- 2 days ago
Why_America_Can_NEVER_Win_in_Iran.........
Category
đ
LearningTranscript
00:00What happens after a regime changes?
00:02You've probably seen the playbook, and on paper it sounds simple.
00:06Take a country with an unstable and oppressive leader,
00:09remove them, and replace them with one who aligns with your, usually American, interests.
00:14Then, all is well.
00:15The only real issue, it never works.
00:18In 2001 it was Afghanistan, 2003 Iraq, Libya 2011, and now it seems Iran.
00:25But this time, it's different.
00:27Because Iran isn't like any of the other countries on the list before.
00:30It has the world's third largest oil reserves,
00:33and the centerpiece to a network of alliances across the region.
00:37Top all this, and what follows isn't just another failed state.
00:40You pull the thread that holds together an entire region,
00:43creating a power vacuum that stretches from Lebanon to Yemen,
00:47the Strait of Hormuz, and possibly every gas station on the planet.
00:50Here is the pattern of regime change,
00:52and why toppling Iran's leadership may just be the start of America's problems.
00:57In the 80 years since the Second World War,
01:00the United States has spent 60 years,
01:02nearly three quarters of that time,
01:04involved in some kind of war.
01:06These conflicts have spanned every corner of the globe,
01:09and cost trillions of dollars.
01:11In the 1960s, the war in Vietnam was a way to stop communism.
01:15In the early 2000s,
01:16Iraq was invaded to stop the creation of weapons of mass destruction.
01:20And in 2011, the same was done to Libya and Colonel Gaddafi.
01:23The logic behind all of them was the same.
01:26If you spread democracy,
01:27the world gets more stable.
01:29And a more stable world means a safer and richer America.
01:32Now, America is hardly the first country to run this playbook.
01:35The British Empire redrew maps across the Middle East.
01:38The Soviet Union installed puppet states across Eastern Europe.
01:41And even Napoleon tried to set up governments in Europe.
01:44It's arguably the oldest move in the Great Power playbook.
01:47But given how common these interventions have been throughout history,
01:50you might expect that they, well, actually work.
01:53In reality, the opposite is true.
01:55Of the 28 times that the US has tried regime change,
01:58only three have been successful.
02:00Japan, Germany, and Panama.
02:03So, the obvious question is, why?
02:05Why does this keep failing?
02:07And why would it just fail again in Iran?
02:09The answer isn't really about military strategy or political will.
02:13It's about something much more fundamental.
02:15How money flows through a country.
02:17In most of the Western world, economic power is highly decentralized.
02:21In a country like the UK or the US, the economy works from the bottom up.
02:26Millions of people and businesses produce things, earn money, and get taxed on it.
02:30And that tax is what funds everything.
02:32Roads, hospitals, the military, all of it.
02:36Which means the government is effectively dependent on its people.
02:39If the people stop producing, the state has no money.
02:42And that dependency is what keeps the whole thing in check.
02:45Now, flip everything I just said on its head.
02:48In a country like Iraq, the government doesn't need its people to generate wealth.
02:53Instead, it's sitting on a valuable resource.
02:55Oil.
02:56It can pull money straight up out of the ground and into government accounts.
02:59Which means this whole power dynamic reverses.
03:02The people don't fund the state.
03:04The state funds the people.
03:05This may seem like quite a small distinction, but it literally changes everything.
03:10And this really becomes an issue as you tend to skip a few steps on the development chain.
03:13Just take a look at what happened in Iraq.
03:16Before the 2003 invasion, oil accounted for roughly 95% of Iraq's export revenue, and
03:22around 60-70% of GDP.
03:24This oil sector was entirely state-controlled, meaning that literally everything in the country,
03:29public sector wages, food rations, fuel subsidies, and infrastructure spending, all flowed outward
03:35from a centralized system financed by oil.
03:38Even in the private sector, which didn't seem linked to oil, all relied upon it.
03:42Funnily enough, this term was a phenomenon coined in the 1970s by an Iranian economist,
03:47Hossein Madhavi, something which he called a rentier state.
03:50In a rentier state, the deal is that the government controls the wealth, and in exchange for political
03:55obedience, it distributes enough of that wealth to keep people compliant.
03:59It's a social contract, just not a very democratic one.
04:02And as long as that deal holds, it can work.
04:04For example, Saudi Arabia has run on this exact model for decades, and remained remarkably stable.
04:10The problem only really starts when that deal begins to break.
04:14When someone, whether it's an invading army or an internal collapse, removes the distributor.
04:19That's when everything unravels.
04:21So when the United States removed Saddam Hussein in 2003, they didn't just need to replace
04:26the leader, but the entire way the economy functioned.
