Trump threatens intervention as deadly protests rock Iran

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I think it's going to divide the rank of the protesters, between those who now fear being in the streets will encourage a U.S. attack and are not willing to see that, and those who might think that if they escalate and create more casualties, then the U.S. would intervene. President Trump threatens to attack Iran as protesters there take to the streets.

0:51It's Friday, January 2nd, and this is Here and Now anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:01Today on the show, a new year sadly does not wipe away the problems of the old one. In a few minutes, we'll hear from an American humanitarian group in Gaza that's being kicked out by the government of Israel. We think this is an attempt to delegitimize humanitarian organizations. It is a dangerous precedent, and it will put, you know, two million people in Gaza at risk, at further risk. But first, protests in Iran have spread across the country and turned deadly. Local media and officials there have reported several deaths as security forces crack down on demonstrations that started over the rising cost of living, but which have come to include calls for political change.

1:49Iran's currency has been in freefall, with one dollar worth well over a million rials, which is part of the reason why shopkeepers and students were among the first on the streets earlier this week. The country's economy has long struggled under U.S. and U.N. sanctions. Last year, it took another blow after the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran. For more on what's going on, Indira Lakshmanan spoke with Vali Nasser of Johns Hopkins. So we know Iran's economy has suffered years of international isolation and Western sanctions. Annual inflation reached 42 percent in December. The currency lost half its value in the last year.

2:31There are water shortages, energy cuts. But I keep thinking, Vali, many of these issues aren't new. So what sparked protests now? These issues are not new, but they got worse after the 12-day war with Israel. First of all, the whole instability that has gripped the country since then has caused more money to leave the country, puts downward pressure on the real. And also, I think that the government has now diverted more of its resources to rebuilding its defenses, build more missiles, be able to defend in the next war that it's expecting will come sometime in the near future. So Iran's security forces have a record of using deadly force to suppress protesters in 2022.

3:17Two listeners will remember the death in police custody of a young woman who was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly sparked nationwide protest. Hundreds of protesters were killed. How were Iranian authorities responding to these new protests? They're going to show teeth and eventually get tough, but I don't think they have at scale yet, largely because these protests are happening after a war that shocked Iran and Iranians completely. And so I think the context is different. I think the Islamic Republic does not want to alienate the population. The population also understands now that there's no easy solution to the problems that they're facing.

4:03The war is not going to bring about regime change, and their protests are not likely to do so either. So I think the regime is taking much more of a wait-and-see policy, hoping that the protests will peter out eventually. All right. Well, Iran's President Masoud Pazeshkian, his first year in office has been challenging, to say the least. There were airstrikes by Israel in the U.S. that did severe damage to Iran's nuclear facilities. But curiously, I noticed a few weeks ago he was not blaming Israel or the U.S. for Iran's problems. He said Iran's government has a lot of problems that it needs to fix.

4:35He cited corruption at home. He kind of shrugged his shoulders and said he can't be expected to fix it all. Then this week, his tone has changed to highlight external enemies. Here he is on Wednesday.

4:50We are engaged in a full-scale war. Right now, the enemy has placed most of its hopes on knocking us down through economic pressure. You cannot conquer a nation with bombs, fighter jets or missiles. So I'm wondering, were you surprised when the president at first cited problems at home and corruption a few weeks ago? And why do you think he's changed his rhetoric now? I think both of these are true. Even when he was running for office, he said that the problems of Iran will not be fixed unless sanctions are lifted, which was a way of saying that Iran needs to elect a president who can negotiate with the United States and remove external pressure.

5:30And I think he's now bitter that in the middle of the negotiations, Israel attacked Iran and then the United States joined in. I think he understands that there is mismanagement at home. There is corruption. There's a lot that they need to do in order to be able to get more out of the economy that they are doing. But at the same time, it's a fact that Iran's problems are aggravated by the scarcity that is caused by sanctions. And even the threat of war on Iran, which President Trump reiterated again, basically puts even more pressure on Iran's economy. So I think both are true. Iran is at war.

6:09Its economy is constrained by maximum pressure sanctions. But it's also not managing the situation before it in a way that would provide relief to its population. Well, you mentioned President Trump. He said in a post on Truth Social this morning that the U.S. is, quote, locked and loaded and ready to help protesters if Iran's government uses violence against them, which we see has already happened with reported deaths. Iranian protesters have looked to the U.S. for help before, or at least some of them have, but no administration from either party has come to their aid. Do you expect the U.S.

6:43to actually help protesters this time? Well, I mean, helping by bombing Iran is not helping the protesters. And in fact, by even making this threat, he's basically creating a situation in which protesters will now be responsible for bringing war onto Iran. And I think it's going to divide the rank of the protesters between those who now fear being in the streets will encourage a U.S. attack and are not willing to see that. And those who might think that if they escalate and create more casualties, then the U.S. would intervene. And I think it's complicating things. I've asked you this question many times in the last decade, but do you think these protests could threaten the regime this time?

