Iran and the World: A Defining Crossroads

By Sheema Kalbasi

Available reporting indicates protesters’ demands in Iran have shifted decisively from economic grievances and reformist appeals to outright rejection of the governing system. This removes all internal pressure valves. The population is no longer negotiating. It is revolting. When opposition movements abandon reformist objectives and delegitimize the system itself, regimes lose all nonviolent mechanisms of control. In such cases, force becomes the sole governing tool. Iran has crossed that threshold.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is now actively engaged in mass lethal repression of its own population at a scale not observed since the consolidation of the post-1979 system. Multiple independent activist networks, regional intelligence sources, and on-the-ground reporting indicate between twelve and twenty thousand civilians were reportedly killed over a three-day period. This constitutes a decisive shift from authoritarian repression to organized mass killing.

For decades, Western assessments characterized the regime as resilient, capable of managing unrest through coercion, patronage, and ideological control. That assessment is now obsolete. The scope, speed, and brutality of the current crackdown indicate the regime no longer believes it can govern through consent or incremental repression. It has transitioned to exterminatory logic.

Iran is no longer a state experiencing unrest. It is a state in economic freefall, and at war with its own population. Regimes that cross this line historically face only two outcomes: collapse through internal fracture or prolonged civil war sustained by mass violence. There is no path back to stability. The current trajectory guarantees escalation.

In 1938, the world hesitated while Jewish businesses burned in Germany. In Bosnia, it hesitated while mass graves filled the countryside. In Rwanda, it hesitated while a million people were butchered. Every time, the language was the same: too complex, too risky, not our fight, we don’t have perfect information. Each time, delay multiplied the dead.

America did not wait for perfect intelligence before confronting Nazi Germany. It did not demand certainty before stopping Milošević. It did not refuse action when ethnic cleansing was broadcast live on European television. Intervention occurred because the alternative was far worse. What is happening in Iran now is not a future threat. It is happening now.

When a state kills its citizens at this scale, sovereignty is no longer a shield. It forfeits it. The argument that “intervention will destabilize the region” is analytically indefensible. The region is already destabilized—by the Islamic Republic’s militias, by its weapons shipments, and by its wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The regime exported violence for four decades. It has now turned it inward at industrial scale.

To do nothing is complicity.

We are told intervention might “cause civil war.” Civil war is already here, and timely intervention is the only thing that could prevent it from becoming a full-blown civil war.

Right now, one side has tanks, drones, prisons, and firing squads, while the other side has cell phones and courage. As Iran becomes a failed state in the face of economic collapse and its declaration of war against its citizens, taking up arms becomes inevitable. When the state massacres thousands in days, the war has begun, whether we acknowledge it or not.

From a regional security perspective, the implications are severe. Iran’s proxy network depends on centralized command, funding, and ideological cohesion. A regime fighting its own population at this scale cannot indefinitely sustain external control. Proxy coordination will degrade. Autonomous violence will increase. Regional actors will exploit power vacuums. Escalation risk will multiply, not diminish.

Periods of regime breakdown historically increase proliferation risk. Degraded command structures, elite rivalries, and desperation incentivize reckless signaling behavior. Sensitive capabilities become more dangerous under fragmentation than stability.

The window for action is closing.

From a U.S. strategic perspective, Washington does not control Iran’s internal dynamics, but it controls its own response. Preventing mass slaughter, limiting regional war, preventing proliferation chaos, and maintaining global credibility are central to U.S. interests.

Failure to act now will not preserve stability. It will guarantee far worse instability later. Legitimacy collapse, economic failure, and mass violence now reinforce each other in a closed vicious loop. The crisis is irreversible. The stakes are high.

Should U.S. aid help to usher in a free Iran, the strategic prize is enormous. It would dismantle the central engine of Middle Eastern instability and open a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity to benefit both the Iranian people and the world. With a population of nearly 90 million, elite human capital, and massive energy reserves, Iran’s liberation would instantly reshape global energy markets, weaken adversarial blocs, and collapse the regime’s proxy war architecture across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

For Europe, this means energy security without dependence on hostile suppliers. For the United States, it means the removal of the most aggressive anti-Western actor in the region and a decisive rollback of Russian and Chinese leverage. Sanctions would end. Capital would flood in. Western firms would dominate reconstruction, infrastructure, and tech sectors.

This is not humanitarian charity. This is sober geopolitical calculus. A democratic Iran would export growth instead of militias, trade instead of terror, and stability instead of ideological warfare.

History rewards states that shape outcomes, not those who observe atrocities and issue statements. The opportunity is strategic.

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Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-Danish-American poet and writer. She trained and served in the Danish Defence. She is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2008), Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024), and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026).

Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Pushcart Prize Anthology, PEN America, Writer’s Digest, PBS, and NPR, and has been set to music and visual art, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at venues including the Smithsonian National Museum, The Writers Studio, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), and the Canadian Parliament.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.