To be fair, they really don’t have any other option. They’ve already made the US a long-term enemy both culturally and politically, and, despite that, Iran still seeks to be a key geopolitical player. There aren’t many other avenues for that in the short term, which is all that usually matters for a dictatorship.
Things will be shaking up in the next few years, so let’s see whether they’ll continue to be perceived as antagonistic to the world at large as the US shifts into goblin mode and khamenei kicks the bucket, hopefully loosening oppression.
Building Nuclear Weapons solve exactly zero of their problems. Just look at North Korea as an example. I also don’t really like the prospects of another civil war in the Middle East.
Iran’s core problem in Geopolitics, lack of foreign investment despite an increasingly educated population, is due to their own underinvestment in agriculture and stifled private-sector growth due to government corruption and collusion. Most of their exports are oil and gas in most years. They recently had a multiple year recession where GDP continuously shrank.
Compare them to other middle eastern regions like Afghanistan which provides the majority of the world’s real Saffron and a hefty sum of Gold, Turkey which exports Cars, or Syria which exports Olive Oil. Iran has the climate and resources to expand and diversify in a lot of sectors but instead it continues to cut government subsidies and increase taxes, it’s just not sustainable.
I honestly don’t know enough about economics to dispute anything you’ve said. I will point out that this dispute is nearly entirely unrelated to nuclear capabilities, though. Were both Israel and Iran to both disarm their nuclear capabilities, they’d both still seek to tear into one another for a host of theology-adjacent reasons.
Let’s not make them out to be saints, either. They’re very squarely aligned witb China and Russia.
To be fair, they really don’t have any other option. They’ve already made the US a long-term enemy both culturally and politically, and, despite that, Iran still seeks to be a key geopolitical player. There aren’t many other avenues for that in the short term, which is all that usually matters for a dictatorship.
Things will be shaking up in the next few years, so let’s see whether they’ll continue to be perceived as antagonistic to the world at large as the US shifts into goblin mode and khamenei kicks the bucket, hopefully loosening oppression.
Building Nuclear Weapons solve exactly zero of their problems. Just look at North Korea as an example. I also don’t really like the prospects of another civil war in the Middle East.
Iran’s core problem in Geopolitics, lack of foreign investment despite an increasingly educated population, is due to their own underinvestment in agriculture and stifled private-sector growth due to government corruption and collusion. Most of their exports are oil and gas in most years. They recently had a multiple year recession where GDP continuously shrank.
Compare them to other middle eastern regions like Afghanistan which provides the majority of the world’s real Saffron and a hefty sum of Gold, Turkey which exports Cars, or Syria which exports Olive Oil. Iran has the climate and resources to expand and diversify in a lot of sectors but instead it continues to cut government subsidies and increase taxes, it’s just not sustainable.
I honestly don’t know enough about economics to dispute anything you’ve said. I will point out that this dispute is nearly entirely unrelated to nuclear capabilities, though. Were both Israel and Iran to both disarm their nuclear capabilities, they’d both still seek to tear into one another for a host of theology-adjacent reasons.