Iran at the brink

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 13th of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: the government crackdown in Iran.

The political crisis continues to deepen this week… with President Trump calling for possible military action.

EICHER: The last year in Iran saw shortages, an economic crisis, and increasing executions by the Islamic government. That culminated with demonstrators taking to the streets in large numbers last month. The protests have spread… despite a violent crackdown. As you heard moments ago, some reports say the number of dead now numbers around 600 … with thousands of arrests.

Here to talk about it is Janatan Sayeh. He’s an Iranian-American research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

REICHARD: Janatan Sayeh is focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic's influence. Janatan, good morning

JANATAN SAYEH: Good morning, great to be with you.

REICHARD: So glad you're here. The regime looks substantially weaker now than it has in the past. How can we measure its vulnerability to falling and what factors weaken it?

SAYEH: There are two factors, internal and external. Externally speaking, their proxies in the regions are severely weakened by Israeli attacks throughout the last year. When we talk about their military, of course, air defense systems are down, meaning they cannot repel external attacks. Domestically speaking, not only are they ideologically bankrupt, and not only has the 1979 Revolution proven to be deficient and incapable of governing, but more so the young people are risking their lives coming out to the streets. So this is the most fragile the Islamic Republic has been, and you can sense the paranoia given how harsh the crackdowns have been by authorities relying on foreign militias and relying on automatic weapons to attack unarmed protesters that have been protesting, entering the third week.

REICHARD: Now, you mention foreign militias. Who are these groups? And why doesn’t Iran just use internal security?

SAYEH: It is greatly dependent on how paranoid the regime is. So the Supreme Leader is increasingly concerned with defections from its own military apparatus. These are different entities that have competed with each other and these are gaps that foreign intelligence have been able to exploit in the past. The Mossad has been able to leverage ongoing rivalries between, let's say, the Islamic Revolution in GAR Corps Intelligence Organization and the Ministry of Intelligence, so these gaps exist. And a second layer is that these militias, given that they're not Iranians, they're more likely to feel comfortable opening fire on protesters that are not of the same nationality as them, they don't speak the same language, realistically, not even the same religion. As to who they are and what their background is, most of them have been designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. Many of them are part of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force, the PMFs, and of course, you have the Lebanese Hezbollah come in.

REICHARD: President Trump said he's weighing his options, and Tehran has signaled that it is open to talks. What do you think would be the goals of those talks?

SAYEH: Regime officials always want to put up a facade of negotiations to ease tensions, to project a false image of improvement, to satisfy and appease their own support base, and try to maybe distract the international community and their own population from what's really going on on the ground. But that is a tactic that was used by them during the 2025 spring negotiations, that they dragged out talks without offering any concessions or anything really meaningful, just to say that one, they've exasperated all options and the ball is in America's court, and two, to signal to the protesters that America is not on your side, that America is negotiating with us and not you. So that has been the tactic. Now, whether that would deter Washington from signaling and a strike against Iran's target, that has not been the case. Negotiations were not finally wrapped up in early 2025 before the 12 day war, and still Israel struck the Iranian side. So just because there are negotiations, that does not mean that Washington is not going to proceed with the military action against the Islamic Republic.

REICHARD: President Trump has threatened Iran with military action over killing the protesters. So what do you see as the correct way forward for the US? And I worry that this plays into the US as foreign interferer narrative. What do you think?

SAYEH: No matter what America does, these labels are going to exist. Even when there were no foreign interference in the past, Islamic Republic officials still blame and put these false labels on their own citizens, accusing them of being foreign agents or espionage operatives. So given that Islamic Republic has already pushed us down that road, it is really meaningful now for America to back these threats with real actions, given that Iranians on the ground are effectively begging for help, given that they're unarmed and they're getting massacred, and the numbers are increasingly looking to be in the thousands. So really the cat's out of the bag, it's now or never, and these remarks coming from Tehran don't carry any weight anymore.

REICHARD: All right, so, concrete steps, what's the correct way forward for the U.S.?

SAYEH: It is not about waging another war against another country. It's about enabling a democratic and secular movement to thrive in a very turbulent region. So it ultimately comes down to targeting the repression apparatus, enabling Iranian protesters through cyber support and through strike funds to maintain this battle against the regime. So that would ensure that, in the long run, once we do arrive at the point of regime change, it would look more like a democratic transition with a movement that is aligned with American values.

REICHARD: And who would that be if the regime falls?

SAYEH: Protesters inside are increasingly calling for the return of the Pahlavis, the monarchy that has been really the symbol of this latest protest movement. Young Iranians only have a positive view of the past. Almost all Iranians at this point, majority of them, have been born after the ‘79 revolution, so they've only lived under the misery of the Islamic Republic and have only heard about how amazing the economy was under the Shah, or how great the passport was and how easily Iranians could travel abroad. It was really about that glory and about reclaiming it. But the opposition has been very clear that this would be about enabling a transition movement that would later facilitate the way for elections for Iranians to really define their form of governance, but it's a matter of getting there, and the Crown Prince is the only person that could lead that.

REICHARD: Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Janatan, thank you so much.

SAYEH: Thank you for having me.

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