Oil, gas and Iran economic analyst
OPEC oil production continued its sharp post-war recovery in July, but Iran remained a notable exception, with output still around a quarter below pre-war levels and its oil revenues taking an even steeper hit.
Iran produced 2.478 million barrels per day (bpd) in July, up just 26,000 bpd from June, according to OPEC’s latest monthly report.
By contrast, Saudi Arabia increased output by about 590,000 bpd, Iraq by 665,000 bpd and Kuwait by 393,000 bpd. Combined crude production among OPEC members rose by about 1.66 million bpd in July to 23.63 million bpd.
Iran’s export revenues have recovered even more slowly.
Commodity intelligence firm Kpler told Iran International that daily deliveries of Iranian crude to Chinese refineries fell from more than 1.7 million bpd in March and April to less than 500,000 bpd in July.
Kpler said Iran offered its crude at a discount of more than $5 a barrel in July, while transportation costs exceeded $10 a barrel. Once payments to intermediaries were included, it estimated that at least 25% of the nominal value of Iran’s oil sales was lost before the proceeds reached the country.
At July’s export volumes, Kpler estimated that crude delivered to China had a nominal value of about $1.2 billion. That compares with average monthly oil revenues of about $3.8 billion last year, according to OPEC estimates.
China has long been overwhelmingly the largest destination for Iranian crude, leaving Tehran particularly exposed to changes in purchases by Chinese refineries.
Iran struggles to restore output
Iranian production fell by nearly 1 million bpd between the beginning of the Middle East war and May, according to OPEC figures.
Over the following two months, it recovered by only about 200,000 bpd, reaching 2.478 million bpd in July. The pace of that recovery slowed sharply last month, with the 26,000-bpd increase leaving production roughly a quarter below pre-war levels.
The figures contrast with the much faster restoration of production elsewhere in the Persian Gulf following the severe disruptions caused by the war.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait accounted for much of OPEC’s July increase as producers took advantage of the temporary ceasefire to restore output. Despite the rebound, regional production remains well below levels before the conflict, with large volumes of Persian Gulf supply still offline.
The contrast is even sharper with the United Arab Emirates, which left OPEC in May and has since sharply expanded production. OPEC continues to track UAE output in its monthly report despite its departure from the group.
OPEC estimates that UAE crude production reached around 3.78 million bpd in July, approximately 882,000 bpd above its level in the months preceding the war.
Venezuela also continued its recovery, with production reaching about 1.12 million bpd in July, up from around 940,000 bpd in January.
For Iran, however, the combination of depressed production, sharply lower deliveries to China and the costs associated with selling and transporting its crude means the financial recovery has lagged even further behind the rebound in output.
In the study of migration and bilingualism, Persian is, for many children of Iranian immigrants, a heritage language: a language passed down through family and cultural background while another language dominates their schooling and social world.
The term is not the same as mother tongue. A mother tongue is usually the first language learned in childhood; a heritage language may lose its dominant place very early, sometimes before the child can read a word of it.
For Iranians, this is not merely a question of language teaching. More than four decades of political, social and economic emigration have built a multigenerational society outside Iran, one now entering its third generation.
The question is no longer how many Persian words the children know. It is how much of the language, the family memory and the direct connection to Iran will reach the generations after them.
One generation weakens a language; the next can lose it
Starting school is one of the deepest turning points in a child's linguistic life. The host country's language is not just the language of lessons; it becomes the language of friendship, play, jokes, music, the internet and most of the child's social world. Even in a family where the parents speak Persian at home, the real share of Persian in the child's day shrinks, steadily and without anyone deciding it should.
The shift rarely happens suddenly. First the child understands Persian and answers in Persian. Then she still understands her parents but replies in the dominant language. Later, Persian narrows to family matters and daily routine, while feelings, schoolwork and personal disputes migrate to the other language.
Nor are understanding, speaking, reading and writing a single skill. A person may understand Persian almost completely yet grope for words when speaking, or speak fluently yet be unable to read a simple text. At that point, direct access to Persian literature, media, history and much of the written world of the language closes too.
The experience of other immigrant communities shows how deep the shift can run within two or three generations, a pattern sociolinguists have described since Joshua Fishman's classic model of three-generation language loss.
In the United States, 89 percent of first-generation Latino youth and 79 percent of the second generation report speaking Spanish well; in the third generation the figure falls to 38 percent, and only 26 percent report strong reading and writing.
Canadian data show the shift happening inside the family itself: in households where both immigrant parents shared the same non-official mother tongue, 24.4 percent of children used only English or French at home, against 2.5 percent of their parents.
These numbers are not about Iranians and cannot be transferred to them directly. But the pattern they draw is unambiguous: a language's strength in the first generation is no guarantee it will reach the third.
When the shared language shrinks, the hard conversations shrink with it
The consequences are not only cultural. One of the most consequential facts of immigrant family life is the gap that can open between the linguistic reach of parents and children.
