President Donald Trump is likely about to face a difficult choice: how to enforce his redline warning to Iran not to kill protesters who have taken to the streets. Trump warned on Jan. 2 that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
Iran has been beset by new protests since late December. Tens of thousands are protesting over the collapse of the country’s rial currency, a reduction in government subsidies, and soaring inflation above 52%. Savings have lost their value, pensioners and those on low to middle incomes are struggling to afford basic food supplies. Tensions boiled over when President Masoud Pezeshkian outlined a 2026 budget providing huge boosts to military-security spending and real-term cuts to salaries and pensions.
Thus far, Iranian human rights and independent news organizations report that fewer than 50 protesters have been killed by security forces. But with protests continuing across Iran, a harsher crackdown is probable. Indicating as much, internet monitors noted that Iranian officials had shut down the country’s internet networks on Thursday. Iran has traditionally done this in preparation for violent crackdowns, seeking to prevent organization among protesters and foreign attention to its actions.
Perhaps Iranian officials will restrain themselves from gunning down their fellow citizens. But Trump will have to respond to any significant killing that causes hundreds of casualties.
This wouldn’t ultimately be about the morality of deterring massacres against civilians, but rather ensuring that Iran and other adversaries realize his threats aren’t bluster. Following the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro last weekend, Trump’s failure to act would also waste the new political capital now attached to his threats. As things currently stand, leaders from Iran to Cuba to North Korea are unprecedentedly fearful of getting on Trump’s bad side. While Trump was always viewed as unpredictable, that unpredictability now has companion strength via his penchant for risky but highly successful employments of military force.
Moreover, red lines matter. The world took notice when, following a Syrian regime chemical weapons attack on civilians in August 2013, President Barack Obama failed to enforce the red line he had issued a year earlier against the use of those weapons. Obama’s willful impotence diluted foreign perceptions of American resolve, emboldening adversaries to test the limits of American power. While Obama’s weakness was not the prime cause of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and intervention in support of Bashar al-Assad’s in 2015, it certainly encouraged Vladimir Putin to be bold. It is also notable how Xi Jinping escalated his militarization of islands in the international waters of the South China Sea following Obama’s red line debacle.
So, what should Trump do if Iran moves to violently crush the protesters?
A short, sharp response would be the best option. The objective here would be to enforce his threat in a manner that quickly throttled Iranian and global attention while deterring further crackdowns. Trump could order air or missile strikes targeting barracks or command centers supporting security forces or IRGC forces such as the Basij militia, especially the Imam Ali battalions, involved in crackdowns. Trump could then warn that if the killings continued, larger military action would follow against higher command facilities and personnel.
This approach would be best suited to encouraging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, and his security and military chiefs to consider whether continuing their crackdown had become riskier than allowing the protests to continue. It is important to note here that the Islamic Republic remains deeply shaken by last year’s successful U.S. and Israeli air strikes on its nuclear facilities, by the Israeli devastation wrought upon its key proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and by its continuing economic fragility. Leveraging these fears, Trump need not immediately pull out the big guns.
Indeed, Trump would be wise not to launch a massive attack as his first response to any mass killings. This would undoubtedly be the preference of Israel, which understandably views Iran as its prime nemesis. The problem with massive U.S. military strikes is that they might overwhelm Iran’s fear-insecurity calculus, leading the regime to lash out with irrational but heavy retaliation against the U.S. and its interests. This Iranian retaliation could destabilize the Middle East, disrupt key trade routes, and see direct terrorist attacks on American civilians. Although Iran held back from these retaliatory options following the U.S. strikes on its nuclear program last year, Khamenei might regard a major U.S. military response to any crackdown as an existential test to his theological project. That moment demanded the highest risk of Iranian reprisals in a desperate effort to restore deterrence.
THE REWARDS AND RISKS IN TRUMP’S GROWING USE OF MILITARY FORCE
Amid his military deployments around Venezuela, China’s rising aggression in the East and South China Seas, and facing a coming showdown with Russia over his Ukraine peace effort, Trump would be ill-served by a regional conflagration that distracted U.S. forces and further depleted munitions stocks.
The key, then, is for Trump to do enough in response to any massacre that his and the nation’s credibility is upheld and Iran thus deterred from further mass killings. But not so much that the U.S. gets sucked into another bloody Middle Eastern conflict.