#WTH Will the Islamic Republic fall?

And can we really help?

News is filtering out of Iran slowly, and it’s horrifying. Men, women, and children gunned down in the streets. Parents paying extortionate fees to recover the bodies of their loved ones. Surveillance everywhere. Text threats. Anywhere from 2000 to 12,000 deaths. Perhaps even more.

We talked to our colleague Michael Rubin about what’s happening, the prospects for the regime’s end, the viability of the late Shah’s son, the best targets Donald Trump could hit to help the counter-Islamic-revolution, and more. Listen to the whole pod, check out the transcript below, and read on. There’s a lot in play right now.

The “why now” question is best answered by historians after the smoke clears, but there are several key factors. Iranians hate their tyrants, the regime is at its weakest since 1979-80, inflation is on fire, and finally — finally — the critical bazaari class has joined in the fight.

There have been efforts to overthrow the regime before — in 2009, 2019, and 2022. But there have been ongoing demonstrations and strikes throughout the life of the Islamic Republic. Because it was manifest in only weeks after the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei that he was neither interested in the well-being of the Iranian people, nor in democracy of any kind. He, like his successors, was a Shia Islamist, a thief, and a hypocrite.

But the bazaari class — the shopkeepers and businessmen who are, as Michael says, the economic lungs of Iran, were instrumental in the downfall of the Shah, and should the Islamic Republic fall, they will again be critical. Why have they suddenly joined the women and the students who were the stalwarts of previous uprisings? Because the rial has never been so low, trading now on the black market at about 1.5 million to the US dollar, and because Iran’s economic lifelines in Venezuela and Syria have disappeared. It’s hard to have a profitable axis of resistance if members keep getting arrested or deposed. It’s hard to feed your people when no money comes in.

Every dictatorship has a tipping point, and it appears — I underscore appears in this volatile situation — that the people of Iran have decided the time is now. When the regime gives its all in its efforts to stifle freedom and millions are still pouring out night after night, things are indeed dire. And when Donald Trump slaps away the blandishments of Iran’s oily elites, you know the die has been cast.

So… “help is on its way.” That’s terrific, as the Iranian people are up against a heavily armed and determined enemy — their government. But what exactly does Trump think he can do? Clearly, he doesn’t want the ever-vilified “boots on the ground;'“ but no boots are truly necessary. The Iranian people want this, and they need help, not the 82d. A few days ago, I shared an assessment of military tools available to the United States in the region, which noted the absence of a carrier battle group and other assets necessary for a full scale aerial assault. But that doesn’t mean the United States doesn’t have options.

What could that look like?

• Soft power: Battle against the regime’s communications blackout with more Starlink access, more terminals, and more evidence of the regime’s war on its own people. Will that be enough? Probably not.

• Economic power:

  • Sanctions have already been levied against Iran’s trading partners, but the reality of such sanctions is that getting them to bite takes time, if it’s at all possible.

  • But what about targeting Iranian refineries? Iranian shipping? Iranian economic centers? Kharg Island, Iran’s critical export terminal in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf (perhaps we could call it that again soon?) is a single point of failure, and its loss would devastate the Iranian economy. Iran’s dependence on oil revenue is so critical that further erosion could well begin to prompt defections from the regime.

  • How about the leaders’ bank accounts? There too, there are options to begin to eat away at the billions the Iranian regime has stolen from its people over 47 years. As the Israelis have locked on to terrorists’ crypto assets, locking on to senior leaders’ financial stashes could also prompt the crumbling of the regime.

• Military options: Short of boots, the United States has stand off capabilities in the region, and flight options from the United States. It could hit regime leadership (remember the late Qassem Soleimani?), or IRGC headquarters, operations centers and arms caches. As with the Israeli strikes on key Iranian military leaders, such an effort could also cause the regime to sue for peace, and look for a transition away from the system of the Islamic Republic.

Are any of these options silver bullets? Nah. The regime wants to hold on to power, and will kill as many Iranians as necessary to do so. But will they sacrifice their own lives, their own families, or their own treasure to do so? That’s less clear. They have a lot to lose.

