Iran’s Protests Are a Turning Point for the Islamic Republic

Almost half a century ago, on November 4, 1979, student followers of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized control of the US embassy in Tehran and took its staff hostage, releasing them 444 days later when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated US president. Khomeini had come to power a few months before as the undisputed leader of a popular uprising that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s shah or king, who had been installed on his throne in 1953 through a military coup orchestrated by the CIA.

By early winter 1979, however, Washington had given up its policy of ironclad support of the shah. President Jimmy Carter instructed his Tehran ambassador to tell the shah it was time to vacate the throne and leave the country. Within a few weeks of the shah’s departure, the monarchy fell apart while US envoys secretly negotiated with Khomeini and his closest allies in Paris and Tehran for an orderly transfer of power.

In the months between the official declaration of an Islamic Republic in March 1979 and the subsequent embassy seizure, relations between Washington and the fledgling Islamic Republic were tense but cordial. Under Khomeini’s supervision, the provisional government’s head, Mehdi Bazargan, and members of his staff continued clandestine meetings with US diplomats in Tehran.

They discussed how to rebuild relations, restructure Iran’s military purchases, and recover the money — somewhere between $10 and 12 billion — that the shah had deposited in US banks. There was also sensitive intelligence sharing on the Soviet Union and Iran’s other neighbors, with the CIA even informing its Iranian contacts about Iraqi troop movements on their country’s border.

Meanwhile, a motley coalition of Islamic leftist and Marxist groups and organizations was gaining political traction by vociferously attacking the provisional government’s overt and covert dealings with the United States as a betrayal of the revolution’s anti-imperialist mandate. This was the volatile background of the Tehran embassy seizure, an event that would change the course and character of the Iranian Revolution by pitting it against the full might of the American colossus.

The Iran hostage crisis doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who immediately imposed comprehensive trade sanctions on Iran and went on to order a botched military hostage rescue operation. While the shah and Iran’s frozen assets were not returned, confrontation with the United States served Khomeini’s more important objective of consolidating his clerical dictatorship by outflanking the Left and harnessing anti-imperialist popular mobilization in what he called a “Second Revolution.”

In the long run, however, Khomeini’s confrontation with the US, dubbed the “anti-imperialism of fools” by Marxist scholar Fred Halliday, would have disastrous consequences for Iran. It earned the deep enmity of the US government and public, while giving Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein the chance to invade an internationally isolated Islamic Republic.

The Iran–Iraq War lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988, resulting in more than a million casualties and costing more than $1 trillion. When Iran regained lost territory and went on the offensive in 1982, the United States increased its support for Iraq. At the same time, however, Washington also was secretly arming Tehran in violation of American laws — a clandestine project whose exposure almost destroyed Reagan’s presidency.

The United States was pursuing a cynical policy of maintaining the military balance between the two adversaries, prolonging the war to bleed both Iran and Iraq. As a CIA operative put it bluntly, “We just wanted them to kick the shit out of each other.” Israel too intervened according to the same playbook, initially arming Iran when Iraq had the upper hand and later aligning with the US policy of militarily containing Iran’s repeated offensives.

By 1988, US involvement had reached the threshold of direct military intervention on Iraq’s behalf. The largest US fleet since the Vietnam War was assembled in the Persian Gulf, where growing skirmishes with the Iranian navy signaled Washington’s readiness for all-out war. When Khomeini finally accepted a ceasefire in 1988, he was ruling over a battered and impoverished country whose basic governing structure and official ideology would remain largely intact all the way to the present.

The Islamic Republic fashioned itself through its existential face-off with the United States, turning into a rampart state whose main pillars were intelligence and military institutions. It would brutally crush domestic opposition, attributing it to conspiracies hatched in Washington and Tel Aviv, whose relentless covert and overt war on Iran helped justify the regime’s paranoid narrative. The Islamic Republic’s identification of dissent with treason took a terrible toll on Iranian society, with thousands being executed or killed in street clashes and tens of thousands languishing and tortured in prison during the revolution’s first decade.

Yet the regime did not rule by repression alone. A decade of revolution and war during the 1980s necessitated social and economic policies that would shape the Islamic Republic into a “warfare-welfare state.” There were tangible improvements in health, education, electrification, and transportation, mainly in rural areas — a policy that later would sharpen class stratification and demands for political inclusion.

