"The ruthless slaughter of anti-government protesters in Iran appears to have stopped — but only because residents are being held hostage in their homes by machine gun-wielding security forces that have flooded the streets... 'There were tanks out — there's tanks everywhere'... 'There are no protests anymore because of massive killings. With 12,000 dead, people are terrified...'" — The New York Post, January 15, 2026.

Iranians have learned through bitter experience that when executions are "paused," this does not mean they are canceled: they are "postponed" or carried out quietly, away from international scrutiny.

What this episode ultimately exposed was not simply a tactical decision by one administration, but a structural failure in how the West approaches popular uprisings against entrenched tyrannies. Western leaders are adept at virtue signaling but conspicuously hesitant and fragmentary at follow-through. Expressions of solidarity are issued quickly; commitments to protection are hedged or left deliberately vague.

The Islamic Republic understands this pattern intimately. It knows that it can absorb rhetorical condemnation, wait out media cycles, and then resume repression once attention shifts elsewhere. Tehran's temporary retreat on executions, whether genuine or tactical, fits neatly into this playbook. A regime that has survived more than four decades through systematic violence does not abandon its methods because of warnings. It adapts, recalibrates and seeks to reduce the immediate risk of foreign intervention while preserving its core mechanisms of control.

The danger for the protesters is that external encouragement, when not backed by sustained pressure, can accelerate this cycle by convincing the regime that it must act more efficiently, more quietly, and more ruthlessly.

[O]ppressed populations are encouraged [by the West] to rise, while those encouraging them retain the option to disengage.... By speaking openly about consequences and then stepping back once Tehran signaled a partial retreat, [Trump] exposed the limits of American power in a way that previous administrations often concealed behind bureaucratic language.

Iran's regime has revealed, once again, the deadly trap at the heart of Western policy, seen in Ukraine as well as in the Middle East: a willingness to praise bravery without guaranteeing protection. Trump's handling of these crises should be read less as a simple failure or success than as a warning. Words can inspire, but they can also expose countless people to monumental danger. In Iran today, and Ukraine, the difference between success and disaster depends not on declarations, but on whether those who speak the loudest are prepared actually to follow through.

The most remarkable feature of the year in question is Trump's success, perhaps unintentionally, in desacralizing power by opening it to the agora with TV cameras that delineate its contours.

The 9-to-5 political day is gone.

With Trump, we have seen the end, at least for the time being, of the era of grandiloquence in favor of simple, right-to-the-point quips that remind one of Gary Cooper in his Westerns. "We're locked and loaded!" is one example.

He has shaken the United Nations by withdrawing from dozens of "international" agencies acting as gravy trains for the "progressive" elite of tax-exempt bureaucrats and technocrats, all card-carrying members of the Blame-America-First fraternity.

Also shaken out of its slumber has been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had morphed into a lobbying and public relations outfit rather than a military machine to fight putative aggressors. Trump has persuaded NATO members that unless they are ready to at least wash their dishes, the American "room service" might not rush in the dinner trolley.