Iran on the brink.

On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Shay Khatiri who insists that the real question isn’t what happened on January 8 and 9 — it’s what comes next. Because this wasn’t an economic protest that got out of hand. This was the maximum force Iranian civil society can muster on its own. And it wasn’t enough.

Khatiri — a leading Iran scholar expalins that every previous uprising (2009, 2019, 2022) left a residue of unfulfilled promise and mounting rage. This time, the pattern breaks. What Khatiri heard from every source inside Iran was the same plea: We’ll do everything we can, but we need help from outside.

Now Iran poses an enormously difficult choice with nuclear stakes: a tottering but still powerful theocracy that has exported revolution and brutality for 47 years, facing an uprising that can’t succeed without US help.

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