When Fear Changes Sides: Iran’s Regime Enters the Danger Zone

 

Power in Iran is wobbling because fear has changed sides. The people are done trembling, and the security forces are starting to calculate. Every regime dies twice—first in the streets, then inside its own ranks. The second death is always faster.

I have watched Iran convulse before. I remember 2009, the Green Movement, the hopeful noise and the brutal silence that followed. I remember 1979 only through history books and whispered family stories, but the rhythm feels familiar. This time, though, the ground sounds different. Louder. Angrier. Hungrier. What started on December 28, 2025, as scattered protests didn’t fade the way the regime expected. It multiplied. Twelve days later, by January 9, 2026, crowds of thousands flooded streets from villages to megacities. All thirty-one provinces shook. The young and jobless showed up first, as always. Then the women. Then the middle-aged. Then the middle class that once believed it had something to lose by staying home. When that class walks out, regimes sweat.

In Tehran, the chant cut straight to the bone: “death to the dictator.” No poetry, no reformist hedging. The target was clear: the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, 86 years old, four decades into a revolution that has eaten its own children. Elsewhere in the capital, officials said protesters torched mosques, seminaries, banks, police stations. In Mashhad, a hardline stronghold, crowds swelled so big that President Donald Trump went online and declared the people had taken control. A cleric tied to the regime muttered that it felt like a turning point. That’s not how loyalists talk unless they’re rattled.

The regime answered the way it always does: blur the line between protester and criminal, then erase it. On January 9, Khamenei refused to separate grievance from violence. Everyone was a stooge. Everyone worked for Washington. The internet slowed to a crawl, the old tell before the truncheon swings harder. Human-rights groups counted over forty (40) dead and more than 2,000 arrests. Hardliners grumbled that the numbers were too low, that fear needs blood to breathe. Khamenei has said for years that the shah fell because he lacked iron resolve. History, he insists, rewards the ruthless.

History also mocks them.

I have seen this movie elsewhere. In Romania in 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered force and got it. Then the army defected, the crowd surged, and the iron man fell in days. In Tunisia in 2011, Ben Ali’s police fired and fired until the country stopped believing in him. He fled with his pockets full and his legitimacy empty. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak tried half-measures and speeches while bread prices bit; eighteen days later, he was gone. Brute force works until it doesn’t. Once the spell breaks, it breaks fast.

Inside Iran, the spell is cracking because life has become unbearable. Even the president admits the state can’t arrest its way out of a cost-of-living crisis. Electricity and water shortages stack on food scarcity. Imports die on the road to the provinces. The rial slides so fast shopkeepers hoard goods rather than sell at a loss. Inflation chews wages and savings to the bone. Roughly three in ten Iranians now live in poverty. Over the past fifteen years, about 15 million people slipped from a shrinking middle class into the working class. That’s not ideology; that’s arithmetic. You can chant slogans over empty plates, but you can’t feed families with speeches. Hunger doesn’t salute uniforms.

Abroad, the regime’s shadow has thinned, and people feel it. Israeli strikes over the past two years have mauled Iran’s regional proxies. A short, brutal air campaign last summer decapitated much of Iran’s senior military command. Khamenei reportedly spends long stretches in hiding, an awkward posture for a man who claims divine confidence. Washington has tightened the screws again, squeezing oil exports and revenues. Trump’s warning that lethal repression would bring “hell” may not be humanitarian, but it’s a constraint. Even the rumors matter. Pro-regime media floated tales of American troops near the border. There’s no evidence, but fear doesn’t check footnotes.

For the first time since 2009, the street has something like a focal point. The crowds really exploded after Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah, called for mass action from Washington. I hear the cynicism in Tehran voices: he’s a brand, not a plan. One teacher scrawling slogans said it out loud. The name works because nothing else does. In Kurdish and Azeri towns, chants reject tyranny with or without crowns. Even Trump hedges, calling Pahlavi nice while keeping his distance. The opposition remains messy, fractured, allergic to easy heroes. Revolutions rarely come tidy.

What’s new is the silence inside the system. No televised splits. No colonels switching sides on camera. A businessman close to power whispered that reformists now speak with guns to their heads. Yet cracks leak through. In closed forums, insiders grumble. In some towns, security forces have been filmed stepping back. That matters. Every regime falls twice: once when people stop fearing it, and again when its enforcers start fearing for themselves. After thirty-six years at the top, Khamenei looks tired, boxed in, recycling old lines. On the eve of the protests, some insiders even floated a savior in uniform, a Bonaparte from the Revolutionary Guards. That’s not confidence; that’s panic shopping.

Khamenei won’t resign. He won’t take a comfortable exile. Those who knew him say he belongs to a generation that sanctifies martyrdom. He would rather fight than leave. I believe that. I also believe stamina cuts both ways. The regime still commands guns, prisons, money, and time. The people command numbers, rage, and a daily reminder that tomorrow looks worse than today. When the clock starves you, patience becomes treason.

So I watch the streets and the palace and ask the only question that matters now. Who can last longer? A ruler who confuses resolve with rigidity, or a society that has learned the cost of silence and decided it’s higher than the price of noise. Iran’s fate isn’t sealed by speeches or tweets. It’s being negotiated every night between batons and empty cupboards, between fear and fatigue. One side will blink. The other will remember.