Another CRUSHING Defeat: US Out Of Options In Iran | Patrick Hennings

## Introduction and Iran reporting A scene that should have been an emblem of collapse instead became proof of resilience: millions in the streets of Tehran and cities across Iran, mourning and defiant after a high-profile assassination. The spectacle of mass funerary processions — stretching over days and spanning national and transnational centers of Shi‘a devotion — exposed a strategic miscalculation by foreign actors who banked on fragmentation. Reporting from the ground, Patrick Henningsen conveys how what many Western narratives presented as a brittle polity was instead a society that answered external violence with public unity and renewed political purpose. The implications go far beyond domestic legitimacy: they redraw the contours of deterrence, propaganda warfare, and regional alliances in a multi-polar contest between the United States, Israel, Iran, Russia, and China. ## Western media narratives on Iran One of the clearest takeaways from the exchange is how entrenched and instrumentalized Western media narratives about Iran have become. Henningsen and the conversation expose a sequence that repeats across multiple theaters: shocking allegations, moral outrage, and a public opinion arc designed to make military action tolerable or even righteous. Claims of mass killings, unsourced atrocities and grotesque headlines are not neutral reporting mishaps; they function as preparatory rhetoric, building a moral case for coercion or intervention. The transcript points to a pattern — the same rhetorical architecture deployed against Saddam Hussein, then Saddam’s regime; later, against other targets. Whether or not journalists intend it, such narratives are part of a wider policy ecosystem in which intelligence, diplomatic aims, and media output circulate in tandem. Beyond intentionality, the mismatch between ground reality and dominant narratives was striking. The reported presence of tens of millions participating in funeral rites — admitted even by mainstream Western outlets — undermines portrayals of a regime on the edge. Henningsen argues that the Western strategy relied on a calculable public opinion reaction: demonize, isolate, and then exploit internal discontent. But when the evidence on the ground contradicts the preparatory tale, propaganda not only fails to justify force but also accelerates the consolidation of the very order it sought to dislodge. ## Iran after attacks: unity and anger The visceral public response captured by the processions was not simply grief; it was political energy. The funeral gatherings served as a kind of social litmus test, demonstrating how external attack can compress domestic divides into a more unified front. Henningsen’s reporting describes an almost theatrical unity: elderly women and young liberals chanting in a chorus that ranged from demands for vengeance to categorical rejections of further negotiations with the United States. The assassination did what years of economic pressure and opposition support had not: it delegitimized the domestic opposition that external powers had invested in and strengthened the central narrative of victimhood and resistance. This is not to suggest unanimity on all policy questions inside Iran. Many Iranians remain critical of their government on governance and economic performance. But when existential threat is perceived — and when families are directly harmed by foreign strikes — domestic grievances often recede under a broader imperative of defense. What stands out in the conversation is the role of agency: citizens did not need to be ordered to mobilize. Volunteer networks, improvised logistics for feeding and sheltering millions, and spontaneous displays of solidarity suggest a civil society that can rapidly convert mourning into organized political expression. That civic capacity has a strategic payoff: it complicates foreign plans that expected civil unrest to translate into regime collapse. ## Iran, Shia Islam, and the Muslim world The funeral processions were not bounded by Iran’s borders. The movement of remains through holy cities in Iraq and the participation of Iraqi Shi‘a highlight how religious affinity shapes transnational politics in the region. Henningsen emphasizes that Iran’s appeal is not purely ideological; it is embedded in a civilizational matrix that predates modern statehood. For many in the broader Muslim world, the conflict has been reframed as more than a Sunni–Shi‘a binary: it asserts a collective solidarity with Palestine and a shared opposition to perceived Western-Israeli aggression. This religious and civilizational dimension does double strategic work. First, it gives Tehran an ability to project influence through non-state and soft-power channels — clerical networks, pilgrimage routes, and commemorative practices — that are resilient to conventional military or economic pressure. Second, it amplifies Iran’s capacity for asymmetric deterrence. When a strike against Iran resonates across the Ummah, the cost for the attacker is not limited to bilateral retaliations; it risks widening the conflict and hardening the positions of allied actors. The conversation therefore reframes the conflict not as a narrow interstate spat but as a multilayered struggle over narrative, identity, and regional moral authority. ## A new revolutionary moment Perhaps the most consequential thesis from the on-the-ground reporting is that Iran has entered what Henningsen describes as a “new revolutionary moment.” Unlike earlier generations whose revolutionary memory was transmitted through museums and anecdote, the current cohort — young people who have witnessed direct military confrontation and the impact of modern bombardment — now carry an immediate, visceral memory of attack. That direct experience can renew revolutionary identity not as archaic nostalgia but as contemporary praxis. This shift matters for how Iran will approach both internal reform and external diplomacy. A population galvanized by external assault will likely demand a harder line against perceived betrayals and concessions. Moreover, leaders who claim the mantle of defense and survival accrue legitimacy no longer tied solely to ideological orthodoxy, but to demonstrable stewardship in crisis. The outcome could be political stabilization under a more assertive foreign policy posture. Western planners who imagined that coercion could catalyze political liberalization may instead have birthed a longer-term consolidation of the revolutionary state. ## Iran’s deterrence and global role One of