German lawmaker urges Europe to back Iran protesters

Revolutions differ from episodic unrest not by the scale of any single demonstration, but by their structure and direction. They are sustained rather than spontaneous; cumulative rather than cathartic. Their power lies in endurance, in the gradual erosion of legitimacy, authority, and administrative control, until the system itself becomes untenable.

Compared with past protest waves, the current unrest appears more nationally synchronised, socially broad, and symbolically convergent. Equally significant is the re-emergence of a shared national language of opposition that Tehran has long sought to crush through ideology, patronage, and repression.

This matters because revolutions do not target the security apparatus alone. They strike at the regime’s ability to govern routinely. A state under revolutionary pressure must deploy coercion continuously rather than episodically. That is costly, exhausting, and politically corrosive.

Iranian police have circulated text messages warning families to keep young people and teenagers at home, citing the alleged presence of “terrorist groups” and armed individuals at demonstrations and threatening decisive action. The author has independently verified these messages.

Such warnings are not merely informational; they are designed to shift responsibility for state violence onto families themselves.

Yet repression alone does not explain the regime’s present fragility. For much of its rule, governance in the Islamic Republic has been hollowed out by a deeply entrenched kleptocratic system, in which political authority, security power, and economic privilege are fused.

Years of sanctions, chronic inflation, currency collapse, and fiscal mismanagement have hollowed out state capacity. Recent military setbacks have compounded internal strain. The result is a regime increasingly reliant on force at a moment when its economic and institutional resilience is at its weakest.

Mass killing

Iran International reported on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people had been killed in the recent protests, describing the crackdown as “the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history.”

The emerging scale of violence therefore places Iran’s crisis under increasing strain within the framework of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). When a state is credibly accused of mass killing, collective punishment, and systematic efforts to conceal casualties, its claim to sovereign non-intervention comes under acute pressure.

R2P does not mandate automatic military action, but it does impose an obligation on the international community to consider diplomatic, economic, legal, and—if atrocities escalate further—coercive measures.

In this sense, the internationalisation of Iran’s crisis would be the consequence of Tehran's own conduct, not foreign imposition.

In 2011, the UN Security Council invoked the Responsibility to Protect in Libya when the Gaddafi regime threatened mass atrocities during the Arab Spring. Western alliances have acted to prevent large-scale civilian harm even in the absence of an explicit UN mandate.

From Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the former Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone and parts of the Sahel, the underlying logic has been consistent: when states engage in or enable mass violence against civilians, sovereignty ceases to function as an absolute shield.

Trump’s intervention

It is in this context that US President Donald Trump’s increasingly explicit warnings to the Islamic Republic should be understood.

Earlier today, Trump issued a direct message to Iranian protesters on Truth Social, urging them to “KEEP PROTESTING–TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS,” announcing that he has cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials, and declaring that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” if the killing of protesters does not stop.

This marks a notable escalation in both tone and signalling.

Trump has now repeatedly framed continued repression as a red line, stating that the United States will not tolerate mass killings of civilians.

It is unlikely that US planners would ignore the lessons of Israel’s recent 12-day campaign against Iran, a campaign in which American forces ultimately participated and which demonstrated both the reach and the limits of strikes narrowly focused on infrastructure.

Any strategy under consideration would likely be shaped less by symbolic targets than by the regime’s security architecture itself: the institutions, decision-making structures, and coercive networks that sustain repression.

Whether such pressure remains declaratory or translates into action, the signal is unmistakable: the regime’s own conduct has pushed the crisis beyond routine diplomacy and into active contingency planning.

Change in strategic terrain

The comparison most often drawn is with 2009. But the analogy is misleading.

The Green Movement was largely urban, middle-class, and procedural in its demands. It challenged an election outcome, not the foundational legitimacy of the system itself. The current movement contests the regime’s right to rule altogether.

Nor does this moment resemble many leaderless uprisings of the past century, which fractured under pressure or collapsed into ideological ambiguity. What distinguishes the present phase is the growing convergence around a figure and a direction.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah—whose reign ended in February 1979 following the revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini—appears to be functioning, through popular recognition rather than formal appointment, as a focal point for disparate strands of opposition.

Whatever one’s view of monarchy, the presence of an identifiable political centre of gravity marks an important departure from previous cycles of unrest.

For now, the Islamic Republic retains formidable coercive capacity. Revolution does not guarantee swift collapse. What it does guarantee is a change in the strategic terrain.

The question is no longer whether the regime can suppress protests tonight, but whether it can sustain governance tomorrow, next month, or next year under unrelenting strain.

China opposes any outside interference in Iran's internal affairs and does not support the use or threat of force in international relations, its foreign ministry said on Wednesday, after US President Donald Trump warned of "very strong action" against Tehran.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, made the remarks at a regular news briefing when asked about Trump's comments.

Trump told CBS News that the United States would take "very strong action" if Iran starts hanging protesters. He also urged demonstrators to keep protesting and said that help was on the way.

The announced plan to use the death penalty against protesters was unlawful and showed authorities were willing to use executions to suppress demonstrations, said Mai Sato, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, on Wednesday.

An Iranian protester, Erfan Soltani, 26, who was arrested on January 8 during anti-government protests in Fardis, west of Tehran, has been sentenced to death and was due to be executed on Wednesday.

Even if Wednesday execution does not go ahead immediately, Sato wrote on X, the stated intent to use capital punishment and the sentencing of a protester on a moharabeh (“enmity against God”) charge show disregard for freedom of assembly and expression.

“The death penalty is not the response of a country where freedom of assembly and expression are respected,” Sato said.

Iran remained largely offline as the nationwide internet blackout passed its 132nd hour, internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Wednesday.

“Metrics show Iran remains offline as the country wakes to another day of digital darkness,” NetBlocks said, adding that early reports indicate thousands of casualties and that the lack of connectivity is obscuring the true scale of the killings.

Fars news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, wrote that internet restrictions should continue as protests persist across the country.

It argued that maintaining limits on internet access is necessary, linking the blackout to what it described as security concerns during the unrest.

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.

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  The bazaar finally breaks with the Islamic Republic

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.