The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1315: Is Iran on the Brink? w/ Firas Modad and John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

72 MinutesPG-13Firas Modad is a Middle East and geopolitical risk analyst and host on The Lotus Eaters. John Fieldhouse is a former Army officer. Firas and John join Pete to talk about the recent unrest in Iran.Firas' SubstackThe Lotus EatersFiras on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I'm very well, very well. Thanks for having me on again. Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. And another returning guest, Dr. Fieldhouse. How are you doing, Doctor? Doing well. All right.

I wanted to have two guys here, one who has done, you know, a lot of historical study on what's going on in Iran right now and Iranian politics. And Ferris, who is really looking at what's happening on the ground today and the current affairs happening in Iran. So let's talk about Iran, gentlemen. And Ferris, why don't you start us off and give us some first impressions of what you see happening? Okay. Well, there are sort of several strands of protests that are being wrapped into this. One of them is protests by the merchant class, which has traditionally been loyal to the regime, supportive of the regime.

They get usually the privileged access to dollars so that they can continue their their business and the collapse of the Iranian real, the continuous collapse of the real has really upset this group to a significant extent. And these are guys who are, you know, relatively devout, practicing. They accept the regime as it is and they have bargains with it, kind of like the commercial class in Syria in the days of Assad, who were on good enough terms with the regime and could continue functioning. So these guys are upset over the currency crisis. There is a bunch of other strands relating to the fact that Iran is an environmental disaster

zone. The dams projects that have been overseen by the IRGC led to a lot of water systems collapsing, a lot of drought, didn't work out as planned, et cetera. That's one strand. pollution in the cities and how it affects people's lives, the hijab issue, general discontent with the regime. And this is all happening under an umbrella where basically the Islamic Revolution lost. The promise of Khomeini's revolution was that they would come in and unify the Muslim world under their leadership and expel the American, and Zionist presence from the region.

And over the course of the war that started on the 7th of October, that has been dismantled, especially with the decapitation of Hezbollah and its severe weakening and with the loss of Syria into the hands of Turkey. And so the regional Iranian project was something that the leadership could sell to the public as saying, look, We know that you're suffering, but we've been able to build up a bunch of industries. We've been able to reduce our dependence on imports.

We developed all kinds of indigenous capabilities, and we're using those to show the West that we are its equal. And in a way, the Iranian nuclear program played a big part in that, because merely having the Big Five plus Germany sit down at the table with the Iranian leadership, meant that Iran was now a great power. With their defeats in Syria and Lebanon, and okay, they were able to hurt the Israelis in their missile attacks, it showed that basically this was for nothing. And that what's needed now is a nationalist readjustment

to focus on protecting their interests in the Gulf and in Iraq and on protecting the Shiaa and dropping the Pan-Islam stuff. And what's worth remembering is that this is an old tendency in Iran. So some guys linked to the IRGC would tell you that we were serving Iran in the days of the Shah. We continued serving Iran under the days of the Islamic Revolution and we will always serve Iran. And this nationalist strand was expressed in the 2000. an eight period by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who got into a bunch of conflicts with the religious leadership because he wanted to be more of a nationalist, to the extent that one of his, I believe

it was his vice president who ended up in jail because he was saying things about how Islam had usurped traditional Persian culture. So this old Persian identity is being asserted, now that the pan-Islamic identity has failed. And these protests are different from the 99 protests or the 2008 protests or the, you know, 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021 protests. In all of these years, the Eringen's experience unrest, but they still had a narrative of a victory to spin. Now the regime doesn't have a justification for its existence. And the way that these things work, and I want to be careful,

about making predictions here, but the way that these regimes operate is that when the guys on the ground lose their confidence and lose the spirit that allows them to go around and shoot protesters and break the back of protests, the whole thing falls apart. Like when law enforcement isn't willing to maintain order, things fall apart, especially in these kinds of systems. Sorry to interrupt, but it almost sounds like a situation in a right. right before the Russian Revolution that you're describing. Yeah, sort of.

Sort of. The defeat hasn't been that spectacular. And they were able to bloody the Israelis nose, especially with a Haifa Refinery attack, and especially with the attack on the Wiseman Institute. And they did manage to deplete 50% of all Thad interceptors in the 12-day war. So it's not like they were helpless. It just wasn't enough to spin a tail.

of victory. I was actually thinking more about what you were saying about the internal law enforcement, but I wasn't even thinking about the external threat there. But yeah, that makes sense, sir. Right, right, yeah. So that's a brief overview of the situation. And again, and tell me if I'm interrupting too much. But one of the questions are things that stood out to me as an American, to the limited extent,

we have any information that isn't coming from Lindsay Graham on the question. Fox News is this sounds a lot like what Stephen Kinser described the anti-Mosidek coup by the Shah, or at least how that group of American scholars, historians describe it. And again, I'm an American. I've got weird relations with Iran, but that's just how it looks to a complete outsider. Look, the, the Mossadegh thing, he had lost a lot of popularity internally, which is what made the coup possible in the first place. And now, in a sense, what's being offered is a reversal.

