David Remnick: When the United States instigated a regime change in Iran in 1953, it didn't do so with aircraft carriers. There was no shock and awe. It was a piece of covert business involving the CIA and British intelligence. Together, they engineered the overthrow of the elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because his government was pursuing a plan to nationalize Iran's oil industry.

There were also concerns about the influence of communists in Iran. Contemporary Iran is not Venezuela. Does Donald Trump want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term, or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this complex situation might play out, I called on one of the best sources I know on Iran, Karim Sadjadpour. Sadjadpour is a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications.

Let's begin our conversation about now with the most obvious resonance. In 2002, 2003, the American government looked on the leadership, Iraq, quite rightly, as horrific. We went to war with Iraq and it was a catastrophe. Right now, the United States under Donald Trump is amassing a gigantic military force around Iran. What do you make of American intentions here, and what is the wisdom of them?

Karim Sadjadpour: Well, I think part of the challenge we have, David, is that it's not clear in President Trump's head what his intentions are and what his endgame is. If we rewind, the reason we've gotten ourselves into this situation is that when these protests began in Iran in late December of last year, 2025, President Trump initially said to the Iranian regime, "If you kill protesters, there's going to be consequences. The United States is locked and loaded and ready to protect them."

He later went on to issue, by my account, at least nine more of those red lines warning Iran that if it kills protesters, the United States was going to have their back. He incited protesters to the streets. He said, "Go and seize your institutions." Iran drove a giant truck through Trump's red lines. By some accounts, the regime killed as many as 30,000 people over a 48-hour period. We don't know for a fact. It was very clear that the regime in Iran totally flaunted President Trump's red lines.

There's recent history on this one when President Obama issued a red line against the Assad regime and Damascus against using chemical weapons. I said use chemical weapons. That was one of the critiques, foreign policy critiques of Obama's presidency, that that red line wasn't enforced and what are the implications and messages for other adversaries if we don't enforce red lines? I think that's the context of how we got to where we are now.

David Remnick: Isn't the context also that the United States, I think it was Phil Gordon, a national security figure for Democrats, for Obama as well as for Kamala Harris. I think Phil Gordon once said, "We invaded Iraq fully and it was a disaster. We invaded Libya partly and it was a disaster. We kept out of Syria and it was a monumental disaster." Now, with Iran, the humanitarian question of the killing of thousands of demonstrators is without question. Question is what to do about it.

Karim Sadjadpour: The big question is, does the United States have the power to transform Iran's government? Do we have the ability--

David Remnick: Or the right.

Karim Sadjadpour: Or the right. Listen, I think that if the last two and a half decades of Middle East history had turned out differently, I think we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Now, I do believe that Iran is a very different place than Iraq and Afghanistan. I do think we have to be very honest in saying that the last two decades has proven that we don't have the ability to dictate our preferred outcome in Iran. We don't have the ability to dictate who comes to power the day after a military attack.

David Remnick: We're told all the time that Iran, unlike other countries in the region, is quite pro-American. What does that mean, and what does that imply for what's going on now?

Karim Sadjadpour: Well, I think, simply stated, after 47 years of living under a theocracy whose identity has been premised on death to America, it's the most secular society, I would argue, in the Middle East and the least anti-American, the most pro-American. I think most Iranians have also reached this conclusion that so long as the ethos of their government is death to America and death to Israel rather than long live Iran, this country will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation.

There's a lot of nostalgia. It's an interesting phenomenon, having nostalgia for a period which you never lived, because 3/4 of Iranians were born after the revolution. They do have this nostalgia for the stories they heard about life before the revolution, when people had social freedoms, when Iran had a dignified place in the world, when the Iranian passport could get you places, when the country wasn't an isolated pariah state.

It's not to say that people want to be a lackey of the United States, but I think there's a basic recognition that this nation, which in my view should be a G20 nation, it has the human capital for it, it has the natural resources for it. Number two, reserves of natural gas. Number three is the reserves of oil, has this one of the longest continuously inhabited civilizations in the world. It's punching way below its weight. Could be South Korea. It behaves like North Korea.

I think there's a recognition among Iranians that this radicalism, this anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism has just led the country into a ditch. If the country is ever to fulfill its potential, it needs more tolerant government. It needs a government that prioritizes national interests before ideology. I believe that it's a society which is capable of representative democracy, but authoritarian transitions are not usually popularity contests. They're not usually dictated by the vote of people. It's oftentimes, when that power vacuum comes to be, who can mobilize violence.

