Why the Trump-Putin bromance could finally topple Iran's ayatollahs

Telegraph

24-03-2025

It was by far the biggest and most destructive use of American military might of his second presidency. Last weekend, the 'war ending' president Donald Trump ordered US forces into action in Yemen, bombing the Houthis, who are blamed for attacks in the Red Sea. At least 53 people were killed.
But this show of force was not simply about keeping the shipping lanes open. It was a message – a gauntlet thrown down – to another country entirely.
'Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN,' Mr Trump announced on social media. 'And IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!'
The challenge is significant. Though less discussed than Gaza and Ukraine, Iran's nuclear programme is one of the biggest problems in Mr Trump's inbox.
In 2018 he killed off the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that gave Iran sanctions relief for curtailing its nuclear program. Since then, Tehran's officially-peaceful atomic projects have gone from strength to strength.
Today, the regime has enough highly-enriched uranium to turn out weapons-grade material for at least five bombs. The lead time between an order being given and warheads rolling off production lines is estimated not in years but in weeks.
On March 7, Mr Trump wrote a letter to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei setting a two month deadline for a new nuclear deal to be signed.
A day earlier, Israeli jets flew a joint exercise with American B52 bombers – one of only two aircraft capable of delivering the bombs needed to hit and destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The other aircraft, the B2-Spirit, was used in the weekend strikes on Yemen.
The messaging is clear: a decades-long effort to prevent an Iranian bomb is reaching crisis point. Only Mr Trump can decide whether to avert it through diplomacy or military means.
But the difficulty is that both options will put him at odds with a man he has now appears to be cosying up to: Russian president Vladimir Putin, ally of the ayatollahs.
Now the question is: will Russia defend the clerics in Tehran, or sacrifice their regime on the altar of Russo-American rapprochement?
Destruction or humiliation
The early signs are that there is plenty for the ayatollahs to worry about. When Trump and Putin spoke at length this week, in an ostensible effort to end the Ukraine war, there was cosy talk that the Middle East was 'a region of potential cooperation to prevent future conflicts'.
Immediately afterwards Vladimir Putin contacted Iran to offer his services as an intermediary with the Americans. The Russians 'said Trump wants to talk and is preferring it over war,' one regime insider told The Telegraph.
The nightmare scenario in Tehran is that Putin may withdraw his support for the regime in return for Trump's support over Ukraine, and that a Russo-American alliance could force it into humiliating compliance over the nuclear issue. The humbling of Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28 remains a vivid warning. 'There is a big uncertainty around after what happened [to Zelensky] in the White House,' says the source.
But the consequence of snubbing Putin and Trump's overtures is hardly more appealing.
'The offer [From Trump for ending the war on Ukraine] feels like being stuck on a two-way road [where] one path leads to war and destruction and the other leads to humiliation. Yet, no one here wants to reject any offer from Putin – yes, it's a difficult situation,' adds the source.
Nor is there any guarantee that, for an already weakened regime, humiliation is survivable either.
The final straw
Iran has seen more than a dozen dynasties come and go in the two-and-a-half millennia since Cyrus the Great founded the first Persian empire. Some, like Cyrus's first empire, fell to foreign invasion. Others, like the Pahlavi monarchy overthrown in 1979, to internal strife.
Most collapses have also involved economic dysfunction and environmental crisis. Indeed, irrigation on the Iranian plateau has been essential to the survival of every dynasty since drought contributed to the decline of the Achaemenid empire more than 2,000 years ago.
Each challenge alone is capable of toppling Iran's rulers. But in 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran is grappling with all of them at once.
In the past year, it has suffered humiliating military defeat: Israel's humbling of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the fall of Bashar al Assad in Syria, has left its much-touted 'Axis of Resistance' in tatters. Israeli airstrikes on Iranian territory last year severely depleted the air defence network and the machines that make rocket fuel for surface-to-air missiles.
The economy is in free-fall: inflation is running at over 35 per cent. In November, the government introduced two-hour rolling blackouts in response to a critical fuel shortage – an astounding sign of weakness in the oil- and gas-rich country.
And an under-reported, but severe and years-long, drought has produced crippling water shortages.
