New Delhi, July 20 -- In the final days of 2025, merchants in Tehran's Grand Bazaar did something they had not done during eight years of war with Iraq, not during the 2009 Green Movement, not even during the worst of the pre-war sanctions: they shuttered their stalls and walked out. Not in defiance of the Americans. In defiance of their own government.

the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic is not the naval blockade tightening around the Strait of Hormuz, not the CENTCOM strikes degrading the Revolutionary Guard's military infrastructure. It is the 90 million people the regime depends on for its own survival, increasingly young, increasingly without work, and increasingly unwilling to pay the price for a governing compact they ...