David McCloskey

And then the last one is kind of the foreign environment, foreign backers,

How hostile or non-hostile is the environment around you regionally and internationally?

Does it support your state or is it working against it?

And those are the things that the analysts are looking at right now to understand, are these things weakening or are they working for the regime?

Having a mental model for what the Islamic Republic of Iran actually is, I've always found to be a bit challenging because it does have these kind of weirdly pseudo-democratic structures inside the government.

but then it also has this theocratic underpinning or overpinning to it.

And then it also has, I would say, sort of elements of what, it's almost like a military autocracy, right?

In the extent to which some of the coercive institutions, in particular, the IRGC,

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have become, I guess, a power center of the government itself, this sort of enforcer of the supreme leader's autocratic will, and deeply, deeply embedded in the economic structures, both official and unofficial.

inside the Islamic Republic.

So you have these kind of a lot of different layers to this thing.

But what has happened over the past, I don't exactly know where you draw the line, but certainly, you know, over the past 10 or 15 years has been that power is much more tightly concentrated around the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and

The IRGC, the sort of military and security apparatus that keep the regime in power.

So it's become more concentrated elites.

Like, for example, I mean, Kareem Sajjadpour and Jack Goldstone have written a great article, by the way, I would commend to our listeners to read in The Atlantic, looking at sort of the conditions.

for revolution in Iran and each of these tripwires, if they've been tripped or not.

And they make the point that every living former president of Iran has been silenced or sidelined.

That you have these kind of elites that had maybe more of the political types, right, who

have less and less power in the system and in theory could develop connections with an opposition that would undermine some of this pillar.

There does not seem to have been any certainly senior level defections, obviously from the level of violence.