The outcome of ongoing protests throughout Iran against the dire economic downturn and the regime’s unabated draining of the country’s finances to support armed terrorist organizations in the region, is impossible to predict. However, these protests can impose consequences for the Iranian regime’s policies and its foreign policy in particular.
Certainly this does not mean that the regime would go for radical or sweeping changes in its foreign policy. Rather, in case it succeeds in dealing with the protests so as to prevent their escalation to the point of regime change, it would seek to at least review the operational tools of its foreign policy tools, especially at the level of military and financial support offered to its allies in this region.
Strong Message
The primary driver would be that the gradually-escalating protests have sent a strong message to the Iranian regime and its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that draining the country’s financial resources to back its foreign interventions and offer financial and military support to armed terrorist organizations operating in the region will face impediments in the coming period. That is, this depletion of resources was the direct cause of the current worsening economic conditions. The regime has always prioritized its foreign interventions over efforts to find solutions to domestic intractable problems such as high rates of poverty and unemployment, rising numbers of the homeless and drug addicts, rampant corruption and smuggling, among others.
Prioritizing the Nuclear Issue
Hence, it can perhaps be said that Iran’s continued compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal will be highly prioritized in the coming period despite persistent obstacles. Among the several reasons is that any alternative can entail a huge cost at the domestic level.
That is, if for any reason Iran’s compliance with the deal is interrupted, strong economic sanctions will be re-imposed on Iran by members and non-members of the UN Security Council. Fresh sanctions would be stronger than those imposed prior to the mid-July 2015 deal with the P5+1 groups of world powers.
Provided that the current protests do not impact his political future, this possibility can provide an opportunity for President Hassan Rouhani to put more pressure on the regime’s most influential institutions, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in particular, to stop provocative actions used by the US Administration of President Trump as a justification for taking more escalatory measures against Iran. Most recently, such measures included more sanctions against firms and individuals accused by Washington of supporting Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
In other words, Rouhani can capitalize on the current protests to assert the importance of, and the need to stop the regime’s provocations. These provocations, over the past period, caused further tension with the United States and even contributed to the recent rapprochement between Washington and European capitals that used to put pressure on the Trump Administration to improve the chances of keeping the nuclear deal in place to rule out the possibility of ending up back at square one of Iran’s nuclear crisis.
Based on this, it cannot be ruled out that the current protests can force the Iranian regime to refrain from taking the risk of choosing to exit the deal. The reason is that continued compliance with the terms of the deal would spare the regime from being slapped with unprecedented economic sanctions and keep the door open for foreign investments to flow to Iran despite the current sanctions and obstacles. This would, relatively, help the Iranian government to deliver on some commitments to provide more jobs thus, perhaps, avoid a renewal of protests in the coming period.
What is remarkable in this context is that the government started to appeal to protesters by propagandizing a new plan to create some 830,000 jobs in 2018. The aim is to contain the protests or at least stop them from spreading to new cities after they already broke out in Mashhad, Isfahan, Tehran, Kermanshah and spread to smaller cities and far-flung townships and village, in the south-east and north-west in particular.
Rethinking Support for Terrorist Organizations and Militias
At the same time, pressure imposed by the protests may force the regime to reconsider its rising support for armed and terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East. Hence, at least in the medium run, the situation would not escalate to a sweeping change in such policy. Rather it may develop into putting forth the possibility of reducing this support to channel part of it to deal with domestic issues in order to avoid having this chronic crisis in the coming period, which can perhaps be considered the most crucial in the history of this regime since the 1979 revolution.
Potential Obstacles
Nonetheless, this possibility may face no easy obstacles, the most prominent of which is the regime’s inability to continue to be in compliance with the nuclear deal if and when the US Administration escalates its pressure thus reducing the strategic and economic benefits of the deal.
In other words, there may not be several options for the regime to improve the chances for continuing compliance with the deal in the coming period. That is because policies pursued by other major parties to the deal may influence such possibility. In particular, the Trump Administration must take a crucial decision in mid-January on whether to continue to waive energy sanctions against Iran’s energy industry. Moreover, insistence on implementing the deal despite US escalatory measures may be seen by some influential institutions of the Iranian regime as weakness. Such a view can push these institutions to mount their pressure on the regime to make as much political and strategic gains from the deal as possible. These are concerning the literal implementation of the terms of the deal and refraining from circumventing them and exploiting some loopholes to continue ballistic missile test-fires.
In this same context, the Revolutionary Guard Corps may have the view that reducing support to regional allies can impose disastrous consequences on them because such support remains one of the most important and reliable mechanisms for countering possible regional and international pressure over their unabated threats to the security and stability of neighboring countries.
That said, it can be argued that for any these scenarios to become a reality will hinge on the scope of the current protests, which may very well pose one of the biggest challenges to the regime since it was established in 1979. In other words, the spread of these protests is the medium variant that can determine such a possibility, but may not be the only determinant because the current crisis facing the Iranian regime remains open to several likely eventualities.
