Trump's Threat to 'Rescue' Iranian Protesters Is Reckless

The last thing that protesters in Iran need are threats of intervention from the U.S. government.

The president starts off the new year with more threats against Iran:

Donald Trump has warned Iran that the US will come to the “rescue” of protesters if Tehran responds violently to the largest nationwide demonstrations the Islamic republic has faced in several years.

In a post on Truth Social early on Friday, the US president said: “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.”

The last thing that protesters in Iran need are threats of intervention from the U.S. government. The last thing that the U.S. needs is another conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. is not helping anything in Iran by threatening to attack the country. It is a reckless threat, and it puts the U.S. and Iran on yet another unnecessary collision course.

Trump’s first instinct in this situation is to threaten the use of force. He probably saw a news report about a violent crackdown on protesters and immediately reacted with threats of more violence of his own. Many credulous analysts bought into the president’s self-presentation as a sort of antiwar candidate, but when it matters his first impulse is always to reach for the sword to brandish and then often use it.

Threatening to attack Iran over its response to internal protests is unhinged. It is exactly the sort of mindless interventionism that some of Trump’s supporters claimed to be repudiating when they voted for him. The U.S. has no right to attack another country to “rescue” protesters from their own government. If the U.S. made this a reason to attack other countries, it would never stop bombing other parts of the world.

According to Sina Toossi, the latest round of Iranian protests “most closely resembles the 2017–2018 and November 2019 economic protests: decentralized, sparked by economic shocks, geographically dispersed beyond major cities, and met with force.” It remains to be seen whether they will spread across more of the country or if they could build into a larger movement. The administration is going to be disappointed if they think they can use these protests to trigger regime change.

The U.S. has a long history of harmful and unwelcome intervention in Iranian affairs. Iranians remember this and naturally resent it. The vast majority of Iranians has a negative view of the United States at this point because of the many years of relentless economic warfare. According to a survey done in 2024, seven out of ten Iranians viewed the United States very unfavorably. The direct U.S. and Israeli attacks on their country last year will have likely soured the Iranian people’s view of the United States even more. Decades of destructive hawkish policies have made the Iranian people see the United States as a threat and an enemy. Why would Iranians want “help” from the government that has tormented them for so long?

The threat of foreign intervention is a gift to Iranian hard-liners. It gives the Iranian government the perfect excuse to crack down even harder, and it makes it easier for their state propaganda to paint the protests as a foreign-backed effort to destabilize the country. It will make it more difficult for protesters to have their grievances heard, and it will make it less likely that those grievances are addressed.

If anyone bothered to ask the protesters what they thought about this, most of them would likely denounce Trump for his threats against their country. Whatever their views of their government may be, Iranian protesters are just as fiercely loyal to their country as anyone else. The Iranian government would like nothing more than to be able to paint the protesters’ legitimate economic and other grievances as the work of foreign governments’ fanning the flames of discontent. Anything that the Iranian government can use to distract the public and delegitimize the protesters is useful to them. Trump just gave them a great way to do both.

It didn’t seem possible, but Trump’s Iran policy is becoming even worse than it already was. It used to be that he would threaten to attack if the Iranians wouldn’t give in to his unrealistic, maximalist demands to surrender on the nuclear issue. That was terrible and led to the illegal attack last year, but it did at least seem to be limited to the nuclear issue. Now he also threatens military intervention over their response to domestic protests. The president is more of an aggressive interventionist on this issue than many neoconservatives.

No one believes that Trump wants to help the Iranian people in any case. The president who has impoverished and killed innocent Iranians for years with “maximum pressure” sanctions doesn’t care in the slightest about what happens to the people. Like the Iran hawk he is, he uses the plight of the Iranian people as a pretext to pick a new fight with Iran. If Trump follows through on his insane threats, it is the Iranian people who suffer most once again.

If the U.S. truly wanted to help the Iranian people, it would lift the cruel and destructive sanctions that have done so much to wreck the Iranian economy over the last decade. The best thing that the U.S. could do for the protesters and for the entire population is to take its boot off their neck and end the senseless economic war it has been waging on all of them. The fact that Trump would never do that tells us everything we need to know about his talk of “rescuing” protesters.