7:26I don't think they're at a scale to do so right now unless they bring foreign intervention into Iran. But no, we're not there yet. All right. Vali Nasser is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior State Department advisor. Vali, thank you. Thank you.

7:55Coming up next, Israel is kicking more international aid groups out of Gaza. We'll hear from one of them after the break.

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8:53It is hard to get a house. Getting that down payment together? Brutal. You shipped off to Djibouti to afford a down payment for a house? Yes, sir. 100%. On Planet Money, the high price of housing. What the Trump administration is trying to do about it. And will it work? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Doctors Without Borders prides itself on delivering life-saving medical care to people everywhere. They've treated people in Sudan, Ukraine, and countless other war zones, but Israel is forcing them to leave Gaza. Doctors Without Borders is among 37 international aid organizations that Israel is banning from Gaza for, quote, the refusal to provide complete and verifiable information regarding their employees, which the country's Diaspora Affairs Ministry said is needed to prevent the infiltration of terrorist operatives into humanitarian structures.

9:53Groups like the Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE have said that complying with those new demands would put their workers at risk. In a statement protesting the move, the Quaker humanitarian group American Friends Service Committee said, quote, these requirements are part of a systematic effort to arbitrarily criminalize humanitarian organizations. And noted Israel has killed hundreds of aid workers since October of 2023. Indira Lakshmanon spoke to American Friends Service Committee's Carrie Kennedy. So Carrie, the Israeli government said it needs to know exactly who works for aid organizations in Gaza.

10:34And that's because following the October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel that killed 1 ,200 people, the Israeli government alleged that some local employees of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees were involved with Hamas. The UN investigated those claims, fired nine employees, cleared the others who'd been accused. Given that backstory, is it reasonable that Israel wants to know more about local employees and their familial connections? It is not. And it is unprecedented in humanitarian operations globally. So all international NGOs follow international law. We follow strict compliance guidelines.

11:13We are following OFAC sanction laws. We're following EU sanction laws. So we are already complying. We are doing our own internal vetting of who our staff is, who any vendors are, or any connections that we may have. What Israel is asking is for private details of staff and family members. And we know that Israel, the Israeli military, have killed more than 500 aid workers this year. That is beyond, it's a historic unprecedented amount. Last year, you mean. In the past two years, yes, in the past two years. So we are really worried that if we give that data, it will violate the privacy of our staff.

11:56And specifically endanger the lives of the local staff who you work with. Without a doubt. And we have faced this scenario in Burundi, in Sudan, in Zimbabwe, in other places where governments have requested staff information and we have never complied. Okay, so let me ask you. So this is an office for Israel. You have until March to leave Gaza, according to the Israeli government. Other organizations, including the International Rescue Committee, are trying to negotiate conditions so they can stay. What is AFSC doing between now and then, and are you also trying to figure out a way to stay? So we are slightly different than an organization like Doctors Without Borders or CARE.

12:37All of our operations are local. So we have local staff, so we only hire Palestinians in Gaza, and we operate through local partnership. So we are much less affected than some of the big INGOs, which bring in international staff. All international staff have been told that they have 60 days to exit. We don't have international staff there. We have a few people that would go in and out to supervise and to offer support. What it will mean, though, is that 25 % of the families in Gaza are surviving on one meal a day. We know that more than a million families do not have access to shelter. They're living in tents.

13:19We're in a period of winter storms and rain. And the situation for families surviving in Gaza is so difficult. And the NGOs that are there are providing 60 % of all the aid that is provided. So more lives are going to be lost. We've already lost so many people. And it is just... More than 70 ,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Exactly. Let me ask you, the Israeli government body that manages the entry of aid into Gaza claims that the 37 organizations that have been told to leave, including your own, collectively gave only 1 % of the total aid to Gaza and that banning you won't have a noticeable impact.

14:03The figures you just cited are quite different. Explain that to us. I have no idea where they're getting that data. I mean, we're on the ground. We see the numbers. We know that we've provided a million meals to a million people in Gaza. We know that the Israeli government and the aid trucks are not coming in. So I can't reconcile that. I think that this is a real attempt by the Israeli government to delegitimize international organizations and to say that they're not needed. We saw that the Israeli government did attempt to bring in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was run in partnership with the U.S.

14:42government. It was run not by humanitarian actors or people that had experience with humanitarian principles and operations, but by military. And hundreds of people died because it wasn't well organized. It wasn't a legitimate humanitarian operation. So we think this is an attempt to delegitimize humanitarian organizations. It is a dangerous precedent, and it will put, you know, 2 million people in Gaza at risk, at further risk. Right. In the few seconds we have left, Gaza has been under a fragile ceasefire since last October. Aid deliveries are still delayed. What's going to happen to the Palestinians you serve without you there?

15:21Many will be at risk of dying. They will suffer. People will die. More children will die of hypothermia. That's Kerry Kennedy of the American Friends Service Committee. We'll leave it there. Thank you, Kerry.

