Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis | The New Yorker

Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis | The New Yorker




Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis
During the President’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically.
By Benjamin Wallace-WellsJanuary 17, 2026

Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty
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On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.



The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”




This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.


Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”
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In Iran, the despotic regime is fragile and desperate, and, as Merz suggests, it may soon fall. But it may also survive, by means of violent repression, and by Thursday the news from Tehran had quieted. Sounds of gunfire had faded; there were no new bonfires. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its allies had maintained a system of humanitarian interventionism, until the President so delightedly detonated it. “In the first year of his administration,” the Times noted last week, Trump “dismantled the instruments of soft power—such as Voice of America and the State Department unit that dropped internet capability into Iran—that were key to democracy promotion.” What he is left with are his threats and a hollow sort of exhortation that borrows from the same program of humanitarian interventionism that he has so explicitly disavowed. “Iran is looking at freedom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “perhaps like never before.”

Perhaps. The President’s statements of allegiance—and, potentially, the internet that Elon Musk has offered to make available for free via Starlink—may well strengthen the resolve of the Iranian opposition. But Trump’s domestic acts, in a countervailing way, may embolden the regime. Cynicism travels, too. Right now, he is faced with a mass protest in Minneapolis against a government show of power that is growing increasingly unpopular, and his reaction has been to double down: on Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops to the upper Midwest.

What supplies all these events with a sense of approaching a precipice is the open contestation between pro- and anti-democratic forces, happening both here and abroad, in view of each other. Through the partial curtain between the two societies, we are watching what is happening in Iran. And Iran, surely, is watching us. ♦




Published in the print edition of the January 26, 2026, issue, with the headline “Power and Protest.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes about American politics



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Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable
Political repression and a teetering economy have sparked widespread protests and chants of “Death to the Dictator.”
By Robin WrightJanuary 13, 2026

Photograph by MAHSA / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty
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Over decades of travel to Iran, I’ve regularly returned to symbolic sites of the Islamic Revolution as a way of assessing the national mood. One is the ornate mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which features a huge golden dome and four spiny minarets visible for miles, a sprawling parking lot with space for twenty thousand vehicles, and a mall of souvenir shops and kebab restaurants. The shrine remained well attended during official government events, but, as the years went on, I noticed fewer and fewer visitors—usually tourists and Shiite pilgrims, plus the “dusters” in charge of cleaning the elaborate enclosure in which the Imam is buried. I have also routinely attended Friday prayers at the University of Tehran, where senior clerics, and occasionally the Supreme Leader, give the sermon. Over time, the crowds got older and older.

“It is almost impossible to keep the revolutionary élan alive and to transmit it down generational lines,” Anne O’Donnell, a historian at New York University, told me. “There’s something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them.” But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria “has a shelf life, a time stamp.”





It’s been almost a half century since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi boarded the royal Boeing 727 at Tehran’s airport for an extended “vacation.” He reportedly wept while bidding farewell to his staff and inner coterie, and took a vessel of Iranian soil with him. At that point, after fourteen months of nationwide protests, his exile seemed inevitable, the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now the theocracy that succeeded his rule is in its third generation—and in its own desperate struggle to survive.



After two weeks of anti-government demonstrations in all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces, more than five hundred people have reportedly been killed, and thousands more have been detained. “The Iranian regime has faced and brutally repressed repeated rounds of popular uprisings since 2009,” Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, posted on X. “Never has it struggled with the kind of perfect storm it’s sailed itself into.”

Iranians have plenty of reasons to feel angry, betrayed, vulnerable, or insecure. In the last two decades, several major protests have erupted. In 2009, millions took to the streets in a series of demonstrations dubbed the Green Movement over alleged political fraud in a Presidential election. Between 2017 and 2019, the soaring costs of basic items sparked protests in dozens of cities. (The price of fuel, managed in part by a government subsidy, rose by three hundred per cent.) In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for improperly covering her hair, produced the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, led largely by young women. The current protests erupted on December 28th, after merchants in Tehran’s lofty Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops as the value of the rial, the national currency, went into free fall. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, a dollar could be exchanged for roughly seventy rials; this month, a dollar bought 1.4 million. Annual inflation has exceeded forty per cent, and soared to seventy-two per cent for food. The revolution was carried out in the name of “the oppressed,” but Iran’s population has almost tripled since then, and the government has been increasingly unsuccessful in feeding, housing, educating, and employing them.

