JIM GERAGHTY: Trump’s Sudden Reversal on Iran.

To be fair, Iran’s mullahs are doing a fair job of imploding the nation all by themselves:

I cannot say with certainty that the Iranian regime will topple in the coming year. But I can say with certainty that this current Iranian regime will never be able to fix the country’s deepening economic problems. Earlier this week, Jason Malsin of the Wall Street Journal had a spectacularly reported account of how a bank collapse illuminated the deep-rooted destructive rot running throughout the country’s economy:

Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it.

Instead, the failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the proteststhat now pose the most significant threat to the regime since the founding of the Islamic Republic half a century ago. The bank’s collapse made clear that the Iranian financial system, under strain from years of sanctions, bad lending and reliance on inflationary printed money, had become increasingly insolvent and illiquid. Five other banks are thought to be similarly weak. . . .

The director of bank supervision at the Iranian central bank last year called Ayandeh “a Ponzi scheme.” For many Iranians, it was a symbol of a system whose few resources had been diverted to a well-connected few while they suffered.

The regime in Tehran is running out of money. And it’s not helping when every elite in Iran can see the cracks in the foundation widening and is trying to get every portable asset out of the country.

As Geraghty writes, “You don’t move tens of millions out of a country on a whim. You don’t fly planeloads of gold to Moscow unless you think there’s a good chance you’re going to lose it if you keep it in the country. The people within the regime and closest to the regime are moving their money out, risking its seizure. You only take that risk when you’ve concluded that keeping your money in the country is more dangerous.”