Taken together, these reverses have left the regime shrouded in a profound crisis of legitimacy that limits its leeway for unpopular but necessary economic reform, and could eventually bring down the entire revolutionary project.
'The fall of the regime is a perennial question. But this year feels different,' said a Western official who has worked closely on the Iran file. Inside the country the feeling is much the same.
'The situation is very difficult…they feel the regime has never been as weak and incapable as it is now ... It has become desperate and incapacitated,' said Mohammad Rasoulof, an exiled film director, of the mood of his friends and relatives back home. 'Iran's regional ambitions, whereby it really had wrought all this chaos in the region, have really fallen to pieces over the last year. This is of major significance.
'At the same time it is clearly apparent that there are huge divisions within the regime itself. There are those who believe that it's no longer possible to keep confronting the world this way. There are those who think that getting the nuclear bomb is an absolute must. [And] there are those who think that we need much stronger relations with China and Russia.'
It is not only staunch regime critics like Mr Rasoulof who can see legitimacy falling away.
Iran's top judge recently acknowledged that rampant corruption is eroding the regime's key support among its base. Remaining popular backing would sour, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i warned fellow officials, 'if we fail to control our greed'.
The situation is so desperate, one senior Iranian official told The Telegraph, that Khamenei must choose between negotiating with America to ease the economic pain, or finally building a bomb as the ultimate insurance policy.
'Those are the only ways for the regime to survive,' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Current indecision over which path to choose, he added, is 'driving the regime toward collapse'.
A new revolution
Ultimately, regime change is most likely to come from within. And in many ways the scene seems set for a new revolution.
Parallels between the fragility of today and the circumstances that led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 are not exact. Yet there are similarities. At the end of the 1970s an inflation shock coupled with sharp austerity policies came as an unpleasant surprise to a population accustomed to rising living standards. It is not difficult to find middle-class Iranians suffering just such impoverishment today. And many of the older generation see direct parallels with the fall of the Shah.
'I saw a revolution happening right here before my eyes,' one bookstore owner on Tehran's Enghelab (revolution) street told The Telegraph by phone. 'And I won't die before I see another.'
The class of small traders and shopkeepers called bazaaris played a key – possibly the decisive – role in the 1979 revolution.
The 68-year-old, who said he used to close his shop to join the people on the streets in the days leading up to the revolution in 1979, said he now felt 'fooled' by the promises made by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. 'It seemed like a good decision at the time, but if I had known this would be the outcome, I would never have done it,' he said. 'The people are turning away from the regime, and the regime is becoming more brutal – they can't hold on, just as the Shah couldn't,' he said.
The bazaaris today do not have the economic or political clout they had 45 years ago, and their regrets today do not constitute a rebellion. But regime insiders say they know a moment of maximum revolutionary danger is fast approaching.
At 85, Khamenei, the current supreme leader, is nearing the end of his life.
Earlier this year he was photographed wearing what looked like a bullet-proof vest under his robes, suggesting that he fears someone may try to give nature a helping hand.
However he eventually dies, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, a crucial paramilitary force loyal to the regime) assumes his demise and the appointment of a successor will be accompanied by an enormous anti-regime uprising.
'The suppression of protests you have seen in recent years is just a warm-up for the ultimate one, which will happen after the death of the supreme leader,' a member of the IRGC's auxiliary Basij militia told The Telegraph last year.
One reason the regime is so worried about that uprising is that it is likely to bring together dissidents from across the political spectrum.
Iranian and foreign pundits generally agree that Khamenei's most likely successor is his second son Mojtaba. Some believe Mojtaba has plans for a set of reforms modelled on the policies of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
The goal would be to take enough modernising steps to repair relations with the West and the Iranian public as a means of cementing the regime's grip on power.
Mojtaber, however, is no reformer. He is well regarded in the IRGC and his inner circle includes some of Iran's most ideologically extreme clerics.
So his appointment will certainly provoke a backlash from both anti-regime Iranians and regime loyalists appalled at the prospect of the revolutionary republic turning into another hereditary monarchy.
They will not succeed, the militia man confidently predicted. The IRGC will use 'force to silence any opposition to Mojtaba's leadership,' he said.
Trump's options
What does all this mean for Donald Trump as he tries to head off an Iranian bomb?
