The long arc of Donald Trump’s obsession with Iran

Devastating images and videos have come out of Iran since December 28, when a wave of protests began sweeping the country: dozens of body bags outside a medical center and security forces firing into crowds. 

At the time, shopkeepers in Tehran’s central market closed their stores in a movement that grew to hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrating against the government over economic collapse and rising prices.

“People are demanding economic justice, the end of corruption, and the strengthening of civil liberties,” the Iranian scholar Behrooz Ghamari told me on Friday. “[But] the news is dire,” with thousands of protesters, by the Iranian government’s admission, killed.

The government’s reaction to the protests was initially curtailed in part by White House threats of violence and political instability after Iran’s conflict with Israel in June, which culminated in US strikes on Iranian nuclear energy facilities. But on the night of January 8, crowds reportedly took to the streets after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed Shah, called for support and insisted he would soon return to Iran to take power. The regime cut off internet and international phone calls and began the deadly crackdown on demonstrators.

The US has imposed restrictive sanctions on Iran since 1979, which Donald Trump escalated during his first term after abandoning the nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration. Iran has been a point of focus for Trump, who has threatened further strikes and urged protesters to “Make Iran Great Again.”

To try to understand how the government and people of Iran fit in this picture, I spoke with Ghamari, an Iranian historian who has studied and written about the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its consequences for three decades. Ghamari, a student activist during the revolution, was condemned to death months after his arrest in 1981 and remained in prison after developing cancer, which went untreated until his sentence was annulled in 1985. 

Ghamari’s latest book, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, released January 13. We spoke to discuss the book, current events, and the decades-long, ongoing conflict between the US and Iran. 

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

How are you feeling right now about the news coming out of Iran?

It’s a feeling first and foremost of sadness about loss of life. The news is dire. We don’t know exactly how many, but it seems like it’s in the thousands rather than hundreds. 

And a sense of anger at US interference. People are demanding economic justice, the end of corruption, and the strengthening of civil liberties. It makes it difficult to clearly understand what is happening on the ground and possible ways of supporting from the outside. Many Iranians who live abroad are watching how things unfold in trepidation, feeling that it’s very difficult to participate in a meaningful way that does not contribute to the advancement of American-Israeli interests and does not minimize the significance of people’s right to protest.

What are you seeing and hearing from people in Iran right now, given the internet blackout? 

In the past week or so, I haven’t heard anything.

But before that, when the protests started, the signs were encouraging because the government kept repeating that it is people’s right to protest and the president met with some of the bazaar merchants.

I talked to a couple of people at Tehran University, who said there were rallies there. They arrested a lot of students, but they held them for 24 hours and released them afterwards. And then things got out of hand and indiscriminate violence began. I don’t know exactly how things are at this moment. It seems like the government has taken over the streets and the rallies have stopped or at least been contained.

It’s very unfortunate because similar events happened in 1980 right after the Iranian Revolution, where there were mass demonstrations in Iran.

A particular group, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, started an armed resistance then and assassinated the president and the speaker of the parliament. They also previously put a bomb in the headquarters of the ruling party, killing more than 70 people. Once that type of violence begins, people retreat to their homes because there is no space for ordinary people to participate in a legitimate movement. The government reacted and started summary executions.

We saw some signs of that in the past week or so, but we don’t know exactly who the other side is. There are reports in the Financial Times that there are organized groups who are attacking security forces and government buildings.

Could you speak about your relationship with previous popular movements in Iran? Did these experiences shape how you see the current protests?

In 1953, the US intervened in Iranian politics directly for the first time by overthrowing a democratically elected prime minister who initiated the nationalization of oil in Iran, Prime Minister Mossadegh.

Since then, Iranian politics always had three dimensions: A group of people who protested the dictatorship of the Shah installed by the CIA in 1953, the government who responds to the protests, and American interests. It’s why the Iranian Revolution was both an anti-monarchical revolution and an anti-imperialist revolution.

I was involved in the revolutionary movement as a young student and was invested in the overthrow of the Shah’s regime.

The revolution had an ambiguous agenda because it was defined in negative terms of overthrowing a regime, but affirmatively, it wasn’t quite clear what was going to take its place. So there was a fierce power politics after the revolution in 1979 between different groups, each of which try to define what exactly would be established. I was part of a collection of Marxist and socialist groups who were against the establishment of an Islamic Republic. 