It's the Islamic Republic that has become unpopular. Crucially, the Supreme Leader, Sayyah al-Qaimini, is 85 years old, I think 86 or 85, 87 years old. And he's delivered in a lot of ways, but not where it matters. Like the collapse in living standards is a big deal. And the unpopularity has become, I'd say, real. And you have this radical group within Iran. And look, the Israelis are saying that we, the Mossad, are backing this

and that we are helping them organize and that we are, or at least if you believe people who say that they speak to them, that we're giving them starlight. and we're making sure that they're connected and we're giving them advice and so on and so forth. So there is that external element that's involved as well. And we saw from the last war that the Israelis have really penetrated Iran quite deeply to the extent that they had drone production facilities inside Iran and the Iranian television was broadcasting raids on these locations.

So that does exist, like this sort of foreign element that you saw during the mostub. days that helped bring the coup to fruition. That exists. You're absolutely right about that, Dr. Fieldhouse. But there is, in both cases, something real underneath it, as in you're only vulnerable to this kind of external intervention if you have built up a series of domestic and external problems. and that's pretty much what the Iranians have done.

Understood. The other thing that does stand out to the extent that the most out coup is relevant is, it's no secret that the CIA was heavily involved in. There are multiple history books about it. It was Deodor Roosevelt's grandson who was organizing it on that. Yeah, Kermit Roosevelt. But even the people that the CIA was backing and spotting. and pushing to attempt them to organize activities.

A lot of those are guys who became anti-US intervention to a huge extent. I mean, Ruhalla Khomeini being the greatest example, which as an American, the thing I try to stress is, yeah, even if we are, even if the CIA is directly engaging and influencing mobs, that doesn't mean that things are going to come out the way we want because they definitely didn't last time. Absolutely. And although the way that I'm thinking about it is this, now the threat facing the Iranian nation is coming from Azerbaijan and its alliance with Turkey. It's coming from Turkey and the Turkish influence over their northern border after the Armenia-Azerbaijan war. It's coming from the Kurds and pretty much everybody in the region agrees that the Kurds need to be kept in their place. It's coming from the Arabs, etc. It's coming from the Maloian surgency. And so the answer to it can't be pan-Islamism and revolutionary. The answer to it has to be nationalistic.

And a nationalistic Iran wants to contain Turkish ambitions and wants to contain Arab ambitions. and guess who shares that precise objective, Israel. Which, again, that brings up interesting parallels to the Mossadegh. Exactly. Yeah, because, again, the average American doesn't probably understand it under the Shab. And again, the coup was essentially a reassertion of the South because it was a constitutional monarchy before then,

and he directly ruled as the executive is, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But the nationalistic aspects, I had a question of, about that because my understanding is Persians, ethnic Persians, are a shrinking part of the Iranian population to the point they're only like 57% today, aren't they? Yeah.

With Azeris being like the growing, yeah, the largest growing aspect of a portion of that. So I was corrected about this the other day. I was of the view that the Azidis were 25%. And I was told that it's closer to 15 or 16%.

and that the Azadis are the most Persianized of the groups that are within Iran. And Khamenei is half-Azadi. So I don't know what the correct percentages are because in a country like that, you're going to get a lot of obfuscation. You're also going to get a lot of people sort of shifting identities as they move from rural areas into urban areas and sort of blend into the national Persian identity. Just as it happens in the Arab world, people becomes Arabs when they move into the city.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't have a lot of confidence in that. What I can see is that the Iranian regime itself was very afraid of the Armenia-Azerbaijan war. And their interests were more naturally aligned with Armenia, but they had to side with the Azaris. because of public opinion. That's an interesting case, since they also have a large Armenian population as well, don't they? Yes, they do.

But the Armenians don't mobilize in the same way because Christians don't riot in the same way. Yeah, especially ones in Iran. Especially ones in Iran, exactly, exactly. But it is my also understanding that most of these other minority groups in Iran, probably with the exception of the ethnic Arabs in Kuzestan, there's not really a whole lot of separatist action other than, as you said, the Kurds and the Balochis.

The Kurds, the Balochis, the Arabs have a history of protesting for Arab separatism. That tends to ebb and flow, and a lot of the Arab areas have been Persianized by moving Persians into them. You still get some Arab unrest. every few years and it's still an issue. But if you're a sane Arab and you look next door at Iraq, you don't say, well, I'd like to join Iraq. Like Iran is an industrial power in some senses. It builds its own cars.

It builds gas turbines that it even exports to Russia. It builds missiles. It builds drones. It builds all kinds of things. They have decent steel production. They have a good refining capability. They have a decent chemicals industry, et cetera, et cetera. Iraq is a basket case.

And so even if you're an Arab nationalist, you're not really thinking, well, I want to join my brethren over the border because they are just, like Iraq is a fully failed state. Yeah. On that note, just pure anecdote, but when I was stationed there 2006, 2007, I was advised of the Iraqi army. And one of our function was, you know, local expense accounts in which we were allowed to purchase items off the economy for our Iraqi unit. And it was no secret that almost all the stuff that I purchased computers being like the best example. You know, we're talking about Windows computers. You could look at me. You could see they were fabricated, you know, manufactured in Iran.

And we weren't, I wasn't doing business with Iran, but the people I was doing business with, you know, the only place they had to get these things was Iran. And it was, it's no secret that you would have everything from computers to beer to, to, uh, to process food to, you know, yeah, beer. Like I said, those are the kinds of things you bought in Iraq that came from Iran. I mean, that would have probably come through Dubai and then into Iran and then into, but yeah, fair enough. Can we talk a little bit about the, uh, the color revolution angle here? John and I were talking the other day about we saw a video of Balush allegedly.

