Iran survived 3 months of war. Can it survive the aftermath?
Three months of war with the United States and Israel may not have broken Iran’s resistance, but its economy has been brought to its knees.
Forty days of American and Israeli bombing in March and early April – targeting energy grids, steel mills, petrochemical plants, ports and transport corridors – were followed by a two-month US naval blockade that sealed off much of what remained.
The damage bill has reached an estimated US$270 billion against a gross domestic product of US$371 billion in 2025.
By that measure, economists say the destruction is almost equivalent in scale to everything Iran lost during its nearly eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s – the last time the Islamic Republic posed a sustained threat to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, with negotiators convening in Switzerland and a fragile ceasefire holding, the question is whether economic ruin can do what decades of sanctions and military pressure could not.