Ah, the geopolitical analysts are at it again, treating the collapse of a theocratic surveillance state with the same clinical detachment one might use to describe a malfunctioning toaster. The latest bit of wisdom trickling down from the high priests of the 'think tank' industrial complex tells us that all the conditions for the Iranian regime’s demise are met, save for one tiny, insignificant detail: the people with the guns haven’t decided to stop shooting yet. It’s a remarkable piece of insight, really. It’s like saying a man is perfectly healthy except for the fact that his heart has stopped beating.

The central thesis here—that a revolution requires the upper echelons to defect—is the kind of high-level observation that makes one wonder why we pay these people in anything other than Monopoly money. Of course, the elites need to flip. History isn’t made by the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; it’s made when the guys in the fancy uniforms realize the guy at the top is a liability to their pension plans. But the suggestion that Western countries should play a role in 'helping' this happen is where the satire truly writes itself. We have a track record of 'helping' in the Middle East that is roughly equivalent to a toddler trying to fix a Swiss watch with a ball-peen hammer.

Let’s look at the 'conditions' currently supposedly simmering in Iran. You have an economy that has been strangled into a coma, a youth population that views the morality police with the same affection one might reserve for a recurring skin rash, and a central leadership that is effectively a geriatric ward with better security. On paper, it’s a powder keg. In reality, it’s a stalemate where the regime’s only remaining skill is the industrial-scale application of gravity to protesters. The analysts suggest that if we just offer the 'upper echelons' a golden parachute, they’ll suddenly discover a latent passion for secular democracy. It’s a charmingly naive view of human greed. Why would a general, who currently enjoys the spoils of a sanctioned-yet-lucrative shadow economy, trade his guaranteed fiefdom for a 'maybe' from a Western government that changes its foreign policy every time a new TikTok trend goes viral?

The Left, as usual, watches this with a sort of performative agony, tweeting hashtags and wearing symbolic colors while carefully avoiding any policy that might actually require a sacrifice in their own comfort. They want the 'people' to win, provided the people are a sanitized, Western-approved version of revolutionaries who share their views on carbon offsets. Meanwhile, the Right salivates at the prospect of another 'regime change' opportunity, seemingly having learned absolutely nothing from the trillion-dollar graveyards of the last two decades. They view Iran not as a complex society of eighty million people, but as a strategic board game where you just need to flip the right tile to win. Both sides are unified by a singular, staggering ignorance of how power actually functions when it’s backed by a sincere belief that God wants you to keep your job.

The idea that the West can 'play a role' in facilitating defections is the ultimate hubris. What is the pitch? 'Come to the West, where we will freeze your assets the moment the political winds shift, or stay in Tehran where you can continue to be a wealthy warlord.' It’s not a difficult choice for the cynical. And let’s be clear: the 'upper echelons' are not idiots. They see what happened to the 'defectors' and 'allies' in previous Western-backed adventures. They know that a Western promise is about as durable as a wet paper towel in a hurricane.

So we sit and wait for the 'one missing condition.' We wait for the moment of clarity that supposedly hits a regime when it realizes it is hated. But hatred is a currency the Iranian regime has been trading in for forty years; they are experts in its management. They don't need the love of the people; they just need the fear of the people to be slightly greater than the exhaustion of the riot police. The analysts will continue to write their checklists, ticking off 'economic despair' and 'social unrest' like they’re planning a corporate retreat, while ignoring the grim reality that power, once concentrated in the hands of the fanatical and the corrupt, does not simply dissolve because a columnist in London thinks the time is right.

In the end, this isn't about liberation or democracy or even 'conditions.' It’s about the endless cycle of the 'expert' class trying to project order onto a world that is fundamentally chaotic and cruel. Whether the regime falls tomorrow or lasts another century, the result will be the same: the people on the ground will continue to be pawns in a game played by elites who wouldn't know a revolutionary if one hit them with a Molotov cocktail. We are watching a tragedy being reviewed as if it were a mid-tier Netflix drama, and the critics are more interested in the plot points than the body count.