The post Trump Says Ayatollah’s Dictatorship Must Go – What About Iranian Oil? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Protests sweeping Iran are the widest rangingThe post Trump Says Ayatollah’s Dictatorship Must Go – What About Iranian Oil? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Protests sweeping Iran are the widest ranging

Trump Says Ayatollah’s Dictatorship Must Go – What About Iranian Oil?

Protests sweeping Iran are the widest ranging since 1979. The world is transfixed not just because of its iconic imagery or even geopolitics, but rather one commodity: oil.

AFP via Getty Images

Each new crisis in Iran revives fears of a repeat of 1979, when Iranian oil production collapsed by 80 percent, removing 7 percent of supply from the global market and triggering a historic energy shock. Today, with Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), including its bloody volunteer Basij militia, killing the citizens en masse, and with President Donald Trump weighing his options, events in and around Iran are prompting similar anxieties. But the conditions that turned Iran’s 1979 upheaval into a global oil shock no longer exist. Leadership change in Iran — as very recently advocated by Trump — would create short-term market disruption, but these risks are manageable.

A Collapsing Economy, a Regime Under Pressure

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran’s clerical-security elite have crippled the country’s economy. Growth has been weak and illusory. In nominal U.S. dollar terms, Iran’s GDP has stagnated, while unemployment remains stubbornly high at 10 percent. Corruption has become institutionalized across the public and private sectors.

Many of these failures are diffuse and abstract, but inflation is immediate and unavoidable. Iran has long struggled with price instability. Annual inflation has exceeded 30 percent for seven consecutive years. In December 2025, inflation reached 42 percent year-on-year, with food prices and healthcare costs rising by more than 50 percent. On December 28, the rial collapsed to 1.45 million per U.S. dollar on the open market—a 40 percent devaluation since early 2025. The shock triggered nationwide protests, led in part by bazaar merchants, a constituency that brought down the last Shah in 1979 and has historically been a pillar of regime stability.

The drastic change in the official exchange rate of the Iranian Rial from ~42,000:1 to 1,072,500:1 is a stark symbol of a wider economic collapse.

AFP via Getty Images

Iran’s Sanctioned Energy Base: Reserves, Output, and Capacity

Iran sits atop some of the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves, ranking third in oil reserves with 209 billion barrels and second in natural gas reserves with 1,200 trillion cubic feet. Despite this tremendous wealth, production never recovered to the pre-1979 peak of 6 million barrels per day owing to mismanagement, decades of sanctions, underinvestment, and technical decline in aging fields. Under current conditions, Iran’s crude output hovers at 3.3 million bpd.

As Iran has long posed a threat to U.S. national security and regional interests, both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to restrict Tehran’s access to hard-currency revenues from oil, refined products, and petrochemicals. While the Obama Administration pursued the ill-fated nuclear deal (JCPOA), it allowed payments of $400 million in cash linked to the hostage release, $1.3 billion in additional cash payments, and unfroze over $100 billions of Iranian reserves worldwide. The first Trump administration reinstated sweeping prohibitions on the purchase, transport, and marketing of Iranian petroleum and expanded sanctions to cover entities providing goods or services to Iran’s energy sector. These measures have weakened the industry.

Limited access to foreign capital, advanced drilling equipment, enhanced oil recovery technology, and international project finance have slowed maintenance of mature fields, refinery upgrades, and investment in critical infrastructure. In this environment, China emerged as Iran’s dominant buyer, importing approximately 1.3 million bpd of discounted crude through semi-independent “teapot” refineries and shadow shipping networks. Smaller volumes continue to flow to Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and — until recently — Venezuela, to evade sanctions.

Iran’s natural gas exports are regionally concentrated. In 2023, Iraq and Turkey accounted for 87% of exports, though flows to Turkey fell 43% due to technical outages, weaker post-earthquake demand, and Ankara’s competing contracts with Russia. Exports to Iraq remain unstable, constrained by seasonal domestic shortages in Iran and Baghdad’s payment difficulties. Beyond these bilateral sales, Iran relies on swap and transit arrangements with Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, importing gas in its northern provinces and delivering equivalent volumes elsewhere. These swaps underscore the limits of Iran’s export scalability and leave gas flows sensitive to contract renewal, sanctions enforcement, and domestic disruption.

Iran allows Qatar to exploit the giant South Pars gas field rather than successfully building a world-class LNG industry that would have benefited the Iranian people. Sanctions, high domestic gas demand, corruption, and mismanagement of the theocratic dictatorship have missed this great economic opportunity for the Iranians.

The Strait of Hormuz, to the south of Iran, is a global energy choke point whose closure would have devastating international implications.

