DUBAI—Many ordinary Iranians say Iran’s 12-day war with Israel and the United States last June shattered the regime’s carefully nurtured image of invincibility. Now its results are helping to fuel the wave of protests that have been ongoing for the past two weeks at least 500 people Killed while the Islamic Republic attempted to regain control.
Leaked footage from the country shows that despite the crackdown, large-scale protests are continuing. Human rights-group assessments say security forces have already killed hundreds and possibly thousands of protesters. President Trump has repeatedly said Threatened to attack Iran If lethal force is used, and is scheduled to brief allies on Tuesday on specific measures the US could take to respond to the killings.
Iran’s leaders have faced similar storms before. This time, the regime is in a very weak position.
The ayatollah’s rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq began after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The social agreement that persisted after that shock was that Iranians would accept hardships and sanctions in exchange for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.
That notion collapsed when Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction to the center of Tehran last summer.
Israeli attacks throughout Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the subsequent US bombing campaign dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s nuclear program. This was an affront to a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth in a proxy network designed to prevent such an attack on the homeland.
Now protesters are facing arrest or gunfire as they demand not only a change in policy, but the fall of the Islamic Republic.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said, “This was the last straw. For years the regime had argued that although it has not been able to bring prosperity or pluralism to Iranians, at least it has provided them with safety and security. That did not happen.” “Now people have reached a point of saying: enough.”
June’s 12-day war gave the regime “a temporary Chinese high that many mistakenly believed was a national rally around the flag,” said Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointing out that the Islamic Republic had, since its founding in 1979, opted to wage a war of choice rather than a war of necessity against Israel. “External wars strengthen the revolutionary regime in the early years, but military humiliations expose the fragility of later-stage dictatorships.”
Indeed, history is replete with examples of repressive regimes falling victim to domestic unrest following military strikes against foreign adversaries. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in 2000, a year after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign forced him to relinquish control of Kosovo. Argentina’s junta was replaced by a democratic government a year after it was defeated by the United Kingdom in the 1982 Falklands War. And Greece’s military dictatorship collapsed after losing the war over Cyprus in 1974.
There is not just one reason for any upheaval. The immediate cause of the latest round of protests in Iran was a series of currency devaluations, indicative of Iran’s deepening economic crisis as oil prices have fallen and Western sanctions have blocked business activity. However, this crisis is linked to Iran’s isolation, which is a clear consequence of its failed foreign policy.
Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader Ali Khamenei has resisted pressure to change course since the 12-day war and has attempted to carry on with business as usual. Tehran did not make significant changes to its foreign policy or reach a deal with Trump on Iran’s nuclear program that could have led to a reduction in sanctions. Nor did the regime implement any major domestic political and economic reforms that could boost its popular support.
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said, “The fact that U.S. air forces could blow up Iran was not a surprise to anyone. What was surprising was that once you get blown up, you still want to go back to the same policies that got the country into this situation.” “That’s what has created a feeling of complete despair, people saying: I’ve got nothing more to lose here.”
This is not the first time the Iranian regime has been challenged by mass protests. It survived the so-called “Green Revolution” over the disputed presidential election in 2009, as well as periods of major unrest in 2019 and 2022.
However, now the international environment has changed. The US, under Trump, is encouraging the protests – while Iran’s regional rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia, hope the regime will be controlled and focused inward, but not collapse.
Many of Iran’s neighbors fear the country of more than 90 million people could slide into a Syria-style civil war, in which separatist insurgencies could spread across the borders in provinces populated by Iranian Kurds, Baluchis and other minorities.
“The perception among Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf is that they prefer to deal with the Iran they know rather than some new or destabilizing region,” said Nikolay Kozanov, research associate professor at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Centre. “The Arab neighbors, despite all the problems and contradictions, want to see a weak Iran, but an Iran that they understand. Let’s not have the illusion that regime change in Iran will lead to a more friendly regime there.”
In 2009, then-President Barack Obama had similar concerns and stayed away from supporting Iranian “Green Revolution” protesters, and focused more on negotiating a nuclear deal with Khamenei’s regime. In 2013, Obama also backed off from attacking the Iranian-sponsored Syrian regime for a nerve-gas attack on civilians in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, after initially declaring that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” triggering US intervention.
On the contrary, Trump is signaling that he will take action. “Iran is looking toward freedom it may never have seen before. America stands ready to help!!!” Trump posted on social media on Saturday, shortly after Senator Lindsey Graham reposted the statement, that “the brutality of the Iranian Ayatollah and his religious Nazi minions” will not be challenged.
Of course, Trump is excited about this beheading success Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime and, at least so far, securing the cooperation of his successor. Diplomats and Iran watchers say they may be tempted by a similar template of removing Khamenei and hoping for better fortunes with a more viable successor.
Last June, Trump said on social media that he knew where Khamenei was hiding, but that he would not have him killed – “at least not for now.”
Elie Geranmayeh, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that if the US removed Khamenei it could provide an opportunity for the rest of the regime to take a more pragmatic approach – as happened in Caracas.
The rest of the Iranian regime can tell the population, “We can give you hope for economic recovery because we are going to push for an agreement with the US that will lift sanctions, and we are repairing the cracks in the security node of our social contract because we have removed the constant threat of attacks by the US,” she said.
“The big question is whether this will be enough to appease Iranian citizens, given the level of unrest, riots and violence we are seeing on the ground right now,” he said. “But it is an off-ramp that is available to the current ruling system. It is also one that – if we look at Venezuela – it could attract Trump and the Gulf countries.”
That may not necessarily be so attractive to Iran’s pro-democracy protesters.
“If we get there, what will it all mean?” Esfandyar Batmangheli, CEO of the Bourse and Markets Foundation think tank, predicted that the Iranian system would move toward a more pragmatic approach anyway after Khamenei’s eventual death.
“Such a massacre that preserves the essence of the regime would be tragic,” he said. “This would mean that all those who have lost their lives so far in these protests and subsequent protests will have done so in vain,” he said.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov yaroslov.trofimov@wsj.com
