Four Players, One Exit: Trump, Netanyahu, Khamenei and the Iranian Street

What journalists and lawmakers miss when they focus on warheads instead of workers, truckers and hacked courtrooms.

Jalal Arani  30 May 2025

Trump, Netanyahu, Khamenei and the Iranian Street

Three Leaders, Three Traps — and One Unstable Chessboard

Donald Trump sits atop the world’s lone super-power, but Realpolitik refuses the 30-day closing schedules of real-estate deals. Lobbyists, allies and electioneers tug him in opposite directions: clinch a grand bargain, avoid a new Middle-East quagmire, preserve U.S. primacy while campaigning on “Make America Great Again.” He brandishes overwhelming force, yet Pentagon planners concede that super-firepower is a blunt instrument against a theocracy fluent in asymmetry. One rash order could trigger exactly the chain reaction he claims to be defusing.

Benjamin Netanyahu flashes televised fighter-jet drills that dominate prime-time news but convince few inside Iran. Any officer who has read Clausewitz knows you do not telegraph a surprise attack. Worse, the prime minister’s credibility bleeds daily: the International Criminal Court wants him on war-crimes charges, and a cadre of retired Israeli generals calls the Gaza campaign “immoral and strategically ruinous.” Israel’s air force could sustain perhaps a week of high-tempo sorties—if an uninterrupted American resupply pipeline survives congressional skepticism. Tehran studies the same logistics charts.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seems immovable, yet he is hemmed in by a domestic volcano. He cannot trade away uranium enrichment without shattering the myth of revolutionary infallibility. “We will never give in,” he vows—not because he is stubborn, but because his survival depends on appearing invulnerable to the 95 percent of Iranians who have already rejected clerical rule at the ballot box and in the streets. Years of clandestine procurement may have given him a rudimentary bomb option, but even that sword cuts both ways: the chain of command required to deploy it would leak from an officer corps riddled with quiet dissent.

The result is a four-way deadlock—Washington, Jerusalem, Tehran and the Iranian street—each actor able to upend the board yet terrified of the ensuing cascade. Any renewed diplomacy, sanctions gamble or military feint must operate inside this combustible crucible.

A Diplomatic Deadlock Masking Domestic Free-Fall

Negotiators have reached what one senior European envoy calls “the exhaustion point.” The United States insists on zero enrichment; Khamenei replies that surrendering centrifuges would invite regime collapse. After 46 years of clerical rule, any concession that signals weakness could detonate demands for regime change already pulsing through Iran’s streets.

Inside the country, poverty has soared to a five-decade high. The state-run daily Ham-Mihan conceded on May 26 that “today’s problems in Iran have no technical fixes.” ¹ In the same edition, editors listed a “common political root” for unrest: bakers protesting subsidized-flour corruption, truckers blocking highways in 110 cities to protest diesel shortages, and the discovery of millions of liters of smuggled fuel. “None of these shocks can be solved in isolation,” the paper warned. ²

Parliamentarians—every one pre-vetted by the Guardian Council—now plead publicly for a “precise re-configuration of the governance framework” ³ and admit that “fundamental prerequisites for effective governance … are still absent.” ⁴ When loyalists use the Majles floor to denounce “blind fanaticism” toward the Supreme Leader’s economic decrees, doctrinal unity is gone. ⁵

Streets Gone Dark, Highways Gone Silent

Electricity blackouts—“the worst in a century,” one MP laments ⁶—add literal darkness to political gloom. Truckers’ strikes empty highways; bakers driven out of business torch regime posters. Tehran’s response is savage: 165 prisoners were hanged in May alone, ⁷ including 14 people in a single day. ⁸ The “No to Execution” civil-disobedience campaign has now passed its 70th consecutive Tuesday, its chants smuggled from inside prison walls.

Even the judiciary is no longer immune. On May 27, Judge Ehsan Bagheri—“the Butcher of Shiraz,” notorious for mass death sentences—was shot dead outside his home. A clandestine resistance unit claimed responsibility in a video circulated through encrypted channels.

These Kanoon-ha-ye Shoroshi (Resistance Units) look from afar like graffiti crews. In practice they are micro-organizations capable of flash-mob arson at Basij bases, sabotage of surveillance cameras, even drone strikes on petro-facilities. Opposition researchers, citing leaked IRGC ledgers, count more than 3,000 such operations in the Persian year 1403 (2024-25).

The Organized Alternative the Regime Fears Most

Critics dismiss Iran’s diaspora opposition as fractured. Tehran does not. When former deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi condemned Saudi Arabia for arresting an obscure hard-line cleric last week, state television spent more airtime railing against the “terrorist infiltration” of strikes by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) than discussing U.N. inspectors.

The MEK’s political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)—led by Maryam Rajavi—offers a 10-point blueprint for a secular, democratic, non-nuclear republic. Bipartisan resolutions endorsing it have cleared large blocs of the U.S. Congress, the French Senate and parliaments from Canada to Croatia. Inside Iran, slogans like “Rajavi, yes; shah & sheikh, no!” appear beside “Woman, Resistance, Freedom,” spray-painted overnight despite the death penalty for “enmity against God.”

