The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz

Elliot Kaufman and Yonah Jeremy Bob are the co-authors of the new book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis – an inside account of the decisions, debates, and personalities that shaped Israel’s multi-front war, from October 7 to Hezbollah and ultimately Iran.

Elliot Kaufman is an editorial writer and member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where he focuses on Israel and Iran and has covered the war since October 7.

Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military analyst at The Jerusalem Post and the author of several books, including Target Tehran.

Their reporting draws on extensive access to senior military, intelligence, and political officials.

The Islamic Republic may discover that surviving the war was the easy part. Its military has been mauled, its deterrence shattered, its proxies weakened, and now an already dysfunctional economy faces relentless pressure — with no victory to rally around and no economic rescue on the horizon.

On the latest episode of The Iran Breakdown, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by FDD’s Miad Maleki, a former senior Treasury sanctions official, to explain why the regime’s greatest threat may no longer come from American bombers or Israeli jets, but from an economic crisis it cannot bomb, repress, or print its way out of.

For decades, Washington and Jerusalem worried about Iran dominating the Middle East. But as the Islamic Republic weakens, is Erdogan’s Turkey positioning itself to become the region’s next great revisionist power?

Mark Dubowitz is joined by two Turkey and Middle East experts: Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at FDD.

They discuss Erdogan’s ambitions, Turkey’s growing confrontation with Israel in Syria, Ankara’s support for Hamas, its complicated relationship with Tehran, its future in NATO—and whether Turkey could eventually pursue nuclear weapons.

The central question: As Iran declines, is Turkey the next big Islamist threat?

In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, Mark Dubowitz sits down with FDD’s Rich Goldberg for a wide-ranging discussion on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, global energy markets and America’s growing energy dominance.
Rich leads FDD’s Energy and National Security Program and served in the second Trump administration, where he helped establish the White House National Energy Dominance Council. During the first Trump administration, he served at the White House as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. A former Navy intelligence officer with experience on the Joint Staff and in Afghanistan, Rich also spent years on Capitol Hill, where he was a lead architect of sanctions against Iran. Iran sanctioned him in 2020
Mark and Rich examine the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, the resilience and the risks in global energy markets, emerging workarounds to bypass the strait, America’s expanding energy power and China’s role in the equation. It’s a conversation about more than barrels and pipelines—it’s about energy, economics and military power, and the central question: Does Iran have Trump over a barrel—or is it the other way around?
Relevant article: Tehran is losing its grip on Hormuz, and with it all its leverage

What makes the Islamic Republic of Iran different from a conventional regime seeking security, prosperity, and survival? Its ideological DNA fuses Maoist revolutionary thought, Frantz Fanon’s vision of anticolonial struggle and redemptive violence—channeled through Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati—and a revolutionary Shia theology of martyrdom, resistance, and struggle against oppression.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder and first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, forged these currents into a revolutionary state whose legitimacy rests not simply on governing Iran, but on resisting an international order it considers fundamentally unjust.
That helps explain the regime’s remarkable ability to turn military defeats, economic devastation, and mass suffering into narratives of resistance, sacrifice, and even victory.
Haviv Rettig Gur—Middle East analyst at The Free Press, and host of Ask Haviv Anything—joins Mark Dubowitz on The Iran Breakdown to unpack the ideological DNA of the Islamic Republic, why it has endured, and what its enemies still misunderstand about the regime they are fighting.