Gordon Carrera

And I think it's interesting, actually, Russia has particularly given it some support on how to crack down on protesters and how to do surveillance and things like that.

And some of the technologies of that, which is very interesting.

But still, fundamentally, particularly after you look at Venezuela, I think if you were Iranian, you're going to be going, they're not going to come and bail us out.

That there are allies that will help us to a point, but we're kind of on our own.

And I think that is the reality for it.

So if you're looking at the foreign environment, that last pillar, you've got less of a network of deterrents around you with the kind of Hezbollahs and Assad's and the like.

Your allies are a bit shaky.

And then, as we said right at the start, you've got the wild card, and it is a wild card of the US.

Does Donald Trump want to do a deal with the Iranian regime about opening it up somehow, or does he want regime change?

I think that's the kind of wild card and the question marks.

So that's the pillars, I guess, just as we come to an end of this first episode.

How challenging is it to actually take those six pillars and then just say, well, the answer is yes or no, it's stable or unstable.

It's not as simple as that, is it?

Partly because it's quite hard to get accurate.

Here, anecdotally, it's a lot of people in Iran going, why did we spend so much money on a nuclear program which get destroyed?

Why did we spend so much money backing Hezbollah and some of these other causes when we can't feed ourselves at home?

And those things didn't protect us and were wiped out pretty quickly.

So you can see why actually those things are actually kind of feeding into this delegitimization.

of the Iranian regime at the moment.

Where does that leave us in terms of predicting what will come next?