Mehrdad Marty Youssefiani, director of the Middle East Forum’s Iran Freedom Project, tells host Wayne Allyn Root that Iran’s economy is collapsing as oil exports and civil aviation shut down and the rial loses half its value in a month. Youssefiani says the regime has overplayed its hand by trying to extract concessions tied to the U.S. midterm elections and predicts President Trump will not accept Tehran’s belated offer at the United Nations.
Youssefiani argues arming Iranian civilians would be counterproductive against a regime willing to use helicopter gunships, favoring sustained economic pressure and civil disobedience instead. He adds that Persians and Jews share a three-thousand-year civilizational bond untainted by the regime’s ideology, and says Iran’s exiled crown prince could play an important role in a future pluralistic coalition but cannot govern alone.
ROOT: All right. Way down the roots, the root, the root, the root’s on fire. Welcome back. We have a guest for you who is an expert on Iran and Iran’s economy and what’s happening in Iran right now that you don’t hear in the mainstream media. His name is, hopefully, I can pronounce this right, Mehrdad Youssefiani, foreign policy and Middle East expert, director of the Iran Freedom Project at the Middle East Forum, which you can find at meforum.org, meforum.org. Again, Mehrdad Youssefiani. Did I get that fairly right, close enough?
YOUSSEFIANI: You got it perfect there.
ROOT: Okay, good. So Iran’s economy is literally imploding, and I mentioned that before we went to the break, and I didn’t even realize who my next guest would be. I was just quoting Scott Bessent, who said we’re two weeks away from Iran having nothing to trade anymore. Their oil will be gone. They’ve got nothing. Their country is in total, complete economic collapse. Is that true? Is that really what’s happening? ‘Cause we’re sure not hearing it in the mainstream media.
YOUSSEFIANI: Th-that is very accurate. Secretary Bessent’s, new approach supplementing what we previously had as the kinetic approach, the kinetic, sort of policy towards engaging and sort of containing the regime. Now, this is a second layer of the non-kinetic, meaning sort of putting the clamps on the economic, lifeline. Oil and gas is shut down, as of just this past couple of days ago. The entire aviation into the— civil aviation into the country, into the country has shut down, so no imports can come in, even through air. So yes, the economy, even previous to the war, was on the verge of a collapse. That is why the people came into the streets. And so conditions are even worse than they were before.
ROOT: Are the, are the supermarket shelves empty? Can they get food? Can they get water? Can they get essentials? I know they can’t get gas, right? This— One of the world’s biggest oil producers, yet they have no gas.
YOUSSEFIANI: That’s right. I mean, the regime has been placed in a condition that they have to import, regular automobile fuel and for whatever they have left for their air force in terms of helicopters and whatever they can fly. They need to actually import all of those, jet fuels and regular fuel for the cars, and this is a big tragedy for, one of the top oil and gas producers with the biggest reserves in the world. But that is an indication of why the Iranian people are unhappy, because the regime, having inherited a massively wealthy country, has driven it to the ground, and the people literally have no food and water. Now, are the shelves empty? No. The regime is very clever. They’ve been, quite efficient in terms of managing, the sanctions over the years, so they can supply the shelves, but the issue is the Iranians’ purchasing power has collapsed. When you see the ri-rial has just, past month alone, has lost fifty percent of its value. It’s now trading over two million rials. When I left the country, it was at seventy. Imagine that.
ROOT: Mm-hmm.
YOUSSEFIANI: Seventy to over two million. So-
ROOT: Wow
YOUSSEFIANI: ... The purchasing power is not there and, you know, outside of the elite who can afford, whatever they wish, it is the masses that cannot. Seventy-two million people, you need to be able to feed them, you need to be able to sustain them, you need to be able to support, their well-being, and this is exactly where the pressure point is taking effect. Those people are paying the price for the regime, and the idea is, hopefully, the regime will not be able to hold this any longer, and the people themselves can speak up and, take charge of their destiny.
ROOT: The problem is pretty obvious ‘cause it happened back in, what was it, January, I think? Where the people did rise up in the streets, and they were very bold and very brave and very courageous, and, they just mowed down and killed fifty thousand of them. They arrest them and then murdered them in prison. I heard they gang-raped the girls ‘cause they didn’t want them to go to heaven. They wanted to be virgins. So they would gang-rape the poor girls and then murder them. I mean, when you’re dealing with people this brutal, this vile, this, devious, this evil, satanic, how do you ever overthrow them? ‘Cause you’ll come in the streets, they’ll gun you all down. That’s been the issue, right?
YOUSSEFIANI: You’re absolutely on, Mark. This is an evil regime. This is a regime that has done nothing in its forty years of, forty-seven years of existence, but to, sort of make itself wealthy, squander the national assets and wealth, and, either spend it on its proxies or on foreign regional adventures that it has not paid off. So yes, you’re right. The second part of that is not only is the regime evil in terms of its corruption, but that it will not hesitate to slaughter. And yes, back in January, we saw that thousands, tens of thousands of, innocent Iranian civilians were slaughtered. But let me tell you this, we have seen this before in history. The evil empire, the Soviet Union, collapsed. It was no different than this regime.
