For most of 2026, the world’s most important oil chokepoint has been a battlefield rather than a shipping lane. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has spent months asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz. They have become the central obstacle to reopening one of the world’s most economically vital waterways.
But the standoff over Hormuz is not really a story about the IRGC acting on its own. It is a story about Iran’s central government—the theocratic, unelected leadership structure the IRGC exists to protect—using every tool at its disposal, from a shipping chokepoint to live ammunition in city streets, to survive. As long as that government structure remains standing, the freedom Iranians risked their lives for this past winter will keep receding.
Iran’s constitution places ultimate authority not with its elected president or parliament but with the Supreme Leader and the unelected bodies around him: the Guardian Council, which vets every candidate allowed to run for office; and the security and judicial organs, which enforce the council’s will. Iranians vote, but only for candidates the apparatus has pre-approved.
The IRGC is the muscle of this system, not its architect. It was founded in 1979 specifically to guard the system, and it answers only to the Supreme Leader. They are the military wing of Iran’s real government: the clerical establishment, the security state and the small circle of unelected officials who have run the country’s foreign policy, economic policy and domestic repression for nearly five decades.
This is the government that let Iran’s currency collapse and inflation spiral until shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar walked out in late December. It is the government whose economic mismanagement, corruption and sanctions-inducing foreign adventurism turned a currency crisis into a nationwide uprising within days, spreading to more than 200 cities across every one of Iran’s provinces. When Iranians responded by chanting for the fall of the regime rather than simply for cheaper bread, it was Iran’s central government—not some rogue faction within it—that chose massacre over dialogue.
By multiple independent human rights assessments, what followed was the deadliest period of state repression in decades, surpassing even the crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement active in the fall of 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, at the hands of the so-called morality police for not properly wearing a head covering.
Security forces under the state’s direct control opened fire on protesters and bystanders in city after city. Well over a hundred children were among the dead. On January 8, the government shut down the country’s internet nationwide, not as a side effect of the unrest, but as a calculated decision by state authorities to blind the outside world to the scale of what they were doing to their own citizens. Tens of thousands were detained.
This was not an institution malfunctioning. It was Iran’s central government functioning exactly as it was built to function. When its legitimacy was challenged, it chose bullets, censorship and mass arrests over concessions.
Six weeks later, that same government took the country to war. A regime that had just been shaken to its foundation by its own people found, in an external war, a familiar and convenient escape hatch. War allowed a government that had just killed at least 42,000 of its own citizens to change the subject. It allowed it to further criminalize dissent as treason and rally a shaken public around the flag instead of against the state.
Even one member of the IRGC allowed to remain in power is one too many.
In its command of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s government found something it badly needed: relevance and leverage on the world stage at the exact moment its legitimacy at home had utterly collapsed.
Iran’s negotiators are not treating Hormuz as a humanitarian or even an economic question. They are explicitly using it to extract political concessions from Washington, with the Supreme National Security Council itself declaring that the strait will stay closed until the United States “corrects its behavior.” This is a government holding not only the United States but also a fifth of the world’s oil supply hostage to ensure its own survival, the same instinct that led to the deployment of snipers on rooftops during the January crackdown.
It does not matter whether Iran eventually strikes a deal over Hormuz, the next Supreme Leader proves more pragmatic or the war grinds toward some negotiated end. None of that touches the actual problem, which is structural.
Iran’s central government was not designed to be reformed by the people it governs. Instead, it was established with a Guardian Council to filter out any potential reformers, and an IRGC to physically crush anyone attempting to bypass that filter in the streets. A change in individual leaders would not alter this fundamental structure.
Despite enduring sanctions, the assassinations of its top leaders and an open war with two formidable militaries, the Iranian government has not loosened its grip for a moment. By design, it is shielded from the kind of public accountability that would otherwise compel change.
That is why the war’s outcome and the Hormuz negotiations, on their own, are almost beside the point to the Iranians who marched in December and January. A ceasefire and the reopening of the strait would end an international crisis. They would not free a single political prisoner, restore a single filtered-out candidacy or repeal the apparatus that decides who is allowed to govern Iran in the first place. Any settlement that ends the war and reopens Hormuz while leaving Iran’s central governmental structure intact will have solved the world’s oil problem without touching on Iran’s freedom problem.
This case is not uncontested. Some Iran analysts caution against reading the December-January protests as a unified movement with one clear alternative or demand. Support for exiled opposition figures was real, though uneven and largely social media-driven rather than organized on the ground. This complicates any claim about exactly what the Iranian people want as a replacement.
Others argue that treating Iran’s government as a fixed, unreformable structure understates the factional divisions within the clerical establishment and security services, and that systems this large have shifted under sufficient pressure before.
Critics of U.S. and Israeli policy make a serious point: Framing the war as incidental to the Iranian government’s survival rather than as a major driver of Iran’s deepening authoritarian turn lets outside military intervention off the hook. They add that, historically, external military pressure on Iran has tended to strengthen its hardline security apparatus rather than weaken it.
Readers should weigh my argument against those criticisms.
However, even one member of the IRGC allowed to remain in power is one too many. We know that the Islamic Republic of Iran wants Shi’ite hegemony across the globe. The world cannot live with that.