A child usually learns the host country's language faster and deeper than her parents do. A father or mother may handle the new language perfectly well for work and errands, yet still feel a memory, an emotion or a complicated thought most precisely in Persian. The child may lack sufficient Persian in exactly those places.
In childhood the gap barely shows. School, food and tomorrow's plans need only a narrow band of language. Adolescence demands other conversations: anxiety, love, identity, discrimination, gender, politics, the future, the family's own disputes.
A shrinking common language does not by itself produce a family crisis, and the difficulties of immigrant families cannot be reduced to language. Economics, the migration experience itself, generational difference and social pressures all play their part. But the more complicated the conversation, the more the linguistic ceiling makes itself felt.
In Iranian families, the bond with the older generation carries its own weight. A child with limited Persian can manage daily talk with her grandparents. Hearing the story of a life, the memory of an emigration, an argument about history, is harder.
For a community whose modern experience is knotted together with revolution, war, repression, protest and wave after wave of departure, this is not only about preserving literature and culture. Language is one of the principal carriers of family and historical memory. The narrower it becomes, the more the next generation's access to its own family's lived experience will depend on summaries, and on translation.
The third generation: who will teach Persian, and with which Iran?
About the coming generations there is still no comprehensive data. Nobody knows how many Iranian children abroad understand Persian, how many speak it, how many can read and write it. Even the size of the diaspora resists precise measurement, because countries classify people differently, by birthplace, citizenship, ancestry, ethnicity or language.
Yet the third generation's challenge is already visible in outline. The first generation typically carried complete Persian out of Iran. The second may hold a reduced version: strong comprehension, weaker speech, little literacy. When that generation becomes parents, its narrower Persian is no longer a private matter; it directly constrains what can be passed to the next child.
For Iranians, teaching the language carries a political complication too. Many immigrant families are caught between the need to preserve Persian and their distrust of institutions that are official, or tied to the Islamic Republic. Not everyone has access to a Persian school, and some parents refuse to let their child's language lessons come bundled with religious instruction, ideological content or the state's official narrative of Iran's history and identity.
So the question is not only how Persian should be taught. It is who teaches it, with what content, and with which image of Iran.
A few hours of weekend class will not carry a language on their own. A language survives when a child has reasons to use it: books and media made for her age, friendships with other Persian speakers, and the ability to talk in Persian not only about home and food, but about her own world.
For part of the second generation, Persian is still the language of home but no longer the language of life. For the third, the question is more fundamental: will Persian remain the language of home at all?
That question is not only about the survival of a language. Its answer will decide how directly generations who may never live in Iran can reach their family's memory, their people's modern history and the Iranian experience itself; whether Iran, for them, will be a land whose language they know, or a story that always arrives in translation.
The poll drew nearly 100,000 responses, with 83% saying they would emigrate and 17% saying they would stay. Economic hardship, inflation, social restrictions and uncertainty about the future featured prominently in comments from respondents considering leaving.
“We didn't have money to emigrate before; now we don't even have money to live in Iran,” one respondent wrote. Another said that with the exchange rate reaching 2 million rials to the US dollar, even getting to the border had become unaffordable.
Many emphasized that their desire to leave stems from a basic wish for stability, dignity, and a normal life without constant anxiety. "We only get one chance at life and youth, and I wish we could spend it somewhere in good spirits," one respondent wrote. "Why should we keep waiting years for Iran to be fixed?"
The findings align with independent research on societal hopelessness in the country. A poll conducted in March 2024 by the Washington-based Stasis Institute found that 76 percent of Iranians believed young people saw no successful future for themselves in Iran, a figure that rose to 82 percent among those aged 18 to 29.
According to United Nations data, more than 4.14 million Iranians have sought asylum abroad since 1980. Iran International estimates that an additional two million Iranians have emigrated through legal channels, meaning roughly one in every 15 Iranians now lives abroad, out of a population of 87 million. Unofficial estimates place the first-generation Iranian diaspora at over eight million.
Economic strain and brain drain
Persistent inflation, eroding purchasing power and limited job opportunities remain among the main factors driving the desire to leave. Iran has consistently ranked among the leading countries of origin for international students in North America and Europe and ranks fourth worldwide as a source of doctoral students in the United States.
Socio-political restrictions, air pollution, and declining public infrastructure further exacerbate the sense of impasse. Foreign diplomatic operations in Iran have also slowed following recent regional escalations, leaving many visa applications halted and adding to public frustration.
Sociologist Hossein Ghazian previously told Iran International that push factors within Iran have consistently played a greater role in driving emigration than opportunities abroad. As those domestic pressures intensify, he said, the desire to leave is likely to grow.
Resistance versus departure
Despite the overwhelming majority favoring emigration, a segment of respondents rejected the idea, framing it as a surrender to the Islamic Republic. Some argued that remaining in Iran to demand political change is the only viable path forward.
"Emigrating means giving up," one respondent wrote. "Instead, we should rebuild Iran." Another added: "No, the ones who should leave are the Islamic Republic."
