European-Iranian. Agnostic, Academic & Aspergers. PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography. Opinionated without arrogance. RTs not necessarily an endorsement.
I am NOT a monarchist, but I support #KingRezaPahlavi as Iran's interim leader. As it stands, I would even support him as a presidential candidate of a Democratic Republic should this (...my preferred...) form of government be chosen by the Iranian people. However, in the more likely scenario that a national referendum decide in favour of a re-establishment of the monarchy, I will indeed support him as our future King!
Trump on Iran deal:
"No it's not final, it's a memorandum of understanding and If I don't like it, we will go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head. If I don't like it, If they don't behave, we will go right back to dropping bombs right smacking in the middle of their head, cause they misbehaved for 47 years."
WOW🤯!!
Once again @FIFAcom shows the world exactly why its reputation is stained by corruption. Instead of standing on the side of humanity, it runs errands for the murderous mullahs responsible for r*ping, torturing, and killing innocent people.
FIFA went to great length to censor the Iranian identity and the real Iranian flag 🇮🇷 at the @FIFAWorldCup 2026. So much so that they panned away with their cameras during the game.
But the truth cannot remain hidden. Shame on FIFA and that bald Dr. Evil president of theirs who are crawling on all four for the mullahs.
This is what they wanted to hide from you:
WTF! This is absolutely crazy!
@FIFAWorldCup removed a man’s🇮🇱 Israeli flag but allowed the Palestinian terrorist flag, and the Islamic Republic flag!
At this point, FIFA has become a political tool influenced by Islamists.
This is discrimination and racist. Share this!
Europeans and American patriots!
Tomorrow, the courts of my country, France, may decide to send me to prison for daring to say on television that “the main danger to women in France is Black African and Arab immigrant men.”
Meanwhile, my own attacker, a Tunisian migrant, is still at large.
I need your help to generate media pressure and hope to be acquitted.
They cannot silence the truth!
Thank you for your support 💪🏻🇫🇷
Marco Rubio is more of a man than Trump or Vance will ever be.
He is the most sensible and honourable leader in this administration and in Washington, and he will never let down Americans, Israelis, or Iranians.
We love you, Marco. You should be President. Rubio 2028!
@aziz0nomics John, thank you so much for being your amazing logical self. We Iranians will never forget the unwavering support you have shown us over the past several months.
In these situations, it’s a choice between reacting emotionally or reacting logically. Being emotional is the easier option.
The problem is that when you’re emotional, propaganda and fear-based scenarios hit you fast and hard, especially the kind that’s deliberately designed to break you early with despair.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. Nothing is over yet. Save your energy and don’t let yourself give up to propaganda.
I acquired a copy of the White House talking points on the Iran MoU and it reads like an accidental confession memo written by a fifth grader.
It took the White House four or five days to produce this — and they still have not released the actual MoU.
They are trying to claim total victory while admitting there is no final deal.
Now look at their top five points.
1) “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
That is not a term. That is an aspiration.
It is also only one of the objectives the administration laid out at the start. The stated goal was not merely “no nuclear weapon.” It was to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity, ballistic missile production, and terror proxy network.
So where are the missile provisions?
Where are the proxy provisions?
Where is the enforcement mechanism?
2) “President Trump ended the fighting on every front, including Lebanon.”
Are we supposed to be this dumb?
If Hezbollah is still attacking Israel as they are tonight, the fighting is not “over.”
What this really means is that the White House is tying Israel’s freedom of action against Hezbollah to Trump’s Iran deal.
That puts the U.S. right back in the Obama role: restraining our ally to preserve a deal with our enemy.
It also throws Lebanon under the bus — at least the part of Lebanon not controlled by Hezbollah.
3) “The Strait of Hormuz is open again, free of charge.”
This could be the most absurd talking point in the whole memo but there are just so many contenders.
Iran threatened the world’s oil artery, then gets relief for reopening what it had no right to close.
That is not “performance.”
That is hostage-taking with a tariff schedule.
And if the Strait needed to be opened, the United States had the military power to open it. Instead, Trump is treating Iranian blackmail as a deliverable.
4) “Iran’s rewards come from its own unfrozen money, not American taxpayers.”
Spare us.
Sanctions are leverage.
Unfreezing Iranian funds gives the regime resources it otherwise would not have. Money is fungible. Whether it comes from U.S. taxpayers or frozen accounts, the strategic effect is the same: Iran gets cash and we know how they'll use it. I'm just waiting for Vance to literally repeat John Kerry verbatim.
If Iran’s nuclear program is “in ruins,” its military is “gutted,” its economy is “collapsing,” and the regime had “no other choice left,” why are we rewarding it, rebuilding it, and negotiating with it at all?
5) “Obama never even got a signed document. President Trump did.”