The first is that he has genuine economic leverage.
'I think certainly 'maximum pressure' if it's re-implemented in the way it was last time, would accelerate the process of economic collapse,' said Professor Ali Ansari, head of the centre for Iranian studies at St Andrews University, referring to the merciless sanctions regime Mr Trump resumed on Tuesday.
Mr Trump's first exertion of maximum economic pressure, after he quit the original nuclear deal in 2018, drove Iran's oil exports to near-zero by the end of his first term. It caused economic chaos, but failed to force Iran back to the negotiating table.
This time, many with inside knowledge of the Tehran theocracy are convinced the country cannot survive another round, and that negotiating, cautiously, for sanctions relief is imperative.
'I believe that we should negotiate with everyone except the Zionist regime [Israel] – but we must know America better,' said Mohammad Javad Zarif, the reformist former vice president who as foreign minister negotiated the 2015 deal.
Shortly after making those comments he was forced to resign following a backlash from hardline opponents, underlining the deep divisions inside the regime.
If it comes to military action, most observers assume Mr Trump would rather Israel do the actual bombing.
Israel's air force has been rehearsing the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities for more than a decade, and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has several times come close to ordering the raid.
Israeli forces did some of the preparatory work in October, when they destroyed Iranian S-300 air defences around Tehran.
The Russian role here is also important. Vladimir Putin's backing – or at least acquiescence – would make the mission much safer.
But there remain major challenges. For a start, suppressing air defences, providing fighter cover and hitting the targets would require a fighter package of 100 aircraft and take all of Israel's aerial refuelling capacity, a 2012 study by the US Congressional Research Service found.
That alone is not an insurmountable obstacle for an air force as large and well trained as Israel's. But the size of the bombs required does present a problem.
Israel's US-supplied 'bunker buster' bombs, like that used to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in October, are designed to penetrate up to six feet of reinforced concrete.
Iran's Fordow enrichment plant, however, is built into a mountain beneath an estimated 89 metres of solid rock, and the regime has built underground 'missile cities' in every province.
The only known non-nuclear weapon in existence that could hit a target like that is a six-metre, 12-ton monster called the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).
The MOP was developed, and is exclusively operated, by the United States for exactly this job. It is so massive it can only be carried by American heavy bombers like the B2 Spirit or the B-52, neither of which Israel possesses.
So American involvement is probably inevitable. Hence the recent high-profile deployments of both aircraft.
Beyond that, the success of the mission would depend above all on reliable intelligence.
Over the past year, Israel has demonstrated remarkable intelligence penetration of Iran's security services, so it is possible its intelligence agency Mossad is able to identify hidden sites.
But if Israeli and American spies miss just one underground facility, or the bombs fail completely to destroy the ones they have identified, the mission could prove fruitless.
The fallout
Some anti-regime Iranians believe such a bombing raid might be enough to destroy Khamenei's remaining credibility.
Many, however, are less certain. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran after the 1979 revolution ironically legitimised the new regime – as Iranians, including monarchist remnants, rallied to defend the nation.
Another problem with regime change is that there are no obvious alternative leaders inside Iran. The hope of finding a pragmatic partner inside the regime may be illusory. And none of the plethora of would-be leaders outside Iran have much credibility inside.
Reza Pahlavi, the Pahlavi crown prince, campaigns for a democratic transition from exile in the United States. But for all the fatigue with the mullahs, there's little enthusiasm for a return to monarchy. 'It would be like eating something you've already thrown up,' one recent Iranian exile said. Pahlavi himself sensibly plays down the prospect of a royal restoration, though his supporters dream of it.
Most toxic of all is Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) and self-styled Council of National Resistance. While her well-oiled (and funded) PR machine has had some success in styling her as a leader-in-waiting in the West, inside Iran she and the MEK are almost universally hated as terrorists and traitors for siding with then- Iraqi-leader Saddam Hussein in his unprovoked invasion in the 1980s. A report commissioned by the US government in 2009 concluded the organisation operated like a cult.
Change, then, is most likely to come from Iranians themselves.
As Mr Rasoulof notes, that could 'be a long, painful road'. But, as the people of neighbouring Syria can testify all too vividly for the ayatollahs' comfort, it could come very, very quickly.