The head, the commander of the police station at Aronshire, Makmoud, Hakkakat, just being assassinated in his, being assassinated in his car while driving. And it seems that he was famous for cracking down on anti-regime, Balusias. And John said that historically, if he saw Belouche activity, he would think that the CIA was involved. Well, I would assume that there is a level of involvement. And the Belosh right now are incredibly useful because you could use them in Pakistan to target the Chinese. And you could use them in Iran to mess with the regime. And so if you are the CIA and you're not using the Belouche, then you're just not being competent at it.

So we're seeing an escalation of attacks in Pakistan that are targeting the Chinese. We just saw an attack in Afghanistan targeting the Chinese and targeting a Chinese mining company and burning their equipment and killing a bunch of people. And so there is every interest for the United States in. using the withdrawal from Afghanistan to build on the networks that they had pre-withdrawal and to use that as a launch pad for destabilizing activity across that region, targeting both Pakistan and Iran. So I would, I don't know if they would be giving them specific targets and saying, after that police officer, but if they weren't at least training them, funding them,

equipping them, they would be remiss. Yeah, and just so we're clarifying, I've never worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and I only had tangential interaction with them. So I have no access to any classified information that I could release. But the other thing that I was going to say that stood out about that attack, where literally it's a regular vehicle that pulls aside and the guy shooting an AK in there. And the other thing I thought is this was clearly done. done in order to produce video content.

Because if you're a serious insurgency and you're trying to eliminate security force leadership, you do it quickly and cleanly in a way that you're not going to actually compromise your own assets, you know, you kill people. We blow up their cars or you kill them at their houses. And that's the kind of thing you would do because you want that video that looks like an action film out there. Yeah, I would assume that too, because you saw them sort of driving up to the car and spraying it with an AK. Your objective in doing that kind of thing is to inspire others who would

do it on their own and to show clearly that you can reach individual commanders. And that is intended to sort of deter these commanders from cracking down on the protest movement too hard. Because the message that you're sending is that this could be you. Yeah. On that note, there's reports in America media, which again, I don't trust at all, that police in some locations are actually joining the protesters. Do you have any information? What way the other on that? Honestly, getting anything verified these days is impossible. The pro-Iran accounts are showing protests that are supposedly supportive of the regime. And they're doing various vox pop clips where they're interviewing people who are. We're saying, if you want to protest, it's fine. Don't do it by burning police stations and attacking IRGC buildings and so on. Chamini has confirmed that a bunch of buildings have been attacked and burned.

And so the videos showing these attacks look like they're credible. We are at an age where we just don't know exactly what's coming out, unless you have a very robust network on the ground, which I don't claim to have. And so what we're seeing is a narrative. war, with both sides doing their best to exaggerate the support for their side of the story. Getting a good read on it is very difficult. What I can say with some confidence is that the regime looks exhausted and that the regime doesn't look like it's retained the will to do this.

And the way Khomeini phrased it, he phrased it as, some people burnt buildings in order to serve Trump because the American president told them to. What you're saying is that there are factions within Iran who would prefer Donald Trump to you. That's a bad look and that's a bad defense to begin with. Instead of saying these are just, you know, criminal elements, foreign agents, and we've wrapped it up and it's done. Like he's presenting it in a bad way. Some of the videos of the unrest do look quite significant. And that is happening in Tehran among other places. There is also a lot of information warfare saying that the Iranian foreign minister's family has moved to Lebanon and that so-and-so has been attacked and so-and-so is.

Like, it's difficult to verify. It's really hard to say with any accuracy what's real and what isn't. Yeah, I was going to say it's been identified that confirmed in the last 24 hours that the Internet was shut down. Yes. Yeah, so the one thing we do know is that individual civilians on the ground, unless they have Starlink, there's very little chance that this is, you know, very recent as in the same day reporting. Yeah. So all that you have right now is what the protesters are posting, which, given the internet shutdown, would presumably be done by people who have been given internet access. If you remember during the early days of the Syrian Civil War, the first thing that was done was to you.

give these protesters satellite phones and to give these protesters cameras and media training and the equipment and support that they would need to spit a narrative that would build into a civil war. There was the first thing that was done in Syria. The first bits of aid before the military stuff, before all of the weapons, it was the media war. And Facebook helped them and all of the social media giants help them. In Egypt, Google was helping the protesters in Iran in 2008. It was Twitter at the time that was helping the protesters. So when the when the internet shuts down, you're only left with the two most extreme narratives. That are the protesters who have been given access to the internet by an external power. This time it seems through Starlink.

and that of the regime, which is still broadcasting through official media, and trying to say, it's all fine, the public still supports us, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, which I think ironically probably supports or feeds into the worst habits of either side, because it really does sort of encourage mob psychology, because everybody's going to insert it the worst, because why would you not? Yep, and you keep seeing these videos either, of the police beating of protesters or of the protesters beating up security forces. And this is intentional. You want to spread the message that this whole thing is falling apart

and you want to pick a side. And incidentally, that's where Venezuela comes in. Keep going with that. So with Venezuela, what happened wasn't regime change. What happened was leadership decapitated. to convince the regime to change its behavior. And now the Venezuelans face a choice. Either the US strikes them again and keeps up the embargo and pretty much collapses the Venezuelan economy because nobody can do anything to get oil out of Venezuela

if the US Navy doesn't want them to. And in that context, you know, Dulci, Rodriguez could be next or the Minister of Defense could be next and it doesn't have to be clean and tidy kidnapping. It could just be a bomb falling on their heads. And so the message that's been sent through Venezuela is that we can touch you as individual leaders and we can get you as individual leaders and you have two options. Either you play ball and you govern Venezuela in accordance with our wishes or we will go after you as individual.