Others cited the popular protest song Suroud-e Zan (Women's Anthem) by Singer Mehdi Yarrahi, echoing its line: "Why travel? Stay and take it back."
For many, the decision remains contingent on the political regime itself. "If Iran were in good shape, never, but with the clerics in power, yes," one comment read.
For others, family ties remain the sole anchor. One woman noted she would have left two decades ago were it not for her mother, while another said she still hoped to build a better future for her children, even as she felt her own youth had slipped away.
As economic pressures intensify, the debate between leaving for stability and staying to push for change continues to define the daily reality of millions of Iranians.
Analysts disagree over how directly Tehran is involved and what is driving the Houthis back into action after largely sitting out the Iran war. But whether Tehran is directing them or benefiting from decisions they make independently, renewed Houthi activity puts additional pressure on Iran's adversaries, particularly Saudi Arabia.
On Tuesday, the Houthis fired missiles at the Tanzania-flagged cargo ship Tihamah in the Bab el-Mandeb strait, killing four crew members and two members of the government-allied National Resistance Forces, according to Yemeni authorities.
Later on Tuesday, the Houthi-affiliated Al-Masirah network said the group targeted another vessel carrying what it described as Saudi “military equipment” in the Bab el-Mandeb.
Houthis pursue their own war
The Houthis' return to action appears rooted first in their own calculations inside Yemen.
Kamran Bokhari, a senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council and strategic forecaster, describes Iran's so-called Axis of Resistance as a corporate brand in which some groups operate more like Iranian-controlled subsidiaries, while the Houthis resemble an independent franchise.
“They'll come in and participate in a conflict and they'll act as and when they see that it's in their interest to do so,” Bokhari told Iran International. “They're not like, you know, Iran says jump and they say how high?”
For months, that interest appeared to lie in staying out of the Iran war while its trajectory remained uncertain.
The calculation began to change following a confrontation involving an Iranian aircraft bound for Houthi-controlled territory. Saudi Arabia struck a Yemeni airfield after the aircraft attempted to land, helping trigger a renewed cycle of attacks between the Houthis and Riyadh.
The escalation also comes amid growing activity by Saudi-backed government forces and UAE-backed southern separatists inside Yemen.
“It's all domestic, is what I'm trying to say. It has nothing to do with Iran,” Bokhari said of the immediate Houthi calculation.
But that domestic struggle is unfolding in a regional environment transformed by the Iran war.
Iranian disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has already increased pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. Renewed Houthi activity around Bab el-Mandeb means Riyadh increasingly has to contend with threats around two critical waterways.
Saudi Arabia is also trying to build a stronger security architecture around itself. The recently signed Saudi-Pakistani-Turkish defense pact could give the kingdom greater regional support as it confronts those threats.
That may give the Houthis an incentive to press Riyadh now.
“The Houthis want to be able to extract concessions from the Saudis before the grid goes up, if you will,” Bokhari said.
Their ultimate objective, he argues, remains establishing themselves as Yemen's dominant political and military power and forcing Riyadh to accept that they cannot simply be eliminated.
Iran benefits
But the Houthis' pursuit of their own objectives does not mean Tehran is a bystander.
Fatima Al-Asrar, a Yemen and Iran specialist, sees the renewed Houthi pressure as increasingly intertwined with Iran's broader strategy against the United States.
“Of course, they [Iran] see it as an extension to them. They're no longer hiding it,” Al-Asrar told Iran International, pointing to Iranian rhetoric linking pressure around the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.
She said Tehran is closely watching growing US fatigue with the Iran war and sees the approaching midterm elections as an opportunity to increase pressure on Washington.
“They're very transparent, very calculating, and they're using the Houthis on that front in order to press their advantage,” she said.
New reporting from Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat raises the possibility of a more direct Iranian operational role.
Citing Yemeni security sources, the newspaper reported on Tuesday that IRGC officers are overseeing aspects of the Houthi escalation and that an Iranian official, Ali Mohammad Rezaei, is supervising an operations room managing military and security affairs in Houthi-controlled territory. Iranian officers have also helped establish additional missile and drone launch positions, according to the report.
Iran International has not independently verified the claims.
What will this lead to?
In July of this year, US President Donald Trump has warned Washington would hold Tehran responsible for renewed Houthi attacks, describing the group as an Iranian “Surrogate and/or Proxy” and threatening military punishment against both.
But retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe, who served for 27 years and commanded four warships, told Iran International that he doubts Trump will want to launch another major military campaign against the Houthis.
“He definitely doesn't want to be embroiled on a second tangent here,” Sharpe told Iran International.
Bab el-Mandeb also does not carry the same strategic weight as the Strait of Hormuz, Sharpe said, because ships have alternative routes, albeit at considerably greater cost and distance.
Yet Iran can still benefit.
Greater Houthi disruption could complicate shipping and potentially force the United States and its partners to devote resources to another strategic waterway.
“I think they'll be pleased,” Sharpe said of Tehran. “If it does draw away resources, US resources from the Gulf of Oman, then that's in Iran's favor.”
