A lone man crouched in the middle of a Tehran street, a black jacket pulled over his head, blocking advancing Iranian security forces. The video went viral among Iranians, quickly drawing comparisons to the famous “Tank Man” in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Similarly courageous actions have occurred across Iran: young protesters — sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or more — standing or kneeling peacefully before their repressors.
The protests, which started on Dec. 28, have spread to all of Iran’s 31 provinces. They intensified after Kurdish groups announced a strike and former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called on Iranians to take to the streets on Thursday and Friday evenings — a call echoed by activists, celebrities and other Iranians. Videos showed large numbers of Iranians in the streets before an internet blackout put the country off line. Some protesters called for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, which was ousted in the 1979 revolution.
The protests are the largest since the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that began in 2022 and are taking place despite what the United Nations has called crimes against humanity committed by the authorities during that period. At least 49 protesters have been killed and 2,300 arrested, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
The trigger this time was the collapse of the Iranian rial against the dollar. However, the protesters’ core grievances remain constant: government mismanagement, corruption and repression, and include an explicit demand for the ouster of the Islamic Republic.
The new element is the Islamic Republic’s deepening fragility. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s war on Gaza, Tehran has experienced a series of blows to its regional strategy with the maiming of its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon and the fall of its main regional ally in Syria. The disastrous 12-day war with Israel in June revealed a security apparatus rotten with Israeli infiltration and exposed the regime as a paper lion unable to defend its airspace. Its nuclear program is in shambles after U.S. bombing.
This vulnerability is compounded by families unable to make ends meet, power outages in a resource-rich country and the possibility that the capital could run out of water. The paralysis of the clerical establishment, led by the increasingly rigid octogenarian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggests it is operating from an outdated strategy of resistance by backing proxies and developing ballistic missiles.
At a moment of such fragility, President Trump, perhaps emboldened by the capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, embarked on a round of threats. He said on Jan. 2 that the United States was “locked and loaded and ready to go,” and two days later that the Islamic Republic was “going to get hit very hard by the United States” if Iranian protesters were killed. The president also appeared in a photograph with a signed “Make Iran Great Again” baseball cap, echoing his post from the June war: “If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!”
The Islamic Republic may yet again repress the protests and survive U.S. pressure. Ayatollah Khamenei on Friday vowed that the security apparatus would “not back down” in its suppression of protests and accused those opposing his rule of being foreign agents. No serious signs of regime collapse, such as significant defections by Iranian security forces, are visible. Indeed, repeated rounds of unsuccessful anti-regime protests in recent years appear to have left Western governments numb to the idea that the Islamic Republic will no longer exist in its current form. That certainly has been my experience in discussions with Iran experts and Western government officials.
But it is clear that the West needs to engage in serious policy planning to provide support to the Iranian people if such a dramatic change occurs. This would entail coordination among U.S. allies, exploring sanctions relief, figuring out what should be done with Iranian assets abroad and speaking with human rights organizations about establishing a transitional justice system that would hold regime officials accountable for human rights violations.
Some protesters have responded positively to Trump’s support, renaming Tehran streets after the U.S. president and even placing in various locations stickers bearing his visage that read: “Trump! Iran is waiting for you.” Other anti-regime Iranians worry about foreign intervention.
“The very fact that people are out in the streets is surprising considering that it usually takes years for people to recover and networks to form after recent brutal crackdowns,” Roya Boroumand, the executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, told me.
Her center documented 2,045 executions in 2025, the highest number in 30 years. The Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that at least 26 executions took place over 48 hours last week. The protesters seem undeterred.
Like earlier waves, these current protests have distinguishing qualities. After the 2022 uprising evolved into a movement, Iranian youth — especially women — have been pushing back against mandatory hijab laws and trying to reclaim public spaces. This is a generational rupture. Gen Z Iranians are a different breed from their parents — unwilling to bow to the Islamic Republic and driven to fight for a future without its rule. Not surprisingly, today’s protests appear to be partly led by Gen Z.
The Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is now languishing in solitary confinement, recently noted that the idea of merely reforming the Islamic Republic has been dead for years — a common refrain among opponents of the regime. The “main struggle,” she said, “is truly between the realist ‘survivalists’ and the ‘downfall seekers’ of the theocratic authoritarian regime.”
Activists like Ms. Mohammadi have called for a constitutional assembly and a referendum and now a transition to a secular democracy “grounded in popular sovereignty, national interests and normal relations with all countries of the world.” Instead U.S. and key European leaders have ignored these demands in favor of diplomacy — choosing, once again, the devil they know: a sclerotic clerical establishment.
The Islamic Republic faces an array of challenges: the lingering specter of renewed war with Israel, upheaval over the eventual succession of a replacement for Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, and the likelihood of continuing protests. Many U.S. and Western policymakers and analysts recoil at the prospect of change in Iran out of fear of the unknown. But the status quo has wreaked havoc and suffering on the Iranian people and the region for decades.
Western governments must not be caught flat-footed. They should begin serious policy planning for the possibility of change in Iran, a country with more than 90 million people, including the destabilizing waves that could accompany regime collapse, which U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf are worried about.
There are numerous scenarios that could unfold. One possibility is a transitional government led by a figure from civil society, a collective body or Reza Pahlavi, tasked with establishing a democratic system and ushering in elections. More concerning, a figure from within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps could move to seize control and preserve the existing system under a new facade.
Western governments should move urgently to fill the gaps the Trump administration created by slashing funding to internet freedom programs and human rights organizations working on Iran.
After the 1979 Iranian revolution, Anthony Parsons, then the British ambassador to Tehran, commented that “with full hindsight, my judgment is that our failure was not so much one of information but one of imagination.” Washington and its Western allies should not make the same mistake again.
Holly Dagres, an Iranian American, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and the curator of The Iranist newsletter.
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