Iran has once again appeared on the front pages, framed as a state on the brink. Protests in Iran have unfolded inside a dense fog of information warfare.
Tehran’s self-imposed internet blackout has created a vacuum, and vacuums invite manipulation. Into that space rush foreign media, exile groups, intelligence-linked amplifiers, and governments with agendas of their own.
The result is a distorted picture that treats every demonstration as existential, every chant as revolutionary, every rumor as fact.
There is no reason to doubt the courage of those on the streets. Thousands have been killed by most estimates. That alone demands moral seriousness. But empathy should not require credulity. Claims that Iran is days away from collapse are less analysis than aspiration.
They echo the same wishful thinking that accompanied the 2009 Green Movement, the Arab Spring and later the Syrian uprising—episodes where hope outran structure, and narrative outran reality. What is happening in Iran today is serious, tragic and consequential. It is not, however, a simple morality play with a foregone conclusion.
Washington’s role in this distortion is not subtle. For years, US policy toward Iran has leaned on the logic of pressure leading to rupture. Protests become evidence that regime change is not only desirable but imminent. This framing flatters policymakers who prefer inevitability to complexity.
Yet Iranian politics, like Iranian society, resists such simplifications.
Three crises, one boiling point
Iran’s unrest is not the product of a single spark. It is the convergence of three long-simmering crises that have periodically erupted over the past decade.
The first is water. Iran is running dry. Lakes are vanishing, rivers reduced to sludge, aquifers depleted beyond recovery. This is not a cyclical drought but a structural collapse driven by mismanagement, climate stress and overextraction.
Water scarcity has already forced internal migration, hollowed out rural economies, and fueled protests that are as much ecological as political. States can repress dissent. They cannot negotiate with hydrology.
The second crisis is energy. Years of sanctions and decaying infrastructure left Iran vulnerable even before the June 2025 conflict, when Israeli strikes damaged oil and gas facilities.
Repairs have lagged. Gas shortages have become routine, especially in winter, triggering demonstrations year after year. Energy, once Iran’s strategic asset, has turned into a domestic liability.
The third and most corrosive crisis is economic. The collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal marked a turning point. The re-imposition of US sanctions strangled Iran’s economy, accelerated inflation, and hollowed out the middle class.
Since then, Iran has experienced major protests roughly every two years—over fuel prices, water shortages, women’s rights, and now the broader cost of living. The pattern is unmistakable. Pressure accumulates, erupts, is suppressed and returns stronger.
This time, the trigger was currency collapse. Since the Israel-Iran war, the Rial has lost roughly 40% of its value. When shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar took to the streets, it signaled something deeper than ideological dissent.
Merchants are not natural revolutionaries. They protest when the system no longer allows them to survive.
Why the state endures
If Iran is so troubled, why does the system persist? The answer lies in institutions, not illusions.
The Islamic Republic is not a monolith, but it is resilient. It retains a stable support base rooted in ideology, patronage and fear of chaos.
More than 13 million Iranians voted for an ultra-conservative candidate in the last presidential election. That constituency underpins the clergy, the security services, and the paramilitary networks that keep the state functioning.
Crucially, Iran’s coercive apparatus is layered. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military force; it is an economic empire with deep political entrenchment. Defections from its ranks are improbable.
The regular army, less ideological and less privileged, is the softer underbelly—but even there, mass defections would require a collapse of legitimacy far beyond what currently exists.
History offers sobering parallels. In 1979, the Shah’s regime collapsed not simply because of protests, but because the military fractured and the elite defected. In Syria, Assad survived precisely because his security apparatus was held. Iran today looks far closer to the latter than the former.
There is also the fear factor—less discussed, but decisive. Many Iranians who oppose the government also fear what comes after. A sudden collapse could unleash ethnic fragmentation, regional secession, or civil war.
The Islamic Republic, for all its coercion, provides a form of national unity. That unity may be imposed, but in a region scarred by state failure, imposed unity still counts.
Change from within—or something worse
None of this means Iran is static. Protests matter, even when they fail to overthrow governments. They reshape internal balances, empower some factions, and weaken others. Iran’s leadership knows this.
The recent reshuffling of economic ministers and the central bank governor is less reform than theater, but theater has its uses. It buys time. It signals responsiveness without surrendering control.
The real question is not whether change will come, but in what direction. One possibility is gradual adjustment driven by pragmatic figures who see sanctions relief as existential.
President Masoud Pezeshkian was elected precisely by that promise. So far, diplomacy has failed—both Tehran and Washington are clinging to maximalist positions. Future talks may revive. Or they may not.
The darker possibility is consolidation in the opposite direction. If unrest is perceived as an existential threat, power may shift further toward the IRGC, with security logic overtaking political calculation.
History suggests that states under siege often choose coercion over compromise. Iran would not be the first.
What is certain is that there is no organized opposition capable of seizing the moment. Inside Iran, dissent has been systematically co-opted or crushed.
Outside, the opposition is fragmented—monarchists, republicans, leftists sharing little beyond hostility to the current system. Online influence does not translate easily into on-the-ground power.
So, what is really happening in Iran right now? A society under immense strain. A state facing serious, but not terminal, challenges.
A protest movement brave but structurally constrained. And an international environment eager to project its own desires onto a far more complicated reality.
Those hoping for collapse should recall a lesson history teaches repeatedly: regimes rarely fall because outsiders want them to. They fall when internal structures give way. Iran’s have not—at least not yet.
M A Hossain is a senior journalist and international affairs analyst based in Bangladesh.