So in the event the desired outcome arrives, and the regime is gone or agrees to go, what then? This is the proverbial $64,000 question, and anyone who knows Iran is all too aware it is a nation of 90 million wannabe prime ministers. (OK, I exaggerate slightly.) But it’s not a dumb question: Who will rule? Regime collapse and chaos are perhaps more desirable than the status quo, but carry substantial risks as well. At the end of the day, this is why the option of the son of the late Shah, the former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, has become so attractive.

The young shah is not so young — 65 years old — and has spent most of his life in the United States. But, unlike so many of Iran’s reformers and “opposition leaders,” he has, as Michael notes, not made compromises with the regime. He is, I think, an honorable man, and does not seek a dictatorship of a different kind for his country. And because Reza Pahlavi has lived outside Iran for so long, he is not caught up in the political feuds about succession, and could preside over a genuine transition away from the Islamic Republic.

Finally, there’s the eternal “forever war” trope and its adherents who believe America should be indifferent to the battle for liberty in Iran. First, allow me to emphasize for the umpteenth time that none of the so-called “forever wars” were, indeed, forever. Rather, they required a paltry number of troops to sustain countries that had been centers of anti-Americanism and maintain them in our sphere of influence. (If you’re interested, check out Iraq today.) Second, there is the falsehood that it is not in America’s national security interest to aid people who wish to fight for their own freedom. Forgive me: If someone else wants to kill our enemies, my view is, Amen, go to it with our blessing and help.

If you want to keep up on developments at a more granular level, Michael is doing a great job, and you can find his work here. In addition, our Critical Threats team is reporting daily on developments. Their work is here.

TRANSCRIPT

Q: Talk to us about how these Iranian protests started. And why does the regime feel so threatened at this particular moment?

MR: Well, you’re right. There have been protests before and a lot of them have involved the elites, the people who bothered to vote. The university students and so forth. What made this different is it started off in the Tehran Bazaar. The Tehran Bazaar is normally very religious, also very conservative.

Q: What is the Tehran Bazaar?

MR: The Tehran Bazaar is basically, you can think of it as the lungs of the economy. And Iran is a country without the huge industrial conglomerates outside the Revolutionary Guard. And so the Tehran Bazaar, both economically and historically, has an outsized role. The point is, this wasn’t a university women striking or protesting. These were the people who were the traditional constituents of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. These are people whose brothers or cousins were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpsmen. The point is, when inflation is reaching 40%, when the currency is crashing to be near worthless, we’re talking getting close to Zimbabwe levels, then you’ve got a situation where even if you’re a Revolutionary Guardsman, even if you’re technically a regime loyalist, you still got to put food on the table.

Q: Many are making comparisons to when the Shah fell in Iran 1979. Amid blackouts and with all the caveats, how does this unrest compare?

MR: The Islamic Revolution in 1979 actually kicked off with a strike in the Tehran bazaar, but I’ll do you more. The Mossadegh protests, Tehran bazaar. Likewise, the 1905 Constitutional Revolution started in the Tehran bazaar. That’s why this is so important right now.

Now, what’s basically going on is this is no longer just a protest. We’ve seen reports now confirmed of security force colonels who have been killed. People who were involved in crushing earlier protest movements hunted down and killed. This is a full scale revolution and the regime is responding in kind. The big question, of course, is whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is going to sit on the fence or whether it’s going to fire on their countrymen.

You add into this mix a couple things. The Revolutionary Guard has a lot to lose. I’m going to push back on something you said, Dany. You said state level jamming across Starlink. Some Starlink terminals are working. What’s not working are the Starlink terminals that most people in Iran had, which were sold to them by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fronted companies. So when you have the Revolutionary Guard sitting on the fence, some of them have decided to take their list of who has these terminals and go door to door and reclaim them. But those which were infiltrated through non-Iranian sources seem still to be working.

Q: So what sparked it? Conditions are bad, inflation is bad, the currency is spiraling, but what caused this to happen right now?

