Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the collapse of the country’s currency and surging inflation, with many calling for an end to the Islamic republic. Yet the government’s response has differed from earlier waves of unrest. Whereas Iran’s rulers were quick to suppress the 2009 Green Movement and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the security forces were slow to react as the current protests intensified. Rather than brutally cracking down, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian initially responded with belt-tightening reforms to free up funds for subsidies to the poor.
However, this stopgap did not hold. While the poor might have been mollified, those in the middle rungs of society bore the costs and joined the protests in greater numbers. What started as an expression of economic discontent soon became a political uprising. Only after protests erupted across the country on Thursday last week did the regime clamp down in earnest.
Why was the reaction to political dissent so different this time? The current protests are taking place in the shadow of Iran’s 12-day war with Israel in June last year. Iranian officials are still reeling from the conflict and operating on the assumption that it could resume at any time. That threat looms larger than domestic political unrest, because Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and the collapse of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime have left Iran with little deterrence against foreign intervention.
Illustration: Mountain People
Adding insult to injury, Iran is no longer able to prevent foreign actors from boosting popular discontent at home. During last year’s war, Iranians did rally to the flag, and the regime reacted by relaxing its enforcement of religious rules, most notably regarding hijab. However, the current protests pose a dilemma: Cracking down too hard could undo the fragile understanding that the regime forged with the population after the war, while letting them grow could invite foreign intervention.
Iran’s worsening economy has also been a decisive factor. A combination of mismanagement, corruption and crippling sanctions has caused rampant inflation and unemployment, steadily weakening the middle class and expanding the ranks of the struggling poor. The June war accelerated these trends. In the six months following it, the rial lost more than 40 percent of its value and inflation surged by as much as 60 percent. With many assuming that the hobbling of Iran’s nuclear program had reduced its leverage to negotiate sanctions relief, capital flight soon followed.
Thus, as Iran’s rulers see it, the economic plight that has brought protesters to the streets is deeply intertwined with the external threat facing the country. They remember that during last year’s war, Israel called on ordinary Iranians to revolt. The Israelis calculated that eliminating dozens of senior military commanders, and battering military and security institutions would encourage Iran’s restless population to rise up and overwhelm the beleaguered state. When that did not happen, Iran’s leaders were the first to acknowledge that they had survived the war thanks to their people. However, it also became clear to them that a popular uprising was part of Israel’s war strategy, and this realization informs their view of the current protests.
These suspicions were confirmed when US President Donald Trump recently took to social media to declare that the US is “locked and loaded,” ready to intervene to “rescue” Iranian protesters from a violent crackdown. The real threat of the protests lies not in what Iranians could achieve on their own, but in whether they could serve to justify US military action against Iran.
The obvious parallels are to Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring, when the US and some European governments invoked a “responsibility to protect” protesters to justify military intervention. These popular uprisings quickly morphed into foreign-led regime-change efforts, ultimately leading to civil war and state collapse. Notably, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is filled with veterans of the Syria conflict. They witnessed first-hand how quickly peaceful protests with external support can precipitate civil war. The imperative to avoid Libya and Syria’s fate is the driving force behind Iranian decisionmaking today.
Yet another factor in Iranian leaders’ thinking is the US kidnapping of then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Like everyone else around the world, Iran’s rulers were stunned. This was not the kind of regime change that the US had carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and pursued in Libya and Syria a decade later. Rather than committing troops or advocating nation-building, the Trump administration has left the Chavista power structure in place, demanding that it submit to US imperial control or face economic strangulation.
Could the US pursue a similar strategy against the Islamic republic? If so, it might try to launch a precision military strike to kill Iran’s supreme leader, and key political and military leaders, capture Iranian oil tankers on the high seas, and then demand that whatever is left of the Islamic republic accede to its demands (which would include abandoning its nuclear and missile programs and handing over control of its natural resources). Even short of killing Iranian leaders, a US strategy of bombing and oil-export interdiction could bring the regime to its knees.
Faced with these scenarios, Iran’s immediate response was to point to the potential costs of US aggression. On Tuesday last week, the Iranian Defense Council revised its strategic posture, announcing that Tehran could pursue “pre-emptive measures” if faced with “objective signs of threat.” Although a pre-emptive strike on US targets in the Middle East would surely invite a war that Iran does not want and could well be the end of the regime, it cannot afford to give the impression that defeating it would be cost-free.
Even if Iran could avoid a direct confrontation with the US, and even if the current wave of protests subsides, the country’s economy is in a downward spiral. That means public anger would only grow over the medium and long term. The Islamic republic is in a vice, squeezed by the external threat from the US and Israel, and the internal threat of a mass uprising. There is no easy escape from this impasse. A total collapse of the Islamic republic is not necessarily imminent, but Iran’s revolution is now nearing its end.
Vali Nasr, professor of Middle East studies and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, is the author, most recently, of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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