The United States is not watching events in Iran with concern. It is fiddling, as it has always done—plucking at social tensions, amplifying fractures, and waiting for a collapse it can claim as liberation.
Ranjan Solomon
THE claim that Iran is witnessing a decisive, popular revolt driven purely by internal discontent must be treated with caution, if not outright scepticism. This is not to deny that Iranian society has faultlines, grievances, and debates—every society does. But to present the current unrest as a spontaneous democratic awakening, while stripping it of geopolitical context, is not analysis. It is narrative management. And the hand of the United States is once again unmistakably present.
Washington has never reconciled itself to Iran’s sovereignty. Since the 1953 CIA–MI6 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh for daring to nationalise Iran’s oil, the US has viewed Iran not as a nation with agency but as a problem to be neutralised. That foundational crime still shapes the relationship. What followed—support for the Shah’s dictatorship, the arming of Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war, relentless sanctions, assassinations of scientists, cyber-attacks like Stuxnet, and a permanent state of economic siege—amounts to a long war by other means.
Iran’s real sin is not authoritarianism. It is independence. Iran remains a civilisational state that refuses to fold itself into the US-Israeli security order in West Asia. It does not host American bases, does not subcontract its foreign policy to Washington, does not recognise Israel, and does not accept that the region must remain permanently subordinated to Western interests. For this defiance alone, Iran has been marked for containment, destabilisation, and eventual fracture.
What we are witnessing today is not a classic coup attempt but a more refined strategy: information warfare blended with economic exhaustion. Sanctions designed to suffocate daily life are paired with relentless media amplification of dissent, often stripped of scale, verification, and nuance. Social media floods are treated as evidence of national collapse. Anonymous videos circulate without context. Exile groups with deep Western funding pipelines are presented as authentic voices of the Iranian people. Western NGOs issue reports that move seamlessly from press release to headline, rarely questioned.
This is not solidarity; it is orchestration.
The irony is painful. At a time when Western streets—from London to Paris to Washington—are heaving with rage over Gaza, austerity, racism, and democratic erosion, those same governments suddenly claim moral urgency over Iran. The protests in Western capitals are massive, sustained, and often violently suppressed. Yet no one frames them as existential legitimacy crises of the West. When police batons crack skulls in Paris or students are dragged out of US universities for opposing genocide, this is called “law and order.” When Iran enforces public order, it becomes proof of tyranny.
The selectivity is revealing.
If women’s rights were the real concern, Saudi Arabia would be sanctioned into isolation. If democracy were the benchmark, Egypt would be under embargo. If human rights mattered, Israel would face punitive action rather than unconditional arms shipments. The truth is simpler and uglier: human rights are invoked only against those who resist Western power.
Iran is not a utopia, and it does not need to be romanticised to be defended. There are genuine debates within Iranian society—about governance, cultural norms, economic justice, and generational change. But these debates belong to Iranians, not to Washington think tanks or Western intelligence agencies. External interference does not empower reform; it poisons it. It hardens positions, delegitimises internal critique, and turns social questions into national security crises.
The goal is not reform but erosion. Not dialogue but delegitimisation. Not solidarity but exhaustion.
This campaign also serves a broader strategic purpose. A weakened Iran benefits Israel’s regional ambitions, fractures resistance to occupation, and clears the ground for Western re-entry into West Asia under the familiar banner of “stability.” It distracts from Gaza, from Western complicity in mass killing, and from the collapse of moral authority in Euro-Atlantic capitals. Iran becomes the convenient villain onto which all anxieties are projected.
History offers a grim warning. Wherever the United States has claimed to champion freedom—Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan—the result has been devastation, not democracy. Societies emerge fractured, economies destroyed, and sovereignty hollowed out. The language is always uplifting; the outcomes are always catastrophic.
Iran understands this history. That is why it resists not only militarily or diplomatically, but civilisationally. It insists on the right to chart its own course, however imperfectly. That insistence alone makes it dangerous in the eyes of empire.
To question Western narratives on Iran is not to deny Iranian agency. It is to defend it. It is to say that genuine change cannot be scripted in Washington, televised by Western media, or engineered through sanctions that starve the poor while empowering elites. It must come from within, at a pace and in a language chosen by the people themselves.
The United States is not watching events in Iran with concern. It is fiddling, as it has always done—plucking at social tensions, amplifying fractures, and waiting for a collapse it can claim as liberation.
We would do well not to mistake sabotage for solidarity, or empire for conscience.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
