Trump To Test Whether the Islamic Republic Can Collapse Without America Taking Another Shot

The much-maligned idea of ending the Iran war simply by declaring victory despite recent setbacks for the American side, can eventually end a regime that has wreaked havoc on the region and the west for 47 years. President Trump says he is only “semi negotiating” with Tehran over the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and ending its nuclear ambitions. A significant military escalation to achieve these goals increasingly seems unrealistic before the November midterm elections. The president, though, is signaling a third option. “A must read!,” the president wrote late last week on TruthSocial, linking to an article written by a former Trump transition team official James Jay Carafano, titled “Donald Trump Won The Iran War.” Declaring victory even as the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards Corps is blocking the Hormuz Strait and as some 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium is unaccounted for seems like an empty boast. Those challenges, though, might disappear if the current economic pressure on Iran is maintained. “I believe the objective here should be regime collapse, I don’t particularly care who comes next,” Senator Ted Cruz said recently. An obvious alternative leader is yet to emerge. Civil war can follow a vacuum at the top. The country might break up as non-Farsis — Kurds, Baluch, Yezidis, and others — secede. “While all such risks exist, we still need to help the Iranian people to topple the regime,” a veteran Israeli-Iranian broadcaster, Menashe Amir, tells The New York Sun. “Every day that this regime is in power, its threat to the Mideast is growing.” The regime, he adds though, “will fight to its last drop of blood.” The Islamic Republic’s religiosity instructs that “you need to struggle until you achieve final victory, and that if you fail you reach paradise.”Early this week Tehran announced new appointments at the top of the regime, which were reported to have been made by Supreme Leader Mujtaba Khamenei. The reshuffle was accompanied by a release of a videotape purportedly showing Mr. Khamanei addressing a group of religious scholars.The undated video depicts an unharmed Mr. Khamenei, who is known to have been badly injured in the February 28 strike that killed his father, former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. In contrast, Iran Wire and the London Times reported that Mujtaba Khamenei is now in critical condition or on his death bed. The new appointments in the name of the supreme leader and the rush to portray him as invigorated and in charge seem designed to demonstrate that the leadership is firmly in control and is receiving its marching orders from Mr. Khamanei, who has not been seen in public since that fatal February 28 strike. “I suspect it’s an orchestration of communication and process to make it look like there is communication and process, and that can actually give off the appearance that there is some sort of communication and process, even if there is not,” an official in Mr. Trump’s first term national security council, Richard Goldberg, tells the Sun.Tehran officials and many in America claim that the regime is winning, and that the blockade of Hormuz is the Islamic Republic’s ace in the hole. At the same time, the Iranian economy is in shambles. Inflation makes life difficult across the country. Hormuz: An Iranian Ace in the Hole? In two years, the strait will be “irrelevant,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said recently. Yet two years is a long time for America’s Gulf allies who rely on Hormuz to export oil, and Iran can use its Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, to block Bab el Mandeb, stopping Red Sea traffic to Asia from the Arabian peninsula. At the same time, Mr. Goldberg notes, “a cadre of ships that have signed up to move through Hormuz are shuttling oil out and going back and forth with the assistance of the U.S. Navy.” By now, up to nine million barrels a day are evading Iranian harassment, exporting oil to Asia and other places.Meanwhile Iran’s oil export is down to near zero. “As long as the regime has money to pay the IRGC ranks, they will remain loyal,” Mr. Amir says. “Their salaries are better than other Iranians, but inflation is hurting everybody, and at one point even the Guards will be unable to maintain acceptable living standards.” An economic collapse might not impress hard core regime types, but the longer financial pressures linger, the more rebellious the population turns — including mid-level regime enforcers. No Kinetic Strikes Might Hasten Rebellion “You’re not able to really plan a revolution if there are missiles or bombs coming from the sky,” a reporter for the anti-regime Iran International, Negar Mojtahedi, tells the Sun. “In many ways, ending the war will force the regime to face this post-war economy, and allow for the people of Iran to mobilize in some way.”For now, though, regime elites have honed their oppression tactics. The January 8-9 killing spree of some 40,000 protesters is still etched in the public’s psyche. In the last few months the regime has accelerated public hangings of men and women allegedly involved in organizing the protests or otherwise suspected of anti-regime activities.Regime Reshuffle: Rearranging Chairs on the Titanic?A host of new nominations was announced on Monday, including a head of the army, an IRGC deputy commander, and others. Most significantly, the longest serving past IRGC commander, Moshen Razaei, was named secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, replacing Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who was named as adviser to Mr. Khamenei. The round of new appointments has led to endless speculations by Tehranologists who tried to guess the meaning of the reshuffle for the future of the war. Yet it might have been an attempt to prove Mr. Khamenei is in full control of Iran. In reality “it serves as a distraction, because people are asking, where is Mujtaba,” Ms. Mojtahedi of Iran International says. The reshuffle also indicates that the regime ranks are thinning and aging. Messrs. Razaei and Vahidi are veterans whose careers date back to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Both are internationally wanted for their role in the 1994 bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish center at Buenos Aires. “They’ve all been recycled through different positions in the past” and “have institutional memory of the playbook, and took orders from Khomeini,” Mr. Goldberg says.While Tehran officials boast victory over America and Israel, the Islamic Republic is suffering its worst economic crisis since the 1979 revolution. Those at the top will fight to the end, but an American help to topple the regime could achieve all other war goals, from a return of free navigation at Hormuz to ending Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump To Test Whether the Islamic Republic Can Collapse Without America Taking Another Shot

Trump To Test Whether the Islamic Republic Can Collapse Without America Taking Another Shot

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