Iran’s poisoned chalice: can economic pressure end the regime? - opinion

Ayatollah Khomeini referred to his 1988 decision to accept a ceasefire ending the eight-year Iran-Iraq War as “drinking the poisoned chalice.”

The war caused over 500,000 deaths. Iranian children were sent to the front lines to clear minefields, wearing martyr badges and “keys to heaven” around their necks.

After the loss, Khomeini began investing heavily in proxy forces to wage war indirectly, beginning with Hezbollah. Yet today, Israel has, for the most part, neutralized many of Iran’s proxies.

The ninth president of Israel, his excellency, the late Shimon Peres, told me at the turn of the last century that the new wars of the 21st century will be economic wars, proxy wars, media wars, and ideological wars.

I asked a former Joint Chiefs of Staff leader of the United States government what determines when wars begin and end. He answered simply: the media.

There is no question that the Persian people can wage and win an ideological war, a media war, and an economic war. It also has the power, as a proxy force, to win a proxy war. It is only a matter of time.

The United States is now attempting one of the most complicated negotiations imaginable with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is, quite frankly, like threading a needle in a hurricane.

We must remind ourselves that it was fundamentally an economic crisis that caused Khomeini to drink the poisoned chalice.

It was another economic crisis, in January 2026, that sparked protests beginning in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and spreading rapidly across the country. This marked the first time since the 1979 revolution that the bazaar played a catalytic role in widespread unrest.

The reason was clear: economic collapse.

In late December 2025, the Iranian rial fell to historic lows, approximately 1.4 million rials to the US dollar, placing immense pressure on merchants struggling to price their goods.

It has been 47 years since Khomeini declared the first day of the “government of God,” ending 2,500 years of Persian monarchy on April Fools’ Day, 1979.

If it took 47 years to build such a regime, perhaps it will take 47 weeks of wise diplomatic sanctions to dismantle it, and 47 more days to drain the swamp.

You cannot kill a demon with a bullet. The ideology driving Iran’s obsession with nuclear power will not disappear through military force alone. As has often been said in America: it’s the economy, stupid.

I once had lunch with Ronald Reagan, along with several Evangelical leaders. We asked him, “When you become president, what will you do about Communism?” He smiled and said softly, “I think I’ll bankrupt it.” And he did.

The ideology of Communism, which controlled over a billion lives, collapsed not merely through weapons but through economic pressure.

The same can happen in Iran. But the most significant weapon will not be military armaments; it will be the Persian people itself.

Iran’s economy was already on life support before the war. The war itself has caused as much as $1 trillion in damage to Iran’s economy. There is no possibility that the regime can overcome this crisis, and the Persian people will 100% blame the regime for it.

Even for Reagan, it took years. After his famous “tear down this wall” speech, time passed before the wall actually fell.

Iran’s regime has one primary card left to play: oil, specifically control over the Strait of Hormuz. But America holds a stronger card, a true trump card: blockading Kharg Island, through which roughly one billion barrels of Iranian oil are shipped annually. Such a move would bankrupt Iran.

I once asked King Abdullah of Jordan, during the height of the Syrian civil war, what determines who terrorists fight for. His answer was simple: “Money does.”

Whoever pays them the most, they fight for.

The poisoned chalice is not forced; it is chosen when there is no other option left.