Despite repeated interventions by Iran’s highest authorities, most notably Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian, aimed at defusing public anger over the country’s deteriorating economic conditions, the protests that erupted on 28 December in Iran have shown little sign of abating.
Senior officials have sought to strike a conciliatory note, pledging to address the structural causes of the country’s economic problems, acknowledging the legitimacy of public grievances, and insisting that peaceful protest remains a lawful and acceptable form of dissent.
Yet, these assurances have failed to restore calm.
What began as demonstrations by bazaar merchants and segments of the urban middle classes have steadily broadened. Students, residents of peripheral and border provinces, and ethnic minorities, communities often subjected to deeper and more enduring economic deprivation than those in Iran’s major cities, have since joined the protests.
While public demonstrations are not new to Iran and have repeatedly been driven by a mix of political, economic, and social grievances, the latest wave is unfolding at an especially precarious moment for the country.
The protests mark the first significant internal challenge to the political system since Iran endured a series of severe external setbacks over the past two years, which have eroded much of its regional influence and weakened its network of allies and proxies.
They also come as Tehran faces threats from the United States and Israel, both of which have warned of large-scale military action unless Iran halts uranium enrichment on its soil and curtails its ballistic missile programme.
In this environment, Iranian officials also view the US intervention in Venezuela as an implicit warning, adding another layer of anxiety.
The result is a complex and unforgiving calculus for Tehran. The authorities must contain domestic unrest and respond meaningfully to its economic roots, all the while simultaneously preparing for the possibility of a US-Israeli military escalation.
The task has been further complicated by overt US and Israeli intervention in the rhetoric surrounding the protests. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared in recent days that Washington will “rescue” the Iranian protesters if they are killed by the authorities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Monday that Israel “stands in solidarity with the struggle of the Iranian people and their aspirations for freedom and justice.”
While some hawkish voices in Washington argue that such statements increase the pressure on Iran’s leadership and thereby weaken the regime’s grip, they appear to misread sentiments inside Iran.
For many protesters, Trump’s interventions are not reassuring but counterproductive. Rather than emboldening dissent, they are widely seen as reinforcing the narrative of foreign interference, strengthening hardline factions within the state, and increasing the likelihood of a forceful crackdown, ultimately deepening the very repressive tendencies that the protesters seek to challenge.
“By any serious moral or political measure, Trump’s declaration that the US stands ready to ‘rescue’ Iranian protesters is not merely contradictory; it is cynical and profoundly dangerous,” a prominent Iranian reformist politician close to the Pezeshkian government told Al-Ahram Weekly.
“Iran’s profound economic challenges are structural in nature, related to sanctions, mismanagement, and corruption, and this is a reality that is widely recognised.”
“While the authorities have expressed an understanding of the people’s grievances and pledged policy reforms in response, external forces such as the US have proclaimed their readiness to rescue the protesters, yet the aim is to exploit unrest, precipitate institutional collapse, and ultimately seize control of Iran’s vast oil and mineral wealth in a pattern we are already witnessing in Venezuela,” he said.
Iran is currently experiencing its most serious wave of socio-economic unrest in years. The trigger is not ideology, but something far more elemental: the collapse of living standards.
There is a national currency in free fall; by some estimates, wages for large segments of the workforce have lost well over half of their purchasing power over the past decade; inflation exceeds 40 per cent; and daily life has become a struggle for large segments of society.
Shopkeepers, market traders, students, and pensioners — these are not revolutionaries. They are people responding to economic hardship. Their protests are largely local, fragmented, leaderless, and focused on survival rather than regime change, at least so far.
The Iranian government bears undeniable responsibility for the current crisis. Years of mismanagement, corruption, structural dysfunction, and ideological rigidity have hollowed out public trust. Even before the renewed US sanctions, Iran’s economy was brittle, inefficient, and deeply unequal.
But to pretend that external pressure played only a marginal role is disingenuous. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement on its nuclear programme that Iran was complying with, removed the single most important mechanism stabilising Iran’s economy.
Washington offered no alternative framework, no diplomatic off-ramp, no gradual recalibration. What followed instead was the policy of “maximum pressure”.
The consequences were predictable. Oil revenues collapsed. The rial entered a cycle of depreciation. Inflation hardened into permanence. The middle classes struggled to maintain their lifestyle, savings were erased, and the working class struggled to provide basic necessities.
In other words, the economic ground on which today’s protests are unfolding was profoundly shaped by decisions taken in Washington as much as in Tehran. This is why Trump’s posture as a would-be protector strikes many Iranians as not merely hypocritical but also insulting.
Iranian public opinion is not monolithic, but there is a striking convergence across social strata on one point: Trump is not seen as a saviour.
Among the economically exhausted majority, being those struggling with food prices, transport costs, and housing prices, the prevailing sentiment is grimly pragmatic. Anger at the Iranian state coexists with a clear-eyed understanding that US sanctions have worsened their lives.
For these citizens, Trump is associated with aggressive policies against Iran.
Among the urban middle classes and reform-minded constituencies, the concern is strategic. Many support the right to protest and resent state repression. Yet, they also understand a central paradox of Iranian politics: overt foreign threats strengthen hardliners and shrink the space for reform.
Trump’s words, in this reading, hand Iran’s security establishment precisely what it needs: a pretext to securitise socio-economic dissent and reframe it as foreign-instigated unrest.
From this perspective, Trump’s rhetoric does not weaken the regime. It strengthens its most repressive instincts.
Even among more radical anti-regime voices, enthusiasm for an American “rescue” is muted at best. Iran’s historical memory weighs heavily and includes the CIA-backed coup against elected prime minister Mohammad
Mosaddegh in 1953 following his nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry; US support for former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; and decades of sanctions.
This is not abstract history. It is a lived experience. Thus, when Trump speaks of being “locked and loaded,” the dominant reaction is not hope but of fear.
Ali Shamkhani, political adviser to the Supreme Leader, pushed back sarcastically. “The Iranian people know the American ‘rescue experience’ very well — from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza.”
Pezeshkian came to office promising economic reform, limited social liberalisation, and renewed engagement with the West. His room for manoeuvre was always narrow, constrained by entrenched institutions and ideological veto points.
The economic protests already put his project under severe strain. Trump’s intervention tightens the noose further. By externalising the crisis, Washington’s rhetoric allows hardliners to argue that compromise is naïve, dialogue is dangerous, and repression is necessary.
It collapses distinctions between peaceful protesters, disgruntled shopkeepers, and violent opportunists. It also transforms a governance failure into a national security emergency. In short, it militarises what is fundamentally a socio-economic struggle.
Perhaps Trump’s most consequential error is his assumption that economic protest is inherently convertible into regime-change mobilisation. However, most of the demonstrations explicitly reject chaos and foreign entanglement.
By attaching these protests to an external power struggle, Trump risks alienating precisely those citizens who might otherwise sustain pressure for internal reform. History shows that Iranian society often closes ranks when confronted with overt foreign threats, even when deeply dissatisfied with its leaders.
Who, then, is helped by Trump’s offer? Certainly not the Iranian protesters. Not the reformists. And not ordinary households watching their purchasing power disintegrate.
The beneficiaries are more likely to be those who thrive on confrontation: the security institutions, ideological hardliners, regional spoilers, and political actors on all sides who profit from escalation.
For Trump, the statement plays well domestically by projecting strength and decisiveness. For Iran, it injects further volatility into an already combustible situation.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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