The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has long fantasized that the "enemy" is on the verge of collapse, regardless of the situation in the real world. In Iran, discussions about the self-destruction of the West in general, and the United States in particular, fill the state-sponsored airwaves no matter the political weather.
Broadcasts and official media outlets’ reports on the plight of the United States are always driven by the “predictions” of Ayatollah Khamenei. One of the Supreme Leader’s hottest and most enduring takes was on the looming total expiry of US oil reserves. Nearly 10 years on, an article by Tasnim News Agency laid bare just how badly that claim has aged.
March 20, 2012
Platform: Mashhad, the Shrine of the Eighth Shiite Imam
On this date, Iran was on the verge of entering the biggest crisis in its contemporary history. The leader of the Islamic Republic, however, displayed little comprehension of the sanctions that were about to take hold, and instead posited them as an act of suicide by the West.
"[Westerners] will pay for this mistake,” he told audiences in the holy city of Mashhad. “They can ... see and understand the catastrophe that awaits them. Western countries will not be letting their people know about the future oil disaster."
Which oil disaster, exactly? As it stands, there is scant information on who provides Khamenei with the briefings for these infantile statements, but officials have let it be known that he is very interested in reading only those "reports" that fall within his mental coordinates.
Nine years ago, Khamenei appears to have genuinely believed the West's access to oil would be terminally scuppered by the sanctions on Iran. Furthermore, he opined, by the Gregorian calendar year 2021, the US would have completely run out of oil.
"Western countries are in trouble in terms of oil resources,” Khamenei boomed. “Their problems are getting worse day by day. The oil resources of some European countries and Western states in general will run out in four years, some in six years, and some in nine years; they have to use sources other than their own.
“The United States, which today has about 30 billion barrels’ worth of reserves, will run out of oil by 2021: that is, in nine years’ time, based on calculations made by our country's experts, whose statistics are based on the statistics of the Americans themselves."
Halfway through the year 2021, Iran is three years into its worst political and economic crisis since World War II. The oil embargo has mangled the economy of a country that once exported more than 2 million barrels per day, and now struggles to shift as much as 500,000, and that at cut-price rates.
The oil situation in the United States, however, is more buoyant than it was nine years ago. Approved US oil reserves have risen from 30 billion barrels in 2012 to more than 47 billion today. Throughout the last nine years, the US fuel and energy market has been performing better than it did in 2011-12. Meanwhile, the global energy market has been largely stable since then, despite the near-elimination of Iranian oil from the market. It even survived a pandemic.
Unfortunately, the socio-political atmosphere in Iran is such that no one can ask the leader of the Islamic Republic why he got this so badly wrong. And moreover, why, after it became apparent that the rest of the world could survive without Iranian oil exports, did he persist in promoting these illusory ideas?
July 12, 2021
Platform: Tasnim News Agency
"The Supreme Leader's reference to the depletion of American oil was a clever hypothesis or conjecture."
The Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Tasnim News Agency has published a new report entitled Reflections on the Words of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution 10 Years Ago About the Depletion of US oil Reserves. Instead of reflecting, though, author Mahdieh Imam Gholi tried to answer the pertinent questions of "skeptics and ill-wishers of the system".
In this report, Imam Gholi insisted that at the time of Khamenei’s speech in 2012, the US had not yet discovered the new oil reserves. This belied the fact that it is standard practice across the globe for the oil industry to discover new reserves all the time. It still makes headlines, of course, just as it does in Iran.
The author then tried to shift the goalposts by emphasizing the environmental consequences of shale extraction in the US, in which oil is derived from rocks through hydraulic fracturing. Green energy is indeed a pressing concern for Western economies, and the production of oil from shales can have a catastrophic impact on the environment. But this had nothing to do with the projections Khamenei made at all, and the facts still stand.
Imam Gholi also sought to justify Khamenei's "prophecy" by claiming that when the Supreme Leader cited so-called expert predictions in his speech, this was not intended as a “prediction”, a "guaranteed promise" or a "clear and unequivocal guess". Rather, he said, it was a “report” of a “hypothesis or intelligent conjecture by experts”.
Khamenei’s prophecy, then, was not even an honest forecast based on a miscalculation. That, at least, would have had a basis in reality. What Tasnim’s analyst omitted to point out was that such “hypotheses” have been irresponsibly jimmied into state-sanctioned public discourse in Iran for decades, and this particular one went on to inform the regime’s stance against the US and the West for 10 years. In the same speech, Ayatollah Khamenei told his followers that the US, the West and Israel would be finished – respectively in nine years, in 25 years, and “soon”. Ten years on, reality again speaks for itself.
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