and collapse your economy. With the Iranians, this is a little more difficult because if they start going after Iranian tankers on the high seas, the Iranians could choose the suicide option, which is the Hormuz option. But it is a suicide option. Because even if they shut down the energy of everyone else, one of the consequences is that everything they have

also gets shut down. Not only that, when they start targeting Gulf countries, There's 150 F-15 sitting there in Saudi Arabia. There's a hundred Western jets sitting there in the UAE. All of these would be turned over to American command and would be used against ERA. So for the Iranians to retaliate to a tanker war is for them to trigger a suicide option. And it's the same with the nuclear. If they try to build a nuclear weapon, like it's a nuclear.

pretty hopeless for them. They can't deal with the retaliation. They can't deal with the... It's not a quick... I'm sorry, it's not a quick action either. It's not like you build one in five minutes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And they've shown that their leadership is so heavily penetrated by US and Israeli intelligence that they themselves, as decision makers, can't be certain that this decision won't be immediately discovered by the United States. So they have no confidence in doing that. So they're being given option A, suicide. Option B, Chaminé is going to die, get rid of him, and change the regime yourselves to go down the nationalist route. And if you go down the nationalist

route that leads you to partnership with Israel, maybe under the table, maybe over the table, it doesn't matter, but it does mean that your threats become your own borders and Turkey, and you're a functional partner of Israel. And so we're no longer dealing with regime change where the Americans come in and debatify the Iraqi state and dismantle the Iraqi army. We're dealing with a regime change that keeps the personnel, keeps the state structures, but forces them to make different choices as they govern. And those choices would be more along the lines of historic Persian rather than an Islamic Republic. No, precisely. At least not a pan-Islamic. I mean, the point I would make to Americans is a lot of places, Persians,

They're Muslim, and we even say devout Muslim, but their religiosity in terms of their politics is sort of like Italians and Catholicism. It's ever-present, but it doesn't mean that the Pope decides how traffic tickets work in Italy. In some ways, that would almost be better for the religious establishment, because they have more authority when they're not micromanaging, which has basically been the whole theory behind European monarchs since, I don't know, the Treaty of West. Not just that, the traditional Shia model didn't involve a very active clergy. This is a relatively modern thing that had its origins theoretically in Iraq under Muhammad Ba'aqa al-Sadr, and then was adopted by the Dawa Party in Iraq and was adopted by Hezbollah and was adopted by the Iranians. So these, like the tradition is different for the Shia.

They're less active in politics. In addition, when you remember somebody like Ali Sistani, where does his power come from? It comes from the fact that he rarely ever speaks. And then getting a meeting with him is absolutely impossible. And so other people speak for him. sons-in-law are heavily involved in the corruption in Iraq and all of that stuff but he himself in a way his power comes from a silence and you remember when he disciplined both maliki and muctahsadr all he had to do was say that he was driving from nashaf to carbala

and his convoy moved at like five kilometers an hour and everybody like i think it was a million people who actually walked with him all the way. And that's it. The fighting between Maliki and Sard ended because Sistani came to the city. He didn't say that he was going to mediate. He didn't say he was going to solve this. He didn't say what they should do. He just said, I'm coming. What he'd done before was go to do Britain for treatment, if I remember correctly, when the crisis started. Then he comes back and says, well, I'm just going to take a drive. And that's it. The fighting ends. And so these clerics who know how to stay quiet end up becoming a lot more powerful than very verbose clerics like, you know, Pope Francis comes to mind because of their silence. We hear that they're having water issues that I think there's a water shortage there.

Have we confirmed whether that's due to drought, whether it was due to. anything that Israel, you know, the bombing did or do we have any information on that? It's a longstanding issue. It's a very longstanding issue. We were reading about it in 2010, something like that. And the IRGC's bid to build a lot of these dams was in response to it, but it seems that the dams made everything worse. So it's not a new thing. I don't know if somebody did something to make some particular aspect of it worse. Like, I don't have that kind of information, but I do know that it's a longstanding issue. It is the Middle East water is an issue everywhere, even when everything works.

Exactly. On that note, the engineering capacity that the IRGC got for that, how did they get that? Was it just their engineers of their own? Do they get them from the former Soviet Union? Do we even know? I don't know about that, actually. I honestly don't know about that in detail. What I can tell you is that you saw a lot of people

who are connected to the regime studying in Western universities and that they did get Russian help for a whole range of things and that the Iranians are a genuinely creative and scientific and capable people. So this is built with developed,

indigenous capacity for a whole range of things, including in the oil industry, and in weapons manufacturing, where it was a combination of foreign help, people studying abroad, people were studying abroad to learn how to do better engines for Iranian drones. We had people, I think, in Britain, who were doing research on that on behalf of the Iranians. And they themselves are capable. And the Shah said people are brought to study and this sort of continued. Yeah. On that note, as a digression, were the people that were sent behind the Shah, the study in the U.S., was there any kind of acceptance of them? Were they ever treated or accepted by the new regime?

