For decades, Western commentary has treated protest in Iran as a countdown to regime collapse. Each wave of unrest is framed as the final chapter of the Islamic Republic, each demonstration as proof that the system is about to fall. This narrative has resurfaced once again following the nationwide protests that erupted in late 2025. Yet this framing is analytically lazy and politically dangerous. What Iran is facing today is not a sudden revolutionary rupture, but a systemic crisis produced by three converging forces: economic breakdown, social realignment, and an increasingly coercive yet exhausted state. As Michael Doran argues in The Free Press, the regime is not collapsing overnight but is steadily losing its capacity to govern under conditions of deep economic stress—a distinction routinely ignored in collapse-driven narratives.

The first and most decisive factor is economic breakdown. This is not merely inflation or currency depreciation; it is the transformation of everyday survival into a political struggle. When access to food, housing, and basic services becomes uncertain, dissent ceases to be ideological and becomes existential. Crucially, this crisis now engulfs the middle class and small merchants—groups long treated as silent stabilisers of the system. Iranian economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has long warned that economic crises become politically destabilising precisely when they erode the regime’s implicit distributive bargain. The participation of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, historically pragmatic and risk-averse, confirms this rupture. A state that can no longer guarantee material stability loses legitimacy........

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