The Iranian regime is caught in a death spiral But President Masoud Pezeshkian and his colleagues can see the same videos of violent rebellion that are circling the globe. They must understand that these protests keep happening because the regime is rotting, politically and economically, and the whole country knows it. Every wave of repression spawns future protest. The regime can put out this fire, but what about the next one, and the one after that? The Iranian regime is on a one-way street to disaster. A senior European diplomat in Tehran shared that assessment with me several years ago, and it remains true. Iran has powerful security tools, but they’re getting rusty. The regime couldn’t protect its proxies Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And most important, Iran couldn’t shield itself from Israel’s systematic assault in June. The regime is on a losing streak. “The Islamic Republic is today a zombie regime,” argues Karim Sadjad...
