Is Iran at a Tipping Point? Protest, Military Escalation and Regime Survival

Since protests erupted on 28 December 2025, Iran’s deepening cost-of-living crisis and renewed US and Israeli rhetoric about ’options on the table‘, have pushed the Islamic Republic back to the top of the international agenda. It is tempting to cast the unrest as an endgame. While the system has historically absorbed shocks through coercion, calibrated concessions and narrative control, this cycle appears qualitatively different. Even if the regime has successfully contained the protests for now, it is confronting a more structural, potentially existential, stress test of state capacity, elite cohesion and deterrence.

The initial trigger for the protests was economic: renewed volatility in the Rial and year-end inflation running above 50% on some measures further eroded household purchasing power, this already thin after the years of sanctions and policy mismanagement that followed the 2018 nuclear deal withdrawal by the US. Within days, the protests took a turn toward anti-government, pro-opposition chants. The Iranian regime quickly moved to suppress the unrest through lethal force, mass arrests and executions, with some estimating that more than 2,500 people had been killed – though the true toll remains contested amid the regime-imposed, ongoing internet blackout, with one report of 16,500 feared dead.

The regime’s resort to brutality underscores how far its claims to legitimacy have eroded across broad segments of society, and how sharply the gap has widened between the governing elite and the governed. Legitimacy does not need to be universal to sustain an autocracy, but it does need to be sufficient to reduce the everyday costs of rule. The frequency of spontaneous protests over water shortages and electricity, and the scale and intensity of coercion deployed since late December suggests that this reservoir is thinning, forcing the state to rely more heavily on fear and fatigue than consent.

At the time of writing, there are few credible indicators of high-level defections and limited evidence that the authorities have had to lean extensively on elite or ‘special’ IRGC units, beyond the regular ground forces and internal security elements used to restore control. The activation of elite units at scale can be a tell: it may signal overstretch, that conventional policing and Basij mobilisation are proving insufficient, or that the security apparatus is confronting pockets of non-compliance, including refusal to execute orders, fractures in the chain of command, or a breakdown in ‘shoot-to-kill’ discipline. The absence of these indicators does not mean the regime is secure; it means, rather, that it may still be operating within familiar coercive parameters, containing unrest without yet revealing the deeper vulnerabilities that often precede systemic rupture. Yet, the ability of the regime to emerge intact from this round of protests suggests its institutional depth has proven resilient in the short-term. The question now is what ‘survival’ looks like in practice for the regime. After the level of coercion it deployed, how will the regime seek to reassert control, and what will that mean for Iranians, as well as for the range of US, UK and European policy options.

So far, renewed co-optation tactics have also proved insufficient. Early on, President Pezeshkian seemed willing to listen to the protesters’ demands acknowledging they had a right to demonstrate, and made several swift if minor moves in response – replacing the head of the Central Bank and offering a new if small monthly stipend to the poorest sections of the population. The protests, however, rapidly escalated and by 2 January had spread across the country, drawing many more people to the streets. The tone of the slogans became politicised – a situation the Iranian leaders have faced many times previously, often resulting in brutal suppression.

Iran’s Response to the Protests: The Spectre of External Intervention

In a darkened, information-poor environment it is nearly impossible to assemble a verifiable picture of the protests. One particularly contentious issue involves allegations of external involvement. Allegations, including Israeli claims of operational reach inside Iran, may have altered both the regime’s framing of events and the dynamics on the ground. Three points illustrate the interplay between protest dynamics, disinformation and speculation:

First, the protests not only spread quickly across Iran, but took on a sharper, more violent form than in previous episodes of unrest. Alongside street mobilisation, there were reports – difficult to independently verify – of clashes in which security personnel were killed, with some accounts placing the figure as high as 200 police and officers, although the majority of killed protesters are civilians. A senior cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, claimed in his Friday sermon that extensive arson and sabotage had occurred, , including attacks on over 350 mosques and other state-linked infrastructure.

