Ask five different experts whether Donald Trump can starve out the IRGC and you’ll get five different answers.

Hell, ask me the same question on five different days and you’ll probably get the same kind of response dispersion.

On most days, it feels like Trump’s losing the standoff. Whenever something important blows up — like the East-West Pipeline that connects the Saudi oil-producing heartland to the Red Sea port of Yanbu — it’s a reminder that the Guards retain the ability to inflict meaningful damage to critical infrastructure in the region either directly or through their proxies.

Similarly, the Houthi’s lightning offensive — which saw the group capture strategic coastal towns and an island in the Bab el-Mandeb last month — served further notice that whether the world wants to admit it, the group won the war in Yemen. It’s been a dozen years. They still control the capital and their capacity to disrupt maritime traffic through the Red Sea has only grown.

Whether they win the new war (the internationally-recognized Yemeni government on Monday announced a major military operation backed by Saudi air power aimed at reclaiming territory lost to the Houthis since 2016) is a separate issue.

As for the Strait of Hormuz, more oil’s getting through — a lot more — but prices are still elevated versus pre-war levels, and let’s face it: No one’s enamored with the idea of having to creep through the chokepoint with the lights and radio off under cover of darkness, even if the odds of doing so safely are higher than they were.

In the meantime, there’s no organized resistance in Iran, and unlike the Assad regime in Syria and other personalist dictatorships, the government in Tehran’s not a personality cult. It’s a military junta with a rubber-stamp legislature and a religious figurehead who no one’s even seen since his father and several members of his immediate family were killed one fateful day in late-February.

Could a nationwide popular uprising reach critical mass (there’s a nuclear joke there) such that the sheer number of aggrieved Iranians is sufficient to overrun the Guards and the security establishment? Yes. But tens, and quite possibly hundreds, of thousands of people would have to die across the country to wrest control. It’s very difficult to imagine that happening in the first place and even harder to picture what might come next.

The upshot is that the IRGC can sit around and wait for Trump to blink, or even just lose interest in the whole thing given the lack of a discernible end game. Post-World War II US military interventions are a case study in directionless quagmires, but in every case The White House could at least pretend to articulate a goal, even when that just meant restating nebulous allusions to creating “stable democracies” from the smoldering ashes of countries America bombed and invaded. Unless you count the whole “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon” refrain, the Trump administration doesn’t have a set list of objectives anymore.

All of that said, the Guards are in trouble. Over the weekend, security chief Mohsen Rezaei, not exactly a man famous for concessions, admitted during a meeting with Iran’s top civilian officials that the country’s experiencing its most acute crisis of the Revolutionary era save perhaps the war with Iraq, a war he fought in and advocated tirelessly.

Rezaei, who was appointed personally by Ruhollah Khomeini (the OG) to run the Guards in their formative years, stepped into his current role in August when Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr abruptly resigned. Zolghadr, you’ll recall, replaced the slain Ali Larijani who some hoped would be “Iran’s Delcy.”

The figure below gives you a sense of the currency’s free fall. The rial was 2.7 million per dollar on Monday and still weakening, according to what limited real-time information’s available.

You’ll note that the situation’s gotten dramatically worse since late -August. That’s a product of the US blockade and much as it may pain you to admit Scott Bessent succeeded at something, the rial’s snowballing losses strongly suggest tighter Treasury sanctions are working to accelerate an outright economic collapse.

It’s impossible to say where the breaking point is. After all, hyperinflation never drove Nicolas Maduro from power, and the Venezuelan army and security services are nothing compared to the Guards.

Still, there’s only so much people can take before they feel they don’t have anything left to lose. Masoud Pezeshkian’s still apologizing, but nobody cares because everyone knows he doesn’t have any say in the negotiating process.

“The enemy’s plan in recent months has been to cut off the country’s vital arteries with the aim of pressuring the noble people of Iran,” he wrote on social media. “Economic pressure has intensified, but by the grace of God, with the accompaniment of the people and the measures taken by our colleagues in the government, we have not allowed the enemy’s objectives in the economic war to be realized.”

That’s pretty euphemistic. It’s hard to see how engineered hyperinflation doesn’t count as the “realization” of Bessent’s pressure campaign. And the truth is, the Iranian people would be out and about demanding change were it not for the fact they’d be clubbed and shot in the streets by the Basij. Or rounded up and murdered.

But, again, it’s not clear the threat of violence will be enough to suppress public discontent in the face of ruinous inflation. As The New York Times observed, both government and private sector employees “have taken to social media to say they were quitting their jobs because their salaries could no longer support them.” And local media reports suggest retired government employees have seen their pensions payments cut.

The Guards couldn’t care less about the plight of everyday Iranians, but they’d rather not find themselves back in a position where they “have” to kill a few thousand people lest the public should get any ideas about taking matters into their own hands like they did in January.

As the Times noted in the same linked article, US restrictions on air travel between Tehran and the rest of the world have “add[ed] a new layer of economic isolation that could hurt critical imports, including medicine.”