Harounoff: Iran's greatest strength is that it's not a democracy

Iran's regime slaughtered its own people in January and the world moved on. British-Iranian journalist Jonathan Harounoff speaks on the people nobody is negotiating for.

More than a month and a half after the US–Iran memorandum of understanding was signed, talks remain frozen in what Harounoff calls a Groundhog Day cycle of revived and denied negotiations. The Iranian people were never on the agenda in the first place. Speaking to Deep Dive host Jacob Laznik, he describes a "tale of two Irans" — a regime with a bottomless reserve for missiles and cutting-edge military technology, and a population facing blackouts, water shortages and inflation it cannot survive. His sharpest point cuts against Western assumptions entirely: the Islamic Republic's single greatest strategic asset is that it isn't a democracy. It doesn't answer to polls, petrol prices or public fury, so its strategy is not to defeat Washington and Jerusalem militarily but to out-suffer them in a war of attrition, with the Strait of Hormuz as its bargaining chip.

Harounoff spent nearly two years as Israel's international spokesperson at the United Nations, and he is unsparing about what he saw there: a Secretary-General who took two to three weeks to issue a statement of concern after the January killings, when comparable events elsewhere in the region would have produced a response within hours. He argues the deeper problem isn't indifference but access, the longest internet blackout in recent history sealed off the voices that might have forced the story onto the agenda, the gap his book Unveiled: Inside Iran's #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt set out to fill. And he closes on the observation that most unsettles Western listeners: the people lobbying him hardest for continued operations against the Islamic Republic are Iranians themselves: At Nowruz parties in Brooklyn, from families with relatives still inside the country. The ones with actual skin in the game.