Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran on January 9, 2026.

(Photo by MAHSA / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)

It’s virtually impossible to predict what lies ahead for Iran and its people. But if President Donald Trump decides to take military action against Iran’s current regime, nothing good will come out of it.

C.J. Polychroniou

Jan 14, 2026 Common Dreams

Iran’s Islamic regime is under incredible pressure as the protests that begun in late December over the collapse of the currency have morphed into a mass popular uprising that has spread across the entire country and shows no sign of slowing despite a brutal crackdown that has resulted so far in the killing of thousands of protesters.

Make no mistake about it. Iran’s current leadership is murdering its own citizens in order to remain in power and thus block the growing support for secularism, freedom, and democracy. It’s as simple as that. This is a regime that has been facing unprecedented hostility by the United States and some of its closest allies since coming to power in 1979 but has been far more interested in exporting the Islamic revolution than looking after the well-being of its own citizens. It is a reactionary regime that has suppressed the fundamental rights of women, banned independent trade unions, and engaged in a systematic crackdown of communists and other leftists, all the while catering to powerful national capitalist interests.

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Iranians have a long history of rebellion against authoritarianism and repression. Under the Shah, Iran had one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, strongly supported by the United States. Indeed, while the Shah sought to modernize the country and even gave women the right to vote, and the Family Protection Law of 1968 granted women certain rights in divorce and custody, he and his generals ran the country with an iron first. Tens of thousands of Iranians were killed during the Shah’s reign, and Iran’s dreaded secret police, SAVAK, employed torture and execution to stifle political opposition.

Yet, Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, aided by Marxists, intellectuals, various secular groups, and the middle class, did not represent a transition from monarchy to democracy. Instead, it replaced a brutal, pro-Western monarchy with a theocratic regime that rolled back much of the social progress that had occurred up to that point. Repression came back, this time with an Islamic face, though the regime enjoyed at first considerable support among merchants, students, clerics, and the poor. Khomeini’s regime massacred and exiled all communists and embarked on a campaign of purification of policies. Women’s rights were drastically curtailed, and this included the removal of professional women from the public sector as well as the adoption of various means and methods aimed at discouraging women in general from entering the labor force.

The US is an imperialist power with a long history of undermining democracy throughout the world. The Iranian people will not accept US interference into their own political affairs.

Iranian women took to the streets by the thousands just a few weeks after the revolution to oppose Khomeini’s decree mandating the hijab. This decree was followed by a ban on alcohol, the separation of men and women in schools and beaches, and the criminalization of music. Iran was converted in no time from a Westernized society with a brutal political regime to an Islamic state sustained by an equally brutal political regime. Under the new social order, religion and state mixed as thoroughly as they did in Saudi Arabia. The only difference is that the two countries followed different branches of Islam–Iran’s political system is based on Shiism, while Saudi Arabia’s rests on Wahhabism.

More recently, in 2022, the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Jina Mahsa Amini while under morality police custody sparked the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which people from all walks of life joined to call for an end to the four-decade rule of Iran by the religious fanatics. The Iranian authorities responded by detaining thousands of people while killing more than 560 protesters. It was reported that the average age of those arrested was 15.

The key reasons behind the current anti-government protests are economic hardships and political grievances. Iran’s economy has been under severe strains for a long time due to the international sanctions but also because of mismanagement, corruption, and a host of deep structural problems (chronic inflation, widespread poverty, and high youth unemployment, among others) which the regime has failed to address.

Protests broke out on December 28 after the Iranian currency, the rial, crumbled against the US dollar, leading to soaring food prices and to an even higher inflation rate, which had already risen to nearly 50%. It all started with demonstrations by shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, but they quickly spread to numerous cities across the country, reflecting deep and widespread discontent among the general citizenry with the current regime. This means that the protests, which have been very large in size and joined by people from across Iranian society, are not simply driven by economic worries. They are political protests against a corrupt and oppressive regime.

