Brett McGurk is a CNN global affairs analyst who served in senior national security positions under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Years ago, I was negotiating with Iranian officials for the release of American hostages held in Tehran. The talks were not going well.
At one point, my Iranian counterpart asked why Iran should ever make a deal with a country that constantly changes its government — in other words, a democracy?
I responded with a question of my own. For how long can a country that takes hostages and represses its own people with violence expect to remain in power? History shows such systems collapse, and Iran will surely prove no different.
His answer was chilling. The regime enjoyed support from a critical mass of the population and — more importantly, in his view — it had the guns and readiness to use them.
Over the past decade, Iran has repeatedly proven that point. Nationwide protests in 2017, 2018, again in 2019, and most dramatically in 2022 were crushed with force. Each time, the regime survived by relying on the same grim playbook: Deny legitimacy to the protesters, blame foreign enemies, shut down communications, and unleash the security services.
Today, Iranians are once again in the streets. And once again, the regime appears to be responding as it always has — with brutal violence. Might the end result this time be different?
In September 2022, protests erupted across Iran after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was detained by the country’s morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code by showing her hair. She died in custody. Mahsa’s death ignited a nationwide uprising not only against compulsory hijab laws, but against the Islamic Republic itself.
The United States and its allies publicly backed the protesters. The Biden administration moved to expand access to internet services, including satellite connectivity and virtual private networks. Congress passed the Mahsa Amini Human Rights and Accountability Act. New sanctions targeted Iranian officials and institutions involved in repression.
None of it was enough. According to a subsequent United Nations investigation, Iranian security forces killed more than 500 people and detained roughly 20,000 during the crackdown. The protests were eventually smothered by months of violence, fear and exhaustion.
Poverty, corruption and rising prices
The current protests reportedly started in and around Iran’s Grand Bazaar, historically the heart of Iran’s merchant class. That matters. The unrest that led to Iran’s 1979 revolution began there. Iran’s merchants are not revolutionaries, preferring the stability of order to the uncertainty of rapid change. But Iran’s economic misrule, with inflation at 50 percent, together with a crisis in basic services, has forged economic grievances together with longstanding political and moral demands for regime change.
The protests sparked in Tehran quickly spread across the country, now reportedly present in all of Iran’s 31 provinces.
Supreme Leader Khamenei responded on the thirteenth day of unrest with familiar rhetoric, dismissing protesters as hirelings of foreign powers and enemies of the state. The language signaled that a crackdown could follow, just as it did in 2022. By this past weekend, the country was under a communications blackout and reports emerged again of rising casualties.
On the surface, the stage appears set for a grim replay: protests, repression, survival of the system. But three factors make this moment different. They may not lead to an immediate collapse but they are certain to shape the coming days and weeks in Iran.
Iran’s leadership made a fateful decision after October 7, 2023, when it chose to support and then join a regional war against Israel. Khamenei is the only world leader to openly praise Hamas’s massacres in Israel on that day, and he soon authorized Iran’s proxies across the Middle East to support Hamas’s maximalist demands and then attack Israel — as well as Americans.
This regional dimension of the crisis does not dismiss the horrors in Gaza following the war that Hamas unleashed. But the situation today cannot be understood without it. Iran chose at a moment of horror to join the mayhem. It did nothing to support negotiations to end the crisis — and chose instead to escalate it. Its proxies targeted Americans in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, inflicting American casualties. Eight months into the crisis, Khamenei said Israel was at a “dead end” and had “completely misjudged the capabilities of the resistance front” led by Iran.
He was wrong about that. By the time Joe Biden left office, Iran’s proxies had been shattered. Iran had no air defenses. Its missiles had been defeated in two attacks. And hostages were finally coming out of Gaza. President Trump sought to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran but when those talks stalled, and the Gaza war started again in March, the United States joined Israel in a military campaign that significantly degraded Iran’s leadership and war making capacity.
The combined US and Israeli strikes into Iran shattered Iran’s sense of strength and deterrence, and left it vulnerable to new strikes. This is not where Iran had aimed to be when Khamenei chose to join with Hamas in a broader war instead of pressing Hamas to release hostages and end the war. That was a choice for Khamenei to make, and he chose poorly.
Khamenei is 86 and in his fourth decade of power. During the June war, he was conspicuously absent from public view. In a system built around the myth of an omnipresent Supreme Leader with claimed religious authority to rule over 90 million Iranians, this absence continues to resonate.
With the loss of many of Khamenei’s top lieutenants during the war last summer, the cohesiveness of Iran’s decision-making apparatus is now being tested — as factional rivalries jockey for position awaiting the moment Khamenei passes from the scene. Even without the popular unrest, Iran is at the precipice of systemic change. One potential outcome is its evolution from an Islamic theocracy ruled by clerics to a hardline nationalist state ruled by it security structures.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (the IRGC) and the Basij militias inside the country have ample experience suppressing popular demands with mass violence. There have been no signs yet that those structures are fracturing with defections. But the looming succession crisis, together with a new sense of vulnerability and widening popular unrest combine to create unique conditions for revolutionary change, with some parallels to the revolt that swept Iran 47 years ago and led to the Islamic Republic.
Trump has publicly warned that the United States will carry out military strikes if Iran responds to the protests with violence. In the past, Iranian leaders may have dismissed such threats as bluster, but after the US bombed its nuclear facilities last summer, they can no longer do so. Many of those Iranian leaders were killed, and their replacements will be thinking about their own survival.
Targets exist. Israeli strikes in June reportedly targeted the Basij militia—one of the primary tools of internal repression. The US might also choose to target leaders responsible for the massacres. However, unlike the US strikes in June against Iran’s nuclear facilities, which had been rehearsed for many years, these operations would be more dynamic and uncertain.
Beyond military action, Trump could tighten sanctions enforcement against Iran, which is currently exporting nearly 2 million barrels per day despite a US policy announced last year to “drive Iran’s oil exports to zero.” This should be done regardless. He can also work with leading American technology companies to support measures that might allow Iranians to overcome the regime’s communications blackout, while also encouraging allies to join US sanctions against Iran’s repressive structures such as the IRGC.
At this hour, three forces are now converging in Iran and in Washington:
1. The protestors. The courage of Iranians risking their lives to overturn a system that oppresses them and exports terrorism abroad is inspiring and should be supported in any way possible. Despite early reports of a brutal crackdown, the protests have not stopped and are likely to continued even if in smaller numbers.
2. The repressive state. The Islamic Republic’s coercive apparatus is gearing up with the only playbook it knows — suppressing its own people with mass violence, snipers from roofs, Basij militias on the streets with live ammunition, mass roundups and executions.
3. The US threat. CNN has reported that Trump will be briefed on military options early this week. He earlier wrote that “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!” He has defined this to mean “hitting them very, very hard” in the event Iran started “killing people like they have in the past.”
As of right now, with protests spreading and the Iranian regime acting to violently suppress them, Trump’s moment for decision — whether and how — is likely to come soon. Whatever is chosen, the aim should be maximum support for the Iranian people and their desire for systemic change.
Trump late Sunday night said Iran has reached out for talks. Oman’s Foreign Minister was in Tehran on Saturday and has been known to carry messages between Washington and Tehran. Iran, however, has historically only agreed to talks with the US on two issues: hostages, or its nuclear program. It has refused to discuss any other topic — such as its missile program, or support for terrorism, or supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine.
The immediate issue at hand is the mass murder of its own people. Unless Iran is prepared to discuss that, which is unlikely, then there is little to discuss. Iran’s dangling talks about a nuclear program that is now buried underground would be unserious and an effort to gain time and release the pressure that’s building. The US should not fall for it.
