Is Iran on the Brink of Another Revolution?
The regime faces a crisis like never before, historian Ali M. Ansari explains, and the nation has an 120-year tradition of fighting to establish the rule of law.
By Elliot Kaufman
March 6, 2026 3:59 pm ET
Everywhere you look, there’s another expert to tell you what won’t happen—what can’t happen—in Iran. Regime change is impossible. Never mind the mass protests of January; the regime has the guns and is willing to use them. Never mind the airstrikes on leaders and thugs; you can’t topple a regime from the air. Trust the political science.
Ali M. Ansari has a different view. “I’m a firm believer in what Hannah Arendt says: Revolutions are impossible before they happen and inevitable after they happen.” Prof. Ansari, 58, is a historian at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, where he directs the Institute for Iranian Studies. His 2024 book, “Iran,” is the best primer available on the nation’s modern history. He worries that
social scientists and international-relations types “have become so wedded to their templates that they can’t see” what has happened inside Iran.
“The vast majority of people are struggling. The political system is hated. The economic system isn’t delivering,” he says in a video interview. Salaries “no longer meet the basic needs of life. There’s an environmental crisis—they’ve drained the water table. And now, they have an international crisis.” That’s putting it mildly.
“Every crisis you can think of, the Islamic Republic is facing,” Mr. Ansari says. “People tell me, ‘Oh, but it’s strong and stable.’ Well, it can’t be that strong and stable because people are rebelling every few years, and on a scale the regime deems existential.” Regime supporters, whom Mr. Ansari pegs at 10% to 20% of the population, “are convinced they are going to defeat the U.S. in this war.” He pauses: “They are not going to do it.”
The professor stresses humility. We don’t know if the regime will fall. But he
doesn’t buy the claim that the protest movement was crushed for good in January—and not only because the U.S. and Israel are creating a new opening.
“The regime carried out such a mass slaughter that it actually proved counterproductive,” he says. “If they had suppressed it with, say, ‘only’ the 3,117 dead that they claim, it might have succeeded.” But having killed “10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of your own in the random manner that they did—and shooting people in hospital beds—it creates an anger that is difficult to suppress.” Students had resumed protesting before the airstrikes began on Feb. 28.
The analogy to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre fails for a variety of reasons. For one, Beijing had something to offer its people: “ ‘Yes, we’ve politically suppressed you, but we’ve bought you off with economic success, and we’re now going to be a superpower.’
In Iran, what are they offering? All the regime can say to Iranians is, ‘You are going to have a great time in heaven when you get there.’ ”
Besides, we already heard, after Iran’s brutal repression of protests in 2019 and again in 2022, “that the protest movement had decided going out on the streets isn’t worth it, because ‘all we do is get shot,’ ” he says. “Then suddenly, this burst on the scene in January,” more rebellious than ever. Pulling back the lens reveals the “accelerated means of protests—mounting, mounting, mounting”—a “persistent and recurring tendency to protest and try to fight for their liberty.”
This is one legacy of the
1906 Constitutional Revolution, which won for Iran a “liberal constitution in the Anglo-American tradition” and established the ideal, if not the practice, of the rule of law. While the 1979 Islamic Revolution steals the spotlight, 1906 has “had a much more profound impact on political ideas and activism,” Mr. Ansari argues in his 2024 book. This tradition remains a live alternative. Iran is no nation-building project but a real nation with a modern state that the ayatollahs inherited from the shahs.
Textbooks say the Islamic Revolution started in January 1978, with an article in Ettelaat newspaper that insulted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It sparked protests, “but I can tell you,” Mr. Ansari says, “nobody noticed at the time that the revolution had started.” He remembers going to the cinema in Tehran as a 10-year-old in April 1978 to see “The Spy Who Loved Me,” the James Bond film, dubbed in Persian. “This, in the middle of a revolution? I don’t think so,” he says.
Mr. Ansari—the son of an Iranian ambassador and a distant cousin of Farah Pahlavi, the shah’s widow—was sent off to boarding school in the U.K. in June 1978, “which was fairly good timing.” He returned to Iran to do academic fieldwork in the 1990s and wrote his thesis on the political myths constructed by the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79) to legitimize its rule.
Mr. Ansari worked hard in subsequent years to encourage Iran and the West to have a more constructive relationship. But the
Islamic Republic has spurned the Anglo-American ideals of 1906 and even the French ideals that informed the 1979 revolution. Instead of anchoring a modern republic in Iran’s Shiite tradition, as the revolutionaries had promised, “the supreme leader became a sort of religious monarch,” Mr. Ansari says. Parliament was rendered “an empty shell.”
When I raise the media speculation that Iran could now devolve into a security state run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mr. Ansari can’t hold back: “It already is!” And this isn’t the early IRGC, with its “brotherhood in arms and no ranks,” he says. “It became a business conglomerate and a political force gradually”—and then suddenly. Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13), auditing bodies were dismantled and many state assets transferred to the IRGC. By one assessment,
$800 billion in revenue went missing.
“A lot of them in the IRGC made a lot of money,” Mr. Ansari says, “and they don’t want to lose it all.” That’s now a stronger motivation to fight than old revolutionary fervor: “I don’t think the IRGC is some sort of homogenous, unified, ideologically coherent unit of hundreds of thousands of men.” (That figure includes the basij paramilitary.)
