Bombs won't break Iran's regime, but money might | Eye for Iran | EP 115 |

I wanted to discuss Iran's potential Achilles heel.

Uh, Roger, you wrote a recent substack that, I mean, it really [chuckles] got me thinking after reading it.

You argue that while the Islamic Republic has proven, at least for now, that it can absorb military strikes and infrastructure damage, it can still hold the streets so long as the men holding those streets are paid.

So the real question isn't how much damage can a bomb actually do, it's what happens when the money stops coming in.

So Roger, make that case for us.

Why do you believe the regime's greatest vulnerability isn't military, but financial? And could we say that the real center of gravity is the IRGC's payroll and not necessarily the missiles?

So Negar, thank you very much indeed for having me on.

It's a, it's a real privilege and a pleasure to be on, uh, with you tonight.

Um, everything stems around money.

The regime has been built for forty-seven years to withstand conventional military pressure, tenderizing, as it were, and the US, uh, has done that very successfully over the past five months.

We've seen continued pressure, we've seen continued attacks on infrastructure, we've seen continued attacks on the IRGC, uh, the Navy, uh, so on and so forth, but yet they still exist, and why? It's because they still dominate in the financial space.

Um, we know that to begin with, they, they had d-d, uh, destroyed, you know, they killed Ali Shamkhani, who controlled a lot of the Ghost Fleet, for example, uh, but they still exist.

And this is down to the economic strength that they still have, but also the ability to pay through whatever means, because they have not just the banking means, but they have other means to pay.

But they have people paid to keep them going.

So really, you have a financial reason to exist rather than a pure ideological reason to exist, and this is where it gets very difficult.

They are built to absorb military pressure, but are the ability, uh, do they have the ability to absorb the payroll pressure, as it were, um, overall? And perhaps this is something that is their center of gravity.

I know that Donald Trump, over the last five months, has attacked very effectively the, the, the said, the military element of, of the IRGC and, and the Islamic Republic.

Um, we've, uh, seen sanctions, we've seen continued pressure on them, we've seen the ability to, to write them down, but still they exist.

And I think really, we, we need to be looking at the financial center of gravity, which is not just the payroll, but also the military boneyards, Asan Kozrazavi, uh, Khatam Al-Ambiya, all of these organizers which control so much, and not just the oil.

They control so much of the, the underlying, uh, strength of the regime, which is where it has it.

And, you know, while sanctions, and I, I'll, I'll, uh, uh, defer to, to Miad for this, but sanctions impact upon the state, but of course, when they throttle the state, the state throttles the people.

I think we must remember what we need to look at is how we can remove the will, shatter the cohesion and the will of the, so the, the foot soldiers from the Basij and from the IRGC to, and separate them from the state.

What you have, since the death of Khamenei, seen, you have effectively a militia which has a state rather than the other way around.

Mm-hmm.

Everything is now controlled by the IRGC.