The Economist writes of “predictions that Iran’s economy faced imminent collapse.” The title of the article is “America’s Blockade is Breaking Iran’s Economy.”
The Telegraph says: “US sanctions have choked Iran’s economy … They believe that tightening those current restrictions while issuing fresh curbs would ‘squeeze’ the regime, forcing it to eventually make a deal to prevent total collapse.”
The strategy is to threaten—or promise—to “collapse” the economy. With just one more push, it will come crashing down!
We know what it means for a house to collapse. After a house collapses, there is no house. After a bridge collapses, there is no bridge.
When an economy collapses, is there no economy?
Unless the people have been wiped out, they are still alive and still seek food and shelter. They still care for themselves and their families. They still trade. They try to scape by. Their economy may be impoverished, but an economy remains. It does not collapse into nonexistence the way a house does when it collapses.
The ‘collapse’ narrative suggests that after the collapse, ‘we’ can move in to rebuild and restart and reset. Build Back Better.
What the regime-changers seek is the collapse of a certain organization, namely, the governing regime. Once the leadership of an organization is decapitated, the organization itself may be no more. Organizations can collapse, like a house. Organizations can be revivified by installing new leaders. The regime-changers try to swap in their own friends and stooges as leaders of a new regime. But first they need to collapse the current regime by removing the leaders.
One tool in collapsing a regime is to devastate the economy of the country.
I asked a Grok about economic collapse narratives in articles of the following sources:
- New York Times
- Washington Post
- Wall Street Journal
- CNN
- Politico
- The Atlantic
- National Review
- Axios
- The Economist
- The Times (London)
- The Financial Times
- The Daily Mail
- The Telegraph
On November 1, 2026, I asked Grok how many times “collapse” (”collapsing,” etc.) is used with respect to the economy of each of the three regions and within certain time windows:
Region Time window
Iran 1 June 2025 – 1 Nov 2026
Ukraine 1 Feb 2022 – 1 Nov 2026
Gaza 1 Jan 2023 – 1 Nov 2026
The upshot: Talk of economic “collapse” in Iran has far exceeded talk of economic “collapse” in Ukraine or Gaza.
This is so in the raw totals. But two things make the result even more noteworthy.
First, the time window for Iran is 17 months whereas that for Ukraine is 57 months and that for Gaza is 46 months.
Second, while Iran has been victimized by severe sanctions, the kinetic destruction of its economic resources has been far, far less than has occurred in Ukraine or Gaza. Gaza has been pulverized, and Ukraine has been economic knee-capped. Yet, talk of economic “collapse” has been much greater for Iran, even in its much shorter time window.
Here are quotations from Grok’s response:
- “Iran (1 June 2025–today, ~17 months): high — on the order of 60–120+ clear uses (economy descends into a death spiral, battered/beleaguered/moribund/survival economy, currency crisis or collapse framing, oil dollars drying up, economic pain/pressure, collapse of the regime linked to economic conditions, etc.). Coverage is concentrated and consistent…”
- “Ukraine (1 February 2022–today, ~57 months): low — on the order of 10–25 uses… [E]xplicit collapse-family terms applied directly to the ongoing Ukrainian economy are sparse.”
- “Gaza (1 January 2023–today, ~46 months): moderate-to-low — on the order of 25–50 uses … [P]ure collapse-family formulations applied specifically to the Gazan economy remain less dominant than for Iran; many results still require filtering for physical building collapses.”
Grok provided the following pairwise ratios of the estimated totals:
- Iran to Gaza ≈ 3 : 1 to 5 : 1
- Iran to Ukraine ≈ 5 : 1 to 10 : 1
Again, those ratios are raw totals. They become much more extreme if we adjust them for the different lengths of the time windows, because Iran’s (17 months) is much shorter than Ukraine’s (57 months) or Gaza’s (46 months).
Grok summed it up: “In short, the absolute volume for Iran in its shorter recent window still exceeds the longer windows for Gaza and especially Ukraine.”
The reason for the vast difference is that the 13 media outlets are propagandists of elites who want to sell the story of an Iranian collapse. But when the propagandists turn their attention to Ukraine, they do not want to suggest that Ukraine is weak. As for Gaza, they mostly just do not want to turn readers’ attention to the conditions that survivors are suffering under.
Other aspects of the talk of economic “collapse” in Iran also are deplorable.
First, suppose that the United States and Israel kill a lot of Iranians and knee-cap its economy. Will that actually cause the regime to collapse? That does not seem likely.
Second, even if the regime did collapse, will something desirable really follow in Iran? Over the past fifty years, how have the US’s and Israelis’ regime-change efforts worked out for humankind?
It’s easy to collapse things like regimes and other institutions, and much more difficult to build and sustain them. Maybe one reason governments today apply themselves to collapsing things is because they suck so bad at building and sustaining anything.
