The U.S. almost attacked Iran again on Tuesday. Details have emerged of a plan to install a virulently anti-American politician as leader of Iran when Israel and America attacked on Feb. 28.
Read more below.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The likelihood of a near-term uprising is very low … The internal controls seem very much intact in Iran.”
— Robert Gates, former U.S. Secretary of Defense
MBN Iran Briefing Podcast
Expert conversations unpacking the latest developments in Iran and how they are reshaping security, energy markets, and geopolitics across the Middle East.
TOP OF THE NEWS
The war has produced surprises from the start. This week delivered two more.
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had called off a military strike on Iran scheduled for the next day. Gulf leaders, he said, had asked him to stand down to allow negotiations to continue. “There seems to be a very good chance that they can work something out,” he told reporters at the White House.
It was the first time anyone had heard that an attack was planned for Tuesday.
The Iranian press noted the statement and hewed to the defiant line it has adopted throughout, quoting analysts who anticipate a widening of the scope of the war and noting that the U.S. president had “emphasized in a warning tone that Iran knows ‘what’s coming soon.’”
The attack might still happen, the president said: “I put it off for a little while, hopefully, maybe forever, but possibly for a little while.”
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at UN headquarters when he was president of Iran. Photo: Reuters.
The week’s second big surprise came in a New York Times report, which claimed that the United States and Israel went to war against Iran in Feb. 28 with a secret plan to install a new leader in Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former president and one of its most notorious political figures.
If true, nothing came of that that plan, of course. A strike on Ahmadinejad’s home in the Narmak district of east Tehran on the first day of the war, intended to free him from house arrest, wounded him instead. Initial reports inside Iran said he had been killed; those reports were quickly retracted. He has not been seen since.
Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013. At a 2005 conference in Tehran he quoted Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” He also denied the reality of the Holocaust, and oversaw aggressive expansion of the country’s nuclear program. He was, for years, the face of Iranian defiance of the West.
What made the U.S. and Israeli calculation so striking was the transformation of his domestic standing over time. After leaving office he clashed repeatedly with the clerical establishment, accused senior officials of corruption, and was barred from running for president multiple times by the Guardian Council – the last time after Khamenei himself advised against his candidacy.
In an article headlined “Where is Ahmadinejad and why is he silent?,” Fararu, one of Iran’s main news sites, noted that the man who had once placed himself at the front of resistance to Zionism had said nothing publicly about Israeli actions against Iran in the period between last year’s twelve-day war and the current conflict.
Armed But Not Rising Up
People walk near a billboard with an image of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters.
When the strikes began on Feb. 28, President Trump called on Iranians to rise up and seize their government. Embedded in that call was an assumption with a long history: that the Islamic Republic was brittle enough to crack under external pressure. The Green Movement of 2009, the protests of 2019, the Mahsa Amini uprising of 2022, and the brutally suppressed protests in Dec. 2025-Jan. 2026 all fed that hope. None of them brought the regime down, of course, and none were triggered by bombs. The decapitation strike on Feb. 28 killed Khamenei, and still produced no popular uprising.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been the most persistent advocate of that assumption. In July 2009, he told Robert Gates, then U.S. Secretary of Defense, that the Iranian regime was fragile and would “crumble at the first attack.” Gates says he told the Israeli Prime Minister then that he was “dead wrong.”
On Sunday, appearing on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Gates said: “The likelihood of a near-term uprising is very low … The internal controls seem very much intact in Iran.” He added: “You haven’t seen any demonstrations, or very few demonstrations in the street. People are cowed, they’re afraid, and right now they’re concerned with how they can eat and live under the current circumstance.”
The war seems to have made the regime harder to dislodge, not easier. Hard-line elites have consolidated power. The IRGC has squeezed out alternative voices within the system. Internal repression is likely to intensify against any signs of dissent. These dynamics reduce the likelihood of large-scale public protests even as economic pressures persist, as long-standing Iran analyst Danny Citrinowicz notes in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.
