Is this time different in Iran?

On Thursday night, the Iran government cut off internet service and international calling in the country as anti-government protests broke out throughout the country. Videos that made it to social media showed large crowds marching through multiple cities and government buildings ablaze.

The most recent protests appeared to be in response to a call to take to the streets from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the shah of Iran, who fled the country prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But protests have been spreading throughout the country since late December, spurred by public anger over the state of the economy.  What began with merchants shuttering stores in the bazaar in Tehran, quickly spread to cities and rural areas throughout the country. Human rights groups say more than 40 people have been killed in the demonstrations and thousands detained. 

Raising the stakes last week was President Donald Trump’s threat that the US was “locked and loaded” to intervene if the Iranian government killed protesters. It’s a threat Iranian leaders have to take seriously since the US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last June, not to mention the events that just transpired in Venezuela. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused protesters on Friday of “ruining their own streets to make the president of another country happy,” i.e., Trump.

The Iranian regime has managed to violently suppress rounds of mass protests before, from the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 to the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022. Is there any reason to think that this time is different?

To get more clarity on that question, Vox spoke with Vali Nasr, professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a leading expert on Iran domestic politics and foreign policy. Born in Iran, Nasr served as a State Department adviser during the Obama administration and is the author of the recent book Iran’s Grand Strategy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When you watch what’s unfolding in Iran right now, what do you think distinguishes these protests from earlier periods of unrest we’ve seen in Iran such as the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022?

At least until Thursday, the scale of the protests did not approximate the Mahsa Amini protests, but last night they seemed to be much more prolific and spread across Iran in a much larger way and also grew very violent towards the end of the night, with burning of some government buildings

But I think the main thing that is much more significant is that these protests are coming at a time of war for Iran. The aura of invincibility for the regime is different. When the Mahsa Amini issue happened, as important and as significant that it was, there was a certain confidence in Tehran that they could do whatever they wanted, using brutality and suppression.

Now, first of all, there was a war [with Israel] in June, which was obviously devastating and shocking in many ways to both the regime and the public, and in fact, the worsening of Iran’s economy between June and December is partly due to the war. That’s how we saw the rial depreciate 40 percent over six months and inflation spiked by 60 percent during the same time. 

“The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want?”

In the regime’s mindset, the war never ended. Even with the precarious ceasefire that President Trump negotiated after the “12-day war,” the leadership’s anticipation is that the war will resume sooner or later, and that Israel didn’t think that it had achieved all of its war aims. Plus, Iran is no longer able to use its proxies and its nuclear program is lying in ruins.

And so when these protests started, the highest priority in the minds of the key security decision-makers in Iran was not domestic stability or inflation, it was an imminent Israeli-American attack on Iran. And then on top of it, you have President Trump actually threatening that if the protesters are harmed, if Iran reacts violently, that the United States is “locked and loaded” to come and rescue them. 

So the decision-making for Iran became much more complicated, because if you don’t clamp down on them, the protests will get bigger, and the protesters will now assume that America has their back, and they could push more. And perhaps that’s the reading from yesterday’s larger scale of protests and how they grew more violent. 

On the other hand, if they reacted and they clamped down, then the United States may then actually use the crackdown as a pretext for restarting the war with Iran. So I think for Tehran, the larger issue is not the protest itself, it’s war with America and Israel, right? That’s a much larger issue. 

Were you surprised to see Trump align himself with the protests like this? Democracy promotion hasn’t been a big priority for his administration, including in Venezuela where he’s basically left most of the regime in place after capturing Nicolás Maduro.

I think for him it’s a way of putting pressure on the Iranian government. The protesters are a tool in his hand. It’s similar with Israel. [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for the protesters’ “aspirations for freedom, liberty and justice.”] That’s not really a way of giving legitimacy to the protests, if the country that attacked Iran is backing them, but Israel was not necessarily concerned about the protesters so much as it was messaging to the Iranian government that we’re deeply penetrated in your country, we’re on the streets, we may even be responsible for your headache with the protesters.

For both Trump and Israel, the issue is not that they want to help Iranians enjoy democratic rights; the main issue is how they can weaken and break the Islamic Republic. Trump basically wants to tell the Iranians that you’re caught between letting your protesters run wild or facing war with me.

The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want? He might be happy to live with an Islamic Republic, provided that it does his bidding. But what is his bidding?

Why do you think this is happening now? Is there a spark that set this movement off?

First of all, there are large segments of the Iranian population that are now alienated from the Islamic Republic. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, religious, or secular. There are just a lot of people who believe that it is a bad government and they don’t want it, and even those who are more sympathetic to it are now really angry at the level of corruption, mismanagement, economic inequality. They believe that Iran’s international isolation and the economic sanctions against Iran need not be there, and that the Islamic Republic is not doing anything to solve it.

