Iran’s greatest threat isn’t Washington. It’s the generation that refuses to bow. |
While Western policymakers obsess over centrifuges, sanctions, and proxy militias, they are staring past the Islamic Republic’s greatest existential threat: its own children. Iran is no longer a revolutionary state; it is a terrified, cornered theocracy clinging to power, frightened not of American warships or Israeli jets alone, but of teenagers with smartphones, dreams of changing their country, and an unbending refusal to inherit their parents’ chains.
More than 60 per cent of Iran’s population is under 30. They did not march in 1979. They did not chant for Khomeini when he descended from the plane upon his arrival from Paris. They do not see holiness in turbans or salvation in martyrs’ graves. With eyes flaming red, they see only abject failure. They grew up amid broken promises, vanishing dreams, collapsing currency, authoritarian hypocrisy, and a ruling clerical elite that spends more time policing hair and killing joy than governing competently.
When Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody in 2022, the world framed it as a protest against hijab laws. It wasn’t. It was far more profound. It was a generational mutiny. Young women tore off their scarves not in defiance of a dress code, but in rejection of the entire religious authority itself. The chant that echoed across Iran was not about fabric. It was about freedom. “We do not want your Islamic Republic” was the unspoken, and occasionally screamed, truth on the........