How Trump’s secondary tariffs could hurt Tehran

Revolutions differ from episodic unrest not by the scale of any single demonstration, but by their structure and direction. They are sustained rather than spontaneous; cumulative rather than cathartic. Their power lies in endurance, in the gradual erosion of legitimacy, authority, and administrative control, until the system itself becomes untenable.

Compared with past protest waves, the current unrest appears more nationally synchronised, socially broad, and symbolically convergent. Equally significant is the re-emergence of a shared national language of opposition that Tehran has long sought to crush through ideology, patronage, and repression.

This matters because revolutions do not target the security apparatus alone. They strike at the regime’s ability to govern routinely. A state under revolutionary pressure must deploy coercion continuously rather than episodically. That is costly, exhausting, and politically corrosive.

Iranian police have circulated text messages warning families to keep young people and teenagers at home, citing the alleged presence of “terrorist groups” and armed individuals at demonstrations and threatening decisive action. The author has independently verified these messages.

Such warnings are not merely informational; they are designed to shift responsibility for state violence onto families themselves.

Yet repression alone does not explain the regime’s present fragility. For much of its rule, governance in the Islamic Republic has been hollowed out by a deeply entrenched kleptocratic system, in which political authority, security power, and economic privilege are fused.

Years of sanctions, chronic inflation, currency collapse, and fiscal mismanagement have hollowed out state capacity. Recent military setbacks have compounded internal strain. The result is a regime increasingly reliant on force at a moment when its economic and institutional resilience is at its weakest.

Mass killing

Iran International reported on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people had been killed in the recent protests, describing the crackdown as “the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history.”

The emerging scale of violence therefore places Iran’s crisis under increasing strain within the framework of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). When a state is credibly accused of mass killing, collective punishment, and systematic efforts to conceal casualties, its claim to sovereign non-intervention comes under acute pressure.

R2P does not mandate automatic military action, but it does impose an obligation on the international community to consider diplomatic, economic, legal, and—if atrocities escalate further—coercive measures.

In this sense, the internationalisation of Iran’s crisis would be the consequence of Tehran's own conduct, not foreign imposition.

In 2011, the UN Security Council invoked the Responsibility to Protect in Libya when the Gaddafi regime threatened mass atrocities during the Arab Spring. Western alliances have acted to prevent large-scale civilian harm even in the absence of an explicit UN mandate.

From Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the former Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone and parts of the Sahel, the underlying logic has been consistent: when states engage in or enable mass violence against civilians, sovereignty ceases to function as an absolute shield.

Trump’s intervention

It is in this context that US President Donald Trump’s increasingly explicit warnings to the Islamic Republic should be understood.

Earlier today, Trump issued a direct message to Iranian protesters on Truth Social, urging them to “KEEP PROTESTING–TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS,” announcing that he has cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials, and declaring that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” if the killing of protesters does not stop.

This marks a notable escalation in both tone and signalling.

Trump has now repeatedly framed continued repression as a red line, stating that the United States will not tolerate mass killings of civilians.

It is unlikely that US planners would ignore the lessons of Israel’s recent 12-day campaign against Iran, a campaign in which American forces ultimately participated and which demonstrated both the reach and the limits of strikes narrowly focused on infrastructure.

Any strategy under consideration would likely be shaped less by symbolic targets than by the regime’s security architecture itself: the institutions, decision-making structures, and coercive networks that sustain repression.

Whether such pressure remains declaratory or translates into action, the signal is unmistakable: the regime’s own conduct has pushed the crisis beyond routine diplomacy and into active contingency planning.

Change in strategic terrain

The comparison most often drawn is with 2009. But the analogy is misleading.

The Green Movement was largely urban, middle-class, and procedural in its demands. It challenged an election outcome, not the foundational legitimacy of the system itself. The current movement contests the regime’s right to rule altogether.

Nor does this moment resemble many leaderless uprisings of the past century, which fractured under pressure or collapsed into ideological ambiguity. What distinguishes the present phase is the growing convergence around a figure and a direction.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah—whose reign ended in February 1979 following the revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini—appears to be functioning, through popular recognition rather than formal appointment, as a focal point for disparate strands of opposition.

Whatever one’s view of monarchy, the presence of an identifiable political centre of gravity marks an important departure from previous cycles of unrest.

For now, the Islamic Republic retains formidable coercive capacity. Revolution does not guarantee swift collapse. What it does guarantee is a change in the strategic terrain.

The question is no longer whether the regime can suppress protests tonight, but whether it can sustain governance tomorrow, next month, or next year under unrelenting strain.

In recent weeks, millions have taken part in an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic — and under a nationwide communications blackout, at least 12,000 people have been shot dead in what amounts to the largest mass killing of Iran’s contemporary history.

The collapse of the rial may have ignited the protests, but this wave of defiance runs far deeper than exchange-rate volatility. It reflects a society exhausted by decades of strategic deprivation.