Meanwhile, by the war’s end, the regime’s repressive, militarized “deep state” controlled assets larger than those of either the public and private sectors. Iran’s economy came to be dominated by parastate conglomerates, mainly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and a few powerful foundations operating under the supervision of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as supreme religious leader after the latter’s death in 1989 and has carried on in that role to the present.

Owning or controlling hundreds of companies, banks, investment firms, and welfare institutions, the Guards and the foundations adapted to decades of onerous US economic sanctions. Gradually, they have expanded their already opaque operations into managing a shadow economy adept at multibillion-dollar clandestine financial transactions, setting up dummy corporations abroad, manipulating currency, laundering money, and selling oil under the table.

Having been ostensibly aimed at weakening the Islamic Republic, US sanctions thus helped create a powerful Iranian deep state whose key operatives and shareholders, euphemistically called “sanction merchants,” reap enormous rewards by circumventing the sanctions regime. At the same time, Iran’s ruling oligarchy has forged structural ties to the country’s perpetual military buildup in response to US and Israeli military threats and actual strikes.

The first post-Khomeini decade saw a relative détente with the United States, with the Clinton administration somewhat loosening the trade sanctions without ever removing them. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Islamic Republic quietly moved closer to the US, assisting its military invasion of Afghanistan. Tehran also welcomed the 2003 removal of Saddam Hussein by President George W. Bush and coordinated with the US occupation of Iraq, where it gained a significant foothold as the benefactor of the country’s majority Shi’i population.

These developments triggered a concerted response from Israel, which waged a successful campaign to place Iran on top of the “Axis of Evil” list of US enemies because of the Islamic Republic’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons and sponsorship of international terrorism. While Israel and its allies in the US government highly exaggerated Iran’s military threat, the Islamic Republic was in fact pushing its nuclear energy program to the threshold of being able to build a bomb.

It gradually developed a ballistic missiles program capable of reaching not only Israel but Europe and built military alliances with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. While Tehran justified these moves as necessary deterrence against the threat of US and Israeli military invasion, they gave some credence to Tel Aviv’s portrayal of the Islamic Republic as a regime flexing its military, and potentially nuclear, muscle outside its borders.

US political and economic pressure on Iran mounted during the first decade of the new century, reaching a new peak during Barack Obama’s first presidential term. Once in office in 2009, Obama secretly reached an agreement with Khamenei to resolve concerns over Iran’s nuclear program through negotiations. However, before official talks could begin, Iran was plunged into its largest mass protests since the revolution’s early years.

This was the Green Movement of summer 2009, when millions took to the streets denouncing fraud in presidential elections. The regime quelled the protests violently, killing dozens and inflicting hundreds of casualties, thus crushing a popular movement that asked for peaceful democratic change within the confines of the Islamic Republic. In retrospect, the major lesson of the Green Movement seems to have been that meaningful reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic was impossible. From this point on, mass protests were to be spontaneous and leaderless, angrily asking for the regime’s overthrow.

During his second term, Obama resumed negotiations with Tehran, in July 2015 accomplishing a breakthrough agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. According to this “Obama deal,” Iran would keep nuclear fuel enrichment strictly within the limits for peaceful use and allow total inspection of its nuclear facilities. In return, the United States, China, Russia, France, the UK, and Germany agreed to roll back trade sanctions in a step-by-step manner, reversible any time the Islamic Republic was found to be in violation of its obligations.

Coming in the wake of significant rises in Iran’s oil income, the reduction of sanctions had immediate tangible effects on the economy, which grew an average of 10 percent in 2016 and 2017. However, temporary economic growth did not reverse the long-term declining trend in people’s living standards. Between 2011 and 2019, close to ten million people, roughly 15 percent of the population, sank into the ranks of the poor.

By the end of 2017, pent-up public frustration was boiling over into violent riots. For ten days in December 2017–January 2018, angry demonstrations erupted in more than one hundred cities. The protests turned violent as crowds chanted anti-regime slogans and attacked banks, government offices, police stations, and seminary schools.

Between twenty-five to fifty people were reported to have been killed and several hundred were injured before the protests were put down. The crowds were mostly from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds. In contrast with the 2009 Green Movement’s reformist demands, they called for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

Elected to his first term in the wake of these protests, Donald Trump, strongly pressured by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, withdrew the United States from Obama’s nuclear deal in May 2018. Though Iran was in full compliance with its provisions, Trump claimed he could force a “better deal” from Tehran, something which did not happen.

