Iranians Had a Better Shot of Toppling Their Monstrous Regime Before the War
The country's rulers have become more entrenched and brutal, turning the glimmer of hope during the protests into fear and despair
My friends’ internet came back two days ago—three months after Iran cut it. That’s the Islamic Republic’s standard practice when it needs to massacre thousands of people without witnesses. When the connection returned, my phone filled with messages imploring me to share with the world what they cannot say themselves.
I am 27—I left Iran at 18. I am not a geopolitical scholar or a credentialed journalist. I am someone who grew up inside this regime’s machinery and was fed its deadly ideology in its mosques and classrooms. I rejected it, and escaped to build a free life in America. I’ve spent the nine years since watching it closely from the outside, working out how I could help my loved ones left inside. I am writing this as a three-month check-in on a war that was supposed to liberate Iran. And I want to say plainly: the people of Iran have been betrayed.
What Three Months Have Produced on the Ground
Let me tell you what my friends are describing right now.
Since the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising, the majority of Iranians rejected the regime and its ideology. The minority that continued to support the regime was largely marginalized—ashamed, quieted, outmaneuvered—after Amini’s murder.
In January, Iranians took onto the street to demand an end to the theocracy. My friends were there in the crowd, on Jan. 8 and 9, when millions of unarmed Iranians were met with machine guns. Whether one accepts the more conservative estimates from human rights monitors or the higher figures reported by Iran International’s document review, what is not in dispute is that thousands upon thousands of unarmed Iranians—young and old, men and women—were killed with live ammunition on those two days in the deadliest crackdown on protesters in the Islamic Republic’s history. An untold number were imprisoned and tortured. My friend told me she saw decapitated bodies in the alleys where we used to spend our evenings as teenagers. Her mother was struck in the stomach with a rifle butt hard enough to rupture her kidney. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented that security forces used beatings alongside live fire during the crackdown, including against bystanders not involved in the protests, while snipers were reported to have fired deliberately at protesters’ heads and torsos.)
A government that massacres its own citizens this efficiently is not a legitimate government but an occupying force. Iranians welcomed the war that followed. Everyone was fed up. Everyone has lost someone, or knows someone who has. As wars go, this one should have been straightforward.
What has happened since is that the war handed the small minority that still supports the regime everything they needed to come roaring back. They are now organized, paid, and armed. I’m not speaking metaphorically—everyone connected to the regime, from those who attend its mosques to those who work in its institutions, from boys in their early teens to women in their ’70s, has been armed. They flood the streets every day waving Islamic Republic and Hezbollah flags, claiming patriotism and screaming that the supreme leader’s death was the fault of women who refused to cover their hair. Some fire at the sky, while others point it at whomever they judge not sufficiently friendly to the regime.
Unlike during the January massacre, when they received orders from above, these loyalists now act entirely on their own initiative. The movement has decentralized. Killing their leaders did not stop them—it freed them. This is one of the war’s most consequential and least-discussed outcomes: the regime has successfully distributed its violence so that no single decapitation strike can contain it anymore.
Large banners have appeared across cities showing the graves of schoolchildren killed in Minab. The caption, addressed to the majority who felt hopeful that America will help free Iran, reads: “Traitors, look—your help has arrived.”
Since the bombing of Iran’s industrial infrastructure—steel mills, petrochemical plants—prices have risen three- to five-fold in weeks. That pain is felt by ordinary Iranians, not by regime supporters who continue receiving generous handouts. Much of the regime’s senior leadership has been decimated—an achievement worth celebrating. Yet the regime survives—weaker, but alive enough to continue enslaving Iranians and threatening the world.
There has never been a stronger internal appetite for regime change in Iran. But the momentum of the January uprising is gone. Those who believed Trump when he said “help is on the way” have watched the regime endure three months of war against two of the world’s strongest military powers, and emerge even more menacing and confident. The demoralization is immense.
Everyone I have talked to from Iran has asked me a variant of this question: “How is it possible that the world’s strongest military power failed to topple a decapitated regime that does not even have support from its own people?” My friend could not comprehend why America would abandon its Iranian allies again. “What is the public opinion in America?” she asked me. “Do they know we’re not with the regime?”
Whatever is driving Washington’s restraint, it cannot be concern for the people it claims to be liberating. Ordinary Iranians are the ones who have suffered most—from the bombs, the economic collapse, and the armed loyalists terrorizing their streets. And yet they are being betrayed and forgotten by Trump’s botched war in Iran.
I had no answer to offer my Iranian friends, because I couldn’t see any coherent endgame. This war seems to be driven by pure impulse, announced in social media posts, and revised every time reality refused to comply.
The Three-Month Arc of American Promises
In January, Trump posted on Truth Social urging Iranian protesters to keep going and take over their institutions—“HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He declared his support for regime change, calling it “the best thing that could happen.” He told Iranians that seizing their government was “probably your only chance for generations.” His stated military objectives were absolute: completely destroy Iran’s navy and dismantle its missile industry.
Then he announced that Iran had agreed to stop killing protesters—as if that were sufficient—and reversed course. Then came the war. Then, in late March, aboard Air Force One, he told reporters the war had already achieved regime change because enough leaders had been killed. “We’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.” Then, on April 1, with no mass uprising materializing, he declared flatly that “regime change was not our goal.” Within days he said he “didn’t care” about Iran’s remaining nuclear material, and walked back his promise to eliminate its missile capability to merely claiming launches had been “dramatically curtailed.”
And now, at the three-month mark: a draft peace deal reportedly including a $300 billion postwar fund for Iran, rebranded from “reparations” to “investment fund” to avoid political embarrassment at home, with provisions for American energy companies to enter Iranian markets once sanctions lift. The regime that just killed six American soldiers and massacred tens of thousands of innocent people is, apparently, now a business partner.
The journey from “help is on its way” to a $300 billion reconstruction gift for a surviving regime is too monstrous for me to believe. It is a betrayal of Iranians and of everyone in the free world who believes freedom is worth something.
Why Half-Measures Are Worse Than Nothing
While Trump has been stalling, the southern ports of Iran remain under a blockade.
I grew up under American sanctions. I know from the inside what sustained economic pressure actually does. It does not destroy authoritarian regimes but the populations they rule.
I had a friend in Tehran named Rana (a pseudonym to protect her identity). She was expelled from the University of Tehran for wearing her hijab “incorrectly.” She pivoted to makeup artistry, spent her life savings on equipment, and built a following on Instagram. A multinational makeup brand noticed her talent and reached out to hire her. She was ecstatic—maybe Milan Fashion Week wasn’t so impossible after all. The moment they discovered she was in Iran, they canceled, citing sanctions. That day, something inside her died, and she still hasn’t fully recovered.
That is who sanctions punish. The men who shattered my friend’s mother’s kidney have the resources to circumvent sanctions and get their ammunition imported. The people who cannot circumvent sanctions are innocent people like Rana.
The economic devastation does have one potential saving grace: if pushed far enough, it could drain the treasury to the point where the regime can no longer pay its loyal 5%. That threshold—where the spatula hits the bottom of the pot, as we say in Farsi—is what actually could threaten the regime’s survival. Every Iranian I spoke to is willing to pay that price if it ends the regime. But anything less inflicts maximum suffering on ordinary Iranians while leaving the regime’s apparatus intact.
The current path’s answer to that question is to present us with the worst of all worlds.
The Only Two Defensible Choices
The United States and Israel face a binary with no justifiable middle.
