In 2025, economic breakdown and war shattered the Islamic Republic’s core claim—security—leaving a regime that looks intact yet hollow, like a corpse propped up in power.
For the Islamic Republic, the hardships of 2025 began from the very first day. In November, when Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency for a second term, anxieties set in—only a month after the assassination in Beirut of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah.
In the first month of 2025, the man who had ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani returned to office. That record alone was enough to tighten the knot of Iran’s nuclear dossier and make any agreement with the United States and the three European states even less likely than before. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, in 2020, the Supreme Leader had said he was “kicked out of the White House in disgrace and sent to the dustbin of history.” That prediction proved wrong. Trump’s second term returned to the White House with a policy far more aggressive than his first.
But other starting points are hardly brighter—or even gray. For example: on January 1, 2025, if you walked along Ferdowsi Street in Tehran and decided to buy dollars, each dollar would cost you around 80,000 tomans. Just a month earlier it was 70,000, and six months before that about 45,000. It feels like a century has passed since those days. No—only eighteen hard months have gone by.
By the final days of 2025, the dollar had surpassed 130,000 tomans, and some pessimistic forecasts speak of a 250,000-toman dollar by the end of 2026, while optimists predict 180,000 to 190,000.
But perhaps even the dollar is not the right place to begin.
A Year That Began With Energy Shortages
On the fourth day of 2025, the government cut gas to a large number of industries and petrochemical plants. The winter gas shortage again revealed itself—more intensely than before. Disputes over shortages of gas and electricity, and over the failure to refill power-plant reservoirs during the summer, escalated. Ironically, the cycle of gas cuts and reconnections ended only with warmer weather. But once the weather warmed, the problem resurfaced from two other directions: electricity and water.
“Get Ready for the Peak”
If we take only water, electricity, and gas as indicators and set the rest aside, 2025 was a year of bankruptcy: emptying dams, the drying of Lake Urmia, summer blackouts, water rationing, and hundreds of other stories of the same kind. But if we add other indicators, does the picture become any better? Inflation above 50 percent, the bankruptcy of pension funds and social security, a budget imbalance affecting half the state budget, the expansion of extreme poverty—these all pile onto the bankruptcy of water, electricity, and gas.
In previous years, if you wrote about these economic indicators and described what was happening, the Islamic Republic’s security and propaganda apparatus would say you were “blackening the picture.” The events of 2025 went so far that even they no longer bother to repeat the government’s paranoid lines that externalize its own internal problems to foreign powers.
The promise of “reaching the summit” was made only three years ago—and it was not made by some mid-level manager in a ministry or state body. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic—its “all-wise mind”—said with great confidence: get ready, and prepare the flags to be raised at the peak.
A more accurate rendering in English might be: prepare for achievement, for victory, for a historic breakthrough—get ready to raise the flag at the top. But in 2025, that rhetoric sounded like an echo from another planet.
Perhaps Ali Khamenei had seen the image upside down—mistaking the top for the bottom and the bottom for the top—and that is why his promise turned out hollow.
“At Least We Have Security”
In the two or three years leading into 2025, the Islamic Republic also learned a new narrative line to pull out whenever criticism of its economic performance intensified: we may have all this trouble, but at least we have security.
In 2025, even that “at least we have security” melted into the air. At dawn on June 13, Israel attacked Iran. It killed a large number of IRGC and non-IRGC commanders, as well as nuclear scientists. It struck and destroyed state television, missile bases, nuclear sites, missile-production facilities, air-defense systems, and whatever else it could reach. For twelve days its aircraft roamed Iran’s skies. In Tehran, the Chief of the General Staff—whose appointment decree was barely dry—survived the bombing of his secret headquarters, only to be tracked down and killed: in broad daylight, in the heart of the capital. The Supreme Leader went into a bunker and disappeared for a long period. Even months later, he remains more in his shelter than in his official residence.
It was not only military and political figures who became victims of Israel’s attack. Ordinary citizens also lost their lives. The narrative myth that “the Leader kept the shadow of war away from Iran,” and that “we fight in Syria so we will be safe within our borders,” collapsed within hours. The lives of ordinary people were not spared.
Three days before the end of the war, the United States also entered the battle. Iran’s three main nuclear facilities—which, according to Mohammad Javad Zarif, had cost $500 billion to build—were destroyed by American bunker-buster bombs.
Hard Collapse
In those twelve days, the Islamic Republic faced something it had not even seen in its nightmares: a hard collapse—the possibility of a political system collapsing through the targeting of its own leadership.
Living under the shadow of collapse is not new for the regime, though not this kind. Throughout its entire life the Islamic Republic has feared collapse. Over four decades, it has treated nearly every form of opposition—at any level—as a national security threat and as an “overthrow” project. Political, professional, labor, and party organizing; publishing books and journals; book-reading circles; visiting the graves of those killed in massacres—all of it has been framed as “overthrow.” Even if a student publishes a black-and-white magazine of 300 copies criticizing the Supreme Leader or lower officials, the security apparatus “dives like an eagle” onto that student to prevent “overthrow.”
The Eagle Without Claws
The Islamic Republic’s intelligence agencies—so numerous and varied they resemble a 24-color Staedtler pencil set—have for decades performed displays of security and power, while killing, forcing into exile, or silencing even the most solitary dissenters.
In 2025, this “eagle play” and this claim to “security and power” lost its color overnight. What happened? Forget providing security for the people—the Islamic Republic cannot even protect its own Leader and IRGC commanders. The king was naked.
Can you have so many colored pencils in the box and not one of them has a sharp tip? Yes: none had a tip. People had said before that the regime’s security and repression apparatus functions mainly by manufacturing cases against the powerless—swaggering in empty alleys—but hearing is one thing, seeing another.
We do not need to go into the nuclear file or the snapback mechanism to complete the picture of the Islamic Republic in 2025. What we have already is enough.
After the end of the twelve-day war, Abdullah Ganji—a media figure close to the IRGC and the Supreme Leader—invoked Khamenei’s Nowruz speech of 2020 to blame the regime’s failures on jinn, a supernatural class of beings in Islamic and Arab traditions. He wrote:
“A strange phenomenon! After the recent war, papers containing talismans with Jewish symbols were found on some streets in Tehran… Years ago, the Supreme Leader said enemy countries and Western and Hebrew intelligence services use occult sciences and jinn beings for espionage.”
Now that even jinn have entered the story, perhaps it is fitting to end in the Islamic Republic’s familiar language—by recalling the story of Prophet Solomon and his army of jinn.
Solomon’s Palace
Azrael, the death angel, came to Solomon’s palace and took his life while he stood facing his city of jinn and humans, leaning on his staff. According to the Qur’an and religious texts, Solomon exploited the jinn as much as he could, and these unfortunate beings longed to be freed. For a time, Solomon’s lifeless body remained standing, facing the city whose inhabitants had bent under his commands. Doubt spread among jinn and humans: why does Solomon not sit, not eat and drink, not move? Yet none dared approach him to see what had happened. Under Solomon’s fixed gaze—though he had no life—they kept working and feared the corpse, until, as the Qur’an says, termites were commanded to gnaw through his staff, and the body fell face-first to the ground.
Now let us summarize what happened to the regime this year in one sentence using the same story: Azrael took the Islamic Republic’s life in 2025, though its corpse has not yet fallen; in the palace of power, a dead body leans on a staff, staring blankly at the city. Doubt has entered the hearts of the people, and the sound of termites chewing can be heard.
