POSTED ON AUGUST 19, 2025 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN IRAN, TRUMP FOREIGN POLICY
IRAN’S CRISIS DEEPENS
Iran has been out of the news since a U.S. attack devastated its nuclear program in June. What has been going on, out of the view, as far as I have seen, of the American press?
The London Times headlines: “Reformers urge an end to uranium enrichment as crisis grips Iran.”
If you run out of water and electricity, you are in deep trouble. One should note that if Iran had a civilian nuclear power program–which it doesn’t–electricity wouldn’t be an issue.
Emphasis added. These warnings are especially significant because they come from “an important pillar of support for the relatively moderate president Masoud Pezeshkian.”
Without a normalization of relations with the U.S., conditions in Iran are dire:
The regime’s unpopularity has led to calls for other changes, as well:
The mullahs so far have rejected calls to abandon their nuclear ambitions, but restarting weapons development will take a long time, given that the U.S. bombing “heavily damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities,” while Israel’s targeted strikes eliminated important military leaders and nuclear scientists.
So Iran is in a state of economic collapse, with runaway inflation, increasingly worthless currency, and basic necessities like water and electricity intermittently unavailable. Thus, a large majority of Iran’s people want to get rid of the mullahcracy. But totalitarian regimes can take a long time to die: see Venezuela. We can only encourage the Trump administration to keep up the pressure, in hopes that Iran will, sooner rather than later, rejoin the real world.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/08/irans-crisis-deepens.php