By Julia Kassem – Jan 16, 2026
Washington’s escalating posture toward Iran masks a deeper strategic failure, as sanctions, sabotage, and information warfare fail to fracture Iranian society or restore US regional leverage.
After waging an unsuccessful regime change attempt on Iran, the US wants to cut to the chase and is making preparations for an imminent attack on Iran.
Yet here’s why, despite publishing “Iran is closer to collapse” headlines for more than 40 years, the US is closer than ever to collapse.
In late December, protests over the country’s deteriorating economic situation escalated. This collapse was largely the result of the United States’ maximum-pressure campaign and its ever-mounting sanctions on Iran. Tensions intensified further following November’s sanctions on Iranian currency exchange offices, which directly affected the importation of goods.
Iran’s mercantile class – who couldn’t bring their goods to market – responded by shuttering their doors as shopkeeper strikes swept through commercial districts. Their discontent reflected broader frustration with the punitive effects of sanctions on Iran, joining nearly 20 weeks of ongoing strikes by port workers demanding better pay and improved working conditions.
The US, hungry to exploit any domestic, internal contradiction, jumped on the opportunity to continue the trajectory of activating internal sabotage networks activated at the onset of its 12-day Israeli-led war with Iran. Yet Trump’s attempts to “strike Iran from the inside” seem to have been foiled, as weapons stockpiles – containing both US-made and domestically produced arms – hidden in the homes of Mossad-backed rioters have continued to be uncovered and dismantled, much as they were during the first three days of June war.
The US became arrogantly deafened by the rhetoric of an obnoxious and loud minority of Persian nationalist gusanos – created by the US/Israeli hand in the first place. In reality, support for the Revolutionary Government was demonstrated by millions mobilizing in the streets to condemn the riots. In contrast, anti-government protestors – according to analysis by American data analyst Mark Pyruz (@intelonIran), who made AI-assisted analysis of protest footage – didn’t exceed 0.0025% of the population, peaking at an estimated 11,000 people on June 11.
The people even helped their government in identifying and catching armed rioters that were killing their own people – 400,000 calls to IRGC help line were made by the people which helped dismantle the Mossad-backed networks. As during the 12-day war in June, citizen tips to the IRGC to report saboteurs and agents were a huge factor in cracking down on espionage and sabotage networks.
US information warfare was thwarted. Starlink networks deployed via smugglers and on-the-ground agents, were dismantled – despite the fact that Pompeo had even given those agents a warm New Year’s shoutout.
Shutting off the internet wasn’t to cut the protests off from each other, or even to prevent information from reaching outside – as Western media claims – but rather to deny Mossad access to protesters. This objective was underscored by circulating videos that exposed direct coordination and communication between Mossad handlers and agents in Iran.
The capacity to thwart information warfare is a huge blow to US psychological warfare against Iran. You see, materially in the region – despite the genocide, despite the destruction across Lebanon and Gaza – the situation isn’t favorable for the US at all. The US Navy lost the battle against the Yemeni Ansar Allah resistance, losing control over the Red Sea trade route in the process. “Israel’s” Eilat port continues to crumble, deserted, and settlers are not rushing to return to the north of Occupied Palestine. Despite sustained pressure on the Iraqi government, trade with Iran continues to surpass US trade with Iraq. Meanwhile, Washington’s Gulf Allies – namely Saudi Arabia – despite contending with “Israel” for the role of the most worthy and successful US regional partner, have refused to serve as cannon fodder against regional resistance forces. They have shed the failed security-for-oil social contract and no longer wish to open their airspace for a war against Iran.
So the US – in spite of these silent losses – flashes the only card it has left to distract from its increasingly hollow grasp of strategic depth in the region. This is the main tool of shock-and-awe spectacle, a show of force in sabotage, treachery, and manipulation of the global economic market to incite fear. But the effectiveness of fear, threats, and intimidation diminishes in the absence of material US leverage against China.