15:40Well, the war in Gaza has not ended, despite a widely celebrated and quickly broken ceasefire a few months ago. But it's not the only conflict that is festering in the new year. Coming up, a group behind a global conflict watch list sheds some light on wars that have not made as many headlines in the U.S. Indira has that after the break.

16:09Thank you.

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16:52All over the world, high levels of conflict seem to be the new normal. That's one of the findings of a recent report on conflicts from Ukraine and Gaza to Myanmar and Sudan. Let's bring in Klina Rala. She's Director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Organization, which tracks conflicts around the world. She joins us from Brighton in the UK. Clina, welcome. Thanks very much, Indira. It's lovely to be back. Well, first, give us a snapshot of how many conflicts you tracked worldwide last year, and is the trend moving upward or downward? So ACLED collects all information on all reported acts of political violence and all demonstrations within the world last year.

17:33And we collected over 1 ,000 events a day, both violent and, of course, demonstrations. And so what we found effectively is that there's been about 210 ,000 events in the last 12 months. That has led to a very conservative estimate of about 240 ,000 deaths. Now, you also estimated that 831 million people, or 16 % of the global population, have been exposed to conflict in the last year? Yeah, and that's a really important statistic to think about how normalized quite a lot of the violence has become. But really, what I would caution about that 16 % number is that it's likely, again, a conservative reflection.

18:18And the reason is because quite a lot of the conflict of the last few years has been both in Gaza, of course, and in Ukraine. And in both cases, the conflict is exposing the same population over and over again. But we only count that population once. So when you get larger conflicts like we're expecting in 2026, we would expect that the number of people exposed to violence will increase quite drastically. All right, before we get to those conflicts that you expect for 2026, let me ask you, who is responsible for most of the violence? Governments or insurgent groups or who? That's a great question.

18:52And in part, it really reflects what's different about 2025. So what I would say is that when we started covering the whole world, which was in 2019, what we saw over the last five years is that there's been a doubling of conflict rates. And for the most part, we would have associated that doubling of conflict rates with insurgent groups, non-state armed groups, you know, jihadi groups, etc. But really what we're seeing in 2025 is that the amount of conflict has leveled out at its highest point, but that governments are far more involved with violence than they used to be. So whereas before we would have looked to cartels, we would have looked to ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc.

19:33as being the main drivers of violence, it's very much governments in 2025, in part because of the very high levels of defense spending, but also because there's new geopolitical competition and governments are contesting that domestically and internationally. Your watch list for 2026 looks at, of course, Gaza and Ukraine, but also Syria, Myanmar, Sudan, even places that are less in the news like Ecuador and Pakistan. Give our listeners a sense of which countries you want to highlight or which regions we should be watching for 2026. If I had to definitely say two places that I'm laser focused on in 2026, it's Venezuela and Iran.

20:18In both cases, you have unfinished business, if you will, between two of the four countries that I think are driving quite a lot of the conflict within the world at the moment. So even if they're not involved, the US, Israel, Russia, and the UAE are behind quite a lot of the conflict movements we're seeing in the world. And of course, what's happening in Venezuela and what's happening in Iran, or what may happen in Iran, is going to be, of course, pushed by these various forces. With state violence, it's a little bit different than watching the escalation of non-state armed groups or insurgent groups.

20:57States prepare quite a bit in order to launch mass violence, which is one of the reasons that we expect quite a lot of violence in 2026. President Trump has dubbed himself a peace president, and he claims credit for bringing peace to more than half a dozen conflicts around the world. You have said that conflict increased during the Biden administration and has now stabilized but at a high level. So what do you think President Trump's impact has been on global conflicts? And how do you see it? Where do you see it going? in the coming year? So I would say that one of the reasons that you saw the escalation during the Biden years is a little bit of American indecision when it came to how to deal with the massive numbers of new conflicts and of course the huge conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine that started during that time.

21:45But in the Trump administration, what I would say is that Trump is certainly not a peace president, but he doesn't necessarily want big wars, but he does want big victories. And so what that means is that we enter into kind of an awkward deal-making slash violence-creating situation, which I think we're in right now and we can see the results of that, which is fragmented and kind of starty-stoppy violence, like we've seen in some of the areas that he has seen that he's claimed to resolve. All right. Well, we will be watching that with you. We will be bringing you back to continue talking about Gaza, Venezuela, Ukraine, Sudan, and the other places that are on your watch list for 2026.

22:33Thank you so much. Klina Raleigh is president of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Organization, tracking conflicts around the world. Thanks, Klina. Thanks very much. Goodbye.

22:52That's our show for today. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Sam Rafelson, James Mastro-Marino, Ashley Locke, and Jill Ryan. Today's editors were Julia Corcoran, Micaela Rodriguez, and Michael Scotto. Technical direction from Matt Reed and Andre Peralta. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And Here and Now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back with you on Monday. Thank you.