In Tehran, the measures of a siege are taken not at the walls but in the accounts: the exchange rate, the price of bread, the wage that buys less each week. It is that arithmetic that the Iranian government now says it intends to correct. As Rached El-Moctar reported for Al Jazeera on October 6, the government is seeking to reduce the severe financial pressure the American siege and sanctions have laid upon the populace.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has taken the file into his own rooms. He recently sat with several members of his cabinet to discuss measures to ameliorate the economic effects of the US-Israeli war on Iran — among them the depreciation of the national currency and a cost-of-living crisis that falls, as such crises always do, hardest on households with the least room to absorb it.
An arrangement for special conditions
The shape of the response has a name, even if its mechanics remain behind ministerial doors. According to Middle East Eye, Pezeshkian announced on October 3 that his government has adopted “a new arrangement to manage these special conditions” — the conditions being stricter US sanctions and a naval blockade.
In his telling of the contest, the enemy’s design of recent months has been to sever what he calls the country’s vital arteries, the economic networks on which daily life runs, in order to bring the pressure to bear. The government’s answer, he insists, is coordination — state measures matched with public endurance.
The ledger of the blockade
The strain predates the latest round. A Soufan Center intelligence brief from August described an economy already under more pressure than at any time in its modern history: the wartime destruction, an ongoing US naval blockade of Iranian ports, and the cumulative effects of decades of sanctions that have shut Iranian banks out of the global financial system. The new American measures, the brief noted, add pressure even where the old ones had already constricted nearly everything.
So the president convenes his cabinet, and the cabinet studies its instruments, and the arrangement takes form. Whether any arrangement can stand between a blockaded economy and the people queuing under it is the oldest question of siegecraft. The walls were always metaphor. The breadline never is.