Is a New Revolution Brewing in Iran?

The following is a copy of the speech by Schoresch Davoodi at the Pirate Security Conference on Feb. 15, 2026 in Munich, Germany.

Iran, Europe, and the Axis of Autocracies: Manuscript for a Lecture

Introduction & Current Situation in Iran

We are not witnessing an isolated protest in Iran, nor a sudden flare of anger, nor a single event that fits neatly into the old patterns of crisis. What has been unfolding since late December 2025 is something far more profound: the visible breaking open of a structural chasm that has long divided state from society. A regime that has lost every claim to legitimacy now clings to power only through escalating violence, suffocating fear, and ruthless control of information—and it is visibly failing to hold the line.

Since December 28, 2025, Iranians have poured into the streets every single day—not merely in Tehran, but across nearly every province, from Mashhad in the northeast to Shiraz in the south, from Isfahan to Zahedan. What began with economic despair—the rial in freefall, bread and fuel prices soaring out of reach, wages left unpaid—very quickly became something deeper. The chants on the streets leave no room for ambiguity: this is no longer a call for reform inside the system. It is a demand to dismantle the system itself.

These protests stand apart from every previous wave in three decisive ways.

First, their social breadth is unprecedented: women leading the charge, students, workers, pensioners, ethnic and religious minorities marching shoulder to shoulder.

Second, they are not confined to the big cities; they deliberately reach into smaller towns and the most economically abandoned regions.

Third—and most tellingly—the tone has changed. No more polite requests for better management. The slogans name the end of the Islamic Republic. They openly brand the

Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. Regime symbols are attacked in broad daylight. This is no longer negotiation. This is rupture.

The regime’s answer is the same old script, but delivered with growing desperation: mass deployment of security forces, Basij militias, and IRGC units unleashing unrestrained violence. Arbitrary arrests without charge. Expedited death sentences meant to terrify. And, most

systematically, the digital space itself is strangled—nationwide internet blackouts, severe throttling, targeted blocking of every platform that could coordinate resistance, as meticulously tracked by Access Now’s KeepItOn campaign and NetBlocks’ real-time observatory.

These digital sieges do more than disrupt organization. They deliberately blind the world to the scale of the repression. Exact death tolls, arrest numbers, the true geographic reach of the protests —all are shrouded in engineered ambiguity. That fog is not an accident. It is strategy. It shields the perpetrators.

Yet even as the violence turns inward, it is mirrored outward: aggressive posturing toward Israel, activation of proxy militias, familiar accusations of “Zionist plots” and Western intelligence orchestration. The regime tries to manufacture a siege mentality, to paint domestic dissent as foreign invasion. The narrative is tired. And for the first time in decades, it is visibly losing its grip.

A generational shift lies at the heart of this change. Most of those in the streets were born after 2000. They carry no memory of 1979, no sentimental attachment to its symbols, no patience left for ideological sermons. To them the Islamic Republic is not a bulwark against imperialism—it is the single greatest obstacle to a normal, dignified life.

This is the deeper truth this lecture seeks to illuminate: the Iranian regime’s crisis is not merely political or economic. It is epistemic. The state has lost the power to make its version of reality believable. When narratives collapse, violence is all that remains.

And that is why what happens in Iran matters urgently to Europe. Iran is no isolated actor. It forms one node in an interlocking authoritarian constellation that fuses energy leverage, systematic disinformation, and exported violence into a single strategic weapon. The streets of Iran are therefore not only an Iranian story—they are a barometer reading the health and durability of the entire axis.

To grasp what is truly at stake, we must go back: to the historical origins of this regime, to the strategic blindness of its early opponents, and to the persistent blind spots that still shape Western thinking.

The 1979 Revolution: The Iranian Left, Strategic Naivety, and the Long Shadow to Today

The Revolution as an Alliance – Not as an Islamist Project

The 1979 revolution was never a purely Islamist project. It was a broad, uneasy coalition united against the authoritarian rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Religious networks around Khomeini stood beside liberal nationalists, segments of the urban middle class, and—crucially— powerful left-wing currents, as Ervand Abrahamian and Nikki Keddie have carefully documented.

