Will the Iranian regime collapse? | The Economist

0:00 So Shashank Khomeini's dead. What happens now? Well, the war goes on. Central command, Centcom. That's the bit of the Pentagon that runs operations in the Middle East. It's talked about its war aims the other day, and the aim wasn't to kill Khomeini. The aim was to, quote, dismantle the Iranian regime security apparatus. And actually a lot of the strikes we've seen so far have been against Iran's navy. They've been against Iran's missile launchers, which is, of course, a very important target. They've been against the political leadership. They haven't actually dismantled that security apparatus. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its local provincial bases, They're all still there. So it's the aim here as as at least the stated aim is to create the conditions to sweep away the regime.

0:45 And that's what I heard the other day from Donald Trump and from Benjamin Netanyahu. Then we're still a little bit of time away from that. What I will say is, of course, that Donald Trump, as he can do so often, is capable of changing his mind. And he could say, I've done enough. I want to stop. I want to cut a deal with the Iranian regime. But to do that, he would really have to back down on his promise of a prosperous, glorious future for Iranians, the promise of regime change. He would really be stepping back from his aims. So if the aim is regime change, what else will the US and Israel have to hit? How are they going to make that happen? Well, there's always more leaders. We have a new, leadership in Iran. We have, for example, the new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander. we have General Vahid, who is a man with a pretty, macabre

1:31 history connected to the bombing of a Jewish cultural site. And one of Cyrus in the 90s, responsible for suppressing protests in the 2020s, is Interior minister. And, of course, you know, it's the aim really is to destabilize this regime. Then I would fully expect that we would see more attempts to kill its senior leadership, including those who are appointed in the line of succession after the death, of death of harmony, after the death of the defense minister, after the death of the interior minister, and on and on and on. They've hit the judiciary, which was responsible for sentencing and executing political prisoners. They struck the intelligence ministry, which obviously was involved in in crackdowns and repression. So there have been targets struck in that sense.

2:17 But these were nationwide protests that we saw earlier this year nationwide. And whilst there have been targets struck right across Iran, I'm not sure I've seen a substantial weakening, let alone a dissolution of the Iranian regime security apparatus. from the way I see it, if a protest, if the war were to stop today and mass protest were to break out tomorrow, the regime would be highly vulnerable. But I don't think there is any guarantee that it would be incapable of shooting another 10 or 20,000 people, as it did earlier this year. But what I will also say is, of course, in practice we know there are clearly other target sets here. Israel is predominantly concerned, I would say, about Iran's stockpile of ballistic missiles.

3:02 now Israel says they took out half of Iran's ballistic missile launchers. That's a remarkable number. When you think back to the fact that in the first Gulf War in 1991, America struggled to find very many of Saddam Hussein's mobile missile launchers. But there are still a lot more to take out. And, you know, I, I think that we, we, really may see in the coming days a degree of tension between Israel, which will feel it wants to do lasting, durable damage to this regime even if it cannot topple it. And Trump, who may be getting a little bit more cold feet about the prospect of a campaign lasting a weeks or a much longer time. And you mentioned Iran's nuclear capabilities. I mean, originally it was this was all about Iran's nuclear capabilities.

3:49 So where do they stand in all of this? We haven't heard much in recent days, We have seen some nuclear sites attacked. So for instance, the Americans seem to have struck the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran, which obviously has a connection to its, long standing nuclear program. There have also been other facilities. The Israelis, the Israelis are suggesting that they have struck, some research sites associated with the Iranian nuclear weapons program But of course, the the nuclear material, the highly enriched uranium Iran had, we think was largely buried under rubble in last year's conflict. And I don't think there's been an indication that's been moved. So that hasn't really been addressed by these strikes. And I think it, to me at least, is very clear when Israel

4:37 and to some degree America say Iran was moving ahead on its nuclear program. I just don't really buy that. I don't think there was any meaningful, imminent change in the Iranian nuclear program in recent days. I think this was largely about opportunity to strike. It was about the Iran regime's weakening in protest in recent months, and it was about Iran's rebuilding of its missile program. But I'm very, very skeptical that Iran was doing anything serious on the nuclear front. The US, Israel claims, was about to put it in some kind of zone of immunity, beyond which it would have been impossible to strike. I'll be honest, I don't believe that. and Shashank. Tell me about Iran's military capabilities. We've already seen considerable retaliation. Can that continue? Yes it can. I mean, Iranian command and control, which is to say the way that orders

5:25 are passed down to their missile forces is really badly degraded. And you can understand why, right? If you're killing senior commanders, you may not want to pick up your mobile phone and take it off airplane mode to go issue orders to the missile units. And what I've heard from officials I've been talking to today is a sense that quite junior commanders in Iran are firing off things, really on their own initiative, in quite a chaotic fashion. But that doesn't mean that isn't quite a potent capability. Right? We're seeing missiles get through, hit the ground in Israel. They're hitting infrastructure across the, across the region, military bases, civilian areas. And this is a decent arsenal of missiles. Some of these have ranges of 2000km. And if you look at the number that were fired on the first day, some of the Israeli press reports suggest

6:12 you may have had over 150 fired on that first day, which is basically the same as was fired in the first round of retaliation last year. And there have been a remarkable number of these fired against, the UAE. And it's not an easy thing for missile defense to cope with. Now, there's a there's a dual pressure here for the Israelis and the Gulf states. The pressure is do we have enough interceptor missiles to keep taking out these incoming Iranian missiles? If this goes on for days and days and days, and I think the answer is they probably do for a while. But if this goes beyond a week, you may begin to see gaps opening up for the Iranians. Of course, the challenge is, how do we fire these off without the launchers being detected and attacked from this, from the air, this time with the Americans doing it? Because last year it was just the Israelis doing that, missile hunting on the ground.

6:59 And how do we conserve our stockpile of missiles? In a way that allows us to conserve this. If this goes on for two weeks, So both sides will be really considering their best strategy in this situation. And Shashank, as you say, we've already seen explosions across the region. How big is the threat that this could expand even further into a bigger conflict? So in, in military terms, we we have a phrase you hear called horizontal escalation. The idea of a crisis not just getting worse within its perimeters but spreading. And what we've seen is very serious horizontal escalation. We have seen not just strikes of the first day on, you know, Arab countries specifically. We've seen Iran strike Oman, a country that mediating nuclear talks between the United States and Iran just a few days ago, in a way

7:48 that has caused a sense of betrayal and shock in Oman and in other Arab countries as well. We have seen, strikes against a French naval base in Abu Dhabi. So you're seeing European powers being sucked in. And you had British troops, I'm told, that were within a couple of hundred meters of a strike in Bahrain. You have three American soldiers, at least, who have been killed. You have Dubai, a place that bills itself as a place of safety and international cosmopolitan, finance and business being struck This shows you that Iran is just not holding back. And it really is only a matter of time, I think, before you see a mass casualty event.

8:34 In which many, many more people are killed and is there a path to de-escalation? I think there are paths to de-escalation. One of them is Donald Trump changing his mind and deciding he has weakened the Iranian regime enough to go to them and say, okay, now sign the nuclear deal. I wanted you to sign before this, in which you give up your nuclear program and you give up enrichment. Do I think that will happen under the leadership of Revolutionary Guard generals, who are the same people who've been running the show for decades? No, I don't, so short of Trump getting spooked by something, I think that's unlikely. The other path to de-escalation, I think, is that this campaign goes on and the regime begins to crumble.

9:20 And then you could see really a highly unpredictable chain of events. But I have to say, I think we are still some days away from that kind of outcome. Shashank, thank you very much. Thank you. Rosie.