For months, analysts have debated whether President Donald Trump’s campaign against Iran was working.
Tehran’s propaganda has tried to turn high oil prices and slow negotiations into evidence of US weakness.
The reality is less flattering for the regime and its military, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps: Trump has forced them into a prolonged cold-hot war that drains their finances, strains their regional network and strips away their leverage.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has moved back toward pre-war levels — and Iran’s domestic deterioration is increasingly difficult to dismiss.
Iran’s rial fell to roughly 2.2 million to the dollar in September, from about 958,000 a year earlier.
Inflation is nearing 70%, food prices have more than doubled, and unemployment is above 9%.
The latest official figure put youth unemployment at 20.1%.
Oil exports have also collapsed, falling to roughly 260,000 barrels a day from 1.7 million a year earlier.
The bigger story is what those numbers mean for the IRGC’s power.
The IRGC still must pay its own forces while financing allies and militias across Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.
Washington has been squeezing that network’s financial lifelines by targeting oil exports, shadow fleets, exchange houses, front companies and the foreign buyers willing to take sanctioned Iranian crude.
China matters most here: Treasury estimates that China buys about 90% of Iran’s oil exports.
In April, Washington sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical’s Dalian refinery after it bought billions of dollars of Iranian petroleum, including crude linked to Iran’s armed forces.
That is the difference between sanctions on paper and sanctions that bite.
Iran can withstand restrictions far more easily if Chinese refiners keep buying its oil without consequences.
Washington has also gone after the financial channels used to move the proceeds. Treasury says Iranian shadow-banking networks move tens of billions of dollars.
In August, it moved to cut Banque Misr UAE off from US correspondent banking after estimating the bank had processed about $1.8 billion for 103 companies potentially connected to Iranian shadow networks since 2024.
Washington also sanctioned the manager of Bank Melli’s Dubai branch, which Treasury says helped the IRGC and its Quds Force move money.
China’s political strategy has come under strain, too.
Beijing celebrated the 2023 Saudi-Iran agreement as proof that China could stabilize the region.
Three years later, however, Saudi Arabia is again confronting Iranian and Iran-backed threats around Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, while Beijing has had to press Tehran to rein in the Houthis after Saudi appeals with no success.
Riyadh, meanwhile, is looking to Washington.
Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan is in the US capital this week for talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Saudi officials call for protecting shipping through Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
More important, Saudi Arabia ended its participation in mBridge, a China-backed digital payments project, after a limited trial with no real Saudi transactions — another sign that Riyadh’s deepest financial and security ties remain with the United States.
The IRGC has also lost much of the leverage it once derived from threatening Gulf energy flows.
Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline can carry up to 7 million barrels a day toward the Red Sea, with roughly 5 million available for export.
The UAE has gone further: It left OPEC on May 1, freeing itself from production quotas, and pushed crude output above 3.8 million barrels a day in June.
These shifts keep Gulf oil flowing while weakening a key IRGC pressure tool.
Iran is now weaker at home and abroad, and its sponsors, China and Russia, have been unable to save it from what is unfolding.
Trump is doing something Washington has rarely attempted with this breadth: going after not only the IRGC itself, but the entire system that kept it funded, supplied and able to project power across the region.
That is precisely why his pressure should continue — whatever the domestic political consequences.