Go Persians, go!

[The Minsky Moment]

Regime is living on borrowed time.  The old veterans from the Iraq-Iran war that are the base of regime support aren't getting younger, and they've blown whatever remnants of other public support they might have been able to claim.  The bazaari merchants turned out big in these protests which is always a bad sign for an Iranian regime.  The real old timers and top leadership in IRGC may bitter end it, but the mid-level elechons are going to start to think about what a successor regime might look like and whether they would be better off getting out in front of that process.

[Sheilbh]

I agree with all of that - although on that count I think that's where Pahlavi die-harders in the West are not particularly helpful (although perhaps they just don't matter).

The slight thing I'd question is about the mid-level because, as Tonitrus says I can remember several rounds of very significant protests in Iran. But I can't think of any elite defections or security service defections. I think those are key factors in successful revolutions. I'm not sure the extent to which, like under Assad, it is simply impossible for those people to imagine an alternative under a successor regime and the extent to which their material and status is tied up in the regime enduring.

[Tonitrus]

...Pahlavi die-harders in the West are not particularly helpful (although perhaps they just don't matter).

That exiled prince dude, and the attention he gets amid these events is pretty ridiculous.  Iran doesn't need to replace mullahs with a failed/discredited monarchy.

That said...the prospects for any kind of democratic movement there will have lots of difficulties from the start.  The democratic/republican institutions from the pre-Shah days are pretty far gone in the past, and there is a large cohort of regime loyalists/sympathizers/leftovers who would still be around to push things in a regressive direction.

Even if a popular revolution would to push over the line to topple the regime, there is a great danger of things going along the lines of the post-USSR Russia...years of poverty/beggary followed by a slow or quick retrenchment into thuggery.

But maybe I am too cynical.

[Jacob]

The number of dead is horrendous... but sadly, not out of character for the regime.

Does it look like the US will take any action?

[Legbiter]

The number of dead is horrendous... but sadly, not out of character for the regime.

Does it look like the US will take any action?

They have a lot of kit assembled in-theater but what would a sustained bombing campaign even do? You can bomb leadership targets, the lower rank move up but facts on the ground remain the same. If the US seizes/blows up Kharg Island on day 1 then I'll believe they're serious about tossing the Islamic Republic out. Unless the opposition is armed with weapons on the ground this is like Venezuela 2.0

[Tonitrus]

I have enough low opinion of the current US government mafia that I suspect Venezuela 2.0 might be exactly what they're thinking.

However, I also suspect the Iranian ayatollahs are not as pliable as it seems Maduro's successors turned out to be, even if they are bombed.

[Tonitrus]

And I am much more skeptical that a "snatch and grab" operation of Ali Khamenei would work out as well either.  For us or for them.

[Sheilbh]

The number of dead is horrendous... but sadly, not out of character for the regime.

Does it look like the US will take any action?

I think there's reasons to think it. They've moved a lot of hardware into the region. The UK have deployed the RAF in a "defensive capacity" to Qatar (a very close ally). The regime has issued some very bellicose statements. Reports in Turkiye are that the government are activating emergency plans for a US-Iran conflict.

(Very much not important but I'd just note on this from a Euro-centric perspective that the Syrian conflict resulted in around 1.5 million refugees in Europe - and had a big destabilisnig effect on our politics. And worth noting that Turkiye took significantly more in - closer to 3-4 million. But seen an article from several years ago estimating a war in Iran could lead up to as many as 8 million refugees in Europe - again probably far more within the region.)

Agree on all of that though Tonitrus.

I think this is a far more hardened regime that I think will be prepared and preparing for an attack (see their very aggressive statement). There is a leadership class at the top that are ideologically committed and came through (often as the young radicals) a revolution and existential war. I suspect even more broadly than that there is a broad class whose material well-being depends on the survival of the regime. As I say I think there is more of an Assad style zero-sum aspect with the opposition here too.

On the other hand I slightly query quite what the regime can do in response - and I think it does show the worth/sense of their "forward defence" policy in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen for the last forty year. As it's a lot easier to attack Iran when they don't have proxies to move in the region. I'd also add that Saudi is re-aligning interestingly.

Having said all that - the attack in Venezuela was extraordinary, so I'm very reluctant to write of the US military.

[mongers]

I have enough low opinion of the current US government mafia that I suspect Venezuela 2.0 might be exactly what they're thinking.

However, I also suspect the Iranian ayatollahs are not as pliable as it seems Maduro's successors turned out to be, even if they are bombed.

Yes, the US is after all their 'Great Satan' and I'd guess many do genuinely believe that after the Iran-Iraq war, during which the US extensively cooperated with the Iraqis to mount the most successful chemical weapons campaign on the battlefield.

And not forgetting all of the European country's chemical companies that supplied the base chemicals and for whom European countries turned a continent wide blind-eye.

My point being that if so many of the regime have survived chemical weapons attacks, they'll forever hold the US and the West responsible, so for them martyrdom of one form or another is no big deal.

[Jacob]

I'd also add that Saudi is re-aligning interestingly.

How so?

