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After threatening to attack Iran for days in support of protesters challenging the government in Tehran, United States President Donald Trump appeared to dial back the rhetoric on Wednesday evening.

The killings in Iran, Trump said, had stopped, adding that Tehran had told his administration that arrested protesters would not be executed.

Trump did not rule out an attack on Iran, but in effect, negated the rationale for such an attack.

Still, as Trump closes in on the completion of the first year of his second term in office, his track record suggests the possibility of US military strikes against Iran in the coming days remains a real threat.

We take a look:

Maduro abducted – amid diplomacy and limited strikes

Since August, the US had positioned its largest military deployment in the Caribbean Sea in decades.

The US military bombed more than 30 boats that it claimed – without providing evidence – were carrying drugs to the United States, killing more than 100 people in these strikes. For months, Trump and his team accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of leading mass-scale narcotics smuggling operations, again without evidence. Amid the boat bombings, Trump even said that the US might strike Venezuelan land next.

But in late November, Trump revealed to reporters that he had spoken to the Venezuelan leader. A few days later, the call was confirmed by Maduro himself, who described it as “cordial”.

The US then hit what Trump described as a docking facility for alleged drug boats in Venezuela. After that, on January 1, Maduro offered Trump an olive branch, saying he was open to talks with Washington on drug trafficking and even on enabling US access to oil. Trump appeared to be getting what he ostensibly wanted – access to Venezuelan oil and blocks on drugs from the country.

Yet only hours later, US forces targeted the capital, abducting Maduro and his wife on charges of narcotics trafficking and transporting them to the United States.

Iran bombed – when ‘two weeks’ of diplomacy appeared imminent

Venezuela was not the first time Trump launched a dramatic attack at a time when diplomacy appeared to be taking hold.

In June, Iran learned the hard way that Trump’s words and actions do not match.

Amid rising tensions over US accusations that Iran was racing towards enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, Washington and Tehran engaged in weeks of hectic negotiations. Trump frequently warned Iran that time was running out for it to strike a deal, but then returned to talks.

On June 13, he wrote on Truth Social that his team “remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue.”

His “entire” administration, he said, had been “directed to negotiate with Iran”.

But barely hours later, US ally Israel struck Iran. Most experts believe Israel would not have attacked Iran without Trump’s approval.

As Israel and Iran traded fire in the subsequent days, Trump faced questions over whether the US would bomb Iran.

On June 20, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quoted Trump as saying that he would “make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks”.

Far from utilising the full two weeks he gave himself, Trump made his decision in two days.

In the early hours of June 22, US B-2 Spirit bombers dropped fourteen bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, buried deep inside a mountain near Qom. The US also bombed nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan using the most powerful conventional bombs in the US arsenal.

The attack shocked many observers, in part because of what appeared to have been an elaborate diplomatic ruse preceding it.

Iran protest calculus: What’s Trump’s plan?

Now, all eyes are on Iran again, where demonstrations against the government have been under way for the past two weeks, before calming down earlier this week.

As the unrest turned deadlier last week, Trump urged Iranians to continue demonstrating.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on January 13, without elaborating on what form that help might take.

But within 24 hours, during a meeting with reporters in Washington, DC, Trump said he had been assured that the killing of protesters in Iran had stopped.

“They’ve said the killing has stopped and the executions won’t take place – there were supposed to be a lot of executions today, and that the executions won’t take place – and we’re going to find out,” Trump said on Wednesday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in an interview with Fox TV, also denied that Tehran planned to execute antigovernment protesters. “Hanging is ‌out of the ‌question,” he said.

Which other countries is Trump threatening?

Beyond Iran and Venezuela, longstanding US rivals, Trump’s aggression has increasingly extended towards Washington’s own allies, including Canada and Greenland.

The most striking example is Trump’s eagerness to take over Greenland, a Danish territory, which has evolved from a campaign talking point into a focal element of his administration’s Western Hemisphere strategy.

On January 5, the State Department posted a black-and-white image of Trump on social media, declaring: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”

The president has refused to rule out the use of military force, with administration officials openly discussing US interest in Greenland’s strategic location and mineral resources.

Denmark has categorically rejected any sale, while Greenland’s leadership insists the territory is not for sale.

But experts such as Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, argue that Trump uses threats to intimidate adversaries and typically employs force only against weaker targets.

In a paper published last May titled, The bully’s pulpit: Finding patterns in Trump’s use of military force, Shapiro suggested that Trump frequently invokes military threats but often fails to follow through.

According to Shapiro, Trump is more likely to act when threats carry “low escalation risk”, while threats against nuclear-armed or militarily strong states largely serve rhetorical purposes. The most extreme or theatrical warnings, he argues, tend to function as tools of “political signalling rather than precursors to real military action”.

“Trump often deploys grandiose threats but only accepts limited, low-risk military operations. He uses foreign policy as political theatre, aiming threats as much at his domestic base and media cycle as at foreign adversaries,” Shapiro writes.

Calculated unpredictability?

Some analysts believe Trump’s approach offers tactical advantages.

“The intent is to keep opponents off balance, heightening psychological pressure and extracting maximum strategic leverage,” a Pakistani government official told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media. “Even his European allies are not always certain what to expect.”

Others remain sceptical. Qandil Abbas, a specialist on Middle East affairs at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, described Trump’s behaviour as erratic, citing his repeated threats against multiple countries.