The left was far from marginal. The communist Tudeh Party, the Marxist-Leninist Fedayeen-e Khalq, and the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) with its distinctive fusion of Islamism and socialism supplied organizers, strike leaders, intellectual framing, and street-level energy.

What held this alliance together was not any shared vision of democracy, but a burning antiimperialism rooted in the lived trauma of the 1953 CIA–MI6 coup against Mossadegh. The Shah was not merely a dictator; he was seen as a Western puppet. That memory became the ideological cement.

Anti-Imperialism as a Strategic Short Circuit

Here lies the fatal miscalculation whose echoes still reverberate. For much of the Iranian left, defeating Western imperialism ranked higher than constructing durable democratic institutions.

The assumption was simple and seductive: remove the Shah and a just, progressive society would naturally follow.

Khomeini was treated as a tactical partner, his clerical agenda downplayed or deliberately ignored. The left believed it could steer the post-revolutionary process. What they overlooked was that the clerics possessed what their allies lacked: tight organization, religious legitimacy, and armed structures already in place.

While leftists relied on fluid councils and mass mobilization, Khomeinists quietly built parallel institutions—revolutionary committees, militias, religious courts. Anti-imperialism became the bridge across which theocratic power marched to victory.

Power Consolidation and the Crushing of the Left

Once the Shah fell, no pluralist order emerged. Instead came ruthless consolidation. Liberals were pushed aside first. Then the left was systematically disarmed, divided, and criminalized.

The Tudeh Party was outlawed in 1983, its leaders imprisoned. The Fedayeen splintered under repression and infighting. The MEK became the regime’s principal enemy. Political disagreement turned into liquidation.

The most chilling chapter came in 1988: the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners— many of them leftists—after summary “trials” lasting only minutes. These were not excesses. They were deliberate cleansing. The revolution devoured its own children.

That trauma lives on. It explains the profound distrust today’s protesters feel toward grand ideological promises and any hint of co-optation.

The Long Shadow in Western Discourse

Paradoxically, a romanticized version of 1979 still lingers in parts of the Western left—remembered as a heroic anti-imperialist breakthrough while its authoritarian aftermath is quietly downplayed.

That selective memory has real consequences. It allows the current regime to be framed in some circles as a legitimate counterweight to the West. Repression is contextualized—or excused— whenever it fits a geopolitical enemy–friend binary. Iranian dissidents are too easily dismissed as Western proxies.

These are not fringe attitudes. They quietly shape debates on sanctions, Israel policy, digital regulation, and energy security. The strategic blindness of 1979 still distorts the present.

Prognosis and Confirmation

Already in the early 2020s I argued that the Iranian system’s problem was never a lack of reformability—it was structural inflexibility. A regime that can sustain itself only through repression, parallel power structures, and ideological conformity eventually loses all capacity to adapt.

The current uprising confirms that diagnosis in the starkest terms. It is broader, fiercer, and far less ideological than anything that came before. It no longer asks for changes inside the system. It denies the system’s right to exist.

And it has learned the hardest lesson of 1979: no false alliances, no romantic illusions, no trust in supposedly benevolent power-holders.

This brings us to the next unavoidable question: if internal reform is structurally impossible, why has the regime survived so long? The answer lies in its deliberate architecture of power—and that is where we turn next.

Why the Regime Is Structurally Unreformable

The Islamic Republic is not an ordinary authoritarian state that might gradually open under the right pressure. It is a system engineered from the beginning to make genuine reform impossible.

At its core lies a dual architecture: the formal state on one side—parliament, government, judiciary —and on the other a parallel revolutionary superstructure that can override everything else at any moment. The Guardian Council vets every candidate and vetoes legislation. The Assembly of Experts selects and can theoretically remove the Supreme Leader. Vast bonyads operate beyond parliamentary oversight. Above all stands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which fuses military might with an economic empire, political veto power, and media dominance.

This is not a bug. It is the feature. Power is fragmented precisely so that no reformist current can ever capture the commanding heights. Even the most “reformist” presidents have always operated inside strict red lines. When they approached those lines—as during the 2009 Green Movement— they were met with overwhelming force.