In a way, the Iranian population, by and large, has moved beyond the revolution and is no longer buying into the narrative of the Islamic Republic. And then on top of it, the Islamic Republic lost a lot of its stripes with the collapse of Hezbollah, the fall of Syria, and the Israeli attack on Iran. It has less of an aura of power and invincibility. 

In the meantime, the economy has been steadily getting worse since 2018 when President Trump imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran. It’s true that the government has weathered those sanctions, but also at a huge cost to its population. More Iranians have grown poor. More of the middle class has lost its purchasing power. Inflation has gone up, unemployment has gone up, and life has become a lot harder. Also, sanctions have encouraged corruption and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.

Finally, on December 28 when the rial again collapsed in a big way, the merchants who particularly rely on imports, and these were actually mobile phone sellers, were the first to react to say, you know, basically we’re just going to shut our businesses, because there’s no point in having businesses when you’re mismanaging the economy and things are getting worse, etc. And so they basically closed their shops. And so you had a trigger, which was purely economic, and it brought people into the streets to decry the fact that the government was not doing anything about rightsizing the economy that then began to spread into other segments of the population.

How do you understand the role of Reza Pahlavi here? My assumption was always that he didn’t have much of a constituency within Iran itself, but his call for people to come out and protest does seem to have been part of the catalyst for what we’ve seen over the past few days. 

He definitely has a certain following in Iran. There’s a tremendous amount of nostalgia towards his father and grandfather’s reign in Iran. Whatever grievances Iranians had in 1979 that brought about the revolution are long forgotten and are definitely not remembered by the generation that’s alive in Iran today, by and large. They can look back at that [pre-revolutionary] period as a sort of a golden era where Iranians traveled the world, the country was open, there was affluence, they were not isolated, when Iran looked a lot more like what Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan or Turkey does today. He represents a sort of anti-Islamic Republic. I think his role is most important right now in basically giving a sense of direction or a rallying cry to those who are in the streets, and particularly those who want the Islamic Republic gone.

However, he wasn’t responsible for the start of these protests. In fact, he’s been chasing them. He himself does not have a “ground game” in Iran. His organization is not able to run campaigns in Iran. And I think his ability to shape Iran’s future is limited, largely because he has very few political relationships in Iran. 

Are there any signs this is a true revolutionary moment? Are we seeing any signs of fracture within the regime itself?

I think we could be potentially on the verge of that. The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious. 

“The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious.”

Even before the June war, and even more so after, there were intense debates within the halls of power in the Islamic Republic around the future of the country. Are you going to be able to defend it against Israel and the US? How are you going to get the country out of the economic impasse that it finds itself in? You no longer have a nuclear program to negotiate over, and Trump is not interested in negotiations. So the country clearly sees itself as at an impasse. 

It’s time to acknowledge that this phase of the revolution of the Islamic Republic has reached its limits, and that the country needs a different direction. Of course, the Supreme Leader is not open to these ideas, but I think there’s now much more open debate even among the political class in Iran.

Now we’re not yet seeing a Yeltsin getting on a tank, a major leader coming out and addressing the people and saying, “I’m calling for the end of the Islamic Republic,” or a redirection of the Islamic Republic, but I think Iran is very close to that sort of a scenario.

This particular protest may not be the turning point, but Iran is now caught in that sort of whirlwind where it’s going to face crisis after crisis, and ultimately that’s going to force a major shift.

What would it take for these protests to be that turning point?

The protests themselves have to become even larger than they have been, they have to be sustained, and they have to be able to overwhelm the security forces when and if they are deployed in full force. And then they also have to be able to draw defections from the bureaucracy or the security forces of the country. I’m not saying that none of that is possible. It’s quite possible, but that has not happened yet. 

The Supreme Leader is 86 years old now. Whatever happens with the protests, he probably won’t be in power for more than a few more years. Is this a regime that can weather that kind of transition?

Well, it can weather it, but his passing would be the opening that would bring a real debate about, “Where does Iran go from here?” The kinds of discussions happening now behind closed doors could come out in the open. 

Any leader that comes in his place will not be as powerful as he is, it will take a number of years for any leader to consolidate power, and in that time period, there’s going to be a lot more intense fighting and a lot more ability by different factions to basically put on the table very different scenarios for the future of Iran. 

I would say that Iran’s Supreme Leader is now a bit like [Former Soviet Leader Leonid] Brezhnev or Mao. The system already knows that it needs to change, but it can’t under him. When Mao passed, that’s when the debate in China really burst into the open, right? It took a number of years between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, right? In [the Soviet Union], there were two or three leaders until we arrived at Gorbachev. But once Brezhnev was gone, I think the system was beginning to unwind. So when [the Supreme leader] passes, that is going to be the critical, pivotal moment for Iran.