As US policy increasingly resembles the erratic, dying lunge of a rabid dog rather than a sophisticated instrument of strategic depth, it has reduced itself to crude displays of power projection – such as enabling a genocide in Gaza, destroying Syria, or kidnapping Venezuelan president Maduro – all ultimately intended to send a message to Arab leaders in the region, and – infinitely less successfully – to Iran’s political leadership.
Again, this fails to scare the Iranian leadership. The US has exhausted every treacherous plot and scheme, ending up revealing itself as the very image of irrational, fumbling madness that it once islamophobically projected onto the so-called ‘mad mullahs.’
Iran perfected the art of jamming Western communication networks, including Starlink, from Russia’s experience in Ukraine, and from Operation True Promise 1 and 2, it excelled the art of precision striking and overwhelming Israeli defense systems. From the treacherous terror pager attacks to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb – repeated on Iran through the deployment of sabotage networks in the country – they’ve since learned to circumvent and thwart the mechanisms of internal sabotage, proving that such tactics are weaker than the spider’s web of their namesake.
As we count the minutes towards a resumption of the anticipated war between the US and Iran – no matter how much the US loosens the reins on its vicious Israeli lapdog, Iran will not flinch. That’s because the US lost before it reached round 2. The war waged by the US against Iran never really ended. When “Israel” was just days away from complete collapse and defeat, Washington and Tel Aviv slammed the brakes on the war in order to continue building internal sabotage networks under Iran’s nose – much like in Syria. But this attempt blew up in their faces, and now the US realizes it doesn’t have the capacity or ability for an internal strike.
Expecting Iran to make the first move, as they did on the night of January 14 when both the US and “Israel” made partial evacuations of the al-Udeid and Nevatim airbases, was yet another admission of weakness, but of its own guilt in not really ending the ceasefire. “Israel” can’t strike people as in Lebanon. Israelis were buying time in Syria by arming and organizing domestic terrorists. But Iran is not Syria, and this plot failed again. Iran technically reserves the right for preemptive attack, which it won’t do because Iran doesn’t seek war. The doctrine of strategic patience means they will buy as much time as they can while watching the US unravel and burn out under the weight of its own mounting contradictions.
Global support for “Israel” is at an all-time low, and propaganda efforts targeting Iran have become increasingly ineffective.
The US underestimated just how much the global disgust for “Israel’s” genocide has hampered the ability to maintain its hegemony over the media narrative as the world watched a genocide broadcast through the same platforms invested in by their perpetrators. Just as large investments into weapons were lost through the resistance’s ability to inflict a war of attrition on the battlefield, netizens continue to express and circulate messages of support for Palestine and disgust toward Israel, drowning out the droves forked over for Hasbara.
Even the propaganda of Western-payrolled Iranian exiles can’t stomach this level of playing in Mossad scripts. The US and “Israel”, in their latest round on Iran, have underestimated how much “Israel’s” catastrophic public‑relations failure surrounding the genocide is likely to come full circle and ultimately backfire.
The American claim of safeguarding human rights worldwide as a pretext for domination has lost credibility, the final nail in a rusty coffin that weighs heavier for the collective West than the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives it slaughtered in Gaza. The chickens have come home to roost, and the boot Washington has wielded worldwide has hammered down on the necks of Americans themselves, whether it’s an Israeli-imposed gag order choking American free speech claims, or the bloody brute force of the ICE agent and the police officer that chokeholds and shoots their own citizens. Ironically, these are the very actions the US claims are occurring in Iran, yet it holds little real leverage to make them happen. Iran’s police and defense forces protect their people, operating as a vanguard for the Islamic Republic’s national sovereignty, whereas US police primarily defend the interests of a ruling cabal of pedophile elites.
Western Media Whitewashes Deadly Riots in Iran, Relying on US Government-Funded Regime Change NGOs
The US failed to disarm the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza through military means. It will also fail through attempts at diplomatic and political pressure as the Lebanese and Palestinian people – increasingly proletarianized by ever-intensifying economic war on their livelihoods – turn to rally around the only forces that have ensured the defense of their sovereignty against imperialist forces working day and night to extinguish their existence.
