War, diplomacy, or revolt: What comes next in Iran?
By Nadeen Ebrahim and CNN Staff
(CNN) — After a week of the largest nationwide demonstrations in years, the streets of Iran have once again fallen silent, subdued by force.
One resident of Tehran compared the mood in the capital to the days around Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, when many leave the city and shops close early.
But there’s no festive cheer, only eerie quiet, they said. Life carries on in the shadow of a deadly crackdown on protesters and under the specter of a potential new military faceoff with the United States. The Islamic Republic hopes to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the revolution that brought it to power next month. It will bring out crowds and blast revolutionary tunes. Yet the mood in the halls of power in Tehran is likely to be far less celebratory, as the regime faces the biggest threat to its survival yet.
It may have been able to crush the latest wave of protests using its tried-and-tested playbook of repression. But the fundamental grievances animating protesters haven’t gone away.
How did we get here?
Last Thursday and Friday are emerging as some of the most pivotal days in recent Iranian history.
Economic protests that began in Tehran’s bazaars suddenly transformed into what may turn out to be the greatest threat facing the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979.
Large crowds took to the streets across the country chanting death to the dictator, calling for the fall of the regime and, in a relatively new development, some calling for the return of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah.
The scale of the crackdown that followed indicates that the Iranian regime, wounded by last summer’s war with Israel and the US, and bereft of its regional proxies, was in no mood to compromise.
The unprecedented digital shutdown, which has cut Iranians off from the world, means the true scale of the brutality has yet to be fully understood. More than 2,400 people have been killed since the start of Iran’s crackdown on dissent, according to US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).
Will the US and Iran come to blows?
Over the past several weeks, US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to attack Iran if the regime used violence against protesters.
On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters that “very important sources on the other side” had informed him the killing had stopped in Iran — suggesting there would be no immediate US military action. Gulf officials have also told CNN that Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt urged the US to avoid strikes on Iran, warning of security and economic risks that could affect both the US and the wider region. These diplomatic efforts appear to have led to a de-escalation.
But that could be temporary. Analysts say the threat of American or Israeli strikes on Iran isn’t over yet.
“There has been no solution to the actual root of the tensions,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told CNN, adding Israel’s tensions with Iran were never about the protests.
A source told CNN on Thursday that the US military is moving a carrier strike group to the Middle East. It is estimated to arrive in the Persian Gulf towards the end of next week.
But for now, talk of talks is louder than the drums of war. Speaking in Florida on Thursday, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been in direct contact with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi over the past week, also struck a conciliatory tone.
Is there still room for diplomacy?
Even if Tehran and Washington try to revive diplomacy, Iran would be doing so from its weakest position yet. Compared with earlier rounds of talks, the balance of leverage has shifted sharply. Iran’s main nuclear facilities were badly damaged by US strikes last summer, degrading key parts of its program, and most of the proxies it used to project power have been effectively neutralized by Israel.
While Iran still retains a sizeable stockpile of highly enriched uranium – a key component for a nuclear bomb – the physical and symbolic blow is significant.
“The Iranians have, in many ways, lost a tremendous amount of leverage,” Parsi said, predicting that “Trump will adopt a very maximalist position” should negotiations restart.
Beyond the nuclear issue, any renewed talks are likely to cover a wider range of issues. The US would be keen to curb Iran’s missile program and its support for proxy groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, as well as Shiite militias across the region. That’s where things can get more complicated.
While Iran’s leadership has in the past shown some leeway for a nuclear deal with the US, it has treated the missile program and support for what it calls “resistance” groups as non-negotiable. Any compromise on those fronts would be seen as nothing short of outright capitulation to American demands.
But it wouldn’t be the first time revolutionary Iran has been forced to accept an imperfect deal. At the end of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, the Islamic Republic agreed to a ceasefire it had long resisted, with the revolution’s founder Ruhollah Khomeini famously saying it was like “drinking from a poisoned chalice.” Nearly four decades later, the regime has found itself in a more precarious predicament.
It may be willing to make painful compromises to ensure its survival once again. But even if it does, that may not be enough to regain the legitimacy it has lost with the public after killing so many of its own citizens.
The social contract is ‘damaged forever’
Experts say the latest protests have shown that the social contract between the Islamic Republic and its people is irreparably broken. The state has not only failed to protect its citizens from foreign attacks, deliver economic prosperity or allow political and social freedom; it has also repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use brutal violence to silence them.
The social contract was already weak, Parsi said. Now it has “been damaged forever.” While the public had some wins after the 2022 round of protests in terms of loosened hijab rules, today’s unrest is very different, Parsi said, attributing it to the unprecedented level of violence employed by the regime.
For many Iranians, nothing short of fundamental change will suffice. That’s an extraordinarily difficult task.
Over decades in power, Khamenei and his vast security apparatus have systematically crushed any form of internal opposition capable of mounting a serious challenge to his rule.
Figures such as Mostafa Tajzadeh, former deputy interior minister, or Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize- a winning human rights activist, have spent years behind bars for challenging the system from within.
If meaningful change were ever to emerge, it is more likely to come from within the same security and power structures that have benefited most from the regime, rather than from the reformist camp that has been steadily hollowed out.
“The most likely scenario is that there is another variation of the regime, through elements from within the same regime,” Parsi said. “It’s one thing to decapitate the top leadership. The security establishment is a different matter. It cannot just be decapitated easily.”
No viable opposition
Outside Iran, the picture gets murkier. Foreign-based opposition groups remain deeply fractured. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, has re-emerged as a potential rallying figure. He insists he’d be a transitional leader willing to steer Iran to a more prosperous democratic future. But after more than four decades in exile, he has struggled to build a diverse cross-political coalition or devise a plan to bring change that doesn’t include intervention by the US. And he isn’t even Trump’s favorite candidate to rule the country.
Most opposition figures have been out of the country and haven’t really “done the leg work,” Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead for Bloomberg Economics based in Geneva, said, adding that someone like Pahlavi “is a very divisive figure and he would split Iranians significantly.”
It is this uncertainty that weighs on many Iranians as they consider how far they can push for change. Another potential concern is whether the potential fall of the regime will usher the collapse of Iran as a nation. With its ethnic and regional diversity, and with some groups openly agitating for separation, the risk of fragmentation is a distinct possibility.
It is likely only a matter of time before another protest wave emerges. And as leaders in Tehran will surely remember, the 1979 revolution was itself a culmination of a year-long protest movement that ebbed and flowed before finally toppling the Shah’s regime.
“I don’t think this is the last of the protests,” Esfandiary said. “A line has been crossed and that we have reached a point of no return.”
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