Good morning, world! Antigovernment protests in Iran that started late last year spread across the country last week. They continued over the weekend even in the face of an escalating crackdown by the authorities; rights groups estimate that hundreds have been killed.

Iran’s theocratic rulers have faced mass protests before. But this time around, something new is looming in the minds of both the protesters and the government. That something is Venezuela. Today I write about how events half a world away may be influencing what’s unfolding in Iran.

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The protests in Iran and Trump’s threats

Iran’s antigovernment protests were already underway when a surprise U.S. operation toppled the Venezuelan president.

The drivers of the protests are primarily economic. The country has been crippled by sanctions and years of financial mismanagement and corruption. Prices have soared. A falling currency has eroded savings. Unemployment is high. Life for much of the population has become increasingly difficult.

The crash of the Iranian rial on Dec. 28 was the last straw. The fact that it was Tehran’s bazaar merchants who helped kick off the protests was symbolically charged — bazaar merchants were also central to the protests that led to the 1979 revolution. Demonstrations have since spread to universities and poorer towns far from urban centers, generating images of government buildings on fire and prompting the authorities to shut down the internet.

It’s a bad time for Iran’s leadership to be facing a mass movement. It has been weakened militarily. The Assad regime in Syria has fallen. Other regional allies, liked Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been decimated by Israel. And tensions remain high after a 12-day war in June with Israel that saw brief U.S. involvement; early on in the protests, President Trump warned that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” if any peaceful protesters were killed.

Then the U.S. attacked Venezuela — like Iran, a member of an anti-American axis with China and Russia as partners — and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Not long after, Trump doubled down on his threats toward Tehran. “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,” he said last Sunday.

We know from human rights groups that people have been killed; we’ve since learned Trump is “seriously considering” strikes. One question now hangs over the country: Is Iran the next target of an emboldened U.S. president?

An image from a social media post on Saturday showed demonstrators in Tehran. UGC, via Associated Press

‘On everyone’s mind’

I spoke to my colleague Erika Solomon, who has been covering the story. She told me Venezuela has been a huge topic in Iran. It was intensely covered on state television and mentioned by Iranian officials in online posts and articles.

“Iran’s leadership is very anxious about what happened,” Erika told me. “Protesters are equally aware. It’s very much on everyone’s mind.” (You can watch our conversation in the video above.) Erika and other colleagues spoke to protesters in Iran by phone, who said these protests felt far more dangerous for the Islamic Republic than those in the past.

Events in Venezuela revealed three things: that Trump is unafraid to use military power to remove a leader he doesn’t like; that he will seize tankers in international waters to choke off oil revenues; and that Russia and China, Venezuela’s — and Iran’s — allies are unable or unwilling to intervene.

In the past, the Iranian government has relied on ruthless force to suppress protests, and by yesterday earlier signs of restraint seemed to have evaporated. Information about the protests is hard to obtain, but the death toll appears to be rising fast.

Still, cracking down hard this time around may involve a different set of calculations.

“Trump openly threatening that he will intervene is essentially making a case that whatever happens in Iran domestically could be a cause for an attack,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins and an Iran expert.

The protesters Erika and other colleagues spoke to said they didn’t expect U.S. forces to conduct a similar operation against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader. But they believed the Venezuela attack had their government rattled.

“There’s maybe a sense that we can push this, we can stand a little harder because the government is definitely watching how the U.S. might respond,” Erika said.

Open questions

Of course, we’re still waiting to see how events in Venezuela ultimately play out. One thing Iran’s protesters are conscious of is that U.S. involvement in Venezuela did not lead to the end of the system itself — just the end of Maduro, said my colleague Farnaz Fassihi, who is also covering the protests. The country is now being run by his former vice president.

And one thing that Iran’s government is almost certainly conscious of is that while the Venezuela operation might have put anti-American governments like Iran’s on notice, there remains one country on America’s enemies list that seems to have less reason to worry, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. That would be North Korea, with its nuclear weapon — something Iran’s regime, if it survives these protests, may be more incentivized to obtain than ever.

Read more on Iran’s mass protests.

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