Size, Fear, Anger, Repression, and More: Key Factors to Watch in Iran

Iran may be closer to a revolutionary moment than at any point since 1979—but it is not yet in a revolutionary transition. The mistake many observers make is to treat visible unrest as evidence of imminent collapse. History suggests otherwise. Cycles of protest and repression are not signs of failure in authoritarian systems; they are, in fact, how such systems function. What matters now is whether protest can spread, deepen, and organize in ways that change the balance of power. Here are five factors to keep in mind as we watch these events unfold.

First, size matters—but only up to a point. What matters more is who is not protesting.

Much discussion of Iran’s unrest focuses on the visible scale of demonstrations. Research on civil resistance often cites the “3.5 percent rule”: Movements that mobilize roughly that share of the population at peak moments tend to succeed. In the Iranian case, that would imply many millions in sustained participation—not the perhaps tens of thousands reported this past week, though exact figures are difficult to verify given internet blackouts. The rule is a useful heuristic, not a guarantee. Numbers alone do not produce regime change, but they are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a popularly based revolution. (Regime change can, of course, also come through elite-led coups.) Organization, leadership, elite fracture, and a clear political agenda matter just as much—and so does whether protest spreads into strategically vital sectors of the economy.

I was present in Iran during the 2009 Green Movement, when demonstrations in Tehran reached hundreds of thousands and, at moments, more than a million participants. That scale posed a real challenge because it mobilized a broad, urban, secular, and religious middle class demanding reform. Today’s protests are geographically dispersed and persistent but appear to involve far fewer people at any given moment. More importantly, they have not yet translated into sustained strikes in strategic sectors such as oil, petrochemicals, transportation, or large factories. The decisive fact is not the courage of those protesting, but the millions of fence-sitters who sympathize yet fear joining them.

Second, fear works because it is rational—and because the state still functions.

Fear in Iran is not only about repression in the narrow sense. It is also structural. Leaving aside the current inflationary surge, currency collapse, and spikes in food prices, Iran’s administrative system still has the capacity to function relatively competently. The state continues to deliver subsidized education, health care, transportation, fuel, electricity, and water, alongside extensive welfare and patronage networks.

For much of the urban middle and working classes, protest is not a simple moral choice. It is a calculation that weighs political frustration against the risk of losing access to a system that, however corrupt, still provides. There is also the often-overlooked figure of the “dissatisfied Islamist”: citizens who accept the Islamic Republic’s framework but are deeply unhappy with its performance. Many of the merchants who have closed their shops in protest—traditionally conservative and sometimes regime-aligned—fit this category. Their actions signal economic grievance and political pressure, not necessarily a desire for regime overthrow. In both cases, fear is not cowardice; it is rational risk assessment.

Third, anger without leadership and organization does not produce transitions. Iran lacks the bridge.

The most underappreciated feature of the current moment is the disconnect between the street and the only domestic actors capable of steering a transition. There are no chants calling for imprisoned or marginalized opposition figures to step forward, no effort to revive banned parties, and no visible attempt to link protest energy to institutional pathways, political organization, or negotiation. This absence matters enormously.

Paradoxically, Iran does possess much of the infrastructure an alternative regime would need: an experienced bureaucracy, dormant political parties, and leaders who know how the state works. Figures like Mostafa Tajzadeh—who has openly called for a transition away from the Islamic Republic and is now entering his eleventh year in prison—could plausibly serve as bridges between street pressure and elite negotiation precisely because they have pasts within the system. That past, however, is treated by many protesters as a disqualifying stain rather than a strategic asset.

In this vacuum, abstract or nostalgic alternatives rush in. Calls for Reza Pahlavi reflect not a viable political project, but the absence of credible domestic leadership—symbolism filling the space where organization should be.

Fourth, repression works because the regime’s core is not only ideological—it is generational.

The Islamic Republic remains astonishingly ideologically unified at the core. Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the population—across senior political leadership, the Revolutionary Guards, the security services, and key bureaucratic posts—remains deeply committed to the regime’s legitimacy and values. These are not merely opportunists; many are true believers willing to absorb isolation, economic pain, and even death to preserve the system, as Iranian casualties in Syria demonstrated.

This cohesion is also generational. Much of the coercive apparatus is staffed by people whose entire adult lives have been bound to the Islamic Republic. There is no pre-1979 state to restore, no alternative institutional memory to return to. That makes elite defection harder than in late Soviet or Eastern European cases.

Finally, the international environment matters—but it cannot substitute for internal fracture.

Democratic transitions rarely succeed in isolation. Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968 show how heroic movements can be crushed when coercive power remains intact and no assistance is forthcoming. By contrast, the Philippines in 1986 remains the classic case of people power: mass mobilization coincided with military splits, church backing, U.S. pressure, and an organized political alternative.

Iran today lacks that alignment. Donald Trump’s Iran policy is not aimed at democratization. It is more interest- than values-based, focused on zero nuclear enrichment and the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program; missile dismantlement to reduce threats to regional partners; ending support for regional proxies; and explicit threats (“Death to America” and “Death to Israel”). This amounts to pressure without nation-building—or even wholesale regime change. But Iran differs from cases like Venezuela in a crucial respect: its ruling core is not primarily a cartel; it is an ideologically and generationally committed elite, making external coercion less predictably effective unless it coincides with domestic fracture.

At the same time, foreign leaders must be exceedingly careful, because ill-calibrated rhetoric can be worse than silence. Without overstating the influence of Trump’s words—which matter far less than domestic conditions—such rhetoric can still raise expectations, encourage risk-taking, and leave Iranians to absorb the consequences alone.

Trump’s recent statements illustrate the danger. He effectively declared his own red line when he warned that the regime would face severe consequences if it killed protesters. Like Obama’s red line in Syria, that threat was never enforced. His exhortations urging Iranians to “take over government buildings” and assurances that “help is on the way” were irresponsible, particularly because the moment when outside pressure might have mattered—when people were still in the streets and being killed—had already passed. The subsequent public “thank you” to the regime for supposedly “pausing” executions appeared deeply misjudged, even if intended to buy time for the United States, its regional partners, and Israel to prepare for possible Iranian missile retaliation in the event of an American strike.

Many around the world and inside Iran dream of ending a regime that has been a thorn in the side of the United States and the West for half a century and a boot on the face of a majority of Iranians. Against that backdrop, speculation that the movement of naval assets into the Persian Gulf signals a large-scale military strike—or a dramatic, Maduro-style move against Khamenei—seems unlikely. A more plausible scenario would be a limited military operation modeled on the December 2025 U.S. strikes against ISIS in Syria: at a minimum, narrowly targeted to signal resolve and increase negotiating leverage over what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program; and at most, designed to neutralize Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile capabilities—its remaining serious threats to regional partners—rather than to pursue regime-level effects. Whether such actions could fatally weaken the regime by decapitating its leadership and degrading its remaining deterrent capabilities is certainly possible but remains uncertain.

The upshot for Democrats and liberals in the United States is not to embrace regime change by force, but to moderate knee-jerk rejection of any form of U.S. intervention. The task is to identify a narrow but consequential overlap between measures that open space for more Iranians to take to the streets, organize, and build a peaceful opposition—and measures that advance core U.S. interests without falling into the trap of occupation, nation-building, or total war. If Iran is entering a long endgame, the danger is not intervention per se, but failing to distinguish between actions that widen political possibility and those that foreclose it.