From late 2025 through mid-January 2026, Iran experienced one of the most severe and wide-ranging waves of protest since the 1979 Revolution. This period coincided with a sharp deterioration in economic conditions, marked by the national currency, the rial, falling to historic lows against the U.S. dollar—reportedly reaching between 1.4 and 1.46 million rials per dollar—while food inflation surpassed 60 per cent. The protests were initially triggered by a strike among merchants in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on 28 December 2025 and rapidly spread nationwide, drawing in students and a broad spectrum of social groups. As the movement expanded, its initial economic grievances increasingly gave way to overtly political demands, ultimately coalescing around a distinctly revolutionary slogan calling for the end of the clerical regime.
This internal combustion has coincided with a radical transformation in US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Despite branding himself the ‘Peace President’ and railing against ‘forever wars,’ Trump’s restraint vanished after the US and Israel launched the 12-day “Operation Midnight Hammer” in June 2025—striking nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. By January 2026,the pre-electoral stances were entirely replaced by calls for Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ and the slogan ‘MIGA’ (Make Iran Great Again).
This shift begs a critical question: why has a president who built his political identity on anti-interventionism suddenly embraced the very regime-change fantasies he once loathed?
The answer lies first in the “quick win” from Venezuela. The ‘successful‘ abduction of Venezuela’s Maduro, which served as a proof of concept for Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’—a rationale for pre-emptive, decapitating strikes to project power. Weakened Iran now appeared as the next ‘easy win.’
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu personally shaped this pivot, leveraging intelligence on Iranian assassination plots against Trump and a diplomatic process designed to fail, thereby convincing Trump that diplomacy was a sham and military action was justified.
Furthermore, Trump’s transition to a “humanitarian interventionist” has been fuelled by the sheer brutality of the Iranian crackdown. With rights groups estimating over 2,000 deaths and a total internet blackout intended to hide mass executions, Trump has found a moral justification that could resonate with his base.
While protests provide a moral pretext, the deeper continuity in U.S. policy is energy geopolitics: denying rivals access to independent oil supplies, a logic linking Venezuela and Iran.
Meanwhile, on social media, Trump promised protesters that “help is on its way,” leveraging the domestic unrest to frame regime change as an act of “rescue” rather than an imperialist war. This allows him to maintain his MAGA credentials by arguing that he is helping the Iranian people “control their own destiny” rather than committing “boots on the ground”.
However, this policy of “Maximum Pressure 2.0” carries a high risk of miscalculation. Analysts warn that while Maduro’s Venezuela constituted a relatively manageable target, Iran possesses far greater retaliatory capacity and escalation potential. Unlike the June 2025 strikes on nuclear sites—to which Tehran responded with a largely symbolic missile salvo against a US base in Qatar—an existential threat to the regime could trigger catastrophic retaliation: direct attacks on U.S. assets and Israel, regional proxy warfare, and the disruptionof the Strait of Hormuz—spiking global oil prices and undermining Trump’s domestic economic agenda, particularly his emphasis on controlling the cost of living.
The current approach rests on the assumption that a form of “synergy” can be generated between internal protest movements and external military pressure.
The protest movement lacks clear, unified leadership. While exiled figure Reza Pahlavi seeks this role, his advocacy for military strikes and monarchist symbolism does not equate to broad societal support. The movement’s diverse grievances do not inherently demand a royal restoration, which itself contradicts Western democratic rhetoric.
Crucially, Iran’s security apparatus (IRGC, Basij) remains cohesive and invested in the regime’s survival. There are no visible thresholds of collapse: no major elite defections, security force fragmentation, or clerical splits to facilitate a transition.
The dangerous dance between Tehran’s internal unrest and Washington’s newfound appetite for regime change is a recipe for catastrophe, not liberation. President Trump has traded his pre-electoral affirmed non-interventionism for a strategy of attritional coercion, mistaking Iran’s profound internal crisis for an opportunity for a cheap, Venezuelan-style victory. But Iran is not Venezuela. Its regime is harder, its retaliatory reach longer, and its capacity for turning a targeted strike into a regional inferno far greater.
The tragic irony is that the very people Trump claims to champion—the Iranian protesters—are left in a perilous limbo. Their brave uprising is being weaponized as a moral pretext for a policy driven by energy dominance and geopolitical score-settling, while offering them no credible political pathway forward. There is no “synergy” when external pressure only strengthens the regime’s siege mentality and its ruthless security grip, without a viable, unified opposition to harness.
The result is a perfect storm of miscalculation. The U.S. is pursuing regime change without a plan for what comes after, risking a war it doesn’t want, over a goal it cannot easily achieve. Tehran, for its part, faces a people who have loudly rejected its rule, yet confronts them with its security might.
Trump’s “Maximum Pressure 2.0” is therefore the worst of both worlds: all the risks of escalation with little prospect of success. The world is left watching a volatile standoff where the spark of revolution meets the fuse of foreign intervention. Unless cooler heads prevail and strategy replaces sloganeering, the next chapter may not be “MIGA,” but a Middle East in flames.