The poverty pushing millions to the brink is not simply the result of policy error or mismanagement. It is the by-product of a conscious political choice: a calculated trade-off.

Tehran and its defenders routinely blame sanctions. Western analysts point to corruption or incompetence. Both explanations miss the governing logic at work.

What defines the Islamic Republic’s decision-making is not a lack of alternatives, but a rigid hierarchy of priorities: ideological integrity and regional reach consistently outrank broad-based prosperity.

In this calculus, economic crisis is not an unintended detour from the leadership’s path; it is the terrain on which that path has been chosen.

Fear of external influence and so-called “cultural invasion” reinforces this worldview. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly framed material prosperity and deep integration with global markets as vulnerabilities that erode faith and weaken resistance.

His much-touted “Resistance Economy” is not designed to escape sanctions, but to endure them. It promises resilience, not growth; survival, not transformation.

That trade-off cascades through policy. The drive for agricultural self-sufficiency, promoted as revolutionary virtue, has drained aquifers and destabilized rural livelihoods, as water-intensive crops and inefficient irrigation exhaust already scarce groundwater.

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  The bazaar finally breaks with the Islamic Republic

Meanwhile, a maze of subsidies, multiple exchange rates, and import restrictions creates rents that enrich well-connected actors while suffocating independent enterprise. These distortions are tolerated—even sustained—because they preserve political control and reward loyalty over innovation.

Even when officials acknowledge the scale of failure, they remain bound by the same red lines that produced it.

The water crisis lays this contradiction bare. Faced with mounting shortages, authorities warn of “water bankruptcy” and champion desalination plants and transfer megaprojects as proof of resolve, while continuing to treat self-sufficiency in water-intensive crops as a strategic achievement rather than a structural mistake.

The result is improvisation without reform: capital flows to spectacular projects that buy time, while the incentives driving depletion and waste remain untouched.

In such a system, rising living standards are irrelevant. Economic pain does not trigger reform because reform risks undoing the political architecture that keeps the Islamic Republic intact.

On the streets today, that logic is meeting its reckoning. Protesters are not merely rejecting inflation or unemployment; they are rejecting the premise that their suffering serves a higher purpose.

In recent remarks, Khamenei praised young people who aspire to “meet their maker” and embrace sacrifice over material advancement. Yet the chants echoing across Iranian cities demand something else entirely: dignity over obedience, participation over submission, a future to build rather than one to forfeit.

Confronted with this unrest, the leadership retreats to its familiar narrative of foreign plots, dismissing protesters as agents of outside powers. That rhetoric cannot conceal the deeper confrontation underway: two visions of national purpose that cannot coexist within a single political order.

One demands a society willing to trade its welfare, opportunities, and youth for an ideological project. The other, facing bullets and batons, is signaling that this exchange—their lives for the regime’s vision—is no longer acceptable.

For a generation that refuses to be treated as collateral, the Islamic Republic and its leader have no answer.

Trump said on Sunday that Iranian officials had reached out seeking talks on a nuclear deal and said the United States may meet with them after repeatedly warning Tehran against killing demonstrators and mooting "very strong" military options.

Former British Army officer and military analyst Andrew Fox told Iran International that the Islamic Republic is deliberately applying maximum force early to crush the protests before Washington can act decisively.

“If (Trump) limits his intervention to just rhetoric, then clearly that is, of course, strategic restraint, but also an absolute betrayal at a critical moment,” Fox said.

“He’s made promises. It’s very clear that there were promises that the Americans were not ready to deliver.”

Trump, in a post on Truth Social last week, warned that the United States is “locked and loaded” and ready to intervene in Iran if authorities violently suppress demonstrators — statements that analysts say emboldened many to take to the streets.

“It’s questionable that this many people would have protested had Mr. Trump not made those promises,” Fox said. “So at the moment,” he added, “America potentially has blood on its hands quite frankly.”

Publicly, Iranian officials struck a defiant tone. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran was open to negotiations but also “fully prepared for war,” insisting the situation inside the country was under control.

Behind the scenes, however, US officials say Tehran is sending a different message.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said an Iranian official had reached out to US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff “expressing a far different tone than what you’re seeing publicly.”

Axios earlier reported a phone call between Araghchi and Witkoff during which the two sides discussed both the protests and Iran’s nuclear program.

On the ground, the crackdown has intensified amid a near-total internet shutdown.

Medics and eyewitnesses told Iran International that the preliminary death toll over more than two weeks of unrest had surged in recent days to as many as 2,000 people.

The full scale remains impossible to verify due to communications blackouts.

New evidence suggests the state response is being conducted as a wartime operation.

A physician who treated large numbers of wounded protesters described mass-casualty conditions, overwhelmed hospitals, and the use of live ammunition and military-grade weapons by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij forces according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran.

