that rarely accounted for more than 20 percent of Iran’s GDP.

      In short, the harm the Trump administration has inflicted on so many Iranian households does not, in fact, equate to fundamental vulnerability in the Iranian economy.

      Other analysts say Trump’s recent statement that the situation in Syria has “nothing to do with us” also sends the message to Saudi Arabia, Israel and other U.S. allies in the Middle East that Washington will no longer block Iran’s designs on the region.⁶¹

      De-Escalating Tension

      Meanwhile, Iran’s preference to avoid a military confrontation has been evident in the care it has taken not to kill or wound any Americans in the region and by denying responsibility for the most aggressive incidents. The Trump administration also has kept its responses to those incidents below the threshold of war.

      In June 2019, when Tehran acknowledged downing the unmanned U.S. surveillance drone, Iranian officials pointed out that they had refrained from shooting down an accompanying U.S. Navy P-8 maritime patrol aircraft carrying 35 crew members.⁶² After Trump cancelled retaliatory airstrikes on Iran, he launched a nonlethal cyberattack that wiped out Iran’s database for tracking ship traffic in the Persian Gulf. It was Trump’s answer to suspected Iranian attacks in May, which Iran denied, that damaged several foreign tankers in and around the Persian Gulf.

      After the attack on Saudi oil facilities, Trump resisted hawkish lawmakers’ calls to retaliate militarily against Iran, mounting instead another cyberattack on Iran’s “propaganda” infrastructure, U.S. officials said. “You can do damage without killing people or blowing things up; it adds an option to the toolkit that we didn’t have before, and our willingness to use it is important,” said James Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist Washington think tank.⁶³

      Iran also appears to be exhibiting similar caution with Saudi Arabia. When two explosions ripped gaping holes in an Iranian oil tanker sailing off the kingdom’s Red Sea coast on Oct. 11, 2019, the state-run National Iranian Oil Co. that owns the ship initially claimed the Saudis had fired two missiles at the tanker, raising fears of Iranian retaliation. But later, the company said the origin of the explosions was unclear.⁶⁴

      Saudi Arabian Defense Ministry spokesman Turki bin Saleh al-Malki displays pieces of what he said were Iranian cruise missiles and drones recovered from a September

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