\n<\/p>\n
Forty-seven years ago, Iran had a revolution that replaced a U.S.-allied monarchy with an anti-American theocracy. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran may be on the verge of a counterrevolution.<\/p>\n
History suggests that regimes collapse not from single failures but from a fatal confluence of stressors. One of us, Jack, has written at length about the five specific conditions necessary for a revolution to succeed: a fiscal crisis, divided elites, a diverse oppositional coalition, a convincing narrative of resistance, and a favorable international environment. This winter, for the first time since 1979, Iran checks nearly all five boxes.<\/p>\n
In the past week, protests have engulfed Iranian cities, their momentum growing daily. These began as a response to a fiscal crisis: a national currency in free fall, a state with empty coffers. In American politics, inflation rates of more than 3 percent tend to bring down administrations. Iran\u2019s inflation rates\u2014more than 50 percent across the board, 70 percent for food\u2014are among the world\u2019s highest. Over the past year, Iran\u2019s currency has fallen more than 80 percent relative to the dollar. In 1979, a single U.S. dollar was worth 70 Iranian rials; today, it\u2019s worth 1.47 million rials, a depreciation of more than 99 percent. Iranian currency has become less a medium of exchange than a daily index of national despair. And unlike past economic crises, this collapse has crossed all class lines, affecting bazaar merchants and the well-off as well as the poor.<\/p>\n
Iran has 92 million inhabitants, perhaps the largest population in the world to have been isolated for decades from the global financial system. In addition to inflation, the country suffers from endemic corruption, mismanagement, and brain drain. Young Iranians contend with high rates of unemployment and underemployment; older generations have found their pension funds to be largely insolvent. Renewed global sanctions and the dwindling price of oil\u2014down 20 percent in the past year\u2014have forced Tehran to sell its oil to China at a backbreaking discount. Power outages and water rationing have become fixtures of daily life.<\/p>\n
The second condition for state breakdown\u2014the alienation of the elite\u2014is also widely evident in Iran. What began in 1979 as a broad ideological coalition has, by 2026, contracted into a one-man party: the party of Ali Khamenei. Mir Hossein Mousavi, a founding father and the former prime minister of the Islamic Republic, is in his 15th year of house arrest. Every living former president has been silenced or sidelined: Mohammad Khatami is under a total media ban, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is marginalized and monitored, Hassan Rouhani was barred from seeking a seat in the 88-member Assembly of Experts (the clerics who choose the next supreme leader).<\/p>\n
The regime has been hollowed out by decades of negative selection\u2014the result of rewarding mediocrity and prizing ideological loyalty over competence. The effect has been to alienate the professionals and technocrats who once provided the state with its administrative backbone. Replaced by sycophants and suffocated by the clergy\u2019s interference in daily life, this class has long since lost faith in the system. It sees its wealth eroded by inflation, and the country ruined by incompetence\u2014a failure now undeniable in the mismanagement of Tehran\u2019s water supply.<\/p>\n
Much like the Soviet Union of the 1980s, the Islamic Republic has mostly lost its convictions. Only a small percentage of its insiders remain true believers; the majority are motivated by wealth and privilege. One Tehran-based political-science professor we spoke with put a finer point on this: \u201cAt the beginning of the revolution, the regime was 80 percent ideologues and 20 percent charlatans. Today, it is the reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bazaar merchants played a pivotal role in the 1979 revolution, serving for years as a core constituency and economic base for the Islamic Republic. But in recent decades, the regime has built the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into a military-industrial complex from which networks of wealth and power flow. Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman held hostage by the regime for eight years, compared the Iranian state to \u201ca collection of competing mafias\u2014dominated by the IRGC and its alumni\u2014whose highest loyalty is not to nation, religion, or ideology, but to personal enrichment.\u201d This system has not only weakened the regime\u2019s ideological cohesion but also displaced the traditional merchant class, turning the bazaar from a pillar of support into a source of dissent.<\/p>\n
Still, one group of elites remains united: the country\u2019s security forces. Their solidity has, until now, prevented the Islamic Republic\u2019s collapse. No senior IRGC commanders have defected as yet or voiced even mild public criticism of Ayatollah Khamenei, despite years of nationwide protests and the targeted Israeli assassination of nearly two dozen senior figures in their ranks. For many of these commanders, losing power would mean losing wealth and potentially their life. They would likely be the last leaders to turn against the regime. But if they did, the regime would not survive.<\/p>\n
Iran clearly meets the third criterion: The Islamic Republic\u2019s political, economic, and social authoritarianism has created a diverse oppositional coalition in response to perceived injustice. Over the past decade, intermittent mass protests have drawn participants from virtually every socioeconomic class, including ethnic minorities on the periphery of the country, labor movements, women, and bazaaris. These groups have rarely coordinated their efforts or protested in unison. But many of their reasons for outrage are broadly shared.<\/p>\n
The Islamic Republic is a theocracy that claims to rule from a moral pedestal. For this reason, examples of its graft and hypocrisy are particularly galvanizing. IRGC commanders oversee the brutal enforcement of the veiling of women\u2014but their daughters and mistresses are spotted overseas without hijab. The country is suffering from a severe water shortage\u2014and many Iranians believe that a \u201cwater mafia\u201d linked to the IRGC is diverting resources to their own industrial projects while entire villages are left to die of thirst. The children of thousands of senior officials advertise their lives in Western cities on Instagram and LinkedIn. Protesters in the city of Yasuj recently chanted, \u201cTheir children are in Canada! Our children are in prison!\u201d<\/p>\n
