Pepe Escobar
Tehran will never bow down to the diktats. The neo-Caligula regime change obsession - in fact mirrored as a NATOstan obsession - will keep ruling. Tehran is not intimidated.
The whole planet is somehow convulsed by neo-Caligula's latest scam: because he did not get his "peace" Nobel from Norway, part of his megalomanic narcissist revenge is to bag Greenland from Denmark (in Empire-speak, who cares ? These Scandinavians are al the same anyway).
In neo-Caligula's own words: "The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland."
That seals the Empire of Chaos completely morphed into the Empire of Plunder and now the Empire of Permanent Strikes.
Assorted Euro-chihuahuas dared to dispatch a tiny bunch of dog-sled conductors to defend Greenland from neo-Caligula. To no avail. They were instantly hit with tariffs. The strike remains in effect until the "complete and total purchase" of Greenland.
Euro-chihuahuas - following the Global South - may have finally woken up to the new paradigm: Strike Geopolitics.
Neo-Caligula did not get regime change in Caracas - and his oil mirage was refuted even by US energy majors. He did not get regime change in Tehran - even if CIA, Mossad and assorted NGOs worked full time to deliver.
So Plan C is Greenland, essential for imperial lebensraum purposes, as collateral for the unpayable $38 trillion - and rising - debt.
By all means that does not imply ditching the Iran obsession. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is moving into a position in the Sea of Oman/Persian Gulf where it would be able to strike Iran before the end of the week. All attack scenarios remain in place.
Assuming all hell breaks loose, this may become an even more humiliating replay of the 12-day war in June last year, which the death cult in West Asia spent as much as 14 months planning.
The 12-day war not only failed as a regime change op; it engendered a sample of Iranian reataliation so hardcore that Tel Avi still has not recovered. Tehran has been explicit, over and over again, that the same fate awaits neo-Caligula's forces in Iran and across the Gulf in case of renewed strikes.
Why the regime change obsession endures
As for the equally, miserably failed regime change op on Iran these past few weeks, it featured on the forefront the pathetic Clown Prince Reza Pahlavi, safely ensconced in Maryland, massively plugged by US media as a "unifying political figure" capable of reassessing the "lived catastrophe of clerical rule".
Neo-Caligula was too busy to care about these ideological niceties. What he wanted was to accelerate the proceedings by - what else - applying Empire of Permanent Strikes logic: bombing Iran.
Diversionist spin, predictably, went ballistic. The death cult in West Asia may have asked Moscow to tell Tehran that they would not strike if Iran did not strike first. As if Tehran - and Moscow - could trust anything coming from Tel Aviv.
The Gulfie crowd - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman - may have asked neo-Caligula not to strike, because that would have set the whole Gulf on fire and generate "grave blowback".
The real deal - once again - was TACO. There was simply no gamed US strike scenario that would have allowed lightning quick regime change, the only acceptable outcome. Thus back to bagging Greenland.
It took only a few days to unmask the massive propaganda campaign across NATOstan about "mass casualties" among Iran protesters.
The - fake - figures came from the Center for Human Rights in Iran, located in, where else, New York, and financed by the CIA-infested National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington and other assorted disinformation entities.
The list of reasons for urgent regime change in Iran though remains off the charts, featuring, among others, these four key elements:
- Tehran must ditch the Axis of Resistance across West Asia supporting Palestine.
- Because Iran is at the privileged crossroads of trade/energy connectivity corridors in Eurasia, both its connections with the
- International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) and China's New Silk Roads (BRI) must be severed. That means blowing up from the inside organic intra-BRICS cooperation between Russia, Iran, India and China.
- As over 90% of Iranian oil exports go to China - and are settled in yuan - that's a serious threat to the petrodollar: the ultimate anathema. That's where in Empire of Permanent Strikes terms, Iran aligns with Venezuela. It's our - petrodollar - way or the highway.
- The staying power of the never-ending dream of an Iran under the Shah remix - complete with a Shah-style SAVAK secret police; cosy Mossad ties to rein in those Arab barbarians; and a sprawling CIA-run net of surveillance hubs targeting both Russia and China.
How to counter a "regime-change war"
Tehran is not spooked by sanctions - as it has endured over 6,000 of them over four decades, designed to totally strangle its economy and even bring oil exports, in imperial terminology, down "to zero".
Even under maximum pressure, Iran was capable of building the most extensive industrial base across West Asia; relentlessly invested in self-sufficiency and state of the art military hardware; joined the SCO in 2023 and BRICS in 2024; and for all practical purposes developed a top Global South knowledge economy.
Tsunamis of - digital - ink have been spent on why China has not properly helped Iran so far against imperial maximum pressure, for instance supporting Tehran against the speculative attacks on the rial. That would have cost Beijing almost nothing - compared to its level of foreign reserves.
The speculative attack on the rial was arguably the essential trigger of the protests across Iran. It's essential to remember that hunger salaries were a key contributor to the collapse of Syria.
It's up to Beijing to - diplomatically - answer this uncomfortable question. The spirit of BRICS Plus - call it Bandung 1955 Plus - may not survive when we all know this current world war is essentially about resources and finance, which need to be mobilized and properly deployed.
And that brings us to China's leadership seriously evaluating whether it's worth to remain a sort of larger version of Germany: embryonically self-centered; harboring fear; and fundamentally selfish in economic and financial terms. The - auspicious - alternative is for China to create sufficiently sized credit facilities within BRICS to an array of friendly nations.
Whatever happens next, it's clear that the Empire of Permanent Strikes not only will remain "actively hostile" to a multipolar, multi-nodal world; the hostility will be marinated in a toxic sludge of anger and revenge, and subordinated to the ultimate, panic fear: the Empire's slowly but surely, inexorable expulsion from Eurasia.
Cue to White House Special Representative Witkoff - the real estate Bismarck - enouncing the imperial diktats to Iran:
- Stop enriching uranium. Out of the question,
- Reduce missile stockpiles. Out of the question.
- Reduce approximately 2000 kg of enriched nuclear material (3.67-60 %). That might be negotiated.
- Stop supporting "regional proxies" - as in the Axis of Resistance. Out of the question.
Tehran will never bow down to the diktats. But even if it did, the - promised - imperial reward would be the lifting of sanctions (the US Congress will never do it) and a "return to the international community". Iran is already part of the international community at the UN and inside BRICS, SCO and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), among other institutions.
So the neo-Caligula regime change obsession - in fact mirrored as a NATOstan obsession - will keep ruling. Tehran is not intimidated. Cue to the strategic advisor to Iran's Parliament Speaker, Mahdi Mohammadi:
"We know that we are facing a regime-change war in which the only way to achieve victory is to make credible the threat that, during the 12-day war, although it was ready, did not get the opportunity to be carried out: a geographically expansive war of attrition, focused on the Persian Gulf energy markets, on the basis of steadily increasing missile firepower, lasting at least several months."