International Security and Law Analyst
The events of the past two weeks in Iran point toward an openly regime-change movement, with protesters calling for the end of the Islamic Republic itself.
Revolutions differ from episodic unrest not by the scale of any single demonstration, but by their structure and direction. They are sustained rather than spontaneous; cumulative rather than cathartic. Their power lies in endurance, in the gradual erosion of legitimacy, authority, and administrative control, until the system itself becomes untenable.
Compared with past protest waves, the current unrest appears more nationally synchronised, socially broad, and symbolically convergent. Equally significant is the re-emergence of a shared national language of opposition that Tehran has long sought to crush through ideology, patronage, and repression.
This matters because revolutions do not target the security apparatus alone. They strike at the regime’s ability to govern routinely. A state under revolutionary pressure must deploy coercion continuously rather than episodically. That is costly, exhausting, and politically corrosive.
Iranian police have circulated text messages warning families to keep young people and teenagers at home, citing the alleged presence of “terrorist groups” and armed individuals at demonstrations and threatening decisive action. The author has independently verified these messages.
Such warnings are not merely informational; they are designed to shift responsibility for state violence onto families themselves.
Yet repression alone does not explain the regime’s present fragility. For much of its rule, governance in the Islamic Republic has been hollowed out by a deeply entrenched kleptocratic system, in which political authority, security power, and economic privilege are fused.
Years of sanctions, chronic inflation, currency collapse, and fiscal mismanagement have hollowed out state capacity. Recent military setbacks have compounded internal strain. The result is a regime increasingly reliant on force at a moment when its economic and institutional resilience is at its weakest.
Mass killing
Iran International reported on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people had been killed in the recent protests, describing the crackdown as “the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history.”
The emerging scale of violence therefore places Iran’s crisis under increasing strain within the framework of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). When a state is credibly accused of mass killing, collective punishment, and systematic efforts to conceal casualties, its claim to sovereign non-intervention comes under acute pressure.
R2P does not mandate automatic military action, but it does impose an obligation on the international community to consider diplomatic, economic, legal, and—if atrocities escalate further—coercive measures.
In this sense, the internationalisation of Iran’s crisis would be the consequence of Tehran's own conduct, not foreign imposition.
In 2011, the UN Security Council invoked the Responsibility to Protect in Libya when the Gaddafi regime threatened mass atrocities during the Arab Spring. Western alliances have acted to prevent large-scale civilian harm even in the absence of an explicit UN mandate.
From Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the former Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone and parts of the Sahel, the underlying logic has been consistent: when states engage in or enable mass violence against civilians, sovereignty ceases to function as an absolute shield.
Trump’s intervention
It is in this context that US President Donald Trump’s increasingly explicit warnings to the Islamic Republic should be understood.
Earlier today, Trump issued a direct message to Iranian protesters on Truth Social, urging them to “KEEP PROTESTING–TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS,” announcing that he has cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials, and declaring that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” if the killing of protesters does not stop.
This marks a notable escalation in both tone and signalling.
Trump has now repeatedly framed continued repression as a red line, stating that the United States will not tolerate mass killings of civilians.
It is unlikely that US planners would ignore the lessons of Israel’s recent 12-day campaign against Iran, a campaign in which American forces ultimately participated and which demonstrated both the reach and the limits of strikes narrowly focused on infrastructure.
Any strategy under consideration would likely be shaped less by symbolic targets than by the regime’s security architecture itself: the institutions, decision-making structures, and coercive networks that sustain repression.
Whether such pressure remains declaratory or translates into action, the signal is unmistakable: the regime’s own conduct has pushed the crisis beyond routine diplomacy and into active contingency planning.
Change in strategic terrain
The comparison most often drawn is with 2009. But the analogy is misleading.
The Green Movement was largely urban, middle-class, and procedural in its demands. It challenged an election outcome, not the foundational legitimacy of the system itself. The current movement contests the regime’s right to rule altogether.
Nor does this moment resemble many leaderless uprisings of the past century, which fractured under pressure or collapsed into ideological ambiguity. What distinguishes the present phase is the growing convergence around a figure and a direction.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah—whose reign ended in February 1979 following the revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini—appears to be functioning, through popular recognition rather than formal appointment, as a focal point for disparate strands of opposition.
Whatever one’s view of monarchy, the presence of an identifiable political centre of gravity marks an important departure from previous cycles of unrest.
For now, the Islamic Republic retains formidable coercive capacity. Revolution does not guarantee swift collapse. What it does guarantee is a change in the strategic terrain.
The question is no longer whether the regime can suppress protests tonight, but whether it can sustain governance tomorrow, next month, or next year under unrelenting strain.
In recent weeks, millions have taken part in an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic — and under a nationwide communications blackout, at least 12,000 people have been shot dead in what amounts to the largest mass killing of Iran’s contemporary history.
The collapse of the rial may have ignited the protests, but this wave of defiance runs far deeper than exchange-rate volatility. It reflects a society exhausted by decades of strategic deprivation.
The poverty pushing millions to the brink is not simply the result of policy error or mismanagement. It is the by-product of a conscious political choice: a calculated trade-off.
Tehran and its defenders routinely blame sanctions. Western analysts point to corruption or incompetence. Both explanations miss the governing logic at work.