According to some sources, more than 2,500 people have been killed by the Iranian authorities since the protests begun, but there are unverified reports, suggesting that the number of protesters killed could be at least 12,000 and possibly as high as 20,000. Leading Iranian officials have labeled protesters as “enemies of God,” a charge that is punishable by death under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They also insist that the protests are foreign driven.

Israel and the United States would like nothing more than to see regime change in Tehran and turn Iran into a US-Israeli vassal state. But the claim that the Iranian people are protesting against a dictatorship by being a pawn in the hands of foreign powers deserves nothing but scorn. Nonetheless, it speaks volumes of how alienated the regime’s rulers must feel from the nation’s citizenry. I suspect that deep down they are cognizant of the fact that their regime lacks political legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of the Iranian people.

The people of Iran have not forgotten the involvement of the CIA in the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh. Their desire to get rid of Iran’s current regime is not an invitation for foreign interference. Indeed, who is to say that perhaps none of the courageous protesters would be paying with their lives for Iran to be free from an oppressive theocracy if the 1953 coup hadn’t happened?

It’s virtually impossible to predict what lies ahead for Iran and its people. But if President Donald Trump decides to take military action against Iran’s current regime, nothing good will come out of it. The US is an imperialist power with a long history of undermining democracy throughout the world. The Iranian people will not accept US interference into their own political affairs. In fact, such action may cause many Iranians to unite, at least temporarily, behind the regime. In sum, only the Iranian people themselves should be able decide their nation’s future.

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C.J. Polychroniou

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

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 Keith Jone, WSWS, 14 Jan 2026

The Trump administration is preparing an imminent military attack on Iran, in the next stage of a regime-change operation aimed at returning the Middle Eastern country of 93 million people to neocolonial subjugation and placing its vast oil reserves under US imperialist control and domination.

For days, Trump, America’s fascist would-be dictator president, and his henchmen have been threatening to strike Iran with bombs and missiles under the cynical pretext of “defending” anti-government protestors.

On Tuesday morning, in a social media post framed as a message to the Iranian protesters, Trump declared, “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS… Help is on its way.” This was just hours before he was to confer with top Pentagon generals and his national security staff on “options” for attacking Iran.

Open-source intelligence and flight-tracking data reveal that since December there has been a surge of US war materials to the Persian Gulf region, a necessary prerequisite for waging war on Iran.

Trump’s attempt to depict himself as the “liberator” of the Iranian people is a monstrous fraud, based on the Hitlerian concept of the “Big Lie.”

US imperialism never reconciled itself to the mass uprising that overthrew the tyrannical regime of the Shah in 1979. It has mounted a decades-long campaign of threats, military aggression and economic warfare against Iran and its people. In 2018, Trump torpedoed the UN-backed Iran nuclear accord and unilaterally imposed crippling sanctions—subsequently reinforced under the Democrat Biden—with the avowed aim of crashing Iran’s economy and bringing about regime change.

Washington’s desired outcome has always been driving the Iranian people into deprivation and misery. The sanction-enforced cut-off of access to drugs and advanced medical devices has alone caused tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of premature deaths.

As always, the US corporate media are all reading from the same script dictated from the White House. They question nothing, investigate nothing.

Less than two weeks ago, Washington illegally attacked Venezuela, killing more than 80 people, kidnapped its president and seized what are the world’s largest oil resources. In the weeks preceding, the media repeated the administration’s transparent lies that President Nicolás Maduro headed a narco-terrorist regime, just as they breathlessly repeated the claims of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney regarding Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the run up to American imperialism’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  

Now Trump, his Democratic Party enablers and the media would have us believe that Iran is in the grip of a “popular uprising” that is being “brutally” crushed by the Iranian authorities. This is the new manufactured casus belli. It replaces that used to justify last June’s 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran that killed more than 1,000 people and which Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked when they held a war conclave at Mar-a-Lago on December 29—the threat supposedly posed by Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

No doubt there is widespread anger and dissatisfaction with Iran’s clerical-led bourgeois nationalist regime, which represses any form of working-class political self-expression and has systematically dismantled the social concessions made to the working people in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the tyrannical monarchical-dictatorship of the Shah.

