Trump Middle East Tour Incites Envy in Iran
The country's citizens are enduring power outages while Saudis are making deals for cutting-edge technology.
NYT UN bureau chief and Iran correspondent Farnaz Fassihi has an interesting report titled “‘A Slap in the Face’: Iranians Watched Trump’s Mideast Tour With Envy.” It is, shall we say, anecdotal.
On his way home from work this week in Tehran, Majid, a 34-year-old computer programmer, encountered traffic chaos because a power outage had disabled the stoplights. Earlier in the day, he and his co-workers had been trapped on the 16th floor of their all-glass office building without electricity or air-conditioning.
The headlines on Iranian state television that evening were dominated by the acute energy and economic crisis plaguing the country. The government had announced daily power cuts lasting several hours, changed school hours to start at 6 a.m. and warned more water outages would soon follow.
In contrast, satellite news channels were broadcasting wall-to-wall coverage of President Trump’s visit to the Middle East, said Majid, who asked that his last name not be published for fear of retribution. Arab countries, considered Iran’s rivals, were announcing multibillion dollar deals with Mr. Trump and showcasing economic development tied to their close alliances with the United States.
“I’m watching Trump announce tech deals with Saudi Arabia, our main rival, and thinking, ‘Where are we, and where are they?’” Majid said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “We are worried about riding the elevator at work, and they are getting artificial intelligence technology.”
Mr. Trump’s high-profile trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates, which wrapped up on Friday, resonated widely in Iran. Many Iranians said in phone interviews, social media posts and online town hall discussions that they had watched the tour of the region — the president’s first major international trip of his second term — unfold with a mix of envy, regret and anger at their government.
They said the visit crystallized for them how Iran’s development had been held back compared to that of its Arab neighbors, and attributed the differences to government mismanagement and ideology.
“Everybody is talking about Trump’s visit with envy, because we could have been like the Arabs,” Hamid Asefi, a political analyst in Tehran who is a critic of the government, said in a telephone interview. “We have the geography, the natural resources and human talent to be a major economic power, but the regime’s anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology has put us where we are.”
“It’s a slap in the face,” he added.
President Trump certainly hoped for this reaction, seeking to stoke it with his speeches.
Washington and Tehran are in the midst of nuclear negotiations to stop Iran’s advancing nuclear program in exchange for lifting tough economic sanctions. Mr. Trump made remarks about Iran at every stop along his regional tour, saying he wants a deal with Iran but also sharply criticizing its leadership for their domestic and regional policies.
“Iran’s decades of neglect and mismanagement have left the country plagued by rolling blackouts lasting for hours a day, all the time you hear about it all,” Mr. Trump said in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, at a speech during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Tuesday. He told attendees, “While your skill has turned dried deserts into fertile farmland, Iran’s leaders have managed to turn green farmland into dry deserts.”
[…]
The comments angered Iran’s officials, who accused Mr. Trump of insulting their nation and being “delusional.” Iran’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying Mr. Trump’s “intention was to sow divisions between Iran and its Arab neighbors.”
Ali Akbar Velayati, the top foreign policy adviser for Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told The New York Times that Tehran does not view its Arab neighbors’ economic development as a threat, and dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments as “baseless.”
Mr. Velayati, who is overseeing the nuclear talks with the United States, said Iran was “an independent, self-confident and powerful” country. “If Iran’s regional power did not exist, then the United States and other world powers wouldn’t be insisting on negotiating and reaching a deal with us,” he added.
But ordinary Iranians and even some prominent politicians and former officials acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s comments had struck a nerve.
“I suffered, I felt embarrassed when the president of America was describing Iran in Saudi Arabia,” Iran’s former vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, said on Thursday in a speech that went viral. “We weren’t supposed to be described in this cruel way even by our enemy. We could have been the No. 1 power in the region.” He blamed sanctions and the ideology of some political factions for the current state of crisis.
Milad Goudarzi, a conservative media personality in Iran, posted on social media that Iran’s government had for decades stifled demands for reform and punished criticism, in the name of preventing an enemy from exploiting those internal divisions. But, he said, “the biggest thing the enemy exploits — at the negotiating table and in rhetoric — is your incompetence.”
The multitude of crises facing Iran has reached an extent that officials can no longer hide or sugarcoat them. In addition to economic woes, such as spiking inflation, an energy shortage has forced the government to announce a number of drastic measures.
All government work force hours, including at banks, have been reduced to 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. The education ministry similarly ordered schools to start classes at 6 a.m., a move that has sparked a public backlash from parents and educators, who say children should not wake up at 4 a.m. to compensate for an electricity shortage.
“In Iran, industries and the economy are directly tied to the energy situation,” said Abdollah Babakhani, an expert in Iran’s economy and energy based in Germany. But in today’s Iran, Mr. Babakhani added, a country with vast hydrocarbon energy resources “is facing severe shortages due to sanctions and mismanagement.”
Mr. Babakhani said the economic status quo in Iran was not tenable and that it made a deal with the United States more pressing.
