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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   197 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 15, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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When do you think we should start taking the news coming out of Iran seriously? What likely leading indicators will we see when things start getting serious for the regime?

I feel like we get the "Iranian protests threaten regime" news cycle periodically, but I have trouble trying to figure out what to trust. We'll of course get biased interpretations, but what concrete facts will tell us when to start thinking big?

I'm all in. Nothing ever happens

Absent outside intervention, regimes fail when security forces defect or desert. If the US (or someone else, I guess) isn't going to intervene, the IRGC can just keep shooting protestors until the survivors get the message. The only other possibility is that the rest of the military decides to intervene on behalf of the protestors, but my (extremely uninformed) impression is that, in true police state fashion, the Iranian military is largely neutered precisely to avoid that outcome.

If you see signs of entire military units defecting or walking off the job of refusing to open fire on civilians.

Been monitoring it. My current read is.

  • In number of protestors, Ayatollah's Iran has seen larger protests before. IRGC has quelled protests of larger scale.
  • In terms of violence, these are the most violent protests Iran has seen since the revolution. This is in terms of property damage, outright protestor violence and retaliatory shooting.
  • Protests were getting more intense until mid last week. Conflicting reports on scale of protests this week.

Protests are materially new in a few ways:

  • Khamenei is old (this time for real) and has no true heir lined up
  • Tehran water crisis is real. Civilians are stressed.
  • Legitimacy of regime materially affected after
  • For the first(?) time, protestors are chanting in support of regime change

Note, the Bangladeshi protests that led to regime change went on for 2 months, until Hasina was eventually pushed out. It took ~4 months in SriLanka. Iran is not an Arab nation, I think recent regime change in developing/middle income stable nations is a better proxy for what a revolutionary protest might look like, compared to Arab spring. In Nepal, banning internet forced more people into the streets, not fewer. So, hard to assign a positive or negative signal based on just the internet blackout. The main difference is that the IRGC is totally loyal to the Ayatollah, so an early military coup to limit causalities is unlikely.

It's honestly difficult to see what can happen besides a revolution or millions dying at this point. They have a severe drought because of mis-managed water supply. They have Weinmar levels of inflation. They have possibly tens of thousands of protestors shot to death. They foolishly cut off internet, giving the locals little better to do than join the protests. If soldiers defect because their families are starving, it's a revolution. If the regime keeps their enforcers fed, it's mass deaths.

Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent claims that the Iranian government is wiring money out of the country. Not sure if that's business as normal or if that's a sign this is the big one.

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