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The Opinions
Are We Headed For Another Endless Middle Eastern War?
00:13:24
Nicholas Kristof on why the U.S. may be headed into a “minefield.”
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Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen.
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Unnamed Co-Host
The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.
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Nicholas Kristof
I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. I go to games always doing the mini, doing the wordle.
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Unnamed Co-Host
I loved how much content it exposed me to things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for.
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Unnamed Announcer
This app is essential. The New York Times App all of the Times all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com app this is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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Nicholas Kristof
I'm Nicholas Kristof. I'm a columnist for the New York Times and a longtime Iran watcher. I've spent much of my career at the New York Times covering war and conflict and the Middle East. I've been to Iran a number of times and I think one of the things that I've learned over the years is that it's very easy to make plans in conference rooms about how wars will go and then they tend to get disrupted very easily. One of the things we need is a lot of humility. If you think back to the Gulf War, then Democrats and doves predicted that it might go very badly, and in fact it went swimmingly. And then partly as a result, Democrats did not oppose the Iraq invasion enough and the hawks were just full of hubris about how we were going to be welcomed with flowers. And in fact, of course it went disastrously. All told, I tend to be wary about overconfidence in conflicts, and I think we're seeing that right now, frankly. It's a Monday afternoon and Iran has just struck back at the United States. It has launched a military attack on an American base in Qatar. No casualties have been reported so far. There is some indication that Iran had launched this attack on the base in Qatar kind of as a pro forma effort, and it had already warned ahead of time that it might do this. The base there is also well defended. So if you wanted to make a statement, but not necessarily kill Americans, that would be a reasonable target. That would be the most hopeful interpretation and that might allow the US to respond in a minimal way and kind of create an off ramp for both sides. I hope that is the case, but there are a couple of fundamental questions that we face. One is how else Iran may retaliate against the United States and indeed how the US May respond to that retaliation. A second is whether the US And Israeli attacks have ended the Iranian nuclear program, or maybe on the contrary, have actually accelerated it. And a third is whether the US strike and this retaliation from Iran, whether they mark the end of a conflict or whether this is simply the beginning of one more never ending war in the Middle East. I think one of the fundamental questions Iran is going to have to decide is whether it is going to try to close the Strait of Hormuz. And this gives it real leverage. The straight up Moses is very narrow. A lot of the world's oil passes through it. But the problem for it is that A, the US Would really respond with devastating attacks on its navy, and second, that would shut down its own oil exports. And one of its customers is China, who it certainly wouldn't be happy to lose a good deal of its oil supply. So if I were guessing, my hunch is that Iran will talk about closing the Strait of Hormuz. There may be a few mines set in the strait, but that it won't fully close down the strait, that it will want its own oil to get through and will be wary of the consequences of fully closing it down. As for the success of the military strikes that the US Made on Iranian nuclear sites, President Trump said that those sites had been obliterated. That seems to have been an exaggeration. The satellite imagery suggests that they were damaged and there was certainly a setback to the Iranian nuclear program, but it's not clear whether everything has actually been destroyed. And in particular, we don't know what happened to the 400 kilograms of enriched uranium, 60% enriched uranium, that Iran had. Naive at this. So I think one of my concerns is that rather than ending Iran's nuclear programs, there is some risk that these nuclear strikes will actually accelerate it by leaving it in control of some centrifuges and that 400 kilograms of enriched uranium. So President Trump has said that it is absolutely unacceptable that Iran have nuclear weapons. And, and I think that that is pretty broadly shared by just about everybody. And I think in the background, one thing that is going through American policymakers is that in the early 2000s, they looked at North Korea's nuclear program and there was a lot of debate in official circles about whether to strike the North Korean nuclear sites. And in the end, officials decided not to for fear of a North Korean response in South Korea. And subsequently, some officials said that was a mistake, that they should have hit North Korea early on before it had, you know, potentially today up to 100 nuclear weapons. So I think that decision not to strike North Korea to Some degree has framed the view of some hawks today that they should hit Iran. Look, my aims in some ways are very similar to those of President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. I would really like to see an end to Iran, Iran's nuclear programs, which I think are incredibly destabilizing. And I would like to see an end to the Iranian regime, which is brutally repressive, misogynistic, destabilizing around the region. My concern is that this doesn't achieve either of those objectives, either regime change or an end to the nuclear program, and that indeed, it is possible that it will do the opposite, although it's a little early to say that it will accelerate a drive to nuclear weapons rather than end it. And in terms of regime change, the Iranian regime is incredibly unpopular. But it's hard to see that at a time when it is being bombed, people are going to rise up and overturn that regime and establish a pro American democracy. If there is regime change, it may be more likely a military coup by hardliners. You know, be careful what you wish for. I reported from Iran in 2004 and again in 2012. I think one perception that Americans sometimes have of Iran is that it's full of these crazy anti American people running around chanting, death to America. And in some ways, it's the opposite. The regime talks about death to America, but ordinary Iranians have historically been just so pro American. You walk around Iran and for the first minute or two, you'll get the standard line about, you know, supporting the Islamic Republic. And then immediately people begin to complain about corruption, about hypocrisy of their leaders, about their economic mismanagement. And their resentment of the Iranian regime is just so striking everywhere you go. You know, I remember once I took my two teenage kids on a road trip across Iran with me. And once people saw these two American kids, they just wanted to hug them. They wanted to take them and give them ice cream, and in one case wanted to provide them with alcoholic drinks, which of course was illegal in Iran and maybe a little bit inappropriate since they were teenagers. I think they wanted to show how free thinking they were, how much they did not subscribe to the extremism of the regime. And so one thing that I worry about is that we have a country that in some ways is one of the most pro American in the entire Middle east at the citizen level. But if we are declaring war, if we are bombing Iran, then I think it will be a lot harder to see that kind of pro American sentiment survive. And I worry that that may be a loss for the long run. Joining the war against Iran was in many ways very uncharacteristic of Trump. You know, he was the one who decried America's wars in the Middle east, who was in many ways something of an isolationist. I suspect he was concerned about his legacy. And the idea of changing the regime in Iran and bringing about a better regime, one that gave up nuclear weapons, was a line that Prime Minister Netanyahu fed to him and that he may have found very appealing. You know, I think presidents often have these dreams and don't fully think through where they're going to go. And in general, I got to say that Prime Minister Netanyahu has gamed this incredibly well. You know, if you think back to where Netanyahu was after the Hamas terror attack on Israel and how unpopular he was then, then Netanyahu has managed to stay in power and in this case, to start a war with Iran and then bring in the US to finish it, to make sure that the US has his back. And now, you know, Trump has joined Israel in that war in Iran. We'll see whether those dreams come to pass. I worry that this is in many ways like the Iraq war in early 2003. And I think back at the time when people talked about how we had to act before a smoking gun became a mushroom cloud, and the disregard of intelligence, the over optimistic assumptions, the failure to remember that wars are always more complicated and that the enemy has a vote. I worry that we may be moving into that terrain again. But, you know, one thing to just remember is that with, you know, very little attention, the Houthis in Yemen, this ragtag militia from the mountains in northern Yemen managed to shut down a great deal of shipping traffic. And the U.S. spent $7 billion tackling them. And we fundamentally still couldn't control them. And now they may be back to the fight. So just a reminder that war is hard and complicated, and the idea that an air war alone is going to defeat an enemy didn't work for the Houthis. I am a little skeptical that it's going to work for the Iranians. And we're, I think, headed toward a minefield. And President Trump thinks that this is going to be successful and will be worth it, but the enemy gets a vote as well.
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Unnamed Announcer
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.