President Donald Trump’s promise that “help is on its way” for anti-government protesters in Iran appears to be increasingly at odds with realities on the ground, and the administration’s desire for an easy foreign policy win — or regime change in Tehran — remains elusive.
As large-scale protests have gained momentum in Iran amid a near-total information blackout, fragmentary evidence indicates the demonstrations have been crushed in a bloody crackdown by Iran’s security forces.
“The low estimate for the number of people killed is 2,000. The high estimate today [Jan. 14] is 15,000,” says Farzan Sabet, a researcher focused on the Middle East at the Global Governance Center, who runs the blog Iran Wonk. “They’re also lining up to do mass executions.”
Amid rumors that American military strikes were imminent, Trump told journalists Wednesday that “We have been informed by very important sources on the other side that the killing has stopped and executions won’t take place,” later adding: “I hope it’s true. Who knows.”
Whether this means the U.S. has ruled out military action for now is unclear. Unpredictability is a feature, not a bug, of this administration’s foreign policy. Trump previously pulled a bait-and-switch on Iran in June last year, promising a week-long window for diplomacy, only to carry out “Operation Midnight Hammer” against the country’s nuclear program hours later.
The protests, which began weeks ago over deteriorating living conditions and economic hardship, grew in size after outside voices endorsed the demonstrations.
On Jan. 6, Reza Pahlavi — the son of the former shah of Iran, who lives in the United States as a dissident-in-exile — released an Instagram post declaring his support for the protests. “Despite the regime’s ongoing violent crackdown, you are resisting, and it is inspiring,” Pahlavi said, calling on demonstrators to gather on the following Thursday and Friday and start chanting at 8pm. “Based on your response, I will announce the next calls to action.”
The video electrified many Iranians.
“I started getting messages, both from people inside Iran and also students who have family who are from Iran, or are here with family. And they were like, ‘Did you see this video? It’s got 15 million views.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll go check it later,’” Sabet tells Rolling Stone. “When I checked later, it was at 80 million views.”
By Thursday, the regime cut internet and phone services across the country. Protesters who had originally been motivated by high inflation were now taking to the streets across Iran chanting “Jâvid Shâh,” or “Long live the Shah,” and “Death to Khamenei,” the most significant direct challenge to the legitimacy of clerical rule in decades.
Trump’s social media post on Jan. 2 promising to take action if protesters were harmed also encouraged turnout. “I think that was a big deal. And his capture of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro reiterated the credibility of President Trump’s words,” Sabet says.
By the weekend, the regime had unleashed the army, police, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — the military branch charged with the protection of Iran’s government — as well as its volunteer paramilitaries, known as Basij.
Handfuls of photos and video clips have leaked out via Starlink satellite-internet terminals or have been hand-carried into neighboring countries. They document heavy and sustained gunfire in city streets, security forces firing on protesters, and rows upon rows of body bags.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump wrote on Tuesday, Jan. 13, after thousands had already been killed.
Yet the military assets required for a U.S. intervention aimed at stopping Iran’s security apparatus were simply not available in the area when Trump first made his pledge in early January. There are no carrier strike groups currently within operational distance of Iran, and until early Wednesday there had been no significant build-up of American forces in the region. Open-source researchers observed multiple aerial refuelling aircraft taking to the sky Wednesday, a possible indication of military action.
“Some of the messages I’ve been hearing from Iran is a sense of betrayal by President Trump,” Sabet says. “They thought they were going out there with him behind their backs.”
It is an open question what Washington expects to accomplish with the resources on hand. Administration insiders previously told the press that the White House is considering a range of non-kinetic options, including boosting anti-government media online, attacking Iranian targets with cyberweapons, or increasing sanctions, as well as limited military strikes aimed at critical targets.
The U.S. does maintain a number of fighter aircraft and naval vessels in the region — notably at Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain — which are capable of launching cruise-missile and stand-off munitions strikes. But destroying Iran’s security forces, dismantling its political and military leadership, and bringing down the regime will likely require a significant commitment in military resources.
“It’s not a one-off,” says Victoria Taylor, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. “Any effort to bring the regime down through military force would require what is best described as a sustained campaign.”
It’s not clear whether Trump is willing to commit to such an action.
“One of the challenges within the administration is there are very different camps in terms of a willingness and readiness to use force,” Taylor says. “Clearly, there are hawkish elements within the administration who are ready to pursue a much more muscular foreign policy — I’d count Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio among those. But we also know that there are strong voices in favor of restraint, like Vice President [J.D.] Vance.”
Amid the lack of a clearly articulated goal or strategy for Iran, some experts are skeptical Washington can achieve its desired results.
