Predictive History

The 2025–2026 Iran Protests

2 min read

The 2025–2026 Iran Protests

Core idea: A nationwide economic uprising that began on 28 December 2025 in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar — triggered by the collapse of the rial — which escalated into the political crisis that preceded and overlapped the Israel–Iran war.

The Economic Trigger

The protests began on 28 December 2025 inside the markets of Tehran and spread within days to Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad. The proximate cause was the collapse of the rial, which fell to a record low of roughly 1.42–1.5 million rial to the dollar (~138,000–145,000 toman) — against 430,000 in 2022 and just 32,000 at the time of the 2015 nuclear deal. The head of the Central Bank resigned. This was the largest unrest since 2022.

This is the economic-collapse trigger Professor Jiang’s framework anticipates: empire decline and economic strangulation producing internal instability, which external actors then exploit. See law-of-asymmetry.

The Slogans

The chants varied. The slogan that drew the most international attention was “Javid Shah” (“Long live the King”), which tracked the rising profile of the exiled Reza Pahlavi. That this monarchist framing rose so quickly is itself relevant — it is precisely the narrative that the documented Israeli influence operation had been amplifying since before the protests began.

From Economic to Political

What started as bread-and-currency protest was rapidly reframed as a regime-change moment. The escalation accelerated after Pahlavi’s 8–9 January call to action, after which the state imposed the internet blackout — and from that point the factual record fractures into competing casualty narratives.

Discipline note: Turnout figures of “1.5 million in Tehran / 5 million nationwide” trace to a single unnamed European diplomat, not an independent count. They should be treated with the same skepticism this cluster applies to the inflated death toll.

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