Politically, the regime has rotted from within, discarding, discrediting, or detaining its own kind. Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said that the turning point happened last Thursday, the beginning of the Iranian weekend and the sabbath, when vast crowds joined the protests. “That’s the point where people saw each other,” he told me. (Kadivar’s father, Mohsen, was an outspoken critic who was imprisoned at Evin Prison and now teaches at Duke University. His aunt, Jamileh, was a reformist Member of Parliament who was put on trial for attending a conference in Berlin and banned from running for a second term. She now lives in London.)

The ideology invoked to justify Iran’s revolution has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of accusations of voter fraud in the 2009 election, which put a hard-liner in power, according to Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina sociologist and the author of “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.” Since then, “people just didn’t buy what a leader was saying anymore, and were looking for a way out,” he said. Iranians have occasionally rallied around reformist candidates, but they, too, have been undermined by hard-line revolutionary purists. “Many Iranians who share the ideals and goals of the reformist movement no longer believe that reform is going to lead to those goals,” Kurzman said.


During an event at the Atlantic Council on Friday, Rob Macaire, a former British Ambassador to Iran, said that the regime in Tehran “does not have the answers to any of the challenges that it’s facing.” The inner circle of power has become “tighter and tighter,” so the government “finds it very difficult to do anything other than to circle the wagons and to double down on a repressive policy.” Guy Burgess, a sociologist who studies conflict and co-founded the blog Beyond Intractability, said that prospects of the Islamic regime collapsing have increased. “These are the sort of things that happen when, all of a sudden, people decide that the brutal force that kept the regime in power can be overcome.”

But the Islamic Republic still has the forces—in the hundreds of thousands—to repress the current uprising. And it has been ruthless. Videos circulating online from one medical center showed a computer screen displaying digital images of the deceased in its morgue for families to identify. Other videos published on social media have shown the dead zipped up in black body bags, laid outdoors for families to claim. The BBC quoted Iranian medical staff who described people blinded by pellets, a tactic used by Egyptian security forces during the Arab Spring, in 2011.

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, much will depend on sentiment within these security forces. In June of last year, Israel and the U.S. destroyed military installations and nuclear sites in Iran and killed key leaders and scientists, leaving the Iranian military feeling vulnerable. In addition, the rank and file share the same (increasingly existential) economic challenges faced by most Iranians. While the security forces are often lumped into an ideological monolith, there is a wide diversity among their members, as nearly all men are required to serve. Some opt to join the Revolutionary Guard because they get off earlier in the day than conventional soldiers, and thus can earn money at a second job. For others, having the I.R.G.C. on their résumés helps them later when applying for jobs in government or at government-funded universities.

O’Donnell noted that a critical juncture in the fall of the Berlin Wall was when upper-level officials in East Germany were no longer assured that the Soviet Union had their backs. Mid-level officials, in turn, were no longer convinced that their superiors would protect them. “So then they started to ask questions whether they should fire on crowds or not and think to themselves, ‘I’m certainly not going to put my neck out if no one’s going to cover me,’ ” she said. Ultimately, the erosion of morale at mid-level positions was what ended Communist rule in East Germany. “It was very unexpected.” Burgess added, “Once you get to the point where some of the regime’s forces decide that they’d be better off siding with the uprising, then the regime collapses quickly, and you find guys like [the former Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad suddenly finding new housing in Russia.”


The first generation of Iranian revolutionaries—including octogenarians like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—have long fooled themselves about their future. In September, during the U.N. General Assembly, I was part of a group of journalists and scholars who met with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a political centrist, at a hotel in New York. He explained that the U.S. and Israel wrongly believed that, after the attacks in June, “people would take to the street and things would come to an end.” This assumption, he argued, did not “understand the Islamic Republic.” But on Sunday, faced with nationwide protests, he had to acknowledge his government’s shortcomings. “Our responsibility is to solve and address people’s grievances,” he said in an interview on Iranian state television. Other government officials have branded the demonstrators “terrorists,” which qualifies them for the death penalty.

