OPINION:
Iran is cornered, increasingly desperate and dangerous.
As it lashes out against the United States and our allies, the regime will rely even more on its proxies and terrorism.
Nearly eight months ago, the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to destroy the regime’s ability to project power. The U.S. and its ally Israel eliminated the upper echelons of Tehran’s military and political leadership and severely degraded Iran’s defense industrial base.
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Iran is not a military powerhouse. Its conventional forces are poorly equipped, poorly trained and poorly led. Tehran relies on asymmetrical warfare. The regime was constructed on the artifice of terror, and it has continued to rely on terror ever since.
Yet Israel has now severely weakened Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s foremost proxies in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, respectively. Both remain dangerous, but they are a far cry from their former selves.
Iran has already played its biggest trump card. The regime’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an important global choke point, sent shock waves through the global economy.
Still, the luster has worn off. Iran’s top proxies are down, if not yet out, and the markets and energy routes are adjusting.
By late September, Middle East crude oil exports had risen above prewar levels. In a four-day peak, exports of crude reached between 19.5 million barrels per day and 22.5 million barrels per day, according to AFP and Reuters. In the war’s opening days, non-Iranian crude dropped by 72%.
Iran is certainly feeling the sting. The country’s economy is in free fall. Its currency, the rial, is at a historic low. The Trump administration has strengthened its hand by launching Operation Economic Outcast to further squeeze the regime’s finances.
Iran is a theocracy run by mad mullahs with a millenarian vision. It is also a kleptocracy with a dysfunctional economy that is completely dependent on black markets, corruption and oil.
Iran, no stranger to riots, may be facing sustained periods of internal upheaval. This time, it might not have the means to pay the jackboots it trusts to ensure order.
As any student of revolutions knows, the moment that palace guards set down their guns is pivotal.
However, this does not necessarily mean that the regime’s collapse is imminent. As under any autocracy, the one with the guns holds the power. For the moment, power remains with Iran’s Islamists, who, after nearly half a century in power, are well entrenched.
Yet it does mean there are encouraging signs of a turning tide, and Iran’s rulers seem to fear as much.
The Iranian regime is a wounded and cornered animal. Though bloodied and severely injured, it will become all the more dangerous in its desperation and rely more heavily on its proxies and sleeper cells.
The world is beginning to wake up to this reality, and it is a rude one.
What appears to be an Iranian-directed cell was uncovered in Britain late last month after several suspicious white vans were spotted near Royal Air Force Fairford, an air base used by U.S. forces. All seven men arrested thus far are British nationals, and one is a dual British-Iranian citizen.
The U.S. has temporarily evacuated its bombers from the base.
In late September, two Iranian men were arrested in Britain after scouting Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester and the nearby Jewish Museum in Cheetham Hill. Prosecutor Mark Luckett accused the men of taking instructions, including on how to construct a chlorine bomb, from a third party inside Iran.
The Sept. 30 incident involving a FlyDubai commercial airliner headed to Tel Aviv — in which the co-pilot attacked the captain midflight — heightened concerns. No links to Iran have yet been established, but it is wholly within the regime’s capabilities to carry out such an attack.
In late March, French authorities suspected Iran was linked to a plot to place a homemade bomb outside a Bank of America branch in Paris.
In recent years, Iranian operatives have been caught operating smuggling rings in North Carolina, casing New York airports for attacks, plotting to murder a Saudi diplomat in a Washington restaurant and perpetrating cyberattacks on U.S. water systems and infrastructure, among other evils.
Tehran has long-standing links to a bevy of transnational criminal organizations, including narcotics cartels, and has both the means and experience to carry out terrorist attacks abroad and on American soil.
An increasingly desperate Iran may do precisely that.
Iran is not yet down for the count, but its calculus is changing. America’s calculus must change with it.
• The writer is the director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at Capital Research Center.
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