The Iranian regime is caught in a death spiral
But President Masoud Pezeshkian and his colleagues can see the same videos of violent rebellion that are circling the globe. They must understand that these protests keep happening because the regime is rotting, politically and economically, and the whole country knows it. Every wave of repression spawns future protest. The regime can put out this fire, but what about the next one, and the one after that?
The Iranian regime is on a one-way street to disaster. A senior European diplomat in Tehran shared that assessment with me several years ago, and it remains true. Iran has powerful security tools, but they’re getting rusty. The regime couldn’t protect its proxies Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And most important, Iran couldn’t shield itself from Israel’s systematic assault in June. The regime is on a losing streak.
“The Islamic Republic is today a zombie regime,” argues Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Its legitimacy, ideology, economy and leader are dead or dying. What keeps it alive is lethal force. It kills to live and lives to kill. Brutality can delay the regime’s funeral, but it can’t restore the pulse.”
Follow Trump’s second term
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, gave a defiant speech Friday, claiming the protesters were “a bunch of vandals” trying to please President Donald Trump. But Khamenei, feeble but inflexible at 86, is the heart of the regime’s problem, living evidence of its exhaustion. And he has no obvious successor since the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in 2024.
How can the United States best help the rebels? Trump has vowed military punishment if Iran slaughters its citizens, but the regime probably won’t give him that pretext: Iran has avoided a Tiananmen-style crackdown during past protests and likely will do so again. The Trump administration can work with allies to tighten the screws further. That’s one reason Trump should avoid alienating friends with his Greenland obsession; he needs them to deal with the bigger issue of Iran.
A harder question for Washington is whether to smuggle in Starlink terminals to reverse the internet blackout that Tehran imposed Friday. The Biden administration weighed that strategy during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022 and 2023 but decided against it — fearing it would put at risk crucial smuggling routes used by the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Perhaps this time, the benefit outweighs the cost.
This week’s protests have spread to every Iranian region and ethnic group, but they haven’t yet reached the intensity of 2022-2023 revolt. That spontaneous mass movement began with women taking to the streets to denounce the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for refusing to wear a headscarf. The ensuing crackdown resulted in 551 deaths and more than 22,000 arrests, according to human rights reports. Security forces killed 104 people on what’s called “Bloody Friday” in September 2022.
Despite this violent obliteration of the rebellion, a new uprising is back three years later. It’s leaderless, and perhaps rudderless, but it’s potent. As of Monday, protests were reported in more than 340 places in all 31 Iranian provinces, according to Iran Wire, an online news service. Through the week, the demonstrations become wider and more violent, as internet videos show.
This year’s revolt is driven more by anger over Iran’s economic failures than the mullah’s repressive Islamic rules. Iran’s annual inflation rate rose to 42 percent in December, and its currency lost more than half its value last year. Another difference this year is that many protesters are supporting Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah of Iran toppled in the 1979 revolution. That gives this rebellion a more conservative, Persian nationalist tone — and a perhaps backward-facing perspective. Maybe this is Iran’s “MIGA” moment.
The wild card this year is whether the regime’s hard-liners have lost their edge. Like the Soviet Union during its last years, the security agencies may have lost their ideological commitment and discipline. They’ve watched helplessly as their proxy forces were crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And they’ve suffered the same scourge of inflation and economic stagnation as the rest of the nation. They’re not broken, but they appear more fragile than in the past.
Let’s think again about what’s going through the heads of those 12 members of the Supreme National Security Council. They know Iran is stagnant. Their budget for the next fiscal year will likely raise taxes and cut subsidies to fund defense spending. They’re waiting for the political transition that will come when Khamenei dies, but for the moment they are lurching forward as a wounded dispirited nation.
As the council members look south across the Gulf to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they see their neighbors racing to embrace artificial intelligence and a dynamic economic future. Meanwhile, they cling to a repressive, retrograde regime that can barely feed its people. Revolutions are impossible to predict. But when you look at Iran, it’s obvious that eventually something is going to crack wide open.
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