We’re not even a week into 2026, and already the year looks set to be no less monumental than 2025 on the world stage. Much of the attention is on the successful butcontroversial arrest and captureof Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US Navy Seals. And rightly so: it’s an unprecedented move by US President Donald Trump, with potentially huge repercussions.
However, events are unfolding in Iran that are potentially even more significant. What started off on December 28 as a relatively contained protest against Iran’s rapidly deteriorating economy that took place mostly in the country’s commercial districts — especially in its famed bazaars — quickly erupted into a nationwide movement calling, once again, for the fall of the Islamic Republic and its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Sceptics point out that we’ve been here before with Iran.
And indeed we have. The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022-23, which resulted from the arrest, beating and ultimate death of a young woman,Mahsa Amini, by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her hijab “incorrectly”, and the “Green Movement” protests of 2009-10 that erupted after the re-election of hard-liner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a rigged election, were just two of the dozens of protests against the Islamic Republic ever since it took control of the country in 1979. Admittedly, most of the others — including one just last year — have been on a far smaller scale and usually with more limited demands.
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But all were quite clearly unsuccessful in seriously damaging, let alone overthrowing, the regime. And yet for the Middle East things change quickly, and the reality of 2022 or 2009 was quite different from that of 2026. So much so, that there are real reasons to expect that these protests could have a different outcome than those of the past — even the long overdue fall of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes and largest sponsors of Jihadist terror.
Most Iranians despise the Islamic Republic regime, but it has long maintained control over its population through brute force, as all fascists do. The Islamic Republic and its military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have long projected an image of vast military might, within the country and without. Considering how successfully it quashed former protests, its ongoing nuclear programme, its armada of ballistic missiles and its countless terror proxies across the region and beyond, that image was hardly lacking in substance.
But then it made a fatal mistake: it engaged Israel in open warfare. Things could have gone very differently. There is evidence to suggest that it was a mere lack of co-ordination that prevented the massacre of October 7 from being even worse, as Hezbollah was supposed to attack Israel’s north just as Hamas attacked its south but failed to do so until a few days later, when Israel was on full alert.
Instead, for all of the suffering and death, every part of the Islamic Republic’s multi-front war on Israel proved just how empty Iran’s vaunted power actually was. Of all of Iran’s proxies, Hamas has proven to be the most resilient, as it remains a powerful guerrilla force in Gaza and a real obstacle to peace, but its military leadership has been decimated and most of its terror infrastructure has been destroyed — sadly, with the civilian infrastructure into which it was woven.
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