Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 79: Breaking Iran's machinery of oppression

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Iran is burning. The streets are full of marchers demanding an end to the regime. Thousands of protesters have been murdered by the regime in recent days — we may never know exactly how many. President Trump is threatening military action. But is all this enough to bring down the regime?How do you dismantle a revolutionary Islamist government that has proven impervious to domestic protest and international pressure?Here’s how.—This episode was sponsored anonymously by a family friend of former hostage Alon Ohel in celebration of his return from Hamas captivity on October 13. We wish him and all the survivors a speedy recovery.—If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Iran is on fire. The regime is shooting protesters. It's cutting the internet. It's daring the world to do something. And the question that all of that raises, what may be the central question for us outsiders looking in from the outside, is the most basic one, is the Islamic Republic, is this regime that has ruled Iran for 47 years? Is it actually fellible? Can it be brought down? Or does it have some kind of structural advantage? and I'm going to try and argue that it has such an advantage given to it by its particular brand of Islamist political ideology, basically a willingness to burn the house down that makes it much, much more durable than Westerners want to believe. The Chancellor of Germany has said this regime is on its way out.

President Trump has been very gung-ho about Iranians continuing to protest, and help is coming, he said. But in fact, maybe this regime actually has advantages is that if we don't understand, we won't be helpful to ordinary Iranians, who we know that most ordinary Iranians want change, want this regime gone. I want to also say something personal for a moment. I'm watching this as an Israeli, as a Jew, as somebody who lives in this region, who spent years trying to understand this region,

without turning human beings into symbols. Just because they're my enemies doesn't mean they're not complicated three-dimensional human beings with stories that they're embedded in and understandings of the world around. them. It's very easy to talk about Iran in these abstractions and these symbols. It's a regime. It's a nuclear file. It's a chess piece. Iranians invented chess after all. But these are real people. And right now, these real people are paying the price in blood for the fact that they were born inside a system that treats all dissent as treason. Watching Iranians go out into the streets again, knowing what the regime is willing to do, knowing that they are walking into gunfire,

knowing that they're thousands dead at the very least, is one of the most morally clarifying things in the region right now. It's courage on a level that most people, obviously, including me, will never actually be asked to summon, which is why I'm a little bit allergic to cheap takes, to talking about regime change from the outside as some flipping thing. If we're going to talk about helping Iranians find their freedom, we have to talk about the kinds of help that actually change the odds for the people on the ground actually taking the risks.

I don't want slogans. I want to understand the machinery of the regime, because if you understand the machine, you can sometimes break it. Let's get into it. Before we start, just briefly, one moment, I want to tell you that we have a sponsor, and we're very grateful to that sponsor for this episode, who has to remain anonymous, and to dedicate this episode, in honor and celebration. of the return of hostage Alon O'Hul, who came back to us together with the last living hostages

on October 13 after 738 days in Hamas captivity. He was taken from the Nova Festival on October 7, and to him and to all of our hostages who have come back. Everyone except the body of Rang Vili are already back with us. I wish them much healing. I wish everyone as much comfort as possible for the dead. And thank you to our sponsor for the dead. that beautiful dedication. I also want to invite you to join our Patreon where you can ask the questions

that we try to answer on this podcast. It helps us keep the lights on. And you get to join us for a monthly live stream where I answer all your questions live, or at least the questions I know the answers to. You can get to the Patreon at patreon.com slash ask Chaviv anything. The link is in the show notes. So let's get started. And let's start with the obvious. As I said, Iran is on fire. not an isolated flash protest like we've seen in the past. This isn't at the scale of past uprisings. This looks like a major nationwide challenge to the Islamic Republic, to the regime and its way of running the country. The regime is responding as if it is that scale. The way it always responds, by the way, when it feels its grip slipping, it's responding with

bullets, it's responding with mass arrests, it's responding with the communications blackout. In the last few days, Iranian authorities have severely restricted internet access, basically shut it down in most places, knocked the country off the internet, phone access in many parts of the countries was actually turned off to the outside world. It's not doing that just to hide what's happening from the outside world. It's also doing that to stop Iranians themselves from coordinating with each other and being able to go out to the protests. And the death toll. We don't know the real number. We may never know the real number of dead. right now in Iran. There are multiple credible reports from activist networks and international

media outlets that describe mass casualties on a scale that's already staggering. 12,000 is likely. It's a report that we're hearing from multiple places. There's one report I saw that talked about all the way up to 20,000. Israeli intelligence a few days ago already said it believed it had passed 5,000, and Iranian officials admitted that there were 2,000 dead, which means it could easily be 20 times that. At the same time, as I said, President Trump is publicly telling Iranians keep protesting, and he said this fascinating line, help is on its way, he said. And that raises two questions.

