Photograph Source: راننده از تهران – CC0

Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran, released a video in Farsi last week calling on Iranians to go outside on Thursday and Friday evenings at 8pm. He urged them to chant from wherever they were, be it streets, rooftops, windows, inside homes, as a collective act of protest against the Islamic Republic’s leadership. Was this part of a plan?

For what it was worth, I had already begun thinking about Iran a few days into the new year, as my time in the English countryside was coming to an end. Bizarrely enough, I heard what I took to be the washing machine. A steady, menacing hum. Then I realised it was coming from outside, then from the sky, and was likely connected to the nearby military airbase shared with the Americans. I realised I now knew that sound from elsewhere—from Bagram, Kandahar, Camp Bastion, Lashkar Gah—not the sound of fury exactly, but of military activity stepping up.

I scanned the press that day. Reports indeed suggested the United States was building up its military presence in the UK following its unilateral mission to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and his wife. According to several accounts in the press, both local and national, at least ten C-17 Globemasters and a pair of heavily armed AC-130Js had already landed at two bases, including the one nearby. The Ministry of Defence declined to comment, but the rural Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard noted a US spy plane among the movements, probably a Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady.

Understandably, these developments would be linked to Greenland as well as the seizure of a sanctioned oil tanker, later three, though another two were to slip through the Channel unchallenged. My instinct at the time was to wonder whether any of this was not also connected to Iran, where demonstrations were still under-reported. Nor was the Iranian situation entirely disconnected from Venezuela. It was well understood how the operation there undermined Iran’s strategic energy partnership with Caracas, cutting off another source of oil exports and leverage against US sanctions.

The protests in Iran had begun over the collapsing economy and the plunge of the rial, spreading through Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and into other cities. This was despite heavy security, including........

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