When Protest Becomes Foreign Policy - FPIF

As tensions between Washington and Tehran escalate over how to respond to one of the deadliest protest crackdowns in recent Iranian history, U.S. statements threatening military options—even as killings “subside,” in President Trump’s words—show how dissent far from U.S. soil is being folded into strategic competition. Rather than simply marking moral support for Iranians on the streets, such rhetoric is now shaping the contours of international confrontation and diplomatic breakdown.

Protest is usually understood as a domestic act: citizens confronting their own state over rights, justice, or accountability. Yet moments of mass mobilization rarely remain confined within national borders. When protests are visible, sustained, and morally resonant, they are watched closely by other governments and, in some cases, publicly embraced. At that point, protest ceases to be only a challenge to power at home. It becomes an object of statecraft abroad.

The recent mobilization in Iran illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. Officials in the United States have publicly voiced support for the right to protest, warned against executions, and hinted that there could be “options” if repression continues. One can agree with the principle being asserted—that peaceful protest should not be met with state violence—while still asking a harder historical question: what actually happens when powerful states turn protest movements elsewhere into instruments of foreign policy?

History suggests that this kind of external backing is rarely neutral. It can raise visibility and offer some measure of diplomatic pressure, but it can also reshape how protest is perceived, both by the regime being challenged and by international audiences. When states speak for protesters, they often end up narrowing what those protests are allowed to mean.

This is not an argument against protest or against international solidarity. It is an argument about power. Protest movements not only confront the states they oppose; they also enter the calculations of other states watching from the outside. Once that happens, protest becomes a symbol—and symbols are useful to governments.

Support for protest abroad typically serves three overlapping functions. First, it signals values. By backing protesters, states present themselves as defenders of rights and freedom, reinforcing their moral standing internationally. Second, it applies pressure. Public statements, warnings, and sanctions are designed to raise the reputational cost of repression. Third, it positions protest within a wider geopolitical narrative. Protests are framed not only as struggles for rights, but as evidence of a regime’s illegitimacy, weakness, or isolation.

These functions are not inherently cynical. Governments do sometimes act out of genuine concern. But history shows that such support is always selective and strategic. States choose which protests to elevate and which to ignore, often based on geopolitical alignment rather than the scale of repression involved. This selectivity matters, because it reveals that protest is being read through the lens of foreign policy priorities rather than purely human rights principles.

The consequences for protest movements themselves can be ambivalent. External backing can amplify voices that might otherwise be silenced. It can help prevent the worst abuses by placing regimes under international scrutiny.

Yet it can also harden state responses. Regimes frequently portray protests as foreign-backed or externally orchestrated, a claim that gains plausibility when outside governments openly champion demonstrators. Protesters then risk being recast, not as citizens demanding rights but as proxies in a wider geopolitical struggle.

This dynamic is not new. During the Cold War, protest movements across the Global South were routinely read through superpower rivalry. Expressions of dissent were praised or condemned depending on whether they aligned with Western or Soviet interests. In some cases, protest was embraced rhetorically while being instrumentalized strategically. Support was offered insofar as it weakened adversaries, not necessarily insofar as it empowered protesters to shape their own political futures.

What is striking is how persistent this pattern has been even after the Cold War’s end. Human rights language replaced ideological rivalry, but the logic remained. Protest became a moral resource that states could deploy: to legitimize sanctions, justify diplomatic pressure, or signal resolve without committing to direct intervention. The language softened; the strategic use endured.

This is where contemporary responses to Iran’s protests deserve careful scrutiny. Public support for the right to protest is both necessary and welcome. But when that support is paired with vague threats or open-ended “options,” protest begins to serve a dual role. It becomes not only an expression of domestic dissent, but also a diplomatic lever. The risk is not that protest loses its legitimacy—protesters themselves supply that—but that its political meaning is narrowed to fit external agendas.

For protesters, this narrowing can be dangerous. Once a movement is framed internationally as a test of regime strength or a proxy for geopolitical competition, its internal diversity is flattened. Protesters are no longer seen as a heterogeneous coalition with varied demands, strategies, and horizons. They are turned into symbols of “freedom” or “resistance” writ large. This symbolic elevation can obscure the very real risks protesters face on the ground.

There is also a deeper tension here. States that publicly champion protest abroad often do so while managing, constraining, or criminalizing protest at home. This does not invalidate their concern for foreign protesters, but it complicates the moral authority with which they speak. Protest, in these cases, becomes less a universal right than a selectively invoked principle—one that travels easily across borders, but unevenly within them.

None of this means that governments should remain silent in the face of repression. Silence carries its own costs and can be read as acquiescence. The question is not whether states should respond, but how. History suggests that rhetorical support alone rarely protects protesters, and that ambiguous threats can sometimes increase danger rather than reduce it. Protest movements are not diplomatic tools to be calibrated; they are lived political struggles whose outcomes are shaped primarily by local conditions.

Understanding protest as foreign policy also helps explain why outcomes are so often disappointing. External actors tend to treat protest as a signal—of legitimacy, instability, or opportunity—rather than as a process unfolding over time. They look for decisive moments: regime collapse, negotiated transition, or clear victory. When these do not materialize, attention drifts, leaving protesters exposed to retaliation once international scrutiny fades.

This pattern should prompt humility rather than despair. Protest movements have always navigated hostile terrain, including the risk of co-optation by external powers. Many are acutely aware of how foreign backing can be used against them and take steps to assert autonomy. But external actors also bear responsibility for recognizing the limits of what their support can achieve.

There is, finally, a broader lesson here for how we think about activism in international politics. Protest does not exist outside power; it is entangled with it. States observe, interpret, and sometimes appropriate protest for their own ends. Acknowledging this does not weaken the case for the right to protest. On the contrary, it takes protest seriously enough to recognize the pressures it faces once it becomes visible on the global stage.

The danger is not that protest becomes “political”—it always is—but that it becomes instrumentalized in ways that reduce the agency of those risking the most. When protest becomes foreign policy, it can gain attention, but it can also lose protection. History offers no simple rules here, only a warning: supporting protest rhetorically is easier than safeguarding protesters materially, and the two are not the same thing.

If there is a role for historians in moments like this, it is not to judge the legitimacy of protest—that belongs to those who take to the streets—but to clarify the structures within which protest is received, used, and sometimes abandoned. Understanding how protest has been woven into statecraft in the past does not tell us what should be done now. It does, however, remind us that solidarity spoken from afar is never neutral, and that the costs of its consequences are rarely borne by those who speak the loudest.

In Iran, as elsewhere, the courage of protesters deserves recognition. But recognition alone is not protection. When states claim to stand with protest movements, history urges us to ask not only what is being said, but what protest is being made to do—and for whom.