The protests that erupted in the streets of Iran at the end of December and beginning of January were the largest since the protests of 2009. They were ignited by an economic crisis and the collapse of the Iranian rial that led to a cost-of-living crisis. As the protests grew from demands for economic change to demands for political change, President Masoud Pezeshkian’s push for dialogue and a moderate response lost to other elements in the regime’s demands for repression. The resultant crackdown was excessive and brutal, and thousands of people were killed.
But there was more behind the protests than domestic demand for change. That demand is real. To ignore it is to miss the grievances and anger of the protestors. But to ignore the role of the U.S. in causing the conditions and stoking the protests is to miss the larger geopolitical issue.
The economic grievances that pushed the people into the streets are severe and real. But they were partly manufactured in America. Iran was verifiably honoring the JCPOA nuclear agreement that promised an end to sanctions. But the U.S. did not honor the agreement, and, instead of an end to sanctions, the first Trump administration illegally exited the deal and increased the sanctions. Those increased sanctions contributed significantly to the cost-of-living crisis because, though Iran has joined BRICS and the SCO and increased trade with Russia, China and the East, Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me they have not yet created an “economic outlet large enough to compensate for the impact of the sanctions.” He explains that “BRICS and SCO – and specifically China – have provided a floor for the Iranian economy, but not a true compensation for sanctions impact.”
Unfair American sanctions caused the economic conditions that drove the people into the streets to demand economic reform that the government was incapable of making without an end to the sanctions. But U.S. terms for ending the sanctions were too dear. The U.S. demanded an end to Iran’s legal civilian nuclear program, and end to Iran’s legal ballistic missile program and even loudly suggested an end to the regime. The cost of calming the protests was the security of the state and the government.
Sanctions were not a blind policy that was meant to pressure Iran in some unspecified way or meant merely to bring about a change in Iran’s nuclear policy. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently explained that “the Iranian currency [was] on the verge of collapse. President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street…. This is economic statecraft… Things are moving in a very positive direction.” Bessant is clear that the sanctions were intended to collapse the economy and catalyze the protestors to take to the street. That, he says, is how we know the sanctions worked.
The U.S then followed causation of the protests with encouragement of the protests. Trump first offered safety to the protestors by promising not to allow the Iranian government to violently repress the protest: “America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” He then promised, not only protection, but that “The USA stands ready to help!!!”
Offers of help then grew to calls for a coup. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump posted before explicitly stating that “It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran.”
Iran’s President Pezeshkian said on January 31 that the U.S. and its partners “rode on our problems, provoked, and were seeking – and still seek – to fragment society. They brought them into the streets and wanted, as they said, to tear this country apart, to sow conflict and hatred among the people and create division. Everyone knows that the issue was not just a social protest.”
Trump’s policies and threats may not only have helped cause the protests and increase their demands, his threats may also have played a role in increasing the government’s repressive and violent response.
By inserting himself into the dynamic, Trump created a situation in which, the longer the protests went on, the greater the motivation for the U.S. to intervene. In a recent webinar hosted by the Quincy Institute, Vali Nasr said that “that reality provides motivation for the regime to end the protests quickly, making the response more brutal.” American confidence and boldness at this moment is partly due to an American belief that the Iranian regime is at its weakest moment since the revolution. In the Quincy webinar, Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Amwaj.media, added that the decisive government response may have come, in part, form a desire to demonstrate to Trump that the regime is still in control, and its options aren’t limited. In the same webinar, Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow and deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, suggested the terrible possibility that countries’ new realization that Trump sides with strength may have also led Tehran to show a more violent response.
There may even have been more help from outside. There were suggestions that foreign agents were on the ground with the protestors in Iran. And there were hints that unspecified foreign actors may have been arming them.
Though the consequences of U.S. policy were intended, the suspicions, and public announcements, of foreign involvement on the ground may have had one unintended consequence. Former Iranian nuclear negotiator [ret] Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian says that “public revulsion against violent infiltrators prompted hundreds of thousands of people to join a government-organized rally in the second week of January, signalling opposition to foreign interference.” While a foreign contribution may have helped grow the protests, it may also have helped end the protests.
With several options still being considered by the Trump administration, including limited strategic bombings, a decapitation operation to remove the Supreme Leader and total regime change, there is still one more option being considered that demonstrates the U.S. policy of stoking the protests to bring down the regime.
Reuters has reported that one option Trump is considering is “targeted strikes on security forces and leaders to inspire protesters” in order to create conditions for “regime change.” According to “two U.S. sources familiar with the discussions, the plan would include striking “commanders and institutions Washington holds responsible for the violence, to give protesters the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings.”
It cannot be dismissed that the protests are homegrown and that the anger is real. It also cannot be dismissed, though, that a significant role has been played by the United States.
