The Iranian regime’s first victims are its own people

But before any of that happens, there are already victims. They live inside Iran.

The Iranian people are too often treated as a secondary concern, eclipsed by geopolitical calculations and security debates. That framing misses something fundamental. The regime’s threat to the outside world begins with how it governs at home. The same system that projects coercive power abroad sustains itself through coercion within.

Iran does not conceal its repression. It broadcasts it.

Arrests are public. Executions are announced. Internet access is blocked. Morality police enforce compliance openly and aggressively. The message is unmistakable: Dissent will be seen, punished and remembered.

Protests in Iran trigger a familiar sequence. Security forces sweep the streets. Courts move quickly. Death sentences follow. This is not law enforcement; it is messaging. Punishment is deployed deliberately, turning protesters into warnings for everyone else.

The same logic governs Iran’s extensive morality laws. These rules dictate how people dress, where they go, what they say and how they behave online. They are not cultural safeguards. They are mechanisms of control, asserting comprehensive authority over the individual.

That isolation is deliberate. It blocks solidarity. It erases memory. It prevents resistance from becoming collective.

Over time, these practices reshape everyday life. Participation gives way to compliance. Public punishment replaces public debate. Fear fills the space where civic life should exist.

This form of rule does not depend on constant violence. It depends on the expectation of it. Once fear is internalized, cruelty becomes efficient. The regime no longer needs to punish everyone. It only needs to punish enough.

In Iran, silence is safety. The regime enforces this lesson relentlessly. Those who speak are punished; those who withdraw are spared. Survival depends not on participation, but on retreat from public life.

As U.S. officials consider renewed diplomatic engagement with Tehran, it is tempting to narrow the discussion to security concerns alone.

But diplomacy that treats Iran’s internal repression as a secondary issue rests on an incomplete picture of the regime itself. A government that rules by terrorizing its own population cannot be separated from the threats it poses beyond its borders. A regime that treats human beings as instruments at home will approach agreements the same way—transactional, disposable and contingent on convenience.

Any serious approach to Iran must therefore confront the full scope of the threat the regime poses—not only to regional security and global nonproliferation, but to the Iranian people themselves. Their repression is not peripheral to the problem. It is central to it.

Clarity matters because confusion benefits power. Vague language blurs responsibility. What is happening in Iran should be understood plainly: This is a regime that governs by breaking its own people.

Iran’s regime has not merely failed its population. It has destroyed the conditions that make ordinary civic life possible.