Anadolu via Getty Images

What Iran’s Unrest Means for Global Markets and U.S. Policy

Slowing global economic activity, combined with ample supply, has kept oil prices broadly in the $60–65 per barrel range since the fall of 2025. The Iran–Israel Twelve-Day war in June 2025 caused the last significant price spike, as Israeli strikes targeted one installation at the South Pars gas field, a fuel depot, and an oil refinery near Tehran. The war revived questions about whether Iranian oil production could be replaced. In reality, production was never the binding constraint. Saudi Arabia and the UAE retain sufficient capacity to offset Iranian volumes. The real vulnerability was — and remains — the security of transit through the Persian Gulf, where Iran can mine the bottleneck, the Strait of Hormuz.

For U.S. President Donald Trump, Iran’s unrest presents a strategic inflection point. Turning away from protesters would repeat the costs of Obama’s failure to enforce red lines in Syria. At the same time, Tehran has demonstrated its unwillingness to deliver the comprehensive agreement Trump has sought, refusing constraints on nuclear enrichment, missiles, proxy forces, or regional conduct. The Republic’s militant Islamic ideology has made a durable compromise implausible, effectively locking Iran into the Sino-Russian orbit while committing crimes against humanity.

If the Iranian leadership changes, in a favorable scenario, sanctions relief could lift production to 3.8 million bpd and redirect Iranian oil to open markets, potentially under conditions far more favorable to U.S. energy companies, rather than sanctions-evasive shipments to China. A new, U.S.-friendly regime in Tehran could also open the door to massive economic opportunities, including new main gas export pipelines to Europe and the construction of LNG facilities at South Pars.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2026/01/21/trump-says-ayatollahs-dictatorship-must-go–what-about-iranian-oil/

Market Opportunity
OFFICIAL TRUMP Logo
OFFICIAL TRUMP Price(TRUMP)
$4.939
$4.939$4.939
-0.08%
USD
OFFICIAL TRUMP (TRUMP) Live Price Chart
Disclaimer: The articles reposted on this site are sourced from public platforms and are provided for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MEXC. All rights remain with the original authors. If you believe any content infringes on third-party rights, please contact service@support.mexc.com for removal. MEXC makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be considered a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC.

You May Also Like

The Channel Factories We’ve Been Waiting For

The Channel Factories We’ve Been Waiting For

The post The Channel Factories We’ve Been Waiting For appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Visions of future technology are often prescient about the broad strokes while flubbing the details. The tablets in “2001: A Space Odyssey” do indeed look like iPads, but you never see the astronauts paying for subscriptions or wasting hours on Candy Crush.  Channel factories are one vision that arose early in the history of the Lightning Network to address some challenges that Lightning has faced from the beginning. Despite having grown to become Bitcoin’s most successful layer-2 scaling solution, with instant and low-fee payments, Lightning’s scale is limited by its reliance on payment channels. Although Lightning shifts most transactions off-chain, each payment channel still requires an on-chain transaction to open and (usually) another to close. As adoption grows, pressure on the blockchain grows with it. The need for a more scalable approach to managing channels is clear. Channel factories were supposed to meet this need, but where are they? In 2025, subnetworks are emerging that revive the impetus of channel factories with some new details that vastly increase their potential. They are natively interoperable with Lightning and achieve greater scale by allowing a group of participants to open a shared multisig UTXO and create multiple bilateral channels, which reduces the number of on-chain transactions and improves capital efficiency. Achieving greater scale by reducing complexity, Ark and Spark perform the same function as traditional channel factories with new designs and additional capabilities based on shared UTXOs.  Channel Factories 101 Channel factories have been around since the inception of Lightning. A factory is a multiparty contract where multiple users (not just two, as in a Dryja-Poon channel) cooperatively lock funds in a single multisig UTXO. They can open, close and update channels off-chain without updating the blockchain for each operation. Only when participants leave or the factory dissolves is an on-chain transaction…
Share
BitcoinEthereumNews2025/09/18 00:09
Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse Makes Another Statement Regarding the Anticipated US Cryptocurrency Legislation

Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse Makes Another Statement Regarding the Anticipated US Cryptocurrency Legislation

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, in his latest statement, once again expressed his support for the cryptocurrency legislation being debated in the US. Continue Reading
Share
Coinstats2026/01/22 05:30
Trump Dismisses Stock Market Dip as Minor While Solana and XRP Stand to Gain

Trump Dismisses Stock Market Dip as Minor While Solana and XRP Stand to Gain

Trump calls stock market dip “peanuts” and predicts big gains for Solana and XRP, despite recent market volatility and geopolitical tensions. President Donald Trump
Share
LiveBitcoinNews2026/01/22 06:00