Here’s the story of contemporary Iran in a nutshell: A decade ago, Iran was relatively stable, led by a reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, who’d just signed a nuclear agreement with half a dozen world powers, including the United States. Its economy, long plagued by economic sanctions imposed most emphatically by the United States, began to expand as softened sanctions allowed its oil exports to grow, and its currency, the rial, traded at 32,000 to the dollar.
But when President Trump 1.0 unilaterally upended the nuclear accord in 2018 and imposed a sanctions regime called “maximum pressure,” and President Biden inexplicably failed to restore the agreement and left sanctions in place, Iran circled the wagons, electing a far-right president, Ebrahim Raisi, and the security services, always powerful, consolidated their influence over the country. When Trump 2.0 resumed its all-out assault on Iran’s oil exports in 2025, Iran’s fragile economy went into a tailspin. The rial, having already tumbled to 430,000 to the dollar in 2022, spiraled downward again last year, falling to 1.4 million to the dollar by December 2025. Inflation, which had been under control ten years ago, blew up, exceeding 40 percent.
No surprise, then, that Iran’s merchants, the bazaaris—led by mobile phone and technology merchants, according to Sina Toossi, a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy—shut their doors, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protests that started in Tehran on December 28 and swept the country in the days and weeks that followed. Yet another president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a reform-minded physician who took over when President Raisi died in a helicopter crash in 2024, initially sought to accommodate the grievances of the population, but Iran’s security services got the last word. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the paramilitary Basij, using live ammunition, fired willy-nilly into crowds and murdered thousands of civilians.
With the country in shock, the protests largely died down, though the country remains extremely tense.
President Trump, who probably couldn’t locate Iran on a map (recall that last year he bragged about ending a war between Azerbaijan and Albania), threatened to bomb Iran in defense of the protests. He ignored that fact that citizens of Iran had been pushed to desperation by the political and economic conditions that Trump himself created since 2018. And the irony was lost that the president was supporting dissenters abroad even as his U.S. law enforcement units, including ICE, the FBI, the Border Patrol, the National Guard, and the U.S. Marines were being used to quell domestic dissent at home.
Still, as of today, the Iranian government remains in place.
In 2009, during the first in a wave of multi-city protests that has swept Iran since then, I spent two weeks in Tehran and several other Iranian cities reporting on the reelection campaign of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The result of that election, widely considered to have been fraudulent, triggered a nationwide revolt by the so-called Green Movement in support of a rival candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. During that upsurge, I spoke with numerous participants in the Green Movement, from senior advisers to Mousavi to students at the gates of Tehran University, one of whom told me, “This is a revolution.” Not a single one favored U.S intervention, and many feared that any show of support by President Obama would allow the government to accuse the opposition of being U.S. stooges. (That didn’t prevent Obama’s domestic opponents from savaging him over his reluctance to get too involved.)
Of course, as it turned out, it was no revolution. The government, the IRGC, and the Basij brutally suppressed the protests. That scenario has played out ever since, in subsequent eruptions of protests, strikes and demonstrations in 2017, 2019, and most recently, in the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom explosion that followed the apparent murder of a young woman, Masha Amini, for violating the dress code imposed by the authorities. Each of these protests demonstrated to even the casual observer that Iran’s population has largely had its fill with a backward, religious authoritarian system.
Some observers—well, many observers, especially those who’ve long been forecasting the fall of Iranian regimes since 1979—predicted during each one that it was, indeed, the Big One, the one that would topple the Supreme Leader. Some foolishly suggested that it wouldn’t even be that difficult. I recall listening to Roger Cohen of The New York Times, speaking at a confab about Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2009, who faulted the Green Movement for not simply marching en masse into the presidential palace. Had they tried to do so, of course, the resulting massacre would have surpassed by far the 3,000 or more killed in January 2026 before the latest protests were crushed.
Blindingly ignorant of Iran, exuding his typical bravado and his shoot-first-and-take-the-oil-later approach to world affairs, Trump repeatedly weighed in on the events in Tehran. For example:
If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
But Iran did shoot and kill protesters, and help was decidedly not on its way.
Recall, if you will, that in 1991, at the conclusion of the first U.S.-Iraq war, President George H.W. Bush blithely called on Iraqis themselves to finish the job of toppling Saddam Hussein. Iraqis, including Kurds and Shiites, took Bush seriously. (“We didn’t expect a general uprising,” said an aide to Bush, at the time.) The result was predictable: countless thousands died when Baghdad responded with overwhelming force, including the use of poison gas. It’s possible to argue, as did two reporters for the Washington Post, that Trump’s reckless calls for a revolution and his “locked and loaded” threats led many Iranians to throw themselves in front of the IRGC’s guns. “I feel like Trump has backtracked again and traded the lives of Iran’s youth,” one protester told the Post.
Some Iran analysts have argued, since December 28, that this time the opposition is different than, say, 2009 or 2022, as did Saeid Golkar and Jason M. Brodsky of United Against Nuclear Iran, a militantly right-wing group of neoconservatives, writing in Foreign Policy. What is in fact different is that Iran has lost its chief regional ally, Syria, and the members of its Axis of Resistance in Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen have been variously decimated, while Iran itself suffered grievously in the Twelve Day War with Israel and the United States in 2025. But what is not different is that internally the repressive apparatus is still intact, and there’s no sign (yet) that the IRCG or other elements of the security services are cracking. (In 1979, by contrast, the shah’s army and police were reluctant to fire on protesters supporting Ayatollah Khomeini and eventually joined Khomeini’s takeover.)
