As the dust settles on the bloody streets of Sanandaj and Abdanan, a bitter reality is dawning on those of us who risked our lives in the January 2026 uprising. While the Israeli security establishment anxiously watches the renewed negotiations between the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic in Oman, they are asking the wrong question. They ask: Why is Trump cutting a deal with the Ayatollahs?

The answer is not in Washington. It is in the failure of the Iranian opposition to offer a governable alternative. And that failure has a name: The Monarchists.

The “January Days”—specifically the critical window between January 8th and 9th—represented the most significant threat to the clerical regime since 1979. But this energy was not defeated by the Revolutionary Guards’ brutality alone. It was dismantled from within by the “Crown,” whose obsession with centralization and performative politics handed the regime a victory on a silver platter.

To understand the sociology of this defeat, we must look at the anatomy of the uprising. It began in late December 2025 as a “rhizomatic” movement—organic, leaderless, and deeply rooted in the economic despair of the periphery. It was a repetition of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî dialectic: self-organized neighborhood committees in Kurdistan and Baluchistan managing their own defense and strikes.

On January 8th, as the uprising reached its kinetic peak, the Monarchist machine in Los Angeles and Washington—amplified by their satellite media echo chambers—attempted to vertically integrate a horizontal movement. They issued a “National Call” for a unified, centralized march under the banner of Reza Pahlavi.

This was a sociological catastrophe. Instead of encouraging the “molecular revolution”—where every neighborhood becomes a fortress of self-administration—they asked the youth to expose themselves in static, symbolic venues to “show numbers” for Western cameras.

They promised that if we came out for the Prince, the world would intervene. They promised that the Trump administration was waiting for this specific signal to topple the regime.

It was a lie. There was no plan. There was no coordination with the leaders on the ground. There was no strike fund to support the bazaar merchants who had shuttered their shops.

When the regime cut the internet and deployed the heavy machine guns on the evening of January 8th, the “central command” of the Monarchists went silent. They had no contingency for a communications blackout. They had no strategy for urban warfare. They had wasted the kinetic energy of the street on a photo-op.

The result was anomie. The protesters, conditioned by the Monarchist media to wait for a “savior” from abroad, froze. The Kurds and Baluchis, who had their own localized defense structures (influenced by the democratic confederalist model), were left isolated as the central cities retreated into passivity, waiting for a “Trump Card” that never came.

This brings us to the current negotiations. Donald Trump is not an ideologue; he is a real estate developer. He looks at the “market” of Iranian politics and sees two entities.

On one side, he sees a brutal but cohesive Islamic Republic that survived the January storm. On the other, he sees an opposition led by Reza Pahlavi that promised a takeover but delivered only chaos and empty slogans.

Trump is negotiating with Khamenei today because the Monarchists proved in January that they cannot close the deal. They showed the world that they are a “simulacrum” of an opposition—great at hashtags, terrible at revolution. Trump effectively looked at the opposition’s failure to hold ground in January and decided that the Mullahs remain the only solvent partner for regional stability.

For the strategists in Tel Aviv, this should be a wake-up call. You have spent years cultivating the Monarchist faction, believing that a return to the Pahlavi era would secure Israel’s interests.

But in doing so, you have backed a force that is sociologically incapable of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. The Monarchists’ insistence on Persian-centric centralism alienates the very forces that have the capacity to fight: the Kurds, the Arabs, the Baluchis, and the radical left.

By supporting the Monarchists, you helped suffocate the only viable alternative: a democratic, decentralized Iran based on the self-determination of its diverse peoples. The result is what you see now: a stabilized Islamic Republic, emboldened by its survival, sitting across the table from a US President who has lost faith in the opposition.

The “Prince” did not save us. He saved the Islamic Republic. And now, we are all paying the price.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)