Maybe the most important thing happening in the world today are the protests unfolding in Iran. These are probably the largest protests in Iran since that 1979 Islamic revolution that put the mullahs in place. The protesters increasingly don’t just want reform. They want to topple the entire theocratic regime. The government, in turn, is cracking down very violently. We don’t know how many people have been killed or massacred, but there are videos coming out of Iran that show people grieving over large numbers of corpses. Yet the protesters seem willing to carry on, to risk death, by continuing to protest. I’ve covered many dictatorships, but rarely have I been to one that is as unpopular around the country as the regime in Iran. Iranians are patriots. They’re justly proud of their extraordinary history and civilization. One thing that Iran has done right is to educate its young people. And so these young people are deeply aware of the greatness of Persian history. And they watch satellite television and they see videos. And all of that underscores just how much Iran has fallen behind the rest of the world today. Iranians are fed up with the brutality of a regime that kills and tortures with impunity. They’re fed up by the corruption, by the inequality, by the hypocrisy, That anger has driven past uprisings, including one in 2009 that was brutally suppressed. There were the Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022, reflecting this outrage at the unfair treatment of women. They too were crushed, brutally. But that brutality in some ways has succeeded in the past in Iran in crushing protests. The question is, is that going to change this time? There are some differences. Iran is a weaker government now than it was before. It has been humbled by foreign military powers. “Iran has been acting very badly.” On the other hand, when I have covered these kinds of uprisings in other countries around the world, one of the things I’ve learned is that the slogan that “the people united will never be defeated,” it’s not true. At Tiananmen in China in 1989, in the Arab Spring, there are very courageous democratic movements that simply can be crushed with machine guns. So the question this time is whether the security forces will stay united and will be willing to mow down protesters. That, fundamentally, is how the uprisings succeed, that the security forces become no longer willing to massacre people. The shah’s government was overthrown in 1979; in 1989, in East Germany and elsewhere in the Communist bloc, the security forces were no longer willing to mow down protesters. We don’t know what is going to happen this time around, but there are things that the United States government could do. It would help a good deal if we were able to smuggle Starlink terminals in, satellite phones to get the word out about what is happening in Iran to facilitate communication. Likewise, I think the intelligence community could use information from intercepts from satellite feeds to help document what is unfolding in Iran and get the word out. The Iranian regime seems deeply moribund. Maybe it can survive this uprising in 2026, but I think its time is running out, and the world will be so much a better place when that happens.
