What Would a Free Iran Mean for the World?

Five writers, each from a different country, on the global consequences of Iran's protests.

Editor’s Note: Since the end of December, Iranians have been taking to the streets to protest a corrupt, theocratic regime that has doled out abuse after abuse against them for nearly half a century.

In recent weeks, Americans have become (re-)acquainted with the vicious treatment the Iranian regime reserves for its own people. International headlines tout casualty figures in the tens of thousands while the Iranian authorities shroud the country in a nationwide telecommunications blackout.

What media coverage often skips over, however, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran has also destroyed lives across the Middle East and farther afield. Iran has propped up dictators and terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. The Russian military menaces Ukrainian civilians with Iranian weapons.

Iranians braving bullets and batons are not only fighting for their own freedom. They are fighting for the entire world.

One of our principles at The Next Move is to fill in strategic blind spots by connecting the dots. To showcase the globe-spanning consequences of the protests in Iran, The Next Move has assembled a unique slate of distinguished authors: one Iranian, one Palestinian, one Israeli, one Yemeni, and one Ukrainian. We asked them each to consider what a free Iran would mean.

Their analysis is at once clear-eyed and inspiring. As people who know the arbitrary violence of the Islamic Republic firsthand, these writers understand that those who aspire to democracy in Iran face an uphill battle. But they also speak to the need for fundamental change. A world with a free Iran would be a better world—a freer, more secure world indeed.

As always, thank you for your support and readership. We look forward to continuing the conversation in the comments and on our next premium subscriber Zoom call.

— Garry Kasparov
Founder & Chairman, Renew Democracy Initiative

— Evan Gottesman
Managing Editor, The Next Move

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An Iranian Perspective: Freedom Is a Necessity Like Air

Marina Nemat is the author of Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed, published in thirty countries. She has received various international awards and has given talks at high schools, universities, and conferences worldwide. Her next book, Mistress of the Persian Boarding House, will be published in summer 2026 by Penguin Random House Canada.

For Iranians living in the country, a free and democratic Iran is not a want or dream; it is a necessity like air.

Images of mass murder have flooded news outlets and social media as the Iranian regime turns against its own people. Iranians want to be free of the Islamic Republic, a brutal dictatorship that has massacred them for 47 years, and I have a feeling of terrifying déjà vu.

Within a year of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, many of us were already on the streets protesting. We saw that Ayatollah Khomeini had no intention to keep his promises about making the lives of Iranians better than they had been during the time of the shah. Even though we had no political freedoms before the revolution, we had personal ones; now the ayatollah was in the process of making the hijab mandatory for women when I had grown up dancing to the Bee Gees while wearing a bikini on the beach. The Revolutionary Guard attacked every protest rally I attended in the 1980s. We were shot at. Many died. Others were arrested.

I spent more than two years in Evin Prison and was tortured and raped. I was just shy of 19 when I was released, devastated and broken.

The people of Iran are still dying on the streets not only because they want freedom, but because they can’t put food on the table. The Revolutionary Guard has spread its tentacles into every aspect of Iranian life; they now practically own Iran’s economy. For them, money and power have been flowing in ceaselessly, and they don’t care how much blood they shed to keep it coming. Iranians are hostages of their own government. Today, those who protest—hundreds of thousands—know very well that they face a high likelihood of a violent death, yet they still take to the streets. All hope has been snuffed out, and Iranians forced into a deadly corner, so they feel they might as well die standing with their heads held high.

Iran has been forced under the murky waters of cruelty and evil for decades, and it has completely run out of breath. Iranians are at a point where they are not risking their lives to make things better, they are fighting for their lives, for survival.

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A Palestinian Perspective: The Road to a Free Palestine Runs Through a Free Iran

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a Palestinian-American from Gaza. He is the founder and director of the Realign for Palestine project at the Atlantic Council, which publishes The Radical Pragmatist on Substack.

For Palestinians, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been like a bad friend who lets you drive drunk. The regime in Tehran enables and empowers the worst elements of Palestinian society, funding and arming groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—terrorists who oppress our people and pursue a strategy of perpetual, unwinnable war with Israel. We know that Iranian officials were involved in the planning of the October 7 attacks, which triggered the most catastrophic chapter in Palestinian history.

Through nearly half a century, the ayatollahs have used Palestinians as a political prop to justify the destruction of countless lives across the Middle East. The expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is called the Quds Force, literally, the “Jerusalem Force.” In the name of the Palestinian people, the Quds Force has committed terrible crimes in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, earning it a designation as a terrorist organization by the United States and Canada.