Really? That is point five? I had to re-read that several times.
Who cares if the document is signed? Is Trump planning to sue them in court? Is that a deliverable?
Obama at least released the awful JCPOA text in 2015, while hiding several annexes. Trump’s team is bragging about signing an MoU they will not show us yet, for a deal they haven't delivered.
On Hannity, JD Vance was asked why they will not release it. His answer was that it would come Friday because of protocol nonsense reasons reasons reasons.
Seriously?
We have a president who claims he can declassify anything, anytime he wants — but somehow the Iran MoU is trapped in paperwork?
The reality is that the administration’s own talking points give away the game.
They are asking us to trust slogans because they do not want us reading terms. The terms that Vance and Trump discuss publicly should be unacceptable to anyone who cares about national security.
Right now, what we have is a hidden MoU, a bunch of chest-thumping, and the JCPOA playbook with less transparency.
The White House says Trump negotiated from strength <-- they keep repeating that word like we're imbeciles.
Fine.
Then show us why he squandered it.
To Clarify: Those from the "Woke Right" who claim that personalities like @marklevinshow are war mongers and "Anti-Trump", the CIA, Rubio and Hegseth are all on the same page. The levels of dishonesty...
I'm still chewing on this "deal" and trying to figure out what the strategy is supposed to be, obviously given a shortage of information. I'm starting to think it's similar to Reagan's strategy that choked the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Dugin describes as an Atlanticist "anaconda."
The rough idea of the "anaconda" strategy is that of a constrictor snake. It doesn't bite except to control small parts at necessity. It squeezes. And it doesn't just crush. It tightens, puts pressure, and when the target squirms, it tightens again. This continues until the target is suffocated.
Dugin accuses the Atlanticist West (first Britain, then the US/NATO) of having done this not only to the USSR but to Russia and continuing it. That's worth discussing at another time. The way he says it happened is by controlling all the regions around the target (then: USSR) and by increasing various demands and sanctions to crush the target. There's no striking (like biting) except in the narrow sense to punish specific transgression. It's just fatally expensive for the target to move.
So this plan might actually be meant to work this way against the Iranian Regime, with a few updated caveats because Trump's geopolitical strategy and Reagan's aren't the same, for good reasons. Trump's is not only likely better overall but learned from the mistakes and shortcomings of Reagan's.
The idea is that by having hit them militarily 13,000+ times and degraded their capabilities, military, and infrastructure to a very bad level, while apparently offering them a "golden bridge" out (Sun Tzu), including some rocketry capabilities, Iran's Regime is desperate, particularly economically.
The "deal" with the economic carrot ($300B in Gulf Coast state investment possibilities, totally contingent on good behavior, plus loosened sanctions and unfrozen assets, all contingent) is meant to get Iran to squirm while releasing the global pressure caused by Hormuz. Iran can't afford not to take it and likely thinks it can outfox the West by taking the money in bad faith. That's "squirming," at which point the snake will either tighten or strike (in narrow fashion) or both.
The IRGC is white-knuckling power, hanging on for dear life in a shattered system that needs relief. The relief is coming from a place that can put massive contingencies on access to the relief, at least in theory. That's like being wrapped in the snake's coils.
Iran's Regime is boxed into needing the relief, but the relief comes at the cost of becoming controlled not just by the U.S. and Israel but by the GCC coalition from which the money is supposed to come. Every time they betray the deal, which is apparently all based on investment money, not state transfers, the U.S. and/or Israel might hit them again to get them back in line while the GCC tightens the financial noose (with U.S. urging).
The "anaconda" holds them tightly, and if they wiggle to breathe (by violating terms), it tightens. If they get too rough, they get bit (another good, hard military strike or ten). They're stuck, slowly suffocating.
The Regime, over time, cannot sustain this pressure and should crack eventually if this is the strategy and it works. It might not even take long because of how shattered they are now. Eventually, a coup from inside can displace the faltering regime, and that's likely the ambition. The question is who it will be, of course. Pahlavi's people should be preparing because other factions, most likely most notably the Leftist MEK, will be positioned to seize the moment if better people aren't.
The update from Reagan's strategy is that Reagan was fighting the USSR in a bipolar world: US and USSR were the two superpowers. Thus, Reagan was a unipolarist. He wanted one pole of power in the world: the United States of America.
(Dugin sees this as a "neo-mondialist" or "neo-Atlanticist" strategy we would call "globalism" today in the common parlance, and he's firmly opposed to it but not in the same way or for the same ends as Trump, MAGA, and real America First.)
What we've learned since then is that a unipolar superpower is not geared correctly to handle a regionalist disruptor like Iran (or Russia, frankly). Its military capabilities are geared otherwise, for one thing, and it can stretch the superpower too thin, for another. That's how you end up with "neo-mondialist" failures in Iraq, which Trump isn't eager to repeat.
