CAIRO — Iran’s government on Wednesday marked the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution with mass rallies across the country, a show of defiance at a time when precarious nuclear negotiations with Washington could give way to another regional war.

Defiance Under the Shadow of War

The annual celebration commemorates the overthrow of the shah, which brought an authoritarian clerical regime to power.

This year, the commemorations took place under the shadow of a fleet of warships sent by President Donald Trump to Persian Gulf waters, ready for a potential attack on Iran if talks over the country’s nuclear and military capabilities do not succeed. On Tuesday, Trump warned he was considering sending a second aircraft carrier to the region.

At the same time, Iran is pursuing a fierce crackdown on anti-government protests that swept the country last month. Security forces crushed the demonstrations with deadly force, killing thousands.

A Nation Divided at Home

An ongoing wave of arrests has targeted figures from the reformist movement, with which Iran’s president himself is aligned — an apparent signal that no dissent will be tolerated.

Speaking from a stage at Azadi Square in Tehran, Iran, the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, acknowledged that the situation had “caused great sorrow.” Pezeshkian has often used a more conciliatory tone about the protests than Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Pezeshkian said, “We are ashamed before the people, and we are obligated to assist all those who were harmed in these incidents.”

“We are not seeking confrontation with the people,” he added.

But Pezeshkian criticized what he called Western propaganda about the unrest, which Tehran claims was orchestrated by the United States and Israel.

“We must stand united under the supreme leader’s guidance, heal the wounds of society, and confront external aggression with unity,” he said, referring to Khamenei, who has ruled Iran for the past 37 years.

The deep divide in the country was palpable during a celebratory fireworks display Tuesday night to mark the eve of the revolution’s anniversary.

As supporters of the government took to the rooftops to shout “God is great,” the sound of other residents shouting “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator” could also be heard in video from Tehran verified by The New York Times.

Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Iranian authorities would try to brand these commemorations as their “year of resistance and defiance to U.S. hegemony.”

In the Iranian calendar, both the 12-day war on Iran, started by Israel and briefly joined by U.S. warships, and the January anti-government protests fall in the current year.

“That hits at the heart of the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Their ideological base is very much driven by this concept of a holy war of U.S. versus Iran,” Geranmayeh said. “They are going to try and galvanize their supporters to come out. Even though that base, in my view, has shrunk incredibly over these 47 years, just because of the sheer size of Iran, that’s still a sizable force.”

Huge crowds of government supporters gathered on the streets of Tehran, festooned with the red, white and green flags of the Islamic Republic. Some chanted “death to America,” while others burned U.S. and Israeli flags or carried caricatures of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.

Netanyahu is set to meet with Trump later Wednesday in Washington and is expected to push for a more aggressive stance toward Iran.

On Tuesday, Trump told the Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 that he was considering sending another aircraft carrier, saying, “Either we reach a deal or we’ll do something very tough.”

U.S. officials have said that any agreement with Iran must address three demands: Freezing its nuclear program and discarding its stockpile of enriched uranium, reducing the range of its ballistic missiles, and ending its support for proxy militias across the Middle East.

Iranian officials have been adamant that the talks with Washington, the first round of which were held in Oman last week, will address only Iran’s nuclear program.

“We still do not have full trust in the Americans,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in an interview with the Moscow-backed outlet RT on Tuesday.

“We were in the middle of negotiations last June when they decided to attack us,” he added.

No date has been set for the next round of talks. A senior Iranian official, Ali Larijani, was in the Omani capital, Muscat, on Tuesday and was holding meetings Wednesday in Qatar, one of several Arab countries that pushed Trump to try to negotiate with Tehran.

Rising Stakes in Nuclear Talks

At home, Iran has become increasingly fractured by the protests and the crackdown.

Morteza Nemati, a political scientist at Payame Noor University in Tehran, described a sense of foreboding as he heard the competing chants from the rooftops Tuesday night.

“It was the first time I had witnessed such a scene,” he wrote in a social media post.

“Society has reached a dangerously polarized state,” he added. “The only way forward is for the government to negotiate with the opposition. Otherwise, disaster is on the horizon.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Erika Solomon/Arash Khamooshi
c.2026 The New York Times Company