By Marc Champion
We understand that Iran's leaders are concerned about the repercussions of the U.S. raid on Venezuela when the editor of the hardline newspaper Javan feels he has to write an article titled "No Comparison with Iran – Don't Waste Your Time," saying there are no repercussions. But whether the Islamic Republic is ready to fall from an external "push" from the US or Israel is another, much more complex issue.
These two deeply unpopular regimes have been linked through their hostility to the U.S. since the 1980s and, more recently, through their shared need to circumvent energy sanctions. It is possible that President Nicolas Maduro's violent transfer from Caracas to New York last weekend has jeopardized another link in Tehran's rapidly shrinking network of alliances, and with it, a significant financial investment.
I say "likely" because it is not yet clear how the successful US special forces operation that took place over the weekend will turn out. Maduro's former deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, made conciliatory statements to the US during her inauguration as interim president on Monday. However, it has met with the ambassadors of the regime's most important international allies, China, Iran and Russia, and is harshly cracking down on any potential domestic opposition.
All of this matters to Iran, not because U.S. forces are about to invade the home of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – something that would be much harder to achieve in Tehran than in Caracas – but because the Islamic Republic has rarely looked so weak.
Iran's clerics are once again facing a wave of mass street protests, and their security forces have so far killed at least 36 people and arrested another 2,000 as part of their crackdown. This prompted an early warning from Donald Trump that the U.S. is "ready" to intervene if the massacre continues.
Khamenei has faced much larger protest movements in the past, from the millions who participated in the pro-democracy "Green Revolution" in 2009 to the "Women Life Freedom" movement of 2022-2023, and protests over water scarcity, prices and fuel shortages. However, this time the situation is different, as the regime is on the defensive, both domestically and internationally. Last year it suffered a heavy defeat by Israel in an air war and proved incapable of protecting its key allies — including President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — from destruction. The humiliation that this entails has been extreme, despite Khamenei's pompous rhetoric. It is also directly linked to protests about the dire state of the economy and the free fall of its currency.
They are accused of neglecting the country's water supply, fuelling corruption and underfunding critical domestic services, Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a series of foreign "adventures" that — for the most part — have resulted in no visible benefit to Iran. This includes a uranium enrichment program that had no commercial value while costing tens of billions of dollars to build. It caused even greater costs for the country due to the sanctions and international economic isolation that followed due to suspicions that the goal was the production of nuclear weapons.
At the same time, added to the strategic waste is the supply and subsidy of the allies in the so-called Axis of Khamenei Resistance, which was designed both to attack and to deter Israel. Assad's Syria tops this list, with the cost of supporting the regime estimated at around $30 billion. Hezbollah — and its vast arsenal of rockets and missiles — follows in second place.
There is no official data on the amounts Iran has invested in Venezuela and may now lose. However, with projects ranging from the construction of oil refineries and tankers to automobile factories and housing, estimates suggest that there may be outstanding credits of $2 to $4 billion. That's not a large amount for a sovereign nation of about 90 million people, but it would expand the regime's undesirable narrative of waste and failure for a government that has just been forced to withdraw a tax hike under the pressure of public anger over soaring inflation and the cost of living. Now it is diverting even more money and attention from the economy as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a main arm of the Iranian armed forces – tries to rebuild air defenses and missile stockpiles destroyed by Israeli and U.S. airstrikes last year.
That brings us back to Trump's threat that "he's ready for action." Iran and Venezuela have long been examples of the claim that, no matter how unpopular, authoritarian regimes fall only when domestic security services are unwilling to kill to keep them in power. That hasn't changed yet for either. But if Khamenei takes Trump seriously, as he should, his options for repression could be limited if the protests continue for a long time or increase in size.
This makes Trump's threats of intervention due to mass killings and Israel's warnings about Iran's ballistic missile program good policies. But when it comes to a repeat of last year's air strikes by the U.S. and Israel, things are less clear. The question is not whether Iran and the region would be better off without the Islamic Republic, but whether the new air strikes would advance or hinder that goal.
There are at least two reasons for restraint. The first is that the regime has enjoyed a "rallying around the flag" phenomenon for some time after the June air strikes, because no one wants to be bombed by a foreign power or the collateral damage that this almost inevitably entails. Iran's Islamist leaders even adopted Persian nationalist symbols that they previously condemned as pagan, to encourage this explosion of patriotism. We can expect that a repeat of last year's attacks would have had the same result. The protesters could well return to their homes for fear of being seen as accomplices of the enemy.
The second reason is that it is unlikely, even if a second attack by the US and Israel caused the collapse of the regime, that a stable pro-Western democracy would follow. It is most likely that power will be transferred to a less religiously fervent but equally hostile government, led by the IRGC. Worse still, in a multinational empire pretending to be a nation-state, a power vacuum will be created that may bring the risk of civil war closer. Think of Syria, but in a country with three times the population.
Napoleon told his generals that they should never interfere when the opponent makes a mistake. It was good advice then, and it still applies today.
