The Duran Guys Critique Iran's Anti-Regime Change Performance

I spent some time this morning reviewing a The Duran video that includes, in its second half, a critique of Iran’s handling of the most recent Anglo-Zionist attempt at regime change. The critique covers both internal and external matters—Iran’s response to economic sanctions as well as its internal security measures. The critique is mostly presented in quite general terms, so it requires reflection. Still, The Duran is presenting a warning: It would be misguided to believe that the Anglo-Zionists won’t try again. See what you think. As you’ll see, both Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou are highly critical of the Iranian regime.

Trump Iran strike on hold... for now

Alexander: But if the Iranians continue to play around, don’t prepare properly, dither, all of those sort of things, then the next attempt at regime change is going to come. They need to understand this. In fact, I would say that, as night follows day, another attempt at regime change is almost certainly going to happen over the course of this year. It’s just that it’s proving more complicated and more difficult than the Israelis and the Neocons expected. At the beginning of last year they probably assumed that Iran would collapse like a house of cards the moment the strike came, and that the decapitation strike that started the June 2025 12-day war would itself collapse the regime. And we saw that didn’t happen. Now they’ve tried again, using somewhat different methods. It didn’t work. The Iranians need to be prepared for the fact that another attack almost certainly is going to come and they need to prepare for it more carefully and more deeply.

A weakness of this critique, for people like me, is that no distinction is made between the two headed nature of the Iranian governing structure—religious and civil. Exactly who is making the key decisions, is this bifurcation a source of disarray? These seem to be key questions that go unaddressed. I don’t know the answers but it does seem that it’s an area that needs to be examined. Do the religious authorities veto initiatives that the civil authorities might want to undertake—such as closer cooperation with non-Islamic nations? That’s an issue that does come up.

And I say this because, again, in advance of this latest attempt, all the indications are that the Iranians were again caught unprepared. I mean there were protests but they weren’t ready to handle the protests. They did not handle the protests well. There was far too much violence at the beginning from the Iranian security services. When the other side started to bring out armed men and all of those things, the government was completely unprepared for it. Over the course of last week, it began to look briefly as if they would lose control. They were fortunate in that they did have this assistance from the Russians or the Chinese or both, because otherwise this thing could have acquired a momentum which might quite possibly have led to regime change.

They need to start getting much more organized about how they manage their economic matters. And I have to say, I think that people make many excuses for Iran there. I think that Iran is potentially a rich country. It’s got a big economy. They could prepare for these kind of economic attacks much more effectively and they could run the economy on a much more stable basis, despite all of the sanctions. The problem is, I get the sense that the senior people in the government aren’t very interested in economic matters in the way that they need to be, and I think that they think that there are simple and easy solutions which, of course, there never are. They need to organize themselves and they need--first and foremost and above all--to work more closely with their friends. They did get help over the last week, as I said, from someone. I think it was the Russians. Perhaps it was the Chinese and the Russians. But whoever it was, they need to start consolidating that help and getting more of that support. And of course, if they do, then at some point perhaps the regime change attempts will abate, because Iran is actually a difficult place to regime change.

It does seem that this is a major stumbling block for the religious authorities in Iran, more than for the civil government—the desire to have Iran “go it alone”. As an historical matter, that’s understandable—for example, Russia has in the past been an aggressive enemy. But times have changed.

And last but not least, I think this pattern of serial production executions is an extremely bad thing at every level. I think that the Iranians need to stop doing this. There’s the moral dimension about it, but I think it is deeply destabilizing within Iranian society.

Alex: Yeah, agreed. Yeah, absolutely. No excuse for Iran when it comes to the economic stuff anymore. Understood. A lot of sanctions, very difficult. No doubt about it. But they’re now part of BRICS and they have an opportunity to really figure things out when it comes to the economy. Something they didn’t have before. Now they do have BRICS. So, this is important. They need to utilize it. They need to take advantage of of being part of BRICS. So, I totally agree with you there. It’s more than Iran when it comes to the regime changes for the Trump administration. I think there’s a lesson to be learned by every country that’s potentially targeted by the United States, by the Trump administration, for regime change because the pattern from Trump is very much going for the knockout. He is looking to go for the knockout. He is trying to avoid a long war. He’s trying to avoid boots on the ground. He doesn’t want any boots on the ground. He doesn’t want any US military actively engaged in some sort of a long conflict. He wants to avoid that. He is looking for a knockout. Whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s Syria, doesn’t matter. That’s what he wants. He wants that knockout blow.

Alex: The United States is playing to their strengths and they’re very good at exploiting the weaknesses, searching for weaknesses, searching for holes or gaps that they can find when it comes to removing a government. Whether the holes are economic holes, whether they’re information war gaps that a government may have, whether they’re military gaps, intel on the ground that can bribe certain officials and then the military can go in and capture the leader, right? So they’re using everything that they can to get these these knockouts. And Trump loves that. He loves this game. He wants to avoid the long drawn out conflicts. So I think every country that’s being targeted by the US, this is the lesson that you can take from this. And they may have not been able to find the knockout punch with Iran just yet. They got very close, but next time they might succeed.

Alexander: Yes. Well, absolutely. What you’ve pointed to is both the US’s enormous strength but also its weakness. It is extremely good at finding these weak points and you cannot afford to let them develop within your country and your society, because the United States, if it’s coming for you, is going to find them. So you need to run a monetary and financial policy that will keep your currency stable--and Iran has all the resources to do that, despite the sanctions. And you’re absolutely right about BRICS. The very first thing that happened, if you remember, what started this process, was a collapse of the Iranian currency. A 40% collapse of the Iranian currency. Why did Pezeshkian not call Beijing? Why did the central bank chairman of Iran not contact China or the BRICS institutions and say to them, “We need a billion dollars to stabilize the currency.” Now, that’s all it would have needed. We’re talking about a relatively small economy. The moment traders knew that China was stepping in with money--even if it was only a billion dollars which, of course, for China is just small change--the currency would have immediately stabilized and that would have transformed the entire mood and situation in Iran. It would have created an enormous surge in confidence and that would have stopped the protest movement gaining momentum right from the outset, and it would have enabled Iran to take further steps to stabilize its economy and to take the process forward.

We’re not talking about huge sums of money here. Certainly not the kind of sums of money that Milei borrowed from the United States just a few weeks ago. And by the way, Milei was right to do that. I mean, if he wanted to pursue that policy, given that the Americans were willing to offer him the money and were in a position to, he’s absolutely right. The Iranians should be doing the same thing with their own friends and they could have paid the money back very quickly as soon as the economy began to stabilize as well. Instead, they went around telling everybody, well, you know, we’ve got all of these sanctions and the situation is very difficult and there isn’t really very much we can do in this situation. Which of course gave people in the bazaar, within the business community, within the Iranian middle class, no reason to hope that anything was going to get better in the short to medium term. And of course that weakened confidence in the government and of course it opened the way for these as I said organized attacks to take place.

But at the same time, talking about these organized attacks, I mean, Iran has never succeeded in gaining a complete and proper handle over the internal situation security situation in Iran. There are still any number of people--agents, insurgent groups, people with guns--still functioning inside Iran. We saw how the Israelis and the Americans and people like that have been able to conduct assassinations and sabotage operations inside Iran. Obviously, there are difficulties about stopping this entirely, but we saw that with the Russians. The Russians have had difficulties dealing with the Ukrainian infiltrators. But it’s been nothing like as bad as what we see in Iran. And, again, I get the sense that the security services in Iran are not especially efficient at this kind of internal protection and control. And, at the same time, they are largely a law unto themselves and they’re very difficult to supervise and control. Iran cannot afford to have those things happen.

I came across an article by an Iranian opposition organization—a “parliament in exile”—that cites some of these problems: Iranian Regime Faces Internal Security Breach Amid Power Consolidation Drive. It’s worth a read. It cites the fractured nature of Iran’s internal security apparatus:

Yet behind the rhetorical triumphalism lies a more disturbing reality. Member of Parliament Mohammad Manan Raisi sounded a rare and public alarm over what he described as serious security failures within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and broader intelligence community. In a scathing critique, he demanded answers to how foreign actors had allegedly gained access to:

• The exact time and location of Iran’s National Security Council meetings,

• The movements and meeting places of top commanders like Hossein Salami and Amir Ali Hajizadeh,

• And other classified information related to military logistics.

“If the enemy is a step ahead, it means we are a step behind,” Raisi declared.

These revelations point to deep vulnerabilities in the regime’s intelligence infrastructure, potentially implicating infiltration, internal sabotage, or technological failure. Raisi’s demand for structural reform — and his frustration at a lack of accountability — reflect a broader crisis of confidence within the state’s hard-security apparatus.

Continuing:

So there are many, many things that Iran can do, and that brings us back to the other point which is the other side of the equation of what you said. Just as these techniques are America’s strengths, they’re also America’s weakness. Because, especially with this president, Donald Trump, who does not like long-term open-ended commitments of the Bush-Cheney kind, you know, occupations of countries, attempts to administer them, democracy promotion and all that kind of thing. It means that if you can counter this kind of thing and counter it effectively, there is a reasonable chance that the Americans will leave you alone, because they’re not in it for the long haul. And, if they can’t achieve it quickly, then they will probably pack their bags, decide it can’t be done, and leave you alone. So there are things that the Iranians can do and which, up to now they haven’t done.

At least this is food for thought. It all appears to me to point to concerning structural weaknesses in the governing apparatus brought about by the dual headed nature of the controlling authorities.