What defines the Islamic Republic’s decision-making is not a lack of alternatives, but a rigid hierarchy of priorities: ideological integrity and regional reach consistently outrank broad-based prosperity.
In this calculus, economic crisis is not an unintended detour from the leadership’s path; it is the terrain on which that path has been chosen.
Fear of external influence and so-called “cultural invasion” reinforces this worldview. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly framed material prosperity and deep integration with global markets as vulnerabilities that erode faith and weaken resistance.
His much-touted “Resistance Economy” is not designed to escape sanctions, but to endure them. It promises resilience, not growth; survival, not transformation.
That trade-off cascades through policy. The drive for agricultural self-sufficiency, promoted as revolutionary virtue, has drained aquifers and destabilized rural livelihoods, as water-intensive crops and inefficient irrigation exhaust already scarce groundwater.
Meanwhile, a maze of subsidies, multiple exchange rates, and import restrictions creates rents that enrich well-connected actors while suffocating independent enterprise. These distortions are tolerated—even sustained—because they preserve political control and reward loyalty over innovation.
Even when officials acknowledge the scale of failure, they remain bound by the same red lines that produced it.
The water crisis lays this contradiction bare. Faced with mounting shortages, authorities warn of “water bankruptcy” and champion desalination plants and transfer megaprojects as proof of resolve, while continuing to treat self-sufficiency in water-intensive crops as a strategic achievement rather than a structural mistake.
The result is improvisation without reform: capital flows to spectacular projects that buy time, while the incentives driving depletion and waste remain untouched.
In such a system, rising living standards are irrelevant. Economic pain does not trigger reform because reform risks undoing the political architecture that keeps the Islamic Republic intact.
On the streets today, that logic is meeting its reckoning. Protesters are not merely rejecting inflation or unemployment; they are rejecting the premise that their suffering serves a higher purpose.
In recent remarks, Khamenei praised young people who aspire to “meet their maker” and embrace sacrifice over material advancement. Yet the chants echoing across Iranian cities demand something else entirely: dignity over obedience, participation over submission, a future to build rather than one to forfeit.
Confronted with this unrest, the leadership retreats to its familiar narrative of foreign plots, dismissing protesters as agents of outside powers. That rhetoric cannot conceal the deeper confrontation underway: two visions of national purpose that cannot coexist within a single political order.
One demands a society willing to trade its welfare, opportunities, and youth for an ideological project. The other, facing bullets and batons, is signaling that this exchange—their lives for the regime’s vision—is no longer acceptable.
For a generation that refuses to be treated as collateral, the Islamic Republic and its leader have no answer.
As nationwide protests continue, authorities have taken steps including staging government-organized countermarches, shutting down the internet, and tightening controls on the media to shape the narrative.
One clip aired by state media and presented as aerial helicopter footage of pro-government rallies in Tehran drew fresh questions after viewers pointed to anomalies, including wind visibly blowing the reporter’s hair while leaving his clothing and microphone seemingly unaffected.
IRIB News shared the video on X on Monday, writing: “Breaking | The first aerial video of the people of Tehran, the capital of Iran, marching in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been released.”
Readers added context on X saying the video appears to have been altered using chroma key (green screen), citing what they described as “unnatural subject edges, mismatched lighting and shadows, wind affecting only the reporter’s hair and not his clothing, a lack of realistic depth of field, and the absence of a seatbelt and headset," calling it a crude propaganda edit.
Multiple users also suggested the post showing large crowds appeared to recycle older material rather than depict new footage from the ongoing protests.
In a follow-up video, the reporter featured in the clip defended the broadcast footage as authentic. Some users, however, said they also saw inconsistencies in the new recording, and continued to question the original video’s provenance and how it was produced.
Separately, another image that circulated widely from the Monday rally showed demonstrators carrying a large Islamic Republic flag. In the photo, one person appears to be visibly inside the cloth, and some users pointed to irregularities in the flag’s details, including inconsistencies in the Arabic takbir rendered in white Kufic script along the edges of the green and red bands.
In another state-rally video, social media users focused on the color of trees in the background, arguing that the foliage appeared unusually vivid for mid-winter and did not match how Tehran’s street trees typically look at this time of year.
The government has a track record of recycling old footage and using AI-generated visuals, tactics that can help dominate the news cycle quickly.
In mid-2025, during a period of heightened regional conflict, state-run IRIB TV1 was shown in fact-check reports to have reused 2022 footage of Russian missile launches and presented it as Iranian strikes. State-run PressTV also published recycled images, including photos linked to a downed drone from the India-Pakistan border, which it labeled as an Israeli drone shot down over Iran.
State-affiliated social media accounts and some news broadcasts went further during the 12-day war with Israel, using high-fidelity graphics from the military simulator Arma 3 to claim “confirmed kills” of advanced fighter jets such as the F-35.
Such measures are framed by Iranian officials within the concept of soft war, an information and influence campaign in which the aim is not necessarily to persuade everyone indefinitely, but to create a temporary sense of superiority or confusion.
Iran has been under an almost complete internet blackout since January 8, when authorities largely cut off access amid nationwide protests, reducing connectivity to around 1 % of normal levels, according to internet monitoring group NetBlocks.
