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I would argue that the shared narrative of this opposition is trying to throw out 'death to America' and 'death to Israel' with 'long live Iran.' This is a very patriotic, nationalistic uprising that wants to put Iran's interests, Iran's economic and national interests, before revolutionary ideology. You know, one of the slogans that people shout and have been shouting for years is, 'Forget about Gaza, forget about Lebanon, think about us.'
Karim Sadjadpour returns to the podcast. Karim is an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously worked for the International Crisis Group, where he lived in Iran for a number of years. He is a recurring guest on this podcast on all things Iran. Karim, welcome back.
So, Karim, we spoke last week and you were, I would say, cautiously optimistic, but I heard, let's just say, signals of skepticism about whether or not the conditions for a revolution in Iran were truly there, whether or not it was truly ripe. How have your thoughts evolved over the past week?
Since we last spoke, Dan, these protests have expanded pretty dramatically, both in terms of the geographic scale. It's essentially a nationwide protest. Now the size of the crowds increased dramatically. When we spoke, I think last week, it was at the highest maybe low thousands. Now some of the crowds look like tens of thousands. And I want to emphasize again that when you're living under a totalitarian regime which has the highest per capita execution rate in the world, shoots to kill political protesters, that's very significant because every person taking to the streets is risking their lives. And so collectively, I would say we now have millions of Iranians protesting throughout the country. And their slogans are ferocious. People are done with reform. It's not only calling for an end of the Islamic Republic, but you know, they're much more clear now, and many people have started to coalesce around the inspirational leadership of the former crown prince Reza Pahlavi.
Okay, I want to get to Reza Pahlavi in a moment, but before we do, can you just get a little more specific on the regime's response this past week? Like, what is the regime actually doing and what can that tell us?
The playbook is pretty clear, which is that once protests expand, they throttle the internet. They throttle communications in order to essentially massacre people in the dark. They want to inhibit people's ability to communicate with the outside world. They don't want the outside world to see what's happening inside Iran. And this morning when I last checked, it's been I think almost 70 hours now that there's 1% connectivity in Iran. You know, only 1% of the speeds it was before. And that's not only internet communication. I think they've shut down cellular networks as well. And reporting is still trickling out of the country. But you're starting to hear reports of massacres, of thousands of people being killed. And one thing important to note, Dan, is that Tehran is a very wired city. You know, there's Starlink terminals, and so you do see some information coming out of Tehran, but I think these massacres tend to happen in smaller places where there's much less connectivity and they feel that they can get away with it. And so the regime strategy is very clear, and in fact they now are openly calling these protesters terrorists. And so for them now, they're shooting to kill.
Karim, you wrote a piece for The Atlantic in which you laid out the structural conditions that would need to be in place, or in fact in many cases are in place, for the regime to fall. And now what you're basically saying is all those were in place and then you had like a match lit over this past week. But can you go through those structural elements?
So Dan, I co-authored that essay with Professor Jack Goldstone, who in my view is the foremost expert on revolutions. And so Jack has these five frameworks that he would view as kind of prerequisites for any revolution, any state breakdown. The first prerequisite is you need a fiscal crisis, an economic crisis. And obviously Iran has that in spades. And that's what triggered this uprising. Essentially a state with hyperinflation and empty coffers. The Iranian rial vis-à-vis the US dollar has depreciated 80% over the last year and 99% since the Iranian revolution. So it's essentially a national currency with very little value.
Now the second prerequisite is you need to have divided elites, and we haven't yet seen fissures among the security forces, and I would argue that's going to be the key to determine whether or not the regime falls. The third prerequisite is you need to have an opposition that starts to cohere. I don't want to make the argument that this is a united opposition, but what they are united about is their common desire to bring down the regime. I think for everyone it's economic grievances, political grievances, and you know, obviously for young Iranians, for women, profound social grievances against what's essentially a moral police state.
The fourth prerequisite is kind of a shared narrative of resistance. And what's interesting in Iran is in 1979, you know, the country changed virtually overnight from being a US-allied monarchy to being this anti-American theocracy. And the organizing principle of the 1979 revolutionaries and what came to be the organizing principle of the Islamic Republic of Iran was essentially anti-imperialism. The slogans of the state became 'death to America, death to Israel.' I would argue that the shared narrative of this opposition is now it's trying to throw out 'death to America' and 'death to Israel' with 'long live Iran.' This is a very patriotic, nationalistic uprising that wants to put Iran's interest, Iran's economic and national interest, before revolutionary ideology. You know, one of the slogans that people shout and have been shouting for years is 'forget about Gaza, forget about Lebanon, think about us.'
