Iran war has a 'second front' — and Tehran has already lost it

 A few days ago, according to a leaked exchange, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told an Iranian military counterpart that their nation’s economy will face collapse in three more weeks without an immediate cease-fire.

He’s not wrong.

Conventional wisdom holds that an air campaign alone cannot trigger a popular uprising, so the combined US-Israel effort in Operation Epic Fury won’t result in meaningful regime change.

But that fails to recognize there’s a second front in this conflict: economic warfare.

And on that front, Iran has already lost.

President Trump’s goal in his first term was to resolve the Iran issue through primarily economic means.

After a year of renegotiating the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, he withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and imposed tough economic sanctions on Iran’s key sectors to prevent nuclear development.

The campaign focused on secondary sanctions — penalties on non-Iranian actors for doing business with the regime.

Some 1.5 million barrels of oil per day were removed from the market, and Tehran’s revenue losses topped $200 billion.

Headlines screamed that Iran was on the verge of collapse.

Yet in 2021 the Biden administration chose to stop enforcing the sanctions, and even provided the Islamic Republic with some $144 billion in additional revenue.

But none of this money was invested in spurring economic growth in Iran, or used to help reduce daily costs for the Iranian people.

Instead, it was poured into Tehran’s terrorist proxies — funding, for example, the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

The Iranian regime also focused heavily on its nuclear program, installing thousands of additional centrifuges and enriching uranium to ever-higher levels.

But Trump re-applied sanctions in his second term — and by last October, significant fissures began to appear. 

Two major Iranian banks failed, triggering ever-increasing inflation as the rial cratered.

In December, the economic pain became acute.

The Tehran bazaar, traditionally a source of conservative support for the regime, broke into open rebellion, and the Iranian people poured into the streets.

The regime cracked down with unprecedented savagery, slaughtering some 30,000 dissidents in early January, and the protests understandably petered out.

The world waited to see how Trump would respond.

American military assets began to flow into the region, and in late February, the president gave the order to commence Epic Fury.

By every conceivable military metric, it has been a stunning success — but it’s only half the story.

For weeks, the regime has restricted Iran’s Internet to 1% of its normal usage, dramatically constricting commerce.

The day before Epic Fury began, the BBC reported that the days-long internet closure that had been part of the January crackdown had caused disastrous economic pain — which pales in comparison to what has happened by now.

Iran announced a new five-million-rial bank note, known as the “Iran Cheque,” on Feb. 1.

It wasn’t enough: Ten days ago, Tehran introduced a ten-million-rial note as its currency continued its downward spiral.

Conservative estimates put inflation at 40% before the war began.

On March 6, a week into the battle, Chatham House projected that if the war did not conclude quickly, the Iranian economy would contract by 10%, triggering a depression.