Iran’s Regime Is Weaker Than It Looks

For five and a half years, I was a hostage of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During that time, I came to believe something about the regime that may seem improbable from the outside: It is far weaker than it looks. Today, I believe we are closer to its end than many Americans realize.

As America approaches the November midterm elections, calls to turn inward will inevitably rise. There will be arguments that we have done enough, that the Islamic Republic is someone else’s problem, that the costs are too high or the outcome too uncertain. Giving in to that temptation would be a historic mistake.

After 47 years, the regime that has inflicted unimaginable misery on its own people and helped spread militant extremism throughout the Middle East may be approaching its final act. This is not the moment to lose our resolve.

Long before Americans became familiar with terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, and long before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Islamic Republic was using religious extremism, hostage-taking, and terrorism as instruments of statecraft. It directly nurtured organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas and helped create a regional environment in which hatred of the West and political violence could flourish.

But the greatest victims of the Islamic Republic have always been the Iranian people themselves. The 1979 revolution was an Iranian one, and the country has lived with its consequences ever since. Nearly half a century later, a different generation is demanding the right to chart an alternative course.

During my years in captivity, I watched a nation seemingly trapped in a downward spiral of corruption, incompetence, and cultish ideological obsession. Every evening, my cellmates and I watched “Akhbare Bisto-See,” or “20:30 News,” on Iran’s state-controlled IRIB Channel Two—a nightly parade of propaganda, arrogance, ignorance, and hatred.

After my first few weeks in Section 2A of Evin Prison, controlled by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, I began conducting a private, admittedly unscientific experiment. I watched the news, observed what was happening around me, talked to as many inmates as I could, and estimated how many years it would take Iran to catch up with the modern world.

Fifty years, I thought. Then 75. Then 100. After eight months, when my estimate reached 150 years, bewilderment set in. So I stopped counting.

What haunted me was not merely the country's physical and moral decay, corruption, or the government's incompetence. It was what decades of humiliation and hopelessness had done to people. Sometimes the evidence sat only a yard from me.

Two of my cellmates were members of ISIS. Both were Iranian Kurds. I could not understand it. They were not Arabs from Syria or Iraq. They were Iranians. How could young Iranian men join an organization as murderous as ISIS? Sometimes late into the night, I listened to their stories. Gradually, I began to understand that before extremism had recruited them, humiliation had prepared them.

One of those young men was Ibrahim. He had just turned 18 when I met him in communal Room 2 of Section 2A. One night, he told me about his younger brother’s death. His family was so poor they could not afford a simple burial. They carried the boy’s body on their shoulders to the outskirts of their village, dug a hole, and buried him without ceremony or even a memorial stone. “Like a dog,” Ibrahim told me. I have never forgotten those words.

Years later, I encountered another Iranian Kurd whose story has stayed with me.

After I was sentenced to 10 years in prison for what the Islamic Republic called “cooperating with the hostile nation of America,” an old friend arranged for a man to help me cross the border to freedom. I will call him Jafari.

We embarked on a 15-hour journey toward the northwestern frontier, but our luck ran out about 20 miles from the Iraqi border, when we were arrested by a field unit of the Ministry of Intelligence. The following day, in the city of Sardasht, Jafari and I waited to appear before a local judge on charges of attempting to cross the border illegally. We sat there, exhausted, our hands cuffed together. Until then, I knew almost nothing about him except that he was 30 years old and a Kurd.

As we waited, I listened as he spoke to the guards. I learned that he had previously spent 10 years in prison for belonging to a Kurdish political organization. Then he described what had happened when he was first arrested.

According to Jafari, while he was kneeling on the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back, his prosecutor unzipped his pants and urinated into his mouth, telling him that he and his Kurdish people were scum.

Looking at him sideways, I could see his eyes welling with tears. These were not tears of fear or anger. They were the tears of a young man whose dignity had been crushed.

There are certain things human beings cannot be expected to endure indefinitely.

I think of Ibrahim and Jafari when I think of the Iranians who have taken to the streets against the Islamic Republic.

To outsiders, demonstrations in Iran are often described in political terms: reformists versus hard-liners, secularists versus Islamists, protesters versus the government. But beneath the politics lies something more elemental: the systematic, prolonged humiliation of a proud nation.

For decades, Iranians have watched a country blessed with extraordinary human talent, history, natural resources, and culture grow poorer and more isolated, while a corrupt, insular ruling establishment enriched itself and demanded blind obedience.

For Iran’s ethnic minorities, that humiliation has often been compounded by discrimination and violence. Kurds, Azeris, Arabs, Baluch, Turkmen, and Lors have all, in different ways, experienced life on the margins of the Islamic Republic.

As for Iranian women, they require almost no explanation. We need only remember the name Mahsa Amini. Volumes could be written about their strength, courage, and dignity—and about the wrath inflicted on them by a deeply misogynistic regime. Mahsa Amini’s death became a symbol because millions of Iranian women recognized in her story the state’s intrusion into the most intimate decisions of their lives, backed by violence.

Iran’s religious minorities have their own disheartening stories. Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, and Christians have lived for decades under suspicion, restrictions, and persecution.