And then finally, oftentimes the fifth prerequisite for revolutions to succeed is you need to have a favorable international environment. And that context has also changed in the last two and a half years in particular since Hamas's invasion of Israel, because on October 6, 2023, Iran felt very strong, right? It was dominating five places in the Middle East: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. It had its allies, Bashar Assad in Damascus, Maduro in Venezuela. It was helping to arm Russia's war in Ukraine. It was selling its oil to China at high prices. And all of that has now changed. Iran's regional proxies have been decimated. It's lost key allies like Assad and Maduro. Oil prices have dropped. China is squeezing Iran when it comes — 90% of Iranian oil goes to China and China's demanding discounts. And you also have the Trump factor. You know, Trump has shown himself, you know, devoid of any real ideology. He began his term wanting to do a deal with Iran. When that didn't work, he dropped 16 bunker buster bombs on Iran. And he's now openly threatening that if Iran continues to kill its people, the United States is locked and loaded and he's prepared to take military action. And so the international circumstances have changed profoundly for Iran.
Something you and I talked about offline, but it may be good to spend a moment on, Karim, is this idea that when there's an attack against the regime like Israel and the US did in June of last year, there is this sense that it can rally a nationalist sentiment against outsiders to the end of strengthening the existing regime. You argue that that model, that idea, that theory may not actually apply to Iran today?
That's right, Dan. I mean, I was in the minority in the aftermath of the 12-day war among people who work on Iran, and I think there came to be a received wisdom that now the country, the people have rallied around the flag. And I wrote at that time in The New York Times and Foreign Affairs that this was only going to be a short-term sugar high for the Islamic Republic. And what we know historically is that if you're a revolutionary regime, like you've just come to power and there's an external invasion, that can help you consolidate power. You know, that happened to Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion. It happened in the early days of the Iranian revolution when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and it helped Ayatollah Khomeini consolidate power. But if you're a late-stage dictatorship and your adventurism gets the country dragged into a military humiliation, that oftentimes serves to accelerate your demise. And you know, we've seen examples of that: Argentina and the Falkland Islands, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was a humiliation, which, you know, a few years later the Soviet Union collapsed. And for Iranians, I think that the 12-day war in many ways just amplified the country's existing divides. So the 15% or so of Iranians who support the regime supported the regime even more after the 12-day war. But the vast majority of Iranians who dislike the regime, their lives got even worse because, you know, the country was devastated. And then you have this perfect storm of other grievances, whether it's water shortages, power outages, national currency in freefall. And so that war, as many argued, didn't help the Islamic Republic. I think that humiliation has played a factor in the events of today.
A few days after the protests began, President Trump warned that the Islamic Republic was, quote, 'going to get hit very hard by the United States' if Iranian protesters were killed. According to various organizations, the numbers range — one report says at least 26 executions took place last week, adding to the — according to this one study, which we can cite in the show notes, 249 executions in 2025, and at least 65 people have been killed in the protests at this point. What would you say is the probability of a US attack on the regime?
Dan, we don't know the precise numbers out of Iran. You cited, I think, 65; perhaps that's confirmed. You know, I hear reports of hundreds if not thousands. So that's something, because the internet is throttled and information is not coming out. We don't know the full extent of the death toll. And you know, President Trump has put his own credibility on the line. He's now on multiple occasions said if Iran shoots and kills its people, we're going to intervene. And at this point, the Iranians don't take that as an idle threat. They shouldn't, given the events of the last year. I would argue what is most critical now for protesters in Iran and just for the people of Iran is to lift this information blanket. You know, they've essentially — the regime has cut off all connection between Iranians and the outside world. And so whether it's the United States, Israel, whomever — whomever is able to take Iranians out of the dark, I think they're going to be heralded in Iran for years and decades to come. And there are more and more Starlink terminals in Iran. Certainly not enough, but the regime, according to reports, is even jamming those Starlink terminals. And I would argue even more important than any type of military action. That is absolutely key.
And I know the discussion is not really happening on what I want to ask you about, but I want to go there because partly based on my experience from Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and even after that, it's immediately where my head goes, which is: if the regime falls, what is the operating theory that should undergird planning for the US administration, other governments around the world, governments in Europe, governments in the Middle East, in terms of what comes next? Now, I don't want to go through all the scars of Iraq, but heading into Iraq, there were different theories heading into the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. One theory was you decapitate the regime, right? Saddam and his sons are gone, and then you just keep the regime basically intact and you just get new executive leadership — was one theory. There were others, including in the Pentagon, that said, 'No, no, no, no. You don't just decapitate the regime. You bring the entire regime down. You don't allow for any remnants of the regime to remain intact, including those that provide technocratic expertise or whatnot. You got to do a full-scale, wholesale remake of the governing structure and the governing functions of the country.' And you bring in external exiles, Iraqi exiles who were living all over the Middle East. Many were living in London. Some were living in the US. You bring them back. Many of them had been chased out of Iraq by Saddam. You bring them back to Iraq and you basically empower them to run things on an interim basis and create a path towards some kind of democratic process. And then lastly, you just do none of what I just described and you just try to do sort of a combination: some folks who were from the inside, some folks who came from the outside, and you try to cobble something together to kind of hold things together. What is the theory about what happens here in Iran if the regime falls? What is your theory?
