Managing Collapse from Within
Oligarchy, Livelihood Breakdown, and the Dangerous Game with the Country’s Fate
Jeffrey Sachs’s recent speech at the United Nations Security Council—though formally addressing violations of the UN Charter and the intervention of major powers in countries like Venezuela—carries, for us in Iran these days, a deeper and more alarming meaning. What Sachs called “coercion, sanctions, and economic strangulation” can be seen in Iran as a mix of the same phenomena, but in a form that has made the crisis more complex and dangerous. A crisis that I believe is best described by the phrase: managing collapse from within by a corrupt local oligarchy.
In Iran today, the economic crisis and the explosion of prices can no longer be reduced to external sanctions alone. The unprecedented rise in the dollar exchange rate, the runaway inflation of basic goods, and the collapse of people’s livelihoods are the result of external pressure coinciding with the active role of a domestic network of spies and vested interests—those who profit from instability, care nothing for people’s lives or the country’s political future, and are even prepared to surrender national sovereignty, compromise territorial integrity, and then flee.
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The Oligarchy: Crisis Speculator and Engineer of Inflation
The oligarchy dominating Iran’s economy is a tangled network of rent-seekers, currency brokers, monopolistic importers, semi-government contractors, and parts of the political bureaucracy. They are not merely victims of sanctions, but direct beneficiaries of their continuation.
For this network:
• The dollar’s surge is an opportunity, not a threat.
• Inflation is a tool to transfer wealth from below to above.
• The collapse of people’s purchasing power is the price of preserving monopoly and rent.
In such a structure, corruption is not a “deviation” but the systemic logic itself. The existing order can only persist in this exact form. Even the rise in exchange rates is no longer the result of random decisions or pure external pressure, but largely the product of deliberate manipulation of the currency market, dual policies, and intentional refusal to enact structural reforms.
Managed Collapse: A Project Aligned with External Interests
More dangerously, this same oligarchy has, at a deeper level, practically converged with scenarios of regime collapse that serve U.S. and Israeli interests. This convergence is not ideological but dictated by economic interests.
This managed collapse:
• Devalues assets.
• Facilitates capital flight.
• Opens the way for redistribution of power in favor of networks already tied to global centers of strength.
Thus, many of the anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans are little more than rhetorical cover for policies that lead precisely to the outcome Washington and Tel Aviv desire: a weak, unstable, isolated Iran drowning in internal crises.
Absence of Will at the Top; Strategic Paralysis
In this situation, the absence of genuine will at the top of the political and security system plays a decisive role. Neither the supreme leadership nor the military-security establishment has shown serious intent to:
• Break the oligarchy’s influence.
• Contain structural corruption.
• Rebuild economic policy in favor of society.
• Or enact real change in foreign policy to secure sustainable security.
Global experiences—including those Sachs referenced—show that sustainable security comes through smart de-escalation and reliance on global power balances. Yet Iran remains dangerously suspended.
Deliberate Sabotage of Relations with China and Russia
The oligarchy has also played a major role in sabotaging strategic relations with China and Russia. At different times:
• Agreements were drafted vaguely and ineffectively.
• Economic and structural cooperation was deliberately obstructed or emptied of substance.
• Media narratives portrayed these relations as “dependency” or “selling out the country.”
The result was not independence but deeper isolation for Iran—an isolation that served both the domestic oligarchy and Iran’s external adversaries.
Without an active, transparent, and balanced foreign policy, Iran has neither truly aligned with the East nor reached sustainable understanding with the West. Instead, it remains stuck in a costly, exhausting middle ground—exactly what internal compromise-seeking currents, including a significant part of the reformist camp, aim for, ultimately pushing the country toward a negotiation table that leads to complete surrender.
Protests: Society’s Response to the Alliance of Corruption and Political Paralysis
The recent protests in Iran are society’s direct response to this undeclared alliance between internal corruption, political deadlock, and external pressure. A people growing poorer by the day rightly ask: Who is responsible? Who benefits from this situation? Why is no one held accountable?
These protests—though exploited by Iran’s enemies abroad and steered by their paid media—are not a foreign project nor an internal conspiracy. They are the natural result of decades of destructive domestic policies that sacrificed the people, weakened the country, and made it more fragile.
What brought Iran to this point is the coexistence of sanctions and a corrupt oligarchy, combined with the absence of political will for change.
If this path continues, there will be no independence, no security, and not even a reformable system.
We have reached the end of the road. Iran stands before a historic choice: Either break the power of the corrupt oligarchy and return politics to serving society, Or slide gradually into a collapse planned by others.
There is no third way.
Reza Fani Yazdi January 16, 2026