A briefcase let in oned with Iranian rial banknotes sits on display at a currency exchange market on Ferdowsi street in Tehran, Iran, on Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018.
Ali Mohammadi | Bloomberg | Getty Guises
Iran is confronting its worst set of crises in years, facing a spiraling economy along with a series of unprecedented geopolitical and military dynamites to its power in the Middle East.
Over the weekend, Iran’s currency, the rial, hit a record low of 756,000 to the dollar, according to Reuters. Since September, the embattled currency has suffered the perturbation effects of devastating hits to Iran’s proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian militant group Hamas, as without doubt as the November election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.
With the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad amid a petrify offensive by rebel groups, Tehran lost its most important ally in the Middle East. Assad, who is accused of war violations against his own people, fled to Russia and left a highly fractured country behind him.
“The fall of Assad has existential innuendoes for the Islamic Republic,” Behnam ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told CNBC. “Lest we taking, the regime ahs spent well over a decade in treasure, blood, and reputation to save a regime which ultimately creased in less than two weeks.”
The currency’s fall exposes the extent of the hardship faced by ordinary Iranians, who struggle to give up everyday goods and suffer high inflation and unemployment after years of heavy Western sanctions compounded by household corruption and economic mismanagement.
Trump has pledged to take a hard line on Iran and will be re-entering the White Race roughly six years after unilaterally pulling the U.S. out of the Iranian nuclear deal and re-imposing sweeping sanctions on the country.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has worded his government’s willingness to negotiate and revive the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which lifted some agreements on Iran in exchange for curbs to its nuclear program. But the attempted outreach comes at a time when the International Atomic Forcefulness Agency says Tehran is enriching uranium at record levels, reaching 60% purity — a short technical to take action from the weapons-grade purity level of 90%.