MR: You know, that’s something historians are going to have to parse. But when you have the currency fall to the point where it’s declining in value 5 or 10% every day, ultimately people are going to protest. So maybe it was some random fruit vendor, like in Tunisia, who set himself on fire. I mean, that’s more of an analogy. We may not know exactly what caused it in this case, but the outrage grew.

Now, one of the other things we need to look at, however, is that Iranians have also learned their lesson from the past. When Dany said, “What are they doing now?” In the past, they simply bashed heads. Now, what oftentimes the Iranians do is they will take photos, they will identify people, and then afterwards they round people up and increasingly either torture or execute them. This is one of the reasons why perhaps everyone feels that it’s all in, this is the last best chance.

At the same time, hovering in the distance is the fact that the Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, he’s close to 87 years old, he’s had cancer, he’s partially paralyzed, and people are maneuvering to succeed him. The latest news is that, and I think Donald Trump has confirmed this somewhat, is Mohammad Javad Zarif has talked about launching new negotiations and the question is whether we’re going to have a Venezuela model break out in Iran. And when it comes to this idea of the spark that caused this, will the Iranians put up with a Venezuela model when it’s the management of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which led the regime to this horrible situation in the first place?

Q: The regime is in an unprecedentedly weak position, but what about the opposition? How strong are they, and what do they want?

MR: That’s the big question. And basically what the opposition wants is for every other opposition figure to bow down before them. This is ultimately going to be the big problem.

But one issue which you didn’t mention in that very accurate litany of just how bad the Iranian situation is. Yeah, Bashar al-Assad fell. Yeah, Maduro is no more. But remember, the Iranians had about, according to some estimates, $200 billion worth of outstanding loans and contracts with the Assad regime. They had, according to some sources, up to $30 billion in loans and contracts to the Maduro regime, none of which are now going to be repaid. So when Marc was asking what sparked this, just in the last couple weeks, we’ve seen any sense of optimism that things could get better, get flushed down the Tehran toilet. So when it comes to the opposition, you’re absolutely right. And the opposition traditionally has been like herding cats.

The one thing we can say is that Reza Pahlavi does have name recognition. The question is whether Reza Pahlavi is more of a white Russian leader who wants to talk about opposition from outside but is afraid to come back, or whether he can actually capitalize on his name recognition on this brand, the grass is always greener on the other side, on this pre-revolutionary nostalgia to actually achieve something.

What my fear is, in 2007, the Revolutionary Guard reorganized to focus inward on repression. They put one unit in every province. I would guess that each of the Iranian provinces has an arms cache. The question is there going to be a mad scramble for these various arm caches? And if that’s the case, no matter what the opposition might want, could we have a situation like Libya where suddenly it’s a mad scramble for these arms.

And as Marc remembers from 2004, John Kerry’s attempt at an October surprise was to accuse George W. Bush of not taking care of these various arms caches and letting the insurgency rage. In Iran, Iran is a much larger country and it’s a wash with arms. So this is something to watch very, very carefully.

Q: What about Reza Pahlavi? Does he have support within Iran and who are other contenders here, including the IRGC?

MR: About 15 years ago, I attended a very good friend’s wedding on Fisher Island off Miami Beach. And it was on Fisher Island because Reza Pahlavi was going to be the best man. Now, my friend who came from a family which was associated with the Pahlavis traditionally was marrying a woman who came from a family which was traditionally Tudeh. These are the guys who were leftists. They were close to the Soviet Union. They were supporters of Mohammad Mossadegh. They were anti-monarchists.

A lot of her family were coming in from Iran and had no idea that Reza Pahlavi would be there. When they saw Reza Pahlavi at this relatively small wedding to a man and a woman, they got down on their knees, they cried, they wanted to kiss his hand. And these are people that were traditionally anti-monarchists. So you can’t underestimate this nostalgia for the way things were. Now, in reality, the way things were under the Shah in Iran was a dictatorship. And Reza Pahlavi understands that his father was a dictator. So perhaps the pendulum shifted too far in the other direction, where Reza Pahlavi, instead of being decisive, decided to try to promote himself as a coalition builder.