Tehran’s own threat assessments confirm its anxiety. A confidential IRGC Directive 981/1403 (excerpted by the site IranFreedom.net) warns that coordination between trucker blockades and urban resistance units “could paralyze fuel distribution and provoke security collapse in under 72 hours.” That prospect is far more immediate than any speculative Israeli airstrike.

Cracks in the Repression Machine

Iran’s security architecture—125,000 IRGC troops, 300,000 Basij militiamen, tens of thousands of undercover ershad morality police—looks monolithic on paper. Reality is messier. Defections from Basij units have surged since the Mahsa Amini uprising of 2022-23; human-rights lawyers document at least 1,200 instances of rank-and-file refusing shoot-to-kill orders. In April, Tehran’s police chief quietly demoted three precinct commanders for “fraternizing” with trucker pickets.

Cyber-warfare is equally corrosive. Opposition hackers recently hijacked 36 regime-owned radio frequencies to broadcast funeral chants for executed prisoners. Telegram channels linked to the MEK leak salary slips showing judges paid in luxury-store gift cards, and internal memos detailing $7 billion lost to fuel smuggling—evidence that shreds what little legitimacy the clerical state still claims.

Why This Should Reshape Washington and Jerusalem’s Playbooks

American and European planners traditionally treat internal dissent as a sideshow; the real levers, they assume, are airstrikes and sanctions. That misreads Iranian history. Every genuine turning point—from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution to the corrupt Shah’s 1979 ouster—was driven by domestic coalitions, not foreign armies.

Khamenei’s tightest circle, perhaps 5 percent of the population, still chants “Death to America.” The other 95 percent crave jobs, freedom and a government that neither shoots protesters nor hangs teenagers. External pressure can be an accelerant, but the combustible material is piled high inside Iran already.

The Revolt Within: Four Fronts Tehran Cannot Contain

1. Perpetual UprisingProtest cycles now recur every two to three years: fuel-price riots (2019), teachers’ strikes (2021), Mahsa Amini uprising (2022-23), and this spring’s trucker shutdown. Ham-Mihan admits no “technical cure” exists—only politics.¹

2. An Underground the Regime Cannot PenetrateResistance Units carried out >3,000 targeted actions last year. Their exiled leadership’s 10-point plan enjoys super-majority support in the U.S. House (H.Res 166) and a dozen European legislatures.

3. Fractured RepressionPolice refusals to fire on mourners, Basij defections, and an IRGC cable warning that soldier-trucker fraternization could “trigger operational paralysis within 72 hours” underscore a system in decay.

4. Information Guerrilla WarfareDaily leaks—judges’ bribe ledgers, oil-minister invoices, real-time turnout tallies showing <10 percent participation—erode the regime’s last currency: mythical legitimacy.

Khamenei’s nightmare is not an American missile but an Iranian color revolution that commandeers his own soldiers and sets the bazaars ablaze.

Policy, Not Palliatives: A Real Solution to the Iran Issue

• Designate the IRGC a Terror OrganizationThe corps enforces domestic repression and exports terrorism from London to Latin America. Recent plots in Europe demand urgent proscription.

• Snap Back Sanctions and Restore U.N. ResolutionsUse Resolution 2231’s mechanism to re-impose suspended nuclear sanctions. Diplomacy has given Tehran time to stockpile uranium for multiple bombs; sanctions relief now mainly funds repression.

• End AppeasementHalt concessions such as hostage-swap cash that fuels “hostage diplomacy.” Forty years of leniency have enabled executions, terrorism and nuclear brinkmanship.

• Recognize the Legitimacy of the Iranian ResistancePublicly acknowledge the NCRI and its 10-point platform as a democratic alternative. The movement seeks political recognition, not foreign arms.

• Hold the Regime Accountable for Human-Rights CrimesRefer Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for the 1988 massacre and the 1,200+ executions since 2024. Expel diplomats implicated in espionage; close cultural centers that bankroll surveillance.

• Support a Democratic Transition FrameworkEndorse Maryam Rajavi’s plan: secular governance, gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, and a non-nuclear Iran. More than 3,500 lawmakers worldwide already do.

The Choice Before Us

The Supreme Leader’s system is in what Iranians call the fasele enteghal—its final phase before overthrow. Western action now is not foreign interference; it is alignment with the will of a people who have concluded that no cleric, no matter how heavily armed, can rule forever without consent.

Failure to seize this moment risks not just another Middle-East crisis but a regional chain reaction of nuclear brinkmanship and mass displacement. Success means enabling Iranians to finish a job only they can complete: dismantling the last theocracy in the Middle East and replacing it with a republic that neither needs the bomb nor brandishes it.

If the United States and Europe want a lasting answer to the Iranian nuclear dilemma, they should stop bargaining over centrifuges and start championing the Iranian street. The real non-proliferation guarantee is the one already etched on Tehran’s walls: