President Donald Trump on Sunday repeated his call for Iranian protesters to rise up and “take back your country, America is with you.”
The Iranian people have a long history of mass protest seeking political and leadership changes. But there are serious obstacles to changing Iran’s government. Bombs are not enough. Neither is empty rhetoric from the U.S. president.
Mass protests in Iran date to the late 19th century, when the country was a monarchy, led by a shah. Iran’s first revolution in the modern era began in 1905, when citizens mobilized nonviolent demonstrations and economic protests. This uprising, known as the Constitutional Revolution, pressured the shah to adopt a constitution in 1906 that significantly curtailed the monarchy’s powers and created the country’s first democratically elected parliament. A Russian invasion in 1911 crushed Iran’s nascent democracy, but Iranians’ democratic aspirations persisted. So did the tradition of protests.
There are serious obstacles to changing Iran’s government.
The mass protests that began in 1978 and brought down the nearly four-decade government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 inaugurated the theocracy that remains in power today, the Islamic Republic. The shah was unwilling to deploy state forces against his people on the scale that would have been necessary for him to remain in power. The Islamic Republic, having no such qualms, has regularly used violence to crush dissent.
This use of force and the regime’s ever intensifying hold on state power are critical to understanding Iran’s evolution and the status quo. Today’s oppressive theocracy was not the form of government many Iranians who participated in the 1979 revolution desired. Many who initially supported the regime soured on it over the years as its brutality, corruption and incompetence grew. Iranians born since the revolution — the majority of the country’s nearly 93 million people — have chafed under the oppression of a radically conservative regime they never chose.
The regime has suppressed dissent and sought to subordinate women with intensifying brutality as protests recurred with increasing frequency, intensity and scope: The best known are the 1979 women’s protests against the imposition of mandatory hijab, the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement aimed at reforming the Islamic Republic, and multiple protests in the 2010s over poor economic conditions and drinking water shortages. Over the years, more and more Iranians across the country joined together in defiance of their regime.
By the 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Iranians coalesced around a demand for regime change. The theocratic system was unreformable, the protesters argued. Leading organizers such as Iranian women’s and labor groups have been clear about wanting to replace the regime with a secular democracy grounded in human rights, gender equality and the rule of law. When Iranians rose up across the country in December and January, initially motivated by the collapse of the country’s currency, freedom from the regime was their ultimate goal.
The regime met these recent protests with a show of force brutal even by the Islamic Republic’s standards.
The regime met these recent protests with a show of force brutal even by the Islamic Republic’s standards. Security forces, reportedly joined by Iran-supported militia members imported from neighboring Arab states, mowed down protesters with live ammunition, then hunted down the injured for summary execution or arrest. Even medical personnel who treated the injured were targeted, and bodies of protesters were desecrated, both an emotional blow and warning to the bereaved. According to the human rights organization HRANA, more than 7,000 died in the recent protests. Over 11,700 other cases are pending verification. Some 50,000 Iranians, including doctors, lawyers and teachers, have been arrested since early January, according to HRANA.
In early January, as courageous Iranians died for seeking freedom, Trump urged protesters to carry on and said “help is on its way.” He threatened the regime with retaliation if it killed citizen protesters. Such rhetoric offered hope to a desperate people, but the regime slaughter continued.
The complications are not merely that the Trump administration has a track record of abandoning situations if the president loses interest or faces obstacles (such as his abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria in 2019). Despite Trump’s suggestions of support for protesters in January, his administration reopened nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic without including human rights as a point of negotiation. Many Trump administration actions over the past year have also made it more difficult to assist the Iranian people: Cuts to Voice of America, which includes a Persian-language service, and policies that have hobbled the independent Radio Farda’s ability to broadcast inside Iran severely curtailed the United States’ ability to communicate with the Iranian public. The administration’s dramatic cuts to foreign aid, grants to civil society organizations and other policies negatively impacted the work of organizations focused on human rights in Iran.
Although the president announced U.S. military action with a call for the Iranian people to “take over your government. It will be yours to take,” regime change involves more than rhetoric. The U.S. message was undercut from the start: With the ongoing internet shutdown in Iran, it is unclear how many people there are hearing Trump’s messages or seeing his Truth Social posts. And bombs raining down — one of which struck a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, killing scores of children — understandably discourage Iranians from taking to the streets. Even with the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, many hardline officials remain in place at every level of government. Given their desperation to cling to power, they will be difficult to dislodge without resources and international assistance. Iran’s anti-regime movement is intentionally nonviolent in its tactics, and the majority of protesters are unarmed. But the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militias still have the guns they have been more than willing to use on their fellow Iranians, including children. All this means that whether or not predictions of an IRGC military dictatorship come to fruition, Iran’s leaders still pose a threat to their own people and the region. A critical first step toward a secular, democratic Iran that shares many U.S. interests and can bring peace, stability and prosperity to Iran and the wider region is the defection of significant numbers of regime officials and military personnel. Such defections would require the United States offering a clearly outlined path and protected off-ramp for defectors. Trump calling for defections is not enough; defectors will require guarantees of their safety. To facilitate regime change, the United States must: provide meaningful, material assistance to the pro-democracy, anti-regime movement; impose severe consequences for any regime officials or security personnel who harm civilians; force the release of political prisoners like Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, who are the potential leaders of a transition government; coordinate with dissidents on the ground to help them seize control; and include women at the table equally for all pre- and post-regime discussions about Iran’s future. Critically, it should develop and implement with Iranians a clear, considered plan for what comes after the regime falls. There appears to be no substantive plan for regime change. Bombs and assassinations will not create one. Iranians are not pawns to be used and discarded for political ends. These are real people who have suffered unimaginably over the past 47 years and who deserve international support to forge the democratic future many have fought so hard to build.
Kelly J. Shannon, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and a historian of U.S. foreign relations, modern Iran and human rights. She is the author of "U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights" and is writing a book on the history of U.S.-Iran relations in the first half of the 20th century. 
