How Iran Is a Creation of Fiat Money

By Zachary Addair · 3/23/2026

Most people analyze geopolitics through the lens of religion, ideology, or ethnic conflict. Useful frames, sometimes. But incomplete ones. If you want to understand why regimes rise, why wars never seem to end, and why the same regions keep bleeding across decades; follow the money. More specifically, follow the printing press.

The modern state of Iran isn't just a geopolitical story. It's a fiat money story. And once you see it that way, you can't unsee it.

1953: You Can't Nationalize What the Dollar Needs

Let me start with a name most people don't know: Mohammad Mosaddegh.

In 1951, Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister did something radical. He nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British firm (now BP) that had been extracting Iranian oil for decades while paying Iran a fraction of the profits. Reasonable move for a sovereign nation. Catastrophic for the Western banking cartel that needed cheap energy to back its currencies.

Britain couldn't let it stand. Neither could the United States. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 ran Operation Ajax, a joint coup that overthrew Mosaddegh and reinstalled the Shah as a compliant authoritarian. Not because of communism (the stated reason). Because Iran tried to control its own resources.

You see, the dollar doesn't just require a printing press. It requires top down control of markets and especially energy markets. The whole system runs on oil, and post-war dollar dominance depended on controlling who got to sell it and at what price. A sovereign nation making sovereign decisions about its own oil was an existential threat to that arrangement.

This is the first lesson: fiat money requires violence to survive. The printing press and the gunship are the same tool.

Now, Bitcoin also requires energy. But the comparison ends there. The dollar needs energy so it can fund the armies that enforce its supremacy. Bitcoin needs energy so that computers around the world can verify truth. One uses energy to coerce. The other uses energy to achieve consensus without any coercion at all. The dollar's energy demand is a feature of its violence. Bitcoin's energy demand is a feature of its integrity.

1971–1979: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Petrodollar Trap

Fast-forward to August 15, 1971. Nixon goes on television and ends the dollar's convertibility to gold. The Bretton Woods system, the post-war architecture that tied the dollar to gold at $35/oz, is dead. The US is hemorrhaging gold reserves trying to fund the Vietnam War and Great Society spending simultaneously, and the math finally stops working.

Now the dollar is just paper. And paper needs a story.

Henry Kissinger provided one. In 1974, the US negotiated a landmark deal with Saudi Arabia: OPEC would price oil exclusively in US dollars, and the US would provide military protection in return. The Petrodollar system was born. Suddenly every nation on earth that wanted to buy oil had to first acquire dollars. Instant, artificial, global demand for a currency backed by nothing.

Here's where Iran re-enters the picture. This arrangement flooded the Middle East with freshly printed fiat in exchange for geopolitical compliance. Iran under the Shah received enormous capital flows, but they were destabilizing ones. Runaway inflation. Rapid, uneven modernization. Massive wealth inequality between a westernized urban elite and everyone else. The Shah's regime became a pressure cooker, sealed shut with dollar bills and US-backed security forces.

The 1979 revolution wasn't just an ideological explosion. It was what happens when a decade of monetary distortion finally detonates.

The Perpetual War Machine: Funding Both Sides of the Conflict

A feature of the fiat standard that doesn't get discussed enough is its ability to fund both sides of a conflict simultaneously, not by accident, but by design. During the 1980s, we watched this happen in real time: the US provided intelligence and military support to Saddam Hussein's Iraq while also, covertly, selling weapons to the Iranian regime during the Iran-Contra affair. One government. Two enemies. Both funded.

Why? Because fiat money has no physical cost to produce. Wars are expensive on a gold standard, but on a fiat standard, they're a line item. Perpetual conflict justifies perpetual military spending, which justifies perpetual currency expansion. The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War lasted eight brutal years with roughly half a million soldiers dead on each side. Both regimes funded the carnage through currency expansion, Iran printing Rials to arm its Revolutionary Guard and Iraq printing Dinars while receiving Western credit, while the central banks on all sides kept the printers warm.

This fiat engine doesn't only fund the immediate adversary; it also subsidizes regional counterweights to maintain a "high-tension equilibrium." For decades, the US has provided billions in annual military aid to Israel, ensuring a perpetual high-tech edge funded by printed money. Every neighboring state is forced to respond by diverting more of its own debased currency toward defense and proxy networks just to stay relevant. Consequently, Iran funds Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria, not necessarily out of ideological commitment, but because the fiat-funded arms race demands constant escalation to maintain leverage.