Whether these figures ultimately prove accurate matters less, analytically, than the pattern they were used to establish: that the Iranian regime did not see the protests as economically driven dissent, but a security emergency.

Iranian authorities increasingly framed events through the lens of infiltration. Around 8 January, in particular, regime messaging and operational posture suggested a shift. This is important for interpreting the trajectory of the protests. The spike in violence – and the rapid escalation of repression that followed – can be read as a moment when Tehran concluded that containment required severing suspected external linkages, tightening control over communications and movement and reasserting control over the streets before the unrest could be shaped into something more strategically destabilising.

Notably, a small number of Israeli political and media voices fuelled speculation about Israel’s role. A fringe, far-right Israeli minister claimed Israeli agents were operating on the ground in Iran. Israeli Channel 14’s Tamir Morag reported that foreign actors had armed Iranians to help them fight against the regime’s forces being used to crack down on and oppress protesters. Separately, Mike Pompeo, former US secretary of state, posted on X: ‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them’. One explanation is that such messaging formed part of a psychological operation to rattle Tehran, reinforce a perception of penetration and shape the regime’s threat perceptions. They may also have been intended to stoke escalation, including a harsher regime response. What followed was that the regime used this narrative as a rationale for the worst crackdown in its history.

Israel’s official public posture has remained comparatively cautious. Government ministers were reported to have been instructed not to address the question of possible intervention in Iran in media interviews. The rationale may be to avoid inflaming escalation dynamics and to preserve strategic ambiguity over its capabilities and intent.

Iranian officials likely suspected that, much as during the 12-day war in June when the country was perceived to have been infiltrated, a similar dynamic was now unfolding. Pezeshkian argued that ‘the same people that struck this country’ during Israel’s war in June were now ‘trying to escalate these unrests with regard to the economic discussion’. That assessment appears to have hardened the regime’s response and made the decision to disrupt Starlink access particularly consequential. While one objective was likely to constrain external influence operations inside Iran, the resulting communications blackout also had a clear operational effect. Under cover of darkness, the regime gained greater freedom to intensify its crackdown on protesters. It also meant that open-source reporting was likely 24/48 hours behind the reality.

Protesters were firmly cast not as discontented citizens but as ‘terrorists’ and foreign-linked agents, a label that lowers the regime’s threshold for lethal force and collective punishment. Emerging reports present a complex picture, with some testimonies describing ‘armed agitators’ among the protesters. Iranian officials have openly blamed US and Israeli operatives for orchestrating the protests.

It remains unclear exactly which factors caused the protests to deteriorate into this level of violence. Critics of Tehran argue that state media played a central role in circulating footage of alleged protester-led vandalism and destruction, therefore serving as regime propaganda. Complicating factors further is that the identity of the armed instigators (if they exist at all), has not been clearly established – whether they should be civilians, Basij forces, Iraqi militia-linked fighters, or others. The securitised framing also appears to have mobilised a counter-reaction, driving pro-regime rallies, with many Iranians worried about the country spiralling into chaos. Overall, uncertainty surrounding online images, disinformation and limited access to verified sources make assigning responsibility difficult.

Second, President Trump threatened to intervene if protesters were harmed, stating ‘I tell the Iranian leaders: You better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting, too.’ On 13 January, he said that if any protesters were executed, the US would attack. His pronouncements directly linked the actions on the streets of Iran with foreign intervention. For the first time in the history of Iranian street protests, the Army (Atesh) stated that it would protect Iran’s strategic assets and stood firm with the government, a signal that the protests were risking Iran’s image as a united nation in the face of foreign threat.

Either way, perceptions are not incidental; they have repercussions. Once protests were cast by Tehran as externally orchestrated, the threshold for repression dropped and the scope for de-escalatory bargains narrowed. With protests framed as foreign-instigated, the regime was able to reclassify dissent from a governance problem into a national-security threat.

Assessing Options: Costs of Action and Inaction

What comes next in Iran is inherently uncertain. Tehran faces a set of internal tensions that it must resolve if the regime is to survive, yet these pressures are increasingly difficult to reconcile and trade-offs are increasingly scarce and harder to disguise.

