Six Points to Navigate the Turmoil in Iran

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By Vijay Prashad

Iran is in turmoil. Across the country, there have been protests of different magnitudes, with violence on the increase with both protesters and police finding themselves in the morgue. What began as work stoppages and inflation protests drew together a range of discontent, with women and young people frustrated with a system unable to secure their livelihood. Iran has been under prolonged economic siege and has been attacked directly by Israel and the United States not only within its borders, but across West Asia (including in its diplomatic enclaves in Syria). This economic war waged by the United States has created the situation for this turmoil, but the turmoil itself is not directed at Washington but at the government in Tehran.

There are reports—such as in the mainstream Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in October 2025 about Israeli “influence operations aiming to install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran”—that Israeli intelligence has a role in the protests, and the United States has openly told the protestors that it would bomb Tehran if the violence by the government increase. Last year, protests took place in twelve South Pars oil refineries, where five thousand contract workers in the Bushehr Gas Refinery Workers Union marched with their families on 9 December in Asaluyeh to demand higher wages and better working-conditions. When the workers took their struggle to the National Parliament in Tehran, where they called for an end to the contract work system, the Israelis and the United States took advantage of these sincere protests to attempt to transform a legitimate struggle into a potential regime change operation.

To understand what is happening, here are six points of historical importance that are offered in the spirit of discussion. Since 1979, Iran has played a very important role in the movement beyond monarchies in the Arab and Muslim world, and it has been an important defender of the Palestinian struggle. Iran is no stranger to foreign interference, going back to the British control of Iran’s oil from 1901, the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention that divided Iran into spheres of influence, the 1921 coup that put Reza Khan on the throne, the 1953 coup that installed his son, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi to the throne, and then the hybrid war against the Iranian Revolution from 1979 to the present. Here are the six points:

1. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 overthrew the rule of the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi, and due to the strength of the religious clergy and its political formations resulted in the creation of the Islamic Republic in April 1979 with the Constitution of the Islamic Republic coming into effect in December 1979. The other currents in the revolution (from the communist left to the liberals) found themselves largely sidelined and even—in some cases—repressed. The March 1979 protests on International Women’s Day in Tehran followed the restrictions on women’s rights (particularly against the compulsory hijab policy), which forced the government to accept the demands of the protests—but this was a short-term win, since in 1983 a mandatory hijab law was passed.

2. The Revolution followed the military coup of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan in 1977, the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan (August 1978), the establishment of the Yemeni Socialist Party (October 1978) that took the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen into the Soviet sphere and that led to the North-South war in Yemen (February-March 1979), and the capture of power by Saddam Hussein Iraq in July 1979—the entire region of south-western and central Asia catapulting in political somersaults. Some of these developments (Pakistan, Iraq) offering advantages to the United States, and the others (Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen) being counter to US objectives in the region. Very quickly, the United States attempted to press its advantages by trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

3. The pressure by the United States on these processes led to a war-like situation in all three countries: the US and its Gulf allies urged Iraq to invade Iran unprovoked in September 1980, starting a war that lasted till 1988; the Gulf Arab states urged North Yemen to invade South Yemen after the assassination of Salim Rubaya Ali (a Maoist who was negotiating the merger of the two Yemens); finally, in Afghanistan, the US began to fund the mujahideen to start an assassination campaign against cadres of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen saw their social projects narrowed by the attacks they faced from outside. Afghanistan crashed into over forty years of terrible violence and war, even though the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan remained in place for eighteen years; the Marxist government in South Yemen remained until 1990, but it was a pale shadow of its own expectations; Iran, meanwhile, saw its Islamic Republic survive a harsh sanctions policy that followed the end of the war by Iraq (in 1988).

4. The Islamic Republic faced several important, consecutive challenges:

   The most important came from US imperialism, which not only fully spurred Iraq’s war, but supported initiatives by the former Iranian elites to restore their rule and supported Israeli attempts to undermine the Islamic Republic (including direct attacks on Iran, sabotage operations, and assassinations of key figures from the science professions and military). It is the United States and Israel that have been systematically trying to erode Iran’s power in the region with the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020, the harsh attack on Hezbollah during the Israeli genocide and the assassination of Syed Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, and the overthrow of the government in Syria in December 2024 with the installation of the former al-Qaeda chief as President in Damascus.

