In Iran, Can a Teetering Regime Be Toppled? 

In Iran, the protests have now spread across the country, to dozens of cities, where the cry in the streets is now “Death to Khamenei.” The demonstrations, prompted by the economic collapse that has seen the rate of poverty rise and the rial sink to a historic low, are not going away. The regime hasn’t yet figured out how to react: to crack down violently, as it did in 2022 with the month-long protest prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish girl beaten to death by the religious police for incorrectly adjusting her hijab, and possibly infuriate the anti-regime demonstrators even more, or to stand back and hope that the protests will simply peter out, and people will go back to work, the bazaaris will reopen their shops, and the students go back to their studies, with the regime weakened, but still holding on.

Day 4 of protests in Iran.
The people are chanting for the return of the King.
No chants against the West.
No chants against Israel.
Iran was hijacked by terrorists in 1979, and the people want their country back. Is the media only interested when protests attack Israel? pic.twitter.com/YkAhxUuUXm

— Sina (@SinaMihandoost) December 31, 2025

More on the demonstrations can be found here: “Iran Protests Escalate as Pressure Mounts on Regime,” by Jonathan Sacerdoti, Algemeiner, December 31, 2025:

Iran is again in motion. Four days of strikes and protests have unfolded across the country, from Tehran to Mashhad, from Isfahan to Kermanshah, from Shiraz to Arak, since Sunday.

In Fasa, in Fars province, protesters broke through the gates of the governor’s office on Wednesday and attacked a government building, an act that carries weight in a system built on the choreography of fear. Each day has brought new reports, new cities, new confrontations. Each day has also revived the familiar, painful question: Could this finally be the moment when the Islamic Republic loses its grip?…

This attack on a governor’s office ratchets up the fear of Iranian officials. The demonstrators are not just shouting slogans, but attacking the authorities directly. What if the army and the police refuse to suppress those violent demonstrators, or worse still, decide to join them and turn their guns on the government? That was how, in the end, the shah’s regime fell, when the army was no longer willing to put down the demonstrators but instead, in many places joined them.

And now that popular unrest has spread from cities to towns. The bazaaris have now shut up their shops not just in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, but in several other major cities. The attack on the governor’s office in Fasa is the first major act of violence during the latest protest directed at government officials.

Fatemeh Maghsoudi, a spokesperson for the Economic Committee of the Iranian Parliament, sad last week that the collapse of the rial owed less to any concrete economic development than to an atmosphere of fear driven by the prospect of conflict, remarking that when US President Donald Trump so much as tells Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “let’s go and have a coffee,” the exchange rate suddenly collapses. And when Netanyahu makes any statement, Maghsoudi added, prices in the market immediately rise, despite the fact that nothing substantive had changed in Iran’s economy.

Fatemeh Maghsoudi claims that the latest fall in the value of the rial has been caused by fear among Iranians of what is to come. They worry that, having received Trump’s blessing to attack Iran’s ballistic missiles, and the plants that build them, Israel is much more likely to do so. And should that happen, there will be a further rush to trade rials for dollars, lowering the exchange rate even more. But Maghsoundi fails to note that the catalyst for the latest protests was the planned removal by the government of subsidies on fuel, which will send the price higher and cause still more economic pain to Iranians.

Yet the regime, too, is moving. According to the Iran specialist Kasra Aarabi, sources inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) indicate that the state has raised its internal threat posture to a “yellow” level, defined as an abnormal situation within a four-tier (white, yellow, orange, and red) national security system. That architecture, built methodically since 2007, reaches into every province, city, district, and neighborhood.

Under higher threat levels, layers of security are activated: checkpoints, patrols, phone searches, internet restrictions, Basij deployments down to the street and apartment block. When a “red” level is declared, infantry units fold into domestic suppression, and the IRGC’s operational security headquarters assume sweeping authority over provincial life. This apparatus exists for one purpose. It has been used before. It has not yet fractured….

In the past, the IRGC and the Basiji have managed to put down protests with extreme violence. But now there is a difference. The Israeli attack last June, that obliterated Iran’s nuclear program and destroyed its store of ballistic missiles and the plants that manufacture them, provided startling proof of the weakness of the regime, and gave hope to those who are now demonstrating for its downfall.

Speaking in Florida alongside Netanyahu this week, Trump warned that Iran may be attempting to rebuild its nuclear program after US strikes in June damaged three nuclear facilities. His language was characteristically blunt. Any renewed nuclear buildup would invite rapid eradication. Missile production, too, was placed under explicit threat. The message was typically blunt. Negotiations remain open. Deadlines, Trump reminded his audience, have consequences.

The last time Trump issued a deadline to Iran, he gave Tehran 60 days to reach an agreement over its nuclear program. When that deadline expired, Israeli strikes followed the very next day, with clear US permission.

Strikingly, this convergence of internal unrest and external pressure has received only limited attention in much of the international media, treated as background noise rather than as a meaningful shift. The result is a failure to register how significant it could be for economic protest, regional spread, and explicit great-power deadlines to coincide in Iran like this.

So far, Trump has not offered a deadline to the regime. But if the regime starts to crack down violently — with more than the tear gas it is currently employing on the demonstrators — he might, for example, declare the imposition of a blockade of Iranian ships, including oil tankers in the Gulf, that will be lifted only after the regime halts its violent suppression of demonstrators.

Have the economic conditions in Iran worsened to such a degree that Iranians feel they have nothing more to lose? The rial is at a historic low; in 1979, the exchange rate was 70 riyals to the dollar, and today it has sunk to 1,250,000 to the dollar. Forty percent of Iranians live below the poverty line. Sixty percent of university graduates cannot find jobs. The historic drought has caused dams to stop operating, leading to electricity blackouts. The price of gasoline and heating fuel is about to rise precipitously, as government subsidies are removed. There is hyperinflation, with food prices having risen 72%, and health and medical items up 50% from December last year.

There is also fury at the government’s misallocation of resources. It spent more than $100 billion on its nuclear program that went up in smoke, thanks to the IDF, last June. In addition, the Iranian regime had been providing $16 billion annually in weapons and other aid to its terror proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis; most of that weaponry, too, has also been destroyed by the IDF. All that money could have been spent on improving the lives of Iranians, as they are well aware, but the regime has for 46 years been monomaniacally intent on bringing down the Zionist entity.

We don’t know if this time the regime will finally topple. But never in the past 46 years, since the Islamic Republic established its despotism, have the stars been so aligned for its disappearance.