What Iran Will Buy With Obama’s $50 Billion – Tablet Magazine http://t.co/PAnWEWikrD
— Roger Simon (@rogerlsimon) June 14, 2015U.S. administration officials are still defending the nuclear deal by assuring us that Iran will only use the $50 billion “signing bonus” they expect to receive on the country’s internal needs. No Iranian official has ever promised that, not even to the Iranian people who have been struggling with economic hardships. Yet the U.S. administration has presumed that Iran’s infrastructure is more significant to the regime than hegemony over Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
...Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s big hopes are unlikely to pan out, for two big reasons. One, no one has forced or will force Iran—deal or no deal—to stop its military operations in the region, so why would they? They can spend the $50 billion both internally and on their regional militias and maintain some kind of “Resistance Economy” until sanctions are lifted and investments get going. Two, Syria is too significant for Iran to just let go, as Iranian officials have declared publicly many times. Without Syria, Iran will lose its link to Hezbollah and thereby its leverage over Lebanon and its borders with Israel. If this leverage is lost, Iran will be forced to let go of its ambitions to become a main regional player and to forget about exporting the Islamic Revolution, the hope on which the regime was founded.
