Iran’s regime clings to power despite Trump’s threats, the economic crisis and protests

“If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.” That warning, printed in Persian and English on a huge billboard unveiled on Sunday in Enqelab Square in central Tehran, has several intended audiences. The background image shows an aircraft carrier under attack, with the stripes of the United States flag painted in blood in the sea. However, the billboard is not aimed solely at Washington. The Islamic Republic of Iran also routinely uses these giant billboards to sound the alarm to its own followers — the segment of the population that still supports it, estimated by various experts at between 20% and 30% of Iranians.

The message to both its loyalists and its foreign enemy is that Iran will respond to any attack; the subtext is the iron determination of a weakened regime to survive, even if doing so requires military retaliation or negotiations with its enemy. All of this comes amid an unprecedented economic crisis and the thousands killed in the repression of the most recent protests against the government: at least 6,221, according to the NGO Hrana; 3,117 by official Iranian figures.

“No regime can fully recover from a bloodbath” like the one that has taken place in Iran, says Eldar Mamedov, a nonresident analyst at the Quincy Institute, in an email. This collective trauma is compounded by figures such as 80% inflation in food prices and water and electricity outages — elements of an economic crisis that triggered the protests that began on December 28 and were crushed amid the spilling of “rivers of blood,” as many Iranians describe it.

Those protests were the latest in a series of demonstrations. They have followed a recurring pattern since 2017, whereby every two or three years the anger of a population impoverished by international sanctions and corruption, combined with a lack of freedoms, erupts in the streets. One third of Iran’s 92 million people live in poverty, according to the World Bank.

The public message that this weakened regime is now projecting on billboards like the one depicting the aircraft carrier is as maximalist as Donald Trump’s threats against it. The Quincy Institute researcher believes the repression of the demonstrations was so brutal precisely to send the world a message: that in the face of an “existential threat,” Iran’s leaders are willing to do anything — even to unleash, if the United States attacks, “retaliation far stronger than in the war last June against Israel.”

Like Washington, Iran sends mixed signals in its rhetoric. While on Tuesday President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed to be willing to discuss options for ensuring peace in a call with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, on Wednesday Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied any direct contact with Washington. Also on Wednesday, the U.S. President again threatened Iran with a message suggesting that his priority is not regime change — nor sending “help” to the protesters, as he said he would — but rather imposing a U.S.-friendly nuclear agreement on the Islamic Republic.

In a post on his social network Truth Social, Trump urged Iran to negotiate “a fair and equitable deal — NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS — one that is good for all parties,” and warned that “time is running out.” Otherwise, Trump said the U.S. Attack on Iran “will be far worse” than the one it carried out alongside Israel in June.

In the message, Trump also alluded to Venezuela. He even claimed that the fleet sent by Washington to waters near Iran, led by “the great aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln,” is “larger” than the one deployed in the Caribbean. The president went further with the analogy, noting that, “like with Venezuela,” that fleet “is ready, willing and able to rapidly fulfill is mission, with speed and violence.”

“For now, Trump is amassing military forces in the Persian Gulf” with uncertain objectives, says Mamedov. The expert points to another possibility that also follows the Venezuelan script: “a maritime blockade against Iran to prevent its oil exports” to China, the country that buys 80% of its crude oil production, disregarding international sanctions against the country. In that case, the threat of economic strangulation — which Washington calculates could once again drive Iranians into the streets — would be added to the military pressure.

“What Trump is seeking,” says Mamedov, “is the capitulation” of the regime. The Quincy Institute expert nevertheless takes it for granted that contacts between the two countries — which Iranian diplomacy denies, at least directly — continue “both through the channel between Foreign Minister Araghchi and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and through Gulf mediators.”

The problem in reaching such an agreement — one that would in principle dispel the specter of a military confrontation — is that U.S. Demands “go far beyond what Tehran would be willing to accept.” Those demands could include “not only an end to uranium enrichment,” which Washington believes is aimed at producing nuclear weapons (a claim Tehran denies), but also that Iran “curtail its missile program” and end its “support for regional allies or proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Hashd al-Shaabi [Shiite militias] in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.”

“It is unlikely that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei will agree to these demands,” which he would see as “a kind of betrayal of the revolutionary ideology,” says Mamedov.

Ideology in Iran, meanwhile, “is not rhetoric; it is a mechanism of control,” warned Danny Citrinowicz, former head of Israeli military intelligence, in a post on the social network X. Renouncing this and accepting an agreement that would open the country to U.S. Companies — and with them to Western influence — would represent the end of the Islamist utopia pursued by Iran’s rulers. As Khamenei himself once said, paraphrasing a U.S. Official, it is easier to bring down the Islamic Republic by sending miniskirts into the country than by dropping bombs.

Blocking Hormuz

“Tehran’s true capabilities remain to be seen, but I would take its warnings seriously,” adds Mamedov. In his opinion, an Iranian regime “weakened by the protests” and the economic crisis would now have “a motivation to retaliate with everything at its disposal”: using its missiles and regional allies “to target U.S. Military bases in the region,” or by imposing a “blockade of the Strait of Hormuz,” the artery of global trade through which 20% of the world’s oil passes.

On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei posted on x a picture of himself on Hormuz Island, accompanied by the telling caption: “Pearl of the Persian Gulf: Hormuz Island, overlooking the strategic Strait of Hormuz.”

For this reason, Iran is emerging as a potentially less manageable enemy than Venezuela. For example, Ali Alfoneh, a researcher at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, raises the possibility that Tehran may plan to direct its potential military retaliation “not against the United States or Israel, but against the regional energy infrastructure.”

“Analysts within the Revolutionary Guard [the parallel army tasked with protecting the regime] seem to have grasped that one of the few issues that deeply concerns President Trump is the price of fuel at the pump,” especially with the crucial U.S. Midterm elections coming up in November. For that reason, he argues, Iran is trying to use this threat as a form of “deterrence.”

Trump — or rather his advisers — are confronted above all with the dilemma that, beyond the risk that a war with Iran could destabilize the Middle East and energy markets, the swift strike the president is seeking might not even succeed in toppling the Islamic Republic, even if Khamenei were assassinated.

The reason, Alfoneh warns, lies in “the decentralized leadership structure of the Islamic Republic.” Without the kind of “ground invasion of Iran” that Trump and his voters reject, “the regime is likely to survive,” at least in the short term.

A U.S. Military attack on Iran would not only fail to guarantee a change in the political system, but could actually strengthen the regime, Mamedov cautions. “External attacks tend to rally populations around the flag, marginalize internal opposition, and strengthen hardliners,” Israeli analyst Citrinowicz similarly noted on X.

Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is trying to ease public discontent through symbolic measures. On Wednesday, Iran’s vice president for Women and Family Affairs, Zahra Behrouz-Azar, announced that the country will begin issuing motorcycle driver’s licenses to women — something they had previously been barred from obtaining.

Like that tiny step forward — minuscule, yet forced by the fait accompli created by Iranian women riding motorcycles without licenses — any lasting change “will have to come from within Iran, from civil society organizations, organic opposition movements, and a more pragmatic segment of the establishment,” Mamedov argues. “Under bombs, it is hard to make a revolution,” he concludes.

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