by Abigail Greenblatt
On December 28th, 2025, Iran’s currency hit a record low, sending thousands into the streets to protest an economy spiraling into crisis. The demonstrations spread nationwide, evolving into a broader movement against the perceived corruption and repression of the Islamic Republic. Communications blackouts have created a murky picture of what’s actually happening on the ground. Without independent verification, media outlets frame events through their own biases while both Iranian and Israeli actors wage competing disinformation campaigns, reigniting their information warfare from last year’s 12-day conflict. Iranian state media deflects by using pictures of American protests to justify its crackdown, portraying repression as universal, while Israeli-backed accounts spread smears and threats to shape Western narratives about the protests.
The protests began as localized demonstrations rooted in economic distress. Decades of corruption and economic mismanagement, exacerbated by international sanctions, led to the collapse of the Iranian rial in late December. Iran is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, which the U.S. justifies based on Iran’s nuclear and missile development programs, support for armed non-state actors in the Middle East, and domestic human rights issues. Sanctions may seek to force changes in a state’s behavior through non-violent punitive measures such as trade embargoes, travel bans, or asset freezes, but can also be an attempt to destabilize governments to facilitate regime change. The United States has imposed sanctions on Iran since 1979, following the Iran hostage crisis. These sanctions target Iran’s energy and financial sectors, along with shipping, construction, mining, textiles, automotive, and manufacturing industries, and arms trade. They also restrict key government entities, including the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The impact of these sanctions is widespread, most intensely affecting Iran’s oil revenues, inflation, and GDP, which drives job losses, increased poverty, and significant challenges for the middle class. Concerningly, sanctions can inadvertently create conditions for corruption to thrive, as efforts to circumvent them can lead to the rise of informal or black-market activity and the manipulation of insider knowledge by government officials. U.S. sanctions have amplified the corruption that already flourished under the Islamic Republic. The U.S. role in Iran’s current economic crisis demonstrates how sustained sanctions can accelerate and intensify economic deterioration, producing a crisis whose costs fall disproportionately on ordinary Iranians caught between two governments.
The U.S.-Iran relationship has been shaped by decades of conflict, nuclear tensions, and regional competition. The 1953 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh sparked enduring resentment toward Western intervention. The 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, regional conflicts involving Iran’s Quds Force, escalating Israeli-Iranian tensions, and Iran’s nuclear program have produced an increasingly adversarial relationship that continues to shape both countries’ policies today. President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal briefly reduced sanctions and eased tensions, but President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the agreement and President Biden’s failure to restore it meant that U.S. sanctions remained in place, continuing to devastate Iran’s economy.
Against this backdrop of hostility, American intervention, both economic and military, has repeatedly worsened conditions for ordinary Iranians. Having contributed to the economic crisis that sparked these protests, President Trump’s repeated threats of military action now risk escalating a domestic uprising into a regional war. Iranian officials are pushing a narrative that the demonstrations, which began as localized economic protests, were taken over by “terrorists” and foreign actors loyal to its enemies, the U.S. and Israel. President Trump’s threats of military intervention feed directly into the regime’s narrative of Western interference and provide justification for the Iranian authorities’ intensified crackdown against protesters. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned that Iran’s forces are on standby and would target U.S. military bases and personnel in the Middle East should Washington intervene militarily.
Trump’s threats raise critical questions about what genuine solidarity with Iranian protesters looks like. While the scale of violence demands an international response, Iranian activists have consistently warned that foreign military action would validate the regime’s narrative, allowing authorities to cast legitimate protesters as foreign agents. Moreover, attacking Iran would likely unite its military, many of its people, and the regime, just as nationalist sentiment surged during last year’s 12-day conflict when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran.
Attacking Iran would deepen the violence on the ground while sending shockwaves through the region. Iranian authorities have explicitly stated that any U.S. military action would be met with retaliatory strikes on American forces and interests across the Middle East. Rather than protecting protesters, intervention risks igniting a broader conflict that would transform a domestic uprising into a regional war. Decades of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East have consistently undermined rather than advanced democratic movements, leaving chaos in place of promised freedom.
Recent history demonstrates this pattern clearly. The 2003 invasion of Iraq triggered a sectarian civil war that had a devastating human cost, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displacing millions more. The power vacuum fueled the rise of extremist groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq and eventually ISIS. Two decades later, Iraq remains plagued by instability and violence. Libya offers another cautionary tale of how military intervention can trigger catastrophic consequences. In 2011, U.S. and European military attacks against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi helped overthrow and kill the dictator, only to produce an ongoing civil war that has killed thousands and displaced millions. Afghanistan stands as the most expensive failure. Twenty years and trillions of dollars after the U.S. invasion, the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 demonstrated the complete collapse of the U.S.-led “nation-building” project. The Afghan people, particularly women and girls who had gained rights and opportunities under the U.S.-backed government, saw those gains evaporate in a matter of weeks.
The pattern is clear: military intervention rallies national unity in the attacked country, empowers the forces it claims to combat, and leaves chaos where liberation was promised. The question, then, isn’t whether the international community should respond to potential crimes against humanity unfolding in Iran; it’s how. True support for the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom should begin with ending U.S. sanctions that have devastated their economy, halting military threats that would deepen the violence, and stopping arms shipments to Israel that fuel regional tensions. The path forward requires diplomatic engagement to address the nuclear issue and de-escalate tensions, not punitive policies that empower the regime while impoverishing the Iranian people.
Abigail Greenblatt is a student at Northeastern University and an intern at MAPA Education Fund
