Iran maintains military spending despite US sanctions

Iran has maintained its military spending dismissing claims that US sanctions forced the government to cut defence budgets.

In an interview with the Financial Times, a military adviser to the supreme leader, Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, said that Tehran had not “made any cuts to the budgets of our military organisations”.

“Militarily, today we are definitely in a better situation than three years ago when Mr Trump came to power, in all aspects — from staff, organisation to equipment. And we will be better in five years if Mr Trump is re-elected,” said Gen Dehghan.

“In the region, since the formation of Isis and the rise of insecurity, we have used all our capacity to organise, train and consult our allies,” he added.

Iran's economy has been hard hit by US sanctions that had plunged the country into a deep recession.

Yet the republic’s official military spending had risen in local currency terms since Trump started imposing sanctions, according to government budgets, although the full extent of defence spending in the country remained unclear.

Trump administration officials, on the other hand, claimed that one of their key successes had been to force Tehran to reduce its military outlays by almost a third.

Gen Dehghan said that part of Tehran’s survival strategy was not to retreat from sponsoring regional militant groups and to continue developing its missile programme; holding out on talks with Washington but avoiding all-out war; and a bet that Trump’s policies would ultimately serve Iran by fuelling anti-American sentiment and empowering its proxies.

America's strategy “is costing them and it costs us. But who is the winner now? Today, we believe our influence in the region has increased despite all this pressure,” said Gen Dehghan.

Iran and the US came close to war last month after Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, was killed in an American drone strike.