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Iran Stiffens Its Resolve as the Trump Administration’s Pressure Mounts

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‘When I Sleep, I Dream of War’: A View Inside Iran as U.S. Escalates Rhetoric

Over the past month, the U.S. ramped up pressure on Iran. We spoke with Iranians to see how they feel about the threat of war and U.S.-Iran relations.

Relations between the U.S. and Iran have hit a new low. And people inside Iran are preoccupied with thoughts of war. “The latest now, on a brewing confrontation with Iran.” “President Trump issued a tough new warning to Iran today.” “The State Department says it’s seeing an increased threat stream from Iran.” Tina Kheiri is one of the many Iranians we spoke with to get a sense of how people are reacting to the ratcheted up rhetoric. Over the past month, The U.S. has increased its presence in the Persian Gulf and has made veiled hints about the possible use of force. “We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that, they’re not going to be happy. They are not going to be happy people.” “You can figure it out yourself. They know what I mean by it.” For Iranians, this threat of war is nothing new. But this time, people say the situation feels more urgent. Tina Kheiri’s mother is a breast cancer survivor. She says U.S. sanctions have made it much more difficult for her mother to get medicine that she desperately needs. Even though President Trump has told advisers he’s not interested in a war with Iran — “With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes, you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go into war, because war hurts economies, war kills people.” He’s also issued direct threats like this on Twitter, saying, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” It’s these mixed signals that leave many Iranians fearful about the future.

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Over the past month, the U.S. ramped up pressure on Iran. We spoke with Iranians to see how they feel about the threat of war and U.S.-Iran relations.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In its campaign to throttle Iran into submission, the Trump administration has in the last several weeks applied smothering force — blocking the country’s last avenues for selling oil, classifying the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization and deploying ships and bombers to the Persian Gulf.

But if the goal of increased pressure was to force Iran to change its behavior or to send angry Iranians into the streets to ultimately sweep the nation’s clerical leadership from power, it has so far achieved neither.

Instead, it appears to have only stiffened Iran’s resolve, pushing it from wary patience to calibrated confrontation against an enemy it has long mistrusted. Its leaders, analysts say, are determined not to capitulate to what they view as economic and psychological warfare, or to negotiate under duress.

“Try respect,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif shot back at President Trump in a tweet on Monday. “It works!”

Administration officials defended their Iran strategy to Congress on Tuesday, laying out intelligence about Iranian threats that they said justified sending an aircraft carrier, bombers and missile defense systems to the Persian Gulf region this month.

In the short term, at least, the administration’s pressure tactics are leaving bite marks. With inflation running high and medicine, food and other basics running short, Iran’s economy is tanking under the combined force of the sanctions and Iranian mismanagement, heightening public frustration.

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The United States sent an aircraft carrier, bombers and missile defense systems to the Persian Gulf region this month.Credit...Mass Communication Specialist 1St Class Brian M. Wilbur/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

But for Iranians, it is hard to view the American chokehold as anything but bullying from a historic foe that promised sanctions relief and a path back into the international community in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, only for the United States to go back on its word.

After months of quietly upholding its end of the 2015 nuclear bargain it struck with the United States and other world powers, Iran has begun to jettison parts of the agreement. It announced last week that it would resume the production of nuclear centrifuges and begin accumulating nuclear material.

Iran, its proxies or other allied groups are suspected of carrying out two recent attacks on Saudi oil tankers and pumping stations in the Persian Gulf and a rocket attack near the American Embassy in Baghdad.

There is no hard evidence linking Iran to the attacks, which caused no casualties and only minor damage but may have been intended to send a message.

“They believe they’re under attack, and their response is not to escalate to a conflict, but certainly not to back down,” said Ariane Tabatabai, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation and an Iran researcher at Columbia University. “What they want to do is continue this current trend of doing everything they can to poke the U.S. in the eye, without getting to the threshold of an all-out war.”

Targeting a crucial oil shipping route would serve as a pointed reminder that Iran is capable of striking American allies and disrupting the world’s economy, even if it cannot fight the United States military head to head.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has three decades of experience goading the United States with asymmetric tactics and, matador-like, narrowly escaping injury, as when Iranian-linked Shiite militias in Iraq waged guerrilla warfare on American troops in the mid-2000s.

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Iranian leaders who supported dialogue, like President Hassan Rouhani, left, have have been sidelined by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, right, because of Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal.Credit...Iranian Supreme Leader's Office, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“I think his dilemma is always that, if he does nothing to counter U.S. pressure, he risks losing face, and if he excessively counters U.S. pressure, he risks losing his head,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He’s comfortable operating in the space between those two.”

Calibrated provocations also give Iran’s leaders a means of showing the public that they are standing up to the United States, Ms. Tabatabai said.

