A deal with Iran at this moment may prolong the unnatural life of the mullah’s regime.

A new Iranian revolution appears to have been averted, at least for the moment. After a month marked by the most consequential protests in its history, Iran’s clerical regime seems to have succeeded in quelling the domestic ferment that broke out in late December. It has done so, resorting to a sweeping internet blackout, the widespread killing of protesters, and brutality by foreign militias operating at the regime’s behest. 

Hopes still run high that military action on the part of the Trump administration might fundamentally destabilize the regime—or at least breathe life back into Iran’s latest protest wave. That, however, remains uncertain. The latest signals out of the White House are that President Donald Trump is seeking some sort of arrangement with Tehran over its nuclear program and support for international terrorism. 

Such a compromise would amount to a reprieve for the Islamic Republic. Still, it would almost certainly be temporary, since any conceivable deal between Washington and Tehran would fail to address the fundamental causes that have propelled Iranians into the streets with increasing frequency over the past decade.

Those causes are legion. Economically, the Islamic Republic is on a trajectory of protracted decline, despite its prodigious energy wealth. Back in 2018, the World Bank assessed that—after four decades of clerical rule—Iranians had become 30 percent poorer than they were before the Islamic Revolution. The situation today is worse still. The collapse of the Iranian rial, now trading at a staggering 1.1 million to the US dollar, has steadily eroded both the purchasing power and the savings of ordinary Iranians. Meanwhile, the regime’s belated efforts to mitigate the crisis, including by offering Iranians the equivalent of $7 monthly stipends, have only added insult to injury. 

This economic failure has been compounded by administrative mismanagement on a grand scale. Years ago, Iran already ranked as one of the most “water-stressed” countries in the world. After years of neglect and poor planning, the national water crisis is now so severe that last autumn Iran’s president publicly proclaimed the need to relocate the capital—a city of some 10 million people—to another (presumably less hydrologically vulnerable) location. 

Demographically, meanwhile, the country is undergoing a profound generational shift. Nearly 60 percent of Iran’s population of 93 million is aged 39 or younger, meaning that a majority of Iranians were either not yet born or not politically aware at the time of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. This cohort lacks the ideological bonds that once anchored support for the regime and its religious tenets. Thus, in September of 2022, when regime forces brutalized 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian activist Mahsa Amini, it ignited a nationwide uprising centered on a rejection of the hijab, or Islamic headscarf. 

Those protests were a reflection of something deeper still: a growing rejection of religiosity, and therefore the regime itself, on the part of the Iranian population. The scope of this challenge for Iran’s ayatollahs was captured in a 2024 governmental study, which found that just 22.5 percent of Iranians supported a religious government, while the overwhelming majority (73 percent) favored the separation of mosque and state. 

It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that Iranians increasingly see the Islamic Republic as a bankrupt concept. An August 2025 survey by GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based polling institute, found that 70 percent of respondents “oppose the continuation of the Islamic Republic,” and 40 percent of those polled believe that the fall of the regime needs to be “a precondition for change.” In other words, a decisive share of the Iranian population now views the regime itself as the problem.  

All of which should lead to an inescapable conclusion: the Islamic Republic is living on borrowed time. Iran’s ayatollahs may yet muddle through the present moment, but no deal with Washington will be able to reverse the regime’s structural rot or restore the legitimacy that it has lost at home.

The only remaining question is whether, when the regime’s reckoning inevitably arrives, the United States will have positioned itself on the right side of history.

About the Author: Ilan Berman

Ilan Berman is senior vice president at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. An expert on regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, he has consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency as well as the Departments of State and Defense. Mr. Berman is a member of the Associated Faculty at Missouri State University’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, as well as an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics.

Image: Fotofield / Shutterstock.com.

The post The Islamic Republic of Iran Is Still Living on Borrowed Time appeared first on The National Interest.