The only consistent winners in this arrangement are weapons manufacturers and the central banks financing them. The people of Iran, Israel, and the wider Middle East are essentially living inside a conflict theater that was architected to justify the next round of debt expansion. Fiat thrives on the chaos it creates.

2012: SWIFT, Sanctions, and the Accidental Bitcoin Ad

In 2012, Iran was cut off from the SWIFT international banking network, a financial weapon wielded through US and EU sanctions pressure. Overnight, Iran's ability to conduct international trade in the legacy financial system was effectively severed.

And something interesting happened. Iranians started looking for alternatives.

This is perhaps the most honest advertisement Bitcoin has ever received: when the legacy system is weaponized against you, you go looking for something the legacy system can't touch. Bitcoin is permissionless, borderless, and censorless. No SWIFT administrator can kick you off the timechain.

It gets more interesting. Iran actually became a significant Bitcoin mining hub for a period. Subsidized energy costs made mining economically attractive. The regime tried to co-opt it and even issued licenses for "authorized" mining. Then the miners started consuming too much power, destabilizing the national grid, and the state started confiscating equipment. The regime that printed money to fund its own survival couldn't control a monetary network that didn't require their permission to operate.

The Global War Machine: Funded by the Dollar

While the Iranian Rial is currently hyperinflating into irrelevance, focusing only on the local currency misses the bigger picture. The Iranian state’s survival, its military reach, and the regional response to it are all downstream of the global fiat dollar.

In the modern era, war is no longer funded by the spoils of victory or the savings of a nation; it is funded by the future labor of every person holding the world’s reserve currency. The US dollar facilitates a global arms race by providing the credit and the "aid" that forces every player onto a collision course. Whether it is billions in aid to allies or the covert financing of adversaries, the dollar is the common denominator.

In the current conflict we see unfolding today, it’s the same old story playing out with higher stakes. The US continues to egg both Israel and Iran into a state of perpetual friction. By sending billions in "defensive" hardware to one side and allowing billions in "humanitarian" or "unfrozen" funds to reach the other, while simultaneously weaponizing the dollar through sanctions, the fiat architects ensure that the fire never goes out. It is an orchestrated regional collision where the US provides the fuel for both engines, ensuring that neither side can truly walk away, and both must keep buying the hardware of destruction with tomorrow’s labor.

Fiat money always returns to its intrinsic value of zero, but before it gets there, it is used to buy the hardware of destruction. Sanctions against Iran are just another lever in a dollar-denominated system that treats entire nations as pawns to justify its own continued expansion.

Bitcoin: Defunding the Global Theater

For someone in Tehran, or someone in the West, Bitcoin isn't just a speculative asset. It's a way to opt out of the war machine.

It is the first technology in history that allows an individual to move their capital into a system that cannot be used to fund a regional arms race. When you hold Bitcoin in self-custody, you are not just protecting your wealth from inflation; you are withdrawing your "contribution" from the global fiat ledger that subsidizes conflict on all sides.

Moving wealth to Bitcoin is an act of financial self-defense and global de-escalation. Every satoshi moved onto the timechain is a small withdrawal of consent from a system that requires perpetual war to justify its existence. This is what "fix the money, fix the world" actually means: removing the ability of centralized powers to fund violence through the invisible theft of currency debasement.

The Bottom Line

The story of Iran isn't a story about Islam versus the West, or authoritarianism versus democracy. Those are the costumes. The underlying play is always the same: centralized control of money enables centralized control of people.

The 1953 coup, the petrodollar trap, the proxy wars, and the hyperinflation are all chapters in a larger narrative of the fiat dollar's dominance; all of it pushing Iran and Israel into this conflict for the past 70 years by design. By being able to print money, states no longer need the consent of their people to go to war. They only need a central bank.

The West should watch this carefully. Modern Monetary Theory and Central Bank Digital Currencies are simply the final form of this monetary coercion, a way to ensure the war machine never runs out of fuel. Iran is a preview of the social and economic friction that occurs when the money is broken.

Bitcoin is the only structural solution because it is the only system that decouples money from the state. It removes the printing press from the war room. If the people control the money, they control the funding of their own lives and they finally gain the power to stop funding the destruction of others.

Fix the money, fix the world.