Paradoxically, every reformist moment has prolonged the system’s life. It absorbs social pressure, creates the illusion of change, and buys time without ever altering the underlying distribution of power.

The regime also runs on a political economy of violence. Repression is not merely a tool of control —it is an economic sector. The IRGC and its affiliates profit directly from instability, sanctions, and isolation: smuggling networks, construction monopolies, telecommunications, energy contracts, arms production. Transparency, peace, and the rule of law would dismantle those revenue streams.

Ideologically, the system defines legitimacy through permanent enmity: the West, Israel, internal “counter-revolutionaries.” Any real reconciliation with society would collapse that narrative foundation. A regime whose very identity depends on perpetual conflict cannot afford genuine peace with its own people.

These interlocking mechanisms explain why reform has never failed because it was badly executed. Reform fails because it is structurally precluded. The only paths open to the regime are repression or collapse.

For today’s protesters this is decisive knowledge. It explains why they no longer demand new laws or new faces—they demand the end of the system. It explains their deep distrust of dialogue initiatives, mediation offers, or Western calls for moderation. And it explains why the regime, facing an existential challenge, answers not with concessions but with maximum escalation.

Constitutional Monarchy as Transitional Logic: Order Before Ideology

When Western observers hear parts of the Iranian protest movement discussing a return to monarchy or the role of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the reflex is often dismissal: monarchy as nostalgia, as political regression. That reflex misses both the lived reality inside Iran and the pragmatic political reasoning behind the demand.

The discussion of constitutional monarchy is not a yearning for the past. It is a direct response to the trauma of 1979: an ideologically overheated revolution that promised liberation but delivered a far more repressive order.

Many Iranians—especially younger activists—are no longer searching for the perfect ideology. They are searching for a stable transitional framework that can prevent chaos while society finds its own way forward. Constitutional monarchy is understood here not as an end-state, but as a temporary bridge: an institutional anchor capable of guaranteeing order during the passage from a collapsing theocracy to a pluralistic republic.

The key distinction is between symbol and power. In the models being discussed, the monarch would hold no executive authority. The role would be strictly circumscribed: guarantor of the constitution, protector of separation of powers, embodiment of national unity. Real political decisions would rest with a democratically elected parliament and accountable government.

History offers precedents. Spain’s transition after Franco and the stabilizing role of the British monarchy in moments of political stress show that constitutional monarchy need not contradict democratic freedom—on the contrary, it can de-ideologize power struggles and provide continuity in fragile transitional phases.

In the Iranian context, Reza Pahlavi brings additional assets: international visibility, established networks, and a certain protective umbrella for the protest movement. His presence makes it harder for the regime to portray the uprising as leaderless chaos or extremist fringe.

Crucially, this is not an assault on republican ideals. It is a pragmatic instrument to enable an orderly hand-over after decades of violence, ideological coercion, and state terror.

From a European point of view, this debate deserves serious attention. If we genuinely wish to support democracy, we must accept that transitions rarely follow Western templates. Stability is not the enemy of freedom—it is often its precondition.

This same logic explains the protest movement’s caution toward external ideological imports. It does not want a new doctrine imposed from outside. It wants breathing space so that Iranians themselves can decide their future.

The real question is therefore not monarchy versus republic. The real question is order versus chaos. And that question links Iran’s struggle intimately to Europe’s own.

Information War, Digital Infrastructure, and Western Complicity

The information war waged by the Iranian regime is not a mere byproduct of repression. It is one of its central pillars of power. It targets not only Iranians, but also the capacity of open societies in the West to see clearly, name perpetrators, and respond decisively to authoritarian violence.

The aim is never persuasion. Obfuscation is enough. A little doubt, a little moral equivocation—that is sufficient to paralyze action.

Inside Iran the tools are blunt and familiar: nationwide internet blackouts, drastic bandwidth throttling, targeted platform bans, pervasive surveillance. These measures do far more than prevent coordination. They shatter any shared sense of reality.

But the campaign does not stop at Iran’s borders. It reaches deep into Western media, academic circles, NGO networks, and political debates. Its purpose is to capture—or at minimum to muddy— interpretive authority and moral clarity.