   The old Iranian elites, led by the Shah at first till his death in 1980 and then his son, so-called Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, joined with the Europeans and the US to restore their rule. It is important to know that while the Shah had sat on the Peacock Throne from 1941, he was forced to accept a democratic government from 1951 to 1953 – which was overthrown by Western intelligence services and then the Shah was encouraged to exercise absolute rule from 1953 to the revolution of 1978-79. The Shah’s bloc has consistently wanted to return to power in Iran. While the Green Movement of 2009 had a very small monarchical element, it represented the dominant classes who wanted political reforms against the more plebeian presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is telling that the United States has ‘chosen’ the Shah’s son, who lives in Los Angeles, as the figure of this uprising.

   Limitations to the republic’s transformative social agenda were present as it tolerated sections of the old elite, allowing them to hold their property, and therefore allowing the formation of a stratified class system that benefited sections of these property owners and an emergent middle class. After the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in June 1989 and the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the government adopted large parts of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies, which —one way or the other—remained in place for decades (the policy was driven by Mohsen Nourbaksh, who was the Minister of Economic Affairs from 1989 to 1994 and then head of the Central Bank from 1994 to 2003). The economy was not organised along socialist lines in 1979, but it had built a strong role for the state and for public planning due to the needs of the war economy and due to the commitment to Islamic social welfare. Nourbaksh could not totally dismantle the state, but he conducted currency and banking reform as well as he did cautiously integrate Iran into the global economy. The class divergence and the difficulties of life for the majority of Iranians increased due to the combined impact of the US-European sanctions regime, the military threats by the US-Israelis (that has led to high military spending in Iran—still at around 2.5 percent of GDP it is much lower than the 12 percent of GDP during the reign of the Shah), and to the neoliberal policies pursued by the increasingly neoliberal finance ministers of the government (such as Ali Tayebnia from 2013 to 2017 and Ali Madanizadeh from 2025). It was this limitation of the Islamic Republic that has led to cycles of economic protest: 2017-2018 (around inflation and subsidy cuts), 2019 (around fuel price hike), 2025 (by bakers), and 2025-26 (soaring inflation and the collapse of the Iranian rial).

5. While the current protests are largely driven by a record-high Rial to USD exchange and a 60 percent food inflation rate, the transition from labor strikes in South Pars to coordinated urban violence points towards a deeper level of intervention. The administration has favoured sections of the import-export sector, which has worked in the context of the sanctions, to assist the commodity-exporters at the expense of the importers – a situation that is not easy to correct. Yet the abrupt 30-40 percent currency drop is a classic hallmark of external financial manipulation. Therefore, what began as business owners protesting the Central Bank without interference, soon morphed into a violent, top-down assault on the state fabric. The “protests” shifted overnight from peaceful assemblies to high-intensity urban sabotage resulting in the deaths of roughly 100 law enforcement officers, with claims that some officers were burned alive, a security member was beheaded, and a medical clinic was torched, claiming the life of a nurse, for instance. The use of close-range small arms fire against civilians further suggests an attempt to maximize domestic tension and provide a pretext for foreign intervention. The geopolitical orchestration behind the chaos became undeniable as the US State Department and Mossad openly cheered the violence in real-time. Once authorities disabled Internet access, the protests significantly lost strength, which places into question the spontaneity of the movement and lends truth to the thesis that there is a destabilization strategy at play, seeking to benefit from the current international conjuncture.

6. The opposition has taken to the streets but recognises that it does not have the strength to seize power. There are reports of US and Israeli interference, and it does not help the opposition that the Shah’s son has been both claiming credit for the protests and seeing himself as its beneficiary. With Trump at the helm of hyper-imperialism, and with Israel amid a period of what it feels are endless victories, it is impossible to know what these dangerous cliques will do. As the mobilisations lose steam, which will take place, the US-Israel might take advantage of the situation to strike Tehran and other cities with more force than it did in June 2025. This should be a worry not only for the people in Iran, the vast mass of whom do not wish an attack on their country, but also the people of the Global South—who will find themselves as the next target after Venezuela and Iran.

   
   

Real problems bedevil the population, but these problems are not going to be solved through a hyper-imperialist aerial bombardment by the United States and Israel. The Iranians will need to sort out their own problems. The sanctions regime and the threats of violence do nothing to allow that to happen. It is easy to say “solidarity to the Iranians” in the West, where protesters are being beaten and even killed for their support of the Palestinians and their anger at the anti-immigration policies; seems to be much harder to say “end the sanctions,” and therefore allow the Iranian people to breathe into their own future.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter