This is the third and final part of this article. Parts 1 and 2 can be read here.
I WOULD argue that the internal picture in Iran is more encouraging than its leadership vacuum at the top would suggest. Mid-ranking IRGC officers have reportedly been fleeing through Turkey and Azerbaijan since early this year. Defectors describe an organisation increasingly strained by internal distrust, pay shortfalls, and fear of internal purges. Iran International and Reuters have both documented growing tensions between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC ) and Iran’s conventional Artesh military. Soldiers have been conducting group desertions, leaving bases and seeking refuge in nearby towns. Pay delays are widespread. Morale is in documented decline. The question that no one has the answer to is this: if the Iranian regime fractures, who gets the keys to the bases and vehicles the officers are paid to leave?
The historical precedent for how this ends is instructive. In 1979, it was not mass uprising alone that brought down the Shah. It was defection from within the security forces. The Shah’s Imperial Army stopped firing on protesters. Officers declined orders. The monopoly on violence collapsed almost overnight. The regime that replaced him understood exactly what had happened, which is why the IRGC was created in May 1979 specifically to prevent it from ever happening again. The IRGC was built from scratch with layered ideological screening, economic incentives tied to loyalty, and systematic surveillance of its own members. It is an institution designed at its foundation to make defection uniquely costly.
The question of cost is the operative one. Right now, most IRGC soldiers see two paths. Fight and possibly die for a regime that is not paying them on time and whose supreme leader has not been seen in three months. Or defect and face execution if caught, with no credible guarantee of protection or resettlement if they make it out.
The mosaic strategy you could imagine, and that strategic analysts are beginning to discuss, involves changing that second calculation in specific geographies. The Kurdish northwest, the Azerbaijani border regions, the Baloch southeast. These are areas where ethnic and religious identity already generates friction with the Persian Shia revolutionary state. They are areas where existing networks, both diaspora and internal, have maintained contact across the conflict period. They are areas where a soldier offered cash, protection, and a credible path out might make a different calculation than one offered nothing but the abstract promise of American goodwill.
The obstacle is real and documented. No high-ranking IRGC commander has publicly defected. The Middle East Forum’s analysis is direct: ‘IRGC loyalty is institutional and rooted in shared survival, material interests, and legal protection. Defection would carry exceptionally high personal and organisational costs.’ The command structure is explicitly designed to prevent exactly the kind of cascading defections that bring regimes down. Officers surveille each other. Criticism of conditions inside a unit can result in detention and accusations of Israeli intelligence ties. The ideological bonding runs deep in the senior ranks precisely because promotion has been tied to ideological conformity for four decades.
But the same analysts who make this point consistently add the same qualifier: ‘The more stress and pressure on the regime, both from within and from the outside, the more likely defections may start to happen.’ The stress is compounding. The pay shortfalls are real and documented. The gap between the regime’s victory narrative and the observable reality is widening in ways that even the internet blackout cannot fully contain.
The Stimson Center’s analysis of collapse indicators puts it plainly: large defections from military units, and battles between defecting security personnel and loyalists, would be early signs of genuine regime instability. We are not there. But we are also three months into a conflict that has decapitated the IRGC’s leadership twice in nine months, blockaded its primary revenue source, exposed its missile programme’s limitations in real time, alienated the Arab neighbours it spent decades cultivating, and left its supreme leader in undisclosed medical care.
The soldiers who are considering walking away need to believe two things simultaneously. They need to believe that continuing to fight leads to death or defeat. And they need to believe that walking away leads somewhere other than an execution courtyard. The first condition is increasingly being met by the facts on the ground. The second condition requires deliberate architecture that is not yet publicly visible.
People ask a reasonable question: why is the US not finishing the job? A-10 Warthogs are already confirmed to be killing IRGC fast-attack boats in the Strait. Maritime intelligence firms tracked 333 IRGC speedboats active in the Persian Gulf at one time, with one swarm alone consisting of 122 craft. That is a target-rich environment.
The answer is not military capacity. The answer is Riyadh.
When Project Freedom launched in early May, a Maersk vessel crossed the Strait under US military escort. The US sank seven Iranian boats that tried to stop it. The US sent a ship through. Iran tried to interfere. The US destoyed the boats. It worked exactly as designed. The US has proved the concept works.
Then Saudi Arabia made a phone call.
