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The seizing of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro by US forces over the weekend has sharpened debates in Tehran about President Donald Trump’s endgame in Iran, as anti-government protests across the country enter a second week.
The episode has prompted comparisons—sometimes uneasy, sometimes fiercely rejected—between Venezuela’s trajectory and Iran’s own.
Strikes and protests have spread to dozens of Iranian cities in recent days, sharpening questions about economic exhaustion and public legitimacy.
Former Iranian diplomat Fereydoun Majlesi told the Shargh newspaper that Maduro’s detention reflected Washington’s current logic: maximal displays of power and deterrence. “Maduro’s arrest was not just a political act but a deterrent message to other players,” he said.
Foreign policy analyst Ali Bigdeli also told Shargh that while a direct U.S. attack on Iran would require congressional approval, the Venezuela episode showed that covert actions or security pretexts remained possible.
“Without a serious revision of foreign policy and adaptation to new global conditions, continuing the old path will not only fail but impose greater costs,” he warned.
‘Erosion of trust’
Even sources close to the establishment reflected unease, albeit more subtly.
Khabar Online, a moderate outlet close to security chief Ali Larijani, highlighted US sanctions on Venezuela while also pointing to mismanagement and corruption.
“Maduro’s fall was not the product of a single factor, but the outcome of accumulated crises long ignored,” the commentary argued, landing on a phrase widely used in reference to Iran’s own condition: “erosion of public trust.”
Political analyst Sadegh Maleki was more direct.
“Maduro, like (Syria’s) Assad, ruled without heartfelt popular backing,” he told Shargh. “Governments that create distance between themselves and the people are more vulnerable to external operations.”
‘Not comparable’
Conservative voices, however, moved quickly to dismiss any analogy. Gholamreza Sadeghian, editor-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Javan daily, was blunt in his assessment. “Iran Is Not Comparable—Don’t Waste Your Time,” he headlined his Sunday editorial.
Washington’s threats, Sadeghian wrote, were not a sign of strength but part of a “repetitive and failed spectacle,” adding that “America neither has the capacity for final victory nor the ability to reshape the global order in its favor.”
Hardline newspapers denounced the US action as an “open kidnapping,” a “violation of the UN Charter,” and a “raid on Venezuela’s oil.”
Commentators argued that Washington’s aim was to gain leverage over global energy markets and consolidate geopolitical influence by controlling the country’s vast reserves.
The lesson, hardliners argued, was that Iran should never engage in talks with the United States, noting that Maduro was detained shortly after he signaled readiness to negotiate with Trump.
‘Military power not enough’
Kayhan newspaper, which is funded by the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, claimed that Venezuelans had taken to the streets in support of Maduro and declared they would not allow their country to be occupied.
Ultraconservative lawmaker Javad Karimi-Ghodousi went further, predicting that Maduro would return to Venezuela “as a hero.” Trump, he added on X, would “be slapped by America’s revolutionary youth and fall into the dustbin of history.”
A more measured assessment came from the moderate outlet Rouydad24.
An editorial argued that the two countries’ situations were fundamentally different and rejected “fear of collapse,” while still suggesting that Maduro’s fate offered a lesson for Tehran on the need to address economic and social demands.
“Venezuela showed that even military structures cannot endure without sustainable social backing,” the site wrote.
US President Donald Trump is seen holding a signed “Make Iran Great Again” cap in a photo alongside Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
"God bless and protect the brave people of Iran who are standing up to tyranny," Graham said in a post sharing the photo.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said on Monday that Iranian intelligence and security agencies have summoned and threatened journalists during the ongoing protests, condemning efforts to silence independent journalism.
The press rights group's Middle East and North Africa regional director condemned what it described as an escalating campaign of intimidation following remarks by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei endorsing repression.
Reporters were contacted and ordered to appear before security bodies, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Sara Qudah said, calling on authorities to immediately halt actions aimed at silencing independent reporting at a critical moment.
Prolonged economic exhaustion and a broader loss of confidence in the Iranian state after historic military and foreign policy setbacks in 2025 means 2026 may be the Islamic Republic's hardest ever year.
Popular unrest is not unfolding in isolation. It comes amid sustained external pressure, legal constraint and strategic exposure that have narrowed the Islamic Republic’s room for maneuver.
The protests are best understood not as a discrete domestic episode, but as the internal manifestation of a broader convergence: sanctions enforcement, legal isolation, military attrition and fiscal strain now intersect more directly with the regime’s ability to manage society.
At the center of this convergence lies a structural tension.
Tehran has long prioritized the maintenance of its coercive apparatus as the ultimate guarantor of regime survival, assuming it could continue to fund and mobilize those forces even as the wider population absorbed economic pain. The present unrest tests that assumption.
The question is no longer simply whether the state can repress protest—it has done so repeatedly—but whether it can sustain that approach under prolonged economic pressure.
The war that reshaped Iran’s strategic landscape
In June 2025, the Islamic Republic faced sustained direct military action against core elements of its nuclear and missile infrastructure, followed not by rapid diplomatic de-escalation but by heightened scrutiny and enforcement.
While Tehran avoided immediate escalation beyond the conflict, the war unsettled long-standing assumptions about deterrence, sanctuary and escalation control.