the most original lines in the discussion concerns the nature of Iran’s deterrence. Henningsen argues that Iran has achieved a form of “geographical deterrence” and strategic patience that has flipped conventional expectations. Outgunned by U.S. and Israeli firepower, Tehran has leveraged terrain, social networks, and asymmetric capabilities to make its retaliation calculus costly and unpredictable. This is not a grand technological transformation but an adaptive geopolitics: controlling key chokepoints, arming proxies with reach, and embedding retaliatory capacity in decentralized manners that complicate targeting logic. At the same time, Iran’s diplomatic posture — patient, culturally rooted, and rhetorically framed as civilization defense — positions it as a more significant node in a nascent multipolar architecture. Its ties with Russia and China are transactional but increasingly significant; the erosion of U.S. hegemony and the rise of alternative economic and security partnerships mean that punishing Iran via sanctions and isolation is becoming less effective. Henningsen highlights the paradox: punitive measures designed to coerce have instead driven Tehran toward strategic autonomy and regional leadership that resist long-term containment. ## What comes next in the conflict Looking ahead, the conversation sketches several plausible trajectories, none easily predictable. First, t

Another CRUSHING Defeat: US Out Of Options In Iran | Patrick Hennings Trump is losing the last chance there was for a face-saving exit from Iran. And he doesn't even know why. U.S. journalist Patrick Henningsen returns to Neutrality Studies after reporting from Iran. He and Pascal Lottaz discuss the funeral processions he saw, public unity under pressure, Iran’s political culture, Shia Islam and Palestine, media narratives, military deterrence, sanctions, and the wider fight between the United States, Israel, Iran, Russia, and China. They also look at how the conflict may develop. Links: 21st Century Wire: https://21stcenturywire.com 21st Century Wire YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@21stCenturyWireTV Patrick Henningsen Substack: https://patrickhenningsen.substack.com Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack. com Merch: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction and Iran reporting 05:02 Western media narratives on Iran 08:32 Iran after attacks: unity and anger 14:10 Iran, Shia Islam, and the Muslim world 24:40 A new revolutionary moment 35:20 Iran’s deterrence and global role 48:53 What comes next in the conflict 01:01:01 Where to follow Patrick Henningsen #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies, today again with the wonderful U.S. journalist Patrick Henningsen. Patrick, welcome back. #Patrick Hennings It's great to be with you, Pascal. #Pascal Thanks for coming back, because you actually just returned from a stay in Iran, and that's what we want to talk about. You were there. You were, I think, if I remember correctly, you went there for the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei, to witness this and to report from the ground. You've spent quite a bit of time there. Can you give us the gist of it, what you saw and what kind of impressions it left on you? #Patrick Hennings Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Pascal. This was actually the second time I've been in the country in the last six months. I was there before the bombing, about 10 days before the bombing in February, and totally anticipating that there would be a war. I think everybody in the country was expecting that. -- 1 of 18 -- And then this time, you know, it was an opportunity. I knew that the state funeral was going to be a really important event, but it had been delayed, or they hadn't announced the date until much later, because normally in Islamic customs, people are buried very quickly after the fact. And this was just very unusual in that sense. And I, you know, I really didn't fully appreciate why until I got there. And I realized that, you know, the amount of logistics involved in an event of this scale—and I'll tell you how big the scale was—just throughout the country. It wasn't just in Tehran, and it wasn't just one day. It was, in total, six days. And it spanned not just the capital city of Tehran, but all the other major cities in the country, as well as in Iraq itself—Karbala, Najaf. So the remains of the late Supreme Leader were traveled to Iraq and then brought back again, and it culminated in the holy city of Mashhad, which is the final resting place of the leader, and it's also considered to be his home city or his hometown. And it wasn't just the leader, Ayatollah Saeed Ali Khamenei. It was also his family as well that were killed and assassinated on February 28th, including a 14-month-old granddaughter. A very small coffin that was amongst the others as well. And so you can imagine this was so emotionally charged. Fifteen million people in Tehran on the street. Now, I don't know the exact breakdown of that, but that was admitted by the Financial Times. Okay, so that's a UK-based media organization. So if that was over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but conservative estimates on Monday put the numbers at something between eight and ten million, conservative on the Monday. That was the last day of the funeral procession in Tehran. And then nationally, 40 million people took part in this in one way or another. That's approaching half the population. So just think about that, and also just kind of gauge that against everything that we've been told about how much support the government has, or how much support the leader or the political system has in that country. What we're being told in the West is what we have been told for the longest time, is that they're teetering on the edge of collapse. You probably saw the Lindsey Graham documentary. Clips have been released where he's musing while they're driving through Washington, "We just want to get a few cities to fall, and then we want to get the Arabs involved, and we think it'll happen quite quickly." He's talking about the collapse of Iranian society and the Iranian regime, as it were. And, you know, so from my experience, I knew this in February. I learned very quickly after the riots and seeing the outpouring of support for the leader and the government in mid-February after these so-called riots. And I was also there to kind of fully understand what I now can see is a massive propaganda campaign, claiming that the Iranian government killed 50,000 of its own people in three days