On January 15 U.S. partner naval forces seized over 3,000 AK-47 assault
rifles, 578,000 rounds of ammo, and 23 advanced anti-tank guided
missiles from an Iranian ship in the Gulf of Oman, the fifth such
operation in a little over two months [photo credit: CENTCOM]
To those who see the current wave of demonstrations as proof that the
regime is weakening and therefore imperilled, Tajbakhsh’s comments are
worthwhile noting:
The regime has managed to remain in power and avoid any great
fissures within the leadership and to circumvent enough of the sanctions
and the isolation so as to provide enough social and economic goods to
people in the society so that the stakes of the middle classes to
overthrow the system are quite high…
Protests and revolts are an ordinary day’s work for an
authoritarian regime…authoritarians do not rule with the consent of the
people. When you know you are going to face constant, sporadic uprisings
you’ve got to beat them down. And if you fail you get overthrown. It is
not the weakness of an authoritarian system that there are revolts, it
is a weakness if the revolts cannot be put down.
With China purchasing Iran’s oil and the Iranians supplying drones for Putin’s war, the Islamic Republic has lined up two powerful foreign allies, while suppressing domestic dissent.
Meanwhile the Middle East watches with continuing anxiety as the Biden
administration seems, as did Obama, ready to ignore the existential
threat, one that looms larger as Iran moves closer to acquiring the
capability to build a nuclear weapon. That is something that neither the
Gulf states nor Israel is going to allow to happen. The Israelis have
made clear both in their language and their actions that, with or
without the US, they will take whatever steps they deem necessary. For his part Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman has long been unequivocal
in stating that if the Iranians secure nuclear weapons, his kingdom
will too. It is, as Kristian Coates Ulrichsen told us in last week’s podcast, a very dangerous situation:
The geopolitical context is a tinderbox. It's just waiting for
that spark to set it alight…. We're now in a sort of worst of both
worlds. There's no JCPOA. But there's also no post-JCPOA follow-on
agreement. And so in that context, in that vacuum, there are certainly
all sorts of subterranean activities which are taking place, each of
which could be that spark.