Some Iranians are sharing videos of how power cuts are disrupting everyday life. A baker in the city of Shiraz posted a video, shared on social media and a satellite television news site, of large batches of sourdough spoiling after a four-hour electricity and water outage, saying he was losing daily income. “This is our country’s situation, damn you,” the baker says in the video.
Pressure on the regime to improve conditions has been increasing for many years. Crackdowns on dissidents have been harsh and reasonably effective in the short term but modern technology has made organizing easier than it was in the past. Further, it has made the contrast between conditions inside Iran and elsewhere in the region harder to hide. Young people, especially, have made their frustrations known.
Ali Khamenei, who has been Supreme Leader since Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, is 86 years old. Who will succeed him has been a matter of speculation for quite some time. His son, Mojtaba, head of the secret police, seems to be the favorite, but he lacks the religious credentials to be considered legitimate by the clerics. Regardless, the transition will mark a huge test for regime survival.
I wonder if the “satellite channels” include Al Jazeera, owned by the government that is giving the felon a $400 million bribe.
Thank you for writing this article.
I know of some Native Americans who describe Trump as an example of a Trickster. They say when a Trickster is in charge, there will be chaos everywhere and many things will be broken. However, they also say that the pattern is that some of the things that are broken will be things that need to be broken, and could not be broken in any other way. None of this demands that we embrace and admire a Trickster, though.
Another example of the NYT sanewashing Trump. (obligatory FTFNYT).
What on earth has Iran’s dysfunction to do with Trump’s deals with the Saudis? The implication of the NYT’s reporting is that Trump is undermining Iran’s regime by making deals with the Saudis.
Of course, there is absolutely zero evidence for that. (And how would that even work? What’s the actual mechanism?)
Just utter tripe.
(By the way, the one single reason for the shitty state Iran is currently in is the 1953 CIA-backed coup that strengthened the autocratic rule of the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. And without that coup, there would almost certainly be no 1979 revolution to be hijacked by the Khomeini-led Islamists.)
Before they get too jealous, Iranians might want to take a pinch of salt to go with Trump’s claims of deals. He’s lying. Qatar is not going to be doing 1.4 trillion dollars of anything, with anybody. Qatar has a nominal GDP of under a quarter trillion. It has the GDP of Kansas, FFS.
Trump isn’t there to make deals, he’s there to take bribes from people who sneer at him behind his back. Here piggie, piggie, here’s your slop, gobble it up, oh most powerful man on earth.
@Jay L Gischer:
Yeah, Dresden, get over it.
@Michael Reynolds: You realize that I wasn’t making an endorsement?
@drj: Sanewashing or not, the reaction seems, to me at least, very much a “mission accomplished” for Trump. He won’t be able to get any benefit from it, but he’s not a process guy anyway. He got what he wanted. He can move on to the next “deal.”
Our egg prices are down 97%, how could they not be envious?
@Jay L Gischer:
Of course, dude.
@drj: I suspect Trump’s visit served as a news hook to write a story Fassihi wanted to write, anyway. But I do think a presidential trip to the region heightens the contrast. The regime is wildly unpopular with women, young people, non-Persians, and non-Shia—which is to say, the overwhelming portion of Iranians.
EDITED TO ADD: I was not previously familiar with Fassihi, who has been a journalist for major outlets for a very long time, but a quick scan of works since Trump’s second inauguration with her byline are decidedly not pro-Trump. See, for example:
Can Trump Rename the Persian Gulf? (subhed: His suggestion to call the body of water the “Arabian Gulf” has apparently done the impossible: Unite Iranians.)
Iran Says Shifting U.S. Messages on Nuclear Talks Are ‘Not Helpful’ (subhed: But Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran planned to participate “calmly and coolly” in the negotiations. Both sides will meet in Rome on Saturday for a second round, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said.)
President Von Shitzhispants only emboldened the hardliners when he welched on the JCPOA.
If he really wants moderation in Iran it’s once again clear that he has no f’ing idea what he’s doing.
Iran is also boxed in by Israel’s destruction of Iran’s most important proxy forces, and the loss of Syria as an ally. Its alignment with Russia can’t replace what it’s lost. But it’s alignment with the Houthis endures, and our failure to totally secure Yemen’s littoral sea lanes with military force is a major US failure.
The stupidest thing the US or Israel could do at this point is attack Iran’s nuclear program. So far, Trump has resisted those calls, and if Bolton couldn’t get him to do it, I’m not sure who can. But Trump is enough of a chaos agent that predicting what he might or might do is…difficult.
My view has long been (and remains) that it’s important to keep pressure on Iran but to play for time. I think time is not on the side of the most conservative elements, especially as the old guard from the revolutionary period dies off.
I sort of feel for Iranians, but then I don’t. How can anyone be surprised that letting your country be run by people 100% committed to a 7th Century ideology prevents you from reaping the benefits of living in the 21st Century?
Short version: It’s the Mullahs, stupid.