Now, this started to change about two years ago. There was an opposition attempt at creating a broader coalition at Georgetown University. And at last minute, Reza Pahlavi broke away from it because he didn’t want to subordinate himself or share. And a lot of people accused him of being the spoiler here. But in hindsight, without a doubt, he is the most prestigious. And others who are at the Georgetown Coalition have faded into obscurity. There’s also another dynamic here that Reza Pahlavi has never made compromises with the regime, although some of his staff members have. Whereas many of the other opposition figures were either reformist journalists or reformist politicians themselves. And it seems that the Iranians are turning against anyone who had association with the Islamic Republic. I wanted to say a previous regime, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself there.

The other issue to keep in mind, however, is that Iran is very fractious. And the Islamic Republic has crushed much of the civil society. The question now is whether you need a figure from outside like Reza Pahlavi, if only to have some sort of unitary vision across ethnicity, across political spheres, in order to have a constitutional convention or something like that. Whether you need a figurehead, think about the transition in Spain from Franco to the democracy. It was because of ... The King played an outsized role in that. The counterpoint to this, however, there’s always a counterpoint, is Ayatollah Khomeini had once talked about how ... And I’m quoting him, “I have no interest in personal power. All I want is a democracy.” And as soon as he got back, that all went out the window. So there’s deep-seated suspicion. Iranians are conspiratorial on the best of days, but this has just taken them to a whole new level.

Q: With that in mind, how do you imagine him being received in Tehran?

MR: I’ve written on this. Yes, I could imagine it. But again, you and I were both in the Bush administration. You had a very high level and I was just a lowly peon. But you remember April 9th, 2003, the day that Baghdad fell. That was the headline. But the sub-headline was what happened to Najaf that day, when Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who was a Western leaning cleric, that some elements of the American government put great hopes upon, came back to Najaf to take over the shrine of Imam Ali. And he was set upon by a mob led by Muqtada al-Sadr’s people. We didn’t even know who Muqtada al-Sadr was at the time, who hacked him to death. And this is what must be going on in the back of the mind of Reza Pahlavi. Now, I’ve talked to some of the people around him. The big fear is that he is going to be so cautious and reticent about going in until he can be sure of security, that he’s actually going to create a situation that allows more insecurity to occur, because he’s going to miss the moment to fill that vacuum.

Q: So, what are the options for the United States? If intervention, what are the odds and the prospects for actually helping the Iranian people?

MR: You’ve got a situation where past is precedent and we’ve had similar debates before. There was the June 4th, 1989 crushing of Tiananmen Square. Although not too many people were talking about military action then, there was the issue about whether we should negotiate. You remember that it was less than I think two weeks later, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger secretly went to Beijing. And Brent Scowcroft was later seeing clinking glasses with the Chinese foreign minister. We don’t want that. You had February 15th, 1991 when George H.W. Bush at a campaign stop in Massachusetts, I think at Raytheon, said, “I call upon the people of Iraq to rise up and throw off the dictator Saddam Hussein.” And they did.

Then the United States stood down because realists surrounding him, Colin Powell and others decided that, or rather convinced, George H.W. Bush this would be a bad thing to do. We had another war 12 years later and we had a great deal of bitterness. And our adversaries, especially Iran, were able to prepare for the future. This brings us to Donald Trump’s original Truth Social post when he talked about how the Iranians shouldn’t shoot protesters, even though it’s part of their culture. And if they did, we would respond. We could go the route also of Barack Obama with his Syria red line. Now, if Donald Trump decides to actually make good on his rhetoric and enforce his red lines, unlike Barack Obama, then you’ve got a situation. You’re right, what should his targets be? Now, I hope we have enough intelligence on this.

But given that the Iranians have a pattern now of after calm is restored, executing people before revolutionary tribunals, what you want to do is go after the revolutionary tribunals. You want to go after the judges. Now, when it comes to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, some are true believers, but some simply want better salaries. What you’ve got to do is go after the ones who are true believers, without antagonizing the people who are only in it for the cash. You don’t want to fall into the trap of ... And this is what Khamenei is trying to drag us into, of creating a broader attack on Iran, which will create a national emergency and allow people to rally around the flag. A lot of people forget that in 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that the Islamic Revolution was falling apart. Khomeini was able to pull it back together because of this national emergency. You don’t want to fall into that trap. The other things you can do, go after these Revolutionary Guard arms caches.

