Authoritarian regimes often reveal their deepest fears not through formal declarations but through the threats they repeatedly describe.
In Iran today, senior officials from different parts of the ruling establishment are increasingly speaking the same language. Police commanders warn that unemployment, gasoline prices and economic hardship could be exploited to generate unrest. Senior clerics warn about another round of protests and war. Government officials describe the danger of a “social and cultural coup.” Even ostensibly conciliatory political figures frame public dissatisfaction through the familiar language of an enemy seeking to deceive Iranian society.
Taken separately, these statements might appear to be routine propaganda. Taken together, they reveal something more consequential: the Islamic Republic increasingly behaves as though another major domestic uprising is approaching.
The significance of this rhetoric lies in what it tells us about the regime’s priorities. Iran faces severe economic pressure, declining purchasing power, shortages, deteriorating public services, political exhaustion and profound distrust between state and society.
Yet the ruling establishment does not primarily discuss these problems as failures of governance requiring political correction. It increasingly interprets them as potential triggers of rebellion. Unemployment becomes a security problem. Gasoline becomes a security problem. Cultural dissatisfaction becomes a security problem. Public anger becomes evidence of foreign manipulation. Once a government begins systematically translating ordinary social and economic grievances into the vocabulary of national security, it is already constructing the political justification for repression.
This is why the most important threat facing the Islamic Republic may no longer come from Israel or the United States. Foreign military power can destroy facilities, penetrate intelligence networks, eliminate commanders and degrade strategic capabilities. Those are serious, but they remain external threats against which the regime has spent decades building institutions of survival. A nationwide revolt is different. It challenges the fundamental relationship between ruler and ruled. It threatens the regime simultaneously in the streets, inside state institutions, within the security services and across the psychological boundary upon which authoritarian power ultimately depends: the belief that resistance is futile.
The regime fears when fear ceases to flow downward
Iranian history explains why this prospect so deeply troubles the current establishment. In the final days of the monarchy in February 1979, political crisis became revolutionary collapse when unrest intersected with fractures inside the state and the diffusion of weapons beyond established chains of command. Once military cohesion weakened and weapons entered a rapidly radicalizing political environment, events accelerated beyond the ability of the existing order to control them. Police stations and military facilities became targets, armed revolutionary groups expanded their influence, and the declaration of military neutrality on Feb. 11 effectively removed the final institutional barrier protecting the monarchy.
Whatever interpretation one gives the revolution itself, its operational lesson is difficult to miss: an apparently powerful state can deteriorate with extraordinary speed when mass mobilization, institutional fracture and the collapse of coercive cohesion occur simultaneously.
The Islamic Republic has spent decades studying that lesson. Its rulers came to power through revolutionary disintegration and therefore understand better than most governments how rapidly political authority can evaporate. Their security doctrine has consequently been built not merely around defeating demonstrations but around preventing protests from evolving into a revolutionary sequence. The regime fears sustained street mobilization; communication among separate centers of protest; defections from the bureaucracy and security forces; attacks on government facilities; and any development that might convince ordinary citizens that the state has lost control.
It fears, above all, the moment when fear ceases to flow downward from the state to society and begins flowing upward from society toward the state.
The specific trigger of the next uprising cannot be predicted with certainty. It could be economic, political, social or generated by an act of state violence.
The repeated warnings now emerging from the establishment should be understood in this context. When senior officials publicly connect economic grievances with future unrest—or describe social and cultural dissatisfaction as a form of coup—they are doing more than identifying threats. They are establishing a narrative in advance.
If protests return, demonstrators can be portrayed not as citizens responding to economic hardship or political repression, but as participants in an externally engineered destabilization campaign. The distinction matters because a state that defines dissent as foreign-directed subversion can present extraordinary violence as national defense. The intellectual preparation for the next crackdown can therefore begin long before the first large crowd appears in the streets.
This is precisely why predictions that the Islamic Republic has become more moderate following military losses or leadership changes should be treated with considerable skepticism. A weakened authoritarian regime does not necessarily become a liberalizing one. It can become more insecure, more suspicious and consequently more violent. The central question is not whether individual personalities in Tehran have adopted a softer political vocabulary, but whether the institutions responsible for coercion have altered their understanding of domestic dissent. There is little reason to believe they have.
Authoritarian stability can be deceptive
On the contrary, the regime’s rhetoric increasingly suggests that the boundary between social grievance and security threat is disappearing.
The structural conditions for another confrontation with society have not disappeared either. Iran’s economic crisis cannot be indefinitely managed through temporary subsidies, administrative improvisation, propaganda or coercion. A government may postpone unpopular decisions, manipulate prices, provide temporary concessions or attempt to prevent a single economic grievance from becoming a national political cause. What it cannot permanently eliminate is the accumulated effect of declining living standards, corruption, political exclusion, generational alienation and the widespread perception that the state demands sacrifices from citizens while protecting the privileges of its own political and security elite.
The specific trigger of the next uprising cannot be predicted with certainty. It could be economic, political, social or generated by an act of state violence. But when combustible conditions become permanent, the absence of an immediate explosion should not be confused with stability.
