Don't Look Now, but Iran's Islamist Theocrats Are in Deep Doo-Doo

Iran, the ninth-largest oil producer in the world, doesn't have enough energy to keep the lights on or the factories humming — and that's just one element of the country's growing polycrisis. 

"The country was virtually shut down to save energy" for most of last week, according to a weekend report in the New York Times. Even President Masoud Pezeshkian can't hide the scope of the country's energy troubles. "We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money, and environment," he admitted in a live TV address this month. "All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis."

"Businesses, schools, universities, police stations, supermarkets and government offices are all shut. 17 electricity plants have been shut down," Ashley Rindsberg posted to X on Saturday. "A citizen who lived through both the 1979 revolution and the Iraq-Iran War says he's never experienced this level of chaos."

After decades of neglect and mismanagement, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken increasing control of the country's energy production and exports in recent years. Letting the military run things has worked out about as well as you'd expect. "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert," Milton Friedman quipped, "in 5 years, there'd be a shortage of sand."

Sometimes, it takes a bit longer than five years, but in the end, government meddling ends with either shortages of necessary goods or surpluses of unwanted goods — or both.

President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly restore his "Maximum Pressure" sanctions on Iran, dealing yet more blows to the country's shaky economy. 

In foreign affairs, Tehran has suffered one humiliation after another.

"Before October 2023, the Islamic Republic had become the unavoidable power that the Americans and Israelis seemed unable to check," Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote for The Dispatch on Monday. But the Hamas terror invasion of southern Israel changed the rules. Jerusalem no longer felt any need for restraint. — not even by Washington. Granted, that was with feckless Joe Biden nominally in charge, but still. 

Since then, Israel has all but eliminated Hamas from Gaza and decapitated Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both were Iran's proxies. Bashar al-Assad's Russo-Iranian proxy state in Syria fell earlier this month in a lightning guerilla campaign heavily supported by Turkish President Recep Erdoğan.

"It’s a very good guess that neither the supreme leader nor his senior commanders in the Revolutionary Guards envisaged that a rampant Israel in a de facto alliance with Erdoğan would crash the 'Shiite crescent' throughout the Middle East," Gerecht concluded.

That's the thing about gray swan events — they're impossible to predict.

Except for the Houthis in Yemen — who are anyway more of a strategic irritant than a strategic threat — Iran's neo-Persian Empire is no more. 

Also, remember that the Israeli Air Force all but eliminated Iran's air defenses in a massive airstrike last October. Tehran could well be next on Israeli's list as Bibi Netanyahu continues to "settle all family business" in Oct. 7's wake. 

Then there's this item, courtesy of Sohrab Ahmari, that came at me from so far out of left field that I've barely started to process it. 

If you speak Persian, this is even more remarkable than the summary below suggests.

An arch-insider says, based on his travels around Iran, that up to 70% of the population backs a monarchic restoration.

Because they associate the Pahlavi era with development. 1/2 https://t.co/bZCznjSbYZ

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) December 23, 2024

"[The insider] adds that the people who’ve reached this assessment are well aware of the shortcomings of the Pahlavis. What they appreciate is that Reza Pahlavi [son and heir to the deposed Shah] has acknowledged these shortcomings and vowed to address them."

None of this means that regime change is imminent or even likely. Recurring island-wide blackouts hit Cuba this year, along with the usual food and fuel shortages. The country relies on tourism for much of its hard currency needs, but — surprise! — tourists don't much enjoy sitting in the dark. Tourism Minister Juan Carlos Garcia said earlier this month that the island nation got just 2.2 million international tourists this year, a million under expectations and less than half of pre-pandemic levels.

Yet the Communist regime that's been in place since 1959 shows no sign of going away.

"The Iranian regime is resourceful," Rindsberg reminds us. "But this feels different."