Trump announced Project Freedom on social media last Sunday without consulting Gulf allies. Saudi Arabia informed Washington it would not allow US military aircraft to fly from Prince Sultan Airbase or through Saudi airspace to support the operation. Due to the geography of the region, providing air cover over the Strait of Hormuz at the range and loiter time required is not achievable without Saudi basing. Trump called Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia) personally to resolve it. The call failed. Project Freedom was paused within 24 hours. (When US and Iranian forces traded fire in the Strait on May 7, striking Iranian bases in Bandar Abbas and Qeshm, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait temporarily restricted US access to American bases on their territory entirely.)
This is the same Saudi Arabia that condemned Iranian aggression on Kuwait. The same Saudi Arabia that called the strikes on GCC states heinous and treacherous. The same Saudi Arabia whose Crown Prince expressed full solidarity with the UAE and Kuwait.
They will condemn Iran with words. They will not allow us to use their airspace to destroy the IRGC navy with aircraft.
There is a straightforward reason. Higher oil prices are good for Saudi Arabia. The Strait being closed hurts some of their competitors in ways that do not equally hurt Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has pipeline alternatives and Red Sea export terminals that other Gulf producers do not. And Saudi Arabia, for all its condemnation of Iranian aggression, has a decades-long institutional interest in ensuring that Washington does not feel so confident in its military posture that it stops needing Saudi co-operation to project power in the region.
The Erdogan parallel is exact. Trump’s most viable ground option for pressuring Iran from the north involved the Kurdish forces who have fought alongside American special operations for years and bled for every inch of territory they hold. Erdogan told Washington that arming and co-ordinating with Kurdish forces was unacceptable. The Kurds were denied the equipment and the formal backing that would have given them operational reach into Iran’s northwestern flank. Erdogan, simultaneously running drone components to Iran through Turkish shell companies, gets to dictate American military options in Kurdish territory.
Two American partners. Two American plans. Both stopped by governments that would not exist in their current form without American blood and treasure.
The 333 boats are still in the Persian Gulf because MBS said no. The Kurdish option is constrained because Erdogan said no. And Washington, across administrations of both parties, has not developed the strategic posture that would allow it to tell either of them that their veto is no longer acceptable.
That is not a military problem. It is a failure of political will that has been building for longer than most of our current soldiers have been alive. The full history of that failure deserves its own accounting.
However, the blockade is working. The squeeze is real. Iran’s currency was in free fall before the war began and has continued declining. Kharg Island, the terminal through which the bulk of Iran’s oil historically flowed, is shut down. IRGC units are reporting pay delays. Police desertions have been documented by Iran International. The crypto exchange Nobitex, one of the primary mechanisms the IRGC used to move money internationally and evade sanctions, was sanctioned this week. Treasury has frozen nearly half a billion dollars in regime-linked cryptocurrency since the conflict began.
But I owe you an honest correction on a piece of analysis I published earlier in this series.
I wrote that the blockade would quickly squeeze China into pressuring Iran toward a deal. That timeline was compressed. It was wrong in one important respect.
Before Operation Epic Fury began, Iran was deliberately running oil exports at roughly 2.1million barrels per day, about 26 per cent above the 2025 annual average. They were pre-positioning. When the blockade began in April, analysts estimated approximately 90million barrels of Iranian crude were already outside the blockade zone, floating in tankers east of the Strait, most concentrated near Malaysia’s Eastern Outer Port Limits anchorage off the Johor coast. That anchorage has functioned as Iran’s offshore floating storage hub for years. It is where shadow fleet tankers transfer Iranian crude labelled as Malaysian before it continues to Chinese refineries.
Since it takes two to three months for oil to reach China from the Gulf and another two to three months for payment to flow back to Iran, the financial pipeline from pre-blockade exports continues feeding the regime potentially through October 2026. China’s official customs records show zero Iranian crude imports since 2022. China’s actual recorded imports of supposedly Malaysian crude in 2025 ran at 1.3million barrels per day, more than double Malaysia’s entire domestic production. The laundering operation was massive, built over years, and fully operational before the first bomb fell.
The IRGC planned for this war. They built the financial cushion before it began. The blockade is working. The squeeze is real. The timeline for when Iran exhausts that cushion is longer than the April blockade start date suggests.
Time is still on the American side. The math still works. It just works on a longer clock than I initially described, and I would rather tell you that plainly than let a compressed timeline stand uncorrected while parents of deployed soldiers are hoping their child can come home soon.
Keep praying for peace.
