A Coup in Iran

The waiting is the hardest part

Former US diplomat and Iranian hostage John Limbert pointed out in his book Negotiation with Iran, “Iran doesn’t give into pressure – only a lot of pressure.” And a lot of pressure is what the regime has got. By the time US and Iranian teams sit down to continue talks on Thursday, the largest US armada – about a third of the available US Naval power – will be in the region. It’s wildly expensive and unsustainable, but President Trump is betting that in ten days he can claim a victory. According to special envoy Steve Witkoff, the president is so confident that he’s “confused” that Iran hasn’t already capitulated.

The President of the United States is an impatient man.Yet, a lot can happen in the 10 days or so before the Great Satan feels compelled to beat the devil out of the Islamic Republic. With a little patience, the sheer gravity of Iran’s internal pressures might compel the country to change its own damned regime. The White House expressed support for the protests in Iran, but banking on it to turn into a popular revolt has a vanishingly low probability without equally low probability of US ground troops in support. Revolutions are messy, they lead to power vacuums and civil wars. They are a tar baby. They are best avoided.

This matters because what Iran looks like by the end of the year going forward, depends largely on what happens in the next ten days. There are signs that Iran is doubling down on it’s terrible position: It recently purchased some $590mm in shoulder fired rocket launchers from Russia to bolster its air defenses. This is not a good sign. When I was in Benghazi in 2012, the place was awash with shoulder-fired rockets the US military called MANPADS and the rest of the world called “stingers.” If you know how to use them, you can take down a commercial airliner or, like the dusty tribes in Afghanistan, scores of Russian gunships. But they are not, however, the thing for a modern air-defense system.

Last week Iran’s Supreme Leader – Ali Khamenei – that the country was prepared to choke up the Strait of Hormuz. And that is something for which these weapons could be effectively deployed. Granted, Tehran’s been warning about this for years, but it looks like, with its ballistic missile program in tatters, it just may be gearing up to do something about it. In addition, the Islamic Republic Guard Corp (IRGC) has been training to board select tanker traffic in the strait. Given currently global energy market condition, the Hormuz maneuver seems about the only thing likely to drive oil prices up – and with about a fifth of the world’s available crude passing through the strait daily – it will hit prices with a vengeance.

Iran’s IRGC however, is a sprawling institution – imagine if America’s largest construction company was also its largest defense contractor, allowed to field its own army (with a larger budget that the national army) at the pleasure of the President without congressional oversight. Anything that big, wielding that much power will have factions, and the IRGC looks after its own. As the internal pressure of the regime it supports mounts, and the external threat of a war it can’t win counts down, the IRGC may be making calculations for its own survival.

A Blow to the State

Coup d’etat is a French loan expression meaning “blow to the state.” It’s more surgical operation by regime insiders that tend to keep much of the existing power structure recognizably in place. While Iran has been something of an intelligence “black box” since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, we can assume that Ayatollah Khamenei is aware of at least the possibility of plotting within the IRGC, the question is from which faction. Here the divide won’t be hardliners v reformers, but the older cohort of officers v. a younger one. This also matters for both the West as well as the Ayatollah, because we can also assume that he knows his regional history as well. He seems like the sort.

In 1908, reformists calling themselves “Young Turks” sidelined the Ottoman sultan overseeing an empire adorably called “the Sick Man of Europe.” The reformer’s kept the sultan on the throne, but gelded him of power to maintain the façade of imperial legitimacy. The old guard are the true believers in the revolution and the theocracy and have a lot to lose if things go pear shaped. Like the Young Turks, they would probably leave the Supreme Leader in place, announce cosmetic social reforms to take the air out of the protests and address the country’s economic woes with more practical approach to the threat coming from America. The Ayatollah becomes ceremonial and the IRGC maintains its commercial empire.

A coup comes from a younger cohort, on the other hand, will take on the flavor of the Gamal Nasser and all the little “colonels” who cropped up across the region in the 1960 and 70s. These officers would be less informed by the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iran War than by Iran’s rise after 2003 – when the US obligingly removed arch-rival Saddam Hussein from power. These guys would likely pack the Supreme Leader and the old guard off to cushy retirements and promote themselves. They would oversee more rollbacks of the religious and social restrictions, as well as controlled economic liberalization. They might announce a “caretaker government” until some future elections … that don’t quite ever happen. The danger with a younger cohort is that while they may lean away from the current regime’s foreign policy as religious doomsday cult, they are likely to replace religion with nationalism. This means reinvigorating the shattered proxy network in order to pester people across the region and the planet.

So What?

A popular revolution is unlikely without US involvement that, at the moment, isn’t coming. Sadly, a coup d’etat is a better middle term play-out for the West even it doesn’t do the good people of Iran much good. The US hasn’t got the assets to run, or even influence, an internal coup. The black box nature of the regime means that while Washington can exert external pressure on a weakened regime, it can’t say how the events inside Iran unfold and will simply have to be prepared for whatever outcome the mêlée produces. And the smart money is that it won’t be a liberal, Western-leaning democracy.

No, the President of the United States is not a patient man, nor is he given to much introspection. He did recently did draw an interesting comparison to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: that sometimes the chaos after the hit is worse than any problem you though the hit might solve. That’s worth remembering, especially if you are dealing with religious zealots and true believers – because for them the end isn’t really the end.

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Coming soon