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Six weeks after the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding, the deal survives mostly as a rumor about itself.
Talks resume, then they don’t. Strikes land while both sides insist the framework holds. On this week’s Deep Dive episode, host Jacob Laznik argues the story has quietly changed subject, and the people it was supposed to be about have dropped out of it.
His guest, journalist and Iran analyst Jonathan Harounoff, spent two years at the UN: after the December protests began and the killing started, it took the Secretary-General two to three weeks to say anything. In Gaza or Lebanon, he says, it would have taken hours.
Laznik’s sharpest question is an arithmetic one. Empty water reserves, rationed power, talk of moving the capital, then two rounds of war. How is this regime physically still standing? Harounoff’s answer is the reason to watch. The math does add up, he argues, because the Islamic Republic spent decades funneling everything into this moment. And its single greatest asset right now is that it isn’t a democracy.
It doesn’t answer to polling, fuel prices, or midterms. Israel and the US do. It can’t win a conventional war, so it plans to out-suffer them, with the Strait of Hormuz as the lever.
With Israel voting October 27, Iran isn’t cracking the top ten campaign issues. Harounoff’s diagnosis isn’t indifference but access, which is why 15% of the views on everything he posts come from inside Iran. Then he closes on the detail that lingers: the people who pressed him hardest for continued strikes on the Islamic Republic weren’t officials or analysts.
They were Iranians at Nowruz parties in Brooklyn, approaching him one after another to urge it. The people with the most to lose were the most insistent.