04:29Okay, this sent things up the wall for really three main reasons.
04:33In Western democracies, people tend to make a lot of fuss when the government changes.
04:37But in the grand scheme of things, day-to-day life for most people tends to look the same,
04:42whether it's under a Labour government or a Conservative one.
04:45Now, part of that is cultural.
04:47Western people are just much more used to political power moving from leader to leader.
04:52But much more importantly, in developed economies, the government isn't the only thing that keeps
04:56an economy running.
04:57However, in a rentier state, removing the government is like pulling the final piece of the Jenga
05:02Tower.
05:03Everything above it simply collapses with it.
05:05The playbook for regime change was designed with Western-style economies in mind.
05:10Swap the leader, keep the institutions, and let the system carry on.
05:14But in a rentier state, the leader is the system.
05:17In 2003, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, looked at a fallen Iraq
05:23and saw a problem.
05:24Hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men who had served under Saddam, and who could
05:29at any moment rise up and challenge the new order.
05:32So he did at the time what seemed like the logical thing to do.
05:36He dissolved the Iraqi military entirely, and banned senior members of Saddam's Ba'ath
05:41party from holding public office.
05:43What followed next, however, was a catastrophe.
05:46Overnight, around 300,000 soldiers were put out of work.
05:49Men with military training, access to weapons, and now absolutely no income, no pension,
05:55and no stake in whatever came next.
05:57The one institution that could have provided some continuity was deliberately dismantled.
06:02And those men didn't just disappear.
06:04They went looking for whoever would pay them.
06:06Many of them ended up forming the backbone of the very insurgencies the US would spend
06:11the next decade trying to fight.
06:13And this leads us to the second reason as to why regime change usually fails.
06:17When the distribution mechanism breaks, it doesn't just leave a vacuum.
06:21It leads the greatest prize of all, for those willing to steal it.
06:24Keys to the state, and by definition, everything that runs the country.
06:29While many of these countries, Libya, Iran, Iraq, may be, on paper, rich, the vast majority
06:34of the population are not.
06:36At the time of the invasion, average incomes in Iraq were around $12,000 a year.
06:41But in reality, around 40% of the country were living in extreme poverty.
06:46Earning less than $2.15 a day.
06:49So, when a foreign country comes along and kicks out the regime, it presents a once-in-a-lifetime
06:54opportunity for different political factions to seize power, and more importantly, money.
06:59The critical resources, oil facilities, military stockpiles, and government mineral reserves
07:05are all finite.
07:05So different factions end up using ever-increasingly brutal methods to try and secure them.
07:11It's a dynamic we've seen play out time and time again.
07:13For example, countries most dependent on Moscow's centralised distribution, the Central Asian
07:18Republics, and parts of the Caucasus, saw exactly this.
07:22When the Soviet Union collapsed, former party officials and criminal networks carved up state
07:27assets almost overnight, and in Tajikistan, it spiralled into outright civil war.
07:32And within months of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the group which would become Al-Qaeda began
07:37coordinating bombings and assassinations across the country.
07:41All sorts of groups began cropping up, attempting to do the same thing.
07:45Fill the power vacuum left by the old regime, and secure the wealth and influence that would
07:50come with it.
07:51But here's the really crucial part.
07:52Imagine a bar fight.
07:54The person left standing at the end isn't the one trying to keep things civil.
07:58It's the one willing to do whatever it takes.
08:00And we see this pattern play out in countries too.
08:03When these resource-dependent nations begin to collapse, it brings everything down with it.
08:08Even the most basic legal protections.
08:11And that creates a world where the most violent and extreme groups, historically suppressed by
08:16the regime, are free to operate without constraints.
08:19If you're an ordinary person living through that, it doesn't really matter whether you
08:22agree with them or not.
08:24They control your neighbourhood.
08:25They have the guns.
08:26And they're the ones keeping the lights on.
08:28So you go along with whoever can protect you.
08:31And that's really the trap.
08:32Removing a dictator sounds like it should make things better.
08:35But when the entire economy runs through that regime, taking it out just leaves people at
08:40the mercy of whoever fills the gap.
08:42And those people tend to be a lot worse.
08:45So, if this is a structural problem, the obvious next question is, can't you just power through
08:50it with enough time and money?
08:52The claim goes something like this.
08:54If the US had just stayed in Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam for a couple decades longer, regime
09:00change might have just worked.
09:01Then, given time, democratic institutions would be able to take root, putting the country on
09:07the path towards development.
09:09There is some logic to that view.
09:11In the two most obvious success stories, Germany and Japan, the United States not only provided
09:16them with unprecedented amounts of aid funding, but also maintained a large military presence
09:21for decades.