The first choice is full commitment: go hard enough, with enough sustained resolve, to actually bring this regime down and give the Iranian people the opening they have bled for—either militarily, or via giving real, material support to Iranian protesters willing to fight. This is a compelling charge for nations that present themselves as forces for good—not as imperial powers driven by expediency, but as civilizations guided by genuine humanistic values. This approach could also reflect strategic self-interest. Iranians are overwhelmingly pro-Western; they want to be friends of America and Israel. A free Iran—at the heart of the Middle East, with deep political influence across the region—could become one of the most powerful forces for dismantling Islamic extremism the world has ever seen. That could mean final and lasting peace: no more proxy wars, no more Oct. 7s—an end to the furnace that has fueled hostilities between Muslims and the West for half a century. Isn’t that far more valuable than a momentary deal?
If the West does not want to bring peace to Iran, its second choice is complete withdrawal: lift the sanctions, step aside, and let ordinary Iranians breathe while they find their own path to freedom.
What is not defensible is the current path—killing enough of the regime’s leadership to provoke it, bombing enough of its industry to starve its people, then walking away with a ceasefire that leaves the Islamic Republic intact, possibly even enriched by a reconstruction deal that rewards its survival. The Iranian people arguably had a better chance of liberating themselves from their tormentors before the war rather than after a deal. That is not pragmatism. That is not “America First.” It is a betrayal of American and Iranian lives alike—and a signal to every authoritarian government that they can get away with taunting and extorting America.
The Iranians fighting for freedom have asked the free world to see them as allies. At the three-month mark, the free world should ask itself honestly: Do we?
If this ends the way it is currently heading, the answer is no. And the Iranians who survive it will remember America as a nation that rewards its enemies and abandons its friends.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
Thank you so much for writing this. First, I want to say I'm deeply saddened by how the Iranian people have suffered, ashamed of what the United States has done in Iran especially these past months, and wish for the fall of the Islamic Republic so that Iranians can have the chance to pursue their own democratic aspirations.
I also want to point you to a piece our Substack published shortly before the US attacked Iran this year: https://theilliberaltimes.substack.com/p/erosion-recognition-lag
It explains a concept we call Erosion Recognition Lag--which is delayed realization about authoritarian changes in US governance, particularly by international democracy aspirants who would have historically looked to the US as a beacon of freedom. It forecasts likely tragic consequences for continuing to look to this US government for democratic solidarity. I think it may help answer the question you've posed: How is it possible that the world's strongest military power failed to topple a decapitated regime that does not even have support from its own people?
No small part of the answer to why the US has behaved this way toward people who only want freedom is, sadly, that this is not the same United States as the one we grew up admiring. In the time you've been here, scholars have documented how the US has undergone significant democratic erosion. And over the past year and a half especially, that has looked increasingly like authoritarian consolidation. Literally as Iranians were calling for US government intervention, masked US security forces were killing American protesters in the streets of Minneapolis. This same government captured Maduro but left his murderous regime in place in Venezuela in order to extract oil. These are not the actions of a democracy trying to spread freedom. Rather, they are indicative of an authoritarian-leaning government pursuing power and extraction, at home and abroad.
You also asked about public opinion in America. The truth is that many Americans (though still not enough) can clearly see their own democratic system slipping away and are fighting back hard here. That means that among the Americans most sympathetic to the plight of Iranians, their attention is almost by necessity focused on pushing back against an authoritarian movement at home. Perhaps more can and should be done to coordinate between freedom-seeking Iranians and freedom-defending Americans. But that would be on a people to people basis, not with an autocratizing US government.
Of course, the US is still vastly more free than Iran, and I understand how meaningful it is that this is your favorite country and that you undertook a perilous journey to reach freedom here. But the current US government is no true friend to free or freedom-seeking people anywhere in the world. I suspect that is at the heart of some of the sorrow I sense in your piece, even if unnamed.
I wish you and your loved ones, in Iran and everywhere, peace, safety, and freedom. Just sadly at this moment it may have to come in spite of, not with the support of, the US government.
I’m so sorry for what your friends and loved ones are living through. This was hard to read, but necessary.