Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime are in their "ninth inning," considering the nation's failing economy and with President-elect Donald Trump about to take office, retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt told Newsmax on Thursday.
Holt, a former deputy U.S. military representative to NATO, told "Newsline" that it might take a while for the inning to play out, but noted the Iranian currency, the rial, has "nosedived again. "
"That's so important," Holt said. "The economics behind all of this is how you figure it out."
One U.S. dollar is worth tens of thousands of rials, and "that's the stuff that revolutions are made of," he added.
"I think there are going to be great days again," he said. "I think the Israeli strategy is to just basically push them over when they get to this weak point."
Russia also will not be able to do much to save Iran because Israel has bombed weapons factories that were producing weaponry for Moscow, Holt said.
"This is really great news all the way around," he said. "It's just going to be very dangerous in the days ahead until we get Trump on board and [have] a new day and strategy."
Just after November's election, Iran's currency fell to a record low after Trump's victory, trading at 703,000 rials to the dollar. As of Thursday, the Iranian currency was trading at about 42,000 rials to the dollar, according to CNBC.
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Iran's government offices are either closed or operating at reduced hours, schools are teaching online only, and industrial plants are being denied power, despite the country having one of the largest supplies of crude oil and natural gas in the world.
The energy crisis is being attributed to years of sanctions, aging infrastructure, and now, to targeted attacks coming from Israel.
"We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money, and environment," Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a televised address to his country earlier this month. "All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis.”
Pezeshkian said that even though the Iranian infrastructure has had issues for years, the crisis is now at a critical point.
And with the shutdowns resulting in losses of tens of billions of dollars, Pezeshkian could offer only apologies, not solutions.
"We must apologize to the people that we are in a situation where they have to bear the brunt,," he said. "God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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