But the protests now unfolding in the streets of Iran are not a movement of and for the working class. This is attested by their social composition, absence of any demands to address the pressing socio-economic problems facing Iran’s workers and rural toilers, and the lack of any organized working-class intervention in the form of mass strikes.

The protests were initiated by the bazaari—that is a section of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie comprised of money-lenders, merchants and shopkeepers—and have taken on an ever more explicit right-wing, pro-imperialist character akin to the “color revolutions” instigated by American imperialism and it agents in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere.

The operatives of the CIA and other imperialist intelligence agencies are manifestly present and playing a major role in inciting violence, alongside such foreign-based imperialist operatives as the Shah’s son, the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who late last week urged protesters to press for the government’s overthrow by “seizing and holding city centers.” On Thursday, Israel’s far-right Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu boasted that Israeli agents are operating on the ground in Iran.

As in 1953, when the CIA and Britain’s MI5 organized the coup that overthrew Iran’s elected president, the nationalist Mossadegh, imperialism works through sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, including no doubt disaffected sections of the Islamic Republic’s establishment, eager to secure their wealth and privileges by functioning as direct imperialist agents.

These elements are viciously hostile to the plight of the oppressed masses as exemplified in the prominent protest slogan, “My heart beats only for Iran—not for Gaza, not for Lebanon!,” the protesters’ targeting of Afghan refugees and increasing embrace of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Due to the misrule of the Islamic Republic and the political confusion spread by the pseudo-left in and outside Iran, who call for unity with far-right forces in the name of “democracy,” tragically some workers and students have no doubt been caught up in the ongoing protests and state repression. But as the World Socialist Web Site previously explained, “any progressive tendency in Iran would have to immediately repudiate Trump’s ‘support’, denounce the threat of imminent US military action and call for the immediate lifting of the punitive sanctions that are strangling Iran’s economy.”Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones

From all indications, as the pro-imperialist character of the protests has become clearer, they have become restricted to more privileged sections of Iranian society. Within the working class the memory of the Shah’s regime, its subservience to US imperialism, monopolization of the country’s wealth and the brutal repression upon which it rested, endures.    

Those now expressing their “horror” and “revulsion” at the “brutality” of the Iranian regime have not been moved by the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza—to say nothing of the Nazi-style starvation of the entire enclave’s population—perpetrated by Israel with the full support and military assistance of Washington, first under Biden and now Trump.

As in Venezuela at the beginning of the year, the Trump administration is acting with utter criminality and recklessness.    

However, more than criminality connects the attack on Venezuela and the regime-change operation, and an impending military attack targeting Iran. They are part of a developing world war.

The US is seeking to seize hold of the world’s oil resources in preparation for military confrontation with China. China imports more than 70 percent of its daily oil consumption, with Iran accounting, according to various estimates, for 11 percent or more of all Chinese imports in 2025 and Venezuela’s 3-4 percent. Losing access to Iranian oil would be a significant economic and strategic shock to China’s independent industrial base.

Workers must be warned: US imperialism is on the verge of launching a new war against Iran whose consequences are incalculable. In threatening Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated “When [Trump] says he’ll do something, he means it.” Trump has repeatedly vowed to unleash military fury against Iran, just as he has pledged to rule like a dictator.

 “I don’t need international law,” Trump told the New York Times last week. “The only thing that can stop me,” he continued is my own will.

In reality, there is something that can stop him: the international working class. Even as Trump prepares for war on Iran, 15,000 nurses are on strike in New York City—the largest nurses’ strike in the city’s history. In France, hundreds of thousands have struck against austerity. Italy saw a general strike in November. Belgium’s workers walked out against the country’s coalition government. From Germany to the UK to Latin America, the objective conditions for a global movement against capitalism and war are emerging.

As the WSWS wrote in its New Year statement: “The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.” This depends on the building of a new leadership in the working class, rooted in the principles of Marxism and armed with the strategy of permanent revolution to forge its political independence and unify its struggles across state boundaries and continents.