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For anyone who has watched Iranians take to the streets before, as they have at reasonably regular intervals over the years, this week’s protests had a depressingly familiar feel – viewed from the safety and comfort of the UK, that is.
What started as angry bazaar traders complaining about the economic mismanagement that had led to surging inflation and the collapse of the Iranian rial spread quickly across the country and to almost every level of society at the beginning of January. Tens of thousands of people, desperate to break free from the stifling oppression of the theocracy, took to the streets to call for an end to the Islamic Republic and for a system that would respect their fundamental rights and democratic freedoms.
For a while it felt as if this might be their chance. The Islamic Republic is close to breaking point, with an ageing Ayatollah presiding over a sclerotic regime, a parlous economy and a military weakened and demoralised by the 12-day war with Israel and the virtual destruction of its proxies across the Middle East.
But as has happened so many times before, the bravery of the protesters was met with the savagery of a regime with its backs to the wall, for whom the only response seems to be to massacre, rather than listen to, the people it should be protecting.
Many of those following the story had mixed feelings when the US president, Donald Trump, signalled the US would get involved. Maybe US intervention might be what was needed to collapse the regime and set the people of Iran free, or – at the very least – force the regime to negotiate and agree to some much-needed democratic reforms. On the other hand, a US military intervention in Iran had (and has) the potential to be an utter disaster.
Nevertheless, when Trump posted a message, “Iranian Patriots, keep protesting – take over your institutions!!! … help is on its way,” it felt as if this might be the moment of change. But the US pulled back – unready to act and uncertain of what intervention could achieve. Now the forces of repression are once again taking over Iran’s streets.
We spoke with Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin and a regular commentator on The Conversation, who addressed several of the key issues that will affect the future of Iran.
It’s clear that the vast majority of Iranians reject the theocracy. And not just from the fact that there have been so many massive protests calling for democratic change. They’ve repeatedly told researchers the same thing. In the latest survey conducted late last year by Ammar Maleki of Tilburg University and Pooyan Tamimi Arab of the University of Utrecht they found the 80% of Iranians reject the regime.
But, interestingly, there was less of a consensus about what Iranians want to replace it. Only about one-third support the exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi (although that number appears to be growing) and about twice as many felt that protests and strikes were more likely to force change than elections. The second most popular option for change was foreign pressure or intervention, but as we’ve seen this week, foreign intervention seems unlikely, for the present at least.
Read more:
Iran protests 2026: our surveys show Iranians agree more on regime change than what might come next
Bamo Nouri, meanwhile, believes that a US military intervention is pretty much the last thing that Iran needs right now. Experience has shown that the threat of foreign intervention has actually had the opposite effect, allowing the feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to consolidate its domestic power.
And Iranians tend to be wary of western interventions. Everyone knows about the coup of 1953 in which the US, with British help, unseated the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh for the crime of nationalising Iran’s oil industry (as we’ve seen recently in Venezuela, this still goes down badly with energy superpowers).
Read more:
The use of military force in Iran could backfire for Washington
Soon after the protests started to really spread across Iran (and before the killing started in earnest) the regime employed a tactic they have used before to great effect. They shut down the internet. In a tech-savvy country like Iran, word of protests spreads like wildfire, so preventing people’s access to social media meant that it was far more difficult to organise online.
UGC via AP, File
In theory, at least. But between 80 and 90% Iran’s aforementioned tech savvy population now uses a VPN to access the internet. This, writes Konstantinos Mersinas and Francesco Ferazza, tech experts at Royal Holloway, University of London, meant that the regime was forced to actually shut down the infrastructure that supports all communications networks in Iran.
It’s a measure of how seriously the authorities were taking these protests that the Islamic Republic was happy to live with the consequences of the shutdown, write Mersinas and Ferazza, that they were willing to suffer a breakdown in banking, payments, logistics and all the other facets of everyday life that depend on online communications.
Read more:
Iran: how the Islamic Republic uses internet shutdowns as a tool of repression
Greenland under pressure
The US president, meanwhile, continues to covet Greenland. Whether for its mineral wealth, its vital strategic position or just the fact that by acquiring it for the US would mean he has added more territory to the map of the US than any of his predecessors.
There’s no getting away from the fact that Greenland is slap bang in the middle of one of the Earth’s most contested regions. And Trump is right when he says it’s important for US national security to have a robust Nato military presence there. As Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, professor of war studies at Loughborough University, points out, Russia has spent the past decade beefing up its assets in the region and far outmatches western military capabilities across the Arctic.
This is only going to increase as the Arctic continues to warm, writes geopolitics specialist Klaus Dodds of Middlesex University. The region is at the heart of what he refers to as the “new great game” between global superpowers.
Dimitrios Karamitros/Shutterstock
Dodds is concerned that 2026 may see a series of cynical but expedient territorial swaps, whereby Trump’s America is happy to see Putin’s Russia take the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in return for a free hand in Greenland (we’ll say nothing about Ukraine at this point). Taking a bigger picture view, Dodds concludes that: “The ground would thus be prepared for a new world order in which Putin, China’s president Xi Jinping and Trump all have their spheres of domination, not just influence.”
Read more:
As the Arctic warms up, the race to control the region is growing ever hotter
Danish foreign Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, went to the White House on January 14 to meet US vice-president, J.D. Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to discuss the future of the world’s largest island. The meeting reportedly lasted less than an hour, ending when it was clear, as Rasmussen told journalists, that there is still a “fundamental disagreement” over the future of Greenland.
Still, at least Greenland was represented at the meeting. The island’s 57,000 people have been angered at times by Denmark’s failure to include them in some of the discussions about their future. As they say in Greenland: “nothing about Greenland without Greenlanders”.
Read more:
As US and Denmark fight, Greenland’s voices are being excluded once again
Ukraine observes a bitter landmark
There was a bitter landmark for Ukraine this week. On Tuesday Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” moved beyond the 1,418 days it took the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin to beat Hitler’s Germany.
Comparing the two conflicts, Stefan Wolff notes the unqualified support offered by the US under its president Franklin D. Roosevelt, compared to the vacillations of the current occupant of the White House. And free Europe had a rather more impressive leader in Winston Churchill.
As the fourth anniversary of the full-scale Russian war in Ukraine approaches, Wolff takes stock of the situation and worries that Ukraine is a long way from becoming another much-needed example of the maxim that “aggression never pays”.
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