In its aftermath, the state’s survival was framed domestically as vindication. Yet continuity did not amount to recovery. Vulnerabilities exposed by the war could not be addressed simply through rebuilding or rhetorical reaffirmation.
Iran’s leadership has often equated endurance with strategic success. In this case, endurance masked erosion. The post-war environment became more constrained, not more permissive.
Sanctions and their toll
The reactivation of pre-2015 United Nations sanctions through the snapback mechanism in September 2025 constituted a second rupture—less visible, but no less consequential.
These measures reimposed binding legal constraints independent of the JCPOA framework.
Whatever Tehran’s posture toward negotiations, its obligations under revived Security Council resolutions and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remain formally intact.
Iran’s refusal to comply with inspection-related understandings, alongside renewed threats to withdraw from the NPT, reflected a strategy of legal brinkmanship. But brinkmanship has limits.
Snapback has proven difficult to circumvent, constraining access to finance, insurance and energy markets. Even states inclined to engage Iran have struggled to shield it from the broader effects of renewed enforcement.
These constraints have translated into economic pressure. The protests now visible across Iran are therefore not only political acts; they are also the social consequence of legal and economic containment.
Missiles and strategic trade-offs
Under this pressure, Tehran has prioritized strategic reconstruction, particularly in its ballistic missile program. Facilities linked to missile development and solid-fuel production have shown signs of renewed activity, even as nuclear infrastructure remains under close scrutiny.
This reflects a belief that missile capability can restore leverage by raising the costs of external pressure.
Missile reconstruction aims to reconstitute coercive leverage and recover lost influence. Yet the strategic context has shifted. Measures once tolerated as incremental are now interpreted as preparatory, intensifying scrutiny and compressing decision timelines.
The domestic trade-offs are significant. Resources directed toward military-industrial reconstruction are resources unavailable for economic stabilization or social relief.
Iran’s rulers appear to have judged that sustaining coercive capacity outweighs the risks of popular discontent—a calculation that depends on continued loyalty within the security apparatus, even as economic conditions worsen.
A narrowing set of options
During the war, US President Donald Trump publicly raised the prospect of regime change—not as declared policy, but as a conceivable outcome should Iran prove unable to govern or stabilize the country.
While ambiguous, the remarks widened the range of interpretations available to Tehran.
As protests spread, that signalling evolved. In early January, Trump warned that violent suppression of peaceful protesters would provoke an American response. The emphasis shifted from missiles and enrichment to repression itself.
Taken together, these statements suggest a growing linkage in US rhetoric between Iran’s internal conduct and its external confrontation, though how far this would translate into policy remains uncertain.
For a system long reliant on compartmentalization—treating internal repression and external escalation as separate domains—this rhetoric further narrows room for maneuver.
Repression now carries not only domestic costs, but potential external risk.
Resilience—and its limits
None of this points to inevitability. The Islamic Republic has weathered previous crises, including acute pressure in 2009 and again in 2022, through repression, fragmentation of opposition and strategic patience.
Those precedents caution against linear narratives of collapse.
Yet the present unrest differs in one important respect: it is embedded in sustained economic degradation rather than episodic political mobilization. Repression can suppress protest, but it cannot substitute for economic viability indefinitely.
In 1978, prolonged disruption in Iran’s oil sector did not immediately bring down the state, nor did repression collapse. What faltered was the state’s capacity to function as revenues declined and administrative coherence eroded.
The parallel should not be overstated. But it underscores a familiar pattern: regimes rarely fail at the height of coercion; they falter when the material foundations of governance erode to the point that authority can no longer translate power into control.
Whether the Islamic Republic is approaching such a threshold remains uncertain. What is clearer is that its margin for error has narrowed. The 12-day war did not end Iran’s confrontation with its adversaries, it reshaped it.
The unrest now visible across the country is not separate from that confrontation—it is one of its most consequential domestic expressions.
Prices of basic goods in Iran are expected to rise by 20% to 30% in the coming weeks, with sharper increases likely for chicken, eggs and cooking oil, government spokesperson said on Monday.
Fatemeh Mohajerani said the increase was the result of the government’s decision to end subsidized dollars for essential imports in an effort to stabilize the foreign exchange market and curb corruption, a move that has pushed up the local-currency cost of imports of goods and raw material.
“It is evident that by ending or reducing subsidized and preferential official foreign currency exchange rates, the prices of some items will rise,” she said.
Earlier on Monday, parliament said it had approved the general outlines of the budget for the next Iranian year, which begins in March, after the bill was initially rejected and subsequently amended by the government.
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The government described the changes as reforms aimed at improving livelihoods, as authorities seek to ease ongoing anti-government protests and strikes.
The revisions are said to include a pay rise of up to 43% instead of 20%, a cut in value-added tax to 10% from 12%, and the allocation of $8.8 billion in subsidized foreign exchange to curb price rises for basic goods.
The budget was also reported to earmark funds for guaranteed wheat purchases to supply bread and for adjusting pensioners’ salaries.
Lawmakers approved the budget framework with 171 votes in favor, 69 against and six abstentions, out of 246 lawmakers present.
Meanwhile, nationwide protests entered a ninth day on Monday, with merchant strikes continuing in parts of the country.
The unrest began after the rial fell to record lows in late December and has since broadened into a wider test of the government’s ability to manage a country under sustained economic strain.