The main obstacle for the protesters is that they have not yet formed a cohesive movement with an easily articulated goal. Nor have they established infrastructure or announced some form of centralized leadership. As with the Arab Spring, which toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen but failed to establish democratic governments or address economic inequality, protesters in Iran know what they are opposing but haven’t landed on a viable alternative. In the short term, any action taken by the Trump Administration may do little to provide clarity to the situation. On Saturday, the President posted on Truth Social, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Later, Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a golfing buddy of the President, posted that the Iranians’ “long nightmare” was “soon coming to a close.” He continued, “President Trump understands Iran will never be great with the ayatollah and his henchmen in charge. To all who are sacrificing in Iran, God bless. Help is on the way.”

Another site I’ve often visited while in Tehran is the Paradise of Zahra—or Behesht-e Zahra, in Farsi—the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city. A big section of the graveyard is devoted to “martyrs” from the eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Martyrdom, a commitment to die fighting for justice, has been central to Shiite Islam since the seventh century. Over the weekend, CNN and other media posted a video of mourners carrying the body of a protester into the Paradise of Zahra for burial. The mourners shouted, “Death to Khamenei” and “I will kill the one who killed my brother.” Security forces reportedly used tear gas to disperse them. A new generation of martyrs is being created. 

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The Bloody Lesson the Ayatollah Took from the Shah
With demonstrations in dozens of cities across Iran, Ali Khamenei and his regime are faced with a dilemma.
By David RemnickJanuary 11, 2026

Photograph by Michel Setboun / Corbis / Getty

On November 6, 1978, while riots raged throughout Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a rhetoric of conciliation. “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” he said. The Shah promised to correct the regime’s mistakes, liberate political prisoners, call parliamentary elections, investigate the corruption in his midst, and ease the crackdown on dissent against a nationwide opposition.

But, as had happened so often in the history of brittle regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was read as desperation. In a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consistently attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had said earlier, and was “drawing its last breaths.” And now, despite the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there could be no compromise.



Two months later, the Shah, suffering from cancer, fled Iran and commenced the indignity of travelling from one country to the next, looking for an acceptable place of exile. He died in July, 1980, in Cairo.



The current leader of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six. He is one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He is keenly aware of the story of the decline and fall of the old regime. And now, with the Islamic Republic facing dramatic demonstrations in dozens of cities across Iran, Khamenei is faced with a dilemma not unlike the Shah’s. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other instruments of force as his bludgeon, Khamenei has chosen bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s attempt to shut down the internet and other means of communication has dramatically slowed reporting, yet human-rights groups say that Iranian authorities have already killed as many as two hundred demonstrators.

“Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and had instructed his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he might have been saved. The question now is will the average soldier on the street shed more and more blood. How far will they go?”

The leaders of the regime, various experts told me, derived dark instruction not only from their historical enemy, the Shah, but from subsequent history. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Cold War with the United States, and introducing market mechanisms into the economy. His conclusion was that “we cannot live this way any longer”; a regime guided by Communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of generalized poverty, isolation, and confrontation. And yet, although many conditions improved through Gorbachev’s liberal policies, he also risked the existence of a fragile system. Finally, he could not control the forces he had unleashed, and, by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was forced from office.

Khamenei came to power in 1989, at the peak of “Gorbymania.” The spectacle of the fall of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to grow more suspicious of the West and of any sign of internal reform. “I have now reached the conclusion that the United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said in a speech to government officials, in July, 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. U.S. officials intend to carry out the same in Iran, and there are plentiful clues [evidencing this] in their selfish, often hasty remarks made during the past few years.”

The Islamic Republic has certainly faced periods of internal unrest before. There were student protests in 1999, following the shutdown of a reformist newspaper; the rise of the Green Movement, in 2009, following the fraudulent reëlection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and, in 2022, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstrations which were sparked by the police killing of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for failing to wear a hijab properly.

