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To think clearly about Middle East wars, you need to hold multiple thoughts in your head at the same time. It’s a complicated, kaleidoscopic region where religion, oil, tribal politics and great power politics interweave in every major story. If you are looking for a black-and-white narrative, you might want to take up checkers. So, here are my four thoughts on Iran — at least for today.

First, I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.

Second, this will not be easy, because this regime is deeply entrenched and is hardly going to be toppled from the air alone. Israel has not been able to eliminate Hamas in Gaza after over two years of a merciless air and ground war — and Hamas is right next door. That said, even if this U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran does not lead to the uprising by the Iranian people that President Trump has urged, it could have other, unanticipated, beneficial effects, like producing an Islamic Republic 2.0 that is much less threatening to its people and neighbors. But it just as easily could result in unanticipated dangers, like the disintegration of Iran as a single geographic entity.

Third, we must remember that the timing of the end of this war will be determined as much by the oil markets and the financial markets as by the military state of play inside Iran. Iran is on the edge of economic collapse, with a currency worth little more than wallpaper. Europe has become much more dependent on liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf to run its economies, since phasing out purchases of natural gas from Russia. A sustained burst of inflation caused by higher energy prices would anger Trump’s base, many of whom already don’t like being dragged into another Middle East war. There are a lot of people who will want this war to be short, and that will impact how and when Trump and Tehran negotiate.

Fourth, we must not let this war to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iran distract us from the threats to democracy and the rule of law posed by Trump in America and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Trump wants to promote those ideals in Tehran, even as his ICE agents operated for two months with limited regard for legal restraints in my home state of Minnesota and as he floats ideas about restricting who can vote in our next election. If the war in Iran enables Netanyahu to win the Israeli elections planned for this year, it will be a major propellant to his efforts to annex the West Bank, cripple the Israeli Supreme Court and make Israel an apartheid state, which would be a major blow to American interests in the region beyond Iran.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/opinion/trump-iran-war-future.html