Iran's President Hassan Rouhani delivers remarks at a news conference during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, U.S. September 20, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith
Ariane M. Tabatabai, Foreign Affairs: Why the Protests Won't Change Iran's Foreign Policy
State Sponsorship of Terrorism Will Continue.
On December 28, 2017, protests broke out in Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran. By the time the rest of the world was celebrating the advent of a new year, major demonstrations had spread to cities and towns across the country. By January 2, over 20 people had been killed amid the unrest. As Iranian officials scrambled to respond to the largest demonstrations since the 2009 Green Movement—a wave of protests over the fraudulent reelection of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency—U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to express his own thoughts on what was taking place.
According to Trump, the Iranian people are sick of the regime’s sponsorship of terrorism, which chips away at their wealth. As the president put it, “Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!” This talking point has since dominated U.S. officials’ and lawmakers’ remarks on the developments in Iran. As White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it, Trump would “certainly like to see [Iran] stop being a state sponsor of terror. I think that’s something the whole world would like to see.”
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WNU Editor: Maybe it will change .... In jab at rivals, Rouhani says Iran protests about more than economy (Reuters).
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