Iranian leader, Trump trade threats as activists say protest deaths rising<\/a><\/p>\n“We’re looking at it very seriously. The military is looking at it. We’re looking at some very strong options,” Trump said.<\/p>\n
Some U.S. lawmakers and foreign policy experts say U.S. military involvement would be a disaster.<\/p>\n
“The U.S. can only make things worse. The U.S. has a terrible history of interfering in Iranian affairs, rarely making any constructive moves,” said Northwestern University political science professor Ian Hurd.<\/p>\n
In addition, Hurd says the president has given the international community very few reasons to trust him. Tarokh agrees, and he has no confidence the current anti-government protests will lead to anything different.<\/p>\n
“There is no sign of any imminent collapse, and unfortunately, that the opposition of the regime, also, they don’t provide any new discourse. They don’t have any new promise,” Tarokh said.<\/p>\n
Others are more optimistic. Some Iranian Americans are hope protesters do not give up and that this could be the uprising that finally leads to a regime change in Iran.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2026 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO (WLS) — Tens of thousands of Iranian Americans have settled in the Chicago area, and many are…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":512928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[229210,960,5462,5386,1818,229201,5962,229205,8457,229200,208363,229206,8442,8441,229208,229202,229209,229204,229203,229207,229199],"class_list":["post-512927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago","tag-229210","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-news","tag-il","tag-illinois","tag-iran-killing-protesters","tag-iran-news","tag-iran-president","tag-iran-protest","tag-iran-protest-deaths","tag-iran-protests","tag-iran-today","tag-iran-trump","tag-iran-us","tag-what-are-iranians-protesting","tag-what-are-the-protests-in-iran-about","tag-what-is-happening-in-iran-right-now","tag-whats-going-on-in-iran-right-now","tag-whats-happening-in-iran-right-now","tag-why-are-iranians-protesting","tag-why-are-iranians-protesting-now"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}