One, what does help even mean in practice, given that this regime is willing to kill, to stay in power? and two, and this is the deeper question, can it actually be brought down? A whole lot of Westerners and, frankly, a whole lot of Iranians, have been asking some version of this question for decades. You always see huge protests. You always see tremendous courage. And you always see millions of people who clearly hate this regime. And then the regime survives.

And it survives not because it's popular. We actually have data on this. We have polling on this. It's not popular. But because it's built to survive, it's built like a bunker. It has an ideological story that gives it an enormous advantage in moments like these. It has a security apparatus designed for domestic war. It's actually failed at just about everything it has tried or claimed to believe in in 47 years,

including building out the economy of this energy-rich nation, including, by the way, the destruction of Israel. It's failed at everything, except the construction of this unbelievably competent and king. domestic architecture of repression, the besiege, the intelligence networks, the police, all that huge overlapping architecture of repression. That is the one success story in 47 years of this regime. And it has repeatedly shown its willingness to spill as much blood as it takes to stay in power. So the question before us isn't, do Iranians want change? We know they do. The question is, what kind of pressure actually works on a regime that is willing to destroy. its own society rather than lose control of it.

So let me put my argument very plainly. I think the Iranian regime has more sticking power than Westerners think because its Islamist ideology is, in a certain sense, zero sum. What do I mean by zero sum? I don't mean in the simplistic sense of they're crazy or they want death. I mean something much more specific. I mean that the regime's legitimacy isn't primarily based on competence or prosperity or what it delivers for its people.

It's based on defiance. It's based on sacred struggle. It's based on the story of the great arc of resistance that it leads against evil West and civilizational and religious decline in the Muslim world. A normal government fears national collapse. A normal government defines national collapse as a loss in a war, right?

If a war leads to national collapse, you lost the war. But a revolutionary government, a revolutionary regime can sometimes treat collapse itself not only as acceptable but as actually useful strategically as purifying. If ruin can be reframed as sacrifice, sacrifice can very easily be refrained as righteousness. So this regime's legitimacy is built on a kind of zero-sum legitimacy. It's rooted in defiance of an enemy order, of the great imperialist American order, as Iranian Ayatollahs like to talk about it, and not in governance performance at home. That kind of legitimacy isn't undermined in the regime's eyes and in the eyes of its supporters by catastrophic failure domestically. It's strengthened. It's a legitimacy rooted in defiance. It's a legitimacy rooted in defiance. It's a legitimacy where the worse you do, the greater the ruin, the greater the sacrifice, the more your legitimacy

is validated. You defy an enemy order. That is why you exist. Not your governance, not your performance, not what you've done for your people. That kind of legitimacy strengthened by failure is at the heart of the ideology of the regime, too, and really the reason that they have this kind of legitimacy validated by failure is that it's a sacralized conflict. They are a regime defined by a sacred cause. When a regime defines its purpose as sacred resistance means that you don't compromise. You hold the line and in fact you grow more radical as time passes and as the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice grows. Compromise becomes morally polluting. compromise becomes undermining of the validity of the suffering that has been experienced of the

sacrifices that have been made. Concessions delegitimize the leadership and threaten internal cohesion. And so these are regimes that as their own failures accumulate, their leadership has to hunker down and has to hold the line and has to actually grow more radical, more extreme, rather than find compromise. And the third leg of the consequence, of this ideological vision is that is this ethos of martyrdom, ethos of redemptive violence. High losses are very easily reframed as evidence of righteousness, not as a policy failure, but as proof of how faithful you are to the great sacrifice that has to be made for the great sacred religious vision.

