On the second day of protests, he condemned the Iranian government for firing on demonstrators. On day six, he went further, warning that if the killing of protesters continued, US forces “will come to their rescue.”
This amounts to the fastest and most explicit reaction by an American president to a wave of unrest in Iran in the past 45 years. The question is whether this posture translates into concrete diplomatic steps or credible military pressure—or remains a largely symbolic deterrent message.
In 2009, former US president Barack Obama responded cautiously to Iran’s Green Movement protests. At the time, he had sent a second letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and had yet to receive a reply. Obama feared that open support for protesters could undermine the secret backchannel he was attempting to establish with Khamenei to resolve the nuclear standoff.
At the same time, his advisers warned that overt US backing could backfire: protesters might be branded as “foreign agents,” giving the government a pretext to crack down even harder.
Those concerns are far less salient for Trump, at least for now. On one hand, there is currently no meaningful or active diplomatic channel between Tehran and Washington that a sharp US stance could weaken or shut down.
On the other hand, Iranian officials have for years accused protesters of being agents of hostile powers—a charge repeated by Khamenei himself in a recent speech on the unrest—rendering the label largely meaningless. There is little indication that demonstrators now fear either foreign support or accusations of outside ties.
Years later, Obama acknowledged that his cautious approach to the Green Movement had been a mistake, arguing that the United States should support popular, pro-freedom movements wherever they arise. Trump’s swift and blunt reaction suggests he has avoided a similar error.
The Obama administration’s experience also underscores another lesson: firm rhetoric is not enough. In 2012, Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad constituted a US “red line.”
Yet a year later, a sarin gas attack on Eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb to the east of Damascus, killed hundreds of civilians, but the United States did not launch a military strike. Instead, Obama pursued a diplomatic route to remove Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles.
That effort reduced—but did not end—the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and it significantly weakened Obama’s standing, and that of the United States, among Syrian opposition groups.
Trump, by contrast, appears keenly aware that unfulfilled threats erode both his personal authority and the projection of American power. He has acted on threats toward Iran twice: first, with the killing of Qassem Soleimani exactly six years ago, on January 3, 2020, and second, with a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities around 200 days ago.
On Saturday, Trump also followed through on recent threats against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, announcing that the United States had carried out a major operation against Venezuela and detained Maduro and his wife, removing them from the country.
Tehran moved quickly to respond to Trump’s threat against the Islamic Republic’s repressive forces targeting protesters, suggesting that Khamenei is attentive to the speed and clarity of the message and the prospect of its implementation.