And yet, according to most Iran experts, the Islamic Republic has never been as endangered as it is now. Earlier protests demonstrated many Iranians’ opposition to the theocracy’s hard-line ideology, its insistence on the hijab, its control of media and education, its general brutality. This time around, the generalized economic immiseration of the Iranian people has set off the protests. The inflation rate is more than fifty per cent. The currency, the rial, is in free fall. There are extended power outages and water shortages. Food prices are particularly stratospheric, and some basics have gone missing from the markets.

The only sector of the country that is not suffering dramatic economic pain is the élite of the regime, particularly the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a pillar of the security establishment that also amasses huge profits from its economic interests in a range of industries: oil, ports, manufacturing, cement, and many more. Countless Iranians see the I.R.G.C. as a kind of militarized mafia. That long-simmering resentment has also helped lead to the national sense of fury and crisis. As Fatemeh Shams, an exiled professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, “This is a riot of a starving population.” And it is a riot that has extended far beyond the biggest cities and into places often thought of as conservative, quiescent, and loyal to the regime.

Economics, though, is not the sole factor at play. The theocracy of the ayatollahs has been exposed in all its fragility. Over the past two years, its strongest (and most expensive) proxies abroad—Hezbollah, in Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; the Houthis, in Yemen—have been gravely damaged. Which has only led Iranians to ask more loudly than ever why the regime spent its capital on foreign proxies and not on its own people. The regime boasted about its security establishment, and yet, in June, Israel and the United States joined together to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities with almost no resistance. Israeli forces, which had thoroughly penetrated the regime over the years with their intelligence assets, were able to kill unimpeded a range of high-ranking Iranian military, intelligence, and political leaders. Khamenei himself suffered the indignity of going into hiding during the bombings. As the Ayatollah now looks at the recent U.S. incursion into Venezuela, a close ally of Iran, he has to be wondering if Donald Trump will make good on his threat to act should more protesters be killed in Iran. Rather than acknowledge the rot within his own regime, he has blamed the demonstrations on the U.S. and Israel.

One way in which 1979 differs from 2026 is that Khamenei’s regime likely has nowhere to go. Many members of the Iranian élite during the Shah’s reign were educated abroad. They knew foreign languages. When their time came, in 1979, many had the wherewithal to leave Iran and re-make their lives in London or Los Angeles. The Islamic Republic has lost many of its best and brightest to emigration, and the members of the élite who remain are, in general, from a more provincial background. “And so, for the worst in the regime, their backs are against the wall,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Their mentality is kill or be killed.”

What was clear to the experts I spoke to, however, is that the demonstrations happening throughout Iran today are not religiously oriented or focussed on a particular spokesman or sector of society; they are largely about national pride and leading a normal, prosperous, and stable daily life. There are slogans heard on the streets calling for freedom, but not necessarily for democracy. Beyond that, it is extremely difficult to discern with any confidence where this could lead, whether the regime collapses or manages to endure.



A few months ago, Sadjadpour published an important essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs,” in which he speculated on what Iran might become after Khamenei dies or if he is deposed. Could Iran resemble China and shift from theocracy to technocracy? Will it resemble Pakistan, becoming a security state led by the generals of the I.R.G.C.? Might it resemble the isolation and terror of North Korea or the reactionary qualities of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia or the authoritarianism of Erdoğan’s Turkey? Sadjadpour carefully sorts through scenarios, similarities, and differences with a keen sense of Iran’s history and particularities.