David Remnick: Well, I remember on the brink of the Iraq war, I forget who said it in the Bush circle, maybe it was Kenneth Adelman, that we would be greeted, American soldiers would be greeted by flowers and candy. To be sure, in the first couple of days, there were scenes of ecstasy when statues of Saddam Hussein were toppled in Baghdad. What is predictable in Iran. Let's say the combined military and intelligence forces that are arrayed around Iran succeed in that way, in that immediate way, if that's what the operation is, what's in place to fill that vacuum?

Karim Sadjadpour: It depends on what kind of operation we conduct if we choose to assassinate Iran's supreme leader. The people I talk to, both in Washington and in Israel, believe that if we do take military action, there's a better than 50% chance that we will try to target Iran's supreme leader. That has very different implications than if we simply go after their missile program and nuclear program and maybe Revolutionary Guard outposts.

It's my view that even within the regime there is a recognition that this status quo is not tenable. A friend of mine who's a political science professor in Tehran told me that, at the beginning of the revolution, the regime was composed of 80% ideologues and 20% charlatans. Now, it's the reverse. Only 20% are true believers in this system, and 80% are just going along for political expediency. Most people in that system recognize that it's not sustainable and they're waiting for the supreme leader to die.

Now, what happens if instead of dying a natural death or some kind of internal coup, he's taken out by American missiles? That, in my view, is an enormous risk and an enormous gamble that instead of this evolutionary process happening, it could further radicalize and mobilize the true believers in that system to actually try to preserve power among themselves. That is something that I would be concerned about. If Ayatollah Khamenei were 50 years old, perhaps I would think differently, but martyring an 86-year-old, I think, is fraught with some risk.

David Remnick: It seems to me one of the dynamics in Iran that maybe people aren't thinking about enough is that the real establishment in Iran is the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is not only a military and intelligence establishment, but it comprises much of the economic elite. Factories, ports, all kinds of enterprises. There's an upper crust of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that's quite rich and entrenched and they have the weapons. If, in fact, the Supreme Leader were killed, and even more in the intelligence and military elite were killed, you'd still have the Revolutionary Guard Corps there. They're not going to be wiped out. Isn't that what would come to power, and what would that portend?

Karim Sadjadpour: That is a very valid concern that what are you going to do with 150,000-plus Revolutionary Guardsmen and their affiliated militia members, the Basij militia, who are usually much more ideological in their worldview. That is a concern that I have if the goal turns out to be decapitation operation to try to topple the regime. These folks, as we saw in post-Saddam Iraq, they're armed and they're organized.

Now, I don't want to claim that they're monolithic. There are not 150,000 true believers. What I learned from observing the Iraq war is that 1% of society can make life hell for 99% of society if they're willing to go out and conduct suicide bombings and things like that, if they feel like they're not going to have any role in the country's tomorrow.

That, I think, is so critical for Iran's future, for any opposition movement or democratic movement to try to figure out a way to co-opt these folks under a very big tent. If you think about power in Iran as like a pyramid, shaped like a pyramid, at the top of that pyramid is Ayatollah Khamenei. His turban is at the top of that pyramid. All the powerful people below him are not wearing turbans. They're the military commanders.

In some ways, I think the future of Iran will be shaped in part by the battles between these men, because some of them are ideologues who want to continue with the culture of the revolution and death to America and what I call Vision 1979. There are others among them who are not democrats. I'm not arguing that they're democrats, but they recognize, they appreciate power, and they believe that in order to entrench their power and even enrich themselves, it behooves them to throw out Shiite nationalism and anti-imperialism and replace it with Iranian nationalism. Again, they're not democrats, but they're nationalists. I think that is going to be one of the determining fights for Iran's future.

David Remnick: It was very interesting to see the mixed nature of the protests this time. Tell me a little bit about the nature of the demonstrations this time and their extent and who they include.

Karim Sadjadpour: Yes. I think one thing that is important for people to understand about why the Islamic Republic is so despised by such a large percentage of its population is that it's not only politically authoritarian, but it's also economically and socially authoritarian. It tries to micromanage every aspect of people's lives. What you're wearing, what you drink, what you eat, what movies you watch, what music you listen to. For that reason, the grievances against this regime are so widespread.

In this particular instance, the trigger was economic. It was rapidly depreciating currency. It's remarkable when you compare Iran's currency now to 1979, it's depreciated more than 99% since the 1979 revolution. What we saw with these protests was the trigger was economic depreciating currency. Then very quickly, within a couple days, they quickly went to death to the Islamic Republic, and they spread throughout the country.

For me, the things that were very eye-opening were these slogans of, "Long live the Shah, and Death to the Islamic Republic," in these cities, which were conservative strongholds of the regime, in cities like Mashhad and Qom, in the town of Khomein, the birthplace of Ayatollah Khomeini, people were saying, "Javid Shah, long live the Shah."