And all of that put together means that we have a regime. And this is true of all Islamist regimes with, I don't know what to call them, durability multipliers. For example, this ethos validates a very expansive security state architecture. The IRGC, the intelligence services, the besiege. Repression isn't an emergency measure. They don't swing into action to oppress the people or repress an uprising only when there is that crisis. It's the normal operating system of the regime. It's what they're doing every single day.

It's the only thing this regime really does. Two, it radicalizes factions in the regime. As I said, hardline escalation is a good career strategy. Moderation is punished internally because it compromises and invalidates sacrifice. And three, it allows legitimacy literally to be drawn from failure. In other words, you build out resistance against the American Empire or, world, Zionism, or however they frame it. And you then get defeated abysmally, ridiculously.

The 12-day war was an unbelievably bad performance from the IRGC. That defeat is framed as sacrifice. And dissent that says, actually, you lost because you were terrible and are leading us from failure to failure because you're bad at this, becomes collaboration with the enemy, because you are the vanguard of the revolution, because you frame your own existence, what politics is, is resistance. Islamist revolutionary regimes have the ideological infrastructure to be strengthened by these crises, by failure, by internal dissent, by external war, by constant failure. and all of that produces what I'm going to call suicidal capacity.

If you're hearing my analysis about Hamas, you're hearing correctly. I learned this by watching Hamas for many years, and I see it in the Iranian regime. And experts on Iran are going to tell me I'm off base somewhere, and I welcome those responses because I'm going to learn from them. But the suicidal capacity is absolutely intact in this regime, and you need to see it if you want to understand what you can do about Iran, about the freedom of the Iranian people, and about this regime. Suicidal capacity of a regime like this, of a revolutionary ideological regime isn't a moral judgment. I don't mean Iruyuk, they're suicidal, they're terrible people. I'm trying to diagnose a political technology that's hard for Westerners to see. It's this ability given to it by this ideological infrastructure

to absorb enormous harm, extreme harm, to absorb extreme harm throughout society, the society they govern while surviving. To remain steadfast in the face of that extreme harm, harm at a level that undermines the enemy that impose that harm. We've already heard Ayatollah Khamenei say, hundreds of thousands were lost to bring about this revolution. We're not going to lose it now.

That's a threat. Hundreds of thousands were not lost in the 1979 revolution. Maybe he's talking about the entire death toll of the Iran-Iraq war, but what he's saying isn't literally hundreds of thousands died for this revolution. What he's saying is we are willing to kill hundreds of thousands because that is how sacred this revolution is to us. hundreds of thousands of our own people, of Iranians. He's threatening the protesters.

And also, by the way, signaling that he believes the scale of the protests is absolutely unprecedented. Absorbing harm and inflicting extreme harm at levels that the other side, whoever the other side is, will struggle to meet, will struggle to match whether morally, politically, or simply logistically. The protesters are not capable of inflicting on the supporters of the regime, the kind of harm. that the regime can inflict on them. The ability to absorb suicidal levels of damage creates an asymmetry of pain tolerance. If you have a higher tolerance for civilian suffering, for social breakdown, for political collapse,

then the other side's coercive tools become much less effective. Look at Hamas and Gaza. This regime has that. And there's a kind of hostage logic internal to these kinds of societies and regime. When my survival strategy is the inflicting of catastrophic costs onto my own society, then the costs of removing me become prohibitive. I convert my own population into political collateral.

So let me simplify and summarize. This is a regime that can credibly signal something that most governments cannot signal with any credibility, a willingness to oversee the destruction of their own polity. And that means that on its way down, this regime may be willing to do things that, you know, liberal states, Western states, and honestly just about every normal state, would find unthinkable. It may be willing to murder hundreds of thousands of people, potentially even more, if that's the price of staying in power. And that's a massive advantage in any contest where the other side has moral limits, or just political limits, or a higher value. of human life. Even when the regime is failing

in material ways, disastrously, it can keep going because the apparatus and the story are built explicitly and specifically for endurance through catastrophe, and for, by the way, nothing else except enduring catastrophe.

And the lesson from Hamas is enormous and needs to be understood. This is true even if Israel is in the wrong in the gods of war. Hamas has repeatedly shown a preference, for organizational survival, for ideological posture, over civilian welfare. It treats civilian suffering as strategically useful because it raises the cost massively for enemy action. All the costs Israel is enduring right now.