09:22But while that undoubtedly played a role in transforming the countries into where they are today, it
09:27misdiagnoses why Germany and Japan actually worked, for two simple reasons.
09:32Firstly, before destruction, both countries had deep institutional foundations.
09:37Functioning bureaucracies, legal traditions, educated workforces, and industrial capacity
09:42going back generations.
09:44America wasn't simply constructing a state from scratch.
09:48It was helping reconstruct one that already had the underlying architecture.
09:52Compare that to Iraq or Afghanistan, where those foundations either didn't exist, or were
09:57completely entangled with the regime.
10:00And secondly, but maybe more importantly, Germany sat on the doorstep of the USSR, and Japan
10:05bordered China and the Soviet Far East.
10:08American presence, even if not warmly welcomed, was broadly accepted as a guarantee against invasion.
10:14That gave the population a reason to tolerate occupation, and cooperate with the new order.
10:19However, in most modern cases we see, that external threat simply doesn't exist.
10:24And without a common enemy for the population to unite against, the foreign power becomes
10:29the enemy.
10:30Afghanistan is the perfect example.
10:32The United States stayed for nearly 20 years, and at its peak, more than 100,000 American troops
10:38were deployed.
10:39And trillions of dollars were spent in an attempt to build up the country.
10:42But it literally took days after they left for the Taliban to regain control.
10:47Why?
10:47In place of no shared enemy to unite against, the US became the enemy.
10:53Over the years, countless civilians were killed.
10:55And over time, even Afghans who opposed the Taliban grew enormously resentful of the United
11:01States.
11:01Incidentally, this quickly became one of the Taliban's strongest recruiting tools.
11:06They didn't need to be widely loved.
11:07They only needed to present themselves as the force willing to end foreign military presence.
11:12So, in a cruel twist of fate, the presence of America ended up strengthening the very forces
11:17it was trying to break.
11:19So, by now, the pattern should be pretty clear.
11:22A resource-rich state gets toppled.
11:24The economy collapses overnight.
11:26Armed factions fight over what's left.
11:29And the most extreme group tends to win.
11:31And the longer a foreign military stays, the more it becomes the enemy.
11:35Every country on that list, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, all followed some version of this script.
11:41But here's what makes the current moment so different.
11:44Because now the country at the center of this conversation isn't some small isolated state.
11:50It's Iran.
11:51This is a country of 90 million people, sitting on the world's third largest oil reserves.
11:57And it's already been through some version of this regime change.
12:00In 1953, Iran had a somewhat dubiously democratically elected prime minister.
12:06He had just nationalized Iran's oil and taken it back from the British.
12:10So, naturally, the CIA and MI6 organized a coup and removed him.
12:15And instead installed the Shah.
12:17For 25 years, it looked like it worked.
12:20But in 1979, that resentment exploded.
12:23The Islamic revolution swept the Shah from power.
12:26And the new regime was designed from the ground up.
12:29To never be toppled by the West again.
12:31And this is the real key difference.
12:33Because unlike Saddam's Iraq or Gaddafi's Libya,
12:36this isn't a regime built around one man.
12:39It's built around layers.
12:40Military.
12:41Religious.
12:42Economic.
12:43Institutions that have spent over 40 years surviving under pressure.
12:47So there's no single point of failure.
12:49The US and Israel clearly understood this.
12:52Which is why they didn't just target one man.
12:54They hit multiple leadership nodes at once.
12:56But here's why this still doesn't solve the problem.
12:59Iran isn't isolated either.
13:01It sits at the center of a network of proxy forces.
13:04Stretching from Lebanon to Yemen.
13:06So, on paper, the argument for regime change sounds compelling.
13:10Remove a hostile government.
13:12Disrupt the proxy network.
13:14Prevent nuclear breakout.
13:15And replace the whole thing with something more moderate.
13:18But if everything we've just covered tells us anything,
13:21it's what sounds good on paper and what actually happens are two very different things.
13:26Okay, so there are about a million different possibilities of what could happen if the US replaces Iran's leader.
13:32But they roughly fall into four main buckets.
13:35The first, and probably most likely, is the regime gets replaced with some sort of oil oligarchy.
13:41The current regime collapses, either through military defeat or internal fragmentation.
13:46A replacement leadership quickly consolidates power.
13:49Perhaps a restored, pre-1979 constitutional framework.
13:53Or perhaps a genuinely democratic system that emerges from within Iran itself.
13:58On paper, this is the best case scenario.
14:00And it's not entirely implausible.