The repressive apparatus is not new but it is more active. According to a report issued on Monday by the Human Rights Activists New Agency (HRANA), since Feb. 28, authorities have made over 4,000 arrests on charges including espionage, national security threats, and sharing war-related content with foreign media. As I’ve previously reported here, there have been 50 executions in that period, over 30 of them linked to political or security charges.
Ahmedreza Radan, in charge of Iran’s law enforcement command, has said that over 6,500 “alleged homeland betrayers and spies” have been arrested since the beginning of the war. Since the ceasefire, Tehran has tightened its grip further.
A CNN report from Tehran on Monday showed weapons kiosks in Hafte Tir Square and Vanak Square, manned by masked IRGC instructors teaching civilians, including women in chadors and a small girl, to strip, assemble, and fire Kalashnikovs. On state television, a presenter on the Ofogh channel fired a rifle live into the studio ceiling after an on-air IRGC weapons lesson.
As I reported in this newsletter before, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf has warned that Iranian forces are “waiting” for U.S. troops. Iranian state media claims that over a million combatants are prepared for a ground war – in their words, “a wave of enthusiasm has emerged among Iranian ground fighters to create a ‘historical hell’ for the Americans on Iranian soil.”
Meanwhile, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian told executive branch officials to accept wartime hardship and warned against “any voice that breeds division.”
U.S. Treasury Tightens Sanctions on Iran
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Photo: Reuters.
The U.S. Treasury is tightening the noose on Iran. I asked my MBN colleague Abubakar Siddique, an expert on emerging threats, to explain what’s happening. Here’s what he told me:
The U.S. Treasury Department has stepped up its economic sanctions on Iran amid mounting speculation that Washington may return to war with Tehran as talks to end the war remain stalled.
The expanded sanctions, announced on May 19, aim to target the financial institutions, oil shipping fleets, and other mechanisms Tehran uses to fund terrorism and evade sweeping U.S. and international restrictions.
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the new sanctions aim at systematically dismantling Tehran’s “shadow banking system and shadow fleet,” which it uses to manipulate “the international financial system to wreak havoc.”
The new sanctions package targets dozens of companies, individuals, and vessels that are generating revenue for the Islamic Republic by facilitating oil sales, bringing in foreign currency, funding its militant proxies and investing in weapons, including missiles.
The sanctions freeze any assets of the listed entities and individuals in the U.S. and prohibit its citizens from doing business with them.
Photo: Reuters
Individuals who own Amin Exchange, an Iranian foreign exchange broker, have been sanctioned for assisting blocked Iranian banks in transferring hundreds of millions of dollars through shadowy companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries.
To further curb oil revenues and prevent funding for militant allies across the Middle East, the sanctions target 19 ships and numerous individuals and companies linked to Iran’s “shadow fleet,” responsible for moving massive amounts of the country’s oil, particularly to China.
In a move demonstrating Washington’s commitment to effective enforcement, the U.S. seized an oil tanker linked to Iran in the Indian Ocean on May 19. This tanker, the Skywave, had been sanctioned in March for shipping Iranian oil.
The current sanctions are part of the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to prevent Tehran from benefiting economically from the war. Iran has leveraged its control over the Strait of Hormuz to impose tolls on shipping while also benefiting from rising energy prices due to the war. A temporary U.S. license that permitted the sale of Iranian oil also generated windfall revenues for Tehran.
It is not clear yet whether the new sanctions can pressure the Islamic regime to end the war by agreeing to the U.S. demands. Tehran continues to evade sanctions with the help of its allies, such as China and Russia, potentially allowing it to pressure Washington into making further concessions.
So far, Tehran has attempted to absorb the pain imposed by the war and the U.S. blockade despite massive job losses. It has doled out cash, subsidies, and wage increases to appease a population extremely frustrated with the sinking economy and government corruption before the war.
The critical question now is how much more economic hardship Tehran is willing to impose on the Iranian people before reaching an agreement with the Trump administration to end the war.