In the end, Trump did not order the Pentagon to come to the aid of the protesters. Perhaps the events in Venezuela made him reconsider opening up a second front in Iran. Though the United States kidnapped Venezuela’s president, the mini-war ended there, and Trump opted to seek the cooperation of the former vice president and current acting president, Delcy Rodriguez. Had he not done so, and had he attempted to install Maria Cortino Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader, it would have triggered a bloody civil war. In Iran, too, decapitating the regime or destroying the infrastructure of the IRGC would have had consequences that were unpredictable at best and, at worst, catastrophic. (See: Iraq.)
Which is why both Saudi Arabia and Israel separately urged Trump to cool his jets.
Saudi Arabia, with its inherent bias for stability over conflict, feared that were Trump to launch a regime change-style assault on Iran, it would destabilize the entire Persian Gulf and cause Iran to expand the conflict to the oil kingdoms. (In 2019, a handful of Iranian drones hit Saudi Arabia’s oil complex run by Aramco and knocked out half of the country’s output.) And anyway, for the last several years Saudi Arabia and Iran have been slowly rebuilding their relationship, and both value continuing that process.
Israel, meanwhile, was convinced that yet another U.S. attack on Iran, similar to the U.S. strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer, would be symbolic at best and would fail to have the effect that Israel wants, namely, the elimination of Iran’s military capabilities, including its potent array of ballistic missiles. And, as The New York Times reported in mid-January, “Israeli analysts predict that the current wave of demonstrations in Iran will be short-lived.” (Indeed, they were right.) When it comes to killing Iranian scientists and blowing up its nuclear research facilities, Israel is all in, but poking a stick at the lion with no long-lasting impact? No.
And, one leading Israeli analyst added that Israeli intelligence is concerned that if the government did lose control of the country, a prospect considered unlikely, the result would probably be a military coup d’état by the IRGC. From Israel’s point of view, that could result in Iran being a tougher opponent than the current religious leadership.
One reason why the current government is likely to ride out the protests is that the opposition has no effective leadership. What was promising about the reformist movement in Iran—such as the 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammed Khatami, the Mousavi campaign of 2009, and the 2013-2021 Rouhani presidency—is that, for all its shortcomings, it held out the hope for evolutionary change in Iran. That, certainly, met the aspirations of countless people that I spoke to during my trips to Iran, from merchants in the Tehran bazaar to Kurdish activists to reform-minded ayatollahs and working-class people in Shiraz. In the end, the regime was able to co-opt the reformists when they could and imprison or de-platform them when that didn’t work.
That vacuum is what leads some people, especially in Trump’s circle, to say nice things about the scion of the former shah, Reza Pahlavi, whose glib op-ed in the Washington Post on January 6, “Iran is ready for a democratic transition,” made him seem relevant. (He is not.) As Borzou Daragahi, an Iranian journalist, wrote:
Reza Pahlavi can’t save Iran. The son of the deposed shah is ill-equipped to serve as a transitional figure. If he tries to do so it will likely be a disaster for Iran and for him. It’s not just that he is an uncharismatic intellectual lightweight. He is barely even Iranian. He has lived in the US for nearly 50 of his 66 years and has accomplished little during his exile years.
In the end, with Trump juggling Venezuela, Greenland, and Ukraine, it’s possible that he might lose interest in Iran altogether for a while. But he is so bizarrely unpredictable that it’s impossible to rule out the idea that we won’t all wake up tomorrow morning and find out that we’re fully at war with Iran.
In that context Trita Parsi—the man who literally wrote the book on Iran-Israel relations—paints a gloomy scenario. Parsi believes that both the United States, under Trump, and Israel are waiting to complete a military buildup sufficient to deal what would amount to a death blow to Iran’s military apparatus. Israel, which has established its near-total preeminence, militarily, from North Africa and the Red Sea to Iraq and the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf—witness its unpunished bombing raid against Qatar last September—sees only Iran as the last remaining obstacle to its hegemony, according to Parsi.
Which means that war with Iran, protests or not, is still impossible to rule out in the near term. As the United States continues to build up its assets in the region—one or more aircraft carrier strike groups is already headed in that direction—and as the United States hardens its defenses around existing regional outposts in case of an Iranian counterattack, war becomes a distinct possibility. “There’s a very, very high likelihood that there will be a strike quite soon,” said Parsi. Yet given what else is preoccupying him, Parsi asks, “Does Trump have the bandwidth to do this, or is it a bluff?”
No one knows. A recent profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in The New Yorker reveals how utterly and completely Trump himself hogs foreign policymaking. This week, a White House spokeswoman said that the president “leads all foreign policy from the top.” And, visiting Qatar not long ago, just across the Gulf from Iran, Donald Trump, Jr., made a virtue of the president’s inscrutability: “What’s good about my father, what’s unique about my father, is you don’t know what he’s going to do.”
Bob Dreyfuss is an award-winning investigative journalist living in northern New Jersey.