14:02Surveys suggest that somewhere around 70-80% of Iranians would vote against the Islamic Republic if given the chance.
14:09And after the Women, Life, Freedom protests in 2022, support for outright regime change spiked.
14:16So, the desire for change is clearly there.
14:19But that's where this theory starts to come undone.
14:21To see why, it helps to look at a country that's already been through something similar.
14:25In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
14:28And the ideology that held the system together for decades.
14:32Communism was gone.
14:33What followed next under Yeltsin was exactly the kind of chaos you'd expect.
14:37Economic freefall, oligarchs carving up state assets, and a government that could barely function.
14:43But the old system didn't actually die.
14:46It just changed clothes.
14:47While the vast majority were fighting over ideologies, those who held the real power before,
14:52the security services, the ex-KGB, were all quietly behind the scenes scooping up the real keys to power.
14:59Oil, gas, minerals.
15:01So, by the time Vladimir Putin stepped into selling a vision of order,
15:05the institutions that put him there didn't just disappear after communism fell, but just rebranded.
15:11It's not hard to imagine a similar situation in Iran.
15:14In Iran, the state owns the largest companies across the extraction, manufacturing, and finance.
15:20And that power is split between two pillars.
15:22On the one side, you've got the religious authority.
15:25So, the supreme leader, the clerical establishment, and organizations called bonyads,
15:30which are religious foundations that receive around 30% of central government spending,
15:35operating with almost no public oversight.
15:38On the other side, you've got the security apparatus, the IRGC, known as the Revolutionary Guard,
15:44who, over decades, have quietly built their own economic empire across construction, energy, telecoms, and even smuggling networks.
15:52And all of this is ultimately powered by the same thing, oil and gas, which accounts for the majority of
15:58government income.
15:59So, you can see how the picture starts to shift.
16:02It doesn't matter that millions of people want change, because the people closest to the oil fields,
16:07the export terminals, the banks, the state enterprises, are not protesters,
16:11but instead, the forces behind those two pillars,
16:14and they're not going to hand over that power just because someone held a vote.
16:17Okay, this is still kind of a best-case scenario, which isn't actually that different from what we have now.
16:22But if we've learned anything from history, it's not normally the moderates who take control.
16:27And that leads us to the second, and far more realistic, outcome.
16:31The regime change of Iran doesn't produce a clean transition, but total chaos.
16:36Something the US will be very familiar with.
16:38Right now, Iran is home to a network of radical groups.
16:42Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, to name a few.
16:45But at least for now, they exist within a strict hierarchy, with Tehran sitting at the top.
16:50The Islamic regime has shown plenty of times that it's willing to use the most extreme methods,
16:54but it also has a country to run.
16:56And that simple fact forces a little degree of restraint.
17:00And if nothing else, they can't afford to be completely cut off from the rest of the world.
17:03But if we remove that central state, the force keeping those rebel groups in line disappears with it.
17:09Suddenly, you have thousands of militants, who are highly trained, heavily armed, and battle-hardened.
17:15And they no longer have a political boss telling them when to hold back.
17:18Without that, many of these groups would radicalise even further.
17:21Remember, it was only a matter of years after Al-Qaeda was formed in Iraq,
17:26that it effectively filled the vacuum left after the US invasion.
17:29And the groups we're talking about here, the remnants of Kataib Hezbollah and the Badir organisation,
17:35are in many ways better organised, better armed than anything that had existed in Iraq at that point.
17:41Now, according to the IDF, Hezbollah alone is estimated to have stockpiled over 150,000 rockets and missiles,
17:48more than most standing armies in the region.
17:51What you have to remember is that Al-Qaeda, for all the chaos it caused,
17:55was building pipe bombs in back rooms.
17:56These groups, on the other hand, have been state-sponsored for decades,
18:00and add to all of that the rogue factions that would end up simply selling their services to the highest
18:05bidder.
18:05We've already seen how that works.
18:07Wagner Group veterans flooding into African conflict zones,
18:10former Taliban commanders brokering arms deals across Central Asia.
18:14Iran's fractured militias would be no different.
18:16Whether it's Gulf states buying influence,
18:19international arms traffickers moving hardware across porous borders,
18:22or cartel networks looking for security muscle,
18:25The market for that kind of expertise doesn't just simply disappear when a regime fails.
18:30Of course, all of this internal chaos would spread quickly along two main fault lines.
18:35Firstly, Iran isn't a monolithic Persian state.
18:39Only about half of the population is actually Persian.
18:41The rest, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis,
18:45have all been held together by the central government for decades.
18:48Remove that, and those fault lines crack open fast.
18:51Kurds in the northwest would push for autonomy, dragging Turkey in.
