PARIS/WASHINGTON: Despite nationwide protests and years of external pressure, there are no signs as yet that one of the world’s most resilient governments is close to fracture, or collapse.
Although the two weeks of protest mark the most serious challenge to Iran’s regime in years, analysts say it is too early to predict the immediate demise of the regime.
US President Donald Trump’s repeated threats of military action over Tehran’s crackdown on protesters, follow an Israeli and US bombing campaign last year against Iran’s nuclear programme and key officials.
But unless the street unrest and foreign pressure can prompt defections at the top, the establishment, though weakened, will likely hold, diplomats and government sources told Reuters.
Analysts fear Trump’s tariff threat risks reopening rift with China
Iran’s layered security architecture, anchored by the Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitary force – which together number close to one million – makes external coercion without internal rupture exceedingly difficult, says Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American academic and expert on regional conflicts and US foreign policy.
“For this sort of thing to succeed, you have to have crowds in the streets for a much longer period of time. And you have to have a breakup of the state. Some segments of the state, and particularly the security forces, have to defect,” he told Reuters.
Nasr said that while he didn’t think the Iranian regime had reached the moment of fall, it was “now in a situation of great difficulty going forward”.
Thomas Juneau, professor at the University of Ottawa, said: “At this point, I still don’t assess that the fall of the regime is imminent. That said, I am less confident in this assessment than in the past.” These are the key factors seen by analysts as determining whether the Islamic republic’s leadership will hold on to power.
According to Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has survived several past waves of unrest, this being the fifth major uprising since 2009.
The last major protests were the 2022-2023 demonstrations sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic dress code for women.
For that to change, protesters would have to generate enough momentum to overcome the states entrenched advantages: powerful institutions, a sizeable constituency loyal to the clerical rule, and the geographic and demographic scale of a country of 90 million people, said Alan Eyre, a former US diplomat and Iran expert.
On the other hand, Trump’s latest threat – to slap a 25pc tariff on countries that trade with Iran – risks reopening old wounds with Beijing, Tehran’s biggest trading partner.
The duty would see Chinese shipments to the US incurring levies exceeding 70pc, higher than the effective 57.5pc tariffs in place before Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping struck a deal in October to de-escalate their trade war.
Iran last became a flashpoint in US-China ties during Trump’s 2017-21 first term as president as Washington tightened sanctions on Tehran and put China’s Huawei, accused of selling technology to the Iran, in its crosshairs.
It remains unclear which countries with Iranian business links Trump might target, and he has not named China.
Some Chinese experts questioned why Trump seemed intent on revisiting one of the most contentious foreign policy issues from his first term, despite having already made Beijing think twice about providing economic support to Tehran.
“China and Iran are not as close as in the public imagination,” said a Beijing-based Chinese academic who advises the foreign ministry on Iran policy.
That said, Beijing moves around 80pc of Iran’s shipped oil through small independent refiners trading off the books to skirt US sanctions over the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2026
