The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz

Back in January, the regime carried out the deadliest crackdown in modern Iranian history.
As it gunned down protesters in the streets, it launched a parallel war online. A coordinated campaign to turn a domestic uprising into a so-called CIA–Mossad plot — rewriting the story in real time and pushing that narrative deep into Western discourse.
The January crackdown and the narrative battle that accompanied it aren’t isolated incidents. They set conditions for the war that followed, shaping global perception before a single American fighter jet took flight.
So, was all of this just another page from the regime’s standard propaganda playbook? Or is information warfare now a core pillar of its survival?

For years, Washington has leaned on sanctions to contain Iran’s most dangerous capabilities.
Tehran’s drone and missile programs didn’t just survive under pressure, they adapted, scaled, and in many ways thrived, fueled in part by Western-made components slipping through global supply chains.
The result: a procurement network that’s harder to disrupt, more resilient, and still very much intact.
Now, Tehran isn’t just building for itself. It’s exporting the model — arming Russia in Ukraine, supplying proxies across the Middle East, and even laying the groundwork for drone production in places like Venezuela, putting parts of the United States within range.
So the question isn’t whether sanctions work — it’s whether we’re hitting the right targets.
To break all of this down, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by Kerri Bitsoff — a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) who has been called a ‘secret weapon’ in the fight against Iran's weapons procurement.

This war isn’t just being fought with missiles and drones. There's also a war of the words, a narrative battle.
While the regime pushes its narrative at home and abroad, the West struggles to keep up — and the Iranian people are caught in between. 
So, who controls the story: the regime, the West, or the Iranian people?
Mark is joined by historian Ali Ansari to unpack the battle of narratives, the reality of regime power, and who may ultimately shape Iran’s future.

On the battlefield, the Iran war is expanding, and the real negotiations aren’t happening in backchannels — they’re happening in the Strait of Hormuz. 
The Iran war isn’t just about Iran. It’s about energy, leverage, and whether Beijing—and even Taiwan—are already learning the lessons of this war in real time. 
FDD’s Matt Pottinger joins host Mark Dubowitz to break down why a deal may be closer than it looks, why Trump may not take it, and how this war is already reshaping the global balance of power — and why China’s watching closely.

We’re marking one year of The Iran Breakdown by bringing you a special conversation from our sister FDD podcast.
In this episode of Foreign Podicy, host Cliff May sits down with Mark Dubowitz to unpack a question at the core of this show: what the Islamic Republic actually believes — and how it has waged war on the United States and its allies since 1979.
It’s a conversation about ideology, strategy, and a threat too often misunderstood.
If you want to understand the regime in order to make sense of the war, start here.