On Point: Sanctions Have Slashed Ayatollah Iran's War-Making Capacity
http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20201020214731.aspx
October 20, 2020
As October began, Iran's religious dictators were peddling a narrative of imminent triumph on "a momentous day," Oct. 18. On that day, the 13-year-long U.N. arms embargo imposed on Iranian security forces would expire. U.N. Security Council members Russia and China refused to renew it. Both dictatorships acknowledge they would love to sell weapons to Iran.
According to Tehran's propagandists and western media apologists, on the momentous day, The Great Satan (the U.S.) and its malign President Donald Trump would suffer a stinging diplomatic defeat. The regime survived the embargo!
Unlike the Obama administration, the Trump administration understands that the Tehran regime's propaganda theater masks its desperation. Defeat? Since 2017, the Iranian regime has suffered scores of economic, political and military defeats, several self-inflicted or exacerbated by regime corruption.
In 2017, the Trump administration re-imposed economic sanctions with the goals of stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program and penalizing the regime's malign behavior, such as its vicious oppression of its own people, its waging of proxy wars, its engaging in transnational crime and its seeding violence globally.
U.S. sanctions have devalued Iran's currency. StrategyPage.com recently reported that in 2015, one U.S. dollar bought 32,000 Iranian rials (open market rate). In September 2020, 260,000 rials bought a buck. Now it takes 315,000. Note Iranian companies importing food and medicine have a subsidized official exchange rate: 42,000 rials to the dollar.
The regime survived the arms embargo, but 2020 rials don't buy the guns they did in 2015.
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Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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