Antigovernment protests in Iran that began in late December have escalated into the most serious challenge in decades to its clerical leadership. Demonstrations spread to all 31 provinces, and news reports indicate that thousands of protesters have been killed. Since Jan. 8, there’s also been a near-total internet blackout in Iran.
The unrest follows a 12-day war with Israel last June in which the United States joined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. The strain from that conflict compounded years of economic pressure from international sanctions.
President Trump has said the United States is considering “very strong options,” and administration officials confirm he has been briefed on potential responses ranging from expanded sanctions to military strikes. Iran has warned it would retaliate against U.S. bases in the region. Meanwhile, notable Iranian reformists, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, have closed ranks with hardliners, calling protesters “rioters” and blaming foreign agents.
To understand what’s driving this crisis—and where it might lead—we asked RAND experts to address the key questions about regime stability, opposition dynamics, economic pressures, and regional implications.
Q:
Iran has weathered major protest waves before—the Green Movement in 2009, the fuel-price protests in 2019, the Mahsa Amini uprising in 2022. What distinguishes the current unrest? What makes this moment more or less threatening to regime survival?
A:
Heather Williams In the case of the 2009 protests, Iran still had a functioning, though beleaguered, political reform movement. Anti-regime sentiment was an undercurrent of protests then, but many Iranians still saw hope for change from within. In 2019, but particularly in 2022, that dynamic changed. And the only chance for Iranians to gain their civil rights now is to fight for them in the streets.
What makes this moment particularly threatening to the regime is their foreign policy failures; they failed to protect Iran’s nuclear program and sustain Hizballah as a proxy, which makes the regime look weak externally and internally.
Michelle Grisé: The current protests have spread across Iran more quickly and attracted a broader cross-section of the public. But the real difference is the strategic context: The United States and Israel have significantly degraded Iran’s conventional and nuclear capabilities and weakened its proxy network. The Iranian regime is thus facing unrest at home at a time of heightened external vulnerability, with fewer tools to deflect attention from the protests and a diminished ability to absorb internal shocks.
The protests followed a currency collapse and spiraling inflation. Can the regime plausibly relieve this pressure, or has it exhausted its economic toolkit?
Howard Shatz Iran is under extreme economic stress. The currency fell more than 30 percent last year. It has since collapsed further, falling another 30 percent or more in the first week of January—perhaps much more. Inflation has been running above 40 percent and is expected to stay there in 2026. Growth for 2025 looks to be only 0.65 percent, compared to more than 3.5 percent for the Middle East and Central Asia as a whole.
Capping all that are three other things: the demonstration by the United States that it is willing to go after black-market oil and the shadow oil fleet, by which Iran gets much of its revenue; the reinstatement of sanctions by the EU at the end of September 2025; and aggressive sanctioning activity by the United States throughout 2025. Even without sanctions, oil prices are expected to decline in 2026. The Islamic Republic could stabilize its economy at this new, lower level of performance, but there is little it can do over the next few months or even the next year to improve the economic situation.
President Pezeshkian, Hassan Khomeini, and other figures long associated with reform are now backing the violent crackdown. What explains this?
Grisé This shift reflects how protests have changed in recent weeks. Initially, when protests were focused on economic grievances, Pezeshkian took a relatively conciliatory stance. As they evolved to encompass broader opposition to the Iranian regime, however, he has taken a tougher line, including blaming the United States and Israel for fueling the unrest. At the end of the day, Pezeshkian, though a reformist, is part of the regime. Although there are significant points of disagreement between reformists and hardliners, the crackdown suggests they agree on one crucial point: the importance of ensuring the regime’s survival at all costs.
Williams We should not underestimate the complexity of Iranian political dynamics. Pezeshkian, Hassan Khomeini, and Iranian reformists are still ultimately pro-regime figures. Pezeshkian sought the presidency recognizing he would have very little room to shape policy, and he has acknowledged that he is ineffectual. Hassan believes in greater social freedom for Iranians, but he is a hardliner when it comes to foreign policy, and he may be positioning himself inside elite circles as a possible successor to the Supreme Leader.
The death toll has been rising. Estimates are now that about 3,000 protesters and nearly 150 government personnel have been killed. What do we know about the capacity and cohesion of Iran’s internal security apparatus?
