There have been major uprisings in Iran before, most notably in 2009, 2019–2020, and 2022. But the scale of the protests that have engulfed the country in recent weeks and the brutal killings Iran’s security forces have perpetrated in response — which likely number in the thousands — are unprecedented in the 47-year history of the Islamic Republic. Critics of the regime have been predicting its downfall ever since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah and ushered Ayatollah Khomeini into power. Now, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old leader, may be in his most precarious position ever: presiding over a regionally isolated country that has proven unable to defend itself against foreign adversaries and an economy broken enough to lead to mass unrest. But embattled as the regime may be, is it really on the way out? I spoke with Scott Anderson, a prolific author and war correspondent who wrote last year’s King of Kings, a widely acclaimed book about the revolution and the American blunders surrounding it. We talked about the resilience of Iran’s powerful elite, why credible opposition leaders have been so hard to come by, and the similarities and differences between now and 1979.

It remains difficult to ascertain exactly what’s actually going on in Tehran and other cities at the moment. I’ve seen people commenting that after security forces killed so many people, the protest momentum has slowed a bit. Does that match up with what you’ve been hearing?
I’ve not been able to reach anybody inside Iran as of about a week ago. I’ve definitely felt that this thing had so much momentum that it was going to end quite quickly, one way or another. To me, the big question mark of whether it was going to succeed was the rank-and-file military guys out on the front lines — were they going to get tired of shooting people? And it sounds like maybe they haven’t.

It’s very hard to read from the outside. The thing that’s kind of baffling to me is that even just three weeks ago, when I was talking to opposition people in Iran, they were quite despondent. Because they felt that the Israeli and American bombings in June had just caused this huge rallying-around-the-flag effect for the regime. And they couldn’t go out and protest, because then they’d be painted as the lackeys of the Americans and the Zionists. Obviously, that all just switched dramatically.

The thing that’s different with this upheaval, or whatever you want to call it, is that it has crossed all class lines and sectarian lines, where in the past the regime was always pretty adept at........

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