Thomas L. Friedman
How to Think About
Trump’s War With Iran
March 2, 2026
Opinion
Columnist
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.
Life as an opinion
columnist would be easy if every war you had to take a stand on was the
American Civil War and every leader was Abraham Lincoln. But they are not, so
let’s dig a little deeper into these four thoughts on Iran.
While you’d never know
it if you listened to the campus left in recent years, the Islamic Republic of
Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979,
cultivating proxies to control four Arab states — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and
Yemen — and undermining liberal reformers in all four by promoting sectarian
divisions.
Just the weakening of
the Tehran regime, thanks to Israeli and American hammer blows over the past
two years, has led to the downfall of the Iranian-bolstered Assad regime in
Syria and enabled Lebanon to escape the vise grip of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah
militia, which in turn has given space for Lebanon’s most decent government in
decades — one led by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun. That
is why the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being
quietly or loudly celebrated across the region.
Also, the Iranian people are among the
most naturally pro-Western in the region. If that impulse is allowed to surface
and spread, and replace the divisive, radical Islamist poison propagated by the
Iranian regime, we have the possibility for a much more inclusive Middle East.
As the Lebanese Emirati
strategist Nadim Koteich put it to me: It is not for nothing that one of the
most popular chants of anti-regime protesters in Iran has been: “No Gaza, No
Lebanon. My life for Iran.” Many Iranians have been sickened to watch their resources
squandered on militias fighting Israel. It is also no accident, Koteich noted,
that Iran has just launched rockets against airports, hotels and ports of the
modernizing Arab Gulf states.
“They are attacking the
infrastructure of openness and integration and the Abraham Accords — it was the
old Middle East attacking the new Middle East,” Koteich added. Khamenei’s
death, hopefully, “is the death of Khamenei’s idea that the Middle East should
be defined by resistance and not inclusion and integration.”
Hopefully it will also
end the double game practiced by Khamenei and his predecessors like Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad — who served as Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013 and was also
killed in an Israeli-U.S. airstrike — that Iran has the right to openly shout
“Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and then claim that it also has the
right to be treated like Denmark, or to enrich uranium for “peaceful” purposes.
Trump and Netanyahu
finally called out that game.
As for the Iranian
people now coming together and toppling the regime, it is hard to see that
happening anytime soon without a clear leader and common agenda.
The Iranian analysts I speak to say
the more likely outcome is a kind of Islamic Republic 2.0, where leading regime
reformers — like Hassan Rouhani, who served as the seventh president of Iran
from 2013 to 2021, and has been an increasingly outspoken critic of Khamenei’s
hard line, or the former foreign minister and nuclear negotiator Javad Zarif —
press the surviving leadership to negotiate a deal with Trump. That deal could
be one that gives up Iran’s nuclear program and accepts limits on its proxy wars
and ballistic missiles — in other words, whatever Trump wants — in return for
an end to economic sanctions and regime survival.
Such an Islamic Republic
2.0 regime might then be able to oversee a transition to a real Iranian
democracy again. But Trump could also face accusations of throwing a life
preserver to a dying regime that recently killed at least 6,800
protesters, according to the
U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, and likely many more. In other
words, starting this war was relatively easy. Ending it will not be.
Such a deal might be
tempting to Trump, though, to avoid a prolonged war, a recession triggered by
soaring oil prices or the disintegration of Iran. Which is why I was not
surprised to hear Trump tell The Atlantic:
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them.”
As this column has noted
before, in the Middle East the opposite of autocracy is not necessarily
democracy. Often it is disorder. Because when Middle East dictatorships are
decapitated, one of two things happens. They either implode, like Libya did, or
they explode, like Syria did.
Persians are only around
60 percent of Iran’s population. The other 40 percent is a mosaic of
minorities, mainly Azeris, Kurds, Lurs, Arabs and Baloch. Each has links with
lands outside of Iran, especially Azeris with Azerbaijan and Kurds with
Kurdistan. Prolonged chaos in Tehran could lead any of them to split off and
for Iran to, in effect, explode.
Iran has witnessed the collapse of
governments or the fall of rulers throughout its history. Every time, “Iran
stayed intact,” said Koteich. “For the first time I am not sure it will stay
intact.”
If you want to see
$150-a-barrel oil, that kind of Iranian disintegration would take you there.
Iran’s oil exports of 1.6 million barrels a day, which go mostly to China,
would be taken completely off the global oil market. Some 20 percent of all
global oil trade moves through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran can
shut down. Insurance rates for oil shippers are already skyrocketing, and some
150 tankers in the Gulf are reportedly frozen in place.
Meanwhile, over in
Beijing, President Xi Jinping has to be wondering how his weapons systems would
stack up against the U.S.-supplied ones to Taiwan, having seen U.S.-made
fighter planes and smart missiles easily evade or destroy Iran’s
Russian-supplied antiaircraft systems and assassinate much of Iran’s national
security elite in their homes and offices. Maybe this is not the week to invade
Taiwan — or even next week.
It might be a good week,
though, for Beijing to look at all the Iranian people spontaneously dancing in
the streets to celebrate the death of Khamenei and ask itself if the People’s
Republic of China should have been propping up his regime with oil purchases
all these years. Maybe it should have been on the side of the Iranian people.
It is way too early to
predict how this war will affect two critical 2026 elections — one in Israel
and one in the United States.
For Trump it is simple. He does not
want to see the word “quagmire” in any headline with his name in it ahead of
the midterms in November. As for Netanyahu, I could imagine him calling for
early elections to use the downfall of the Iranian regime to keep himself in
power. But victory over Iran could also complicate his politics. Netanyahu has
notched short-term military defeats over Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and
Iran, but he has not translated a single one of them into long-term diplomatic
or political gains. To do so would require him to agree to negotiate again with
the Palestinians based on a framework of two states for two peoples.
The opportunity for
Israel could be enormous: If the Islamic Republic of Iran is either toppled or
defanged, I have little doubt that Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Qatar,
Kuwait and maybe even Iraq would feel much more comfortable normalizing relations
with Israel — on the condition that Netanyahu does not annex Gaza or the West
Bank, but agrees instead to a plan for separation and a two-state solution.
Would Netanyahu rise to that opportunity? Would Israeli voters punish him if he
doesn’t?
But I get ahead of
myself. I expect by Wednesday there will be at least three more points
competing in my head to make sense of it all, because this is the most plastic, unpredictable
moment in the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Everything —
and its opposite — is possible.
