After weeks of mass protests roiled the streets of Iran, President Donald Trump cheered the protesters on through social media. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING,” he wrote on Jan. 13. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
To many, it sounded like a promise of military intervention. But the president softened his message a day later, telling reporters that he had been told “the killing in Iran is stopping” and that “the executions won’t take place.’’
Now, the world waits to see what Mr. Trump will do: launch cyberattacks or targeted bombings; unleash more economic sanctions; blockade Iranian shipping; or do nothing at all. The U.S. Navy has redirected the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group from the Pacific to the Middle East, giving the president tools to act – if he chooses to do so.
Why We Wrote This
As mass protests in Iran prompt a brutal government crackdown, the U.S. is considering its response. President Donald Trump has several options available to him amid historic opposition to Tehran’s current regime.
Riding on his decision are the lives of countless Iranian protesters and, more broadly, the security of a region that produces 30% of the world’s oil. For America’s allies and rivals alike, it’s a crucial time as the White House weighs its options.
“In this Trump White House, all the procedures built by Republican and Democratic White House administrations have been eliminated,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “This is Donald Trump’s show.”
Mr. Gerecht says that “doing nothing is the worst scenario” for Mr. Trump, but the president still has a lot of latitude. The likeliest military option, Mr. Gerecht says, would be air or missile strikes against military installations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which handles internal security and is loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “It would shake the regime, and that in itself is helpful [to U.S. interests],” Mr. Gerecht says.
“Ultimately, change is coming from the inside and not from outside,” he says. “That is why the environment in Iran is so scary for the regime, and why their response has been more brutal than ever before.”
The most recent protests began less than three weeks ago, on Dec. 28, when merchants in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops and marched in the streets to protest the collapse of the country’s currency, the Iranian rial, and the resulting spike in inflation. Food prices have shot up 72% since January of last year, and inflation hovered between 40% and 45% throughout 2025.
The protests, which have since spread to all major urban centers, now represent the greatest threat to the Iranian regime since it came to power after toppling the country’s former U.S.-friendly monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. More than 2,600 people have been killed, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based advocacy group. The Iranian government puts the toll at closer to 300.
Iran’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf region – namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – have had their own squabbles with Tehran’s Shiite clerical leadership. But rather than using the protests as a pretext to conduct their own military actions, most are content to watch from the sidelines. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who performs most government functions on behalf of his father, King Salman Al Saud, reportedly reassured Iran that his country would not participate in any U.S.-led action against Iran, nor allow its land or airspace to be used for that purpose.
For Iran’s rivals, the protests are a kind of endgame for the Islamic republic, which they believe is imploding. “Even if Iran’s rulers survive this uprising, it could prove to be a Pyrrhic victory,” wrote Vali Nasr, an Iranian American political scientist and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a recent commentary for CSIS.
“The bloodshed will create an unbridgeable chasm with the population,” Mr. Nasr wrote. “The crackdown will neither resolve Iran’s debilitating economic situation nor restore its lost aura of power. The Islamic Republic is in a tightening vise from which it cannot escape.”
If Mr. Trump is seeking to de-escalate the conflict, that will come as a relief to critics at home – on both sides of the aisle. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, both Democrats, and others have argued that any strike against Iran would require congressional authorization. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said any strike on Iran could backfire, pushing Iranians to support the regime in a time of war.
Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urged the president to use “all means necessary” to stop the killing of protesters.
Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that Mr. Trump’s unpredictability might actually be an advantage. While Republicans are more likely than Democrats to seek military intervention, they are not likely to censure their own president if he doesn’t take that step, Mr. Takeyh says. “Trump is such an unusual politician; he’s not bound by the normal rules of politics. He can actually say, ‘The situation in Iran is now calm, and it no longer requires intervention on my part.’ Previous presidents might have suffered a credibility gap, but not Trump.”
For the moment, Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, Washington would “watch and see,” and, on Friday, he thanked the Iranian government for not following through on what he said were to be executions of political prisoners. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are urging the United States to refrain from military strikes because, they say, it would destabilize the region.
Mr. Trump “can stop because he has already used force against both Iran and Venezuela, or he can bomb them this afternoon. Anything can happen,” adds Mr. Takeyh, also an Iranian American scholar on the Middle East and a former State Department official. “No one can say he’s against using force.”