But in a couple of years, the government started to consolidate power, and all the opposition groups disappeared from the political scene. One group, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, as I mentioned earlier, started a campaign of armed struggle by assassinating government officials. During that time, thousands of people were arrested, including me.

Many people were sentenced to death like me, but my sentence was not carried out.

I try not to see what happened in Iran through my own personal experience because I think it’s important not to extend my own personal experiences into a political project. And that’s what my scholarship is about—trying to make sense of Iran post-revolution.

For me, one motivation to explore the history of protest movements in Iran was to figure out where people stand within it. Can you share something that’s made an impact on you, in terms of what struggle and resistance means for the Iranian people?

There is one essay in the recent book where I talk about the work of [Haleh Lajevardi], an Iranian sociologist [who] studies how people transformed after the revolution. Many became conscious of their historical and political circumstance—that they can demand particular change in society and expect to see those demands met. The revolution happened 46 years ago and we have two generations after the revolution, but these are the same people who think they can be the agents of realizing change.

If you look at different countries around the world, the inflation is there, poverty is there, social injustice is there, repression is there, but you don’t often see people rising up in the way people do in Iran. It seems like every four or five years, there is a massive uprising in Iran.

Some people see that as an example of how repressive the state is and how dire the economic situation is. But I see it the other way around. It’s a condition that Iranians inherited from the 1979 revolution. They’ve seen it once and they want to repeat it over and over again. 

How are US policies affecting the state and the people of Iran right now?

US policy in the past 40 years has been the same: to contain Iran and its regional influence.

The sanctions on Iran have created economic issues in terms of public access to essential goods. Iran has to go around the sanctions to sell its oil or to trade. That lack of transparency gives rise to these oligarchies in Iran that are running the economy. It’s a recipe for corruption.

The paradox is the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, “I’m going to liberate your people.” This rhetoric about helping people contributes to delegitimizing the Iranian people’s legitimate protests. It gives the Iranian government the excuse to claim conspiracy and say that protesters are acting on behalf of foreign interests and can react severely and violently.

If the US actually wanted to help, the only offer is to not intervene and allow these movements to unfold on their own terms.

Do you see anything in the most recent protests that differs from previous ones?

I don’t know. The Islamic Republic created a situation that ties the relief of the economic crisis and civil liberty reform to restoring relations with the US.

To me, that strategy is wrong because the US can drag this on forever. They did this in the negotiations last year—in the middle of which Israel attacked Iran. Restoring relations with the US comes with a price tag of total loss of sovereignty. 

The Iranian Revolution had three demands: sovereignty, liberty, and justice. Liberty and justice went out of the window very quickly after the revolution, so the only thing that remained and everybody tried to hold on to was sovereignty, where you are not a client state who guards American interests in the region. 

But Iran is the only country at this moment resisting that client role in the region. The US and Israel don’t want Iran to have nuclear technology. Iran negotiated and said they are willing to sacrifice the nuclear enrichment program. Then the US and Israel say, “You shouldn’t have a missile program.” 

It’s a domino effect. The situation in Venezuela is telling. They are not going to stop until they have free access to Iran’s resources and oil. They want to go back to the pre-revolutionary condition in Iran. So long as the social condition in Iran and restoring relations with the US are connected, I think we are going to stay in this situation.

In the introduction of your new book, you mention how geopolitical issues are integrated into issues of social justice and civil liberty. That idea reverbates throughout the book. How does it apply to the Iranian government and protests there today, as well as in other countries targeted by the West? 

Substantively, we don’t see anything different. The same acts happened in Vietnam, the same acts happened in Chile, but the powers that be tried to hide it. The difference today is it’s out in the open. The Iranian government actually showed body bags of people who were killed in the protests.

It reminds one of 19th-century colonialism, which was justified by ideas such as the white man’s burden. Destruction is the price of progress.

You see that in Gaza and Minneapolis. Everyone who wants to see change needs to face this politics of brutality.

I’m reading American reports about what’s happening in Iran, but are there certain sources that you trust as internal news to get a sense of how people in Iran feel?

It might be counterintuitive, but Iranian newspapers are such a good source of information—many are critical of the government. But they’re obviously all in Farsi.

There are good English sources, and some of those Iranian papers have English versions of their news, but all these sites remain inaccessible. I would go to places that have anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-repression political tendencies. But at this moment everyone is shut out.

But Iranians are also very social media savvy. There are quite a number of people who post on Twitter and Instagram. To follow sound news and analysis in the US, I would suggest Trita Parsi and Narges Bajoghli on X and Instagram.