The core group may be driven “by a sort of Shia millenarianism, devoted to Khamenei as a cult,” Mr. Ansari says, “but it’s not an organization that doesn’t fray at the edges and have a variety of views on the periphery and different groups within.” If the U.S. and Israel grind down the regime, throwing into question its ability to repress the people, he expects some IRGC factions to split off.
Others will fight on as a matter of personal survival. Defectors have been promised amnesty, but
the Revolutionary Guards know Iranians will have difficulty forgiving them. “The last shah lost his nerve,” Mr. Ansari says, “but many of his supporters also had places to go. They escaped to the U.S. and Europe. Where are these guys going to go?”
Americans’ temptation to reach an agreement with the regime works in the ayatollahs’ favor.
“You can make any number of deals with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Mr. Ansari says. “They will all be interim. Nothing will last.” Consider the nuclear talks that preceded the war. Mere weeks after “probably the most appalling slaughter of Iranians by their government in 200 years,” Mr. Ansari says, “we get into negotiations, and suddenly, we’re all talking about centrifuges and the Iranians have stolen the narrative.” That polarized the U.S. discussion along partisan lines, ensuring that almost all Democrats would oppose the eventual war.
The West typically errs in “fighting on terrain chosen by the regime,” Mr. Ansari says.
President Obama began by accepting that
Iran’s problems were ultimately America’s fault. Then, when Iranian protests broke out in 2009 over a stolen election, Mr. Obama “served notice, to all who could hear, that a nuclear settlement... trumped the rights of individual Iranians,” Mr. Ansari writes in his 2024 book. The deal’s salesmen claimed that resolving the clash with the U.S. would set Iran on a path to political liberalization. “The reality was that Iran’s approach to its international relations would be dictated by domestic politics, which were hardening by the day.”
The U.S. military option, supposedly “on the table” as a threat to Iran’s regime, instead became a weapon against American opponents of a
nuclear deal. The agreement was “reasonable” on its face, Mr. Ansari says, “but people treated it as if it were some sort of holy grail.” It
ended up restraining America, not Iran. In Syria, “the Russians and Iranians piled in and half a million Syrians died in that war.” Mr. Obama didn’t intervene for fear of upsetting Iran and scuttling the nuclear deal. “The agreement was meant to tie Iran’s hands,” he says, “not tie your own hands.”
When President Trump quit the Obama deal in 2018, Mr. Ansari recalls, “we in the West were all saying, ‘Oh my God, isn’t Trump a son of a bitch?’ But most Iranians didn’t care. They hadn’t seen any benefit from the deal.” The regime dithered rather than take steps necessary for U.S. economic engagement.
For Iranians, the real story was 2009, when hope for domestic political reform died. “But of course we miss that in the West,” Mr. Ansari says. “We’re so fixated on what we think we’re doing about security and nuclear—which has its place—that
we don’t understand what’s going on inside the country.”
For the same reason, some in the West are now “bewildered that young Iranians will cheer because the Americans have started bombing them,” he says. “What they want is a better life. A normal life. They want to be able to travel to America or study there.”
This gets at the main problem Mr. Ansari sees with Western analysis: “We fail to give the Iranians agency in what they do.” When Iran’s economy is in shambles, the reflex is to blame U.S. sanctions. “That doesn’t explain why the Iranians have mismanaged their water. It doesn’t tell you why, well before the real sanctions arrived in 2011-12, they were never able to get any foreign direct investment into the country. Now, why is that?” he asks. “It’s internal. It’s the corruption, the kleptocracy, the short-termism, the opaqueness, the lack of accountability, the uncertainty.” Sanctions didn’t make life easier, he says, but they didn’t befall Iran. They were a consequence of the regime’s behavior.
Today’s war is another example. “We are here in many ways because the Iranians have been chanting ‘Death to America’ for 47 years. I used to say, ‘I don’t think this is helpful.’ ” Western interlocutors and intermediaries would respond that the regime didn’t really mean it. “Well, if they don’t mean it, then don’t say it. Stop. But they never would,” he says. “To be honest, I think they got away with things for so long that they got used to it.”
They didn’t count on a president who would break from standard operating procedure, whom they couldn’t stall until the next U.S. election. Mr. Ansari says Iran had every chance to avert war. But it lost Europe by siding with Russia in Ukraine, and it refused to make a plausible offer when Mr. Trump returned to office. “The longer they waited, the worse it got. They could’ve gotten a deal six months ago. But when ships are waiting outside, the asking price goes up.”
The regime insisted throughout on a “right to enrich uranium”—which “would have more credibility if they respected any other rights as well,” Mr. Ansari cracks.
“We often think of the Iranians as very strategic thinkers, playing the long game. No, no. It’s different. They’re ditherers,” he says. “We ascribe to them too much competence. I do not consider what’s happening now to be the result of great strategic thinking.” He points to
a “dogmatic ideology and a grievance culture, whereby they’ve taken a hit for their nuclear program and can’t back down.” In his assessment, by sheer stubbornness, the regime “basically decided to declare war on the U.S.”
The failure to see that, and so much else, can be attributed to the prevailing “Washington-centered analysis,” Mr. Ansari says. “We always see Iran as almost marginal to the problem, which is Washington.” If only Mr. Trump hadn’t done this or that, the commentators rage. But if there is now an opening for regime change, it is because U.S. policymakers for once were able to turn from the mirror and see what the Iranian people know well: The problem is in Iran.
Mr. Kaufman is a member of the Journal’s editorial board and a co-author of “In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis,” forthcoming in September.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-iran-...tion-463f7be3?
