Iran’s troubled regime cracks down hard as Trump ratchets up pressure

The regime is brittle, but it’s quite brutally intact,” Dr. H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told CNN..."There hasn’t been any serious elite or security defections as of yet. And if you don’t have that, then any sort of intervention from the United States is not likely to actually be very helpful in the short to medium term. There’s a lot of hollowing out, of course. There’s severe economic challenges, if not complete collapse. There’s a very broad protest coalition, of course, but it (the regime) is held together, and it’s held together by very cohesive and very coercive forces."