On January 8, the 12th day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, in response to hyperinflation, shut down Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the Internet, further blacking out an already largely closed society. However, isolated photos and details have been smuggled out, giving a glimpse into just how brutal and massive these events were.
Videos spread of people outside the morgue unpacking body bags as they searched for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital in an attempt to arrest wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a Tehran hospital reported that it was crowded with victims, including several people with gunshot wounds to their eyes. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government acknowledged the killing of 2,000 people, although international observers fear the total number is much higher. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in its “final days or weeks.” If he is proven right, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens — acts that are indignant but also exemplary.
The file of this crisis has reached secret Washington, the offices of career employees in the intelligence and diplomatic services, as well as the offices of Donald Trump’s new appointees, among whom idealism has become an increasingly shunned philosophy. It has been the norm in American foreign policy that all interventions, even those that are blatantly self-serving, are conducted in high humanitarian terms. During the second Trump administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process were exercised only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed up his ouster of Nicolas Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition, but by approving the rise of Delcy Rodriguez, the dictator’s second-in-command, apparently in exchange for oil revenues. (Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado could only present her with a Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the new year, in a conversation that also touched on the annexation of Greenland, against the will of its people, White House adviser Stephen Miller delivered to CNN’s Jake Tapper the party’s emerging catchphrase: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by force, governed by force, and governed by force.”
This is a comprehensive vision, and it is a vision that is now being implemented in Ice A campaign in Minnesota against illegal immigrants and, increasingly, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also illustrates the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. The government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced the demonstrators it killed, describing them as terrorists. The Trump administration said Renee Judd, the woman who was shot Ice An officer in Minneapolis was involved in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those dating back to the Overseas Occupation, as historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the journal equator This week, because, under this administration, the foreign and domestic worlds have bled together, as Trump threatens wartime powers “to detain and deport illegal immigrants — and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under U.S. law.” The administration is also emphasizing an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice President J.D. Vance bluntly asserted that Ice Clients enjoy “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.
However, despite the president’s core sympathy for strongmen – Putin, Orban, and Kim – his strategic interests in Iran are skewed toward the protesters. (As it happens, the administration’s old allies in Israel and its new allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the president made some signs of solidarity. “Keep protestingHe urged.Help is on the way“.
Exactly what kind of assistance it is remains unclear. Trump adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, who was once Iran’s crown prince, but the White House found the ousted king unconvincing. Trump told reporters: “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he will play in his country.” In his publications and appearances, the president returned to more familiar themes: He mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened to impose tariffs on countries that trade with it, and announced little progress — the Iranian government appearing to have reversed a plan to execute Irfan Soltani, a 26-year-old store owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We were told the killing was going to stop,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, he struggled with the verb forms. “It stopped. It stopped.”