Under Trump’s maximum-pressure sanctions, Iran’s economy contracted by more than 10 percent, while poverty rose by about the same percentage. Inflation got out of control as food prices rose by 200 percent and health care costs by 125 percent. All available data show that, during the 2015–2025 decade, the living standards of middle- and lower-class Iranians significantly plummeted.

Decades of US sanctions certainly have contributed to the immiseration of ordinary Iranians, even if they are not its only cause. Moreover, rather than helping Iran’s democratic prospects, US and international sanctions undermine such prospects by pushing the Islamic Republic to harden its state-of-siege mentality and become more tenaciously repressive.

Meanwhile, Iran’s popular discontent has grown more intense and frequent, with significant protests breaking out every two to three years during the last decade. In November 2019, around two hundred thousand mostly lower-class protesters came out across the country when energy prices were raised and subsidies to the poor were cut. They attacked and set fire to government offices and were contained only when the state security forces deployed machine-gun fire, tanks, and helicopters against them, inflicting several hundred casualties.

Mass protests broke out again in September 2022 and lasted through winter 2023, leaving behind more than five hundred dead and 20,000 arrestees. This was the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising which, in addition to its exceptional duration and intensity, displayed new features such as the leading role of young women, the unity of middle- and working-class protesters, and the shifting of the radical epicenter to the provinces.

The protests were also totally secular and at times anti-clerical. Though the mobilization was openly anti-regime, the lack of unified leadership, organization, and clear political demands proved to be a major liability.

This brings us to the immediate background of the January 2026 protests — in other words, the major events of the past three years. The Biden administration failed to revive a version of the Obama deal, no doubt because of its catering to Israel, whose genocide of the Palestinian people Joe Biden fully supported militarily, financially, and diplomatically.

Having blamed Iran for the October 2023 Hamas attack, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus in April 2024. After refraining from direct retaliation for years of Israeli cyberattacks and assassinations of its scientists and military personnel, the Islamic Republic finally responded with missile and drone attacks against military targets inside Israel. The two countries were now at war.

In July 2024, Israel raised the stakes by assassinating Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. The Islamic Republic’s response came in October with a barrage of ballistic missiles fired at Israeli targets, most of which were intercepted by Tel Aviv’s Iron Dome, the US Navy, and Jordanian air defenses. Later that month, Israel retaliated with three waves of strikes against twenty locations in Iran, targeting air defense batteries and ballistic missile production sites. The attack involved more than one hundred Israeli aircraft, with some penetrating Iran’s airspace, and all returning to their bases unscathed.

At the same time, during 2024, deadly Israeli blows against Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, had broken the so-called Axis of Resistance, a network of political-military alliances that Iran had helped construct around Israel at great cost. Having lost its regional allies, the Islamic Republic was now much more vulnerable to direct military strikes by Israel and the United States.

The balance of forces shifted even more against Iran when Trump was reelected and wrote to Khamenei proposing negotiations, an offer that Tehran accepted. Trump set a deadline of sixty days for reaching a new nuclear deal. On June 13, 2025, one day past Trump’s deadline, Israel unleashed a massive barrage of cyberattacks and aerial bombardment on Iran. It hit sensitive military sites and nuclear infrastructure and assassinating dozens of high-ranking military and intelligence leaders and scientists working in the nuclear program.

Israel also bombed civilian targets including Iran’s energy infrastructure, hospitals, residential neighborhoods, and the state broadcasting building. Close to five thousand casualties were reported on the Iranian side, with over one thousand deaths, including hundreds of civilians. The Islamic Republic retaliated by sending hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones toward Israel, most of which were intercepted though some passed through Israeli and US defenses to hit military targets and inflict hundreds of casualties and a few dozen deaths, mostly among civilians.

On June 22, the United States directly joined the war, carrying out a highly complex long-range aerial bombardment, dropping twelve thirty-thousand-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites. When the US–Israeli war against Iran ended with a ceasefire after twelve days, the Islamic Republic declared victory, though in fact the regime was badly damaged and quickly lost whatever sympathy it had garnered from an Iranian public buckling under enemy bombardment.

In the war’s immediate aftermath, a plethora of public statements and open letters demanded a “paradigm change in the ruling system.” These statements came from scholars, human rights and civil society activists, lawyers, former and current political prisoners, trade unionists, women’s organizations, repressed ethnic and national groups, and purged regime dissidents.