18:56The Azeris in the north might look towards Azerbaijan.
18:58And most critically, Iran's Arab minority in the southwest
19:02sits right on top of the country's most important oil infrastructure.
19:06And if that region gets contested,
19:08it's not just a political crisis anymore,
19:10it's a global energy one.
19:12Iran is immensely important for the global economy,
19:15controlling the Strait of Hormuz,
19:17and holding the third largest oil reserves in the world.
19:20And that gives any country in the region
19:22the excuse or the justification
19:24they've been waiting for to get involved.
19:26And it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch
19:29to imagine Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE,
19:32even Turkey getting involved.
19:34And in the vacuum of a collapsing regime,
19:36such an outcome becomes more and more likely,
19:38particular as rogue factions scramble for control.
19:41Instead of a new Iran,
19:43you'd end up with a proxy war on steroids.
19:45A thousand-mile strip of territory
19:48where nobody is in charge.
19:49What all of this produces, ultimately,
19:51is people trying to leave.
19:53To the west, millions would surge through Turkey
19:55toward the European Union.
19:57And to the east,
19:58pressure would pour into Pakistan and Central Asia,
20:01countries that can barely hold themselves together on a good day.
20:04Of course, the US and the rest of the Western world
20:06will be desperate to avoid this outcome.
20:09The most obvious way to do this
20:10would be to maintain a heavy foreign presence in the region,
20:13an attempt to install, or at least strongly back,
20:16a friendly replacement government in Iran.
20:18A bit like what's going on in Venezuela at the moment.
20:21And it wouldn't be the first time that this has been tried.
20:23In 1953, a CIA and UK-backed operation
20:27undemocratically removed Iran's standing prime minister,
20:30replacing him with a Shah,
20:32effectively chosen by the West to represent their interests.
20:35And for a while, it worked.
20:37But the world in 1953 looked very different.
20:40Back then, the US and the UK were the dominant external players,
20:44and nobody else was actively working against the installation.
20:47Tehran modernized rapidly,
20:48earning the nickname the Paris of the Middle East.
20:51And Iran began to look less like an Islamic state
20:53and more like a genuine Western ally.
20:55But of course, that alignment came at a cost.
20:58Over the years, the Shah became increasingly associated
21:01with foreign interference.
21:02And opposition movements, secular and religious alike,
21:06fused around a single idea,
21:08that Iran's sovereignty had been sold.
21:10By 1979, that resentment turned into a full-blown revolution.
21:15The Shah was gone,
21:16and in his place came something far more extreme
21:18than anything that had existed before.
21:20And there isn't much reason to believe
21:22that an attempt to do the same today would go any different.
21:25Today, Iran is embedded in the strategic interests
21:28of both Russia and China.
21:30Russia has deepened its military ties significantly,
21:33drone transfers, fighter jet deals, intelligence sharing,
21:36and views Iran as a key partner
21:38in its broader confrontation with the West.
21:40China, on the other hand,
21:41imports massive quantities of Iranian oil,
21:44and has its own infrastructure ambitions across the region,
21:47with significant belt-and-road projects in the area.
21:50Neither power would just sit back
21:51and watch a US-aligned government
21:53take control of the world's third-largest oil reserves.
21:56At minimum, you'd see money and weapons
21:58flowing to opposition factions,
22:00and, at maximum, full-proxy operations designed
22:03to make sure any Western-backed government never stabilises.
22:06The reality is that none of the options facing the US
22:09at this point in time are particularly appealing.
22:12The regime was brutal and extremely dangerous,
22:15and the pressure to act was completely understandable.
22:17But if history has taught us anything,
22:20it's that the question was never whether the Islamic Republic is bad,
22:23it's whether whatever comes next would be any better.
22:26And based on every example we have,
22:28the honest answer is probably not.
22:30There's also a deeper problem that rarely gets discussed.
22:33This kind of intervention sends a very clear message
22:36to every other hostile regime watching from the sidelines.
22:39If you don't have nuclear weapons,
22:41you're at risk of getting kicked out.
22:43Gaddafi gave up his and ended up dead.
22:45Saddam had none and was toppled within weeks.
22:48But the regimes that have them,
22:50North Korea being the most obvious example,
22:52have been largely untouchable ever since.
22:55If the US continues intervening in foreign regimes,
22:57it will only encourage other rogue states
22:59to go nuclear as fast as possible,
23:02just to make sure they're never next on the list.
23:04The reality is that the cost of getting this wrong
23:06goes far beyond just another failed state.
23:09It would create a far more dangerous world,
23:12with more nuclear ambitions,
23:13and a region that could take generations to recover.
Comments