I asked that because I went to school some of people whose fathers were actually Iranian officers trained at American military academies. And one of the issues, obviously, is a lot of the American trained officers were purged. So I didn't know if they were ever allowed to, if professionals of that type were actually integrated into the new regime. As far as I can tell, some were, but I can't sort of speak with a lot of confidence about this. But I think some were because some went not back, but back and forth. And so some ended up getting acceptance into the regime. Yeah. The Iran-Iraq war was a wonderful thing for the Iranian Revolution

because it forced them to become pragmatic. And it forced them to sort of put a break on their own radical tendencies to focus on surviving and, you know, they hoped winning the war, which didn't happen. But the Iran-Iraq war was the best thing that could have happened to the revolutionary regime because it was sort of like Stalin in the Second World War. He had to turn to the older officers and we had to turn to the capable men that he could find and say, okay, just go and do your thing and I'll sort of relieve you from the pressure of the commissars.

Yeah, at least the Soviet case. I mean, that's how some of the surviving Tsarist officers were rehabilitated. So I did know that the Iran-Iraq War had the effect in part in Iraq. and integrating a lot of the minorities more fully into the Iranian mainstream. I mean, famously Iranian Jews, there are memorials to Iranian Jewish military dead of the Iran-Iraq war, which is the kind of weird thing. The average American wouldn't expect. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the Jewish community in Iran tends to speak out against Israel quite frequently. part of it is that they have to part of it is that they didn't buy into the whole Zionist idea and they accepted that look the exile is there for a reason and this is still the Babylonian exile

like they're still in ancient Babylon as far as they're concerned so it's a bit of a different tradition for them yeah as aside I know since the 70 there were some minority movements throughout the Middle East of Mizrahi and other

minority Jews either returning to the countries of origin or leaving Israel partly just because there was a big complaint that essentially modern Israel is an Ashkenazi-run institution, that there was huge disaffection among large part of that population. And a lot of the conflict that you see in Israel today is coming from Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews asserting themselves against the Ashkenazi secular elite. Yeah. And they make babies. I'm sorry, I said they make babies, so they have a majority in some places now.

Yeah, exactly. And so you're seeing this change within Israel, and part of the explanation for it, is that the Eastern Jews are asserting themselves against the Western Jews. And Nataniahu is sort of playing that game and playing all sides in order to stay relevant. But yes, absolutely. Well, I guess when you see all of this happening, the death of the Islamic Republic has been announced many, many times. For those who know their history, like you, I would assume, Mr. Fieldhouse knows it better than I do. I assume you do, too, is this different?

My sense of it is that this is different and also in part because there is no succession plan right now. If you remember the death of Ra'isi, Raezi went through the judiciary. And in his role in the judiciary, he would have dealt with a lot of the sensitive subjects and been informed of what the intelligence guys were doing and what they wanted. Then he became president, and he was obviously being groomed as a successor to Chamini, as a sort of reliable religious hardliner who could take the mantle. He wasn't a Sayyid, so he wasn't descended from the Prophet of Islam, and he didn't wear a black turban.

He wore a white turban. but he was seen as the kind of person who would be able to keep this thing together in partnership with the IRGC. The way that a lot of Islamic states operate is that they begin with a religious zeal and then they end up in the hands of military men. And that's what happened to Mamluk Egypt and that's what happened to the Abbasid Caliphate and that is a lesson that keeps on recurring in Muslim history. And so the natural evolution of Iran is for the IRGC to take over even more fully.

But the IRGC is fully loyal and obedient to Khomeini. They wouldn't be loyal and obedient to his successor unless he was properly groomed and prepared and given the levers of power in an orderly manner. And the whole intention behind making Raeci president was to enable that. So Raeisi dies or gets killed or whatever it was that happened to his helicopter. And the succession plan falls apart.

And the only other person who understands the levers of power well enough and can wield them and retain the loyalty of the IRGC is much. his son the issue is that if you're going to make this into a hereditary thing why not have the Shah how are you different from the Shah and so it's not a viable plan to put him in charge even though he has these levers of power because in terms of credibility and public acceptance it just doesn't work yeah we say Islam has a weird history

when systems become hereditary, and that usually marks the decline of a lot of caliphates and systems. I mean, the Abbasids did it for a while, the Ottomans did it for a while, it works, the hereditary system works, but if you're claiming that this is a new thing completely, and this is a revolutionary regime, you're going back to the most traditional thing and the most natural thing, which is a new thing, which is monarchy. And you can't have, like, you know, that was part of the problem in Syria. That was the reason that Mubarak,

that was the reason that the army allowed the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt. He was planning on making Jamal Mubarak his successor. And the army was like, no, who are you? We're still going to keep it in the Mamluk way, it's still going to be a general. And we're going to choose which general. And so that, like, it doesn't sell

to let Mujahabha Khamenei become the supreme leader of Iran after his father. Yeah, I would say on that note, I mean, the Pahlavi dynasty, they actually became the Shah of Iran because it was at Riza Shah's father was a military officer who was central the coup. And it was probably performative, but he essentially stepped away after the coup and required there to be mass proclamation that he should be Shah before he had. actually took the throne and that was probably for show but that was part of how it became so you know a military coup and at least in an Iranian society can become a legitimate a legitimate monarchy so if the if the regime falls and there is no successor and the IRGC I assume we'll fight to the

end to defend the regime but there will be IRGC left over what happens to them is that what Is that the, do they become an insurgency? Is that who Israel, Israeli and United States planes will be going after after that? Is that, how does that work? Well, this is where it gets very murky. As a movement for revolution, like you can't say that you're still a revolutionary regime 50 years into the damn thing. It just doesn't work.