It creates international pressure. It fuels resentment and recruitment. Hamas is willing to accept massive destruction of its own governing domain rather than accept an outcome that ends its armed primacy in Palestinian society. In other words, disarming. And therefore ends its claim to represent resistance. It has a narrative and it has an ideological infrastructure and it therefore built an institutional infrastructure to match

that actually strengthens it as more and greater catastrophe is imposed on its own society. Liberal states try to win while keeping their society intact. revolutionary Islamist movements can survive by making the intactness of their society negotiable. They can turn the welfare of their own population into a bargaining chip. And that means that if the West bombs Iran, that will advantage the Iranian regime. It means that if the Iranian economy continues to implode,

that won't fell this ideological system. That means that if almost all Iranians hate it, it because they suffer from it for 47 years and now face genuinely dire economic consequences, that's not enough to bring it down. Bottom line, the Iranian regime's durability is misunderstood, mainly because analysts assume that rulers optimize their rule, their decision-making for national well-being, for state preservation. Revolutionary Islamist regimes do not optimize for national well-being.

They optimize for movement survival. They optimize for sacred defiance, even at the cost of national ruin. Okay. If you accept that premise that the Islamic Republic is unusually tolerant of catastrophe, capable ofwithstanding catastrophe, then the whole entire Western conversation on what's happening in Iran has to change. It's not how do we punish them, the regime, the Ayatollahs. It's not how to we pressure the economy.

It's not how do we threaten them. of those things will work. It's something much, much more realistic and more calculating. The question becomes, how do you break the machinery of the regime that makes repression sustainable? And how do you do it without giving the regime the foreign enemy narrative that it craves, that validates more repression and more extreme repression, which it's totally capable of? So what can the West actually do about a regime whose advantage is that it's willing to let its own society burn to the ground. What levers actually exist? What can the West do? I want to suggest five things, but they're all kind of connected by one theme. You don't beat a catastrophe-tolerant regime by increasing

catastrophe. You beat it essentially by changing the internal incentives of the men who have the guns, by helping society that is uprising against them to coordinate, despite the blackouts, despite the fear. Let's break it down. Lever of pressure number one that the West can impose. Do not punish Iran. Punish the coercive core of the regime. If a regime's legitimacy comes from delivering prosperity, you can pressure it by making the economy stagger or fail or fall a little bit. The Islamic regime doesn't mainly draw its legitimacy from prosperity. Iran getting poorer is not a knockout punch. It just means the public suffers more while the state uses scarcity to tighten control.

It strengthens the regime. So a serious Western strategy cannot be, I'm going to impose costs on society. Cost on society is the dictator's survival strategy. So a serious Western strategy has to start with the coercive core, the actual apparatus, the actual officials. the people who arrest, the people who torture, the people who execute, the people who surveil, the people who actually hit the button on the internet shutdowns, the intimidation mechanisms, the IRGC, the regime's intelligence apparatus, the police, the prison system,

the provincial commanders of all of these different agencies and infrastructures. The West has to target those people, those units, those financial pipelines, and it has to do it relentlessly. I'm not talking about Iran sanctions, which are more likely to hit the population and create a black market that the state very quickly can dominate and actually the IRGC does actually control. I mean precision. These people have names. They have passports. They have bank accounts.

Very often, very often, all of their assets, their pensions, their futures, sometimes their literal families are overseas. They're not suffering the repression and the economic collapse that the very regime, officials that they are related to are driving at home. They're protected from it by being in America or Britain. The relatives' assets, the front companies, all of that is targetable, and a great deal of it is known to Western intelligence. The message has to be to these officials. We know who you are. Your name is on a list. We know about your family. We know where everybody is. If you shoot protesters, your kids can't get into Canada. Your money can't go to Dubai. You can't vacation in Europe, you can't hold money offshore, you become radioactive, you become known.

America already has tools to do this. The only question is scale and seriousness. Can there be an institution built out in the West to target the regime at that level, at that personal directed level? If you really want fractures inside the regime, you need to have mid-level officers and commanders thinking to themselves, my family's future is safer if I don't follow the order to open fire on the protesters. That's the West's leverage point. Lever 2. Break the regime's monopoly on coordination. People underestimate this.

