Conservatives in Iran adhere to the concept of "resistance economy" based on confronting sanctions and employing the regional influence network to secure control over the Straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab and turn them into financial and security blackmail files for the countries of the world, not to mention the wealth it obtains from the countries in which it plants its proxies, while reformists believe that economic recovery cannot take place outside the oil, gas, trade, and natural openness sectors.
The disagreement between the two camps has begun to approach the structure of power itself with the decline of popular trust and the escalation of talk about the future of the leadership and the mechanisms of power transfer within a system based on revolutionary and religious legitimacy, and this has led to a widening gap between society and the state, despite the regime remaining cohesive thanks to its militia and repressive formula, not thanks to the satisfaction of the people.
Even foreign alliances have become subject to review. In the twelve-day war and the forty-day war and what followed them, Iran found itself facing a harsh test of its relationship with its allies. Moscow and Beijing were content with political positions and providing intelligence information (as reported by The Washington Post and Reuters), as if the issue was limited to determining the locations of US forces, not the effectiveness of missile and drone weapons in the first place. In conclusion, all of this led to opening another internal discussion about the value of alliances in the face of a real existential confrontation.
The Iranian problem today is not in one event, but in long accumulations that have made the options narrower; either Tehran rearranges its foreign priorities and opens a path to restore trust internally, or the division continues under the pressure of sanctions and Israeli, American, and perhaps international threats.
Iran stands before a review that has been postponed for years, but the most important question remains: will it be able to manage this transformation intelligently, or will the accumulation of crises make change more costly for it and for the region?
