The Liberation Trap: The Iran War and Its Unforeseen Fallout
In 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, he delivered an address to the Egyptian people, saying, “I have come to restore your rights and punish your usurpers.” That statement did not sit well with the Egyptian chronicler of the occupation, Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, who suspected ulterior motives and did not see a happy transition from the autocratic rule of the Mamluk beys to the arrival of French troops. He was proven right. A similar liberation trap now ensnares the adversaries in the Iran war. After launching attacks on the Islamic Republic in late February, America and Israel initially scripted a narrative of liberation and rescue for Iranians, whose protests were cruelly suppressed by their government more than three months ago. President Trump has since moved away from that liberation narrative, as the war has exposed sobering realities.
The upheaval in Iran derived from systemic inequality and political repression. The Islamic Republic’s investment in militarization and regional conflicts came at the expense of everyday Iranians, subjecting them to debilitating sanctions. As elsewhere, dissent surfaces when central authority falters or fails to deliver necessary services, giving outsiders an opportunity to strike. In Iran, that opportunity presented itself in late February, but the world is now grappling with its unforeseen fallout. Ironically, the regime has not only outlasted the opening salvos but has also gained sympathy from certain quarters in its existential fight. Surely, this is not the outcome that the combatants wanted.
Time and again, when foreign powers intervene, instability follows. Iran offers one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon. In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Convention, which created spheres of foreign influence, undermined the new parliamentary regime. During the Great War, several powers ignored Iran's neutrality, creating widespread upheaval. After World War I, Britain tried to ram through an agreement that would make Iran a de facto protectorate, but instead, Reza Khan came to power (ostensibly with British support) and tried to centralize Iranian authority. In the Second World War, the amphibious invasion of Iran created a cadre of disaffected youth who never forgot the humiliation of the occupation. Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq came to prominence in that context and led the charge to nationalize Iranian oil. His removal through foreign intervention doomed the remainder of the shah’s rule. Even the Islamic revolution drew in external powers, though much of the record remains in sealed archives. After 1979, successive protest movements—all rooted in popular grievances—became vulnerable to foreign agendas, reframed to fit outside narratives or the Islamic Republic’s state priorities, rather than as authentic expressions of Iranian society.
This pattern of intervention and failure recurs across vastly different contexts. Reformist uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) gained traction through broad coalitions seeking political openness. Yet once foreign intervention occurred—whether through military invasion or the threat of it—these movements collapsed. External involvement hardened authoritarian impulses, narrowed political imagination, and left little space for gradual or negotiated change. The priorities of geopolitical conflicts, such as the Cold War, temporarily silenced domestic struggles.
Foreign support for Iran's popular protest movements should be distinguished from the current US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic, however, which is focused on degrading the theocracy’s military power and reshaping the Middle East. The US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic of Iran is not about regime change anymore – and maybe it never was. In any event, these goals might have been more attainable by supporting protesters seeking a democratic state, rather than folding their struggle into a protracted regional war.
Iranians Caught in the Liberation Trap
It is difficult to map out what Iranians desire amid this conflict, given the fractured and contradictory perspectives within the Iranian diaspora and at home. Pundits with their own political agendas tend to strip away political complexity, leaving only their preferred version of reality. For example, some try to misrepresent all supporters of Reza Pahlavi intentionally, in the wake of relentless strikes against Iranian civilians, as anti-Arab racists, overlooking that the last shah once had an Egyptian wife (of Albanian descent but culturally Arab) and maintained cordial relations with many Arab neighbors. They exploit the Arab/Ajam divide to misrepresent not only segments of his diaspora support, but many other regime opponents, as Islamophobic and filled with a misguided sense of Persian exceptionalism. This is not a debate about Reza Pahlavi, his leadership abilities, or lack thereof. Rather, it is about the ways the narrative is politicized in the diaspora, which needs correcting. While elements of this narrative are found among some of Reza Pahlavi’s supporters and others, they do not capture the range of political perspectives held by many Iranians in the diaspora who oppose the Islamic Republic. Regime opponents cannot all be caricatured as right-wing racists, though some certainly fit that profile.
In point of fact, the Islamic Republic has of late appropriated nationalist tropes evoking ancient Persian identity and civilization to mobilize public support in its confrontation with the United States and Israel. In addition, some of the Islamic Republic's policies have exposed it to charges of racism and discrimination, betraying biases, indicating that Iran as a whole needs substantial improvement on this front.
At the same time, it is hard to explain the support that some in Iran and abroad have expressed for the devastating US-Israeli attacks, initially packaged within a liberation narrative. The prevailing—yet crude—consensus posits that many Iranians are so desperate to oust the regime that they would accept devastating bombardments as a necessary cost. But one month into the war, is this still the case? While the immediate euphoria in some quarters following Ayatollah Khamenei’s killing has leveled off, some dissidents continue to view the current conflict as a brutal but singular escape from an otherwise inescapable political deadlock. Many others vehemently disagree and can no longer rally around an invasion that has brought widespread ruin to the country – even if they, too, hope to see a different and better regime in place. Both factions want their struggles and the deaths of tens of thousands of their compatriots to bear fruit. What this shows is that the propaganda warfare outside the country has badly undermined the possibility of change and unity for Iranians – something desperately needed in this brutal war.
Difficult as it is to make this point, the ongoing war between the Islamic Republic and the United States / Israel may have derailed the trajectory of radical political change for Iran indefinitely, however. As the war lingers, survival and nationalist fervor will prevail, shaping public sentiment. This outcome echoes the historical trap al-Jabarti recorded centuries earlier.
