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Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Jan 16, 2025

President Donald Trump reportedly called off the planned invasion of Iran Wednesday when, during a meeting of his National Security Council, his advisers could not guarantee him a quick and decisive victory over Iran’s Islamic regime.

But we see no evidence that the U.S. has pulled back assets from the region and an attack could still take place at some point.

You would have thought Trump would have met with his advisers and got their military assessment before he publicly told the Iran protesters to keep protesting because “help is on the way,” but that’s just Donald Trump. He can’t control his mouth and in this case it likely got people killed. They thought help was going to arrive in their hour of need, when they were most vulnerable, and it didn’t. Trump changed his mind.

Countries had called home their international staff in Tehran and the region. Military assets were moved into place. The propaganda war was in full swing, whipping up support for the war here at home through social media and various news outlets on the right, left and center.

Reports were that the U.S. attack on Iran was “imminent,” likely to come within 24 hours.

But the perceived momentum hit a brick wall sometime Wednesday afternoon when Trump made a comment that it appears the regime had stopped shooting protesters. Trump made another post today, Friday, saying he respects the fact that the Iranian regime has canceled all scheduled hangings.

A strong warning from the Russians may also have triggered second thoughts in Trump. After Trump promised the Iran protesters “help is on the way,” the Russian foreign ministry said any U.S. military intervention in Iran would bring “disastrous consequences.” That’s code for World War III.

Again, this doesn’t mean the war won’t happen. In fact, I’d be surprised if it didn’t. The U.S. simply wasn’t prepared for a full-scale invasion and the likely onset of World War III, so it postponed doing anything for right now.

The Trump administration has been forced to come up with a new battle plan if they really want a regime change in Iran, and I believe they do. Trump and Netanyahu know their window of opportunity might soon close. In fact, it may have already closed and any new attack plan could result in horrific bloodshed, drawing Russia and perhaps China and others into the war.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Trump, he likes to score wins and the more dramatic the better. Easy in-and-out wins. Even if the wins are more perception than reality, he will claim total credit and run a victory lap. Iran offered him no opportunity to come out as the clear winner so he backed off until a more attractive deal can be placed in front of him. Eventually, his ego will not allow him to back down. He will attack Iran. And Iran will be a much stiffer challenge than what Americans encountered in the Iraq war in 2003.

The June 2025 12-Day War was only a partial win, severely degrading Iran’s nuclear facilities but not achieving much else. It failed to knock out the regime, or even to weaken it substantially. I believe Trump and Netanyahu missed their opportunity back in June to deal a knockout blow to Iran.

The Americans and Israelis continually underestimate the Iranian regime’s grip on power.

The last three weeks of protests in Iran were meant to weaken the regime to the point where the U.S. could bring in its military to essentially conduct a mop-up operation.

But the protests were brought under control and the Trump administration saw that if they sent U.S. military personnel into Tehran, they would have met heavy resistance. The regime was still solidly intact, despite all of the fake news about it crumbling.

You simply cannot believe anything you read in most media when it comes to Ukraine, Venezuela or Iran. It’s not actual news based on facts on the ground. It’s all narrative put forth by CIA disinformation and, unfortunately, way too many otherwise solide conservative news outlets take the bait and run with the false narratives. With regard to their coverage of international relations, the conservative media is, by and large with few exceptions, no better than the liberal mainstream media.

The most dangerous neocons are the ones who begin to believe their own propaganda.

In this case, the narrative being spun was that the Islamic Republic of Iran was teetering on the brink of collapse and that a few weeks of people out in the streets could weaken them sufficiently, soften them up for a U.S.-led military coup.

University of Chicago Political Science Professor John Mearsheimer discussed Iran in a Jan. 14 interview with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis. He called it a classic CIA-instigated four-stage color revolution. Fast-forward to the 25-minute mark and listen to him explain how these psy ops work.

 

Mearsheimer states:

“When the protests first broke out, and we listened to the Western media spin this story, the story you get is basically that you have a large number of people inside Iran that are deeply dissatisfied, profoundly dissatisfied with the regime, and the regime has mismanaged the country. And they have decided that the time has come not simply to protest but to overthrow the regime. And this makes imminently good sense in the West because who could like a regime of the sort that we see in Iran? But now, I think it’s become manifestly clear that this story is inaccurate. And what’s going on in Iran is right from the US/Israeli playbook on how to produce regime change.”

He then lays out the classic four-stage playbook that the CIA uses to produce revolutions that lead to regime changes.

The problem is that Iran never progressed past the second stage and was not ready for U.S. military intervention. And Trump was at least smart enough to listen to his advisers and not try to continue with an operation that would have been doomed to failure. My fear is that an even bigger military operation may be lurking around the bend.

Here is a breakdown of how, according to Professor Mearsheimer, the CIA runs revolutions.

“The first element is that we put sanctions on a country and we wreck that country’s economy and we do all sorts of things to make the body populace in that country profoundly unhappy, because they’re suffering enormous cost,” he said. “We’re punishing them with those sanctions. This is what we did in Venezuela. This is what we did in Iran. But who played the principal role in creating those terrible economic conditions? The United States did.”

The second step in the process is that the U.S. administration decides, at some point, that the economy has been sufficiently weakened and it’s time to organize massive street protests.

