🧵 REGIMES THAT DON'T BREAK

Iran survived 44 days of the most intense aerial campaign since Iraq 2003.

North Korea has survived 70 years of sanctions, famine, and isolation.

Russia has survived two years of the most comprehensive economic warfare in modern history.

The question isn't whether these regimes can be pressured.

It's why pressure keeps failing to break them. 🧵 Edward Howell, Oxford University: "There is a much higher tolerance for pain among authoritarian regimes. That's because we see very little evidence of them prioritizing the needs of their people."

The population absorbs the pain. The leadership doesn't feel it.

Trump's maximum pressure model assumes a pain threshold that authoritarian regimes structurally don't have.

Iran's 1,701 civilian casualties. Russia's hundreds of thousands killed in Ukraine. North Korea's mass famines, regime intact in all three cases.

The pain is real. The accountability is absent.

34 days. One war. This is what it cost the people who didn't start it.
1,606 civilians killed in Iran, including 244 children. 1,318 killed in Lebanon since March 2.
50+ killed across Gulf nations.
17 killed in Israel. 13 U.S. service members dead, 350+ wounded.
Every number is a person. This thread is about the people.
🧵 In Iran, the dead include children in a school in Minab on Day 1. More than 170 killed, mostly students, when a strike hit near a military complex their school bordered.

The WHO identified 13 health infrastructure sites struck in the first week alone. The Pasteur Institute, founded in 1920, was destroyed yesterday. It produced vaccines for 90 million people.
244 children among the 1,606 civilians documented by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, and HRANA has "limited access to locations where military forces are present." The actual number is likely higher.