ROOT: True. True.
YOUSSEFIANI: Bashar Assad, for fifteen years, slaughtered hundreds of thousands.
ROOT: Mm.
YOUSSEFIANI: It eventually collapsed. Now, there are those who advocate arming a civilian. I do not subscribe to that simply because when you do that to a regime that is willing to slaughter, they’ll just bring in helicopter gunships.
ROOT: Mm.
YOUSSEFIANI: What are you gonna do there? So I think we need to keep the discipline, civil disobedience, and supplying the people with information and grinding the regime down, grinding them down. Yes, the Iranian people are paying the brunt of that grinding, but in my view, it is next best to actually arming them. And certainly, dropping bombs has not been effective because this is a regime that will dig in deep underground and survive, and we need to make sure that the streets eventually stand up and take over.
ROOT: So what will it take to ultimately bring this regime down? Do you actually think, Mehrdad, that you can eventually, and how long might it take? Could this go on for weeks more? Could it go on for months more? Could it go on for a year more? ‘Cause the American people, sadly, you know, it’s not me, it’s not you, but the American people just don’t have the stomach for it. They don’t have the patience for it. They don’t have the bandwidth for it. They won’t pay the gas prices for it. In other words, they could knock our regime down before we get the Iran regime down. I’m a big Trump guy, but we may lose the midterms all because of Iran. Our regime’s in trouble just as much as their regime. I don’t know if we can outlast them unless this is gonna go quick.
YOUSSEFIANI: Well, yes. As an American of Iranian heritage, I appreciate exactly what you’re saying. You know, the prices at the gas stations, the grocery stores, we see all of that. The pain is here, but it has... When you compare it to what the ninety-two million people in Iran, that’s the second part of my hyphenation, Iranian American, the, when you see them and what they’re going through, I think to be brutally blunt and honest with you, this is not a short-term solution. This will not be resolved within a weekend, a week or two, or a few months. This, we ha- We’re in this for the long haul. We’ve got to grind it out. We’ve got to grind it out. I think the regime has overplayed its hand, and it targeted the midyear elections, as its window-
ROOT: Yes
YOUSSEFIANI: ... To squeeze a concession from Washington. I think it’s-
ROOT: And Trump won’t give in
YOUSSEFIANI: ... Overplayed its hand, and as the president said, the offer they just, made at the United Nations would’ve possibly maybe been acceptable months and months ago, prior during the MOU window. But they overplayed their hands, and they’re offering it now. I don’t think the president, as he announced, I don’t know anything special, but I don’t think he’s gonna accept it. And I think the, e-elections as the window by which things will need to be done by is no longer a threshold for the White House today, and the Iranian regime may have miscalculated terribly because the pressure is coming. And I think if it’s supplemented with other action, intelligence actions and regional actions, it may be the breaking point of the regime. But we should not, as American citizens, we should not expect this thing to go over, in a jiffy. It’ll be, it’ll take some time. Now, I think the oil and gas prices will stabilize and lower after the election window. But in terms of looking at where the Iranian regime is, we may still be, looking at a regime that will hang on for a little while longer. But I have confident and I have faith that eventually that wall will crumble.
ROOT: Are you a fan of how Trump has handled everything?
YOUSSEFIANI: Well, you know, like anything else, again, I wear two hats here, an Amer- an American as well as an Iro- as an Iranian. I have seen some good progress, but then I’ve seen some consistencies that have not been there as I would wish. But it’s a complicated, situation. It’s a complicated region. Things are not black and white. And what I may, what I may want today, is not what I can, demand in terms of policymakers.
ROOT: Well, but did Trump do a good job? I mean, he’s now got us to a point where he’s got Iran ready to collapse. Wouldn’t you say that’s, that he’s, he’s not only done a good job, but he’s done what you need to do in war, which is you need to change your strategy sometimes. Trump changed it. First it was bomb, and now it’s no bombing, and it’s just, strangle with sanctions.
YOUSSEFIANI: Absolutely. Supplementing the original kinetic action with the current economic pressures, I think that’s the right calibrated measure. Again, I just wanna caution, for people not to expect things to be resolved within a week or two.
ROOT: Right.
YOUSSEFIANI: It’ll take some time, but I think this is the right calibration of putting the boa constrictor around the regime’s neck, the economy, shutting it down, and of course you have the military posture of the, US military might, right in the region.
