The United States is heading toward dramatic collapse, according to Hasan Taeb, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Unit.
Taeb said on January 27 that the United States’ only chance of survival was Iran, which he described as the major power in the Middle East. If President Obama’s administration failed to follow Iran’s lead, his country was destined for failure — in the Middle East, but also closer to home. He said the US was heading for a break-up not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, echoing previous comments by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
General Yaghoub Alinazari, commander of the paramilitary Basij Forces in Razavi Khorasan province, shared this view, declaring earlier in the month that the United States was heading for disaster.
Although Taeb predicted America’s downfall only days ago, the belief that the US is heading for self-destruction has been a popular refrain for Iran’s hardliners for years. It even formed a part of 2009 presidential election debates between former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and opposition figures. “For the past four years, we have been hearing that Israel is collapsing, that France is collapsing, that the US is collapsing,” said reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi on June 4, 2009. “Well, this is how we set our foreign policy. No wonder we’re going in the wrong direction; no wonder we make mistakes.”
In September 2015, Vatan-e Emrooz newspaper — one of the most vocal media outlets when it came to opposing the nuclear deal — cited some Texans’ calls for the state to secede from the United States as clear evidence of a coming US collapse. “The election of Hillary Clinton or another Democrat in 2016 will result in the break-up of the United States,” the paper said. Prior to this, Mohammad Ali Ramin, director of an institution that promotes Holocaust denial and an ally of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, predicted that the United States would disintegrate in a couple of years, breaking into independent states.
Some Islamic Republic officials prophesize that the collapse will come later than 2016. “The national debt of America is so big that the country will not be able repay it for the next 10 generations,” General Mohammad Hossein Sepehr, the Deputy Representative of the Supreme Leader to the Revolutionary Guards, announced in early 2015. “The United States will certainly collapse by 2030.”
Often the trend of talking about an impending American collapse is expressed in language usually reserved for end-of-times soothsaying about the arrival of the Shia Messiah, the Twelfth Imam.
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Hardliners cite the US national debt as proof that the country is heading for disaster. Journalists and analysts have written extensively on the topic, not only in newspapers, but also contributing to anthologies on the theme, including in a book entitled The Death of the Satan Is Nigh.
Anti-Western theoretician Hasan Abbasi has been particularly prolific in presenting this argument, echoed by many others — all of which receive ample airtime on official Islamic Republic News Agency radio and television. In fact, the argument is so popular that even some hardliners have complained about being over-saturated with the theory.
The view gained more even more currency during 2011’s global activist movement Occupy Wall Street. “This movement is going to sprout such strong roots in the future that it is going to bring down the American and the Western capitalist system,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said at the time. A few months later he reiterated this belief — and employed one of his favorite analogies, a comparison between the US economy and the fall of the Communist bloc in the 1980s. “This infernal power is not going to survive,” Khamenei predicted in 2000. “Neither is Israel.” This was common knowledge throughout the Islamic Republic, he said. At the time, he refrained from predicting a timeframe for the fall of the United States, though he was sure that Israel would not exist in 25 years.
One opponent of the American collapse theory has been Adel Peyghami, professor at the conservative Imam Sadegh University and think-tank. “TV highlights American debts and announces that America could collapse at any moment,” he said in early 2015. “But the American debt is a sign of its power.”
But without a doubt, the brand of prophesizing so popular with the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence chief still commands influence in Iranian political life. As a result, it is hard to imagine hardliners changing their attitudes toward the US or Israel. And the fact that Taeb has chosen to speak up now — barely two weeks after the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and, in President Rouhani’s view, just after the birth of “a new chapter” for Iran — reveals a new hardliner tactic, a renewed attempt to destabilize improved US-Iranian relations. If you want a stronger America, hardliners seem to be saying, support improved relations. In their view, this “new chapter” will benefit the Americans — on the world stage and well as helping to support their economy — and only the Americans.
It’s a strange logic, but it has its foundations in a strong tradition, where just about anything goes as long as the dream of a victorious Iran is kept alive. And for many hardliners, pitting Iran against the “Great Satan” is the easiest way to do this.
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