Volunteers abroad deploy tech to pierce Iran's internet iron curtain

The non-profit Jewish Institute for National Security of America, founded in 1976, advocates for a strong US military relationship with Israel and researches conflict in the Middle East.

JINSA president and CEO Michael Makovsky and the group’s vice president for policy Blaise Misztal told Iran International’s English-language podcast Eye for Iran that decades of containment, deterrence and nuclear diplomacy have failed because the Islamic Republic itself should be destroyed.

“It should be US policy to seek the collapse of this regime,” Makovsky said.

They said hesitation now — after mass killings of protesters across Iran — risks emboldening Tehran at the theocracy's weakest moment.

“We don’t say regime change,” Makovsky said. “The regime will fall … only when the Iranian people bring it down. But it should be US policy … to seek the collapse of this regime.”

The last months, Misztal said, have created a rare strategic opening: Iran’s nuclear clock has been set back, its regional proxies weakened and Iranians themselves have returned to the streets demanding freedom.

“This is a moment like no other,” he said. “I don’t know when the stars will align like this again… why not make it now? When is a better time than now?”

The duo urged the Trump administration to abandon negotiations, intensify pressure on the Revolutionary Guards and build the infrastructure needed to help Iranians defeat the Islamic Republic.

Misztal said previous administrations focused on Iran’s nuclear program, terrorism sponsorship and ballistic missile development as separate threats without tying them back to what he called the ideological nature of the theocracy.

“Yes, it’s a problem that Iran is the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism. Yes, it is a problem that it’s pursuing nuclear weapons,” he said. “But all of that stems from it being the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Trump’s Promises and a Moment of Decision

Their warnings come as President Donald Trump faces rising scrutiny over his own rhetoric. Earlier this month, Trump vowed support for protesters and issued a direct warning to Tehran.

“I tell the Iranian leaders: You better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting, too,” he said.

But Makovsky warned that after mass killings and widespread arrests, the absence of immediate consequences risks damaging US credibility.

“The Iranians have called his bluff for now,” he said. “If he doesn’t do it, it will go down as a tragic mistake.”

In recent days, Trump has said a US "armada" is heading toward the Middle East, with the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers expected to arrive in the region soon as Washington signals it is positioning military assets amid escalating uncertainty.

The growing tensions are now rippling far beyond Iran itself.

Major European airlines have begun suspending flights across parts of the Middle East, citing security concerns. Air France has canceled flights to Tel Aviv and Dubai, British Airways has halted evening service to Dubai and KLM has suspended routes to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Industry officials say cancellations are expected to increase gradually as carriers reassess airspace restrictions and passenger safety in a rapidly deteriorating regional environment.

A Cold War–Style Pressure Campaign

Misztal framed the strategy as a modern version of what the United States pursued against Soviet communism: strengthening civil resistance while weakening the ruling system from within.

“The strategy of regime collapse has been precisely what the United States pursued throughout the Cold War,” he said.

He argued that Washington should encourage defections, isolate elites in authority, cut off funding streams and expand opposition communications.

“One of the things we recommended is a quarantine of Iran’s oil exports,” Misztal said, “so that it doesn’t keep getting the money to rebuild its forces to pay the Basij or the IRGC.”

Both analysts warned that Iran’s leadership is entering what they described as its most dangerous phase, amid mass violence at home and the potential for war abraod.

“A showdown of some kind” is coming, Misztal said, and “the next showdown will be the last one."

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, along with several destroyers and warplanes, is set to arrive in the Middle East in the coming days, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing two US officials.

“We have a big force going toward Iran,” US President Donald Trump said on Thursday. “I’d rather not see anything happen, but we will see. We are watching them very closely. We have an armada, we have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it.”

The strike group has been en route from the Asia-Pacific region even as Trump has spoken publicly about talks following Iran’s violent crackdown on protests, which has left thousands dead.

The tone from parts of Iran’s military establishment has been notably defiant—and at times confident—prompting questions about whether some in Tehran see war as politically useful, a major event that could overshadow the mass killing of protesters.

“We are preparing for a fateful war with Israel. We possess weapons no one else has,” said Yahya Rahim Safavi, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“The next war will end this conflict once and for all.”

Another senior commander, Ali Abdollahi, warned that any attack on Iran’s territory or interests would turn US interests, bases, and centers of influence into “legitimate and accessible targets.”

Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammad Pakpour wrapped it up: Iran was prepared for any possibility, he said, “including an all-out war.”

Diplomatic messaging from Tehran has been more restrained but no less accusatory.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi again accused the United States of instigating unrest inside Iran. An all-out confrontation, he wrote, would be “messy, ferocious and far longer” than Israel or its allies anticipate.

Araghchi’s tone contrasted with Trump’s remarks earlier in the week, in which he said he had pulled back from a strike after Iran reportedly halted plans to execute hundreds of detainees.

“Iran does want to talk, and we’ll talk,” the US president said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Hours later, aboard Air Force One, Trump reminded reporters that military action remained an option.

As ever, Trump appeared to be keeping his options open. In Tehran, however—perhaps mindful that Israeli strikes last June came amid US-Iran talks—officials appear to have drawn their own conclusions.

The protests initially erupted over a sharp spike in exchange rates but soon escalated into open calls for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

Many Iranians now say they personally know at least one or two people killed on January 8 or 9. Arrests and enforced disappearances—whose exact scale remains unknown—have also drawn countless families into the crisis, deepening fear and uncertainty.

According to people who have recently left Iran or managed to communicate via Starlink, businesses across the country are either closed or operating at minimal capacity, battered by currency turmoil and the prolonged internet shutdown.

On one side, customers have disappeared; on the other, sellers are reluctant to part with their goods.

Merchants say they cannot be sure they will be able to replace inventory amid exchange-rate volatility, turning even routine transactions into a gamble. Many now prefer not to sell at all.

Even before the unrest, businesses were under intense pressure.

Data published by the economic website Eco Iran show that bank lending from April to December rose 47 percent year-on-year. But 82 percent of loans to the productive sector went toward “working capital”—a sign that firms were borrowing not to expand, but simply to survive.

Shrinking purchasing power

Soon after the protests began, the government announced a plan to offset declining purchasing power following the removal of subsidized exchange rates for essential imports.

Under the plan, low- and middle-income individuals are to receive 10 million rials per month—about $7.50, roughly equivalent to one day’s wage for a construction worker.

Four months of payments were deposited at once, with recipients told they could spend one-quarter of the sum each month on 11 basic items, including rice, cooking oil, protein products, and dairy, at state-set prices in designated stores.

Prices for most of those goods in the open market have continued to surge, and some items have become scarce. Most readers responding to a poll by the news website Khabar Online said the subsidy was insufficient or ineffective.

One reader commented on the website that the handout offsets at most half the price increase for the 11 subsidized items, noting that rising food costs would also push up prices for everything from biscuits to restaurant meals, for which no compensation exists.

Many also fear the government will finance the program by printing money, further accelerating inflation, which official figures show had already surpassed 50 percent by December.

Cost of blackout

The nationwide internet shutdown, imposed on January 8 and still in place, has crippled hundreds of thousands of small and home-based businesses.

From home food producers to online language and music teachers, entire livelihoods have vanished overnight, with authorities offering no clear timeline for restoring connectivity.

These businesses relied almost entirely on online platforms for advertising and sales. Many were small producers in cities and even remote villages, selling handicrafts, agricultural goods, or homemade food directly to customers through Instagram.

Even before the shutdown, widespread filtering had forced them to pay for VPNs, further straining already fragile operations.

Kourosh, the manager of an advertising company who left Iran for Turkey after the January 8–9 killings, said all advertising activity had come to a halt.

“My clients have lost any hope of selling their products before the Iranian New Year, which is just two months away,” he told Iran International.

“People have no money, and even if they do, they won’t spend it on clothes, shoes, or home goods. Everyone was counting on sales in these final weeks of the year.”

For more than a year, Iranian political analysts, sociologists and even establishment insiders had warned that mounting economic pressure and social exhaustion were pushing the country toward a nationwide rupture.

The state, unable or unwilling to pursue reform, appeared to place its faith instead in a familiar instrument: brute force.

When unrest finally broke out, it was met with an exceptionally violent crackdown that claimed thousands of lives. The predictions came true in the worst possible way.

‘Boiling point’

In October 2025, former labor minister and government spokesman Ali Rabiei wrote in the reformist daily Sharq that Iranians were “fed up with the government’s promises.” Without meaningful economic relief, he warned, the country risked sliding into civil unrest.