Williams The most difficult reality is that—while Iranian citizens continue to demonstrate heroic bravery in protesting for their cause—the regime’s internal security apparatus has a very high tolerance for violence. This is a force led by veterans battled-hardened by the vicious Iran-Iraq War. Every internal security force apparatus has a breaking point, but the Islamic Republic’s will likely require much blood to be spilled.
Raphael Cohen It’s important to realize that the Iranian security forces are not a single entity, but several different ones. There is the actual military, of course. There’s also the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which parallels the military structure but was built to be loyal to the regime. And, importantly for domestic unrest, there’s the Basij, a militia-like entity also loyal to the regime. So far, we haven’t yet seen signs of fracturing between these different entities, but the possibility is certainly there.
Unlike previous uprisings, chants supporting Reza Pahlavi—the 65-year-old son of Iran’s deposed shah, who has been living in exile—are now reportedly common at protests. How significant is this shift?
Karen Sudkamp The Iranian regime has spent almost five decades repressing opposition movements, or co-opting moderates, especially since the 2009 Green Revolution. Pahlavi’s rise to recent prominence likely stems from his remaining one of the few potential opposition figures who the regime cannot easily eliminate. It is unlikely Iranian citizens desire a return to a monarchy; rather, Pahlavi could represent a figure with no connections to the current regime and an opportunity for a fresh start.
However, with a heavily fractured and repressed opposition within Iran, coupled with his lack of presence in Iran for decades, it is unlikely Pahlavi could be a long-term unifying figure for the country.
Cohen There are plenty of reasons why many in the West—not just Iranian exiles—find the notion of restoring Pahlavi to the throne to be an attractive option. He is a pro-Western figure who has lived most of his life in the United States. His wife practiced law in Washington, D.C. He has advocated transforming Iran into a democracy. And he has promised better relations with both the West and Israel, even visiting Israel in a historic trip April 2023. If Pahlavi can retake the throne, lead the country, and deliver on his promises, it would be a good thing for Iran, the region, and the United States.
But there are a lot of ifs baked into that assumption. There is a natural, if imperfect, comparison to be made to Ahmad Chalabi, the similarly exiled, Western-educated opposition leader who pushed for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. As it turned out, Chalabi was not as popular in Iraq as he suggested he was. And the Iraq the United States found in 2003 was very different than one Chalabi left. Now, the analogy is a flawed one for a host of reasons (Chalabi wasn’t a hereditary monarch for one), but the concerns would be similar. Pahlavi’s true support on the ground may not run as deep as it might seem, especially if the regime collapses and there is not a common enemy to unite Iranian society.
Iran imposed a near-total internet and international telephone blackout, though there is reportedly some satellite connectivity now. What does that signal about the government’s own assessment of the threat?
Marzia Giambertoni Iran’s communications blackout marks an escalation from previous crises. During the November 2019 fuel-price protests, authorities imposed a five-day near-total internet shutdown while keeping domestic services online. In the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, they employed more surgical tactics, throttling bandwidth, blocking apps like WhatsApp, and targeting VPNs.
The current blackout is more comprehensive: disabling internet, phone lines, and even some Starlink terminals. This suggests authorities view these demonstrations as a more severe challenge to their control than either 2019 or 2022. The shutdown serves a dual purpose: It prevents protesters from coordinating, and it prevents the international community from observing evidence of security force abuses.
Sudkamp What information has emerged shows large protests continuing despite increasing security force violence. This is potentially a different population of protesters than in the past; they have less fear of the regime’s oppression because they recognize that this regime cannot improve their lives. The longer the blackout continues, the more the regime views these protests as an existential threat.
Six months ago, U.S. strikes degraded nuclear facilities at Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. Has Iran’s strategic posture changed? Might the loss of nuclear leverage affect Tehran’s calculations?
Julia Masterson Iran’s Defense Council issued a statement January 6 that implied that Tehran could now act preemptively against perceived adversarial threats—including those provoked by the government’s continued crackdown against protesters. That is a stark departure from Iran’s long-held defensive strategic posture. No doubt Iran’s inability to deter Israeli and U.S. strikes last June shaped this amendment. There is no indication, however, that Khamenei has reversed his nuclear Fatwa (a declared ban on nuclear weapons) or that Iran is considering the development of nuclear weapons. Now, perhaps more than ever, the regime may see that pathway as too risky.
