“If you sow winds, you will reap storms.” That admonition, printed in Persian and English, on a huge poster unveiled this Sunday in the central Enqelab Square, in Tehran, has several recipients. The background of the phrase is the image of an attacked aircraft carrier and with the bars of the United States flag painted with blood in the sea. However, that poster does not only appeal to Washington. The Islamic Republic of Iran also usually uses these gigantic panels to reproach its acolytes, the part of the population that still supports it, between 20% and a third of Iranians, according to different experts.
The message for its faithful and for that foreign enemy is that Iran will respond to any attack; the background, the iron will of a weakened regime to survive, even if to do so it has to take military retaliation or negotiate with its enemy. All this with the burden left to them by the repression of the latest protests against them: at least 6,221 according to the NGO Hrana; 3,117 in official Iranian figures.
“No regime can fully recover from a bloodbath” like the one in Iran, said Eldar Mamedov, a non-resident researcher at the Washington-based think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, by email. This collective trauma is added to data such as 80% inflation in food prices or water and electricity cuts, aspects of an economic crisis that unleashed the protests that began on December 28 and were quelled by spilling “rivers of blood,” as many Iranians put it.
Those protests were the last of many. They followed a recurring pattern in Iran since 2017, whereby, every two or three years, the anger of a population impoverished by international sanctions and corruption, coupled with the lack of freedoms, explodes in the streets. A third of Iran’s 92 million people live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
The public message that this weakened regime is now expressing in posters like the one on the aircraft carrier is as maximalist as Donald Trump’s threats against it. The Quincy Institute researcher believes precisely that the repression of the demonstrations was so brutal to send the message to the world that in the face of an “existential threat” the Iranian leaders are willing to do anything. Even to unleash, if the United States attacks, “retaliations much stronger than in the war of June last year against Israel.”
Like that of Washington, the Iranian discourse is ambivalent. If on Tuesday the president, Masud Pezeshkian, claimed to be willing to discuss options to guarantee peace, in a call with the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed Bin Salman, this Wednesday, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, denied any direct contact with Washington. Also this Wednesday, the US president threatened Iran again with a message that indicates that his priority is not to send “aid” to the protesters, as he said he would do, but to impose on the Islamic Republic a nuclear agreement beneficial to the United States.
In a message on his Truth social network, Trump urged Iran to negotiate “a fair and equitable agreement – WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS – that is good for all parties” and warned that “time is running out.” Otherwise, the attack against that country “will be much worse” than the one that led to
The scenario to which Trump . He even stated that the fleet sent by Washington to waters near Iran, led by “the great one” is “bigger” than the one deployed in the Caribbean. The president went further in the analogy, pointing out how, “just like” in the South American country, that fleet “is willing and able to accomplish its mission quickly and violently.”
“At the moment, Trump is accumulating military forces in the Persian Gulf” with uncertain objectives, Mamedov emphasizes. This specialist points to another possibility that also follows Venezuela’s script, “a maritime blockade against Iran, to prevent its oil exports” to China, the country that buys 80% of its crude oil production, ignoring international sanctions against the country. Thus, the threat of economic asphyxiation that, according to Washington’s calculation, could put Iranians back on the streets, would be added to the military one.
“What Trump is looking for,” says Mamedov, is “the capitulation” of the regime. The Quincy Institute expert assumes, however, that the contacts between both countries that Iranian diplomacy denies continue “both through the channel between Foreign Minister Araghchi and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and through Gulf mediators.”
The problem in reaching this pact that would in principle scare away the specter of an outbreak of war is that the American demands “go far beyond what Tehran could be willing to accept.” These demands could be “not only an end to uranium enrichment” that Washington believes is aimed at producing atomic weapons (Tehran denies this), but also that Iran “limit its missile program” and end its “support for allies/proxies in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hashd Shabi (Shiite militiamen) in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.”
It is “unlikely that Khamenei will agree to these demands” which he would see as “a kind of betrayal of revolutionary ideology,” Mamedov emphasizes.
Ideology in Iran, Danny Citrinowicz, former head of Israeli military intelligence, warns on the social network X, “is not rhetoric, but a control mechanism.” Renouncing it and accepting an agreement that should open the country to American companies and with them to Western influence, would represent the end of the Islamist utopia pursued by the Iranian regime. As Khamenei himself said, paraphrasing a US official, it is easier to destroy the Islamic Republic by sending miniskirts into the country than by dropping bombs.
Block Hormuz
“Tehran’s real capabilities remain to be seen, but I would take its warnings seriously,” adds the Quincy Institute expert. In his opinion, an Iranian regime “weakened by protests” and the economic crisis would now have “a motivation to respond with everything it has”; with its missiles and its regional allies “targeting US military bases in the region”, or also establishing a “blockade of the Strait of Hormuz”, the artery of world trade through which 20% of the world’s oil transits.
This Wednesday, the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, posted a tweet with an image of himself on the island of Hormuz, with an eloquent text: “Pearl of the Persian Gulf: Island of Hormuz, overlooking the strategic Strait of Hormuz.”
The jewel of the Persian Gulf: Hormuz Island, overlooking the strategic Strait of Hormuz
Wednesday, February 8, 1404— Esmaeil Baqaei (@IRIMFA_SPOX)
Iran thus emerges as an enemy probably less than Venezuela. Ali Alfoneh, a researcher at the Institute of Arab Gulf States, evokes, for example, from Washington the possibility that Tehran plans to direct its possible military retaliation “not against the United States or Israel, but against the regional energy infrastructure.”
“The analysts of the Revolutionary Guard [el ejército paralelo encargado de proteger al régimen] They seem to have understood that what President Trump is deeply concerned about is the price of fuel at the pump,” especially when the crucial midterm elections are being held this year. Therefore, he claims, Iran is using that threat as a “deterrent measure.”
Trump, or rather his advisors, are faced above all with the dilemma that, in addition to the possibility that a war with Iran will destabilize the Middle East and the energy markets, the quick strike that the president aspires to will not even serve to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
The reason, Alfoneh warns, is “the decentralized leadership structure of the Islamic Republic.” Without that “land invasion by Iran” that Trump and his voters reject, “the regime is likely to survive,” at least in the short term.
A US military attack on Iran not only does not guarantee a change in the political system, but could even strengthen the regime, warns Mamedov. “External attacks tend to unite populations around the flag, marginalize the internal opposition and strengthen the hawks,” agreed Israeli analyst Citrinowicz in X.
Meanwhile, with symbolic measures. This Wednesday, the Iranian Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, Zahra Behrouz-Azar, announced that the Persian country will begin issuing permits, something that was previously prohibited.
Like that tiny step forward, but imposed by the fait accompli presented by those Iranians who drive motorcycles without a license, any lasting change “will have to come from Iran, from civil society organizations, the organic opposition and a more pragmatic part of the establishment,” argues Eldar Mamedov. “Under the bombs, it is difficult to make a revolution,” he says.