The big question, and the elephant in the room, is do you go after Ali Khamenei himself? Well, first of all, we know for a fact, through your sources, through my sources, that Donald Trump has traditionally been reticent about this. The reason being he wanted a nuclear deal and he wanted someone to sign it. Many realists in the administration also don’t want to create a vacuum. So if there’s going to be a transfer of power, they want someone like Ali Khamenei to transfer that over. I think that’s highly unrealistic, but Washington comes up with its own theories. However, could you start going after his family members and close associates? People like Mojtaba Khamenei, the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, where all the money is. Look, if you start knocking off Khamenei’s family members one by one, what that would send the signal to Khamenei, that time’s running out and if he wants to preserve his family, he’s got to act.

But if you have areas of Iran which are liberated and you have many Iranians, the kids of some of these officials studying in the United States, Donald Trump is big into deportations. Why not say, “We’re going to round up some of these family members, cut off their visas, and deport them to free liberated portions of Iran. And the liberated portions of Iran can decide what to do with them.” That might create an incentive for some other defections. I would also give a statement, again, nonviolent and say, “Hey, look. Ultimately, you now have an opportunity. You can go into an embassy and turn yourself in and then there will be amnesty. But if you don’t, then ultimately, you’re going to be held accountable.” And remember, during the Institutional Revolution, you had thousands of people inside the British Embassy seeking refuge.

Why can’t we try to replicate that today?

Q: How successful do you think a military intervention could be?

MR: When I was driving around Baghdad in 2003, shortly after the war, the active phase of the war had ended. What was amazing was to see how precise some of our targeting could be.

So if you take something like Evin Prison, the major prison where political prisoners have been kept where our own former colleagues, Xiyue Wang, was kept, you don’t want to take a chance on killing the prisoners. But if you start taking out the guard towers one by one, that would be hugely symbolic throughout the regime.

So I do think we need to start talking about that. There’s also an element of diplomacy. I worry very much that Qatar, in its desire to negotiate everything, is going to try to give the Islamic Republic an offramp, which actually is more of a cul-de-sac and leads right back to the Islamic Republic. I hope we wouldn’t fall into a trap like that.

Q: Is there a role for Israel here?

MR: The short answer is yes.

And I would guess that perhaps the Israelis, simply because their intelligence isn’t quite as bureaucratic as ours has become, perhaps have better on-the-ground granularity as to where people are and how to get at them. And so then the role of the United States becomes standing back and not interfering. And as I always like to point out to people, the Israeli Navy drives more German submarines than the German Navy does.

Q: Operational limitations imply our need to use the US airbase in Qatar. How do you see their role?

MR: It’s not just Qatar. Look, I trust the Pakistanis about as much as I trust Ben Rhodes, but the fact of the matter is Trump has managed to leverage the Pakistanis for whatever reasons. And the question would be whether the Pakistanis would seek to ingratiate himself by trying to come through Iran, by allowing us to use some of their facilities to come in the back door. So that’s always a possibility.

And then while you’re absolutely right about aircraft carriers, where are our LHDs, these basically amphibious assault vessels like the Iwo Jima and others that actually fly F-35 Joint Strike Fighters? Are they in the region? Remember also Somaliland’s been in the news, and I won’t obsess about it, but when Carter tried to do his hostage rescue mission, initially the place where whatever the special forces were called at the time had gathered in Berbera in what’s now Somaliland, and so that’s just a hop skip and a jump over to Iran.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Sheikh Isa Airbase in Bahrain hosted four times more American aircraft than the Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar hosts. So the capacity is there.

Q: If the IRGC succeeds in a coup d'état, what role do they take on? And what would that look like for Iranians?

