On his way home from work this week in Tehran, Majid, a 34-year-old computer programmer, encountered traffic chaos because a power outage had disabled the stoplights. Earlier in the day, he and his co-workers had been trapped on the 16th floor of their all-glass office building without electricity or air-conditioning.
The headlines on Iranian state television that evening were dominated by the acute energy and economic crisis plaguing the country. The government had announced daily power cuts lasting several hours, changed school hours to start at 6 a.m. and warned more water outages would soon follow.
In contrast, satellite news channels were broadcasting wall-to-wall coverage of President Trump’s visit to the Middle East, said Majid, who asked that his last name not be published for fear of retribution. Arab countries, considered Iran’s rivals, were announcing multibillion dollar deals with Mr. Trump and showcasing economic development tied to their close alliances with the United States.
“I’m watching Trump announce tech deals with Saudi Arabia, our main rival, and thinking, ‘Where are we, and where are they?’” Majid said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “We are worried about riding the elevator at work, and they are getting artificial intelligence technology.”
Mr. Trump’s high-profile trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates, which wrapped up on Friday, resonated widely in Iran. Many Iranians said in phone interviews, social media posts and online town hall discussions that they had watched the tour of the region — the president’s first major international trip of his second term — unfold with a mix of envy, regret and anger at their government.
They said the visit crystallized for them how Iran’s development had been held back compared to that of its Arab neighbors, and attributed the differences to government mismanagement and ideology.
“Everybody is talking about Trump’s visit with envy, because we could have been like the Arabs,” Hamid Asefi, a political analyst in Tehran who is a critic of the government, said in a telephone interview. “We have the geography, the natural resources and human talent to be a major economic power, but the regime’s anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology has put us where we are.”
“It’s a slap in the face,” he added.
Washington and Tehran are in the midst of nuclear negotiations to stop Iran’s advancing nuclear program in exchange for lifting tough economic sanctions. Mr. Trump made remarks about Iran at every stop along his regional tour, saying he wants a deal with Iran but also sharply criticizing its leadership for their domestic and regional policies.
“Iran’s decades of neglect and mismanagement have left the country plagued by rolling blackouts lasting for hours a day, all the time you hear about it all,” Mr. Trump said in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, at a speech during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Tuesday. He told attendees, “While your skill has turned dried deserts into fertile farmland, Iran’s leaders have managed to turn green farmland into dry deserts.”
Mr. Trump said he had secured $600 billion worth of investment deals with the Saudi government and firms. (Though the details the White House provided were vague and totaled less than half that number.)
The comments angered Iran’s officials, who accused Mr. Trump of insulting their nation and being “delusional.” Iran’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying Mr. Trump’s “intention was to sow divisions between Iran and its Arab neighbors.”
“You tried for 47 years to bring this country and its people to its knees but failed, you are threatening us?” President Masoud Pezeshkian said in reaction to Mr. Trump’s comments, referring to the hostile relationship between Iran and the United States since the revolution in 1979. “We will develop this nation and build it with power.”
But ordinary Iranians and even some prominent politicians and former officials acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s comments had struck a nerve.
“I suffered, I felt embarrassed when the president of America was describing Iran in Saudi Arabia,” Iran’s former vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, said on Thursday in a speech that went viral. “We weren’t supposed to be described in this cruel way even by our enemy. We could have been the No. 1 power in the region.” He blamed sanctions and the ideology of some political factions for the current state of crisis.
Milad Goudarzi, a conservative media personality in Iran, posted on social media that Iran’s government had for decades stifled demands for reform and punished criticism, in the name of preventing an enemy from exploiting those internal divisions. But, he said, “the biggest thing the enemy exploits — at the negotiating table and in rhetoric — is your incompetence.”
The multitude of crises facing Iran has reached an extent that officials can no longer hide or sugarcoat them. In addition to economic woes, such as spiking inflation, an energy shortage has forced the government to announce a number of drastic measures.
All government work force hours, including at banks, have been reduced to 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. The education ministry similarly ordered schools to start classes at 6 a.m., a move that has sparked a public backlash from parents and educators, who say children should not wake up at 4 a.m. to compensate for an electricity shortage.
“In Iran, industries and the economy are directly tied to the energy situation,” said Abdollah Babakhani, an expert in Iran’s economy and energy based in Germany. But in today’s Iran, Mr. Babakhani added, a country with vast hydrocarbon energy resources “is facing severe shortages due to sanctions and mismanagement.”
Mr. Babakhani said the economic status quo in Iran was not tenable and that it made a deal with the United States more pressing.
Some Iranians are sharing videos of how power cuts are disrupting everyday life. A baker in the city of Shiraz posted a video, shared on social media and a satellite television news site, of large batches of sourdough spoiling after a four-hour electricity and water outage, saying he was losing daily income. “This is our country’s situation, damn you,” the baker says in the video.
Industry has not been spared. The government announced this week a 15-day total power cut for major industrial factories such as cement and steel. The national association of steel and cement called the move “unprofessional and extremely damaging,” and asked for the president to intervene.
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization, and also covers Iran and the shadow war between Iran and Israel. She is based in New York.
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