Digital Infrastructure, Dogma, and the Politics of Selective Outrage

Across Western progressive and liberal spaces, conversations about digital infrastructure are increasingly driven by moral reflex rather than strategic analysis. Technologies become symbols; companies become shorthand for structural critique.

Legitimate concern about market concentration too easily slides into categorical rejection. When critique hardens into moral condemnation, it replaces political responsibility.

Authoritarian regimes harbor no such ambivalence. For them, digital infrastructure is a battlefield. Internet shutdowns, mass surveillance, the criminalization of circumvention tools—these are standard operating procedures.

That is why satellite connectivity—Starlink, other low-earth-orbit solutions—has become politically explosive. It moves the fight from content moderation to control over the physical layer of information space. Sovereignty itself is at stake.

Yet in the West this material reality is frequently obscured by dogma. Dogma delivers moral certainty in uncertain times—but at the price of agency.

The paradox is painful: those who most loudly condemn repression can sometimes refuse to acknowledge the double-edged nature of the very tools that allow resistance when no domestic alternative exists.

For European digital-rights advocates this poses an uncomfortable question. If we reject American platforms on principle, why have we not built credible European alternatives? The talent exists. The knowledge exists. What is missing is the structural will and support. Talent does not disappear—it emigrates.

High energy costs, regulatory fragmentation, and policy paralysis have widened the industrial and technological gap to the United States and China. Moral critique has too often substituted for construction.

This insight is not new inside Pirate circles. Already at the first Pirate Security Conference in Munich in 2015, Yvonne Hofstetter spoke on “Key technologies for security measures,” underscoring how early the intersection of digital infrastructure, surveillance, and power was recognized—and how urgently strategic rather than purely moral responses were needed.

Big datacenters for AI and the future need much European energy. The German Energiewende cannot provide it alone—AI is important for Europe’s future, values, and security. A digital party like the pirate movement and its member parties should not shy away from these interconnections and eagerly find ways without the energy dogmas of the past to find new ways besides an Energiewendenationalismus. Free thinkers need to look outside national borders and national dogmas to create new ways of thinking and the policy of the future. If we stick to the past as Energiewende has shown us, we will in the end only support China, Iran, and Russia in new ways— putting a new label on deals with the devil to sleep confident while ignoring the plight and dark side of Energiewende.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its special report on Energy and AI (2025 update), data centres in the EU consumed around 70 TWh in 2024, with projections showing a rise to approximately 115 TWh by 2030—driven primarily by AI and accelerated computing— representing a significant strain on grids already challenged by the transition to renewables. In Germany, data centres already account for about 4% of gross power consumption, with forecasts from the German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) and Bitkom indicating further pressure on the grid from AI growth, exposing limits in the Energiewende’s ability to scale reliably and affordably without broader, pragmatic energy strategies.

Transition: From Digital Agency to Material Preconditions

Digital agency can enable resistance. It cannot secure freedom on its own.

Authoritarian systems integrate digital repression into wider architectures of dependency: economic pressure, industrial leverage, resource control.

If freedom depends on infrastructure, the decisive question is no longer only who controls platforms—but who controls the conditions under which societies can act at all.

This is where the Iranian case becomes a European warning.

Censorship as a Technique of Rule – Inside and Outside

Internally, the regime relies on a combination of classic repression and digital control. Internet shutdowns, bandwidth throttling, targeted blocks of social networks, and surveillance technologies have long been part of the standard repertoire of state violence. Communication is not only restricted, but deliberately destabilized: Rumors, disinformation, and fear are meant to erode the protest movement.

But this information war does not end at Iran’s borders. It is systematically extended outward—into media appearances, academic discourses, NGO networks, and political debates in Western democracies. The goal is to gain interpretive sovereignty or at least prevent moral clarity.

The Tabatabai Case: Legitimizing Censorship in Western Discourse

A particularly revealing example is the case of Adnan Tabatabai. The blog Übermedien documented in 2022 how Tabatabai relativized the Iranian regime’s internet censorship in a CNN interview as early as 2017. While social networks were blocked in Iran to suppress protests, he spoke of allegedly “temporary measures” and warned against “fake news” and “dangerous content,” as analysed in Übermedien’s investigative piece and referenced in Reporters Without Borders annual reports classifying Iran as one of the worst “enemies of the internet.”