It does not have to be this way.

Imagine a democratic Iran. A liberated Iran would not need foreign adventures to distract from its theocratic rule. The new Iran would cut off Hamas and offshoots like PIJ. Instead of an exchange of arms and corrosive ideologies, the Iran-Palestine relationship could become an exchange of knowledge and practical ideas. Iran’s society is an educated one, and the country produces more engineers than any other in our region. Palestinians could benefit from their expertise and partnership in rebuilding Gaza’s ruined landscape and infrastructure.

Iran, reborn as a successful Middle Eastern democracy, could also offer a model for Palestinians building a future state and national project.

With the Islamic Republic gone, the Iranian missile and nuclear issue would be struck from the Israeli domestic political agenda. Palestinians would have an opening to peacefully force the question of a two-state solution and an end to decades of Israeli military occupation.

The brave protesters on the streets of Tehran and other cities across Iran are doing more for the Palestinian cause than any kalashnikov-toting thug in the Qassam Brigades ever will. The road to a free Palestine runs through a free Iran.

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An Israeli Perspective: We Are Not The Enemy of the Iranian People

Ksenia Svetlova is a former member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. She previously worked as a journalist and reported from Syria, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, and the West Bank. Ksenia is currently executive director of the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics, and Security.

In recent weeks, Iranian protestors have displayed visceral courage to oppose an oppressive regime. And yet, a sober geopolitical assessment suggests we are no closer to a definitive breaking point than we were before the unrest began. The clerical regime remains entrenched, maintaining its suffocating grip through a combination of brutal repression and a calculated internet blackout. It is a persistent tragedy for a nation of 90 million people—a country of immense cultural and economic potential that continues to be choked by the ideological obsessions of its leaders.

Yet, it is remarkably easy to envision a different future for Iran and its supposed “eternal enemy,” Israel. If the Islamic Republic were to give way to a government focused on national healing and economic restoration rather than the export of Islamic revolution, the Middle East would undergo a seismic recalibration. A new Iran, seeking normalized relations with the world, would fundamentally change the regional security architecture.

The most immediate shift would be in bilateral relations. If Tehran ceased prioritizing the destruction of Israel, we would likely see the resumption of direct flights and trade—features of a pre-1979 era. For Israel, the “day after” would offer a massive peace dividend, potentially allowing for a significant reduction in defense spending currently earmarked for the Iranian threat. Even a transactional, non-hostile relationship would represent a monumental upgrade from the current doctrine of “wiping Israel from the map.”

Furthermore, the Iranian web of proxies would face immediate systemic failure. While the Houthis might retain a localized grip on power in Yemen, their capacity to project force with ballistic missiles would vanish without Tehran’s technical support. Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi militias—deprived of their financial and political lifelines—would see their influence shrink toward domestic irrelevance. Groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which function purely as Iranian satellites, would likely disappear altogether. This vacuum would grant nations like Lebanon and Iraq a historic opportunity to reclaim their sovereignty from foreign subversion.

A future post-Islamic Republic-Iran will undoubtedly remain a regional powerhouse with its own strategic interests and desire for independence. However, such a state would operate through diplomacy and economic alliances rather than subversion. Millions of Iranians already recognize that Israel is not inevitably their enemy; they understand that the regime has used the “Zionist threat” as a red herring to distract from its own domestic failures. A peaceful, integrated future for both nations is possible—provided the current regime finally gives way to the will of its people.

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A Yemeni Perspective: Don’t Let the Houthi Monster Outlive Its Creator

Fatima Abo Alasrar is the founder of the Ideology Machine Project and a senior policy analyst at the Washington Center for Yemeni Studies.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has entered its final act. By turning its guns on its own people, Tehran has traded its future for a temporary, blood-soaked stability, a move that ensures its eventual collapse under the weight of its own injustice. Yet, as the sun sets on the mullahs, the West is making a fatal miscalculation: assuming the shadow falls with the man. In Yemen, the Houthis—the Iran-sponsored group that gained international notoriety for their Red Sea priracy—have never been more physically vulnerable. The Houthis’ cabinets are gutted by airstrikes, and their patrons are paralyzed by domestic survival. Yet, they have also never been more ideologically permanent.

If status quo thinking prevails in Washington, the Houthis will easily outlive their patrons in Tehran. Tehran’s investment has created a political Frankenstein, a creature that has developed its own pulse and no longer needs its creator to survive.

