Current protests in Iran are reminiscent of the uprising in 1979 that forced the exodus of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and put the mullahs in charge. I was a reporter for Newsweek at the time, covering the White House. I remember learning from President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the administration was pleading with the Shah to crack down on protestors infused with religious fervor over his efforts to modernize the country. He refused to use force against his own people.
Instead, suffering from cancer, Pahlavi fled and found refuge in the U.S.—former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and banker David Rockefeller having pressured Carter to let him into the country receive medical treatment. We all know how the saga unfolded from there: Iranian students taking over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and a humiliating hostage standoff that ended some 444 days later with Carter’s defeat.
Several decades and presidents later, the Trump White House is scrambling to deal with a similar set of circumstances: an unpopular regime, propped up by the military, facing widespread unrest. The outcome could change the course of history in the Middle East—and beyond.
Trump is mulling military action to fulfill bold promises to the Iranian people that help is on the way. Carter never considered a military response. It was a different world then, with the United States and the Soviet Union filtering geopolitical strategy near-solely through the lens of their superpower competition. When the Iranian revolution got underway, Carter’s priority was preventing Iran from becoming a Soviet client state—like next door Afghanistan would later the same year. Brzezinski told the president that Afghanistan would be Russia’s Vietnam. He was right about that, but he was wrong about Iran.
We were all wrong about Iran, recalled Gary Sick, who served on Carter’s National Security Council. Sick told the Daily Beast that the Carter team was relying on the fact that the Shah, who had been in power for 37 years, was “quite capable of dealing with his own country, and he had everything he needed to proceed,” including U.S.-supplied weapons.
While Carter stood on the sidelines, to his detriment, Trump has done the opposite, Sick continued. “He put himself into the center from the beginning, and now Iran is calling his bluff.”
Trump is using social media to push the Iranian people to “take over” government buildings and other institutions of power, surely risking their lives in doing so. In the short term, “the most likely impact of all this is nothing,” Sick said, explaining that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps remains “the strongest stable institution in the country and they are likely to prevail.”
(“The Iranian people who are real fighters will eventually win,” Sick added. “It could be 15 years from now, or two years.”)
After the daring capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear structure, Trump is enamored with the might of the U.S. military. If past is prologue, he will find a way to inject American troops into Iran—over the reported objections of advisors. As the death toll mounted in Iran, these advisors and experts calculated the risks (and benefits) of taking action. They couldn’t guarantee anything.
So, what does Trump do next? He wants to have an impact. And he wants credit for starting or stopping something.
“He says I’ll hit you very hard—when and how?” Sick said. “We can hit them, yes, but what are we striking? Military action is a very bad idea. Almost anything you do will make things worse.”
“Authoritarian governments don’t fall if there aren’t cracks in the regime. I’ve been watching for the cracks to develop, and I don’t see evidence of that yet,” added Bill Galston, a senior fellow with think-tank the Brookings Institution.
Trump drew a red line when he said he would intervene if the Iranian government began killing protestors. There are reports that more than two thousand protestors have died. “I think he’s trapped himself into doing something just to redeem that promissory note,” Galston told the Daily Beast.
“The reality is he’s already incurred a moral responsibility,” argued Andrew Miller, a Middle East specialist with the Center for American Progress. “There’s evidence some people turned out because of the president’s bold promises. They’re renaming streets for him… If he takes no action, it will be seen as a betrayal.”
Trump is, then, likely backed into a corner. He’s damned if he does, because military action won’t be effective. And he’s damned if he doesn’t, because he’ll have reneged on a strongman promise. He’ll look weak.
Regime change is what he’s courting, but a hardline military regime could turn any U.S. military intervention into as big a foreign policy fiasco for Trump as non-intervention was for Carter.
So as we wait to see what Trump does to exert his power over another country whose leader calls protestors “terrorists,” it’s best to remind our leaders that definitions are in the eyes of the beholder, and military might is best used judiciously if at all.
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