In the yard of Ward 8 at Evin Prison, I once sat with a Baha’i man I had befriended. It was around noon on October 14, 2022, one day before prisoners rioted and fire engulfed part of Evin. I remember the conversation so vividly not because of what happened the following day, but because of the story this gentle man told me.

Back in 1980, his father had been hanged in that same prison, perhaps only 100 yards from where we were sitting. As a young boy, he had accompanied his mother to collect his father’s body. He told me his father's only crime was being a Baha’i. Nearly half a century later, the son was sitting inside Evin as well, just yards from where he had lost his father.

That is the Islamic Republic’s legacy: a seemingly endless cycle of violence, poverty, and humiliation.

It has had 47 years to build a prosperous nation. Instead, it built prisons, missile cities, and an expansive nuclear program while much of its population struggled.

It had 47 years to harness the extraordinary abilities of the Iranian people. Instead, millions left the country, while some of its brightest young minds ended up in prison cells.

Among them were Ali Younesi and Amirhossein Moradi, two kind, polite, extraordinarily bright young men with whom I had the privilege of sharing a cell in Ward 4 of Evin Prison. Younesi was an internationally recognized astronomy prodigy; Moradi, a gifted physics student. Both were in their early 20s and studying at the prestigious Sharif University. Their stories are repeated across Iran, where the Islamic Republic has spent decades crushing the hopes of some of the country’s most gifted young people.

It had 47 years to earn legitimacy. Instead, it demanded blind submission.

And that distinction matters now because Iran and the Islamic Republic are not the same thing. The regime wants the world to believe that any attack on its power is an attack on Iran itself. It wants Americans to believe that the alternative to the Islamic Republic must be chaos, civil war, or another extremist regime.

I do not accept that premise.

The Iranian people I came to know—including those I encountered in circumstances I would never have chosen—were not yearning for more ideology. They were yearning for dignity, prosperity, basic human rights, and a return to being respected members of the world community. They wanted decent-paying jobs. They wanted opportunity. They wanted justice. They wanted their daughters to live without fear. They wanted the freedom to worship—or not worship—as they chose. They wanted to belong to their country without being humiliated for being Kurdish, Baha’i, Christian, Jewish, Baluch, or anything else.

Above all, they wanted a future. That is why this moment matters.

Earlier this year, Iranians once again demonstrated their resolve. Many initially took to the streets over painfully familiar grievances: inflation, electricity shortages, water scarcity, economic mismanagement, corruption, and the relentless erosion of their purchasing power.

They were met with lethal force. Thousands were reportedly killed in the crackdown and tens of thousands arrested. But casualty figures alone cannot convey the particular cruelty of repression in the Islamic Republic.

For years, Iranian families and human-rights organizations have reported a practice sometimes described as “bullet money” or a “bullet fee”: authorities demanding payment from families before releasing the bodies of relatives killed by the state, in some accounts ostensibly to cover the cost of the ammunition used to kill them.

Think about what that means. Your son goes into the street to protest the cost of food. Your daughter demands the freedom to live as she chooses. They do not come home.

Then you go to retrieve the body of the child you raised, and the state that killed your child demands payment for the bullets before returning the body to you.

Statistics describe Iran’s economic decline. Its currency has collapsed. Inflation has ravaged household incomes. Corruption remains endemic. Millions of talented Iranians have left the country. All of those facts matter, but none captures the nature of the Islamic Republic quite like a grieving parent being asked to pay for the bullet that killed a child. That is humiliation. That is indignity.

And after 47 years, something fundamental is happening inside Iran. The Islamic Republic has survived through fear. Regimes built on fear can seem permanent until suddenly they are not.

I saw fear inside the Islamic Republic. But I also saw something the regime should fear far more. I saw what happens when humiliation turns into anger, when anger becomes courage, and when people told for decades that they are powerless—or scum—begin to realize they vastly outnumber those who oppress them.

The pressure is no longer merely political. Iran is confronting one of the most severe economic crises in the Islamic Republic’s history. Inflation has soared, the rial has fallen sharply, and the regime is struggling to obtain the foreign currency it needs to finance imports and sustain the state. A U.S. naval blockade has sharply curtailed Iranian oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, while tighter financial sanctions are closing channels Tehran once used to evade economic pressure. The Islamic Republic has survived crises before. But rarely has it faced this combination of domestic anger, economic exhaustion, international isolation, and pressure on the sources of revenue that sustain the state.

America should not determine Iran’s future. The Iranian people must decide that themselves. Nor should Washington confuse supporting the Iranian people with choosing their next government. We have learned enough from history to know the dangers of that approach. But an equally dangerous mistake would be abandoning people when they are closer to changing their circumstances than outsiders might realize.

The United States and its allies should maintain pressure on the institutions that sustain repression while making it unmistakably clear that our quarrel is with the Islamic Republic, not with Iran or its people.

We should amplify Iranians’ voices rather than presume to speak for them. And we should resist the temptation—especially when domestic politics becomes consuming—to trade long-term resolve for short-term political convenience.

The final act of this 47-year tragedy may already be underway.

If the curtain is finally beginning to fall on the Islamic Republic, it will not be Americans who take the stage for the finale.

It will be the Iranian people. Our responsibility is simpler: Don't abandon them as they prepare to take the stage.

We may be closer than we think.

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