This was by design. For years, Tehran denied supporting the militia to cultivate the group’s image as an autonomous, indigenous force. While the missiles and drones that the Revolutionary Guards supply matter, they are ultimately replaceable. What will be more challenging to undo is the ideological infrastructure Iran spent a decade embedding into the structures of North Yemen.

This system of indoctrination is now so deeply rooted in areas under Houthi control in northern Yemen that it operates independently of Tehran’s direct control. The Houthis have even evolved the faiths of their forefathers to align with a localized version of Khomeinism. They created an Islamic Republic of Iran in miniature, replicating Iran’s cult of martyrdom and its professionalized instrumentalization of grievance. They’ve built the schools, media apparatus, and social control mechanisms modeled on Iran’s script.

September 21, 2014, the day the Houthis seized Sanaa, was Yemen’s 1979. It birthed a revolutionary project that has transformed a generation. Children who were toddlers when the capital fell are now teenagers conscripted into a worldview that posits jihad as a civic duty and hatred as moral clarity. The slogan on their flag, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews”, is no longer a chant. It is a catechism.

The international community still sees the Houthis as a local problem. They are not. They control the Red Sea’s chokepoints. They have proven they can strike deep into Israel. Russia launders their image through propaganda campaigns. China cuts quiet deals for safe passage through the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Washington bled resources on defensive naval patrols.

Right now, the Houthis are fragile. Israeli strikes shattered their mythology of invulnerability. Their leadership is paranoid. But instead of pressing this advantage, the West retreats into the familiar comfort of “stability.” UN envoys pursue dialogue with a group that only understands force. When the Islamic Republic dies, the Houthi monster will not necessarily follow its maker into the grave. If we are not careful, we will be the ones keeping the threat alive.

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A Ukrainian Perspective: Russian Oil, Iranian Weapons

Oleh Dunda is a member of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where he is co-chair of the Inter-parliamentary Association For the Decolonization of Russia. Dunda is a regular participant in international security forums including the Warsaw Security Forum, the Vilnius Security Forum, the Berlin Forum, and the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum.

The Free World has been watching recent protests in Iran with attention and excitement. Ukrainians in particular know that this conflict is not as distant as it may appear. Events in Iran could be of key importance for Ukrainian and global security for one simple reason: Iran’s oil reserves are among the largest in the world.

These oil reserves directly and indirectly influence the bloody events unfolding across the globe. On the one hand, illicit oil sales allow the ayatollah’s regime to directly finance various terrorist proxies in the Middle East. On the other, Iran’s relative isolation allows Russia to benefit from Brent oil prices at $60-70 per barrel on world markets. These dynamics persist because of Tehran’s unwillingness to change and become part of the global economy, which would result in the development of the Iranian oil industry.

In the long term, the establishment of a democratic government in Iran could bring the country into the world economic system, lowering oil prices, and denying Russia a critical revenue stream, thus hastening Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine. This is on top of the immediate benefit for the Iranian people: stopping the killing in Iran and establishing a stable peace in the Middle East.

The fall of the Iranian regime would also be a significant political loss for Russia, which has already seen authoritarian clients overthrown in Venezuela and Syria. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic have grown significantly closer. Iran supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones, which were hurled against our cities. The Iranian regime also reportedly sent ammunition and artillery to Russian forces. Russia and Iran are increasingly aligned politically in their anti-Western stance. The Islamic Republic’s fall would expose Russia’s weakness to the world.

But how can the fall of the ayatollah be achieved? The world should not watch Iranian protests and assume that the day is already won. Any wrong move in relation to Iran could lead to chaos and further violence instead of a more open society. Turmoil could spread to other authoritarian countries in the Persian Gulf, whose stability and sustainability are exaggerated. Further conflict in the Middle East would lead to a crisis in the oil market and an increase in Russia’s oil revenues. As a result, autocrats would gain at the expense of freedom-loving Iranians, Ukrainians, and others fighting for democracy around the world.

These challenges alone make it clear that resolving the issue of a democratic Iran could take a great deal of time and resources. The world should remain invested in events in Iran, for their development will affect the Middle East, Ukraine, and beyond. The situation in Iran is complex. It cannot be resolved with a cavalry charge overnight nor through a single air strike.

But the potential benefits of a democratic Iran carry global significance that makes them well worth fighting for: for the Iranian people, for Ukrainians, for Americans, and for all those who share their values.

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