OPINION:
A particular kind of behavior emerges when an autocratic regime enters its final spiral.
It grows louder. It gets more brutal. It becomes increasingly irrational and starts making decisions that no legitimate government would make.
These decisions start to make sense only when you realize those in charge have stopped planning for next year and have started planning how to survive the next two weeks.
This is the current state of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Let’s start with the most egregious signal. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has officially lowered its minimum recruitment age to 12. An IRGC official went on state television and said with a straight face that children were “requesting to participate.”
Teenagers with Uzis are now manning checkpoints across Tehran. The Basij, the same paramilitary apparatus that massacred protesters in January, is so depleted of adult volunteers that it has turned to seventh-graders to fill the ranks.
This is precisely what manpower collapse looks like in the obvious historical cases (see the Third Reich in April 1945). No fighting force in history has ever resorted to using child soldiers because it was winning.
Then there’s the regime’s pathetic display in Beirut. Lebanon declared Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Reza Sheibani, persona non grata and ordered him out by March 29. Mr. Sheibani has so far refused to leave.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said the ambassador would “continue his mission,” as if the sovereign nation’s expulsion order were just a suggestion.
A move like this is not the show of strength Tehran thinks. A real power doesn’t need to squat in someone else’s embassy to prove it still matters. The regime in Iran is clinging to its foothold in Lebanon the way a person clings to a life raft because its own boat no longer remains afloat.
Then there is the most telling absence of all. Mojtaba Khamenei, the new “supreme leader,” has not been seen in public since his appointment on March 9. Not once. No video, no audio. His statements have been read aloud by television anchors over still photographs.
The regime has resorted to circulating artificial-intelligence-generated videos of Mr. Khamenei giving speeches that never occurred. Iranians have started calling him “the AI supreme leader.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month that Mr. Khamenei is “wounded and likely disfigured.”
When your supposed head of state is a rumor, your state has a problem.
Zoom out, and the picture is even more damning. The Islamic republic killed more than 32,000 Iranian citizens to stay in power during the mass protests called by Prince Reza Pahlavi in January. A regime that needs to slaughter its own population at industrial levels to survive a protest movement is tacitly confessing that it doesn’t believe it can survive the next wave.
Then there’s the rift between IRGC, the force created in 1979 explicitly to protect the Islamic republic, and the conventional Islamic Republic of Iran army, the Artesh, the conventional armed force that protects Iran’s sovereignty in a traditional sense. The chasm between the two is showing more than ever before. The two are at each other’s throats over food, water and blame.
The IRGC is even refusing to evacuate wounded Artesh soldiers. Members of the security apparatus are defecting “at all levels,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
As Mr. Pahlavi said in January, “Tens of thousands have already signaled their readiness to defect. … Large sections of the army and security forces have already refused to participate in the killing of civilians.”
Read these data points together, and the reality is clear. A sound, secure government does not recruit 12-year-olds into its armed forces, kill tens of thousands of its own citizens, or hide its leader behind written statements and AI. It does not defy a host nation’s expulsion order, squatting in an embassy like a tenant trying to avoid an eviction notice.
Don’t be fooled. The Islamic republic isn’t winning — not inside Iran, not militarily and not diplomatically. It is dying, one globally publicized convulsion at a time.
No two-week ceasefire will change this trajectory. A regime negotiating from strength does not need a lifeline to buy itself 14 days.
Tehran’s 10-point proposal — which includes full sanctions relief, U.S. withdrawal from the region and payment of war damages — reads more like a wish list drafted from a bunker than a serious set of demands.
• Tymahz Toumadje is a senior policy analyst at the National Union for Democracy in Iran.
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