“Look at his threats against Cuba, or Iran, or Venezuela, and yet this is the same president who also wants to win a Nobel prize and is desperate for it,” Abbas told Al Jazeera.

So is Trump actually pulling back from the prospect of attacking Iran – or is he bluffing?

According to Abbas, Trump’s apparent change in tone might be the result of feedback from US allies in the region “that attacking Iran is not smart”.

Transcendent moments in geopolitics that reverberate around the world are no longer just forged in the streets or inside situation rooms. They are increasingly engineered in the digital sphere, where actors, often with a self-serving agenda, compete to control the narrative, define its meaning and decide who speaks for whom.

In recent weeks as protests erupted in Iranian cities, the hashtag #FreeThePersianPeople trended on X. The campaign was accompanied by a flood of posts heralding an imminent “decisive moment” in Iran’s history and presenting themselves as the authentic voice of the Iranian people.

However, an extensive data analysis by Al Jazeera reveals a different picture.

Tracking the sources of this interaction and its dissemination paths uncovers that the digital campaign did not originate organically from within Iran.

Instead, it was spearheaded by external networks – primarily accounts linked to Israel or pro-Israel circles – that played a central role in manufacturing momentum and steering the discourse toward specific geopolitical goals.

‘Abnormal’ patterns of circulation

The data associated with the campaign reveals a striking anomaly in how the hashtag spread, indicative of artificial amplification.

Al Jazeera’s analysis found that 94 percent of the 4,370 posts analysed were retweets compared with a negligible percentage of original content.

More significantly, the number of accounts producing original content did not exceed 170 users, yet the campaign reached more than 18 million users.

This massive gap between the limited number of sources and the vast reach is a hallmark of coordinated influence operations, often referred to as “astroturfing”, in which pre-packaged messages are amplified to create the illusion of widespread public consensus.

A single narrative, multiple formats

A review of the content shows the hashtag was not merely an expression of social or economic grievances. Instead, it carried a rigid political framework designed to reframe and actually pour on the unrest.

The discourse portrayed developments inside Iran as a “moment of collapse” and relied on sharp binaries: “The People vs. The Regime”, “Freedom vs. Political Islam” and “Iran vs. The Islamic Republic”.

The campaign heavily promoted Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, as the sole political alternative. Pahlavi himself engaged with the campaign, a move that was immediately amplified by Israeli accounts describing him as the “face of the alternative Iran”. But he is not thought of in those terms by a majority of Iranians, many of whom have memories of his father’s abuses and how the CIA restored him to power in 1953 in a United States-United Kingdom-orchestrated coup.

Translation: I am sharing my first call with you today and invite you to start chanting slogans this Thursday and Friday, 18th and 19th of Dey, simultaneously at 8 PM, all of you whether in the streets or even from your own homes. Based on the feedback from this action, I will announce the next calls to you.

Direct Israeli involvement

The campaign was not limited to anonymous activists. It also involved direct participation from current and former Israeli officials during the campaign’s peak.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a tweet in Persian addressed to the Iranian people, calling for the “fall of the dictator” and expressing support for the protests.

Translation: The people of Iran deserve a free life, liberated from the killer dictator, Khamenei. We stand with you!

Similarly, tweets by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett were widely circulated within the hashtag’s network, repurposed to fit the “liberation” narrative.

Turning protests into an ideological war

One of the campaign’s most prominent features was its attempt to reframe the protests as a conflict against religion rather than against economic mismanagement and political repression.

Posts describing the Iranian government as an “oppressive Islamist regime” circulated alongside narratives portraying the “Persian people” as victims of Islam. This attempt to distinguish between “Persians” and “Muslims” appeared aimed at isolating the regime from Iranian society and framing the unrest as a civilizational clash.

Israeli activists, including Eyal Yakoby and Hillel Neuer, also pushed content accusing the Iranian authorities of excessive violence while attacking what they termed the “silence of international media”.

Calls for foreign intervention

The discourse quickly evolved from solidarity to explicit calls for foreign military intervention. And this narrative was pushed by US President Donald Trump, who bombed Iran’s nuclear sites as part of Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June.

The network amplified statements attributed to Trump regarding Washington’s readiness to intervene. Pahlavi publicly welcomed these statements, framing them as support for “change”.

Simultaneously, members of the US Congress, including Representative Pat Fallon, a member of Trump’s Republican Party, further amplified these sentiments while dozens of accounts within the network directed tweets at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging direct Israeli intervention.

The ‘puppet masters’ behind the network

Al Jazeera’s network analysis identified specific “central nodes”, or accounts that played a pivotal role in amplifying the hashtag.

• “Rhythm of X”: This account emerged as a central hub for interaction. Created in 2024, it has changed its handle five times. Its content focuses almost exclusively on supporting Israel, promoting the Iranian monarchy and calling for US action against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

• “Nioh Berg”: This verified account created in 2017 (which has also changed its name five times) identifies its user as a “Jewish Iranian activist”. It presents her as a key voice in the movement and says she is wanted by Iranian authorities.

• “Israel War Room”: The analysis shows a strong overlap between the “Nioh Berg” network and the “Israel War Room” account, which regularly disseminates security and political content aligned with Israeli state narratives.

Manufacturing a crisis

The investigation concludes that the #FreeThePersianPeople campaign was not a spontaneous digital expression of internal Iranian anger.