Trump will kill Khamenei if Iranian regime continues murdering protesters

As headlines from The Jerusalem Post scream warnings of extreme US retaliation — including provocative assertions that Donald Trump might kill Ayatollah Khamenei should Tehran continue its violent suppression of protesters — it is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as hawkish posturing. Yet these headlines reflect a deeper strategic shift in US foreign policy that vindicates concerns I outlined in recent blogs that Washington’s punitive sanctions and coercive diplomacy have crafted the miseries inside Iran, and could now be laying the groundwork for external confrontation rather than domestic reform.

Iran is convulsed by one of its largest protest movements in years, driven not by some abstract ideological rebellion, but by grinding economic hardship — a direct consequence of tightening sanctions and economic isolation that have decimated ordinary livelihoods. These sanctions are widely opposed by international human rights actors because they disproportionately punish the populace rather than the political elite, exacerbating inflation and scarcity while eroding the state’s capacity to address domestic grievances.

Into this tinderbox enters a U.S. administration increasingly willing to ‘lock and load’ at the first sign of violent repression. Statements from US officials threatening lethal force against Iranian leadership if protests continue to be crushed are not isolated soundbites — they are symptomatic of a broader policy framework that conflates authoritarian repression with existential threat. The arrest of Venezuela’s president and the subdued global response appear to have emboldened hardliners in Washington who now see regime decapitation as a plausible extension of coercive diplomacy.

This is not to romanticize theocratic rule in Tehran. But conflating internal unrest rooted in economic despair with a casus belli against the Iranian state risks legitimizing harsher US interventions that increasingly look directed not at human rights but at regime change itself. The deeper injustice lies not just in Iran’s domestic repression, but in the US foreign policy calculus that has, through sanctions and threat of force, nurtured the very suffering it now claims to oppose.