In a country classified by Reporters Without Borders as an “enemy of the internet,” such argumentation is not neutral analysis, but a functional justification of authoritarian control. Particularly problematic is not only the content, but the rhetorical structure: The same argumentative patterns—protection from disinformation, responsibility, security—are found again in Western debates on net regulation.

Here, a dangerous overlap emerges: Authoritarian censorship is legitimized with the vocabulary of liberal regulatory policy. The result is a discursive normalization of control.

Selective Outrage and Western Resonance Spaces

This strategy becomes particularly effective where it meets existing interpretive patterns. Parts of the political left in the West function here as an unintended resonance space. Not out of sympathy for the regime, but due to deeply anchored worldviews: anti-Americanism, binary perpetratorvictim logic, and the notion that non-Western actors are per se to be read as victims of Western power structures.

In this framework, human rights are treated not as universal, but as context-dependent. Repression is relativized as soon as it is geopolitically “misplaced.” This phenomenon of selective humanitarianism is no fringe problem, but a structural moral deficit.

The consequences are concrete: The Iranian protest movement loses international solidarity. Exile Iranians are discredited by blanket defamation as mouthpieces of Western interests. The discourse shifts away from perpetrator responsibility toward supposed contextualization—effectively relieving the regime.

These patterns extend beyond Iran, infiltrating debates on energy policy and security within progressive circles, including our own. For instance, dogmatic adherence to certain energy transition narratives—rooted in outdated anti-imperialist or anti-nuclear ideologies—often ignores geopolitical realities. Arguments decouple energy from security, framing nuclear options as inherently unsafe, unreliable, or dependency-creating, while selectively citing isolated cases like Hinkley Point C’s cost overruns as universal proof of failure. This overlooks successful projects elsewhere, such as South Korea’s efficient construction of multiple reactors at lower costs and faster timelines, or the UAE’s Barakah plant, completed on budget and ahead of schedule, demonstrating that standardized designs and repeated builds can achieve reliability and affordability.

Such framing amplifies dogmas through ad hominem attacks, conspiracy-laden accusations of ulterior motives, and attempts to shut down debate by invoking party programs as unchallengeable truths. It mirrors the regime’s tactics: relativizing inconvenient facts, like how energy dependencies enabled aggressions such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, to protect ideological comfort. Even within parties committed to open discourse, like the Pirates, these methods surface —evident in energy debates that echo selective outrage seen in discussions on Hamas or other conflicts, where fear of prestige loss leads to censorship-like efforts rather than evidence-based engagement.

Counterpoint: Pirate Parties International and Universal Digital Rights

This is precisely where the positioning of the Pirate Parties International comes in. With the motion

“Solidarity with the Iranian Freedom Movement and Against Selective Censorship in Digital Rights Advocacy” adopted in 2026, a clear counter-accent was set.

The PPI condemns not only the systematic digital repression of the Iranian regime, but also Western forms of selective censorship—for example, through so-called “Trusted Flagging” mechanisms under the Digital Services Act. The message is clear: Anyone who wants to defend digital freedom cannot distinguish between good and bad victims.

Censorship remains censorship—regardless of whether it is religiously, authoritarianly, or technocratically justified. Anyone who laments internet shutdowns in Iran cannot simultaneously defend discursive gatekeepers in the West.

Neutrality Is Not a Neutral Position

Neutrality in asymmetric power relations is not a neutral stance. Anyone who, in the face of systematic repression, primarily talks about “contexts” but does not clearly name perpetrators, effectively adopts the language of power.

The information war of the Iranian regime works so well precisely because it relies on this moral ambiguity. It needs no majority—doubt is enough.

And that is precisely why clarity here is not an option, but a duty.

Anyone who adopts the language of autocrats stabilizes their power—and anyone who ignores their power structures becomes part of their system.

This is where the look at censorship, narratives, and discourse ends. For authoritarian systems do not exist in isolation. They network, learn from each other, and couple internal repression with strategic blackmail externally. This brings us to the larger geopolitical structure in which the Iranian regime operates.