“There is no violent shortcut to an outcome where the United States and Israel will be happy,” says Ali Vaez, the Iran program director at the International Crisis Group. He observes that while Trump could use non-kinetic options to escalate pressure on the regime, “they won’t check the box of ‘spectacular’ it seems he so often opts for, and might not produce a significant result.”
A series of limited strikes, similar to the airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program last summer, may give Trump a PR victory. But they are unlikely to destroy the regime or protect the lives of protesters.
“There’s certainly a risk that the lesson learned from Venezuela and from the 12-Day War [when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran in June 2025] is that U.S. military power is so overwhelming that we are capable of achieving our goals quickly without putting boots on the ground, and without casualties,” Taylor says. “The difficulty in Iran is really that even if the U.S. were able to topple the regime, I am skeptical that we will be able to control the follow-on to a desired outcome.”
Nevertheless, the protests and the crackdown indicate structural weakness in the Iranian regime, which has portrayed the strife as part of a plot coordinated by Israel. But the sheer scale of the protests belies that they are simply the work of foreign agents. Significant protests in the past which began over social or economic grievances have spiraled into direct challenges to the government, known as “the System” in Persian, which is viewed as oppressive and backwards by many young Iranians.
“The regime is able to suppress, but it is not able to address the underlying causes,” Vaez says. “So all it’s doing is buying time until the next round of confrontation with civil society, and these are becoming more frequent and more violent every time.”
Sabet sees the current crisis as part of a much larger pattern, whose threads can be traced back through nearly a decade of internal protests and crackdowns. “The underlying assumption for me is a trend line where people understand that this system can’t meet their needs,” he says.
“Why are people constantly coming into the streets and killing security forces, and getting killed in huge numbers? Why is there a mass murder happening in the streets right now if reform works?” he asks.
The reason that Pahlavi’s post went viral and added fuel to the flames of protest, Sabet says, was revealed in conversations he had with acquaintances: “They were like, ‘Yeah, listen, we didn’t have an alternative before. Here’s an alternative, right?’ At least it’s trying to provide a vision of some kind of a positive future, or hope for the future.”
Still, the influence of Pahlavi — and Trump — is limited.
“Although the stock of the former shah’s son has improved over the past few months, he is by no means universally seen as the opposition leader,” Vaez notes. “And in any case, he doesn’t have any ground organization.”
Sabet adds: “If there’s a year of mass executions and crackdowns, it might be enough to put a stake in Pahlavi’s ambitions.” Still, while it’s hard to see the U.S. bringing down the regime quickly, Sabet says “a few well-considered actions on the cyber and non-kinetic side, or also on the kinetic and military side, could have an enormous effect” in encouraging another cycle of protest. “This situation is so unstable and fluid that nothing would surprise me.”
Vaez simply does not see the U.S. determining the final outcome for the regime that has ruled a country of 92 million people for nearly 60 years.
“This is an Iranian affair. Outsiders are mere bystanders,” he says.
Nevertheless, Trump views his previous military adventures in Iran — the killing of IRGC commander Major General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the strike against Tehran’s nuclear program last year — as unequivocal successes, and “bystander” is rarely a role he embraces.
Colombia's Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, left, embraces Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth of the Netherlands, at the end of a conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels, on April 29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Don’t Overlook This Surprising Climate Victory
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Good news about climate change? Hard to believe, but yes. It happened last week in the coal-exporting city of Santa Marta, Colombia, and it ranks as the most promising climate news since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
For the first time, a critical mass of the world economy is working together to phase out fossil fuels, a step that scientists have long said is imperative to limit global temperature rise to an amount civilization can survive. This counts as good news not least because it shows that meaningful change is possible, a belief that has been hard to sustain over the past decade. Equally important is what made the Santa Marta breakthrough possible: the advocates of phasing out fossil fuels stopped waiting for the producers of fossil fuels to agree to stop. Instead, advocates will simply stop buying their products.
From April 24 to 29, 57 countries representing most of the biggest economies on Earth gathered in Santa Marta for the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels, where they pledged to phase out burning oil, gas, and coal, the main driver of global warming. The phase-out will not take place overnight but over the years immediately ahead. France, for example, says it will eliminate coal by 2027, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050. Each country will devise a voluntary national plan to “disentangle their economies and societies” from fossil fuels, said Stientje van Veldhoven, the minister of the environment and housing for The Netherlands, which co-sponsored the conference with Colombia.
Calling themselves “a coalition of the willing,” these 57 countries — including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Spain, and joined by California, the world’s fifth biggest economy — make up the largest economic bloc on Earth. Their combined gross domestic product of $38.5 trillion (according to April 2026 data from the International Monetary Fund) is larger than the GDP of the US ($32.4 trillion) and almost twice as large as that of China ($20.9 trillion).