The doctor said security forces operated under orders that eliminated accountability and treated civilian protests as a battlefield scenario, with injured protesters systematically identified inside hospitals and communications deliberately shut down.

To intervene or not?

Trump’s own mixed messaging, analysts say, risks compounding the damage.

“President Trump’s comments on Air Force One contained something for everyone in them,” said Jason Brodsky, the policy director for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), pointing to the combination of military threats, diplomacy with Tehran and outreach to the opposition.

While unpredictability can have tactical benefits, Brodsky warned that a US meeting with Iran’s leadership now “will provide relief for the regime.”

“It can prop-up the currency while demoralizing the Iranian freedom fighters on the ground,” he said. “There is great benefit for Iran in a negotiating process with the US. But no benefit for the US.”

Such talks, Brodsky said, would be “perceived by the Iranian people as external American intervention on the side of the Islamic Republic, not the Iranian people.”

“We should be giving time, space, and resources to the Iranian people,” he said, “not the Islamic Republic.”

Confidence that US military action was imminent has meanwhile begun to waver.

“Do I believe President Trump will strike Iran? Yesterday I was more confident of an attack, today, not quite as much,” said Dr. Eric Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network (MEPIN).

Mandel said he had spoken with Israeli analysts saying they were confident Trump would strike but “did not know sooner or later.”

He said Washington still retains options short of a full-scale war, including seizing oil tankers tied to Iran’s shadow fleet exporting more than two million barrels of oil a day, CIA covert actions, cyber operations, kinetic action against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij and restoring communications through satellite internet systems such as Starlink.

Trump said Sunday he would speak to Elon Musk about restoring internet access in Iran.

As the death toll rises and Iran remains largely cut off from the outside world, analysts warn the moment for measures is rapidly disappearing.

What comes next, they say, will determine not only the fate of Iran’s uprising — but whether US warnings are remembered as deterrence or as words that raised hope just long enough to deepen a sense of betrayal.

What began in late December 2025 as protests over economic hardship—initially centered on Tehran’s bazaar and spreading through strikes—has since transformed into a far broader uprising, with demonstrators increasingly calling for an end to theocratic rule.

The unrest has been met with sweeping force, including mass arrests and the use of live ammunition, as authorities imposed near-total internet blackouts to obscure the scale of the crackdown.

Western governments have hardened their stance as the scale of the crackdown has become clearer, with US President Donald Trump vowing to hit Iran “very hard” if repression continued.

In this environment, Russia has remained persistent in its backing of Tehran.

A Times report last week even suggested that supreme leader Ali Khamenei might flee to Russia should his rule be seriously threatened.

While such scenarios cannot be entirely dismissed, they remain speculative and, above all, ideologically improbable.

Khamenei’s legitimacy is deeply rooted in his personal commitment to the ideological tenets of the Islamic Revolution and to the principle of revolutionary endurance.

This stance sharply differentiates him from other segments of the Islamic Republic’s establishment, notably economic and technocratic elites, for whom exit options and external safeguards may constitute a rational form of risk management.

Whether grounded in concrete planning or not, the persistence of such narratives nonetheless underscores how closely external partnerships—especially with Russia—are now perceived to be intertwined with the regime’s internal resilience and survival calculations.

The perception that Moscow backs repression—and offers sanctuary if it fails—may be influencing the calculations of Iran’s ruling elite, hardening the loyalists’ resolve while quietly expanding the exit options available to those at the apex of power.

Material support

Moscow's backing reflects not merely tactical convenience but a deeper strategic convergence rooted in shared opposition to Western norms of governance and intervention.

For Russia—strained by its war in Ukraine and declining influence elsewhere—Iran represents one of the few remaining pillars of resistance to what the Kremlin portrays as an increasingly assertive liberal international order.

Material cooperation lies at the core of this relationship.

While there is no publicly confirmed reporting of Russian military airlifts tied directly to the current protest wave, the depth of the Moscow-Tehran partnership is evident in joint ventures such as Iran’s recent satellite launches aboard Russian rockets and a series of long-term bilateral cooperation agreements.

Together, these developments form the geopolitical backdrop to the current unrest.

Learning repression

Officially framed as security and counterterrorism cooperation, the partnership has also involved political learning and technological convergence.

Iran’s security apparatus has increasingly adopted surveillance practices similar to those used by Russia to manage domestic dissent, including facial-recognition technologies, large-scale data aggregation and advanced communications monitoring that allow security forces to identify and disrupt protest networks with greater precision.

This convergence is reinforced by doctrinal exchanges and intelligence coordination involving the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Russian experience in sanctions evasion, electronic warfare and information control has proved valuable to Tehran as it seeks to preserve coercive capacity under mounting economic pressure.

Moscow’s support has become an increasingly important component of Tehran’s ability to contain a protest movement that challenges not only economic governance but the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic.