This is the central analytical error frequently made outside Iran. Periods of relative quiet are interpreted as evidence that the regime has restored control. In reality, authoritarian stability can be deceptive. A society can appear politically quiet while anger accumulates beneath the surface, particularly after previous rounds of repression have raised the immediate cost of protest. The absence of demonstrations does not necessarily mean the restoration of legitimacy. It may simply mean that citizens are waiting for a catalyst, an opportunity, a fracture within the state or evidence that others are prepared to move simultaneously.
What appears from abroad as political passivity may therefore be an unstable equilibrium between public anger and the anticipated cost of confronting the state.
The regime understands this dynamic, which is why its own rhetoric deserves closer attention than its public displays of confidence. Governments confident in their legitimacy do not ordinarily interpret gasoline prices, unemployment, cultural change, public frustration and social dissatisfaction as components of an impending security emergency. Governments expecting instability do. The Islamic Republic’s political vocabulary increasingly resembles that of a state conducting a threat assessment of its own population. The enemy it describes may formally be foreign, but the battlefield it anticipates is unmistakably domestic.
What happens if repression finally fails?
This also complicates the assumption that external military pressure alone can produce political transformation. Israeli and American action can weaken the regime’s military capabilities and alter the strategic environment in which Tehran operates, but neither country can manufacture the decisive political variable inside Iran: the transformation of mass dissatisfaction into organized national power.
Nor should a prolonged foreign war be allowed to rescue the Islamic Republic politically by permitting it to transform a confrontation between society and state into a confrontation between Iran and foreign powers. The distinction between Iran and the Islamic Republic remains strategically essential. A policy seeking political change should weaken the coercive capacity of the regime without convincing Iranians that their country itself is under existential attack.
The possibility of another uprising also raises the question Washington has repeatedly postponed: What happens if repression finally fails?
A weakened authoritarian regime does not necessarily become a liberalizing one. It can become more insecure, more suspicious and consequently more violent.
A political transition in a country of Iran’s size and strategic importance cannot be treated as an improvisation to be addressed after the existing order begins to disintegrate. The preservation of territorial integrity, continuity of essential state institutions, prevention of revenge killings, management of armed groups, maintenance of public order and creation of a credible path toward free elections all require political preparation.
The Islamic Republic benefits enormously from uncertainty about these questions because fear of chaos is among the last instruments available to a government that has lost much of its ideological legitimacy.
This is where a credible national opposition becomes strategically important. Reza Pahlavi’s relevance should not be understood simply through nostalgia for the monarchy or through the preferences of foreign governments. His importance rests on a more practical question: whether any opposition figure possesses sufficient national recognition, international access, the commitment to Iran’s territorial integrity, as well as the political standing to help provide continuity between regime collapse and a democratic process determined by Iranian voters.
Washington should not select Iran’s next ruler, and neither should Jerusalem. The form of Iran’s future government belongs exclusively to the Iranian people. But refusing to choose Iran’s future is not the same as refusing to prepare for the political realities that would follow the collapse of the Islamic Republic.
Weapons don’t guarantee loyalty
The greatest danger may therefore lie in misreading the period before the next confrontation. The Islamic Republic still possesses guns, prisons, intelligence organizations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij, and a substantial machinery of surveillance and coercion. That should not be confused with political confidence. The increasingly alarmed language of its own officials suggests the opposite. A regime that sees potential rebellion in gasoline prices, unemployment, cultural change and everyday dissatisfaction is revealing how narrow it believes the distance has become between ordinary grievance and political explosion.
No analyst can responsibly identify the precise day on which another nationwide uprising will begin, and history rarely accommodates political calendars. But the underlying confrontation between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society remains unresolved, while many of the economic, political and social forces that produced earlier revolts have intensified rather than disappeared.
Another major eruption should therefore be regarded not as an exotic scenario but as a central contingency for which Tehran itself appears to be preparing. The critical question is what happens when it comes—whether the regime can once again isolate demonstrations and suppress them through overwhelming force, or whether the next uprising coincides with fractures inside the institutions upon which its survival depends.
The Islamic Republic was born from a moment when the state lost its ability to control the political street. Its leaders have spent nearly half a century ensuring that such a moment could never happen to them. That historical memory explains the anxiety visible in Tehran today.
They know that external enemies can damage the state, but only an internal collapse of obedience can end the political order. They know that weapons do not guarantee loyalty, that institutions can fracture, and that a population considered manageable for decades can become unmanageable with extraordinary speed. This is why the regime is already preparing politically and psychologically for the next uprising—and why the possibility of another large-scale crackdown must be taken seriously before, rather than after, the streets fill again.
Iran’s rulers may fear Israeli aircraft and American power, but those threats are visible, measurable and external. What they cannot easily measure is the moment when economic desperation, accumulated humiliation, political anger and the memory of previous repression converge inside Iranian society. The precise spark remains unknowable. The combustible material does not.
The most revealing evidence is that the Islamic Republic itself increasingly speaks as though it knows this. Its leaders are not behaving like men who believe the crisis has passed. They are behaving like rulers waiting for the next uprising—and preparing to survive it.
