Iran Is Facing Its Soviet Moment and Possibly Its End | Opinion

On September 13, 1985, Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani announced that his country would stop propping up the price of crude. Prices collapsed, and the Soviet Union lost roughly $20 billion a year in hard currency—“money without which the country simply could not survive,” in the estimate of Yegor Gaidar, later Russia’s acting prime minister. Gaidar dated the collapse of the Soviet Union to that announcement. Tehran is now in a weaker position than Moscow was in that autumn. The Islamic Republic is exporting almost no oil, its currency has lost nearly a third of its value since March,...