Hardliners in Tehran are pressing for further military and nuclear escalation despite mounting economic pressure and a widening confrontation with the United States. Is it a reckless gamble, or a realistic response to Iran’s dwindling options?
Soaring food prices in Iran are increasingly reflected in reports of theft, with groceries appearing in cases ranging from first-time shoplifting to warehouse raids and armed robbery.
Iran is seeking to turn the US maritime blockade back on Washington by expanding its retaliation beyond the Strait of Hormuz, threatening shipping across a wider area after US attacks on Iranian tankers.
Moderate and reformist figures in Tehran are increasingly warning that the country cannot sustain a prolonged war, challenging hardline calls for Iranians to accept further economic hardship as the price of resistance.
Calls by former presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami to end Iran’s war with the United States have triggered a fiercer political confrontation after they invoked public opinion in support of diplomacy rather than continued fighting.
Donald Trump said again on Friday that the United States may soon strike Pickaxe Mountain, the underground complex near Natanz that is the last significant site linked to Iran's nuclear program still untouched after two wars.
When a refrigerator breaks in Iran now, the family often cannot replace it, and increasingly cannot afford to repair it either. Behind that is an industry losing its raw materials, its customers and, since March, two of the industrial hubs that supplied it.
A debate is widening in Tehran over whether Iran is exhausting one of its most powerful weapons against the United States, with growing warnings that the Strait of Hormuz could lose its effectiveness the longer restrictions continue.
Iranians have found a way to complain about prices that no prosecutor can touch: they film themselves dancing beside the groceries, insist they are delighted, and explain that if they were not, they would be executed.
The latest round of US and Iranian attacks has shifted the debate in Tehran from whether the country is in crisis to a more fundamental question: what does survival now require—compromise or continued confrontation?
A fleeting encounter between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and China’s Xi Jinping in Bishkek has reignited an uncomfortable debate in Tehran: just how strategic is Iran’s much-vaunted partnership with Beijing?
An economic forecast produced by Iran’s own government planners more than five years ago projected where continued sanctions would leave inflation and the national currency by 2026—and the numbers have proved strikingly accurate.
Five months after Iran's women footballers sought asylum in Australia, the football federation has called the squad back into camp, not to train but to film a documentary about what happened there. Some of the players it wants on camera are the ones who came home under pressure.
Calls for preemptive strikes on US forces are growing in Iran after renewed US attacks, intensifying debate over whether Tehran should shift away from a mainly retaliatory strategy.
Hours after Tehran called on Washington to return to the Islamabad memorandum, President Donald Trump dismissed the value of any agreement with Iran, ordered massive strikes on southern Iran and threatened an even larger attack if Tehran retaliates.
An Iran International investigation into five US-wanted hackers linked to the IRGC and Intelligence Ministry found they combined state-directed espionage with selling stolen data, extortion and attacks on Iranian citizens and companies for profit.
The Islamic Republic moved beliefs about the unseen from the margins of society to the center of power, and used oil money to give them institutions, budgets and a propaganda apparatus, so that its rulers could draw legitimacy from a source no citizen can question.
A dispute over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has escalated into a broader political fight after President Masoud Pezeshkian’s son and adviser Yusef Pezeshkian defended remarks questioning whether enrichment is worth its costs during wartime.
China’s refusal to bow to US sanctions has raised hopes in Tehran that Beijing could blunt Washington’s new economic offensive, but a debate inside Iran reveals doubts over how far China is willing or able to go on Iran’s behalf.
Mohsen Rezaei on Friday set out four Iranian conditions for an agreement with the United States, another sign that the former IRGC commander who once championed an “offensive doctrine” may be moving from advocating war to contemplating a deal at the right price.
Dying has become one of the costs Iranians can no longer meet. Burial plots are advertised at years of wages, families are selling the graves they had reserved for themselves, and some are taking their dead to villages where burial is still free.
As Washington targets the financial and trading networks Iran has used to withstand years of sanctions, economists and analysts in Tehran are debating how much more economic hardship the country can absorb to survive a prolonged economic war.