Deciding on a big change requires courage.
Deciding on a big change requires courage.
These days, I follow American news closely, perhaps because of the intriguing personality of Elon Musk or maybe to see how long Trump will get along with him. But, to be honest, I’m mostly curious to see which entrenched and common clichés the President of the United States will break.
For many years, I also believed that foreign policy was a very important factor in U.S. elections and choosing a President.
In fact, our media present it this way, for example, suggesting that it’s very important to American voters what policy Mr. X will take towards the Middle East.
But as time passed and I connected with some political science professors who have taught and lived in the U.S. for years, I realized that foreign policy, as we imagined it, doesn’t even make it into the top 10 priorities for the people of that country.
Domestic issues are more important to them. They think about how Mr. or Mrs. X’s policies, both inside and outside the U.S., will affect their lives. Trump, too, seems to be trying to affirm this view with his ‘America First’ policy and ‘Make America Great Again’.
In this path, he uses the tools at his disposal.
When he returned to the White House again, he had signing numerous executive orders on his agenda.
Some of them caused a lot of noise, while others were of no importance to other countries. The existence of a mechanism like executive orders or even legislation in Congress is not the focus of this note. Our focus is on assessing the situation and breaking common clichés.
One of the orders Trump signed was to halt U.S. foreign aid for three months and review them to determine how aligned they are with America’s interests and policies.
What benefit do those dollars or political support provided by the government bring to that country and its people? Even Elon Musk recently supported shutting down Radio Free Europe in its Persian section, known as Radio Farda, and Voice of America on Twitter.
Because, according to him, the one billion dollars that the U.S. government spends annually on these propaganda organizations is not beneficial.
All these actions and changes are to help them pull America out of crisis.
Whether they succeed or not is another matter, but for now, they are breaking long-standing clichés that have become routine.
We can examine this issue in Iran as well. Some matters cannot be written about because they are specific issues that require a lot of time and opportunity to address, but other matters can be written about.
For years, billions of tomans have been spent annually on institutions that have no output.
Or the spending for them falls on the people and non-governmental public institutions. If we were to list them, it would exceed the capacity of this column.
However, we can never cut or at least review the three trillion toman budget of a cultural headquarters in 1403 to see if it has been effective or not. Instead, we have to consider a larger budget for it in 1404.
The national broadcaster must receive over 20 trillion tomans annually, the Supreme Council of Seminaries should have about 7 trillion tomans, and 437 billion tomans should be allocated to Mr. Mesbah Yazdi’s institute.
The foreign students’ training program should have about 1.5 trillion tomans in 1403.
We cannot reconsider these financial wastes at all. It doesn’t matter if the government in power is revolutionary or moderate; these funds must be allocated. It doesn’t matter how beneficial they are or how much burden they impose on the country and its people.
We also face this issue in some decision-making processes.
Although the fever for lifting the filtering has subsided, so far, Google Play and WhatsApp are the biggest achievements of this project to slightly reduce public dissatisfaction. The way this was done is also noteworthy. The President is considered the second-ranking official in the country and the top executive authority.
But to fulfill a simple promise that is merely returning the people’s rights to them and is not considered a special privilege, he must gain the approval of individuals who are subordinate to him or have a significant legal distance from him.
Yesterday, the government spokesperson said that the lifting of the YouTube and Telegram filters is on the agenda.
We have to see what happens this time. This is just one example. Unfortunately, we are afflicted with the fact that some clichés have become ongoing practices, and we cannot reconsider them, regardless of whether they benefit us or are harmful.