ROOT: I’ll tell you where I think Trump made a mistake, and I said this from day one. He should do constant updates with the American people, letting them know what’s going on, where we’re at, you know, what we’re planning to do, how long this is gonna be. Y-you know, you can hold people’s hands and make them hang in there a lot longer than leaving them in the dark, and he’s never done, to my knowledge, ever, you know, any sort of a fireside chat about the war in Iran and what’s happening and how quickly we can expect to move out of it. He’s never done one. And he needs to tell the American people, level with them, and tell them what’s going on. I wish he had done that. I’m his biggest backer. I’m a friend of his. You know, I had my honeymoon at Mar-a-Lago. You know I’m a friend of President Trump, but I don’t know why he’s not holding the hands of the American people. They need their hand held. To me, the whole issue is he’s done a bad job of PR. He’s done a good job of the war. He’s done a bad job of PR explaining the war.
YOUSSEFIANI: You’re talking about communications. That is an effective, tool, that the regime, of course, uses effectively on the other side.
ROOT: Mm.
YOUSSEFIANI: And I think what you’re saying, is, has merit in terms of having the heart to heart with the American people so they know where the direction is.
ROOT: Right.
YOUSSEFIANI: I can’t disagree with that.
ROOT: Will the US... Here’s my final question. Will the US eventually need to escalate military to close the deal, or can they do it with just sanctions and squeezing and squeezing and collapsing and collapsing? Or eventually, somehow, some way, you need to fi-finalize it with some bombing and maybe even some boots on the ground?
YOUSSEFIANI: Well, to be perfectly honest, I think outside of the non-kinetic action, I fear, and this is not something I say with positiveness, but I fear that at the end of the day, the regime, w- only, sees the caliber of power, used against it, military power, and that is what will... Almost brought it to its knees last round, and, some people argue that, the job should be finished, and that can only be done kinetically. I’m not sure. Maybe the economic, approach will help it, but at the end of the day, I can promise you this, that it will be the Iranian people themselves that will finish the job.
ROOT: I’ve got some really close friends of mine who are Iranian. Not even Iranian American, Iranian Canadian, but they love America, and they’re very pro-Trump. And they keep telling me that the Iranian government and the Iranian leaders may hate Israel and may hate Jews and wanna kill all the Jews. They said the Iranian people don’t think anything like that. The Iranian people for thousands of years were friends with the Jews. They say that if we can bring down this regime, Iran and Israel could be great friends again. Do you, do you see that as well?
YOUSSEFIANI: That is one area of communication I w- I wish could have been done better. Yes, that is the fact. The Iranian, the Persian civilization and the Jewish-
ROOT: Persian, right
YOUSSEFIANI: ... Civilization is a biblical relationship. It goes back three thousand years, twenty-five hundred years, in fact. I would like your re- your audience to learn this one point if they leave anything on this interview. The Jewish people living in Persia lived there side by, side by side-
ROOT: Mm-hmm
YOUSSEFIANI: ... By their Per- Persian neighbors for one thousand years-
ROOT: Wow
YOUSSEFIANI: ... Before the birth of Islam.
ROOT: Mm.
YOUSSEFIANI: Continuously to this date. So no, culturally, civilizationally, there is no animosity. It’s the political aspect that the Iranian regime has ideologized, ideologed, this whole battle, and that is something that will be reversed once the regime is gone.
ROOT: I thought of one more question. I can’t let you go till I ask one more question. The last leader that was a decent man was the Shah, and of course, they overthrew the Shah, the biggest mistake America ever made letting that happen, and then they got this extremist regime. The Shah’s son, a lot of my Persian friends claim that he could be and should be the new leader of the country, that people coalesce around him. Is that true, though? Would they do that, or do they not want the Shah’s son and they wanna just figure out for themselves who the new leader is? And of course, they could wind up electing another ideologue. Who knows? Does the Shah’s son figure into the future of Iran, in your opinion?
YOUSSEFIANI: This comes from somebody who served him for nearly two decades, so I... My, sort of, set of eyes into that is that, yes, he can play an important role. He has a credible, legitimate standing inside Iran, but the issue is ninety-two million people are no longer the same as back in seventy-eight-
ROOT: Right
YOUSSEFIANI: ... When his father was deposed. So we have a country where has a very good reference to the era before this regime. They look at that era as the golden era. However, the ideological spectrum of the Iranian nation today is not homogeneous, and thus, it will require a coalition of all forces, including the crown prince, who represents a very important segment of the population, maybe thirty-five, forty percent of the population, as those who desire a monarchy, but then you have a balance you gotta bring in, and of course, you have the regime’s o-own base of about ten percent. So it’s a coalition approach. He w- He can and is playing a very important role today, but it’s important to ensure that pluralism is represented in that coalition, and it, and that sort of a combination and approach will be the right approach to liberating Iran.
ROOT: Fair enough. All right, his name is Mehrdad Yousefianni. He is foreign policy and Middle East expert, the director of the Iran Freedom Project at the Middle East Forum, which you can find at meforum.org, ME for Middle East. ME, capital M, capital E, forum.org. ME forum. Do I have it right?
YOUSSEFIANI: MEforum.org.
ROOT: MEforum.org.
YOUSSEFIANI: One F.
ROOT: That’s it.
YOUSSEFIANI: One F.
ROOT: One F. Got it. Thank you. Appreciate it. We’ll be right back.