MR: The bigger question is what happens to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? I’ve said in other contexts that if you want to understand what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is, they became the elite force between 1980 and 1988 against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War. They didn’t want to go into the barracks at the end of the war.

So without moral equivalence, if you want to understand what they became, they took their equivalent to the Army Corps of Engineers and started investing in civilian enterprises. Today, if you want to understand the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, imagine the Army Corps of Engineers merges with KBR, Halliburton, and Bechtel, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Walmart. That’s what the Revolutionary Guard has become. And then on top of which, of course, they have the military. I say this as a Philadelphian, it’s like 1930 Chicago or 2026 Chicago in the willingness of the Revolutionary Guard to make people offers they can’t refuse. Instead of a horse head in the bed, well, put it this way, they become much more creative about beheading nowadays.

The point of this is that this Revolutionary Guard has a conglomerate that’s worth about $100,000,000,000. And one of the reasons why, even without this uprising, it’s going to be a free-for-all, is when you have the Supreme Leader have $100,000,000,000 commercial enterprise, you have the Revolutionary Guard have $100,000,000,000, and then you have a transition, no one’s going to want to subordinate themselves to the other. And everyone’s going to look at it like they’re... When you’ve only had one transition in 35 years, this is their opportunity to win the lottery. And if you don’t win the lottery, you end up dead. And so you’re going to have a massive scramble.

Now, if the Supreme Leader falls, you still have the Revolutionary Guard, which is going to want to preserve its assets. The question is, can you strike a deal, even though this might be an anathema, to allow them to keep some of their assets and perhaps flee to Russia? Or could you convince them that they can keep their assets, they can keep their corruption, and become basically like Egypt, a corrupt military dictatorship, but at least a corrupt military dictatorship that doesn’t kill Jews?

Where I think this idea is a little bit unrealistic is Americans are traditionally bad at understanding others’ ideologies. We like to project. We like to think the best. We like to think that multiculturalism is about walking into a sushi restaurant and ordering a mojito. Fundamentally, however, we need to recognize that you can join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bubble when you’re eight years old because they have the equivalent of evil Boy Scouts. And then you remain in the Revolutionary Guard Corps bubble all the way up through the universities because the Revolutionary Guard controls some universities.

And when we hear, for example, someone like the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rant and rave, we can think that’s ridiculous, it’s all tactical, but if that’s what you’ve grown up in, that’s the bubble, you may actually believe it. And that’s what’s really, really dangerous right now in trusting the Revolutionary Guard to cut a separate deal.

Q: So what’s the downside of acting?

MR: I see no downside to acting.

The big question is, if you remove the Supreme leader and there’s a vacuum, are you unleashing a free-for-all? And then what might that look like in the future? Of course, Iran is four times the size in terms of population in Syria. So could you have Iran implode? Because again, we’re not the only players in the sandbox, and you can bet whenever there’s a transition, all the countries surrounding Iran are going to try to interfere.

In fact, my worry consistently in a situation like this is the Americans like to preach about an even playing field, “we’re not going to interfere,” which means that when there is a revolution or regime change in a country and everyone else has their finger on the scale, the only people who aren’t supported are the ones who would lead to an outcome most conducive to our vision.

I worry about that in Iran as well.

Q: Is the Venezuela model viable for Iran?

MR: The option exists, but what I worry about, of course, is the difference being that Ronald Reagan had an appreciation for freedom and liberty, and I’m not sure whether Donald Trump has the same priorities. And then it becomes a situation like when George W. Bush decapitated the Saddam Hussein regime, replaced Saddam Hussein with Uday or Clise or a Republican Guard general, would we have simply set the clock down ticking towards another conflict or would we be where we are with Iraq today? Iraq has really turned the corner in a way that most Americans don’t appreciate because we still see it as 2003, never mind that 80% of Iraqis were born after the war. The fact of the matter is, I worry about Donald Trump’s thinking in the short term.

Now, but if I may, let me look at the 20,000 foot level. I’m going to give actually a real optimistic take. What’s happening right here now strikes me as being as significant as we’ve seen some waves of in the Middle East. 1952 when Nasser took over and Arab nationalism, all the monarchies fell and so forth. 1979, the Islamic Republic and the waves of chaos. 2011, the Arab Spring. Now we have, if the regime falls, what could be the follow-on effects? What happens in Iran doesn’t stay in Iran.