After the first 10 years, if the revolution isn't done, like, that's it. It's the establishment. And what is there to revolt for exactly? You've got the Turks becoming a power with big ambitions on, they've taken northern Syria. They're in the process of consolidating there. They have very obvious ambitions on Iraq. This is a problem for the Iranians because you have all kinds of clients in Iraq. They have a plan with Qatar to sort of develop a new kind of transport corridor and infrastructure corridor

that would fully integrate Iraq into Turkey on the economic level, on the energy level, on the power level. All of it would go through Turkey. If you're Iran, this is a nightmare and you want to do everything that you can to stop that, and to assert control over southern Iraq, because this is the only place from which you could get invaded, unless Jenghis Khan comes back, you know? So you have a very real problem. And so what is the impetus for an insurgency? So if the Americans are being very good at their diplomacy,

they would be trying to reach out to the IRGC and say, look, guys, the top echelon has already been killed off. or a lot of it was killed off in the last wave of strikes by the Israelis. Do you want to follow Khomeini to the grave or do you want to stay in power and maybe have Reza Shah as a figurehead, maybe have one of your own as a military dictator, whatever. You decide, but that implies a change in direction. And in that new direction, you won't have the Chinese constantly buying everything from you at a massive discount and not actually investing in the country.

You signed this 25-year partnership with the Chinese. Where are the Chinese investments in Iran? They haven't materialized because they don't want to cross American sanctions and because the U.S. is keeping China away from it. And so do you want to take the alternative pathway and stay in power as we did with Venezuela, as what happened in Venezuela? And so if you're one of these guys in the IRGC, you're watching what's happening in Venezuela quite carefully. The problem is that the IRGC could fragment.

It could turn into a criminal enterprise. If they put the Shah in, he will only be a figurehead because it's not obviously that he has real connections within the military establishment of Iran. there's always been a conflict between the IRGC and the Arthesh, the Iranian army. How does that play out? And do the various ethnic groups try to assert themselves? Do the Azadis in Azerbaijan decide, we want to help the Azadis in Iran along our border? And we want to expand our territory.

So there are all kinds of possibilities that come from the removal. of this regime, or at least from the removal of the Islamic Revolution part and heading of this regime. The most peaceful outcome would be the IRGC saying, we're in charge. That's it. And we're going to rebrand, we're going to keep the same brand, but follow completely different behavior, we're going to do whatever. And that's the most peaceful outcome. but it's obvious that there is no need for a guy with a turban at the top.

If you look at the Iranian constitution outside of the supreme leader, it's actually a work of genius with these various appointed and elected bodies that do ensure a level of participation and that allow a competent leader to wield power effectively and to include very many swathes of society in decision-making, through the Parliament, through the Assembly of Experts, less so through the Guardian Council, et cetera, et cetera. So if you just remove the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader, and you have a president with enormous powers with a Parliament and the Assembly of Expert becoming a kind of Senate that oversees,

Parliament as a sort of upper chamber, you have a very functional system, but it will always require a secret police that is very strong to make sure that these ethnic minorities don't get ideas. So it's never going to be a proper democratic system. That can't work in a diverse country like Iran. So that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is some combination of ethnic insurgencies, civil war, conflict between the different military branches, et cetera, et cetera, chaos, which is a very real possibility in a very diverse country with this kind of geography. That's not an optimistic. I know. I know.

The one thing I was going to say that for an audience is we tend to think of the IRGC as just like one organization or just the Army just special forces. But as I tell people, it's a parallel institution. There's a regular army. There's the IRGC army. There's Air Force and Navy. They have regular in. They have IRGC plus the Quds Force.

There's special ops guys who control a lot of their, or direct a lot of their allied insurgents, which is extremely professional and disciplined as well as some other forces. So yet the IRGC is big and it's fairly cohesive, but it's not like it's just one organization. It's this hierarchy of interlocked organizations the way that the KGB was in the Soviet Union, they had its own army and police force or the SS was in Germany that had its own police force in a separate ground army.

And there is the economic wing of the IRGC through Khatem al-Anb, which is a whole massive construction company. And then there is the religious endowments that are under the control of Khomeini through the Boniades, which are a massive economic power in the country. And then there is the traditional merchant class. And then there is, you know, the peasants and the workers and the youth and all of these groups. So there are genuinely very many different centers of power in Iran. And Khomeini did a decent job of centralizing that power around him. but he had 30, 40 years to do so.