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Saudi Arabia has been warming relations with Iran over the past few years.  They even went so far as to lead the condemnation of Israel's strikes last year.

[grumbler]

Yes, the US is after all their 'Great Satan' and I'd guess many do genuinely believe that after the Iran-Iraq war, during which the US extensively cooperated with the Iraqis to mount the most successful chemical weapons campaign on the battlefield.

And not forgetting all of the European country's chemical companies that supplied the base chemicals and for whom European countries turned a continent wide blind-eye.

My point being that if so many of the regime have survived chemical weapons attacks, they'll forever hold the US and the West responsible, so for them martyrdom of one form or another is no big deal.

I don't think that the Iranians believe that the US "extensively cooperated with the Iraqis to mount the most successful chemical weapons campaign." Nor that "many of the regime have survived chemical weapons attacks."

Martyrdom in Shia Islam is definitely seen as a sacred thing.

[Sheilbh]

How so?

May be overstating it but I thought this was interesting by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour from a couple of weeks ago, via Adam Tooze framing the argument and the shift from the Emirati alliance into a closer working with Turkey, a more explicitly religious and anti-Zionist line sems clear. Plus I think while the Axis of Resistance still existed the possibility of alignment between Israel, Saudi and the UAE was plausible - having destroyed the Axis of Resistance, I think Israel's also destroyed the basis of that rapprochement.

I still think aspects of Project 2030 have been surprisingly (to me) successful (I think particularly the propaganda side of things) but I think it's also clear they're trying to defend oil prices as structurally key to their economy.

For more than a decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates functioned as the central axis of what was called moderate Arab politics. They coordinated on Yemen, jointly confronted Qatar, underwrote counterrevolutionary reaction after 2011's Arab Spring, and presented themselves to Washington as the region's most reliable Arab partners. Now, Saudi Arabia is changing this course and is repositioning for regional primacy in a Middle East it believes will soon look very different.

After a decade of costly and inconclusive ventures: the failure to impose an outcome in Yemen, the inability to subordinate Qatar through coercive isolation, the underwhelming regional returns of Vision 2030, and the growing economic and strategic rivalry with Abu Dhabi, Saudi policymakers appear to have reached a different conclusion about what is the best path they have to accumulate regional power in current conditions. A consolidating relationship with Turkey, renewed investment in Islamist and anti-Zionist legitimation, a deliberate freeze of normalization with Israel, and public confrontation with the UAE across multiple theaters are all clear signs of such a major strategic pivot. And behind it all, a strategic wager: the American-led conditions that made Gulf alignment rational are thinning, and Saudi Arabia intends to lead the region in whatever post-liberal world comes next. Riyadh is no longer a conservative stakeholder seeking to preserve an inherited hierarchy. It is acting as a revisionist manager—prepared to challenge old partners, reorder alignments, and redefine the principles around which regional politics are structured.

The immediate trigger was the developments in Yemen, which began last month. Emirati-backed forces advanced into Saudi-controlled territory in the south, seizing energy infrastructure with minimal resistance. Riyadh responded with a sustained counteroffensive that pushed Emirati proxies back and signaled a willingness to contest Emirati positions across the theater. The military clash was quickly accompanied by an information war. Saudi-aligned media accused the UAE of promoting secessionism, undermining Arab territorial integrity, and acting as a conduit for Israeli nefarious plans. Emirati outlets countered by portraying Saudi Arabia as reckless, ideologically Islamist, and unfit to manage regional stability.

This confrontation with the UAE and the end of the Saudi-UAE relationship as a stable axis are the first visible expressions of a broader regional system transition: from a region organized around managed alignment to one structured by open competition among status-seeking middle powers within conditions of competitive multipolarity in which conflict is not episodic but structural.

[...]

What is emerging is not multipolarity in the classical sense—a stable distribution of power among great-power blocs--but something more fluid and less predictable: a post-liberal environment in which the American rule-based hegemony that once mediated competition has ended. Or to put it in other terms, America's hegemony is no longer rule-based. Access to markets, capital, and security guarantees can no longer be secured through institutional compliance. They must be bargained for, repeatedly, from a position of leverage.

[...]

Saudi Arabia's pivot must be read against this backdrop, and against a second, equally decisive factor: Trump's unilateral reordering of global energy markets. Saudi regional strategy rests on oil rents; without elevated oil revenues, domestic and regional expenditures become unsustainable. American policy now threatens that foundation with structural oversupply into a market already suffering from price volatility, undermining OPEC+ leverage precisely when Riyadh needs it most. The turn toward agenda control, symbolic custodianship, and selective mobilization is not ideological regression into a primordial Wahhabi Islamist DNA that reasserts itself. It is an adaptation to a new reality—one in which American actions have become unpredictable not only in the security domain but in the economic base that makes Saudi power possible.

[...]

The combined effect is the collapse of residual bipolarity. A system that had been organized around the two former bounding forces—American management on one side and Iranian-led resistance on the other—has lost both. With fewer external constraints and fewer systemic ceilings, competition becomes direct, positional, and difficult to contain. States accumulate influence less through institutional standing than through control over corridors, investment pathways, narrative platforms, and conflict portfolios. They seek veto points, cultivate leverage across arenas, and treat symbolic issues as instruments of statecraft.

