The Islamic republic is crumbling, and these are its final, frenzied stages
The roots of the Islamic Republic’s fragility run deep, but the 86-year-old Supreme Leader’s recent miscalculations have arguably precipitated the most serious challenge to religious rule since the country’s 1979 revolution.
Ayatollah Khamenei was the only world leader who openly supported the terrible massacre committed by Hamas, one of Iran’s terrorist proxies, in Israel on October 7, 2023. Like the 2010 murder of Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi, which triggered the train events that led to the collapse of Iranian client state dictatorships led by Bashar al-Assad in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and eventually Syria, the terrorist attack on October 7 appears to be one of those history-shaping events whose aftershocks transcend borders, reshape alliances, and impact geopolitics in unexpected ways years later.
Loading
The overthrow of Assad, who waged a relentless war of survival against his own people for 14 years, was completed in less than 11 days. It took less than two months for Israel to comprehensively defeat Hezbollah, a long-feared foe thought to be perched on its northern border with more than 100,000 rockets. Hamas and Iran’s proxy militias in Iraq have also been intimidated for now. In the post-October 7 world, could the Islamic Republic itself, which is at the head of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” in the Middle East, be the next country to disintegrate?
Khamenei’s long refusal to implement any meaningful reforms to Iran’s highly repressive system of government, his failure to combat rampant corruption, and his rejection of genuine attempts at negotiation offered by both the Trump and Biden administrations have prepared the Islamic Republic for the current existential collapse by supporting its people. Iran’s ill-advised 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, which led to the humiliating destruction of Khamenei’s prized nuclear program and the killing of dozens of senior military, scientific and political figures, revealed the regime as a paper tiger.
Loading
Iran was a powder keg looking for a spark, and it found one on December 28 when traders and currency traders in Tehran markets went on strike.
Will extreme violence provide temporary relief for a regime that reveals itself to be in terminal decline? The catastrophic collapse of Iran’s economy was coupled with widespread anger at the unimaginable cruelty of the brutal repression inflicted on citizens, as President Masoud Pezeshkian had previously expressed. accepted They were “legitimate demands” and almost guaranteed another round of protests.
The Islamic Republic is moribund. The question is not whether it will fall, but when and how it will fall. And most tragically, how many brave and innocent lives will he destroy on his way out?
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, academic in Middle East political science at Macquarie University, author of memoir Sky Uncaged: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison and a regular columnist.
The opinion newsletter is a weekly package of opinions that will challenge, defend and inform your own. Sign up here.
