On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif spoke to a gathering of Iranian business leaders and diplomats in an attempt to salvage some confidence in the country’s economy as it faces down the threat of renewed US sanctions and the persistence of an economic crisis that has seen the value of the national currency fall to record lows. Following US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal this past May, sanctions are scheduled to snap back into place on Iran after the first week of August. Additionally, secondary sanctions targeting entities throughout the world that do business with Iran will be fully re-imposed on November 4.

On Wednesday, a press release from the National Iranian-American Council pointed out that the latest congressional defense policy bill will include articles specifically stating that President Donald Trump does not have authorization to initiate war with Iran and that Congress is not aware of any current justification for doing so. For some critics of the White House, such assurances seem necessary in the wake of provocative gestures such as Trump’s all-caps tweet that identified his Iranian counterpart by name on Sunday and promised severe consequences for anti-American rhetoric and threats against the US.

On Tuesday, two days after he addressed an event aimed at highlighting the divide between the Iranian government and its people, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo published an editorial in the USA Today in which he further highlighted the theocratic regime’s history of human rights abuses.

Since President Donald Trump tweeted a stern warning to his Iranian counterpart on Sunday regarding the potential consequences for threatening the United States, various outlets have pointed out that his foreign policy principals are invoking the same hardline stance toward the Islamic Republic. This is certainly true of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who attended an event that same day titled “Supporting Iranian Voices,” in which he spoke to Iranian expatriates in order to describe the clerical regime as being headed by “hypocritical holy men” and being more akin to a mafia than a government.

Since the nationwide uprising that rocked the Islamic Republic of Iran last December and January, there has been considerable attention given to the ongoing protests through which the Iranian people are defying the clerical regime’s restrictions and boldly expressing their contempt for the system of religious dictatorship. The protests have focused on a wide variety of specific issues including a worsening economic crisis, water scarcity in certain regions of the country, and enforcement of mandatory head coverings for women along with other discriminatory laws. But in many cases, these individual causes have been enveloped by an overriding recognition of the ruling regime’s culpability for those problems, and this, in turn, has supported explicit calls for regime change.

This week’s news of Iran filing suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice is indicative of the regime’s effort to confront its longstanding adversaries on the international stage. There is little expectation of the suit having a practical impact on the future of US sanctions against the Islamic Republic, even if it is somehow successful. But such confrontation is essential to Tehran’s post-revolutionary identity as a bulwark against Western influence in the Persian Gulf region.