I recommend everyone with geopolitical interest take advantage of Proxima.earth. It is a radical shift in research analysis which can only be handled by AI. not the uses and contexts from multiple frontier AI tools. And remember this analysis is hours following actual events.

Iran, March 2026
Three crises converge in sixty days. A domestic uprising met with mass killing and the most comprehensive internet blackout in Iranian history. A nuclear confrontation that produced two rounds of US-Israeli strikes nine months apart. And the first assassination of a sitting head of state by airstrike in modern history — the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026.
This episode applies established academic frameworks to ask whether the simultaneous convergence of all three crises creates something qualitatively different from any one alone. Decapitation strategy theory (Pape, Cronin, Johnston, Jordan). Authoritarian resilience (Bellin, Brownlee, Slater, Levitsky). Velayat-e faqih and its succession architecture (Khomeini, Kadivar, Abrahamian). The IRGC as a political-military institution (Ostovar, Bajoghli). Welfare-state authoritarianism and its beneficiary constituencies (Harris). Network cascade theory applied to proxy degradation.
Eight perspectives steelmanned from inside their own logic: the Islamic Republic, the Iranian opposition, the Trump administration, Israel, Russia, China, the IRGC as a distinct actor, and the broader Iranian population as a composite.

Produced under active fog-of-war conditions. Every claim carries elevated uncertainty. Evidence is hedged where thin, contested where disputed, and absent where the blackout prevents verification. The episode does not resolve. The questions remain open.

How this episode was made:
Proxima.Earth uses an autonomous multi-model AI pipeline. No human is in the loop after subject selection. The methodology is the editorial control.

1. Source plan — Claude (clean context, web-search grounded). Identified current events, mapped structural domains, planned source acquisition with orientation notes on every source.
2. Social layer — Grok. Captured real-time public discourse on X. Verified posts with attribution. Narrative dynamics and perspective validation. Social content is evidence about discourse, not ground truth.
3. Academic review — ChatGPT Pro (deep research with web browsing). Adversarial fact verification, claim-by-claim correction, bias detection, missing scholarship, methodological critique.
4. Commission brief — Claude (clean context). Synthesized all inputs. 41 claims extracted with source orientation and confidence ratings. 25 structural questions. 8 steelmanned perspectives. Fog-of-war assessment. The agent had deliberative autonomy over analytical emphasis.
5. Script — Claude (clean context). 19,972 words written section by section with self-checking for redundancy, source coverage, and evidence survival. The agent had deliberative autonomy over narrative structure and pacing.
6. Audio — Kokoro TTS (local, bm_george voice). Broadcast processing chain (EQ, compression, EBU R128 normalization to -16 LUFS). Intro/outro music.
   This episode was produced using Methodology v5.0, which was stress-tested and refined on this episode. The full methodology, including system prompts and production guide, is published at proxima.earth/methodology. It is open source and designed to be instructive — anyone with access to the models can run it.
   Known gaps: No IAEA post-strike access data. No Persian-language domestic sources. Source pack is overwhelmingly Anglophone. No Russian or Chinese primary-source strategic analysis. No battle damage assessment. No ground-level economic testimony from inside Iran.
   Sources include: AP, Reuters, FT, BBC, CNN, CPJ, NetBlocks, HRANA, Chatham House, CSIS, CFR, Brookings, Alma Center, IranWire, Iran International, IRNA, Press TV. Every source receives an orientation note identifying institutional affiliation, editorial lean, and directional bias. No source is treated as neutral.
   Corrections, source disputes, or methodology feedback: editor@proxima.earth