David Remnick: Well, speaking of the Shah, his son, who's now a man of a certain age, has lived abroad obviously nearly all his life, but his name keeps coming up, not only in foreign affairs articles and things like this or in the newspapers, but in the chants of the demonstrators. What role does he play or not play in this entire drama?

Karim Sadjadpour: Reza Pahlavi has spent the last 47 years in exile, mostly in suburban Washington, DC and Potomac, Maryland. He has been very consistent in opposing the Islamic Republic and advocating democracy. It's only been in the last several years that people have begun looking to him for leadership and chanting his name. I do believe that he could win if there were to be a free and fair election in Iran. I think he could actually win an election inside Iran.

David Remnick: Really? Do you think he has intentions of coming back to Iran and playing that role?

Karim Sadjadpour: What he said is that he aspires to serve as a bridge between Iranians and democracy. He's always been consistent in saying, "My goal is not to be king. If people want to vote for a constitutional monarchy, I'm willing to play that role, but that is not my aspiration."

David Remnick: Isn't there some romanticization going on here about the Shah and the Shah's reign? I mean, the SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah, was not exactly a benevolent association. There was a lot of repression under the Shah. There was a lot of corruption as well. Do Iranians, young ones or old ones, they look back on this regime as Valhalla?

Karim Sadjadpour: That's the thing about nostalgia, David, is that you remember things with rose-tinted lenses, and especially for people who-- the vast majority of this society of 92 million people were born after the 1979 revolution. They don't have direct recollections of the bad things that were associated with the Shah's government, but they see the images of how life was. They hear the stories which their parents tell them, which, now, in hindsight, I think the vast majority of people who participated in the 1979 revolution think it was an own goal, it was a mistake, and their lives were much better. For that reason, I think a lot of people have looked to Reza Pahlavi as someone who represents where they want to go as a nation. The pessimistic view about him is that he's trying to be either an Ahmed Chalabi-type figure or--

David Remnick: Ahmed Chalabi being the figure in Iraq who the Bush administration put its chips on to kind of, it sounds almost absurd to even say it, rebuild democracy in Iraq and be installed by America.

Karim Sadjadpour: Indeed. There's that perception of him, and there's also the perception that he is trying to hijack a democratic movement for his own autocratic ends. Now, as someone who's known him for a couple decades, I actually think that exactly the opposite is probably not true, which is that I actually think that he himself does have democratic ends. What's happened inside Iran is that the regime is so brutal that the movement, the opposition against the regime has become very radicalized. I worry that the tendencies of this opposition movement are not entirely democratic.

David Remnick: It's anarchist.

Karim Sadjadpour: It's authoritarian, and it's out for retribution. That is something which is difficult for him to control.

David Remnick: I have to ask you, I know you're an analyst more than you are an advocate, to say the least. What do you hope the American government does, and why?

Karim Sadjadpour: I always quote Kissinger in which he said that a lot of the major decisions you have to make in government are 51-49. For me, this isn't a no-brainer either way. We haven't really talked about the potential risks. I mean, there are risks that Iran unleashes missiles against US Bases in the Persian Gulf, that they go after our allies in the Gulf, and that this requires the United States to then intervene more forcefully. Even though we didn't intend to, we've triggered a regional war which very few Americans support. Those are risks that we need to take very seriously.

At the same time, I go back to these red lines that the President drew that, on nine occasions, he said, "If you kill protesters, there's going to be consequences." I do think that impacted people's risk calculations. I guess, what I would advise the President is I think an operation which can degrade the Islamic Republic's malign capabilities, whether it's missile capacity, its repressive capacity, and it serves to not further unite the regime's security forces but divide the regime's security forces. If that operation is tenable, I think that's an operation which I would be prepared to-- and who am? I'm an analyst sitting in my home in Washington, DC, but I think that that is a defensible operation.

David Remnick: In other words, it's an operation that's an extension of what happened last June rather than a full-blown invasion or decapitation of the regime.

Karim Sadjadpour: Exactly. David Petraeus said this earlier today, I was listening to him, and it's a very important point, and that is that the Venezuela model seemed to go much more smoothly than anyone expected. Nicolás Maduro is sitting in a jail cell now in New York. The seeming success and facility of that Venezuela model has maybe distorted our understanding of how challenging this operation in Iran might be. This is why you're starting to see leaks internally from the Pentagon wanting to pump the brakes before we get ourselves into something which could be totally different than what we anticipate

David Remnick: Karim, thanks so much. I'm very grateful to you.

Karim Sadjadpour: Thank you, David. It's a pleasure.

David Remnick: Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[music]

Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.