Nicholas Kristof

You go around Iran, not just in North Tehran where there are secular liberals, but you go in rural areas and people are just so pissed off at the government.

And that's about not just the repression, which is a little bit less evident in rural areas, but it's about the corruption.

It's about the hypocrisy.

It's about just the incompetence of the government economically.

So on the one hand, I think that there are actually plenty of Iranians these days who are just so upset at the way things have gone that they wouldn't mind a certain amount of foreign intervention to try to topple the regime despite deep nationalism in that country.

On the other hand, though, I think a lot of people, including me, are a little bit skeptical that a military intervention would make things better.

as opposed to making things worse.

And I think we should have a lot of humility about our capacity to bring about the changes we'd like to see in Iran and understand that things could go a lot less well than the Trump administration might anticipate.

Yeah.

Iran has rebuilt its missile program.

And so it can attack not only Israel, but also U.S.

bases in the area, in Iraq and Qatar, elsewhere.

It may not be able to fully close the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 percent of world's oil passes, but it could certainly, you know, make efforts in that direction and disrupt the transit of oil.

And

And I guess beyond that, it might be possible to decapitate the regime and kill the paramount leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But actually changing the regime itself, I think, is a lot less likely.

And it may well be that the IRGC, the military command, is actually what takes over.

And it's not obvious to me that that would be an improvement.

No, I mean, I think David is exactly right.

Iran has a certain capacity to suffer that I'm not sure we fully appreciate.