And whoever comes in on top, if he doesn't understand the system and if he doesn't truly understand these centers of power and how to manage them and how to navigate them and how to give all of the mistake in the country, it can fall apart, which is why Reza Shah worries me. I don't know

how much he is deeply involved with these centers of power and able to speak to them. And nobody has a good read on the internal politics of the IRGC. Like we know which centers of power exist. We know that the aerospace force is getting a lot of resources. We know that the Quds force gets a lot of resources. The Navy, the IRGC Navy gets some resources, et cetera, et cetera. but we don't get the full picture. And one of the reasons for that is that

during the early 2000s color revolution season, the IRGC realized that they could be next. And so they proved the country against color revolutions and against decapitation strikes by dispersing regional commands. And so if you remember the Ukrainian jet that was shot down, Part of the reason for that shoot down, if you don't want to believe the conspiracy theories,

is that the Iranians refuse to have a fully integrated air defense because they believe that that would be more vulnerable. Then this war taught them otherwise, and now they're talking to the Chinese about acquiring some kind of turnkey capability that would cover the whole country. We hear reports that maybe they've gotten the HQ 9 and bits and pieces of China. Chinese air defense or that they haven't gotten them. We don't, like I can't tell you that with any confidence if they have them, if they don't have them. But their own internal politics within the IRGC ended up dictating a level of decentralization. So you could have a province rebelling because the local IRGC commander decided that he and his men

are going to rebel. So there are, it's a very difficult kind of. country. It's a very difficult country to navigate and to get your head around it, which is why it needed to be a monarchy with a very strong secret police. I guess the next question I would ask is, you know, the reason Syria fell so quickly is because they were abandoned by their their allies. It was, that was pretty clear. How's Russia going to play in all this? I mean, in Russia and Iran are trade partners and their allies. So where does Russia come in on this? I don't think they can influence the internal dynamics too much. I don't think they can influence the internal dynamics.

I'm sure they have a good read of the different ethnic groups because Russian sociologists and these guys who sort of study these countries tend to be quite exceptional and incredibly talented and they learn the languages and they master them and they sort of end up loving the culture that they're studying. So they do that quite well. But I don't think that they are able to influence this too much. They can't provide them with an air defense that would check the Americans. This much we know.

They would be all right with Iran turning nationalists so long as it remains stable because then they would have an intersection of interests in the Caucasus and in Central Asia aimed at containing both Turkey and China. So they don't mind so long as there are military and intelligence people that they can speak to and cooperate with

and so long as they can keep the north-south corridor going. because the Russian ambition is to just be able to get to Iran and get to Persia and get to India and be able to sort of contain China that way. The whole Chinese, the whole Indian-Russian relationship is all about containing China. And a nationalist India, a nationalist Iran and a nationalist Russia are very natural partners working mainly against Pakistan in Turkey and China. And so you're going back to Huntington's prophecy of the Muslim world siding with China against the West.

And everything keeps pointing towards that direction. Do you have anything, Mr. Fieldhouse? No. It's sort of like how would you even be able to summarize all that? It definitely sounds like Russia is very concerned, but at least they have the discipline to understand that meddling creates more problems and it solves, at least from their perspective. It's a lot of this comes back to the beginning. Like I said, my biggest concern is America, foreign or American establishment interfering in something it doesn't understand and making it worse, especially since people like me go and die when our country does stuff like that.

Yeah. That remains my issue. I just hope the United States doesn't decide that we're somehow going to remake this country. in our own image and then spend, you know, a decade trying to turn it into Connecticut like we tried to do with Iraq. I think those days are over. I think the days of these kinds of liberal delusions are over, not of military intervention, not of imperialism, but, you know, as someone who's from Lebanon, like all of the empires come and fight in Lebanon at some point or the other, all I want in life is competent imperialism. Like give me competent imperialism. Like give me competent imperialism,

and you will have my undying loyalty. You may not want to expect that from America. Well, the Venezuela example does suggest a different story. Like, it's genuinely genius to go and kidnap a president in the middle of the night, grabbing by the scruff of the neck and parade him, literally parade him in New York, and say to everyone else in Latin America, look, guys, this could be you. And then use that as an example to say to a regime like the Iranian regime, look, guys, you can still be in charge.

We just want this one thing, this crazy ideology, which you accept has failed. We want that gone and we'll do business. This is competent imperialism, in part because the system, the system as it now exists, the challenge from China as it now exists, imposes on the United States restraint. Like you can't go now and just shoot goat fuckers in Afghanistan, sorry, but you can't go do that kind of thing and try to sort of turn the loya jirga into a parliament. That's not going to happen anymore. You can't afford it. The threat from China is too big and it's too real. And so in this multipolar world, to the extent that it is multipolar, the Americans have to act with restraint, and they're, at least in Venezuela, acting with restraint and creativity.

It's still too soon to tell. It could still go south. It could still go badly in all kinds of ways. I fully accept that. sign i do take it as a positive sign well that was optimism i didn't expect so i appreciate it yeah yeah well sometimes sometimes i can't be optimistic sometimes but uh don't ask you to do it too often it it worries me yeah well i mean um i don't know if you saw this one this morning but um Trump said that he was, the U.S. will be conducting land strikes against the cartels. And, quote, we are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico. I was going to say on that that we spoke the other day, Pete, it's at least the context in which I heard it.

It's like that seemed to be Trump shooting from the hip when he was asked direct questions. And just by the body language off of Rubio and Hexas, you kind of got the sense that he had no idea what he was talking about. And I kind of hope that's the case just because I think that is completely infeasible. But maybe I'm wrong. Well, I mean, I was only thinking that, you know, we're told to cheer what happened in Venezuela. And, you know, maybe I am just way to have seen this movie play before and the promise of everything being cheaper. And maybe it's different now with the liberal world order dying. But, you know, I said that if this would have been Mexico, it would have been, you know, we're going to destroy, we're going to do, and it would take

boots on the ground, and men would die. But it seems like that's the more pressing threat to the United States, even though obviously the cartels work with a work with certain factions in the CIA. And yeah, I mean, it's just a big, big mess. It's an existential risk. Look, Mexico, it's a lot harder to do things without the Mexican government being willing to cooperate. And without the U.S. being able to just flood the zone with drones. Yeah. One of the important things about Venezuela is the sheer volume of natural resources available there.