or something. Just totally outrageous, like the most egregious propaganda campaign in the West that you can imagine. Completely fake, totally false. But the main lesson there is that that was designed to create the moral background to justify a war that was coming, or an attack on Iran. So the West are very clever when it comes to their propaganda, whereby they know they can even split the conservative debate by people who are the Thomas Massies of the world, or the former -- 2 of 18 -- MAGA anti-war conservatives, who say, "Well, you know, we're against the war," and then also the centrist liberals who are maybe leaning anti-war. And then when Trump and Israel go ahead and do the war, they'll say, "I'm against Trump. This isn't right. This isn't a legal war. They need, you know, to consult Congress for this," et cetera. But this is a really bad, bad regime. They killed 50,000 of their own people, so it's better that they're gone. It's the same argument they used for Saddam Hussein. Yeah. Yeah. #Pascal The 50,000 Iranian protesters killed is the incubator babies of Iran, isn't it? It's like the moral justification to bring enough people on board to say, like, yeah, fine. Actually, the United States has a very—the people in charge do have a very sophisticated understanding about their own population and how to manipulate them into kind of, yeah, let's go along. #Patrick Hennings Yeah, they can game out the debate in the public sphere ahead of time. And then that's the propaganda that just fills in the gaps and keeps the narrative together. And so it worked to a large degree. I mean, Trump has repeated this. You've also got the 40 beheaded babies, same type of thing post-October 7th. Hamas's mass rape on October 7th. All these things have been widely debunked and shown as evidence-free claims. Likewise with this, but the scale of Iran as a nemesis for the West means that what they— the amount of energy and weight and just the full kind of wall of propaganda has been so relentless. And so, and I became kind of, in a way, understanding much better the second time this year, which I came, you know, which is effectively during the war or after the main period of hostilities, although it ramped up while I was there, but that Iran is the most demonized country, society, dehumanized population, and mischaracterized leadership, possibly in history, at least in the modern era. We can throw a few other countries in there as well, including Russia. I think it's because of the religious component that's particularly threatening to the West, and also what it represents as a sort of anti-colonial or a so-called anti-imperialist kind of role model for other countries. And so the West and Israel, this kind of team, if you will, and more so the Europeans are on board with this demonization campaign more and more, although they weren't so much before, but they kind of are getting into it. It's designed to delegitimize Iran, not just as a country or as a, quote, regime, but also as a civilization. #Pascal Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there. -- 3 of 18 -- #Patrick Hennings And this really, this is where the real clash comes in, because you realize when you're there, and what I saw was extraordinary, Pascal. Like, I don't even have words to describe it. The amount of social cohesion, the power of the crowd, the intense energy on the street. And me as an American— and there weren't many Americans on the streets of Tehran, I can tell you—and I'm down there pretty much on my own for the most part, in some cases completely on my own, amongst millions of Iranians who are all chanting. Many red signs were held asking for vengeance for the death and the assassination of their leader, and a lot of signs with hashtag K-I-L-L Trump. Okay. Held by very old, elderly women, as well as young people, as well as what I would consider former Western-leaning liberals, who are now the most hawkish of all in the crowd in terms of the chants and so forth, saying, "No more negotiations with the U.S. Those days are over." There are really many people having a go at Araghchi and Ghalibaf and the Iranian team, saying, "Why are you negotiating with the Americans?" So, very impatient, and so total transformation in terms of, you know, the opposition bloc in politics. And that's as a result of the U.S. and Israeli attacks and the Minab school, for instance, the slaughter of all these young girls in the opening days of the U.S. bombing and the Israeli bombing campaign. But all of these things have basically kind of eviscerated the opposition that the West took and spent billions building up over decades in that country. And, you know, the real coup d'état was Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, boasting at an international forum of how he took down the Iranian currency, the rial, and brought the protesters onto the street. Now, before that, there were a lot of people who were blaming the government for mismanagement of the economy. But between the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, Pete Hegseth, and Scott Bessent, they completely discredited any opposition arguments within Iran and really empowered, I think, the government, the state, and the leadership, and really kind of validated everything that they've been saying about the West and how brutal and, you know, feckless they have been. #Pascal I have a couple of Iranian friends over here, and they are all basically not very happy with their government. But I've witnessed several of them saying, "Look, the biggest problem we have is that what these people told us for 30 years, that the Americans will attack us and they're out to kill us all, came true. So we cannot really tell them anymore, 'You were wrong,' and they kind of proved a point, and now we are under attack. So even though I would like them to go, I will certainly not support the side that bombs my family." And I think the Trump-Netanyahu alliance brought that point back home to millions of Iranians who were kind of, you know, not happy, but on the other side, on the opposition. And I mean, so speak about uniting a country. I think the United States did the job there. -- 4 of 18 -- #Patrick Hennings And not only that, Pascal, they also reinvigorated the Islamic Revolution, or the revolutionary government. And if you think about the different generations, the generation of this late supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, his generation and maybe his children, who were very young during the revolution—he's talking about the late '70s and early '80s, the Iran-Iraq War, '80 to '88— they