[...]

Saudi Arabia's portfolio is anchored in wealth, scale, and symbolic authority. It is the only Arab state that combines demographic weight, financial capacity, and custodianship of Islam's central holy sites. These attributes generate a form of mass legitimacy unavailable to its Gulf peers, non-Arab states, let alone a small Jewish state, and impossible to replicate through material investment. Riyadh can mobilize regional publics, shape discourse, and redefine political priorities in ways that smaller states cannot. Its control over religious infrastructure further embeds Saudi authority into the everyday political economy of the Muslim world.

These structural assets translate easily into symbolic capital. Saudi Arabia realized that it is uniquely positioned to claim custodianship over regional "moral" files—above all Palestine—and to convert that claim into agenda-setting power, which ultimately makes an anti-Zionist posture more advantageous than a normalizing one. Narrative mobilization is therefore not ancillary to Saudi strategy but integral to it. In a system where legitimacy is increasingly contested, the ability to define what counts as stability, fragmentation, normalization, or betrayal constitutes a form of hard power by other means. Riyadh's current heightened propaganda activities reflect an effort to turn this symbolic advantage into a durable instrument of system management.

[...]

Several of the region's most consequential disputes now turn on a single question: which political units in the Middle East are permitted to consolidate, and which must be kept fragmented and permanently constrained. Unlike what Saudi and Qatari propaganda claim, the real answer is not doctrinal but strictly contingent. Every major actor endorses sovereignty when consolidation would produce a friendly power, and resists it when consolidation would generate a rival capable of locking in an adverse alignment. Fragmentation is not an ethical category. It is an equilibrium outcome in arenas where no coalition can impose a preferred settlement and where permeability itself becomes leverage.

[...]

Iran is where end-state preferences diverge sharply. The Islamic Republic has been severely weakened: its regional network has been degraded, its deterrent architecture disrupted, and its domestic stability stressed by sustained domestic pressure that might, as I type these lines, overthrow the regime. Israel's strategic horizon with Iran is regime change. Jerusalem is not merely trying to reduce Iranian projection or capabilities; it is trying to break the Islamic Republic once and for all without the capacity to regenerate. That is why regime change is central to Israeli victory, whether framed as an explicit objective or as the acceptable terminal outcome of sustained military pressure. Israeli messaging toward Iran's protest movement has always reflected this orientation.

Arab preferences are different. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states do not want regime change in Iran. They want an Iran that is humbled, constrained, deterrable, and internationally isolated—not a collapsing state whose internal convulsions spill outward and whose succession produces unpredictable escalation. But neither do they want a secular, wealthy, internationally reintegrated Iran—economically normalized and capable of stable relations with the West and Israel—which would become a serious competitor for regional primacy with fewer structural constraints and greater attractiveness to capital. Riyadh prefers a weakened, isolated, "Islamic" Iran: this justifies Saudi Arabia's own religious securitization and ensures Iran remains a pariah rather than a competitor for Western investment. The Gulf preference, in other words, is managed containment: weaken Iran's projection and keep it boxed, but avoid the systemic risks of regime implosion and the strategic risks of Iranian normalization.

Moreover, Riyadh's calculus cannot be divorced from oil market dynamics, especially following the developments in Venezuela and how American actions have introduced serious instabilities into that calculus.

Venezuela holds the world's largest proven reserves. Under Maduro and sanctions, production collapsed from roughly three million barrels per day to under 800,000. The removal of Maduro and the installation of an American-aligned successor government opens the possibility of Venezuelan production rehabilitation at scale—a massive supply injection, sold at steep discounts to rebuild market shares, into a market already suffering from fears of oversupply and price volatility. Iran presents the same logic at an even greater magnitude. If the Islamic Republic falls amid the current protest wave and a successor regime normalizes with the West, Iranian production could return to four million barrels per day or more without sanctions constraints. Taken together, the normalization of both Venezuelan and Iranian output would structurally undermine OPEC+ leverage and place sustained downward pressure on prices, precisely when Saudi Arabia needs elevated revenues to fund its ambitious projects, which are already struggling, and defend its regional position in a time of intensified competition.

Saudi Arabia simply wants Iranian oil out of Western markets. A pariah Iran under sanctions is a gift to Saudi market share and pricing power. The current developments are a long-term threat to oil rents that makes Saudi regional strategy possible in the first place. The Saudi pivot is also a hedge against an American-led reordering of global energy markets that Riyadh cannot predict or control.

[...]

[Tonitrus]

Having said all that - the attack in Venezuela was extraordinary, so I'm very reluctant to write of the US military.

I think the factor that Caracas is on the coast, and Tehran (and probably other leadership hideouts) are pretty far inland is not an insignificant one in this case.

[Sheilbh]

Fair.

And it's a long time ago but I remember reading Guests of the Ayatollah which has a whole section on the disastrous rescue mission