On the night of 3 January 2026, fresh from the intervention in Venezuela to seize Nicolás Maduro, President Trump sounded a new warning to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Amid the renewed, widespread protests against the Iranian regime, Trump threatened that ‘if they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States’. This followed on from Trump’s social-media post on New Year’s Day that if the Islamic Republic ‘violently kills peaceful protesters’ then the US was ‘locked and loaded and ready to go’ to their rescue. According to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran, the regime has already killed 29 people and detained 1,203 civilians during its latest brutal crackdown. Will President Trump make good on his threats? And what are the implications of the unrest in Iran for the broader security threats posed by the Islamic Republic?

Dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure remains America’s most pressing priority. Nevertheless, the nature of the Islamic Republic means that, if it survives, it will almost certainly retain its ideological commitment to exporting revolutionary violence across the Middle East and beyond, and to pursuing nuclear weapons. Even last summer’s bombing campaign by Israel and the United States has not diminished the Islamic Republic’s desire to acquire the most destructive weapons. That would require a fundamental change in the character of the regime.

During the second decade of the 21st century, Tehran increasingly resorted to terror and intimidation to take over vast swathes of the Levant. Prior to 7 October 2023, hardly anyone believed that Iran’s empire could be rolled back. But the past two years have exposed for all to see the Islamic Republic’s limited power abroad and its unpopularity at home.

Tehran is the weakest it has been since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Its economy is in free-fall. Real per capita GDP was lower in 2009 than the year before the Islamic Revolution and its economic performance has only deteriorated as international sanctions began to bite. Iranians are alienated and disenfranchised politically; President Pezeshkian was put forward as a last-ditch effort at getting popular buy-in to the system, but he has been an abject failure. Far from liberalising the regime or easing the repression, he has overseen the execution of over 1,000 people in less than a year in office, up 20 per cent from the previous year. Militarily, Tehran’s once-vaunted missile arsenal was rendered ineffective by Israeli and CENTCOM air defence, and, thanks to bold Israeli military action, Iran’s regional proxies are in full-blown retreat and the country has effectively lost control of the skies over its own territory.

It was already clear in years past that costly imperial adventures were a source of deep resentment within Iran. As far back as 2009, protesters chanted, ‘No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life for Iran.’ The crushing defeat of Hezbollah, the collapse of the Assad regime, and Israel’s domination of Iranian airspace have perhaps irrevocably punctured the clerical regime’s aura of power. It has certainly emboldened its opponents. The speed with which its airspace was surrendered elicited widespread anger, as did the way in which the regime’s leaders disappeared from view and left the wider population to find their own shelter. This latest challenge to the regime was thus only a matter of time. It is difficult, perhaps impossible to know, when a tottering regime is approaching the point of collapse. Might the Trump administration be tempted to precipitate its downfall, either with fresh strikes or more covert action?

Despite his longstanding hostility to the Islamic Republic, Trump initially showed little interest, either during his first term or in the first six months of his second term, in an ideological struggle against its dictatorship. During the first trip abroad of his second term, Trump made a point of denouncing westerners who come to the Middle East to deliver ‘lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs’. He also cited the precedents of Iraq and Afghanistan, deriding ‘the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities’. Thus, it surprised many when, in the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, he posted on social media: ‘It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change”, but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???’

Did Trump’s post reflect a change in his thinking or just a sharp taunt in the aftermath of the US bombing of Iran’s most valuable nuclear facilities? Either way, his renewal of those threats against the regime in the past week, particularly after events in Venezuela, cannot be dismissed easily. The president may sense that, if Tehran has to invest heavily in preventing a collapse of the regime, there will likely be fewer resources available to rebuild its nuclear programme. Likewise, it might indicate a recognition that the greater the regime’s financial and domestic distress, the harder it will be to resist a deal that dismantles its nuclear programme.

From the 2009 Green Revolution onwards, the Islamic Republic has exploited America’s post-Iraq queasiness about anything that smacked of ‘regime change’. Its leaders claim that any attempts to modify its tyrannical rule constitute regime change, even while it continues to intervene incessantly in the domestic affairs of countries across the region and wider West. But there is more than one way to change a repressive regime. Even without direct strikes, the Trump administration might seek to counter the regime’s efforts to control or cut off internet access by sharing its programmes that provide VPNs, or through encouraging private-sector partners like Starlink. It might also provide strike pay to workers and unions, with funds potentially coming from frozen government assets abroad.

For all that the past two years demonstrated the clear limits of Iranian power, it would be dangerous to be complacent about its capabilities or intentions. During 2025, Iran still managed to smuggle a billion dollars to Hezbollah – for context, Hezbollah was receiving $700 million annually prior to the 7 October war. The IRGC has also helped facilitate the smuggling of hundreds of advanced rockets from Syria into Lebanon. Iranian drones continue to wreak devastation in Ukraine. And there, of course, remains Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Full implementation of the maximum pressure policy remains, therefore, essential. Its main purpose is to exert pressure on the regime to give up its nuclear programme, but it also deprives the regime of resources necessary to fund the means of repression. While Obama-era sanctions and the maximum pressure campaign during Trump’s first term were effective in crippling the Iranian economy, today those barriers look increasingly porous.

The UAE, in particular, has helped Iran skirt sanctions and retain access to the international finance system. And Iran’s growing links with China and Russia offer Tehran greater potential alternative sources of capital and routes out of international isolation. Above all, over 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports now go to China.

When the US bombed Tehran’s nuclear facilities, it elicited rhetorical condemnation from China and Russia, but not much else. Nevertheless, sodium perchlorate continues to be shipped from China to Iran for use in ballistic missiles in violation of sanctions. Russia continues to offer quid pro quos for the drones and missiles that it receives from Tehran. The three states remain linked in a multifront revanchist challenge to the American-led global order.

America’s intervention to topple the dictator of another member of that axis in Venezuela should certainly have concentrated the minds of Iran’s own tyrants, particularly given that Trump has already gone further than any previous US president in his willingness to strike Iran directly. With the US ‘locked and loaded’, it can only be hoped that Iran’s illegitimate leaders recognise that it is long past time for them to get ‘ready to go’.