These countries also account for roughly 30 percent of current global consumption of fossil fuels. If they make good on their pledges to phase out fossil fuels, it will slash demand for those fuels. A basic law of economics is that lower demand leads to lower prices. (At the moment, the world is experiencing the flip side of this law, as oil and gas prices soar due to the supply restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz.) Lower prices for fossil fuels mean lower revenues for fossil fuel producers, which could prove fatal for the profitability of many current and planned projects and infrastructure.
The Santa Marta conference benefitted from an unanticipated coincidence of timing: the Iran war has triggered a historic energy crisis that is causing countries to lose faith in the reliability and affordability of oil and gas. On the second day of the conference, the head of the International Energy Agency declared that the war had broken global energy markets beyond repair. “The damage is done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with The Guardian. Predicting “permanent consequences” for the fossil fuel industry, Birol said countries will increasingly turn to more secure and less costly renewable energy sources, including by switching to electricity to run transportation and other sectors that historically relied on fossil fuels.
Irene Velez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, welcomed Birol’s remarks. “Our energy sovereignty as well as our climate survival require moving to other energy sources,” she said in an interview.
To be sure, the transition away from fossil fuels promised in Santa Marta has not happened yet, and there is plenty of room between the lip and the cup. But the economic heft of the Santa Marta coalition of the willing is undeniable, and its biggest members — Germany, California, the UK, France — have already made significant progress toward a non-fossil fueled future. Indeed, a core purpose of the Santa Marta conference was for participants to share lessons with one another about how best to leave fossil fuels behind. “This conference is not about [negotiating] documents,” said Rachel Kyte, the UK special representative for climate. “It’s about finding fellow travelers and learning from them — what’s working, what isn’t?”
The fact that the Santa Marta conference got little news coverage in the U.S. and that its greatest power lies in the realm of economics rather than politics may help explain why many observers have not yet recognized its game-changing potential. From the time climate change first emerged on the global agenda with the United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992, the dominant narrative has measured progress through the lens of politics: how many governments sign legally binding agreements to limit global temperature rise, and by how much? This prioritizing of politics is no surprise: most of the people involved in these negotiations — the diplomats conducting them, the scientists and activists seeking to influence them, the journalists covering them — regard governments as the decisive actors in international affairs and have little or no training in economics.
This approach has yielded little progress. With the important exception of the Paris Agreement, where virtually all of the world’s countries agreed to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5 degrees, the annual UN climate summits have been long on talk and short on action. Most of their elaborately negotiated agreements did not even mention the words “fossil fuels,” even though phasing them out is the core challenge.
The UN process has fallen short largely because a loophole gives fossil fuel-producing countries a de facto veto over final agreements. UN summits are conducted under UN rules, which require consensus decision making. “Consensus” does not mean “unanimous,” but it does mean that a handful of countries can block what a vast majority wants. That’s what happened at the COP30 summit last November, when Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in blocking a call by 85 countries to begin drawing up a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
The Santa Marta conference organizers skirted these obstacles by operating separately from the UN process and inviting only participants that had shown a genuine commitment to moving beyond fossil fuels. That meant no U.S. and no China. The proceedings were not diverted into debating whether fossil fuels need to go but rather could focus on how to make that happen, and to do so while protecting workers, businesses, and communities that currently rely on fossil fuels for jobs, profits, and tax revenues.
Santa Marta is only a first step. In a world where fossil fuels account for roughly 80 percent of total energy use, leaving them behind is no small task, as The Netherlands itself illustrates. In the same week that it was co-sponsoring the Santa Marta conference, the Dutch government approved plans to increase offshore gas production. Asked about this contradiction, Minister van Veldhoven explained that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran war meant that in the short term The Netherlands could obtain the gas its residents and businesses need only by producing its own or buying it from Russia, and the latter course was worse on both energy security and climate grounds. This conundrum, she added, “illustrates the very difficult issues facing us and all countries as we try to disentangle ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels.”
Very difficult, yes. But for the first time in a long time, Santa Marta offers plausible hope that humanity can phase out fossil fuels in time to avoid catastrophe. A critical mass of leaders is no longer waiting for the countries that make money and wield power by producing fossil fuels to agree to stop doing so, something they clearly have no intention of doing. Instead, those leaders are responding to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people — 80 to 89 percent of them, according to peer-reviewed scientific studies — want their governments to take stronger climate action. “This is not the end,” Velez said in the conference’s closing moments. “It is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.”
Author and journalist Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for The Nation and the executive director of Covering Climate Now.