Iran’s economy has been through a lot in the past four years. After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was designed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, was sealed in 2015, Iran immediately received sanctions relief: its GDP promptly grew by a staggering rate of 12 percent, and European companies started investing in the country’s key sectors such as oil, gas, and automobiles. But then last May, Donald Trump withdrew from JCPOA and violated the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, single-handedly undoing twelve years of intensive negotiations between Iran and several world powers.
Iran has proven it does not succumb to pressure. Equally important, it has also proven it can tolerate hardship.
By withdrawing, the Trump administration imposed unilateral sanctions, targeting the purse strings of the Iranian economy: banking, finance, and the energy, aviation and shipping sectors. These are the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a country, and the European Union’s attempts at creating independent financial channels for trade and business have so far failed to compensate for U.S. actions. The International Monetary Fund predicted that Iran’s economy is expected to contract by 6 percent in 2019 and unemployment is expected to climb to 15.4 percent in 2019.
“Today, it cannot be said whether conditions are better or worse than the war period,” President Hassan Rouhani said, comparing Iran’s current situation to the tough years of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 1980s, “but during the war we did not have a problem with our banks, oil sales, or imports and exports, and there were only sanctions on arms purchases.”