One of my most surprising interviews in Iran came two decades ago, on one of my first visits, when I dropped by the “den of spies,” as the building that once housed the United States Embassy was known. A monument to anti-Americanism, it was then plastered with posters denouncing the United States as the “Great Satan,” but I managed to chat privately with a uniformed Revolutionary Guard there.
He was a young man, curious about the United States, very amiable. His favorite movie turned out to be “Titanic.”
Iran’s government was then denouncing America for “disgustingly sick promiscuous behavior,” and I asked him if he shared that view. He brightened, and it became clear that he considered this one of America’s selling points.
“To hell with the mullahs,” he confided. “If I could manage it, I’d go to America tomorrow.”
Reflecting on that conversation over the years, I’ve wondered how an Iranian regime that is so unpopular can have so much staying power: Everywhere I’ve gone in Iran, on each visit, I’ve found many people (while out of the hearing of the secret police) to be scathing about the government’s corruption, hypocrisy and economic mismanagement. And though it has been a while since I’ve been allowed into the country, Iranians tell me that people are seething all the more today with frustration and anger at the oppression and misrule; the government’s brutal and misogynistic suppression of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising appeared to compound the anger.
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are therefore right in their aims: to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and, ideally, to nurture the emergence of a better government. The question is how to advance these goals.
It’s too early to know the results of the bombings by Trump and Netanyahu, but it’s pretty clear that while the nuclear program was not “obliterated,” as Trump claimed, the strikes did inflict very significant damage. The Defense Intelligence Agency initially suggested that the Iranian nuclear program was set back by a few months; other estimates suggest that the delay is several years.
The big problem is that we don’t know what happened to Iran’s cache of highly enriched uranium, enough to make about nine or 10 weapons; some reports suggest that Iran moved it from the nuclear sites before the bombings. Nor do we know whether Iran has surviving centrifuges or duplicate conversion facilities to process uranium. If it does have these things, Iran may now be incentivized to sprint to a crude nuclear weapon and capable of doing so (though not necessarily of creating a warhead that could be attached to a missile). A European negotiator on Iran nuclear issues, Enrique Mora, has bluntly declared that the bombings marked “the day a nuclear Iran was born.”
So we can’t be sure whether the bombings ended Iran’s nuclear program, delayed it or accelerated it — or, very plausibly, both delayed and accelerated. Much will also depend on whether Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and kicks out international inspectors. If that happens, we may see more crises and more bombings of Iran in the coming years by Israel or America.
There is a better way. Critics were mostly right in recounting the flaws of the 2015 nuclear agreement reached in the Obama administration, yet while it was in effect it was also transformative.
That nuclear accord forced Iran to pull out centrifuges, give up some enriched uranium and limit its future enrichment to less than 4 percent. If bombing marked a setback for Iran on the nuclear path of a few months or years, diplomacy pushed Iran about 15 years back. We are worrying about Iran’s nuclear program today only because Trump ripped up the accord in 2018.
We tend to hold diplomacy to a higher bar than bombs. Any ambassador would be laughed out of the room for proposing an accord with Iran that allowed it to keep some nine bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium, with no inspections — yet that may be the outcome of the bombings that Trump is celebrating. So however we assess the Trump military strikes on Iran, I hope we’ll now pivot and push for a new nuclear accord, one that deals with its highly enriched uranium. We can’t just shrug when nine or 10 nuclear weapons’ worth of uranium goes missing.
Trump may also have an advantage in negotiating with Iran: He can now credibly threaten the use of military force if Iran is intransigent at the negotiating table. One of Barack Obama’s weaknesses as a negotiator was that enemies knew he had a (well-founded) reluctance to use force.
More broadly, what’s our theory of change? Is it that constant sanctions and military pressure change a country? Looking at Cuba and North Korea, it’s hard to see much evidence for that. In fairness, though, champions of trade and engagement for moderating regimes like China’s haven’t succeeded, either. Having closely followed North Korea for decades, I’ve come to think that nothing works well against rogue regimes — but that isolating such countries is particularly ineffective, and sometimes preserves odious governments by giving them an excuse for their own failures.
Many Iranians are well educated, for one thing the regime has done right is expand educational opportunities, for girls as well as boys. They’re proud of their ancient civilization. Like anyone, they resent foreign bullying, and bombings can cause them to rally around the flag. But most of the time they know that their biggest problem is that they’re led by extremists. Polling in Iran is difficult but suggests that four-fifths of the population wants a new kind of government.
Someday the regime will crack and people power will prevail, but I suspect that will be more likely when there’s peace. The implication is that the diplomatic toolbox, reinforced by military might, is profoundly flawed, but may still be more likely than bombs alone both to contain Iran’s nuclear aspirations and to deliver lasting change in the country.
Bombs can undermine the regime. But maybe so too can “Titanic.”
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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