When Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian declared on December 27 that his regime is engaged in a “full-fledged war” against the United States, Europe and Israel, he was not merely indulging in rhetorical hyperbole, he was engaging in calculated deception. The Islamic Republic is indeed at war, but not with foreign powers. Its real, relentless and increasingly brutal war is being waged against the Iranian people themselves.
Speaking in an interview published on the website of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian claimed that the current confrontation with the West is “worse than the Iran-Iraq war.” That eight-year conflict, launched by Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980, cost over a million lives and scarred an entire generation. To invoke it now is a cynical attempt to summon nationalist fervor, silence dissent and justify repression at home.
But unlike the Iran-Iraq war, today’s crisis was not imposed on Iran by an invading army. It is the direct consequence of four decades of ideological extremism, regional aggression, nuclear deception and contempt for international law. And the primary victims are not Western governments or Israeli generals, they are Iranian citizens, workers, women, students and minorities, who are being crushed under a jackboot of fear.
Since nationwide protests erupted in recent years, the regime’s response has been ferocious. Arbitrary arrests have surged. Torture is routine. Executions have accelerated at a pace unmatched anywhere else in the world. Public hangings, death sentences after sham trials, and the execution of political prisoners have become instruments of terror designed to cow a population that has repeatedly shown it no longer believes in the system.
This is the “war” Pezeshkian refuses to name. Instead, he points outward. He blames America, Europe and Israel for preventing Iran from “standing on its feet.” This narrative is not new. Every failure of governance, economic collapse, environmental devastation, corruption and poverty is always blamed on foreign enemies. Yet it is not sanctions that have emptied Iran’s prisons of due process, nor Western policy that has filled its cemeteries with executed dissidents.
The president’s remarks came months after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities during the 12-day conflict in June 2025, triggered by Tehran’s own actions. Iran responded with missile barrages against Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar, escalating a confrontation it now pretends to lament. For years, Western intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have warned that Iran’s nuclear program is neither transparent nor exclusively peaceful. Tehran’s duplicity is now barely disguised. In mid-November, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted that Iran is no longer enriching uranium, not out of goodwill or compliance, but because its enrichment facilities were bombed. Even then, he clung to the tired fiction that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are purely civilian, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and repeated findings by the IAEA that Iran has restricted inspections and withheld information.
More telling still is the regime’s recent decision to bar IAEA inspectors from visiting bombed nuclear sites. Iran’s nuclear chief, Mohammad Eslami, claimed that inspections would not take place because the IAEA had not established “guidelines.” This is diplomatic nonsense. It is a deliberate act of obstruction, reinforcing the suspicion that Tehran has far more to hide than it admits.
But while the regime obsesses over centrifuges and missile ranges, the country itself is coming apart. Iran’s economy is in freefall. Inflation has officially surged past 50 percent, while the rial has collapsed to historic lows, making even basic commerce impossible. In recent days, shopkeepers in Tehran, long considered a conservative and stabilizing force, have shuttered their businesses in protest, unable to price goods as currency values swing wildly by the hour. Their demonstrations were met not with solutions, but with tear gas, warnings about “instability” and threats of punishment.
These protests expose the hollowness of the regime’s central claim. This is not the result of a foreign siege, it is the predictable outcome of decades of corruption, ideological dogma and economic mismanagement. Sanctions did not compel the state to squander national wealth on regional militias, nor did they force it to silence economists, jail labor activists or criminalize dissent. When merchants cannot trade, workers cannot afford food and young people see no future, the regime’s legitimacy collapses along with its currency.
Pezeshkian’s calls to “listen” to protesters ring hollow in a system that answers economic desperation with batons and prisons. His rhetoric of war is not meant to defend Iran from outsiders, but to discipline a population that is increasingly ungovernable. By portraying Iran as a besieged fortress, the regime seeks to legitimize repression, silence critics and frame any demand for accountability as treason. It is a familiar tactic of authoritarian rule. Manufacture an external enemy to justify internal tyranny. Western governments must not fall for this deception. The real choice is not between confrontation and appeasement, but between complicity and principle. Engagement with Tehran that ignores executions, torture and economic ruin only emboldens those who rule through fear. The Iranian people do not need saving from foreign powers. They need protection from their own rulers.
Masoud Pezeshkian may speak of a “full-scale war” against the West. The truth is far simpler and far darker. The Islamic Republic is fighting for its survival against its own people, the shopkeepers, workers, women and students, who have lost both their livelihoods and their fear. That is the war now consuming Iran. And it is one that no amount of propaganda can win.
Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.