Both sides appeared to swerve away from conflict last week when both Mr. Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei made statements saying they did not want a war. But just as tensions seemed to simmer down, Mr. Trump tweeted Monday that, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”

What provoked the outburst was unclear, but Mr. Zarif, the foreign minister, responded with a hashtag: #NeverThreatenAnIranian. Iranian officials have repeatedly warned that Iran will retaliate if attacked.

The following day, Mr. Trump again raised the prospect of talks, but put the onus on Iran to reach out. “Iran will call us if and when they are ever ready,” he tweeted.

But for Iran, negotiations can only happen if the “sanctions, insulting and bullying” stop, said Diako Hosseini, an analyst at Tehran’s Center for Strategic Studies, which is affiliated with Iran’s presidential office. “Otherwise it is impossible that Iran surrender.”

“It was the U.S. that pulled back from the negotiation table, not Iran,” he added. “Iranians don’t believe in Trump’s sincerity.”

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The old main bazaar in Tehran. Iran’s economy is tanking under the combined force of sanctions and Iranian mismanagement.Credit...Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press

Iranian leaders who supported dialogue, like President Hassan Rouhani, have been sidelined by Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal. On Wednesday, Ayatollah Khamenei openly criticized Mr. Rouhani and Mr. Zarif, saying that he “warned them several times” that he “did not really believe in” the way they handled the nuclear agreement, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Ayatollah Khamenei has compared negotiating with the United States to “drinking poison.”

“The parts of the government that wanted to engage with America have been proven wrong, and are not going to have an opportunity to engage anytime soon,” said Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who frequently speaks with people in hard-line Iranian circles.

Iranian officials have tried to drive a wedge between President Trump, who has frequently expressed the desire to disentangle the United States from the Middle East, and his foreign policy team, which takes a harder line. National Security Adviser John Bolton has long advocated regime change, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also appeared to endorse it.

Iranian leaders have singled out Mr. Bolton as a warmonger who is getting ahead of his boss.

“Bolton May Be Sacked,” read a recent headline in Javan, a hard-line newspaper, referring to American reports that Mr. Trump was not pleased with Mr. Bolton. “Infighting in Washington,” echoed Arman-e Emrooz, a more moderate paper.

Analysts said the Iranians may have been hoping to lay low until the 2020 American presidential election when a friendlier administration might come to power. They were thinking, “maybe we can wait this guy out,” said Dina Esfandiary, a Century Foundation fellow who focuses on Iran. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates support rejoining the nuclear deal.

But there are no guarantees that a Democrat will win, or that a new president would automatically embrace the deal without new demands.

While Iranian officials may be able to rely on rainy-day funds, oil smuggling and trade with friendly countries until the end of 2020, they are not likely to carry it through 2024, analysts said.

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“Iran will call us if and when they are ever ready,” President Trump tweeted a day after warning that Iran will meet its “official end” if it “wants to fight.”Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

The 2015 nuclear deal, which offered Iranians a breather from crippling American sanctions, never led to the widespread economic improvements Iranians were eager for.

Over the last year and a half, the government has faced widespread criticism and protests from Iranians over its mismanagement of the economy, its corruption and its foreign activities, among other issues.

Many Iranians question why the government is spending so much on proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq when it has struggled to handle floods in Iran that caused billions in damage this year or to protect the public from the impact of sanctions.

But nationalism has spiked now that Iran seems under threat. Hard-line factions within the Iranian government appear confident that the United States will ultimately not want to get bogged down in an invasion of Iran, and, moreover, that Iran would win.

It is difficult to gauge public opinion in Iran, but analysts who speak to people there said that some seem fed up with their leaders, while others blame the United States for their troubles. Most Iranians, they believe, want to avoid violent confrontation, either with the United States or with their own government.

Ten years after the government violently crushed the pro-democracy protests known as the Green Revolution, even discontented Iranians have little appetite for a popular revolt. And three decades after their devastating war with Iraq, Iranians hope to avoid another international conflict.

The tensions with the United States worry many Iranians.

“When I sleep, I dream of war,” Tina Kheiri, a 24-year-old Tehran resident, said in an interview. When she wakes up, she checks Twitter to see if anything has happened.

Her mother, a breast cancer survivor, is having trouble finding post-chemotherapy pills, which have disappeared from state-run pharmacies and quadrupled in price. But Ms. Kheiri has found decent work with a cryptocurrency company, helping Iranians use Bitcoin to work around American sanctions.

“I’m just starting to build my life,” Ms. Kheiri said. “But if something unexpected happens, my entire life will stop.”

Nilo Tabrizy contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Iran Stiffens Its Resolve as the Trump Administration Keeps Increasing the Pressure. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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