DUBAI—Iran’s 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June broke the regime’s carefully nurtured image of invincibility, many ordinary Iranians say. Now the aftermath is helping to fuel a wave of protests over the past two weeks that has left at least 500 people dead as the Islamic Republic attempts to regain control.
Footage seeping out of the country shows mass protests are continuing despite the crackdown. Human-rights-group assessments say security forces have already gunned down hundreds, and possibly thousands, of protesters. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran if deadly force is used, and on Tuesday aides are scheduled to brief him on specific measures the U.S. can take to respond to the killings.
Iran’s leaders have weathered similar storms before. This time, the regime is in a far weaker position.
The ayatollahs’ rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.
That assumption came crashing down when Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran last summer.
Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran’s nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland.
Now protesters are braving arrest or bullets as they demand not just changes in policy, but the downfall of the Islamic Republic itself.
“This was the last straw. The regime over the years had argued that although it has not been able to bring about prosperity or pluralism for the Iranians, at least it had brought them safety and security. Turns out, it didn’t,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “Now the people have reached the point of saying: Enough is enough.”
June’s 12-day war gave the regime a “temporary sugar high, which many mistakenly believed was a national rallying around the flag,” said Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointing out that the Islamic Republic, since its inception in 1979, had chosen to wage a war of choice, rather than a war of necessity, against Israel. “External wars tend to strengthen revolutionary regimes in their early years, but military humiliations expose the brittleness of late-stage dictatorships.”
Indeed, history is replete with examples of repressive regimes falling to domestic unrest after military setbacks against foreign adversaries. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milošević was toppled in 2000, a year after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign forced him to surrender control of Kosovo. Argentina’s junta was replaced with a democratic government a year after being defeated by the United Kingdom in the 1982 Falklands War. And Greece’s military dictatorship collapsed after losing a war over Cyprus in 1974.
No upheaval has a single cause. The immediate reason for the latest round of protests in Iran was a series of currency devaluations, a sign of Iran’s deepening economic crisis as oil prices decline and Western sanctions strangle business activity. This crisis, however, is inextricably linked to Iran’s isolation, which is a clear result of its failed foreign policy.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 86 years old, has resisted pressure to change course since the 12-day war, attempting to carry on business as usual. Tehran didn’t significantly alter its foreign policy or seek a deal with Trump over Iran’s nuclear program, something that could have led to an alleviation of sanctions. Nor did the regime implement any major domestic political and economic reforms that could have buttressed its popular support.
“The fact that the U.S. Air Force can blow Iran to smithereens wasn’t a surprise to anyone. The surprise was that once you are blown up, you still want to go back to the same policies that have brought the country to this situation in the first place,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “This is what has given this sense of absolute hopelessness, with people saying: I’ve got nothing else here to lose.”
This isn’t the first time the Iranian regime has been challenged by mass protests. It survived the so-called “Green Revolution” over the disputed presidential election in 2009, as well as rounds of major unrest in 2019 and 2022.
Now, though, the international environment has changed. The U.S., under Trump, is encouraging the protests—while Iran’s regional rivals, especially Saudi Arabia, hope that the regime will be tamed and focus inward, but won’t collapse.
Many of Iran’s neighbors fear that the country of more than 90 million people could plunge into a Syria-style civil war, with separatist uprisings in provinces populated by Iranian Kurds, Baluchis and other minorities spilling across borders.
“The perception among Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf is that they prefer to deal with an Iran that they know, rather than something new or a zone of instability,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, research associate professor at the Gulf Studies Center of Qatar University. “The Arab neighbors, despite all the problems and contradictions, want to see a weakened Iran, but an Iran that they understand. Let’s not have illusions that a regime change in Iran would necessarily lead to a more friendly regime there.”
Back in 2009, then-President Barack Obama had similar concerns and stayed away from supporting Iranian “Green Revolution” protesters, focusing more on negotiating a nuclear deal with Khamenei’s regime. In 2013, Obama also backed out of striking the Iranian-sponsored Syrian regime for a nerve-gas attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, after initially declaring that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” triggering U.S. intervention.
Trump, by contrast, is indicating that he will act. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The U.S.A. stands ready to help!!!” Trump posted on social media Saturday, shortly after reposting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement that the brutality “of the Iranian ayatollah and his religious Nazi henchmen” won’t go unchallenged.
Trump, of course, has been buoyed by the success of decapitating the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro, and securing, at least so far, the cooperation of his successor. He may be tempted by the same template of removing Khamenei, and hoping for better luck with a more pliable successor, diplomats and Iran watchers say.
Last June, Trump said on social media that he knew where Khamenei was hiding, but that he wouldn’t have him killed—“at least not for now.”
Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that if the U.S. removes Khamenei it could offer an opportunity for the rest of the regime to take a more pragmatic approach—as happened in Caracas.
The remaining Iranian regime could tell the population, “We can give you hopes for economic improvement because we are going to push for a deal with the U.S. that lifts sanctions, and we are repairing the rupture in the security node of our social contract because we have removed the constant threat of strikes by the U.S.,” she said.
“The big question is whether this would be enough to appease the Iranian citizenry, given the level of dissatisfaction, rioting and violence we are seeing on the ground at the moment,” she said. “But that is one off-ramp that is available to the current ruling system. It’s also one that—if we look at Venezuela—may be appealing to Trump, and to the Gulf states.”
It wouldn’t necessarily be as appealing to Iran’s pro-democracy protesters.
“If we end up there, what would be the point of all of this?” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank, predicting that the Iranian system would move toward a more pragmatic approach anyway after Khamenei’s eventual death.
A decapitation that preserves the essence of the regime, he added, would be tragic. “It would mean that everyone who lost their lives so far in these protests, and in the protests leading up to this, would have done it in vain,” he said.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com