When US and Iranian officials sit in separate rooms in Muscat, passing messages through Omani mediators, people in Iran do not wait for the communiqué. The quickest dispatch from Oman is never a carefully chosen diplomatic phrase. It is something more elemental — a shift in the atmosphere. And the atmosphere moves fast.

On 13th February, the USS Gerald R. Ford — the world’s largest aircraft carrier — received orders to leave the Caribbean and join the USS Abraham Lincoln already on station in the Middle East. In Washington, two carrier strike groups read as posture. In Tehran, the same fact lands as cost. A shopkeeper does not need a policy memo to know what a tougher American line can mean. He reads signals the way farmers read clouds: not for trivia, but for survival. By the time the headline circulates, a supplier has revised a quote, a landlord has recalculated a lease and a family’s plan for next month has turned into a question mark.

This is not simply pressure. What I call “governance by weather” (GbW) is a condition in which a country’s daily decisions — and, over time, its institutions and social rhythms — organise around the shifting posture of one external power. Formal sovereignty remains on paper, but governing turns into forecasting.

Weather, climate and the threshold

Every state governs under constraints it did not choose. In international relations, those constraints form a kind of climate — the durable backdrop of great-power dynamics, multilateral rules, market forces — that all states share. Climate is slow, structural, multi-sourced. Weather is something else: volatile, concentrated, daily. GbW describes the threshold at which one outside actor becomes the dominant source of day-to-day uncertainty across trade, finance, technology, housing and social life — and the pattern persists not for an episode but for decades. When that happens, the weather effectively becomes the climate for the society living under it, even as the rest of the world experiences only normal atmospheric variation.

The key is not alignment. Governance by weather can grow from antagonism. A state can define itself against an outside power and still make distance from that power the organising principle of budgets, narratives and timetables. A sovereignty that must be narrated through another capital is sovereignty with dependence built into its grammar.

For Washington, Iran is one file among many. For Iran, the United States has functioned, for close to half a century, as the weather system within which everything operates. The rial-dollar rate serves as a daily barometer — the fastest available translation of geopolitics into rent, medicine and food.

For Washington, Iran is one file among many. For Iran, the United States has functioned, for close to half a century, as the weather system within which everything operates. The rial-dollar rate serves as a daily barometer — the fastest available translation of geopolitics into rent, medicine and food.

When the rial hit record lows in late December, the Grand Bazaar shuttered. Protests spread across hundreds of cities, followed by one of the bloodiest episodes of unrest in Iran’s contemporary history. The trigger was not ideology. It was the exchange-rate board.

How the weather travels

The weather does not arrive by army. It travels through chokepoints: dollar clearing, insurance, licensing, compliance rules, export controls and the digital platforms on which modern commerce depends. The point is not only what is formally banned. It is the fear that travels farther than the law — de-risking, overcompliance, the quiet calculation that a transaction is not worth the trouble.

A factory that needs specialised parts also needs a bank willing to clear the payment, an insurer willing to cover cargo and a shipping line willing to accept the route. Any link can fail even when the goods are not prohibited, because “zero risk” is cheaper than judgement. Workarounds keep commerce alive but they replace investment with improvisation — firms stop growing and start surviving.

Then the weather reaches housing. The currency weakens, import costs jump, landlords price in uncertainty. Tenants keep the address but lose a room — or keep the rooms and move to the city’s edge. Square metres shrink, commutes stretch, households double up. Independence gets performed in speeches. Dependence gets negotiated at lease renewal.

A second border closes online. Filtering narrows the internet at home; sanctions and compliance fears narrow it again from abroad. A developer can write world-class code and still fail at the first step: an account that will not accept an Iranian phone number, a subscription no foreign card can pay for, a cloud service a legal team would rather block than review. Licences may exist on paper. Usability dies in the gap between law and risk.

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Independence as slogan

None of this absolves Tehran. Iranians know how often their own leaders turn defiance into doctrine and pride into policy, then pass the bill to everyone else. Domestic choices deepen vulnerability: erratic management, patronage, corruption and a habit of treating society as raw material in a confrontation it never chose. External pressure becomes a licence to postpone reform. “Dignity” becomes a substitute for competence.

Worse, the national project gets framed in language designed never to be tested. When slogans are broad enough to survive any outcome and elastic enough to absorb any failure, there is no mechanism for correction — only for doubling down. On a wrong course, even correct steps lead nowhere useful, and mistakes can land closer to an unintended goal than careful plans do. Without a falsifiable standard, a political system cannot learn from its own experience. It can only repeat it.

Meanwhile, officials blame Washington for inflation, shortages and unemployment. They may be deflecting, but they are also conceding the point: an external variable has become the default explanation for Iranian life. That is not sovereignty. It is dependence on another capital to make the internal story coherent.

Living by improvisation is exhausting. Over time it becomes identity: brace, flinch, repeat. Businesses avoid long-term contracts because they cannot price next month. Researchers publish papers they cannot turn into products because neither capital nor supply chains survive permanent volatility. Families delay having children not only because life is expensive but because life is unreadable.

Living by improvisation is exhausting. Over time it becomes identity: brace, flinch, repeat. Businesses avoid long-term contracts because they cannot price next month. Researchers publish papers they cannot turn into products because neither capital nor supply chains survive permanent volatility. Families delay having children not only because life is expensive but because life is unreadable.

Then the young leave — not all at once, not loudly, but steadily, like air escaping a punctured tyre. Brain drain is usually framed as economics. In Iran it also reads as a referendum conducted in departures: not against the country, but against the belief that its future will ever belong to them.

In the age of hydrocarbons, Iran sat atop strategic wealth and still fell behind. Now, as the world pivots towards AI, advanced computing and the capital-heavy infrastructure of chips and data centres, isolation is no longer a handicap. It is a compounding penalty. Talent needs open access — to tools, platforms, capital and collaboration — to accumulate. In a storm, it evaporates.

Suspense itself has become a market. Iranians are not at the negotiating table. They are being gambled with — by governments and by strangers on prediction markets who turn a nation’s anxiety into a betting line. After decades of this, a darker thought circulates: when uncertainty becomes permanent, even catastrophe starts to look like clarity. That is not appetite for war. It is fatigue — the weariness of people forced to live on forecasts so long that diplomacy, even when it “works”, feels less like an exit than like a new wing of the waiting room.

People in Tehran do not ask for miracles. Many no longer insist on the “right” outcome. Increasingly, they would settle for something more basic: a life that does not require checking the forecast before breakfast. They want the United States to be what it is for most of the world — a powerful state pursuing its interests — not an atmosphere that can turn on a dime.

A storm you cannot predict is the one that breaks you. In Iran, the most damaging storm has not been any single decision from Washington or any single failure in Tehran. It has been a system — built by both sides, for different reasons — that makes ordinary life contingent on signals from elsewhere, then calls that condition sovereignty — or, when the audience changes, “independence”.

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