Much of what makes his essay convincing is its intellectual modesty, its readiness to say that trying to derive confident predictions of the future from the chaos of what is happening on the streets and in government offices is folly. He reminds the reader of another Iran expert, James A. Bill, who wrote an article for Foreign Affairs for its winter 1978/1979 issue called “Iran and the Crisis of ’78.” Bill, the author of “The Eagle and the Lion,” a distinguished book about American-Iranian relations, wrote that “the most probable alternative” to the Shah would be “a left-wing, progressive group of middle-ranking army officers.” Other possibilities, he said, included “a right-wing military junta, a liberal democratic system based on Western models, and a communist government.” History had other plans. ♦

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What Makes the Iranian Protests Different This Time
Unrest has spread across the Islamic Republic as it faces economic disaster at home and a profound weakening of its network of regional allies.
By Isaac ChotinerJanuary 10, 2026



Photograph by MAHSA / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty


On Friday, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened to continue cracking down on protesters who have risen up against his regime, calling them “vandals” working for the Americans. Years of Western sanctions and internal mismanagement have caused Iran’s economy to crater; in response to increasing domestic anger, Iran’s government has cut off access to the internet, and protests have been met violently by security forces. (Rights groups have reported dozens of deaths; a doctor told Time magazine that six hospitals in Tehran alone had recorded more than two hundred protester deaths.) The protests are only the latest problem facing Khamenei’s regime, which had much of its leadership assassinated by Israel during a twelve-day war last June. (President Trump also ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites in June.) Meanwhile, Iran’s network of allies across the Middle East has been severely weakened. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad fled the country after a revolution, which Iran had helped bloodily pacify, finally achieved its goal. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s presence and influence have shrunk following Israeli attacks over the past several years.

I recently spoke by phone with Fatemeh Shams, an associate professor of Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a feminist activist and, since 2009, has been an Iranian exile. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what has made this round of protests against the Iranian regime unique, how the regime’s humiliation by Israel has weakened its standing at home, and why the crackdown on protesters might get even more brutal than in earlier eras.



We talked in 2022 during protests in Iran that were focussed on the hijab. What do you think has changed since that previous round of major protests, and since the other rounds of protests we have seen in Iran in the past couple of decades?




The main thing that is important to keep in mind, and this is a significant change, is that it has become essentially impossible for the majority of the population to make ends meet. I don’t mean just the working classes or the lower classes. Even the majority of the middle class, who were still able to cover the cost of living until last year, are almost completely paralyzed at the moment. The cost of living has significantly increased, and one reason for that is the plummeting value of the country’s currency, which has led to an inability of merchants and traders to import goods from abroad. Then there is the extreme inflation and the lack of basic foods. My mom was just telling me that it has become hard to get cooking oil. The price of chicken has gone way up. Many small businesses have been shut down or are completely unable to operate. The government has been unable to manage the situation, and basically the society cannot survive anymore. This is a riot of a starving population. This is a riot for survival. Society cannot survive without being able to manage the cost of living.

The protests are being met by brutal crackdowns: the population was already enraged. Social freedom has been extremely limited since the regime came to power and particularly in the past couple of decades. And then there is the humiliation that the regime was met with over twelve days of war with Israel last year.

Would you say that this is the broadest discontent since the 1979 revolution, when Iran’s monarchy, led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown by Islamic clerics?

Absolutely. I think this is an explosion. This is a moment where it’s not about social freedom anymore. It’s not about bodily autonomy. It’s about something that is much more widespread. The 2022 protests, which were unprecedented protests in their own right, were intersectional in the way that they brought people of different ethnic groups, genders, and political factions together at the beginning for the bodily autonomy of women, but then it immediately, very quickly, basically moved toward the toppling of the regime and the equality for different ethnic groups in the society. This time, though, it’s about society reaching a dead end. And when I say reaching a dead end, I mean that for the people, for the population. It’s a matter of how to be able to survive and to protect their families and to put bread and food on the table when basic goods are impossible to buy or find.

I would imagine that previous protests, which were about women’s rights or ethnic minorities, and which would sometimes be characterized as a battle between hard-liners versus moderates—all of these types of protests spark opposition, whether from men, from more conservative elements in society, or from the ethnic majority. I know you said that there was a lot of intersectional stuff happening, but I still imagine that those types of protests bring with them some cleavages that a protest in response to economic disaster would not.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s why these are at such a large scale. We didn’t have this large scale of protests in any round of protests in the past in Iran. I don’t know if you have looked at the videos that are coming out of certain cities, like, for example, Mashhad. That’s where I come from. It’s my home town. I grew up there and also it’s the first strategic city for Khamenei in the sense that there is a sacred shrine there, and the expansion of that shrine has been part of his ideological project. I have been shocked as a Mashhadi citizen.

