Forty-seven years in the past, Iran had a revolution that changed a U.S.-allied monarchy with an anti-American theocracy. At the moment, the Islamic Republic of Iran could also be on the verge of a counterrevolution.
Historical past means that regimes collapse not from single failures however from a deadly confluence of stressors. Considered one of us, Jack, has written at size in regards to the 5 particular circumstances crucial for a revolution to succeed: a fiscal disaster, divided elites, a various oppositional coalition, a convincing narrative of resistance, and a good worldwide setting. This winter, for the primary time since 1979, Iran checks practically all 5 bins.
Previously week, protests have engulfed Iranian cities, their momentum rising each day. These started as a response to a fiscal disaster: a nationwide foreign money in free fall, a state with empty coffers. In American politics, inflation charges of greater than 3 p.c are inclined to carry down administrations. Iran’s inflation charges—greater than 50 p.c throughout the board, 70 p.c for meals—are among the many world’s highest. Over the previous 12 months, Iran’s foreign money has fallen greater than 80 p.c relative to the greenback. In 1979, a single U.S. greenback was value 70 Iranian rials; at present, it’s value 1.47 million rials, a depreciation of greater than 99 p.c. Iranian foreign money has change into much less a medium of alternate than a each day index of nationwide despair. And in contrast to previous financial crises, this collapse has crossed all class strains, affecting bazaar retailers and the well-off in addition to the poor.
Iran has 92 million inhabitants, maybe the biggest inhabitants on the planet to have been remoted for many years from the worldwide monetary system. Along with inflation, the nation suffers from endemic corruption, mismanagement, and mind drain. Younger Iranians deal with excessive charges of unemployment and underemployment; older generations have discovered their pension funds to be largely bancrupt. Renewed international sanctions and the dwindling worth of oil—down 20 p.c previously 12 months—have pressured Tehran to promote its oil to China at a backbreaking low cost. Energy outages and water rationing have change into fixtures of each day life.
The second situation for state breakdown—the alienation of the elite—can also be extensively evident in Iran. What started in 1979 as a broad ideological coalition has, by 2026, contracted right into a one-man social gathering: the social gathering of Ali Khamenei. Mir Hossein Mousavi, a founding father and the previous prime minister of the Islamic Republic, is in his fifteenth 12 months of home arrest. Each residing former president has been silenced or sidelined: Mohammad Khatami is beneath a complete media ban, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is marginalized and monitored, Hassan Rouhani was barred from looking for a seat within the 88-member Meeting of Specialists (the clerics who select the following supreme chief).
The regime has been hollowed out by many years of damaging choice—the results of rewarding mediocrity and prizing ideological loyalty over competence. The impact has been to alienate the professionals and technocrats who as soon as offered the state with its administrative spine. Changed by sycophants and suffocated by the clergy’s interference in each day life, this class has lengthy since misplaced religion within the system. It sees its wealth eroded by inflation, and the nation ruined by incompetence—a failure now plain within the mismanagement of Tehran’s water provide.
Very similar to the Soviet Union of the Nineteen Eighties, the Islamic Republic has largely misplaced its convictions. Solely a small proportion of its insiders stay true believers; the bulk are motivated by wealth and privilege. One Tehran-based political-science professor we spoke with put a finer level on this: “Originally of the revolution, the regime was 80 p.c ideologues and 20 p.c charlatans. At the moment, it’s the reverse.”
Bazaar retailers performed a pivotal position within the 1979 revolution, serving for years as a core constituency and financial base for the Islamic Republic. However in current many years, the regime has constructed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps right into a military-industrial complicated from which networks of wealth and energy circulate. Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman held hostage by the regime for eight years, in contrast the Iranian state to “a set of competing mafias—dominated by the IRGC and its alumni—whose highest loyalty is to not nation, faith, or ideology, however to private enrichment.” This technique has not solely weakened the regime’s ideological cohesion but in addition displaced the standard service provider class, turning the bazaar from a pillar of help right into a supply of dissent.
Nonetheless, one group of elites stays united: the nation’s safety forces. Their solidity has, till now, prevented the Islamic Republic’s collapse. No senior IRGC commanders have defected as but or voiced even gentle public criticism of Ayatollah Khamenei, regardless of years of nationwide protests and the focused Israeli assassination of practically two dozen senior figures of their ranks. For a lot of of those commanders, shedding energy would imply shedding wealth and probably their life. They’d probably be the final leaders to show towards the regime. But when they did, the regime wouldn’t survive.
Iran clearly meets the third criterion: The Islamic Republic’s political, financial, and social authoritarianism has created a various oppositional coalition in response to perceived injustice. Over the previous decade, intermittent mass protests have drawn contributors from nearly each socioeconomic class, together with ethnic minorities on the periphery of the nation, labor actions, girls, and bazaaris. These teams have not often coordinated their efforts or protested in unison. However lots of their causes for outrage are broadly shared.
The Islamic Republic is a theocracy that claims to rule from an ethical pedestal. Because of this, examples of its graft and hypocrisy are notably galvanizing. IRGC commanders oversee the brutal enforcement of the veiling of ladies—however their daughters and mistresses are noticed abroad with out hijab. The nation is affected by a extreme water scarcity—and lots of Iranians imagine {that a} “water mafia” linked to the IRGC is diverting sources to their very own industrial tasks whereas complete villages are left to die of thirst. The kids of 1000’s of senior officers promote their lives in Western cities on Instagram and LinkedIn. Protesters within the metropolis of Yasuj just lately chanted, “Their kids are in Canada! Our youngsters are in jail!”