“And we’re going to fuel those massive protests,” Mearsheimer said. “And this is what happened in Iran in late December 2025. And there’s all sorts of evidence now that makes it clear that Mossad was deeply involved in what has been happening in Iran. Furthermore, there have been comments by President Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that make it clear that the United States has been involved from the get-go in terms of fueling this crisis.”

When the Iranians shut down the internet to cut off communications from the protesters, suddenly 40,000 Starlink terminals showed up in Iran. These were compliments of Elon Musk, a major defense contractor closely tied in with the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex.

The third step in the process is to unleash a massive disinformation campaign, designed to convince everybody in the West that these protests are generated organically, that the United States and Israel have nothing to do with it, and that the protesters are all “noble patriots,” Mearsheimer said.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any noble patriots participating. There were plenty of them. But those weren’t the main organizers.

“This disinformation campaign sends the message inside of Iran that the regime is finished. The protesters are on a roll, there’s no way the regime can shut this down,” Mearsheimer said. “So, what we’re trying to do is generate momentum with this disinformation campaign inside Iran.”

Once the protests have reached a certain point, then comes the fourth and final stage: The United States military swoops in to save the day, attacking all manner of critical infrastructure and elite hideouts inside of Iran.

“We deliver the coup de grace, we finish off the regime,” Mearsheimer said. “This is the basic playbook. You see it at play in Venezuela. It’s regime change of the sort we’ve seen many times before. Now, one final point, it’s failed.”

Why did the U.S./Israeli sponsored color revolution fail in Iran?

Mearsheimer stated:

“First of all, the number of protests by Wednesday had been reduced drastically. If it’s failed in terms of the second and third strands of the playbook, how do you use military force to rescue the situation? Trump was intending to use military force, for sure, but that was intended to be used once the regime was on its last leg. Well, the regime is not on its last leg. The regime has triumphed here. It has shut down the protests. Not completely. But it will completely shut down the protests. And it will hang large numbers of the leaders of those protests. So, the question is, what can Trump do now? He’s in a different situation than he thought he would be. Does he think he can rescue the situation with military force?”

I will say, I’ve never seen Lindsey Graham, chief cheerleader for the neocons, look so depressed as he did Thursday after Trump had called off the attack.

 

Despite all that Mearsheimer laid out with regard to the failed color revolution in Iran, we also should not underestimate Vladimir Putin’s role in stopping the U.S. attack. He likely put a chill on the plans by saying Russia was ready to unleash its hypersonic Oreshnik missiles on U.S. forces in the region, and Trump knows the U.S. has no defense against these super-fast, highly maneuverable weapons.

Unlike in the June 2025 12-day war, this time around Iran asked for Russia’s help, and possibly China’s too. It was reportedly the Russians who were responsible for jamming the Starlink terminals.

This level of Russian cooperation with Iran was not in place in June, but Trump has so alienated Putin with regards to the war in Ukraine that Putin is now done with him. He no longer trusts Trump. And Trump is reaping the fruit of his own failure to keep the lines to Putin open. He burned that bridge by doing the bidding of Zelensky and the neocons and now Putin is done listening to him.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar also let it be known that they would not allow U.S. fighter jets to pass through their air space to attack Iran.

Iran can also close the Strait of Hormuz and shut off the flow of global oil supplies. In the face of a long, protracted war, that would devastate Western economies.

I hope this article has shed some light on the fact that attacking Iran presents very real and complex challenges. The neocons dismiss all of these complexities and focus their narrative on the emotion of the moment, making it all about freedom and democracy for a suffering people. This plays well with the masses but it’s the last thing they care about. They neocons and their corporate buddies don’t see the world in terms of freedom and democracy, they see contracts and money to go in and rebuild another shattered country. They see opportunities to control more oil fields, or mine more land for minerals. It’s a very complex picture but the media likes to spin simplistic narratives because this is what gains readers and enlarges audiences. Americans, most of whom aren’t willing to invest the time to understand international affairs, fall for it every time.

The decision by Saudi Arabia, a major player in the region, to close off its airspace to any U.S. military operations against Iran also marks a huge turning point with ramifications for the U.S. empire.

Trump’s more aggressive, some would say reckless, U.S. foreign policy may be driving Iran and Saudi Arabia together in a new alliance. The two traditional enemies now have a common interest: Israel, with the backing of an Israel-first president in the White House, is increasingly seen as dangerously unpredictable. The Saudis, who had been in talks to normalize relations with Israel, now see Israel as crossing too many red lines. In their eyes, Israel needs to be brought down a notch in the overall Mideast balance of power. Netanyahu has gotten too aggressive, too cocky, for their liking, taking full advantage of his good friend Donald Trump.

If you want to understand Trump, look at his biggest donors. They include billionaire casino magnate Miriam Adelson and hedge-fund manager Paul Singer. Singer bought Citgo, the U.S.-based arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil industry, and he will profit massively from Trump’s removal of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Adelson is a big supporter of U.S. military operations seen as beneficial to Israel.

Ultimately, we are still going to attack Iran. They will double down, continue probing for weaknesses in the regime and looking for the next excuse to pounce. But whatever illusions Trump had about a quick in-and-out operation making him look like superman have now been shattered. This will take a much bigger operation than Trump originally had planned and could ignite the kinetic phase of World War III.

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