In 1953 Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was toppled in a coup planned by MI6 and the CIA and carried out by Iranian army units and hoodlums supportive of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s British-run oil industry and allowed Iranians more freedom than they had ever known; the constitutional monarchy he favored was a path between the extremes of royal tyranny and popular radicalism that had beset the country for the previous three quarters of a century. In the years after Mossadegh’s overthrow, as the Shah built a dictatorship backed uncritically by the United States, Iranian democrats and liberals sank into a despondency that was expressed in works of art, perhaps the most lasting of which, the poem “Winter” by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, describes the insidious effect of political failure on the spirit of the individual and the cohesion of society:
They do not wish to return your greeting, their heads are buried in their collars,
No one dares raise their head to greet, to acknowledge friends,
They see no further than their own foot,
For the path is dark and slippery,
And if you stretch a kindly hand toward someone,
They withdraw their hand from their coat-pocket with reluctance,
So searing is the cold.
The breath that rises warm from the chest turns to a dark cloud,
Standing like a wall before your eyes,
So much for breath; what do you hope to gain from meeting the eyes of friends
Near or far?
The revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979 was supported by the country’s liberals and leftists, but the government that replaced him was captured by hard-line theocrats and their followers in the Revolutionary Guard. Iran spent the next four and a half decades waging wars hot and cold, covert and declared, its hostility toward the West hardly wavering, regardless of the price to be paid in hardship at home and ostracism abroad.
The Islamic Republic was a pariah long before its latest war with the United States and Israel. Its economy has been crippled by sanctions and the corruption that is their concomitant, its middle class increasingly inured to privation, its workers crushed by inflation and the nonpayment of salaries, and life for all marred by the power outages, water shortages, and unchecked pollution that are the ambient signifiers of the failing state.
And yet the regime has repeatedly belied predictions of its demise, saved by revenue from the oil it sells to China and by a hard core of ideologues who retain a monopoly on force and a readiness to employ it against dissidents whom they view, without irony, as the agents of Satan. In January they suppressed mass protests with unprecedented savagery at the cost of thousands of lives. In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists. My Iranian dentist in London was congratulated by his Malaysian, Pakistani, and Indonesian patients on the pluck exhibited by a regime he detests, which shows how cleverly the Islamic Republic wages the propaganda war.
During the war the US and Israel attacked not only military and nuclear targets but also steelworks, petrochemical plants, bridges, ports, railway lines, schools, universities, a bank, and a medical research center. Antique plaster and mirror fragments fell from the ceilings of palaces not designed to withstand bombs and missiles. With the cease-fire that came into effect on April 8, Trump stopped short of extinguishing “a whole civilization,” as he had threatened to do. But his hope, shared by Benjamin Netanyahu, that attacking Iran would embolden the people to rise up against their rulers and encourage the armed forces to mutiny was unfounded.
We are often told that the regime does not adequately represent its citizens. As US secretary of state Marco Rubio put it during his confirmation hearing in 2025, “I don’t know of any nation on earth in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them.” The Islamic Republic’s internal opponents are thought to amount to around 40 percent of the population, or 36 million people, with at most 20 percent being die-hard supporters and the remaining 40 percent floating between the two.
Between 1997, when Iran’s first reformist government was elected, and 2022, when many thousands braved truncheons and torture chambers to protest the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody, Iranians tried every means short of armed insurrection to force the Islamic Republic to grant them personal and political freedom and to negotiate an end to some of the harshest sanctions in the world. Their efforts came to naught, and after January’s bloodbath Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps the country’s most respected political scientist and a man who usually chooses his words carefully, told an Iranian YouTube channel that “any eventuality, even war and annihilation, would be better than the survival of the Islamic Republic.” Since the war started Ghaderi has either withdrawn or been removed from the public scene.
Other than the severity of the regime’s response, what distinguished the January protests was that many of the participants flouted a taboo on expressing support for foreign intervention that had lingered since the 1953 coup. Thousands in the streets called on the United States and Israel to attack and topple the Islamic Republic, selecting as their white knight not one of the many reformists who languish in Iranian jails but Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah and a US resident who is scathing about reform, flaunts his alliance with Netanyahu, and hasn’t seen his homeland in forty-eight years. Support for Pahlavi was always stronger outside the country than within, and his silence after a US attack on a girls’ school in southern Iran on February 28, in which 175 people were killed, condemned him in the eyes of many of his compatriots.
