Fear is cracking in Tehran as Trump’s global pressure meets street revolts

What is unfolding in Iran belongs to a wider moment of pressure, movement, and recalculation that extends far beyond its borders. Street protests, labour strikes, armed attacks on regime officials, and the visible erosion of fear inside the Islamic Republic are occurring alongside an assertive reordering of power by the United States across multiple theatres. These events are not discrete. They sit inside the same strategic weather system.
Inside Iran, the protest has crossed several thresholds. Demonstrators no longer confine themselves to ritualised marches or symbolic dissent. In Abadan, crowds ran towards armed police and the police fled. In Gonabad, a Shia religious seminary was stormed. In Ilam, Basij vehicles burned while armed Kurdish activists appeared openly among celebrants. In the energy sector, workers at the Pars refinery went on strike. When the state begins counting dead policemen and protestors carry anointed “commanders” on their shoulders, the grammar of dissent has shifted.
The regime understands this. Its reflex remains brutal repression, yet its posture has grown defensive. Official channels speak of “rioters” and “foreign plots”, while presidents and ministers acknowledge economic grievance in the hope of buying time. Power, however, does not reside with civilian façades. It sits with the security organs and with the ageing figure of Ali Khamenei, whose authority rests on coercion, myth, and endurance. Each protest that breaches fear weakens all three.
What gives the current moment its particular charge is the widening social and geographic base of resistance. Currency traders and bazaar merchants joined first, driven by the collapse of the rial. Students followed, as they always do. Now minorities on the periphery, long marginalised and heavily policed, are moving with greater confidence. Kurdish parties declared a general strike. Sunni Baloch militants of Jaish al-Adl claimed responsibility for assassinating a police commander in Sistan and Baluchestan. These regions sit far from Tehran’s ceremonial core, yet they exert disproportionate force on the state’s nervous system. They stretch security resources, multiply fronts, and erode the illusion of control.
The symbolism matters, too. Protesters renaming streets after the American president, circulating stickers declaring that “Iran is waiting for Trump”, and chanting openly against the ‘Supreme Leader’ indicate a recalibration of expectation. This is provocation aimed as much at the regime as at the world. It invites repression, yet it also tests whether the regime’s threats retain their paralysing power.
At the centre of this rhetorical and organisational challenge stands Reza Pahlavi. His appeal to security forces to defect, delivered in Persian and accompanied by the creation of a secure registration platform, is operational rather than merely symbolic. His Fox News declaration that he has “never seen an opportunity as we see today in Iran” seeks to compress time, to persuade hesitant actors that history has already tilted. Whether that compression holds depends less on charisma than on whether segments of the coercive apparatus decide that loyalty has become liability.
This internal drama unfolds against a backdrop of American action that is both unusually visible and deliberately unsettling. The seizure of two Venezuelan-linked oil tankers, one intercepted in the North Atlantic after sailing under a Russian flag as part of the shadow fleet, was not a quiet enforcement action. It was pursued across weeks and oceans. When the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that Washington enforces sanctions on Venezuela worldwide, the statement functioned as doctrine, warning, and demonstration.
The message reached beyond Caracas. Iran has long relied on sanction evasion networks, maritime opacity, and the assumption that enforcement weakens with distance. The visible dismantling of those assumptions matters. So does the timing. Venezuela has served as one node in Tehran’s so-called axis of resistance, a forward outpost in the Western Hemisphere bound less by shared interest than by shared hostility to Washington. Its vulnerability carries symbolic weight for any regime built on defiance as identity.
Hovering over all of this is Donald Trump, a figure who divides opinion yet concentrates attention. He operates without a sophisticated declared strategy or tidy doctrine, though wearing a ‘make Iran great again’ hat might give clues that could imply a grand strategy of sorts. Threats arrive bluntly. Actions follow quickly. Sanctions bite. Adversaries are addressed directly and publicly. The theatres blur into one another: Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China. The cumulative effect is disorientation, which itself becomes a tool.
This style unsettles allies and adversaries alike. It carries risk. It invites miscalculation. It heightens volatility. Yet in this current period, defined by stalled diplomacy, frozen conflicts, and regimes that thrive on inertia, action alters the terrain. It forces choices. It denies the luxury of drift.
For Iranians in the streets, the global context shapes perception. Dictators fall elsewhere. Shadow fleets are hunted. Sanctions are enforced without apology. Foreign governments, Australia among them, urge their citizens to leave Iran immediately. These signals do not necessarily determine outcomes, yet they reshape the mental map on which individuals decide whether to march, strike, defect, or wait.
None of this resolves into certainty. Revolutions resist timetables. Ruthless authoritarian systems absorb shocks with grim efficiency. Yet the present moment carries an unmistakable density. Fear has changed hands in places. Symbols once untouchable are breached. Peripheral actors move toward the centre. External power presses from multiple directions.
History rarely announces its turning points with clarity. It announces pressure. Iran today lives under that pressure, internal and external, ideological and material. Around it, an American presidency pursues leverage through motion rather than reassurance. Like it or loathe it, this convergence defines the stakes. The shape of power in the Middle East, and beyond it, is being contested in real time, by people in streets and by states at sea.