Iran International
What is unfolding in Iran is a clash between a state that treats isolation and sacrifice as strategic virtues, and a society no longer willing to bear the economic and human cost of the Islamic Republic’s ideological and regional ambitions.
In recent weeks, millions have taken part in an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic — and under a nationwide communications blackout, at least 12,000 people have been shot dead in what amounts to the largest mass killing of Iran’s contemporary history.
The collapse of the rial may have ignited the protests, but this wave of defiance runs far deeper than exchange-rate volatility. It reflects a society exhausted by decades of strategic deprivation.
The poverty pushing millions to the brink is not simply the result of policy error or mismanagement. It is the by-product of a conscious political choice: a calculated trade-off.
Tehran and its defenders routinely blame sanctions. Western analysts point to corruption or incompetence. Both explanations miss the governing logic at work.
What defines the Islamic Republic’s decision-making is not a lack of alternatives, but a rigid hierarchy of priorities: ideological integrity and regional reach consistently outrank broad-based prosperity.
In this calculus, economic crisis is not an unintended detour from the leadership’s path; it is the terrain on which that path has been chosen.
Fear of external influence and so-called “cultural invasion” reinforces this worldview. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly framed material prosperity and deep integration with global markets as vulnerabilities that erode faith and weaken resistance.
His much-touted “Resistance Economy” is not designed to escape sanctions, but to endure them. It promises resilience, not growth; survival, not transformation.
That trade-off cascades through policy. The drive for agricultural self-sufficiency, promoted as revolutionary virtue, has drained aquifers and destabilized rural livelihoods, as water-intensive crops and inefficient irrigation exhaust already scarce groundwater.
Meanwhile, a maze of subsidies, multiple exchange rates, and import restrictions creates rents that enrich well-connected actors while suffocating independent enterprise. These distortions are tolerated—even sustained—because they preserve political control and reward loyalty over innovation.
Even when officials acknowledge the scale of failure, they remain bound by the same red lines that produced it.
The water crisis lays this contradiction bare. Faced with mounting shortages, authorities warn of “water bankruptcy” and champion desalination plants and transfer megaprojects as proof of resolve, while continuing to treat self-sufficiency in water-intensive crops as a strategic achievement rather than a structural mistake.
The result is improvisation without reform: capital flows to spectacular projects that buy time, while the incentives driving depletion and waste remain untouched.
In such a system, rising living standards are irrelevant. Economic pain does not trigger reform because reform risks undoing the political architecture that keeps the Islamic Republic intact.
On the streets today, that logic is meeting its reckoning. Protesters are not merely rejecting inflation or unemployment; they are rejecting the premise that their suffering serves a higher purpose.
In recent remarks, Khamenei praised young people who aspire to “meet their maker” and embrace sacrifice over material advancement. Yet the chants echoing across Iranian cities demand something else entirely: dignity over obedience, participation over submission, a future to build rather than one to forfeit.
Confronted with this unrest, the leadership retreats to its familiar narrative of foreign plots, dismissing protesters as agents of outside powers. That rhetoric cannot conceal the deeper confrontation underway: two visions of national purpose that cannot coexist within a single political order.
One demands a society willing to trade its welfare, opportunities, and youth for an ideological project. The other, facing bullets and batons, is signaling that this exchange—their lives for the regime’s vision—is no longer acceptable.
For a generation that refuses to be treated as collateral, the Islamic Republic and its leader have no answer.
As nationwide protests continue, authorities have taken steps including staging government-organized countermarches, shutting down the internet, and tightening controls on the media to shape the narrative.
One clip aired by state media and presented as aerial helicopter footage of pro-government rallies in Tehran drew fresh questions after viewers pointed to anomalies, including wind visibly blowing the reporter’s hair while leaving his clothing and microphone seemingly unaffected.
IRIB News shared the video on X on Monday, writing: “Breaking | The first aerial video of the people of Tehran, the capital of Iran, marching in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been released.”
Readers added context on X saying the video appears to have been altered using chroma key (green screen), citing what they described as “unnatural subject edges, mismatched lighting and shadows, wind affecting only the reporter’s hair and not his clothing, a lack of realistic depth of field, and the absence of a seatbelt and headset," calling it a crude propaganda edit.
Multiple users also suggested the post showing large crowds appeared to recycle older material rather than depict new footage from the ongoing protests.
In a follow-up video, the reporter featured in the clip defended the broadcast footage as authentic. Some users, however, said they also saw inconsistencies in the new recording, and continued to question the original video’s provenance and how it was produced.
Separately, another image that circulated widely from the Monday rally showed demonstrators carrying a large Islamic Republic flag. In the photo, one person appears to be visibly inside the cloth, and some users pointed to irregularities in the flag’s details, including inconsistencies in the Arabic takbir rendered in white Kufic script along the edges of the green and red bands.
In another state-rally video, social media users focused on the color of trees in the background, arguing that the foliage appeared unusually vivid for mid-winter and did not match how Tehran’s street trees typically look at this time of year.
The government has a track record of recycling old footage and using AI-generated visuals, tactics that can help dominate the news cycle quickly.
In mid-2025, during a period of heightened regional conflict, state-run IRIB TV1 was shown in fact-check reports to have reused 2022 footage of Russian missile launches and presented it as Iranian strikes. State-run PressTV also published recycled images, including photos linked to a downed drone from the India-Pakistan border, which it labeled as an Israeli drone shot down over Iran.
State-affiliated social media accounts and some news broadcasts went further during the 12-day war with Israel, using high-fidelity graphics from the military simulator Arma 3 to claim “confirmed kills” of advanced fighter jets such as the F-35.
Such measures are framed by Iranian officials within the concept of soft war, an information and influence campaign in which the aim is not necessarily to persuade everyone indefinitely, but to create a temporary sense of superiority or confusion.
Iran has been under an almost complete internet blackout since January 8, when authorities largely cut off access amid nationwide protests, reducing connectivity to around 1 % of normal levels, according to internet monitoring group NetBlocks.
