The Iranians demonstrating against their government are displaying awe-inspiring bravery. In the past quarter century, protest movements in Iran have sprung up every several years seeking greater political freedom, and the government has violently repressed each one. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of Iranians have poured into the street in recent weeks to demand change.
They continue to do so even as the government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has responded by killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people. The protesters deserve the admiration of everybody who believes in democracy, freedom and equality under the law.
How to help them achieve the liberty they deserve is a harder problem. The theocratic regime in Tehran has built a fortress of oil wealth, authoritarian allies and domestic brutality. Still, there are promising steps that the United States and other nations can take. President Trump has rightly scolded Iran’s government, but he risks rushing into military action without developing a thoughtful strategy. The crucial question is what measures — diplomatic, economic and potentially military — have the best chance to strengthen the protest movement and sow division among elites allied with the Khamenei government.
The recent brutality of that government underscores what has been clear for decades: It is among the world’s most nefarious regimes, and the people who bear the biggest cost are the citizens of Iran.
Last year, Iran executed an average of about six people every day — more than 2,000 in all. It undermines democracy by preventing candidates who do not demonstrate fealty to the regime from appearing on election ballots. It censors criticism. It discriminates against religious minorities, prohibiting Baha’is from enrolling in universities and at times refusing to allow Sunni Muslims to build mosques.
Misogyny is official government policy. In court, women’s testimony receives less weight than men’s. Polygamy is legal, and husbands can bar their wives from holding jobs or traveling abroad. Women are often harassed for not wearing a hijab, and they cannot sing alone in public or attend many men’s sporting events. Violence against women often goes unpunished. Discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people is also policy. Same-sex sexual activity is illegal, and sentences include flogging and even death.
Iran’s government has impoverished its own people. The government’s focus on warmongering has damaged the economy and led other countries to exclude it from global trade. Iran’s leaders, instead of investing in their own people, have used oil revenue to pursue a nuclear program, support terrorism and bankroll the leaders’ own lifestyles. So little money has flowed into domestic investment that Tehran has come close to running out of water.
Before the 1979 revolution, the country suffered from a different kind of corrupt, repressive regime, under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. But pre-revolution Iran did have per capita incomes above the global average. Today, Iran’s per capita income is less than half the global average. Despite Iran’s historical legacy of literacy and education, its per capita G.D.P. has fallen behind that of Guatemala, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, and South Africa.
Globally, Ayatollah Khamenei’s government has spread mayhem and death. It has sent thousands of so-called suicide drones to Russia, enabling Vladimir Putin to kill more Ukrainians. It was the most important ally of President Bashar al-Assad’s horrific regime in Syria, making possible his vast torture network. Iran’s biggest foreign policy project since the 1979 revolution has been its attempts to destroy Israel, mostly through the terrorist proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Those groups have killed not only Israelis but civilians from dozens of countries, including Argentina, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, France, Thailand and the United States. Hezbollah has helped turn Lebanon into a failed state.
For decades, these efforts allowed Iran to project international strength. Ayatollah Khamenei, who is 86, and the other clerics who run the government fancied themselves a rival to Saudi Arabia for Middle Eastern influence. But the regime has turned out to be much weaker than it appeared.
Israel has debilitated Hamas and Hezbollah since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. During a 12-day war last year, Israel decimated Iran’s aerial defenses and assassinated the leaders of its rogue nuclear program, while shooting down hundreds of Iran’s missiles aimed at Israel. Mr. Trump then ordered an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, setting back the leaders’ apparent ambitions for a nuclear weapon.
Tough new economic sanctions, imposed last year by the United States, Canada, Britain and the United Nations because of the nuclear program, have further hurt Iran’s economy. Adding to the national fiasco, Iran’s government does not seem capable even of keeping its leaders alive; President Ebrahim Raisi, a potential Khamenei successor, and the foreign minister were killed when their helicopter flew into dense fog and crashed in May 2024.
These developments have humiliated the Khamenei regime and led anxious officials to loosen some restrictions on public behavior, like dancing. The government’s apparent weakness has also fueled the current protests.
They began on Dec. 28, among merchants angered that Iran’s currency lost more than 80 percent of its market value last year and that the annual inflation rate exceeded 40 percent. The protests have since become more political and spread to all 31 provinces. Some of them are huge, based on videos. Demonstrators have chanted “Death to the dictator,” referring to the Ayatollah Khamenei. Many Iranians are furious that their government has prioritized foreign adventurism over domestic prosperity. One popular chant is: “No to Gaza. No to Lebanon. My life only for Iran.”
The appropriate response from the rest of the world starts with a unified expression of solidarity with the protesters. The Khamenei regime is too depraved to be reformed. It has had plenty of chances to choose a different path. The Obama administration invited Iran to become a regional power so long as it gave up on having a nuclear weapon and followed basic international norms. The ayatollahs chose extremism and subjugation instead. They have shown themselves to be beyond rehabilitation. The protest movement represents the best hope for an Iran that does less damage in the world and better serves its own people.
In concrete terms, the Trump administration should build on the Biden administration’s efforts in 2022 and 2023 to smuggle Starlink kits into Iran, allowing protesters to communicate using satellites when Iran’s government largely shuts down the internet, as it has in recent days. The United States should also take steps to keep those kits functioning in the face of the Khamenei government’s attempts to block them, among other ways to help the protesters.
The world can also extend the sanctions it has imposed on Iran. The Trump administration this week announced new tariffs on any countries that do business with Iran, and other democracies should impose their own economic penalties. Europe can play a vital role. European leaders have sometimes been naïve about the nature of Iran’s government, and they should step up now. Mr. Trump, for his part, should drop his thorough hostility toward Europe, including his ludicrous ambitions to seize Greenland, and recognize the strength of a unified alliance.
One potential policy involves targeting all significant officials in the Khamenei government, and close to it, with individual sanctions and asset seizures. They should know that they will be isolated forever, without the ability to do the luxury shopping and tourism many enjoy, unless they break with the regime. The goal should be to create competing pressures on Iran’s elites and split them. Such moves would make good on Mr. Trump’s promise to the protesters that “help is on its way.”
He has threatened to go much further, of course. On Jan. 2, five days after the protesters began, he said that the United States was “locked and loaded” and would “come to their rescue” if the regime used violence against them. If Mr. Trump is serious about this threat, we urge him to move much more judiciously than he typically does. He should seek approval from Congress before any military operation. He should make clear its limitations and goals. How will it weaken the regime? How will it avoid spiraling into an open-ending failure? And he should ensure the U.S. military is not stretched too thin by his buildup of forces around Venezuela. He will put Americans in the region at risk if he attacks Iran without adequate preparation and resources.
Above all, he should avoid the lack of strategic discipline and illegal action that have defined the Venezuela campaign. He should ask which policies have the best chance of undermining the regime’s violent repression and creating the conditions for a democratic transition.
Whatever the rest of the world does, the Khamenei government may yet succeed at crushing the protests. It will surely continue to portray the protesters as puppets of foreign enemies. Yet those smears should not intimidate the world into inaction, as the ayatollahs hope. The people of Iran increasingly see through the regime’s lies and catastrophes. Iranians have responded to the last few years not by rallying around the flag but by rallying for a better, freer future. They deserve it.
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