First, Iran’s leadership has limited room for manoeuvre to stabilise a restive population while arresting economic freefall. Buckling under international sanctions and US President Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ tactics, Tehran cannot independently fix inflation or the currency and limited, low-risk, political and social reforms are unlikely to supress public grievances in the mid- to long-term. Even if authorities were to drastically curb patronage networks, impose fiscal discipline, rein in rent-seeking and rebuild a minimum level of public trust in economic governance, there are insurmountable limits to economic recovery via status quo maintenance, especially in the aftermath of June’s 12 Day War.

Second, why has there been a slowing down in street mobilisation, as current reports from inside Iran indicate, and what does that actually mean? A temporary dip in protest activity, enabled by a heavy-handed government crackdown, may buy time and present Tehran with a ‘win’ as it claims to have regained control over the streets. Yet, with limited means to tackle the structural drivers of unrest, protest ‘fatigue’ will not mean stabilisation. Moreover, if the internet blackout is rolled back, reports on the scale of violence against civilians will inevitably begin to filter out. That, in turn, will have a lasting impact on regime legitimacy, making future unrest likely.

Third, a regime-change outcome would require a large-scale, sustained US campaign with political, economic and military elements, maintained long enough to fracture the regime’s coercive apparatus and manage the instability that would follow. That sits uneasily with President Trump’s apparent preference for short, demonstrably ‘winnable’ operations with clear endpoints. Yet limited action of that kind is not designed to produce durable political change. At best, it can impose costs, signal resolve or degrade specific capabilities; it cannot, on its own, deliver a stable transition – and may instead harden the regime’s siege narrative.

That said, the US is very likely assessing its options and, critically, whether limited kinetic action against elements of the regime’s security apparatus can shape events inside Iran that can accelerate the conditions for political transition.

US-led intervention may ultimately look more like sustained and phased pressure over time; a ladder of choices from tighter sanctions and financial enforcement, to covert and cyber activity, to more overt political support for opposition figures and information operations and, at the upper end, limited kinetic strikes. The problem for Tehran is that this uncertainty complicates deterrence: Iran cannot easily calibrate red lines, signalling, or proportional responses when Trump’s next step may be deliberately ambiguous. For the US, meanwhile, each rung carries its own trade-offs between operational effectiveness and escalation risk, thereby raising the prospect that actions designed to ‘manage’ Iran could instead create dynamics that are harder to contain.

Yet, if Washington ultimately opts not to act after publicly signalling support for civilian protesters, the precedent is easy to anticipate. Future US statements of solidarity will be read as non-credible. Human rights groups have warned that international inaction in the face of unlawful killings risks normalising impunity and setting a dangerous precedent.

Amidst all of this, one domestic trend in Iran is difficult to miss. Across wide segments of society there is limited appetite for the regime’s costly foreign-policy adventurism and support for armed proxies, when economic insecurity at home is acute. Slogans such as ‘No to Gaza; no to Lebanon; my life only for Iran’ capture a sharpened Iran-first sentiment. This reflects a contemporary iteration of Iranian nationalism that draws on Iranian–Shiite cultural signifiers but directs them towards the nation rather than the transnational, revolutionary project of the Islamic Republic. This sentiment was loudly expressed during the Women, Life, Freedom protests as well, signalling Iranians’ commitment to address the volatile and unsatisfactory situation in the country on their own terms, rather than as a result of outside intervention.

That matters because it points to the contours of a possible political reordering, should change come: not a simple shift from ‘religious’ to ‘secular’, but the potential emergence of a form of nationalism that seeks legitimacy through national identity, sovereignty and cultural and religious continuity, while possibly rejecting the theocratic architecture of velayat-e faqih. In this reading, the core challenge for the system is no longer only economic performance or protest management, but a deeper contest over what ‘Iran’ is for: a state anchored in the guardianship of the jurist and the export of revolution, or a state whose organising principle is national renewal, dignity and prosperity.

© RUSI, 2026.

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