Elite calculations

That external backing does not affect all factions within Iran’s power structure equally.

Tehran’s most ideologically committed forces—particularly within the IRGC and the security services—are widely expected to resist collapse at almost any cost.

For these actors, collapse would not simply mean loss of office but could entail prosecution, exile or worse. Their commitment to repression is therefore existential, reinforced by decades of indoctrination and deeply entrenched interests in a closed political system.

By contrast, Iran’s economic oligarchy, though deeply intertwined with the state, appears far less ideologically anchored.

Composed of business elites, semi-private conglomerates and networks enriched through privileged access to state resources, this group has long hedged its political bets.

As the crisis deepens, many are likely to seek exit strategies rather than confrontation. Unlike the ideological core, they possess the financial means and transnational connections to adapt quickly.

In the event of a fundamental political change in Iran, such actors would likely shift allegiances or secure settlement abroad.

Diplomatic protection

Beyond material assistance, Russia also provides Tehran with diplomatic shielding.

In multilateral forums, Moscow has consistently portrayed Iran’s repression as a legitimate exercise of sovereignty in response to foreign-backed destabilization.

This posture has taken on renewed urgency following the dramatic detention of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by US forces—a development that sent shockwaves through governments closely aligned with Russia.

Maduro’s removal represented a setback for Moscow, depriving it of a partner whose geographic proximity to the United States offered a rare opportunity to project influence in Washington’s immediate neighborhood.

Iran’s strategic value to Russia is significant but different. While Tehran’s regional reach and energy leverage matter, its geography does not offer Moscow comparable proximity to US power.

As a result, Russia’s investment in Iran—though politically and symbolically important—appears constrained by a lack of capacity to challenge American influence within its own hemisphere.

Russia has nonetheless intensified its diplomatic defense of Tehran, blocking or diluting resolutions on human rights abuses and portraying Iranian protests as externally engineered “color revolutions.”

Shaping Tehran’s calculus

Russian state media has reinforced Tehran’s preferred narrative, emphasizing sanctions and alleged foreign interference while downplaying corruption, elite predation and long-standing structural mismanagement.

Equally significant is narrative coordination through non-Western platforms such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where Russia and Iran have worked to recast unrest as foreign-driven destabilization, emphasizing sovereignty, non-intervention and resistance to “hybrid warfare.”

By signaling that diplomatic backing—and potentially sanctuary—remain available, Moscow reinforces the resolve of ideological hardliners while quietly widening the options available to those at the apex of power.

In this sense, Iran’s internal crisis has become embedded in wider international security networks.

For Moscow, supporting Tehran is not only about regional influence but about defending the principle that political systems can withstand sustained popular challenge through transnational cooperation.

As protests in Iran continue with no clear resolution, their outcome will resonate far beyond the country’s borders, testing the balance between state resilience and popular sovereignty in an increasingly polarized international order.

“This is the worst internet shutdown in Iran’s history,” said Ali Tehrani, director of Washington operations for Psiphon, an open-source anti-censorship tool widely used in Iran. “Even Starlink uploads have been affected.”

Tehrani said supporting internet freedom in Iran must become a serious and active priority for the U.S. government, particularly as Iranian authorities increasingly rely on digital blackouts during periods of unrest.

Cybersecurity expert Amin Sabeti told Iran International that the blackout, which began Thursday evening local time, has severed access to the global internet across much of the country and disrupted domestic online services that remained partially available during previous crackdowns.

“This is the most extreme internet shutdown we’ve ever had,” Sabeti said, adding that its scope signals a significant escalation in Tehran’s use of digital repression amid nationwide unrest.

‘Iranians will die’

Iranian authorities have imposed the communications blackout to prevent protesters from coordinating and to stop evidence of state violence from reaching the outside world.

Tehrani said the current shutdown is even more severe than the near-total blackout during the November 2019 uprising, widely known as Bloody Aban, named after the month in the Persian calendar when the protests occurred.

“It’s not just for The Washington Post that democracy dies in the darkness—it’s Iranians that die in the dark,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Taleblu said communications shutdowns are a core component of Iran’s repression strategy, designed to sever the link between protesters and the international community while security forces operate with reduced scrutiny.

Dozens killed

Despite the blackout, Iran International said it has received and reviewed a disturbing video showing several people lying motionless on the ground following large protests held Thursday night in Fardis, about 25 miles west of Tehran.

The outlet said the shutdown has obstructed efforts to determine the full scale of casualties shown in the footage.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran said on Friday that it has grave and urgent concerns that Iranian security forces may be carrying out lethal repression under the cover of the internet shutdown.

The group said it has received credible first-hand reports of hospitals overwhelmed with injured protesters in several cities and has documented the use of live ammunition by security forces.

It warned that reports of mass killings from the night of January 8 could not be independently verified due to the communications blackout.