Iran on the Edge: Inside the Uprising the Regime Tried to Crush

President Donald Trump had promised the U.S. would “come to the rescue”; it did not. The regime claimed victory. As January wound down, the President pointed toward the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier group and pressed the ayatollahs for “a deal.” Iranians counted the dead.

In the pages that follow, five Iranian writers assay the state of the country they long to return to. Known for most of its 2,600 years as Persia, it has been the Islamic Republic of Iran for less than half a century—a radical, catastrophic experiment in governance whose final hours will be determined by ordinary people now driven indoors by truck-mounted machine guns.

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is in free fall. And the despots quail. As one exiled journalist put it in 2022, the last time Iranians reclaimed public spaces: “I don’t know if this is the final episode of the Islamic Republic. But it’s the final season.”