In a functioning international order—one that took international law seriously and treated civilian protection as more than rhetoric—we would not be trapped in today’s absurd and dangerous choice between a government killing its citizens and U.S. military action that would further endanger civilians and distort any path toward democratic change. This false binary reflects a deeper credibility gap in U.S. foreign policy—a pattern in which the language of human rights and democratic solidarity is invoked selectively, embraced when it aligns with geopolitical aims and quietly abandoned when it becomes inconvenient.
This collapse of guardrails is now acutely visible in Iran, along with the mistrust in diplomatic solutions.
The scale, persistence, and geographic spread of these protests mark a qualitative shift. According to data compiled by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, or HRANA, at least 544 people have been killed in the course of the protests so far, with hundreds of additional deaths still under investigation. More than 10,600 people have been arrested, and demonstrations have been recorded in over 180 cities across all 31 provinces. These figures have emerged despite a near-total internet shutdown since the evening of January 8, which severely hinders independent verification. They point to a sweeping campaign of repression aimed at extinguishing dissent rather than addressing its causes.
This dynamic is not without precedent. One of us witnessed it firsthand in Egypt in 2011, while working alongside civil society actors during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. The regime responded with killings, internet shutdowns, and claims of foreign conspiracy, believing repression would restore order. Instead, it accelerated Mubarak’s downfall by alienating a broader spectrum of society and destroying what remained of the regime’s legitimacy. While the Iranian and Egyptian systems are profoundly different, once a regime crosses a certain threshold of violence and denial, coercion alone cannot reconstitute the political order it seeks to preserve.
That is why calls for U.S. military intervention in Iran are profoundly misguided. Political change cannot be engineered or forced from the outside without warping its outcome. Societies do not reach stability through the triumph of one faction imposed by foreign backers, but through internal rebalancing shaped by their own social forces, pressures, and conflicts.
What is already clear is that the Islamic Republic cannot simply repress its way back to the political status quo ante. How this reckoning unfolds remains uncertain and contested, but it will be shaped primarily inside Iran, and not by foreign military force.
In a world where international law has been weakened and civilian protection treated as conditional, Trump offers war as a substitute for politics. U.S. military intervention in Iran would accelerate that erosion, reinforcing the lesson that when institutions fail and diplomacy collapses, military force fills the vacuum. That message is likely to empower the most coercive actors worldwide, exacerbate instability, and further hollow out an international order that once aspired to constrain both domestic repression and war.
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