The mullahs’ old trick has finally failed

The Islamic Republic’s latest threats against Israel and the United States are not merely the usual clangour of missiles and metaphysics. They are also, as ever, an act of political ventriloquism: a regime attempting to throw its own voice – its own failures – into the mouth of an external enemy. When Tehran warns of “foreign intervention,” it is not analysing reality; it is trying to abolish it.

This is an old habit. The mullahs have long treated responsibility as a Western import, like jazz or pluralism – something to be denounced, never adopted. For decades, whenever the domestic ledger came due – when inflation spiked, corruption metastasised, the currency slid, or the young stopped pretending – the regime reached for the same narcotic: the “foreign hand.” It is an analgesic administered to a frightened bureaucracy and a sermon delivered to a population that is supposed to accept humiliation as piety.

We are watching that manoeuvre being attempted yet again. As protests have spread, Iranian leaders and state media have blamed the United States and Israel for inciting “chaos,” while the Supreme Leader has signalled defiance rather than accountability.

But something has shifted. The propaganda still arrives on schedule; the belief no longer does.

There are moments when a lie ceases to be merely false and becomes unusable – because the audience has acquired the one liberty the tyrant fears: the refusal to pretend. Iran may still be able to beat protesters, arrest organisers, throttle the internet, and stage televised confessions. But it is increasingly unable to reframe a national crisis as a foreign import. The reasons are structural.

First, the crisis is plainly indigenous. Even reporting that foregrounds economic triggers does not treat this as a simple cost-of-living tantrum; it is entwined with corruption, repression, and a political order that has made dignity contraband. A regime may survive inflation; it does not easily survive the perception that it has made life not only expensive, but small.

Second, Tehran’s familiar theatre of “security” is overexposed. When a state feels compelled to treat peaceful assembly as existential warfare – when it must explain every chant as espionage – it is confessing a shortage of legitimacy. One does not need to be a constitutional scholar to grasp the principle: governments that rule by consent do not fear candles at gravesides.

Third, and most consequentially, Tehran’s external escape routes – the foreign stages on which it traditionally performs its strength – are becoming less permissive. The Islamic Republic has for years relied on a simple formula: externalise the crisis, ignite a proxy theatre, and announce that the nation must unite against the enemy. But that formula depends on reliable corridors and dependable friendly regimes abroad. Several of those are wobbling at once.

Which brings us, improbably, to Caracas.

Iran’s interest in Latin America has never been the sentimental “anti-imperialism” that its propagandists pretend. It has been a cold, transactional project: sanctions evasion, clandestine logistics, illicit finance, and the cultivation of permissive jurisdictions in which IRGC and Hezbollah-linked networks can operate with less friction. Reuters has documented US sanctions against networks accused of routing funds to Hezbollah and facilitating sanctions evasion.

Venezuela – under Chávez and then Maduro – served as one of the most useful platforms for this effort: politically aligned, strategically located, and willing to trade legitimacy for survival. It offered Tehran a way to pose as a rising power with global reach, even as it struggled at home.

Now consider the shock administered by President Trump’s operation against Nicolás Maduro. We are not dealing with a diplomatic reprimand or another round of sanctions. Reuters and the Associated Press report that Maduro was seized in Caracas and transferred to US custody, with Trump warning that further action could follow if cooperation is not forthcoming. Switzerland, in response to the arrest, moved to freeze assets linked to Maduro and associates – an indicator of how quickly secondary jurisdictions can tighten when a regime looks suddenly mortal.

The legal and normative arguments around such an operation will be argued for years. But Tehran is interested in something else: capability and intent. Trump has signalled a willingness to disrupt hostile regimes, and Reuters has explicitly reported that US action in Venezuela is stoking anxiety in Tehran as Iranian leaders struggle to contain unrest at home.

This matters because the Islamic Republic’s Latin America posture was, in part, an insurance policy: a place to “reinvent” itself as a global movement rather than a besieged tyranny, to build alternative corridors for money and influence, and to show its domestic audience that the revolution could still expand even under sanctions. If Venezuela’s permissiveness is constrained by political upheaval, deeper US penetration, or the chilling effect on enablers and facilitators, Tehran’s reinvention becomes more difficult and more expensive.

In other words, the mullahs planned to export their crisis away. Trump may have blocked one of the roads.

It is essential to understand that the Islamic Republic did not stumble into foreign adventurism. It was designed for it. Iran’s constitution explicitly articulates support for what it calls the “just struggles” of the oppressed against oppressors “in every corner of the globe,” language that, in practice, has served as a moral varnish for transnational influence.

The instrument of that influence is the IRGC: conceived as guardian of the revolution, now functioning as a state within a state and a crucial link to militant groups opposed to Israel and the United States. This is not incidental to Tehran’s identity; it is central to it. The regime requires external struggle to justify internal repression. Without an outside enemy, it has no sacred emergency; without a sacred emergency, it has no plausible reason to police hair, thought, speech, and aspiration.

This is why its threats against Israel and Washington flare when its internal legitimacy collapses: not because it is strong, but because it is cornered. The regime does not so much defend the nation as conscript it into an endless war against reality.

Revolutionary regimes preach martyrdom while preparing a suitcase. One of the more telling recent reports carried by The Times and echoed in other coverage suggests that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has contemplated a contingency plan to flee to Russia if unrest overwhelms his coercive apparatus.

It would be a mistake to treat such reporting as gossip. It fits the psychology of authoritarian survival. The leadership understands, even if it cannot admit, that coercion has diminishing returns. A regime that has normalised brutality eventually finds itself governed by its own fear: fear of the street, fear of defection, fear of the moment when the security services decide that the leader is no longer the safest investment.

That is why Tehran has long built provisions for a political exodus – money, channels, relationships, havens. The slogans are for the masses. The contingency plans are for the rulers.

The Islamic Republic’s most reliable instrument – blaming outsiders – depends on a domestic public willing to suspend disbelief. Yet the current moment is characterised precisely by the collapse of that suspension. People do not rise in dozens of provinces because Israel has hypnotised them; they rise because they have lived for years in a system that demands submission, manufactures scarcity, and punishes joy.

This is what makes the regime’s threats so revealing. They are not the confident posture of a stable state. They are the frantic incantations of a clerical-security machine trying to wish its problems away.

And it is why the familiar routine may now fail. Tehran cannot indefinitely project its crisis outward when its own streets are erupting, when its foreign hedges are being contested, and when even its leadership appears to be considering escape routes. It can still menace Israel. It can still harass the United States. It can still fund clients and proxies. But it is less able – perhaps for the first time in a generation – to convert foreign hostility into domestic legitimacy.

The Islamic Republic has always wanted to export itself beyond Iran’s borders, to dismantle the West’s moral confidence and to eradicate the Jewish state, so it might repaint the world in its own colours. That ambition remains. What has changed is that the regime’s internal rot is now too visible to be blamed away – and its external corridors, once taken for granted, are becoming contested territory.

The great question is not whether the mullahs will continue to threaten. They will. The question is whether anyone – inside Iran or outside it – will continue to pretend that the threats explain the crisis, rather than reveal it.