Iran at an impasse: What options remain for the regime?

Now entering the third week of massive protests — which have spread in recent days to the majority of provinces, with some turning violent — the Iranian regime appears to be at an impasse. Under pressure from both a population galvanized by an economic crisis exacerbated by recent Western sanctions and the threat of intervention from from Donald Trump's United States, if many protesters are killed, what scenarios are currently available to the Islamic Republic?Risky continuation of the usual methodsThe most conventional option for the regime would be to suppress the protests with harsh repression, as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement between 2022 and 2023 eventually lost momentum faced with the authorities’ inflexibility and the hundreds of victims of the security forces. Our editorial The fate of the uprising in Iran is...