The opposition movement has shown that it can mobilize widespread fury, but to succeed, it will need to move beyond mobilization and forge links with disgruntled elites. Some of these technocrats and marginalized insiders feel alienated but are too afraid to act because of what may await them the day after. The opposition needs to offer a credible safe exit for these regime insiders, convincing them that the Islamic Republic is no longer their shield, but their shroud.<\/p>\n
Revolutions arise when rulers become weak and isolated; when people believe themselves to be part of a numerous, united, and righteous group that can act to create change; and when political elites begin to attach themselves to the people, abandoning the government rather than defending it. In Iran, thus far, the last ingredient has been missing.<\/p>\n
The fourth condition for state breakdown is a convincing shared narrative that bridges a nation\u2019s socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological divides. In Iran today, the regime\u2019s founding principle of pan-Islamic revolutionary ideology has been supplanted by a fierce, corrective nationalism. The state\u2019s shopworn mantras of \u201cDeath to America\u201d and \u201cDeath to Israel\u201d are being drowned out by a demand for national self-interest: \u201cLong live Iran.\u201d This is not merely a change in tone, but a total rejection of the regime\u2019s regional adventurism, punctuated by the now-ubiquitous protest chant: \u201cNo to Gaza; no to Lebanon; my life only for Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond a surge in nationalism, Iranians have grown immune to the hollow ideological slogans and performative piety of a self-appointed \u201cmoral\u201d state. A population largely born after the 1979 revolution seeks, above all, zendegi-e normal\u2014a \u201cnormal life,\u201d liberated from a regime that micromanages people\u2019s attire, intimacy, and private choices. By delegitimizing the Islamic Republic as an occupying force\u2014one that plunders national wealth to subsidize regional proxies\u2014the opposition has effectively subverted the regime\u2019s nationalist rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Every successful revolution requires both inspirational and organizational leadership. Many of the protesters in Iran\u2019s 2026 uprising have rallied behind former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has lived in exile since 1979. Leading an opposition from exile and restoring a deposed monarchy are both daunting, but neither is unprecedented. Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran all spent more than 15 years in exile before returning to lead revolutions that toppled the regimes that had banished them. Several countries that once abolished their monarchies\u2014including Spain, Cambodia, and Britain (under Oliver Cromwell)\u2014later restored them as constitutional monarchies.<\/p>\n
As Iranians know well from 1979, ruthless contests tend to define revolutions. Having spent nearly half a century abroad, Pahlavi has not yet organized the on-the-ground muscle needed to prevail in such a contest. He also faces a deeper question: What kind of order do Iran\u2019s monarchists aspire to establish? Pahlavi has consistently said that his goal is to help Iran transition to democracy\u2014and perhaps to serve as a constitutional monarch if chosen by the people. Yet many of his most passionate supporters are vocal about restoring an absolute autocracy. This tension has inhibited his ability to flip disaffected elites against the regime.<\/p>\n
Yet ironically, among the broader population, this ambiguity could work in his favor. Revolutionary ideologies need not provide a precise future plan to unite and motivate their followers. On the contrary, what often works best are vague or utopian promises of deliverance, combined with an emotionally powerful depiction of the intolerable injustice and inescapable evils of the current regime.<\/p>\n
The final and decisive catalyst for revolution is an international environment that helps sink the regime rather than bolster it. After North Korea, Iran may be the most strategically isolated country in the world. Over the past two years\u2014since Hamas\u2019s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which Ayatollah Khamenei alone among major world leaders openly endorsed\u2014Iran\u2019s regional proxies and global allies have been decimated or deposed.<\/p>\n
For decades, Tehran projected strength through its so-called Axis of Resistance, a network of nearby proxies and autocratic allies. But following the devastating 12-day war in June, that deterrent has been degraded. With Hezbollah\u2019s and Hamas\u2019s leadership in disarray and Israeli jets maintaining a humiliating, virtually uncontested presence over Iranian airspace, the regime is strategically naked before its people\u2014exposed by an empty treasury and an unprotected sky.<\/p>\n
Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela\u2019s Nicol\u00e1s Maduro are no longer in power. Vladimir Putin is consumed fighting a war in Ukraine. China\u2014the destination for 90 percent of Iran\u2019s oil exports\u2014has proved to be a predatory partner. Donald Trump dropped 16 bunker-busting bombs atop Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities, largely destroying an enterprise that\u2014between sunk costs, sanctions, and lost oil revenue\u2014had cost the nation more than half a trillion dollars. Moreover, in contrast to past U.S. presidents who were reluctant to enter Iran\u2019s political fray, Trump has warned the Islamic Republic that if it massacres protesters, the United States is \u201clocked and loaded\u201d to respond.<\/p>\n
Observers of the current protests ask: What is different this time? The answer is that the breadth of the economic collapse and the disastrous defeat in the 12-day war have shown all Iranians that the regime is no longer capable of providing them with basic economic or military security. Why tolerate a state that enriches itself but cannot fulfill the most elemental state functions?<\/p>\n
When the five conditions coincide\u2014economic strain, alienation and opposition among the elites, widespread popular anger at injustice, a convincing shared narrative of resistance, and favorable international relations\u2014the normal social mechanisms that restore order in a crisis are unlikely to work. The society\u2019s equilibrium has been profoundly disrupted and can easily tip into escalating popular revolts and open elite resistance, producing a revolution.<\/p>\n
The Islamic Republic is today a zombie regime. Its legitimacy, ideology, economy, and top leaders are dead or dying. What keeps it alive is lethal force. The most important element still missing from a full revolutionary collapse is the repressive forces deciding that they, too, are no longer benefiting from, and hence no longer willing to kill for, the regime. Brutality can delay the regime\u2019s funeral, but it\u2019s unlikely to restore its pulse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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