Esfandia Badmengelesh
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 13 Apr
Esfandia Badmengelesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And where will that money come from?
The sanctions relief is far more valuable for Iran economically than any revenues they might gain from traffic in the street.
This has actually become a recurring issue in Iran because at every instance of national protests, the Iranian authorities have tamped down on internet access, and it has a direct impact on the livelihoods of millions of people who actually make a living in e-commerce and other services that depend on internet connectivity.
So in a sense, this is actually a self-inflicted harm that the leaders of the Islamic Republic have undertaken, which is, in their mind, for the sake of national security,
trying to restrict access on the internet, knowing very well that this is going to have a profound impact on the economy.
You know, there are carve outs in the internet shutdown to allow some essential services like banking to persist.
But generally speaking, I think what listeners should have in mind about Iran, and this is what's quite unique about this war, is that this is really the first time in which the US has faced an adversary that is a country with a actually quite advanced industrialized, financialized, digitally enabled economy.
And so the impacts we're seeing from this war are unlike impacts we've seen in Afghanistan or Iraq.
We're seeing actually the impacts of a war on an economy much like those in Europe or the US.
And this trade-off between national security and economic stability is one that the Islamic Republic has really struggled to navigate.
I think the easiest way to explain it is that the sanctions regime targeting Iran is the strongest in the world.
Often we hear that the Russian sanctions regime is the strongest or largest, but it is the largest in terms of the number of entities that have been targeted.
The dilemma that this poses is that if you want to rebuild a major industrial facility, you're going to need machinery and equipment.
And that equipment is often not produced domestically in Iran.
It needs to be imported.
For example, the equipment that would be part of a major steel furnace.
And so were the sanctions to remain in place, even if there is some kind of ceasefire, it will be very difficult for Iran to actually rebuild that infrastructure in a timely fashion, making the demand for sanctions relief even more important.
My view is that there will not be an insistence on a toll being paid by vessels in order to fund the reconstruction because that puts Iran on a collision course with its regional neighbors who will never accept such an arrangement.
The reason that that rhetoric is emerging right now is that Iran wants to demonstrate that this is something that it has been able to do under the conditions of war.
And unless the international community wants to see a new war breakout in the region, they will have to accommodate Iran in certain respects, and one of those being providing broad sanctions relief.
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