International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Reza Pahlavi speaks of a “revolution”, but what kind?

Houshang Sepehr — 2026-04-15T20:38:18Z

In Iran, the streets, morgues and cemeteries are now littered with corpses. Predictably, the Islamic Republic is carrying out summary executions of protesters with extreme brutality. It was a deliberate massacre aimed not only at stifling mobilizations, but also at deterring any dissent.

- IVP615 - April 2026 / Iran

The Iranian nuclear bomb: a devastating boomerang

Houshang Sepehr — 2026-03-17T17:32:39Z

In the aftermath of January 2026's crackdown, voices within and close to the Islamic Republic renewed calls for Iran to complete a nuclear deterrent, claiming the bomb would have prevented the current existential crisis. Houshang Sepehr, exiled Iranian Marxist and editor of Solidarité Socialiste avec les Travailleurs en Iran, challenges this on structural grounds. Drawing on the cases of India, Pakistan, and North Korea, he argues that nuclear deterrence only functions within security architectures backed by a great power patron --- a guarantee Iran never had. Neither Russia nor China was willing to absorb the risks of a nuclearised Islamic Republic contesting US hegemony. The bomb, he concludes, would have deepened Iran's isolation rather than protecting it.

- IVP614 - March 2026 / Iran, Nuclear power

Iran on the Brink of the Abyss: War Drums, the Death Knell of the People

Houshang Sepehr — 2026-03-10T16:12:36Z

All Sides Will Make the People Pay

- IVP614 - March 2026

A Terrifying Abyss for the Iranian People and the Region

Houshang Sepehr — 2025-07-06T08:45:30Z

“In the end, the fall of the Islamic Republic, if it is to occur, must in no way be the result of foreign intervention, but that of a popular uprising organized and led by the people themselves.”

- Features / United States (USA), Israel, Iran

Faced with the Iran-Israel war, a third way is possible!

Houshang Sepehr — 2025-06-24T10:03:56Z

While the skies over the Middle East are once again ablaze with smoke and flames, and the media are inundated with talk of ‘Israeli precision strikes' and the ‘promise of token vengeance of the Islamic Republic', what is once again left out is the fate of those who do not take decisions in command rooms or hide in underground bunkers.

- News from around the world / Israel, Iran

Lessons of the presidential election in Iran

Houshang Sepehr — 2024-09-13T09:06:30Z

Iran's recent presidential election was called earlier than expected following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19. It seems that the clique of Supreme Guide Khamenei, the dominant faction within the regime, seized this opportunity to make a tactical shift: to present a more acceptable face to Western countries in the hope of ending their heavy sanctions.

- IV596-September 2024 / Iran

The White House, “best enemy” of the Islamic Republic

Babak Kia, Houshang Sepehr — 2020-02-06T10:32:51Z

The assassination of General Ghassem Soleimani by an American drone on 3 January 2020 in Baghdad is undoubtedly another step in the confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. The targeted assassination of Soleimani, ordered by Donald Trump himself, took place following a long period of mounting tension between Iran and the United States. This act which can undoubtedly be characterised as state terrorism is of course illegal from the point of view of international law (what would have been said if a Western minister visiting abroad had been liquidated by Iran?).

- IV541 - February 2020 / United States (USA), Iran

After the earthquake, the social quake

Houshang Sepehr — 2018-05-04T15:28:17Z

The Iranian working class, long suppressed and brutally exploited, burst onto the scene in early January of 2018, shaking Iran's bourgeois-clerical regime. Iran was shaken by protests against rising food prices, mass unemployment, growing social inequality, the brutal austerity agenda and political repression. The protests began on Thursday (December 28th) in the second largest city in Iran, Mashhad (a holy city, home to the shrine of Imam Reza), then spread to about forty towns and villages in the country, as well as to the capital Tehran.

- IV520 - May 2018 / Iran

A radical political turning point

Houshang Sepehr — 2018-03-12T15:59:33Z

In the history books of modern Iran, the first week of January 2018, which saw a wave of popular uprisings in many cities across the country, will be recorded as a new historical milestone. A turning point after which the Iranian political scene was no longer the same.

- IV518 - March 2018 / Iran

Where is the Islamic Republic going?

Houshang Sepehr — 2009-09-30T13:55:28Z

What is happening in Iran is a spontaneous, ingenious and independent revolt by a people frustrated by thirty years of tyranny by an obscurantist, religious regime, a revolt that was unleashed by electoral fraud.

- IV416 - September 2009