What Trump Fails to Grasp About Iran
The president’s threats reinforce the regime’s siege mentality.
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In one of the darkest periods of my life, when I was working as a journalist in Iran, I was sent to a secret prison in Tehran. I was held for weeks in solitary confinement in a cell barely larger than a grave. My interrogator beat me, humiliated me, and repeatedly threatened to arrest my family and friends. The light in my cell was always on. I had to relieve myself in the same plastic container from which I ate. The stench was so overpowering that I vomited often. Through the pain and degradation, a question consumed me: How does one human being do this to another?
At moments during my interrogations, the officer—an intelligence operative—would pause after beating me, struggling to catch his breath, while I lay on the floor unable to move. He would lecture me about “cooperation,” urging me to confess to fabricated charges. Sometimes he spoke about his own life: his hopes that his children would attend good universities, earn respect in society, achieve financial independence, and one day perhaps run a business of their own.
These aspirations were indistinguishable from my own, or from my parents’ hopes for me—or from the hopes of ordinary people everywhere. How could someone with such familiar dreams have beaten me so mercilessly only minutes earlier?
The answer I eventually came to was that this man did not see me as a person at all. He saw me as an enemy—an enemy who, if our roles were reversed, would do the same to him.
In the worldview that he had absorbed, the “enemy”—the most frequently invoked word in the speeches of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—was not merely a geopolitical adversary. They could come from within, as long as this person seemed to be compromising Iran’s very survival. Anyone placed in that category ceased to be human. Any violence against them became not only permissible but justified.
The Iranian government—one of the most repressive regimes in the world—has long relied on accusations of collaboration with hostile foreign powers, usually the United States or Israel, to silence journalists, activists, and dissidents. The state has rarely substantiated these claims, but proof has never been the point. Labeling someone an enemy immediately makes them a target of the judiciary, security services, and state media. It legitimizes torture, long prison sentences, professional bans, and social erasure.
Crucially, this practice terrorizes broader society. By rashly vilifying seemingly ordinary neighbors and colleagues, and by constructing an impermeable binary between “us” and the “enemy,” the regime deters solidarity by instilling fear.
For decades, those who have staffed Iran’s apparatus of repression have lived in a permanent state of paranoia. Despite having ruled since 1979, the Islamic Republic has never relinquished the psychology of siege. The “enemy” remains the regime’s central organizing principle. Generations of Iranians have paid the ultimate price for this punishing worldview.
Since my imprisonment in 2004, many thousands more have been jailed on similar charges. Multiple waves of nationwide protests have erupted, each met with brutal force. In nearly every instance, the government has blamed foreign conspiracies instead of acknowledging legitimate grievances over the country’s economic collapse, political repression, corruption, social suppression, and international isolation. The presence of an external enemy unifies the security forces, hardens their resolve, prevents defections, and makes internal fractures less likely.
This is one reason successive American presidents, Republican and Democrat, largely avoided explicit threats of military intervention in moments of domestic unrest in Iran. Even a limited familiarity with the regime’s psychology made it clear that such threats would endanger protesters more than protect them.
That changed in late December, when nationwide protests again swept Iran and quickly drew global attention. Within days, President Trump had posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” and ready to support Iranian protesters if the state began killing them.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, then called for people to return to the streets on January 8 and 9. Based on videos from those days and conversations I had with Iranians who participated in protests, turnout seemed much higher than in previous demonstrations. When I asked these Iranians how much Trump’s statements influenced their decision to demonstrate, one answered simply: “A lot.”
Many Iranians believed that Trump’s threats might deter the security forces or cause the regime to hesitate. But what followed was not restraint. It was escalation.
After shutting down internet and mobile international communications on January 8, thrusting the country into digital darkness, the government carried out a massacre unprecedented even in the regime’s own violent history. Witnesses have described tear gas, pellet guns fired at close range, blood on the streets, bodies on the ground. Although the government has acknowledged at least 5,000 deaths, some unofficial estimates have put the count as high as 20,000. Tens of thousands more are believed to have been injured or detained.
More than two weeks on, internet access is slowly coming back. Street protests have subsided, but cities remain militarized and arrests continue. Using an extensive surveillance network, authorities are now hunting down individuals identified in protest footage.
We may never know the full scale of this catastrophe. What we do know is this: When Trump said that he was ready to support Iranian protesters, and when that support mattered most, he did nothing. It didn’t take long for the mood among demonstrators to shift from hope to despair. His empty threats did little more than validate the regime’s impulse to destroy the enemy within.
Now, as speculation grows about a possible U.S. military strike—an American aircraft carrier is moving toward the region—one fact remains unchanged: Such an attack would reinforce the regime’s long-standing narrative that it is engaged in an endless war against an existential enemy.
For the Iranian government, confronting an external enemy is far easier than confronting its own people. Domestic protests threaten internal cohesion; war produces unity. Facing America or Israel is a scenario the regime has prepared its supporters for since 1979. If Trump finally follows through on his threats but still fails to fracture Iran’s machinery of repression, then he should expect to perversely strengthen the regime’s base, which will believe it is justified in even greater violence against the country’s civilians.
What is odd, and so deeply unsettling, is how closely the atmosphere in Iran resembles the months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those who oppose a strike are drowned out more and more by those demanding it—inside Iran and among the diaspora. Many, traumatized by the state’s murderous, repressive regime, now see a military attack by the U.S. as the only way out. Friends and colleagues who once argued that war never spurs meaningful change now advocate for it.
Yet the greatest danger is that Iranians, in their desperation, are walking a road the regime itself has spent decades paving. It is hard to imagine even the most well-meaning attack on Iran yielding any of the objectives that Iranians so desperately want: a free society, democratic governance, the rule of law. I fear that any step that fails to strip the regime of its moral justification for violence will plunge Iranians deeper into darkness.
Iran is a country with a long memory of foreign interference and a deep cultural aversion to outsiders determining their fate. If some Iranians today now openly call on an American president to strike, it is not because they have forgotten history. It is because more than four decades of relentless repression have robbed them of any sense of agency or the tools of even a minimally dignified life. The regime has pushed much of Iranian society toward a choice with no credible guarantees, and no assurance that Iranians themselves will shape what comes next.