Instead, what you need are regional consortiums that act as decentralized regional powers that are broadly in alignment with a U.S.-led world order (thus rejecting Dugin's wretched multipolarism and Russian/Eurasian neo-imperialism). The GCC plus Israel are meant to accomplish this in the Middle Eastern "Great Space" (Grossraum). It may be that this "deal" is geared toward attempting to build such a thing to constrain and eventually choke out Iran regionally, backed by U.S. (and Israeli) might, if needed.
Meanwhile, there's a special situation going on in this case, which is that the Iranian Regime is full of proper lunatic factions. It's literally kufr (apostasy) in the lunatic Islamist view to make a deal with a jahili (Ignorant) society like the "Great Satan" of the United States, which can carry a death sentence. Thus, the internal fragmentation and fighting inside the Regime will be intense, and we allegedly already see this happening.
Parts of the Regime, hoping to white-knuckle power (in the anaconda's coils), has to make the deal. Other more lunatic parts refuse it as rank treason and want to kill the people who make the deals or agree to them. This is not a stable situation for someone trapped in the coils of a snake that's slowly choking them out.
So, maybe this is the real deep purpose of the plan. I don't know for sure. That plus possibly getting Americans inside in order to do nuclear inspections and such (very tight coiling of snake plus potential for agitation on a whole different level), clearing the nuclear material, keeping the passage of Hormuz open for all the reasons (until workarounds are made), etc.
I cannot imagine, actually, that anyone serious really believes that this "deal" will hold, though. Of course, when it doesn't, the "anaconda" gets to bite (military strikes, heavy sanctions, etc.) to weaken them further and enable tighter coiling in the next round.
In the meantime, perhaps we watch the Regime suffocate. It would be smart to get the right people geared up and positioned to fill the vacuum, if that's right.
That is an excellent and fair point. I do wonder, if such a template could be transposed to Iran, would a "transitional government" initially led or ushered in by former regime officials enable for a full democratic transition, and as a show of unity, would they be willing to work with other oppositional leaders (such as the Crown Prince) to usher in a referendum for future governance? You have certainly got me thinking, but I also wonder how many Iranians can put their political allegiances aside and work together (even with former officials) towards creating a better non-theocratic and democratic Iran.
Trump’s got his finger on the trigger. The U.S. military hasn’t left the region. The blockade, just like the sanctions, is now fully structured and can be ramped back up in no time. Israel’s target bank is packed too.
Trust me, they aren’t about to mess with Trump. He is no Obama. You may not know it, but they know.
I do agree that less harm would come to the Iranian people under such circumstances, but that's also assuming that all elements of Sepah would be neutered alongside the ascendancy of a said "Venezuela'd administration".
There is however a major difference between Iran and Venezuela, and that pertains to the whole system of governance and not just the leader. Some people might be willing to accept the Venezuela model as the transitional government, but the public would need to be convinced that the end result is complete dissolution of the Islamic Republic regime. Honestly, unless this objective clearly exists, simply guaranteeing our safety isn't enough, it's a matter of symbolic and national pride too, for which this essence is often overlooked and misunderstood by many non-Iranians.
I would imagine that many more monarchists would outright reject this idea, because as well as the aforementioned problems, it adds an additional layer of complexity and difficulty in bringing about their preferred style of government. Not least because they don't want to lose the momentum and unity that they currently have among both the diaspora and Iranians in Iran towards Reza Pahlavi.
I can understand their view in many ways; I'm not a monarchist, but I do rally behind Reza Pahlavi as the solidarity leader; who would we have if he wasn't there? Hell, would we even be this far in had Iranians not looked up to him as a reason to mobilise? Probably not. I cannot imagine too many people being excited to rally behind Aragchi and Ghalibaf to bring about meaningful change in Iran. People could point to the 2009 Green Revolution as a marker of evidence that it is possible, but that would also ignore far too many contextual factors that distinguishes that era apart from ours.
This is one of the most interesting that I have read in a while, and one that I haven't really thought a great deal about. As undesirable as it is for us Iranians, it could potentially be a less "messy" way towards regime change (though very gradual and not necessarily a guarantee), you'd also be hard pressed to convince Iranians to swallow such a bitter pill and remain quiet, but with that said, what you're saying is relatively plausible. As for finding someone who would play America's bitch from within the IRGC, I would say yes, they're not all self-sacrificing loyalists. Many would prefer to preserve their lives and bend the knee to the new overlords if the choice was between life and death...or who knows, for a better livelihood? I would even argue that it wouldn't be hard to find enough IRGC members to play ball, but identifying them and then safely mobilising them to bring about change would be a huge task.