A month later, sociologist Taghi Azad Armaki described the situation as “critical,” calling for national dialogue rather than denial. Accumulated social dissatisfaction, he told the moderate daily Etemad, had pushed society to its “boiling point.”

Moderate commentator Abbas Abdi went further weeks later, writing in Etemad that Iranian society had reached “the point of no return.”

State-affiliated news agencies — including Revolutionary Guards-linked Fars — did highlight economic grievances, but largely downplayed the likelihood of widespread protest, framing any potential unrest as the work of foreign actors.

A crisis mapped in advance

The clearest articulation of what lay ahead came in late December 2025, just as protests were beginning to spread and foreign-exchange and gold prices were surging.

Writing for the reformist website Rouydad24, analyst Amir Dabiri Mehr argued that Iran’s fate now hinged almost entirely on how the government chose to respond. He outlined four possible scenarios, ranging from de-escalation to catastrophe.

In the first two — economic reform or restraint by security forces — the government would seek to calm public anger without violence. Dabiri Mehr treated both as increasingly unlikely. Events soon confirmed that assessment.

The third scenario, a violent crackdown, did unfold. Security forces suppressed protests across cities including Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Rasht, temporarily silencing dissent through force.

Ignoring it all

Dabiri Mehr’s fourth scenario envisioned escalation: a severe crackdown combined with the portrayal of protesters as “enemies” or “foreign agents,” pushing unrest toward militarization and raising the risk of foreign intervention or broader confrontation.

He cautioned that a social media blackout would not contain anger but displace it — forcing dissent from online spaces into the streets and transforming economic frustration into a wider social movement. Repression alone, he warned at the time, would not resolve the crisis.

The tragedy now unfolding was foreseen not only by contemporary analysts but, metaphorically, by Iran’s own literary tradition.

In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, written a millennium ago, a line captures the logic of the present moment: When a man’s fortune darkens, he does everything he should not do.

The warnings were clear. The alternatives were understood. What followed was not inevitability, but choice—and its consequences are now unfolding.

Trump said last week that he had it “on good authority” that Iran intended to execute 800 prisoners, a claim for which no corresponding evidence has appeared in Iranian official announcements or domestic reporting.

American media reports suggested Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi had been communicating with Trump's Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and his statements had influenced the president's thinking to relent on a mooted attack.

Trump’s apparent willingness to take the claim at face value may also reflect his own preference, at least momentarily, for de-escalation—or for deferring action he may have judged premature at that stage.

Whether the specific information circulated in this episode was exaggerated, fabricated, or misunderstood remains unclear. But if misleading claims were fed to American officials or intermediaries, such behavior would be entirely consistent with Tehran’s long-standing political logic.

Concealment as expediency

This logic does not arise from classical Islamic jurisprudence as such. In traditional Islamic legal thought, deception is generally condemned in ordinary political and social life and tightly constrained even in wartime.

The Islamic Republic, however, reconfigured this ethical boundary when its first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, argued that actions normally considered impermissible could be justified under the higher imperative of preserving Islam—and later, preserving the system itself.

Concepts such as maslahat (expediency) and political taqiyya (concealment) were thus transformed from narrowly defined exceptions into governing principles. Deception ceased to be situational and became structural.

This transformation was evident even before the Islamic Republic consolidated power. Khomeini publicly promised political pluralism, civil liberties, and limits on clerical authority. After 1979, these commitments were quietly discarded or retrospectively framed as tactical necessities of the revolutionary struggle.

What occurred was less a political reversal than the institutionalization of a widening gap between public narrative and actual intent. Decisions of lasting consequence were made offstage, while legality and transparency were preserved largely in appearance.

‘Managing’ foes

In later decades, deception became a stable feature of Iran’s foreign policy as well. Negotiations were often used not to resolve disputes but to reduce pressure, fragment opposition, and buy time.

Iran’s best-known diplomat, Mohammad Javad Zarif, boasted several years ago that his team had deliberately “managed” international perceptions. Misrepresentation was not incidental; it was strategic.

Within such a system, misleading a foreign government or manipulating a prominent political figure would be a default option, not merely a necessary evil.

Whether or not the recent execution claims were accurate, their circulation fits a familiar operational pattern: deflect scrutiny, reshape headlines, ease pressure, and gain time.