Though they both possess nuclear weapons, the US and “Israel’s” Achilles heel that will eventually send it from the region is the absence of political will. Returning IOF soldiers are increasingly losing their pathetic, lowly lives no longer on the battlefield, but by suicide, haunted by the ghosts of innocents they killed. It resembles the widespread mental breakdown and suicide spike noted among US soldiers returning from Iraq, tormented by the oppression they’ve inflicted onto Iraqis.
The initial legitimate demands of the original Iranian protesters, before unruly elements turned them into armed riots, reflect a cry to adhere to, not destroy the foundations of a revolution that expanded welfare for the Iranian working class and brought wealth, infrastructure and resources, back to the people. What happened will only harden the hungry resentment of proletarianized Iranians against the hand that starves them.
Washington’s attempts won’t work. The US has allowed its own country to crumble under the weight of its capitalist class’s endless investment in global warfare. How, then, can it make promises to Iranians, who have long enjoyed socially enshrined rights to education and healthcare, when it cannot even resolve basic disputes at home over feeding children or providing a few public buses on dilapidated streets?
No amount of “securing the backyard” in the Western Hemisphere can hide the unsightliness of the US’s own crumbling abode, even as it tries to starve the Venezuelan, Cuban, and Iranian people through punitive sanctions – to distract from the roaring grumbling hunger of its own citizens. This hunger has really numbed faith fed to us through the bloated image of American exceptionalism, while the starvation of those economically besieged in the Global South has rumbled their resolve to achieve freedom and liberation – not from their own sovereign governments, but from the hyper-visible hand that turns off and on the lever of their livelihoods at will.
The short chapter of the American hero fable closes, swallowed by the volumes of civilizational history etched into the historical memory of the world. The calculation of the rise and fall of civilizations is too vast and much larger than the Big Mac index. And now, the few hundred-combined years of US and 80-years of Israeli settler colonialism, forcing its way into existence through genocide will stand no chance of a thousand-year-old civilization that has withstood historic golden tremors: the al-Aqsa Flood was to you a drop in the ocean.
We have grandparents older than your so-called ‘state’ and can dispel in a single story the fake narratives you pay millions for Google to spread. When they pass away, they are sanctified by the testimony of our millennia-old olive trees, which you desperately try to uproot. Try to take the weapons of our resistance fighters, the olive trees of our farmers, and the homes of our people if you will, but know that you’ve already failed.
As the martyr Abu Obaida said, this land grows resistance fighters like it grows olive trees. We are the trees you cannot uproot. We are the sun that gives your people skin cancer. As “Israel” repeatedly violates the ceasefires, cowardly killing people in the hope of extinguishing resistance, it clearly loses the plot into the very expression of insanity – expecting different results from committing the same actions.
Recall the name of Hamas’s armed brigades. It seems that the US and “Israel” did not learn their lesson, but the Palestinian resistance fighter group’s name, the Ezz el Din al-Qassam brigades, reminds them each time of the leader Sheikh Ezz al Din al-Qassam, whose martyrdom (1935) fueled the Palestinian uprising – from labor strikes to waves of armed resistance. With each killing of leaders, “Israel” pumps more fuel into the fire of this historical memory, no matter how much oil Trump steals from Venezuela to boost the occupation’s global standing.
From “Israel’s” genocide to the release of the Epstein files, people lose faith in a worldly order in the grasp of those who kill children with one hand and molest them with another. It increases the resolve of those who would frankly rather die than be ruled by that regime… and oscillating between different levers of a hybrid war machine endlessly will never change that. The Iranian people, from the onset of the 12-day war till today, have won the war of wills. As Khomeini said and as the Iranian people have demonstrated, “if our enemies besiege us economically, we are the children of “Ramadan” and if they besiege us militarily we are the children of “Ashura”.
(Al Mayadeen – English)
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