Ashley Rindsberg
The country of Iran has shut down. @nytimes reporting a gas shortage is so severe that the government had to choose between using its dwindling gas supply to run the country's power plants or heat people's homes. It chose the latter, which means the country is not producing electricity. The presidential compound has no lights. Food and medical production facilities are shut. Factories have ground to a halt. Businesses, schools, universities, police stations, supermarkets and government offices are all shut. 17 electricity plants have been shut down. One official is publicly calling the situation "catastrophic." A citizen who lives through both the 1979 revolution and the Iraq-Iran War says he's never experienced this level of chaos. Given how dire this is, and the cascading nature of events when they get to this point, this is very likely to get much worse. This is happening right at the moment the Islamic Republic underwent the biggest defeat it has suffered since the Islamic Republic was established. Over the past 15 months, Israel not only destroyed its "Axis of Resistance," which saw its last piece crumble with the fall of Assad, but in its October strike on Iran, the IDF completely destroyed Iran's air defense system. As serious as that was – and as much a challenge the incoming Trump administration represents – a domestic energy crisis of this level represents a threat to the regime that's orders of magnitude greater than either of these two external factors. In recent months, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have taken control over much of the gas industry. The crisis unfolding now will be attributed to the IRGC at a time when its legitimacy has already been questioned. What happens next is unknown. But it's unlikely that Iran can easily quell the storm. Biden, who has spent decades attempting to forge, and maintain, a nuclear deal with Iran is out. And coming in is a president who implemented a strategy of severe Iran sanctions called "Maximum Pressure" — and is reportedly now designing Maximum Pressure 2.0. The Iranian regime is resourceful. But this feels different. Watch this space.
Ashley Rindsberg
This is how regimes fall