The opposition motion has proven that it may well mobilize widespread fury, however to succeed, it might want to transfer past mobilization and forge hyperlinks with disgruntled elites. A few of these technocrats and marginalized insiders really feel alienated however are too afraid to behave due to what could await them the day after. The opposition wants to supply a reputable secure exit for these regime insiders, convincing them that the Islamic Republic is now not their protect, however their shroud.
Revolutions come up when rulers change into weak and remoted; when folks imagine themselves to be a part of a quite a few, united, and righteous group that may act to create change; and when political elites start to connect themselves to the folks, abandoning the federal government slightly than defending it. In Iran, so far, the final ingredient has been lacking.
The fourth situation for state breakdown is a convincing shared narrative that bridges a nation’s socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological divides. In Iran at present, the regime’s founding precept of pan-Islamic revolutionary ideology has been supplanted by a fierce, corrective nationalism. The state’s shopworn mantras of “Dying to America” and “Dying to Israel” are being drowned out by a requirement for nationwide self-interest: “Lengthy dwell Iran.” This isn’t merely a change in tone, however a complete rejection of the regime’s regional adventurism, punctuated by the now-ubiquitous protest chant: “No to Gaza; no to Lebanon; my life just for Iran.”
Past a surge in nationalism, Iranians have grown resistant to the hole ideological slogans and performative piety of a self-appointed “ethical” state. A inhabitants largely born after the 1979 revolution seeks, above all, zendegi-e regular—a “regular life,” liberated from a regime that micromanages folks’s apparel, intimacy, and personal selections. By delegitimizing the Islamic Republic as an occupying power—one which plunders nationwide wealth to subsidize regional proxies—the opposition has successfully subverted the regime’s nationalist rhetoric.
Each profitable revolution requires each inspirational and organizational management. Lots of the protesters in Iran’s 2026 rebellion have rallied behind former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has lived in exile since 1979. Main an opposition from exile and restoring a deposed monarchy are each daunting, however neither is unprecedented. Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran all spent greater than 15 years in exile earlier than returning to steer revolutions that toppled the regimes that had banished them. A number of nations that after abolished their monarchies—together with Spain, Cambodia, and Britain (beneath Oliver Cromwell)—later restored them as constitutional monarchies.
As Iranians know nicely from 1979, ruthless contests are inclined to outline revolutions. Having spent practically half a century overseas, Pahlavi has not but organized the on-the-ground muscle wanted to prevail in such a contest. He additionally faces a deeper query: What sort of order do Iran’s monarchists aspire to determine? Pahlavi has constantly stated that his purpose is to assist Iran transition to democracy—and maybe to function a constitutional monarch if chosen by the folks. But lots of his most passionate supporters are vocal about restoring an absolute autocracy. This rigidity has inhibited his means to flip disaffected elites towards the regime.
But satirically, among the many broader inhabitants, this ambiguity might work in his favor. Revolutionary ideologies needn’t present a exact future plan to unite and encourage their followers. Quite the opposite, what usually works greatest are imprecise or utopian guarantees of deliverance, mixed with an emotionally highly effective depiction of the insupportable injustice and inescapable evils of the present regime.
The ultimate and decisive catalyst for revolution is a world setting that helps sink the regime slightly than bolster it. After North Korea, Iran stands out as the most strategically remoted nation on the planet. Over the previous two years—since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel, which Ayatollah Khamenei alone amongst main world leaders overtly endorsed—Iran’s regional proxies and international allies have been decimated or deposed.
For many years, Tehran projected power by means of its so-called Axis of Resistance, a community of close by proxies and autocratic allies. However following the devastating 12-day conflict in June, that deterrent has been degraded. With Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s management in disarray and Israeli jets sustaining a humiliating, nearly uncontested presence over Iranian airspace, the regime is strategically bare earlier than its folks—uncovered by an empty treasury and an unprotected sky.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro are now not in energy. Vladimir Putin is consumed preventing a conflict in Ukraine. China—the vacation spot for 90 p.c of Iran’s oil exports—has proved to be a predatory associate. Donald Trump dropped 16 bunker-busting bombs atop Iran’s nuclear amenities, largely destroying an enterprise that—between sunk prices, sanctions, and misplaced oil income—had price the nation greater than half a trillion {dollars}. Furthermore, in distinction to previous U.S. presidents who had been reluctant to enter Iran’s political fray, Trump has warned the Islamic Republic that if it massacres protesters, the US is “locked and loaded” to reply.
Observers of the present protests ask: What’s completely different this time? The reply is that the breadth of the financial collapse and the disastrous defeat within the 12-day conflict have proven all Iranians that the regime is now not able to offering them with fundamental financial or army safety. Why tolerate a state that enriches itself however can not fulfill probably the most elemental state capabilities?
When the 5 circumstances coincide—financial pressure, alienation and opposition among the many elites, widespread standard anger at injustice, a convincing shared narrative of resistance, and favorable worldwide relations—the conventional social mechanisms that restore order in a disaster are unlikely to work. The society’s equilibrium has been profoundly disrupted and might simply tip into escalating standard revolts and open elite resistance, producing a revolution.
The Islamic Republic is at present a zombie regime. Its legitimacy, ideology, financial system, and high leaders are useless or dying. What retains it alive is deadly power. Crucial factor nonetheless lacking from a full revolutionary collapse is the repressive forces deciding that they, too, are now not benefiting from, and therefore now not prepared to kill for, the regime. Brutality can delay the regime’s funeral, however it’s unlikely to revive its pulse.