So if you have a situation where you have a smooth landing in Iran, and this is where I hope that Trump and Rubio have imagination, what could it mean in all these other countries which want to abandon their failed models? If Nasser unleashed a wave of overthrowing monarchies in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, could you have a wave of stabilizing monarchies return? And what would that mean for the region? I do think that I wish our State Department and our White House had at times more imagination, in the way that Ronald Reagan had imagination when he stood before the Brandenburg Gate and he broke all diplomatic protocol by demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Q: What about the role of Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states that are pro-American? Is this their opportunity?

MR: One of my current obsessions is that Muhammad bin Salman is actually switching sides and that he’s starting to join the other side. At any rate, you’ve got a situation where if Qatar and Turkey join with Saudi Arabia and even give the death blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran, we may be witnessing the birth of a new sort of force, which is going to tie our hands and stymie our security interests for decades to come. That’s what I very much worry about.

Q: What do you think about the odds? Is the tide turning for the regime, are we giving them too much time?

MR: Put it this way. I hope for the best, plan for the worst, and I worry about that the sheer level of brutality. If you start seeing a massive refugee flow out from Iran, that would be an indication that the regime has triumphed. I don’t think you’re going to have the regime triumph without having that refugee flow because the Iranians know that they’ve stuck their necks out and that the Khamenei isn’t going to be forgiving, should things calm down. So ultimately, I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon. We can’t go back to the status quo ante, and the very least, I would hope that the United States is planning for that eventuality.

Q: If you were sitting with Donald Trump right now, what would you tell him to do?

MR: I would tell him to take out Mojtaba Khamenei. And I would tell him, “Look, if we could be in a situation where we were able to snatch and grab Ali Khamenei, that would be a coup for the ages.”But ultimately, the Iranians need more communications and the Iranians need consistency. We’re in a TikTok generation or a Twitter generation where people have the attention span of monkeys high on cocaine. We can’t actually continue to run foreign policy that way. If we’re going to be committed to Iran’s freedom, we need to be committed to Iran’s freedom.

Another thing might be, and this goes back to Ace Lyons who was one of Jimmy Carter’s military. He was an admiral who was in charge of Pacific Command during the Carter era. He argued that the best way to release the hostages was to take the Kharg oil terminal, Kharg Island. And of course, your listeners know that the Persian Gulf is extremely narrow. It’s extremely shallow. So these big super tankers can’t actually get into port. They rely on these islands or these terminals, which are a few kilometers off the coast of Iran. 95% of Iran’s oil exports go through the Kharg oil terminal. Donald Trump is a fan of taking people’s oil. Well, it’s time Donald Trump take that oil terminal and turn off 95% of Iran’s revenue.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES:

U.S. Steps Up Planning for Possible Action in Iran (Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman, January 12, 2026)

Iran’s Uprising Persists as Death Toll Mounts Under Blackout (Mardo Soghom, MEF, January 12, 2026)

Iran Update, January 11, 2026 (CTP-ISW, January 12, 2026)

To Win Over Iranians, Rubio Should Re-Designate the Mujahedin-e Khalq (Michael Rubin, MEF, January 10, 2025)

Could a Successful Revolution in Iran Spread? (Michael Rubin, MEF, January 11, 2026)

Coming Soon: The Iran Civil War of 2026? (Michael Rubin, 19fortyfive.com, January 4, 2026)

How Should the United States Approach Justice in Iran? (Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum, January 2, 2026)

The Fall of Iran Could Change Everything (Michael Rubin, 19fortyfive.com, January 2, 2026)

Iran: airstrikes and the intervention dilemma (Andrew Fox Substack, January 11, 2026)

#WTH Iran on the brink? (WTH Substack, Danielle Pletka, January 9, 2026)

When does a regime collapse? (Andrew Fox Substack, Andrew Fox, December 30, 2025)