The Axis of Autocracies: Iran, Russia, China, and Energy as an Instrument of Power

Iran is not an isolated rogue state, but an integral part of a consolidating authoritarian axis. Russia, Iran, and China do not form a formal alliance, but a functional community of convenience. They are united not by a common value system, but by a common interest: the weakening of liberal democracies, the fragmentation of Western alliances, and the transformation of economic dependencies into political levers.

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine marks a qualitative turning point in this constellation.

Iranian drone deliveries to Russia, military-technical cooperation, and diplomatic backing show that Tehran is long ready to expand its regional role in favor of global power projection. For Russia, in turn, Iran is a useful partner to circumvent sanctions, procure weapons, and amplify anti-Western narratives, as documented by the Institute for the Study of War and the Atlantic Council.

China plays a special role in this axis. Beijing is neither ideologically Islamist nor religiously motivated. China acts strictly in terms of power politics. For the Chinese leadership, Iran is a strategic factor within the Belt and Road Initiative: as a transit state, as an energy supplier, and as a geopolitical lever against Western influence in the Middle East. This relationship is asymmetric.

China is the dominant actor, Iran a junior partner with limited room for maneuver.

Central here is the energy factor. Iran has—after Russia—the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2025 edition) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Country Analysis Brief on Iran. This resource is not only economically relevant, but politically highly strategic. In the Iranian system, the natural gas business is largely controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, as analysed by the Wilson Center and Reuters investigative reporting. Energy revenues thus flow not primarily into civilian development, but into repression, regional proxy wars, and the expansion of the security apparatus.

Together with Russia and Qatar, a geopolitical triangle of energy blackmail is emerging. States that rely on fossil imports from authoritarian systems enter into structural dependency. This dependency is not always openly exploited—but it is callable at any time. Price shocks, supply throttling, or political conditioning are not theoretical risks, but proven instruments.

For Europe, this means: Energy policy is security policy. Anyone who ignores this connection makes themselves blackmail-able. Anyone who believes autocracies can be civilized through trade misses the lessons of the last twenty years. The axis of autocracies lives not from isolation, but from asymmetric interconnection.

This makes it clear: The confrontation with Iran is not a regional question and no moral footnote. It is part of a systemic challenge for Europe—and it forces us to talk about our own capacity for action.

European Nuclear Base Security: Freedom Needs Structure

If we have learned one thing so far, it is this: Authoritarian systems secure their power not only with violence and propaganda, but with dependencies. Dependencies on energy, on raw materials, on trade routes—and on the willingness of democratic societies to accept these dependencies out of convenience or ideological self-reassurance.

Iran is a textbook example of this. The regime is not just a repressive security state, but an energy actor with geopolitical leverage. Iran has the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves. Crucial here is not just the resource, but who controls it. And in Iran, the natural gas business lies in central parts in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards. Energy, repression, and foreign policy are not separate spheres there—they form an integrated instrument of power.

This pattern is not limited to Iran. Russia has built up European dependencies over years and then openly used them for political blackmail. Qatar acts more subtly, but also strategically—through long-term supply contracts, political influence channels, and the targeted use of bottlenecks. The connecting pattern: Energy dependency creates political blackmail-ability.

This is where the European dimension becomes visible. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz spoke of a Zeitenwende. Meant was a security policy caesura: rearmament, resilience, strategic autonomy. But this Zeitenwende threatens to fail at a point that is too rarely spoken about openly—at energy policy.

What good is military deterrence if the industrial base erodes? What good is security policy determination if exploding energy prices undermine defense capability, digitalization, and industrial resilience? Here lies the core of the diagnosis: The Energiewende must not devour the Zeitenwende.

When we talk about a European nuclear base security, it is expressly not about nuclear armament and not about a replacement for existing deterrence architectures. What is meant is a common, pan-European civilian energy infrastructure that provides reliable, plannable, and highly available base load. Its security policy relevance lies not in weapons, but in capacity for action.

Such base security stabilizes energy prices, protects industrial substance, and creates planning security for economy, digitalization, and defense capability. It also relieves France and the United Kingdom, which today bear a disproportionate share of nuclear infrastructure. A European burdensharing strengthens autonomy and alliance capability equally.

