Ted Cruz

After 20 years of Bush, Obama, and Biden kid gloves, Tehran was legitimately frightened.

And then, after the Tehran-directed atrocity against Israel in October 2023, Israel killed Yahasinwar, Muhammad Deef, Hasran Nasrallah, Ibrahim Akil, Hashim Safedine, and Ismail Haniya,

at an IRGC safe house in Tehran, and almost 100 more in Lebanon and Gaza.

Deprived of its decapitated Hezbollah Praetorian Guard, the Syrian Ba'ath Party didn't trust its own people any more than the Bolivarian Maduro trusted Venezuelans more than Cubans.

the criminal Assad family fled to Moscow.

Then last summer, the Israeli and U.S.

Air Forces wiped out much of the Iranian military's general staff and key nuclear sites.

The pro-Tehran, Moscow and Beijing dominoes continue to fall with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the massacre of his Cuban protection detail, the seizure of Russian ghost ships, and the spread of Starlink terminals in Iran.

Iranians have seen the regime and its backers exposed and humiliated by an American administration, and they were quick to exploit this roll of the dice.

Unlike pro-Hamas nihilists from Berkeley to Dublin, they have hit their streets in millions without a single keffiyeh or aloha akbar.

motivated by American successes against their regime and its feckless backers.

At the time of writing, the regime has turned off the Internet and all landlines, and Khamenei has emerged from a two-day silence to express defiance.

This is no surprise to anyone who knows that Khamenei's greatest fear is moderation that causes the regime to bend and then break.

As expressed in Alex Votanka's The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran, Khamenei became obsessed with the prospect of an Iranian Gorbachev who would impose reforms and usher in a USSR-style collapse.

the more so because this was addressed by Tom Friedman, a Jewish-American journalist, in a 1996 column titled Waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev after he visited Iran.

That pressed all of the leader's buttons.

Expect his defiance to continue as long as he is alive or in power, which may not be long.

And listen to this, because he faces two threats.

The one in front of him is the unpredictable Donald Trump, who has already shed Iranian blood and has promised to rescue the Iranian people.

The one behind him is the IRGC, which holds all the firepower in Iran and which knows, as Mohammad Ahmadinejad knew, that the mullahs are despised by nearly the entire population.