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Notes -
IRAN WINS IRAN WAR
President Trump on Truth Social:
Iran foreign minister Araghchi confirms the agreement.
No regime change
Assurances of "safe" passage through the strait of Hormuz, but no assurance of "free" passage.
Absolutely no mention of uranium, enrichment, or nuclear weapons.
No mention of proxies.
Possible sanctions relief.
There is no doubt this is a victory for Iran. No regime change, nuclear development will continue unabated and, most importantly, an aesthetic and propaganda victory for the Islamic Republic. US sanctions relief will be limited and the Iranians know it, although the wildcard there is whether the Europeans agree to some of it in a political deal.
In the long term, I think this is more mixed for Iran than many realize. The infrastructure destruction has been extensive. As oil prices come down again, a boom in oil revenue will be temporary. Iran is extraordinarily corrupt, and that includes the IRGC; those $2m shipping tolls are unlikely to fund necessary reconstruction and might not even fund weapons purchases after the relevant figures have taken their cut.
Much of Iran’s non-oil export industry, especially around chemical, medicine and some industrial manufacturing and export, has been destroyed. If oil returns to $65 a barrel it’s unclear how fast that can be rebuilt, especially if the IRGC, now firmly in charge, channels as much as possible toward rearming and the nuclear program. The civilian infrastructure destroyed is extensive, and public anger will mount further if much of it goes unfixed while the IRGC spends all it can on munitions and drones.
Eventually, as humiliating a defeat as this is for Trump (not that he cares, and not that he will pay for it) in objective terms, it might herald the end of the Islamic Republic, some years from now.
There's an additional, horrible oncoming problem which, even without the war, Iran would have real trouble fixing - water. Apparently they're overdrafting their aquifers so badly that there's ground subsidence of up to appx 30cm/yr at the worst, which not only causes infrastructure damage, but also
permanently andirretrievably diminishes the ability of the aquifer to be recharged even if the iranians stopped overdrafting on them. There's been estimates that they've suffered up to 70% depletion in groundwater reserve capacity, and they're in a half-decade long drought. Large numbers of dams are at critically low levels, and there's massive illegal pumping in the agriculture sector because, like California, Iranian agriculture focuses on very water-intensive commercial export crops (in CA, almonds, grapes, strawberries, and stonefruits; in Iran pistachios and melons). Further, insofar as Iran wants to rebuild its heavy industries, a lot of those plants will require a lot of water as well...there just isn't enough of it to go around, particularly for a megacity like Tehran (near 17 million in the metropolitan area). Some of the more alarmist reports indicate that there's already been dry-tap episodes in some neighborhoods.More options
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