Protest don't fail because people don't hate the regime enough. Protest fail because the state can atomize society. It can cut off communication systems. It can make you feel alone. It can cut the Internet. It can turn messaging into a trap because you never know if people on the message board are actually tracking you their regime.

officials and spies. It can arrest organizers. It can make ordinary people believe that nobody else is coming out tomorrow. And in Iran, that playbook is not theoretical. Internet disruptions, throttling during crackdowns, infiltration of these networks have been reported again and again and again, including in the current protest wave. All of Iran was knocked off the internet. That's not an accident. You want to help protesters? A huge part of the answer is boring. It's technical. It is central. It is the core. It's connectivity. Don't give speeches. Don't start a bunch of hashtags on X. Actual durable capabilities. Circumvention tools. Mirror networks. VPN, satellite connectivity where possible. Rapid response support when shutdowns happen. And also digital security training.

Online provide security training that is accessible from Iran, from Iranian activists. how not to get rolled up by infiltration, how to communicate, without handing the state a map of your network. If the regime's strength is coercion plus isolation, the counter has to be coordination plus endurance. Revolutions are coordination problems before they are moral dramas. Solve the coordination problem, and you've done a lot more than just taking part in the moral drama. Lever number three. Cut the regime's cash flow for repress. especially its defining cash flow, which is oil evasion. Here's a really uncomfortable truth, a truth that everybody in the Middle East knows.

Iran's repression system runs on money. Even a state constructed to be tolerant of catastrophe needs cash, to pay salaries, to import equipment, to repair equipment, to maintain patronage systems, to fund proxies, to run surveillance, to keep the elites loyal. The target cannot be the Iranian economy. The target has to be the regime's ability to turn oil exports into usable money. Through huge evasion networks, Iranian oil and gas are laundered through the Iraqi oil export system, through Oman, through many other ways and places.

China buys Iranian oil and has bought at various times. And this is where enforcement matters. You have tankers. You have shipping registries. You have insurers. you have shell companies, you have middlemen, you have ports, you have financial nodes that handle the cash flow of all of these systems. The United States Treasury can genuinely change the reality of the Iranian regime in real time,

not by changing any law, but just by upgrading and leveling up the level of enforcement. This is what the U.S. sometimes calls maximum pressure. It's using sanctions authority to target networks accused of moving Iranian oil money, and supporting the IRGC and the Quds Force specifically, it's using already existing sanctions to do that in a very targeted and serious way. The Americans could do that tomorrow. I hope they're doing it already. They can do it faster.

They can do it stronger. But it has to be consistent and it has to be coordinated and it has to be with allies. In other words, if America does it, but somewhere, somehow there are, you know, we already know the Chinese and the Russians are going to try to disrupt. But a lot of Europeans have disrupted this kind of, pressure on Iran over the years. At least get the Europeans on board. America has a lot of leverage in Latin America and Africa. There are a lot of ways that this money can move around, close them all down, or as much of them as you can possibly access, make it hard. Historically, this kind of oil

money that sidesteps the sanctions regimes, it funds the IRGC. You're not hurting the people of Iran. You're primarily hurting the IRGC, which owns most of the oil infrastructure of Iran. You shift the cost curve inside the security system. Lever 4. create credible off-ramps for the security apparatus. You've pressured them personally. You've pressured them as an institution by zeroing in on the sanctions, on the poorest sanctions problem. And now you give them ways out.

And then you start to divide the apparatus. This is sensitive, okay? If you want a regime to fall, you're not going to get there by the sort of storming of the Bastille, by, you know, heroic street fighting, becoming, victorious overarmed men. You're basically going to get there because some meaningful part of the coercive system turns neutral or fractures. That's when regimes start to collapse quickly. And we've also seen the alternative. In Syria, one of the reasons the war became so catastrophic

is that elite cohesion held at the center. Defections happened in ways that escalated conflict, created new nodes of fighting, but the core held. And because the core, held, Asset could just continue to kill and could continue to get out of the problem by simply destroying more and more of Syria. Western messaging has to have two different sides. To the commanders, to the interrogators, it has to say you will be targeted individually. And to the soldiers, the conscripts, the lower level police, and by the way, commanders and interrogators willing to split from the regime, it has to say you have another option, you have an egg You have asylum pathways, you have protection, quiet deals to get you out through third