This is precisely where civilian nuclear energy and military security interlock. Without stable energy supply, there is no resilient armaments industry, no digital sovereignty, and no credible deterrence. Anyone who thinks energy policy and security policy separately is engaging in strategic selfdeception.

Yet, dogmatic narratives persist, often framing nuclear as inherently costly and unreliable by cherry-picking outliers like Hinkley Point C—where costs escalated due to first-of-a-kind regulatory hurdles, design changes, and supply chain issues—while ignoring successful models. South Korea’s APR-1400 reactors, built repeatedly with standardized processes, achieve construction in under five years at half the cost per megawatt, according to the World Nuclear Association’s Nuclear Power in South Korea report and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s cost studies. The UAE’s Barakah project, four units completed on time and budget, demonstrates that experience, modular approaches, and international collaboration yield efficiency, as confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) project reviews and the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) official performance data. China’s Hualong One reactors scale rapidly with domestic supply chains, proving nuclear’s viability when not hampered by fragmented national policies, per IAEA and World Nuclear Association updates.

These dogmas, amplified in progressive debates, decouple energy from security, resorting to technocratic national framing that relativizes dependencies enabling aggressions like Russia’s. They echo fear-driven attempts to stifle discussion, protecting prestige over evidence, much like selective outrage in other geopolitical contexts. Recent discussions, such as those in German media questioning reliance on the US atomic umbrella amid shifting alliances, underscore the need for European autonomy—not military nukes, but civilian nuclear to underpin strategic resilience.

Like Benjamin Tallis has argued in his writings and commentary on Europe’s security transformation —particularly in pieces emphasizing the need for democracies to become effective team players in a fast-shifting world—we in Europe must fulfill the demands of the Zeitenwende by building true resilience together. As Tallis stresses in analyses such as his call for Europeans to learn from elite teams in systemic competition (published via the International Centre for Defence and Security and echoed in his broader work on grand strategy and the Zeitenwende), we need to coordinate across borders, share burdens, and act in complementary ways rather than clinging to outdated national dogmas or lowest-common-denominator unity. Just as Iran shows the struggle for freedom and democracy is a fight on many shoulders and across deeply intertwined policy fields—from energy autonomy and digital rights to security cooperation and moral clarity—so too must Europe rise to this challenge as a cohesive team. Civilian nuclear infrastructure, shared and strategically scaled, is one vital pillar in that team effort: it bolsters industrial resilience, powers digital innovation, and frees us from blackmail by authoritarian energy actors.

Iran makes clear what happens when energy as an instrument of power lies in the hands of authoritarian actors. Anyone in Europe who is willing to relativize this reality—out of false antiimperialism or political convenience—is effectively working to stabilize exactly those systems that undermine freedom.

Iran, like Russia and China, makes brutally clear what happens when authoritarian power is allowed to control the essentials of modern life: energy, information, and the ability of societies to think, communicate, and act freely.

In Iran we see the full circuit completed: a regime that has lost all internal legitimacy survives only through ever-escalating violence and total digital blackout; the same regime exports drones and repression technology to its authoritarian partner in Moscow, helping sustain Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; in return, it receives diplomatic cover, military know-how, and economic lifelines from both Russia and China—forming the very axis that turns energy flows, disinformation campaigns, and proxy violence into instruments of global blackmail.

Russia has already demonstrated the playbook on a continental scale: weaponize gas pipelines, flood the information space with lies, punish dissent with prison or assassination. China perfects the quieter, longer-term version: build overwhelming economic dependencies through Belt and Road loans and infrastructure, then quietly enforce political conformity and silence on human rights.

Iran is the most vivid, most immediate warning because it combines both models in one state: overt theocratic terror inside its borders, covert energy leverage and proxy warfare outside, and deep integration into the autocratic supply chain that now links Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing.

When a regime controls natural gas fields with the Revolutionary Guards, when it can shut down the entire internet of 85 million people overnight, when it can ship suicide drones to fuel another war of conquest—then energy is no longer just an economic good. It becomes a lever of control over entire societies, including ours.

