The Trump Administration has made it an established part of policy to
try to spark public protests inside of Iran, with an eye toward using
those protests to “prove” to the world that Iranians don’t support the
government.
This week, that effort is coming in the form of a social media campaign by
the US State Department. The videos, posted in Farsi, encourage the
Iranian public to reject the “corrupt religious mafia” that is the
Iranian government.
These videos are hyping the US embassy in Iran, and the Americans’
willingness to reopen it if the Iranian public somehow imposes enough of
a regime change to placate decades of US hostility enough that they’d
be willing to have an embassy.
In practice, the US almost certainly doesn’t expect such campaigns to
lead to open revolt in Iran. Rather, the hope is that they can spin
signs of growing unrest as enough to justify more international
campaigns against them.
State Dept Rolls Out Social Media Campaign Fomenting Iranian Unrest
Videos call on Iranians to reject government
Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
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