There Are No Tradeoffs in Iran—Only Shortages

Scarcity of everything

Sorry for the absence. I am working through some health issues—well, survivng them more than working through them. Here are some of my recent writings, followed by a new article.

Could Iran’s Water Shortage Fracture the Regime’s Hardline Base? (MEFO)

We are China hawks. Don’t pivot to Asia! (Breaking Defense with Mike Mazza)

What do Iranians want? (The Spectator)

Before we proceed, please share this newsletter and/or post with your friends and on your social media. It will be a huge benefit. I am not good at marketing—not that I don’t know how to, just that I don’t want to make money off of the rage politics on social media. My best tool is word of mouth. Thank you!e

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An American dog was bragging to his Polish and Russian friends that “Whenever I’m hungry, I bark, and dad puts food in my bowl.” The Polish dog responded, “What’s food?” The Russian dog asked, “What’s barking?”

This is one of my favorite Cold War jokes, one that Ronald Reagan used to tell.

The Islamic Republic has topped communism. It has combined food shortages and censorship and added water and power outages. All to establish the rule of Islam, but 75,000 mosques that have closed down in recent years due to a lack of attendance belie that.

The mark of political maturity is acknowledging that there are tradeoffs to any policy. Except in Iran, where you lose something in return for losing something else, too.

You might be thinking that I’m rambling at this point. I’m not. When I was growing up, the state TV loved to boast about how Iran was the leading country in dam construction. I always found it peculiar as a kid. It was just odd to me that, out of all the countries in the world, Iran had figured out how to build dams best. I just couldn’t accept that the United States and Germany were lagging behind Iran in their dam-building capacity and knowledge.

But what does a 14-year-old know? Quite a lot, it turns out. It’s not that the rest of the world didn’t know how to build dams, as much as they knew better than to build dams.

The regime always pretended as if dam building had no downside to it, while the benefits were plenty: boosting the agricultural industry, generating electricity, helping economic growth. Pretty much like a Persian mother convincing her son to drink tomato juice because “it’s great for your hair, your heart, your brain, your manhood, everything” and if you don’t drink it you’ll die.

I have written in the Middle East Forum Observer article linked above about the political incentives the regime had. On a policy ground, many have speculated that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s notorious paranoia about invasion was also a factor in trying to boost food production at home—indeed, self-sufficiency in producing wheat, rice, etc. was another recurring theme of state TV, but that I didn’t have the wisdom to rebuke at 14 and had to wait until I got my hands on The Wealth of Nations years later.

Going back to my wisdom at 14, I also didn’t understand the argument for energy production because the regime’s we are awesome and sit on some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world and we desperately need to generate more electricity with dams did not go together. (The same goes for we desperately need nuclear energy.)