countries, a distinction between the policy architects at the top and the people trapped in the machine. You say it outright. You push it and you actually put in place the mechanisms that can do it. And if it is credible, it is a powerful mechanism. It doesn't guarantee defection, but it encourages defection. And if all the other elements are put in place as well, and you can get, famous defector that you can put on TV, you begin to undermine the sense of core solidarity

and that the revolutionary ethos is holding even in this moment. And lever number five, this is what not to do. Don't give the regime the one thing that will sustain it for sure, which is a foreign war. When an authoritarian regime faces an internal legitimacy crisis, there is nothing more useful to reframe the reality as this isn't the people against the regime, this is the nation against a foreign enemy, that's what they want. The Islamic Republic is very good at this, and Western policy has to avoid it. Deter the regime from mass slaughter, protect allies, contain spillover, but avoid steps that unify the public around the state's narrative of national defense.

Do not just bomb them. That is not a strategy. goal is regime delegitimization from within, and a regime willing to murder everyone on its way down has to be delegitimized. It cannot be bombed out of existence. You will damage some facility. You will also hand the regime the story they need. The argument that this is a regime that thrives on sacred struggle and thrives on catastrophe means that avoiding external conflict at this moment is really important because external conflict will extend its lifespan. We'll, will rob all of those brave protesters of their sacrifice, of the meaning and purpose of their sacrifice,

instead of actually helping. And finally, what can Trump do specifically? If you want effectiveness rather than theater, do three things. One, enforce against oil networks, the evasion networks, the ways that they skirt sanctions. The world of intermediaries, the insurers, the brokers, the shippers, they should be afraid, cutting them out of the American economy or out of the dollar or pressuring allies to join the sanctions regime against them is a real blow. They will not prefer Iran to America. They won't. Do that. Second, don't target Iran. Target the repression chain. Names, units, money trails, a precision campaign that tells the people doing the killing, you are personally marked. We know who you are. And third, connectivity

support for protesters. This is the least sexy, but the most meaningful. Keep Iranians connected when the regime turns the lights out. If Trump wants to help protesters, this is where the results will happen in the ability of millions of people to coordinate, to document, to persist in the protests, no matter what the regime does. Revolutions succeed because the regime's gunmen lose confidence. And society gains the ability to sustain pressure without being isolated and crushed. That's the goal.

One of the hardest things for outsiders to internalize is how, a movement can treat the destruction of its own society as acceptable, as strategically useful, not as a tragedy to be avoided at all costs, which is how most normal governments think, but as a resource, as fuel for the war, as proof of righteousness, as a way of holding the world hostage to humanitarian horror, as a way of avoiding any other possible option for moving forward in the conflict in ways that aren't zero-sum against an enemy framed as a sacred enemy. That's the logic in Gaza, a political logic where civilian suffering doesn't discredit the leadership.

It reinforces the story. It becomes evidence of the enemy's monstrosity. It becomes a way of arguing that compromises betrayal, and it leaves the resistance narrative as the only authentic identity left. That's the toolkit of the Islamist political world. Once you see that, how that works, you start to see the through line from Gaza to Tehran. It's the same move. They don't have to win.

They just have to make winning too expensive for everybody else. And the expense, the cost, is the Iranian's own suffering. It's the weaponization of ruin. It's a politics that says if we can't win, we can still deny you victory and make the cost of defeating us politically unbearable, morally unbearable, humanly unbearable. And if you can never get victory because of that, we win. And so Western policy has to be built around this basic, sobering, weird truth. You can't out-threaten a regime that's willing to burn the house down. Sabre-rattling by Donald Trump isn't going to cut it.

You have to beat it by breaking the tools of the arsonists who are planning the burning down of the house. You have to take away the money, the guns, the coordination monopoly, that means that they can coordinate while the people can't. And you have to keep the people inside the house connected enough to eventually walk out together. That's it for today. If you found this useful, please share it. The conversation about Iran is going to be defined by one question,

not whether the regime is evil, but whether the regime is breakable and what it actually takes to break it. It's time to get that conversation started.