As an it's not. That's what they say about Ukraine. Yeah, that's Ukraine as well. That's Ukraine as well. That's Ukraine as well. The sheer amount of natural resources that are extractable from Venezuela and from Ukraine is just insane. And so if you're thinking about a war with China, getting all of your oil supply and your mineral supply

from a Caribbean country means that your supply chains are immune and are a lot more resilient than they would be if you were getting them from Africa or if you were getting them from even the rest of Latin America. So there is that supply chain element that is linked to Venezuela that makes it particularly important and that enables action in other theaters that might be long term, be that China or Mexico. But the United States is obviously in an imperial consolidation phase. The other part of the story is not just the imperial consolidation, it's taking away China's allies. And so if the Chinese don't have allies, they then have a much bigger problem.

And one of those, not allies, because the Chinese are different in how they think about the world, but one of those partners that the Chinese have is Venezuela and another one is Iran. And between them, they might account for 20 to 25% of Chinese oil imports. And so if you've gained control over that, you've slowed down the Chinese economy. It's given you breathing space to do other things in other parts of the world, including a place like Mexico. and by showing Shinebound that look one day she could just end up on a plane and find herself on trial in New York, that's the kind of threat that focuses the mind. So this is the kind of approach that says to these leaders,

you have personal skin the game. It's not going to be, you know, my soldiers, killing your soldiers and just people from Appalachia dying. No, no, it's going to be you, the guy in charge, and you're going to live your life in humiliation or in a jail cell or your life is going to end. But now you must think as someone with a lot more skin in the game and act accordingly. And that is a more competent way of doing things. because that capability to reach these people exists. You've demonstrated that it exists and you forced everybody involved

to maybe change their thinking. And in a way, what Scheinbaum has been doing in Mexico is trying to get the cartels into the legal economy. Like part of the logic of the Hugsnut Bullets is that maybe in 20 years' time, these guys will go down the Godfather route and will want to become legitimate businessman and get out of this dirty business. And that might be the only way to do it because they've become too powerful.

Well, okay, that's a nice carrot. You have to pair it with a stick. And so if the offer is, look, you can become a Mexican oligarch. You don't have to be a Mexican drug dealer. And you can sit on this wealth and you have to sacrifice a bunch of your men. Who you know are a bunch of rapists and murderers anyway. just like you. Well, okay, I'll become legitimate

and my family will have a legacy and I'll be rid of these guys. So it's not, what I'm saying is that there is reason for some optimism. Yeah, I'll take that. Yeah, no. And without saying that it's going to work this way

or that there's not going to be a glitch or that it's going to be, you know, all wonderful. But if you're deploying these kinds of tools, a combination of skin in the game and an offer of redemption, yeah, okay, this is better than you have to become a liberal Democrat. There is some coherence there. Hopefully it works, but there is going to. I guess the one, the one thing I think about is, okay, all of this works out really well and everything. Then, well, you have, we have elections here. Then someone comes into power who, You know, that's the, I'm not saying you don't try.

You don't try to make things. You don't try to make your neighborhood better. But if you're, if there's a possibility in three years, somebody's going to come into power who is going to seek to dismantle all of this. It's like, oh, man, we got to get rid of this system so quick. One of the many reasons why I'm a monarchist through and through. Yeah. As Americans, it's nothing but harping if we were to say that. Yeah, yeah.

I can tell you I'm a monarchist, but as an American, it doesn't mean anything concrete. Mexico had a monarchy. We don't. You can sort of try a genuine... We've tried. You could try a January 6th that the liberals imagined that, January 6 was and put Baron Trump on the throne. No, I'm joking, obviously.

Benny marries the princess of Norway and Greenland's not a problem. There you go. How about Iceland? I want Iceland. Yeah. I like Iceland. I've been there. It's a wonderful, a wonderful place.

Yeah. Yeah. On that note, not to digress too much, but my favorite was, in Afghanistan, Iceland stepped up and deployed an infantry battalion to help there. which was a very big contribution since the country has no army but the they never let the fact they didn't have an army stop them from deploying a battalion of infantry that's very impressive that's very impressive i was impressed i landed when i landed in rakeovic when we touched down and i looked to my right the first thing i saw was a um an american c-130 so yeah

then everybody pretty much speaks English and you're like oh I mean besides the fact that everybody here is like fourth and fifth cousins this is uh pretty much seems like home yeah which made you the most eligible bachelor on the island that night yeah all right gentlemen um we can we can go on like we go on like this forever but um you know thank you and uh furious do your plugs Yeah, so you can find me on Madadgeopolitics.com and at Fedas Madad on X. And Pete, thank you very much for inviting me back home. Of course, of course. Dr. Fieldhouse, you got anything?

I've got a substack sometime, someday else. So I started publishing on that until then. Watch. Read Pete. Read Martyr-made. Read Dark Enlightenment stuff. Those are my friends. Until then.

all right thank you gentlemen thank you