They converged on several key points: the release of political prisoners; the freedom to form parties and associations; the end of state control over the media; the transfer to the government of massive economic assets controlled by the Supreme Leader and unelected institutions; and a halt to the involvement of military institutions, primarily the Revolutionary Guards, in economic affairs. All statements also condemned the US–Israeli attack on Iran and rejected the prospect of “regime change” through foreign intervention or violent uprising.

This could have been the perfect opportunity for a regime besieged by mounting public dissatisfaction, an economy on the verge of collapse, and powerful enemies waiting at the gates to at least suggest openness to some form of peaceful structural change. But nothing of that sort transpired. Refusing to accept responsibility for the country’s dire dilemmas, Khamenei doubled down, merely offering his worn-out rhetoric of defiance.

On December 28, protests and strikes broke out in the bazaar of Tehran after a sudden plunge in the exchange rate of Iran’s forever-sinking currency. This occurred in the context of an inflationary spiral of at least 40 percent; electricity, water, and gas shortages; poisonous air pollution; battered middle- and working-class living standards; and ongoing rolling strikes by workers, teachers, and pensioners.

As we saw during previous cycles, the protests quickly spread and intensified, soon involving hundreds of thousands across the country. Digitally captured images of angry crowds spread globally, leading the government to shut down the internet and cut off the country from the rest of the world, as it had done during previous protests.

Initially, Khamenei responded with a mix of conciliation and threats, declaring that the regime would listen to public “grievances” but would not tolerate “disturbances.” He also claimed that US and Israeli agents were among the protesters, trying to steer them toward violent confrontation. The question of violence then became paramount, as most slogans were unmistakably against the regime, and many called for its overthrow. There were also reports of violent attacks on government offices, mosques, and security personnel, though it was not clear who the perpetrators were.

Meanwhile, government forces were firing on crowds, inflicting scores of casualties at first and then killing hundreds and eventually thousands. The latter figure was confirmed by Khamenei who claimed unspecified numbers among them were government personnel. The horrific figure of thousands of casualties inflicted on protesters is unprecedented even by the brutal standards of the Islamic Republic.

Another unprecedented feature of recent protests is the appearance of slogans in favor of monarchy as an alternative to the Islamic Republic. For decades, monarchism, embodied by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed king, has been a phenomenon largely confined to the Iranian diaspora, particularly in the United States, where it is a marginal rather than a popular trend. Moreover, Reza Pahlavi is unabashedly aligned with the most right-wing US and Israeli factions championed by Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

In recent years, his message has resonated in Iran thanks to Persian-language satellite television outlets that are widely believed to be funded by the Saudi, Israeli, and US governments or individual donors from those countries. Far from unanimous in recent Iran protests, monarchist slogans are tied to foreign influence, especially since Reza Pahlavi openly advocates US and Israeli intervention in Iran. He welcomed last summer’s attack on his country and clearly favors foreign military support to topple the Islamic Republic.

Slogans such as “Long Live the Shah” still appear to be angry rhetorical slaps in the face of the current regime rather than programmatic endorsements of monarchy. Nevertheless, the recent surge of monarchism, even if (and especially because) it is backed by the US and Israeli governments, must be taken seriously and not dismissed as a mere reactionary illusion. No comparable political alternative exists outside Iran, while the Islamic Republic for decades has systematically and violently prevented the emergence of any alternative inside the country, even among its own reformist factions.

Though the protests have been forcibly contained for the moment, the political impasse the Islamic Republic has imposed on a restive and by now desperate society persists. Addressing this impasse requires a significant political change, something the regime adamantly refuses to even consider. Nor have Trump’s declarations of support for protesters had any perceptible impact on the ground in Iran except for strengthening the repressive hand of a regime that blames the protests on US and Israeli intervention.

Meanwhile, Trump rachets up his contradictory rhetoric, occasionally hinting at regime change through direct US military intervention. This would be a highly dangerous proposition to which the Islamic Republic could respond by hitting back at US bases and allies in the Persian Gulf, disrupting the global flow of oil and wreaking havoc in the region.

There are signs that even Trump grasps the unpredictable implications of waging full-scale war against Iran, as he has admitted that any viable alternative to the Islamic Republic must emerge from inside the country. At the same time, it remains the daunting task of the Iranian people and their progressive international allies to figure out the basic contours of a viable road map out of the country’s horrible current impasse.