Cohen Iranian capabilities—not just nuclear but also missiles and air defenses—are thankfully still degraded from the war it fought with Israel over the summer and from Midnight Hammer. But it still retains enough capabilities to try to deter either Israel or the United States from intervening here. Besides, from the regime’s standpoint, it doesn’t have much of a choice because not doing anything may result in their overthrow.
Tehran has threatened to target U.S. military bases and shipping lanes if Washington intervenes. What are the most likely Iranian retaliation vectors?
Sudkamp Iran’s proxy networks in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria are weakened. And its ballistic missile capabilities to attack U.S. regional bases are depleted. So, I would look towards the Persian Gulf for retaliation. The IRGC Navy regularly harasses U.S. naval assets in the Persian Gulf; these small boat attacks could escalate in frequency and intensity. Tehran consistently threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, though it has not. If it did, that at a minimum would impact oil exports and could trap U.S. and allied naval assets in the Gulf. I’d view increased aggression against the United States in the maritime environment as an indicator that Tehran is increasingly concerned about its survival.
Gulf states have remained publicly quiet. How are regional actors likely interpreting this crisis?
Cohen From the Gulf’s standpoint, there are probably mixed emotions here. On one hand, Iran is a threat to their own security, and so the overthrow of the Iranian regime is a net gain from a security perspective. On the flip side, instability can spread quickly as we saw during the Arab Spring democracy movement. If you are an authoritarian country, that’s quite threatening.
The Israeli reaction is more straightforward because the Iranian regime has been their archnemesis for quite some time. An overthrow of the Ayatollah—as some Israeli security officials have put it—would be “cutting off the head of the snake” (where Iran is the head and all the Iranian proxies are the tail). Israelis may be worried to some extent about some of Iran’s missiles and weapons of mass destruction program (e.g., stockpiles of enriched uranium) getting into the wrong hands, but net-net, from Jerusalem’s standpoint, this a good thing.
From Tehran’s perspective, what might the regime be hoping to achieve through diplomacy at this moment?
Masterson Iran’s recent proposal to resume nuclear talks is a clear indicator that Tehran is looking for an off-ramp, but its motivations are dubious. Whether Tehran seeks a meaningful resolution to the ongoing crisis over its nuclear program or is simply looking to dissuade Washington from militarily intervening in the country’s domestic unrest remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Washington could seize this opportunity to negotiate with Iran on its own terms. The United States could, for instance, condition future talks on not just an end to the crackdowns but also a near-term restoration of Iran’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Shatz In late 2025, if not earlier, Iran was floating the notion that Israel was the main regional threat and saying that countries throughout the region had much to gain by further normalizing relations with Iran to balance against Israel—and the United States. But with Iran now in tatters, it is difficult to see what it might have to offer, even if other countries did want to balance against Israel. Instead, they’re likely focused on guarding against any spillovers and trying to limit the negative consequences if there is any U.S. military action.
Looking ahead, what do you think are the most plausible scenarios—regime stabilization, prolonged stalemate, negotiated transition, or collapse? What will you be monitoring to assess which trajectory Iran is on?
Grisé The most plausible scenario, at least in the near term, is a familiar one: The Iranian regime restores stability through a combination of targeted economic concessions and a violent crackdown on protesters designed to deter more Iranians from taking to the streets. But the threat these protests pose to the regime shouldn’t be downplayed. As they continue and gain momentum, they lay bare weaknesses within the regime and make its long-term survival uncertain.
Cohen I’m looking to see whether senior leaders from the Iranian security establishment join the protests, if schisms develop inside the different elements of the Iranian security apparatus, or for signs of mass defections. To me, that would indicate whether these protests will go the way of the green protests in 2009 or the women’s protests in 2022 and eventually fizzle or cause the regime’s downfall.
Williams I still foresee the death of Supreme Leader Khamenei as a more likely catalyst for change in Iran. But with COVID, sanctions, the collapse of the reform movement, the mediocre performance and then death of President Raisi, and Gaza, circumstances have shifted inside and outside of Iran that could make dramatic things possible.
– Robin Rauzi, Published courtesy of RAND