The yearning for foreign intervention among some opponents of the regime and the unease this caused in many others have opened a fissure that the Islamic Republic, adept at divide and rule, will exploit. I know people who, despite loathing their rulers, refused to leave the capital during the war because they felt it would be a betrayal of their country and their compatriots. (“Iran isn’t a hotel you leave for another if you don’t like the service,” one Iranian told me.) So they stayed, pushing beds onto landings, sleeping in their clothes, sweeping up shattered glass. They spoke witheringly of “supporters of the war,” especially those who at the first bombings quit Tehran for the safety of the hills or the coast. Iranian democrats who were “against the war” desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.
The current cease-fire resembles a pause for breath more than a prelude to peace, and it is informed on both sides by Trumpian exhibitionism. The Western media directs much attention at the negotiations and the Iranian officials who appear to control them: former and serving Revolutionary Guards, for the most part, with CVs as bloodstained as those of the martyrs they replaced, and the ambiguous, invisible figure of Mojtaba Khamenei, who has succeeded his father as supreme leader but who appears to be a plaything of the Guard. The agony of ordinary Iranians, meanwhile, is forgotten.
Iran is entering a new winter of political failure that will be harder than that of the prerevolutionary period, when the experience of being insulted and infantilized by a crowned despot was alleviated somewhat by rising living standards. There is no such comfort now. In March year-on-year inflation rose to 72 percent, one of the highest rates since the revolution. Food prices are rising much faster. According to Hadi Kahalzadeh, a former economist at Iran’s Social Security Organization, the war disrupted “supply chains, transport networks, and commercial services,” with many firms suspending operations “under the combined pressure of war, inflation, recession, and collapsing demand.” Kahalzadeh estimates that between 10 and 12 million jobs in Iran are under threat, “putting the main source of income for millions of households…at risk.”
The Islamic Republic no longer pretends to speak for all or even the majority of its citizens; it pours vitriol on the “scum, spies, and hirelings”—the national police chief’s phrase—who participated in January’s unrest. In Tehran armed boys of fifteen or sixteen stand on street corners searching cars and demanding phones so they can scroll through photos for evidence of espionage. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and Iran’s chief negotiator in talks with the US in Pakistan, has urged loyalists not to surrender the public sphere to the opposition and has called attendance at the funerals, rallies, and religious ceremonies that succeed one another on the streets of Tehran and other cities an “obligatory jihad.”
The Internet remains blocked for most Iranians, the better, the authorities say, to defend against cyberattacks and to stop traitors from passing information to the enemy or disseminating antinational propaganda; the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, justifies his own unimpeded access on the grounds that he is “the voice of the Iranians.” The Islamic Republic has even appropriated “Ey Iran” (O Iran), a monumental nationalist anthem that was composed as a response to the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II and is an opposition favorite.
Parliament recently passed legislation prescribing twenty-five years’ imprisonment for anyone who passes video footage of the war to a hostile TV station. The judiciary is confiscating the property of “treasonous and mercenary elements who supported the aggression.” On April 13 the chief prosecutor announced that expatriate Iranians will no longer be able to buy and sell property through their appointed representatives. This is punishment for their actions “against the Islamic Republic” and preparation, doubtless, for further expropriations.
That loot will need a home, and the authorities have been advising young people to “come into the system,” which is to say, don the uniform of a Basiji or the guise of an informer and accept the sinecures and perks that alone in a state-run “resistance economy” offer a measure of financial security. When the central bank introduced its most valuable banknote, worth 10 million rials—around seven dollars—in March, there was huge demand for this hedge against a possible crash of electronic payments. “I waited my turn,” an eighty-year-old Tehran resident told the Financial Times, “and the clerk told me he could only give me 10 million rials. But when I made a fuss, telling them I had no money and needed cash, I got 30 million instead.” This in an economy backed by the second-largest natural gas reserves and third largest crude oil reserves in the world.
On April 19 Ghalibaf told state TV, “In the field [of battle], the street and in diplomacy, we are in control.” The number and diversity of the issues that divide Iran and the US—from Hezbollah and the Strait of Hormuz to Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and the Houthis of Yemen—militate against the kind of agreement that would bring the Islamic Republic sanctions relief comprehensive enough to save the economy. So do Iran’s new leaders, who are happier than their predecessors to talk to the enemy, but also bolder—the elder Khamenei never actually closed the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile Iran’s relations with its neighbors on the far side of the Persian Gulf have returned to the bad old days of the 1980s, when the nascent Islamic Republic fought an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was all but encircled by his Arab allies.
As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. The Terror that followed the French Revolution drew much of its ferocity from fears of invasion. In the 1980s the young Islamic Republic decided that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths on the battlefield with Iraq and the immiseration of the economy were prices worth paying to entrench its power and eliminate its domestic opponents. Like Eisenhower and Churchill when they ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow in 1953, Trump and Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.
—April 30, 2026
English (US) · 