Before the first strike fell, Iran was already carrying a wound that had never fully healed. Decades of layered sanctions had not simply constrained the economy, they had reshaped it from the inside. Sanctions forced workarounds where open trade once flowed, pushing a generation of entrepreneurs into informality, and eroding the institutional capacity of a state that might otherwise have managed its resources with greater effect. National income per capita had fallen from roughly $8,000 in 2012 to around $5,000 by the mid-2020s. Inflation was chronic. The rial had lost so much of its value that ordinary citizens had long since learned to denominate their savings in dollars, gold, or anything harder than the national currency. By early 2026, Iran’s economy was a structure held together by ingenuity and habit more than by institutional strength. The war did not create this fragility. It detonated it.
Thanks for this very informative piece. Sad and slightly hopeful at the same time, thanks to the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary Iranians. It was entirely predictable to me, and many others, that bombing from the air, conducted by two genocidal global superpowers, US and Israel, and supported by another old colonial power, the UK (who in its own time inflicted misery and death around the world) would not bring freedom and prosperity to the peoples of Iran, or democracy, or anything resembling justice. Those goals were not even in the designs of those who planned and perpetrated this criminal war.
Thanks for this very informative piece. Sad and slightly hopeful at the same time, thanks to the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary Iranians. It was entirely predictable to me, and many others, that bombing from the air, conducted by two genocidal global superpowers, US and Israel, and supported by another old colonial power, the UK (who in its own time inflicted misery and death around the world) would not bring freedom and prosperity to the peoples of Iran, or democracy, or anything resembling justice. Those goals were not even in the designs of those who planned and perpetrated this criminal war.