That is the interconnection we can no longer ignore.

The fight for freedom in Iran is not a regional sideshow.

It is a front line in the same global struggle that Ukraine is fighting with weapons and Europe is fighting with sanctions, solidarity, and the painful but necessary re-arming of our strategic autonomy.

If we in Europe allow ourselves to remain dependent on fossil flows controlled by this axis—or if we let dogmatic energy narratives prevent us from building the resilient, low-carbon base-load capacity we need—then we are not merely delaying climate action.

We are actively handing authoritarians the tools to dictate the terms of our freedom.

Iran, like Russia and China, shows us the endgame of that path: a world in which dissent is extinguished in darkness, economies are held hostage to the whims of dictators, and the light of open societies is slowly but deliberately dimmed.

We still have the choice to take another path.

But the clock is ticking—and the next move is ours.

European freedom needs energy autonomy—and energy autonomy needs a common nuclear base security.

Taking Responsibility – What Iran Teaches Europe About Freedom

Iran shows us with brutal clarity what happens when authoritarian systems lose their legitimacy: They respond not with reform, but with violence. Not with dialogue, but with censorship. Not with self-criticism, but with external aggression. Internal repression and external escalation are no slips —they are the logical end stage of a system that sustains itself only through control.

For Europe, this is no distant tragedy, but a mirror. For we too face the question of whether we defend freedom only rhetorically—or secure it structurally. Freedom is not a moral state that one invokes. Freedom is a question of capacity for action, of resilience, of real political and economic prerequisites.

Iran makes visible what happens when energy dependency, information control, and geopolitical blackmail interplay. Anyone who makes themselves blackmail-able loses political sovereignty. Anyone who obfuscates discourses loses judgment. Anyone who believes one can defend human rights and simultaneously ignore structural dependencies misses the reality of the 21st century.

Therefore, for Europe: The Energiewende must not devour the Zeitenwende. Without secured energy, there is no secured freedom. Without industrial substance, no defense capability. And without strategic autonomy, no credible solidarity—neither with Ukraine nor with the people in Iran.

A common European nuclear base security is no ideological project. It is an expression of political maturity. It relieves France and the United Kingdom in their nuclear deterrence for Europe, stabilizes energy prices, protects industrial cores, and creates the foundation so that Europe is not torn between climate goals, security, and freedom.

As Pirates, we say clearly: Freedom is universal or it is nothing. We stand against autocracies—not selectively, but consistently. Nationally and internationally, we fight for digital freedom, against censorship, against authoritarian influence, and against energy policy naivety—challenging dogmas that amplify dependencies through fear of debate and prestige loss, whether in Iran solidarity or European energy transitions.

Iran reminds us that freedom must be defended before it is lost. Europe has the means to do so.

What is lacking is not knowledge—but the will to take responsibility.

Iran and also Germany and Europe stand at a turning point, a Zeitenwende deeply interconnected.

We stand at the threshold of history.

We stand at the moment when the choice becomes unavoidable.

Between the uncertainty of freedom and the false security of dogma and rigid thinking.

Between fear that paralyzes and the courage to defend the free word.

Between dependence on other powers that will always demand our silence, and the shared burden of building the tools to protect open debate, human dignity, and the right of every person to live without chains.

This is not merely a policy choice.

It is a moral and existential one.

Look at Iran: a regime that has lost all claim to legitimacy yet still clings to power through batons, bullets, blackouts, and mass graves—and yet the people rise again and again.

Look at Ukraine: under relentless bombardment and occupation, they still hold the line—not only for their land, but for the idea that no empire has the right to erase a nation’s future.

Like the pirate movement, the people of Iran and Ukraine have chosen liberty over fear.

They remind us that courage is contagious.

That when enough people refuse to bow, even the most entrenched regimes begin to crack.

That the defense of freedom is never someone else’s fight—it is ours, here, now, together.

So let us rise to this moment.

Let us reject complacency and selective outrage.

Let us build the energy autonomy, the digital resilience, the moral clarity, and the strategic solidarity that our time demands.

Because the future is not written by those who enforce their will through fear.

It is written by those who choose—again and again—to stand for liberty.

Thank you.