Previous protests were not as big there?

No, not at all. And this is a huge blow to the regime because in Mashhad you see security forces in all corners of the city. Khamenei often gives speeches there laying out his plans for the next year. This is the last place that they would have imagined such a large-scale protest.

The slogans are really important. In the last round of protests, in the previous round, the main slogan was “Woman, Life, Freedom.” It was coming from grassroots collectives of Kurdish women. Now we are hearing slogans about “death to the dictator,” which target the core of the regime. We have also never had such large-scale strikes. Strikes are something that had an important role in toppling the Pahlavi regime in 1979. And, in the previous round of protests, we saw that the Kurdish areas were very active in the strikes. Some activists were shouting that the rest of the country, including Tehran, should join their strikes, but it didn’t happen.

This time, though, the unrest started in Ala’addin Bazaar—a well-known shopping center in Tehran, which primarily sells mobile phones and digital equipment—and it quickly spread to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. The merchants in Ala’addin Bazaar are considered conservative, religiously speaking. They’ve never protested in the past. And this is a place for electronic equipment, mobile phones, computers—this is something about trading and being able to import and so forth. So it started in the heart of the capital, then it spread to other areas of Iran, and then seven major Kurdish parties basically came together and announced that they were joining the strike.

You mentioned the Twelve-Day War with Israel. It was significant the degree to which Iran was humiliated by first Israel and then the United States, and the degree of military power that Israel seems to have displayed over Iran. I would imagine that just from a sheer nationalist perspective, anyone watching their own country get embarrassed like that would be outraged at the regime, too.

I think we have to be very careful in addressing this question because I think there was a lot of misinterpretation in terms of how Iranians responded to the war. Iranians were obviously against the Israeli actions. The majority were enraged about this, but at the same time we have to be careful—when they’re enraged about an assault on Iranian soil, it’s not about defending the regime. This is about the population that is stuck between a murderous criminal mafia that has taken over the country and, on the other hand, Israel and the United States, who follow their own interests. So they’re not defending the regime by condemning Israel.

Humiliation is something that we have to take into account. Many military commanders were killed. I think one of the things that people realized is that this regime is not even able to protect its own high-ranking officials. If they cannot protect their own officials and military bases, how are they going to protect the nation? How are they going to protect their own people? The leader of the country was hiding for twelve days. People were essentially left on their own to figure out how to defend themselves. People could not leave certain cities. They were blocked inside their cities without having any shelter to run into.

So I think the war led to this complete lack of trust in the ability of the government to protect the nation, in the case of an invasion, under a regime that has been basically attacking Israel, attacking America, and isolating the whole nation in the name of national integrity. I’ve been hearing repeatedly, especially after the U.S. strikes and during the war, that people believe the nuclear program has caused more economic devastation and minor international isolation than any success it might have brought. The immense costs associated with the program have only worsened the economic situation, leading to a more stifling environment. Unlike the regime, the people do not view this as a national interest and are instead in favor of negotiating a deal with the U.S. to lift the sanctions. There have been negotiations and discussions within the government regarding this issue, but Khamenei does not seem willing to back down.

What about Iran’s regional standing, which has weakened in the past couple of years after the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell and was replaced by a Sunni government, and after Hezbollah, the Iranian ally in Lebanon, was weakened by Israel? Is there some sense among the population that Iran’s regional position is weaker? Have you seen that fact manifesting itself in the way people within Iran are talking about politics and protest?

I think it is part of that humiliation that we’ve been discussing, and I think a major aspect of it was all these empty gestures and speeches by Khamenei. He was always talking about the “axis of resistance” and the defenders of Haram, which is how he referred to the soldiers that he was sending to Syria to help the Assad regime. All of this is gone and all of it was gone in such a short period of time. And I think Khamenei did not really expect this level of assault and this level of loss on a regional level. On the other hand, I think what’s really important is to take into account the Iranian people’s grievances over this matter.

