Bread, blackouts and the coming reckoning in Iran | GUEST COMMENTARY (original) (raw)

Authoritarian regimes often assume they can survive crisis by controlling information. The Islamic Republic of Iran has relied on that logic: censoring the internet, criminalizing dissent, intimidating families of political prisoners, silencing journalists and concealing repression from the outside world.

But one reality cannot be filtered, throttled or erased: hunger.

Recent warnings in Iran’s state-affiliated media point to a crisis that can no longer be dismissed as temporary hardship. The regime’s own economists warn of a looming “poverty explosion,” with roughly 4.5 million more Iranians at risk of falling below the poverty line this year. They also estimate Iran’s direct and indirect economic losses at about $12 billion, excluding longer-term damage.

These figures measure national ruin under a regime that has diverted the country’s resources toward repression, proxy warfare, nuclear expansion, missiles, corruption and ideological survival. Iran is not poor for lack of resources. It is poor because its rulers have plundered the nation and treated its people as subjects to be controlled.

The consequences are visible across society. Families are cutting meat, milk, rice and eggs from their diets. Workers remain poor despite employment. Young people face prolonged joblessness. Small businesses, especially those run by women online, have been devastated by internet blackouts and digital restrictions. In provinces such as Sistan and Baluchistan, Khuzestan, Ilam and Kerman, food insecurity is not marginal. It is a symptom of a state designed to protect power rather than people.

Some argue that sanctions relief could help ordinary Iranians. Experience suggests otherwise. Under the clerical regime’s mafia-style governance, new revenue rarely reaches the public. It strengthens the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ enterprises and institutions that repress society and finance aggression abroad. The urgent question is how democracies can support Iranians who risk imprisonment, torture and death to demand an end to dictatorship.

On May 16, thousands of Iranian Americans rallied and marched in Washington, D.C., warning that Iran’s crisis is not merely a foreign policy problem. It is a test of whether the West will stand with a people fighting dictatorship or continue managing a regime surviving through repression at home and aggression abroad.

That message will echo in Paris on June 20, when more than 100,000 members of the Iranian diaspora and supporters of democracy are expected to rally for a free, secular, democratic republic. Their message is neither a call for foreign war nor a plea for accommodation with Tehran. It is a call to recognize the Iranian people’s right to self-defense, self-determination and a free Iran.

Tehran’s regional aggression and domestic repression are not separate problems. They reflect one governing doctrine: preserving the regime at any cost. Reports of internal security warnings about unrest driven by inflation and shortages show what Tehran understands better than many Western policymakers: Economic despair in Iran is not passive. It can become organized anger.

That is why executions, censorship and poverty must be understood together. Maryam Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran has described the regime as a “government of hunger, homelessness and religious tyranny.” In recent weeks, she warned that the regime’s “strategy of the noose” is inseparable from its mismanagement of Iran’s crises. Mass repression is how the state tries to contain the fury produced by its own failures.

For Washington, this requires a clearer policy lens. Iran should not be viewed only through the nuclear file, maritime security or regional proxy networks. Those issues matter, but they are symptoms of a deeper problem: a system that exports violence abroad while crushing society at home.

A serious U.S. policy should put human security at the center. It should make executions and political imprisonment central to any engagement with Tehran. It should expand support for secure internet access and censorship circumvention. It should target financial networks that enrich security institutions while ordinary people go hungry. It should also support accountability for torture, enforced disappearances and executions.

This approach rejects the false choice between appeasement and war. The Iranian people are not asking the United States to impose a leader or engineer their future. They are asking democratic societies not to legitimize the dictatorship that represses them.

For American policymakers, the conclusion is clear: a regime that fears hunger, depends on blackouts and answers poverty with executions cannot be treated as stable, legitimate or a partner for peace.

Tehran can throttle communication. It can jail students, workers, journalists, women and dissidents. But it cannot censor hunger.

Ivan Sascha Sheehan is the interim dean of the College of Public Affairs and professor of public and international affairs at the University of Baltimore. Ramesh Sepehrrad is a visiting scholar at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.