On November 6, 1978, while riots raged throughout Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a rhetoric of conciliation. “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” he said. The Shah promised to correct the regime’s mistakes, liberate political prisoners, call parliamentary elections, investigate the corruption in his midst, and ease the crackdown on dissent against a nationwide opposition.

But, as had happened so often in the history of brittle regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was read as desperation. In a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consistently attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had said earlier, and was “drawing its last breaths.” And now, despite the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there could be no compromise.

Two months later, the Shah, suffering from cancer, fled Iran and commenced the indignity of travelling from one country to the next, looking for an acceptable place of exile. He died in July, 1980, in Cairo.

The current leader of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six. He is one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He is keenly aware of the story of the decline and fall of the old regime. And now, with the Islamic Republic facing dramatic demonstrations in dozens of cities across Iran, Khamenei is faced with a dilemma not unlike the Shah’s. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other instruments of force as his bludgeon, Khamenei has chosen bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s attempt to shut down the internet and other means of communication has dramatically slowed reporting, yet human-rights groups say that Iranian authorities have already killed as many as two hundred demonstrators.

“Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and had instructed his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he might have been saved. The question now is will the average soldier on the street shed more and more blood. How far will they go?”

The leaders of the regime, various experts told me, derived dark instruction not only from their historical enemy, the Shah, but from subsequent history. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Cold War with the United States, and introducing market mechanisms into the economy. His conclusion was that “we cannot live this way any longer”; a regime guided by Communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of generalized poverty, isolation, and confrontation. And yet, although many conditions improved through Gorbachev’s liberal policies, he also risked the existence of a fragile system. Finally, he could not control the forces he had unleashed, and, by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was forced from office.

Khamenei came to power in 1989, at the peak of “Gorbymania.” The spectacle of the fall of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to grow more suspicious of the West and of any sign of internal reform. “I have now reached the conclusion that the United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said in a speech to government officials, in July, 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. U.S. officials intend to carry out the same in Iran, and there are plentiful clues [evidencing this] in their selfish, often hasty remarks made during the past few years.”

The Islamic Republic has certainly faced periods of internal unrest before. There were student protests in 1999, following the shutdown of a reformist newspaper; the rise of the Green Movement, in 2009, following the fraudulent reëlection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and, in 2022, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstrations which were sparked by the police killing of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for failing to wear a hijab properly.

And yet, according to most Iran experts, the Islamic Republic has never been as endangered as it is now. Earlier protests demonstrated many Iranians’ opposition to the theocracy’s hard-line ideology, its insistence on the hijab, its control of media and education, its general brutality. This time around, the generalized economic immiseration of the Iranian people has set off the protests. The inflation rate is more than fifty per cent. The currency, the rial, is in free fall. There are extended power outages and water shortages. Food prices are particularly stratospheric, and some basics have gone missing from the markets.

The only sector of the country that is not suffering dramatic economic pain is the élite of the regime, particularly the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a pillar of the security establishment that also amasses huge profits from its economic interests in a range of industries: oil, ports, manufacturing, cement, and many more. Countless Iranians see the I.R.G.C. as a kind of militarized mafia. That long-simmering resentment has also helped lead to the national sense of fury and crisis. As Fatemeh Shams, an exiled professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, “This is a riot of a starving population.” And it is a riot that has extended far beyond the biggest cities and into places often thought of as conservative, quiescent, and loyal to the regime.

Economics, though, is not the sole factor at play. The theocracy of the ayatollahs has been exposed in all its fragility. Over the past two years, its strongest (and most expensive) proxies abroad—Hezbollah, in Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; the Houthis, in Yemen—have been gravely damaged. Which has only led Iranians to ask more loudly than ever why the regime spent its capital on foreign proxies and not on its own people. The regime boasted about its security establishment, and yet, in June, Israel and the United States joined together to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities with almost no resistance. Israeli forces, which had thoroughly penetrated the regime over the years with their intelligence assets, were able to kill unimpeded a range of high-ranking Iranian military, intelligence, and political leaders. Khamenei himself suffered the indignity of going into hiding during the bombings. As the Ayatollah now looks at the recent U.S. incursion into Venezuela, a close ally of Iran, he has to be wondering if Donald Trump will make good on his threat to act should more protesters be killed in Iran. Rather than acknowledge the rot within his own regime, he has blamed the demonstrations on the U.S. and Israel.

One way in which 1979 differs from 2026 is that Khamenei’s regime likely has nowhere to go. Many members of the Iranian élite during the Shah’s reign were educated abroad. They knew foreign languages. When their time came, in 1979, many had the wherewithal to leave Iran and re-make their lives in London or Los Angeles. The Islamic Republic has lost many of its best and brightest to emigration, and the members of the élite who remain are, in general, from a more provincial background. “And so, for the worst in the regime, their backs are against the wall,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Their mentality is kill or be killed.”

What was clear to the experts I spoke to, however, is that the demonstrations happening throughout Iran today are not religiously oriented or focussed on a particular spokesman or sector of society; they are largely about national pride and leading a normal, prosperous, and stable daily life. There are slogans heard on the streets calling for freedom, but not necessarily for democracy. Beyond that, it is extremely difficult to discern with any confidence where this could lead, whether the regime collapses or manages to endure.

A few months ago, Sadjadpour published an important essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs,” in which he speculated on what Iran might become after Khamenei dies or if he is deposed. Could Iran resemble China and shift from theocracy to technocracy? Will it resemble Pakistan, becoming a security state led by the generals of the I.R.G.C.? Might it resemble the isolation and terror of North Korea or the reactionary qualities of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia or the authoritarianism of Erdoğan’s Turkey? Sadjadpour carefully sorts through scenarios, similarities, and differences with a keen sense of Iran’s history and particularities.

Much of what makes his essay convincing is its intellectual modesty, its readiness to say that trying to derive confident predictions of the future from the chaos of what is happening on the streets and in government offices is folly. He reminds the reader of another Iran expert, James A. Bill, who wrote an article for Foreign Affairs for its winter 1978/1979 issue called “Iran and the Crisis of ’78.” Bill, the author of “The Eagle and the Lion,” a distinguished book about American-Iranian relations, wrote that “the most probable alternative” to the Shah would be “a left-wing, progressive group of middle-ranking army officers.” Other possibilities, he said, included “a right-wing military junta, a liberal democratic system based on Western models, and a communist government.” History had other plans. ♦