The Prolonged War in Iran and the Dynamics of the Home Front
How sustainable is the discourse of unity in Iran?
The rallying together seen in the first phase of the war is a natural reflex to an external threat and a response consistent with Iran’s past experience of conflict. The question is not the sustainability of that reflex but the speed and intensity with which the economic siege following the infrastructure destruction US President Donald Trump has threatened will surface in society. The strongest touchstone here is the pattern of the twelve-day conflict between Israel and Iran in June 2025. The cohesion that formed during the attacks of June 2025 began to erode within five months, in October, with the fall of the rial, and by the end of December 2025 discontent had spilled into the streets with the protests of Tehran’s shopkeepers. Layered onto already severe economic conditions, the infrastructure destruction caused by the fighting was enough to trigger that wave.
The scale of destruction in the present war is of a different order. The International Monetary Fund projects a contraction of 6.1 percent and inflation of 68.9 percent for Iran in 2026. According to Central Bank of Iran data, annual inflation between 20 March and 20 April stood at 65.8 percent, and after the rial hit its historic low of 1.81 million to the dollar on 29 April, this trend is expected to accelerate further. Moreover, this picture is superimposed on an economy that even before the war was struggling with power cuts, water scarcity and problems in natural gas supply, and in which industrial layoffs were accelerating. Direct and indirect job losses linked to the war are counted in the hundreds of thousands; infrastructure damage is bringing an already fragile chain of public services close to the point of dissolution. Warnings given to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in internal consultations that rebuilding the economy will take more than a decade suggest that, compared with the twelve days of fighting, the trigger may take effect far sooner and far more deeply.
The economic outlook in Iran
The dimension that reaches the social surface fastest is food and energy security. Grain imports passing through Iran’s southern ports have come to a halt with the effective disruption of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. The South Pars field, struck by Israel on 18 March, supplies roughly 90 percent of the country’s energy and constitutes the basic infrastructure of gas-based fertilizer production. The weakening of energy infrastructure creates indirect medium-term pressure on agricultural yields and food prices. The contraction in fertilizer production, as it feeds into the 2026 harvest, establishes a mechanism that squeezes rural incomes and urban food prices at the same time. That places simultaneous pressure on the rural base the regime has traditionally been able to rely on and on the urban lower-middle class. The navigation risk at Hormuz raises not only import volumes but, through insurance and freight costs, the shelf price of imported goods. That the passive defense strategy effective in protecting military assets could not protect civilian resilience to the same degree indicates that, if the war is prolonged, the social fabric may become the area most exposed to pressure.
The relationship within the “government-economy-people” triangle in Iran is changing qualitatively. Before the war, the Pezeshkian cabinet was operating with a design that raised the security budget by 150 percent while holding wages to two-fifths of inflation. The war has widened that gap further. The tightening of fuel quotas and the cumulative rise in food prices (between March 2025 and March 2026 bread by 140 percent, meat by 135 percent, cooking oil by 219 percent) are accelerating the transformation of daily life into a line of costs that conflicts with the regime’s strategic priorities.
What is the critical threshold?
The critical threshold will be seen in the posture of the urban salaried class and public employees. Because this group formed the backbone of the 2009 Green Movement, the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and the shopkeepers’ movement of 28 December 2025, it is strategically the most sensitive stratum. Moreover, the attachment of the ethnic periphery (the Kurdish regions, Sistan-Baluchistan, Khuzestan) to central authority is already not strong. That Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij headquarters in these regions have been struck during the war may in future create multiple pressures in terms of both security and governance capacity. The strategic reflex here is taking shape not as a general capitulation but as a transfer of resources from social welfare to the security apparatus. Yet this orientation further erodes the performance-based legitimacy of a regime whose capacity to generate social welfare had already weakened.
Under external pressure, tensions have also emerged within the conservative bloc. The public quarrel on 25 April between the Tasnim News Agency and Raja News, which belongs to the Paydari Front, and the fact that two days later, although 261 deputies signed the parliament’s statement of support for the negotiating team, 27 deputies did not sign it, chief among them figures close to the Paydari Front, are indicators of this. That Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared before the public more than two months after his succession is another variable delaying the consolidation of symbolic leadership. But since this is understandable under war conditions, it is not a priority. Even so, if the situation continues after the war as well, the risk will grow by the day. Whether these signals produce structural consequences depends on their coinciding with the social pressure created by infrastructure destruction.
In sum, the rallying-round-the-flag reflex of the war’s first phase is real. But the scale of the destruction of infrastructure is preparing a structurally deeper version of the delayed-instability pattern that the twelve days of fighting of June 2025 triggered in December 2025. Given that the build-up in theatre continues and that the questions of “what is being objected to” and “what is being fought for” are still being debated within the US security bureaucracy, the final round of strikes Trump has threatened is not out of the question. That the United Arab Emirates was subjected to Iranian missile and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks on 4 May, the fire at the oil facility in Fujairah and the UAE leadership’s warning of regional escalation together with Saudi Arabia indicate that the role of the Gulf partners within the coalition is shifting from passive hosting towards active belligerence. That shift constitutes a separate threshold which structurally pushes up both the navigation risk in the Strait of Hormuz and the insurance-freight-shelf price chain, even if the final round of strikes does not take place.
This article was first published in Anadolu Agency on May 8, 2026.
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