The country is already damaged at or near the point of no return (without outside help) and grows exponentially worse by the day.
Try finding 500 million dollars per day. The real number is higher. They have to cut hundreds of millions of dollars per day in budget. It is just not possible.
The best case is that they only deplete all strategic reserves and end up as debt-slaves to China. That is a catastrophe.
The bigger issue is when they can no longer export their oil. Oil infrastructure cannot be shut down. If you shut it down it takes ages to turn it back on. So the better thing to do is to sell it as fast as possible and keep the process open. If the Iranians are unable to bring their oil to market then it backs up and if it backs up and fills the reserves then they have to shut down production. If they shut down production their entire economy (or what's left of it) shuts down too. Iran has no exports. Oil is the driving engine of the economy. This is why the blockade is so important.
Trump doesn't want to keep bombing Iran, The more the war goes on the more there are " unplanned effects" (the pilot shoot downs are the clearest example) , And these unplanned effects have a very real possibility blowing up in his face and making the whole thing a domestic failure (imagine if the two airmen were captured and/or executed by the iranians on TV?). However, if the Trump administration can shut down the Iranian economy, then the Iranian state will be unable to pay its civil servants. These civil servants as of now are the only people outside of the irgc that have anything to gain from the continued existence of the regime. Cut off their paychecks and they have no loyalty.
Combine this with the excellent intelligence which the Israelis definitely have in Iran, and we're looking at grounds for a real revolution.
Pause of dropping of missiles and bombs allows both the Americans and the Israelis to rebuild and redefine list of targets.
Frankly, this has been the very successful and bloodless conflict on our ends. The few US servicemen who were killed, as terrible as that is, it's clear that they died because an Iranian missile hit a FOB that was made of something like a shipping container. On the Israeli front of the war, while the Air Force is unharmed, there have been few casualties in Lebanon. But overall this has been a pretty "clean" conflict so far.
Now imagine if the rest of five eyes openly joined in and the political class wasn't so afraid of their Muslim population.
From what I've read and from what I know, those in the defense sectors of the UK cannot stand the fact that labor is preventing them from doing anything to secure the protection of the because of "muh israel and muh politics".
Just as October 7th had a regional impact, I can only be comparable to the Yom Kippur war, this current " expedition" in Iran will have an impact when it comes to European powers, similar to that of the Suez crisis.
Just a quick aside, the geopolitical basement commentary channels aren't exactly the best place to pull information from. They're regurgitating documents that have been regurgitated four times over and are published in axios or from Twitter threads from people who actually study this shit for a living. (Yes this is directed as the guy who said "China's watching"). International relations is 1/3 understanding history, 1/3 understanding current politics, and 1/3 art. To have a true understanding and a true knowledge of the situation which you want to talk about, you have to jettison all preconceived ideas. You might hate the enemy. You might think they're the dumbest people in the face of the Earth, but the enemy has a vote too. Tropes and memes like "occums razor" are rarely things that make sense in reality. If you're a redditor or you think like one or are low IQ, it allows you to smugly attempt to understand what's going on in the world. The reality is that no one is in charge. Everyone is doing what they think is the right thing to do, every system is interconnected and there is no conspiracy/5d chess/master of puppets/puller of strings, And there never are "easy answers". Finally remember IT'S ALWAYS DOMESTIC POLITICS (for both countries, it's their own respective domestic politics).
If you go in with those mindsets you'll find yourself better understanding the world around you.