One of the things that I hear a lot from people who are not even political, like just ordinary citizens, is that we are starving to death, so why is our money being sent to Hezbollah or to Hamas, for example. This financial support has been, by the way, openly announced. It’s not a secret. They’re sending money and they’re very open about it. They’re bluntly talking about financing the “axis of resistance” and not only financing it but also creating it—they were the ones who created it. And there has been mass dissatisfaction among the people who consider it a form of betrayal, putting them in a very precarious and fragile situation security-wise by exposing them to war and to invasion and to starvation and to sanctions.

I also think something that we need to think about and to take into account is that Iran has been the sole major regional ally of Palestine. Since the beginning of the revolution, pro-Palestine rhetoric has been one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s identity, with talk that we are going to conquer Jerusalem, we are going to free Palestine. Ayatollah Khomeini used to say that the path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala. And that was the slogan for the Iran-Iraq War—this sort of expansionist idea of, O.K., we want to go to free Palestine and free Jerusalem. And I think what happened in Gaza over the past two years, as horrific as it was, and there is no doubt that it was a genocide—it weakened the position of the Islamic Republic, although the world and particularly some post-colonial sorts don’t want to accept that. And they’re keeping silent at this moment because they think that by weakening the Iranian regime, the situation in Palestine will get worse. But with what happened in Gaza I think the Islamic Republic proved that they can do nothing but create even more chaos in the region.

I would imagine the sentiment among the people of Iran is very sympathetic to Palestinians. That makes it all the more striking when you say that there’s tremendous anger that the Islamic Republic has been offering support for Hamas and Hezbollah while things are out of control at home.

Yeah. And one of the slogans that has been chanted again this time, which I heard for the first time back in 2009, is “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” I think people are just done with these regional interventions and expansionist ideological plot that both Khomeini and Khamenei have had in mind for forty-seven years. Their main concern is, How are we going to survive?

Whatever Iran’s hopes about trying to help the Palestinians, the country where Iran has been most active in the region, with a calamitous humanitarian cost, has been Syria, and after spending an untold number of soldiers and dollars there, the Assad regime completely crumbled. And the new Syrian regime probably will not be too friendly to Iran going forward. You wonder if people in Iran are asking why all this was done.

Yeah, exactly. And when Assad fled the country to Russia, there has been—even now, as we speak, there are rumors inside Iran, outside Iran, that Khamenei is also going to flee there. I don’t believe that this is going to happen. I think Khamenei wants to stay in Iran and wants to be “martyred” or “killed” or whatever. He will never leave Iranian soil in my opinion, but the fact that there are rumors like this gives us a really interesting clue about how people are thinking about his fate, and the closest example to that of course is what happened to Assad.

The regime has shown a real willingness to be brutal when it comes to responding to protests. And I’m sure it’s no different this time. Does the worrying situation the regime finds itself in regionally make you think that it will be even less willing to compromise, that it will go all out to maintain its power no matter what?

I’m extremely concerned. And on Friday morning Khamenei basically said that all people who are in the streets are a bunch of rioters and are agents of Israel and America and they should be put in their place. So it’s obvious that they’re extremely scared and desperate. I think the internet blackout is a sign of the desperation on the side of the state because they don’t want the news to get out. In 2019, when they shut down the internet, more than fifteen hundred people were killed.

What makes them much more worried and concerned about the possibility of their survival this time is the lack of regional allies. Bashar Assad is no longer there. They have almost no control over Lebanon. The Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, recently said that the current economic situation is no longer under control. The crackdown on the protesters is going to be much more brutal.

I am also concerned about what’s going to happen in the prisons, because usually the main crackdown and killing and torture happen behind closed doors there. In the past couple of years, the number of executions in Iran has been unprecedented. Just in the past year, some two thousand people have been executed. And one of the main charges, especially since the Twelve-Day War, has been collaboration with Israel. We don’t know whether these sorts of accusations are even true. But we may see much more brutal consequences for protesters than we have seen in the past.

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