As President Trump’s erratic negotiations with Iran drag on and oil prices continue to rise, the United States’ ostensible ethical justification for the war—regime change—has largely disappeared from mainstream coverage. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christopher de Bellaigue argues that the US and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has mostly succeeded in strengthening the Islamic Republic: 

In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.…

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants.

From 1996 until 2005 Bellaigue was a foreign correspondent for The Economist, first in Turkey and then in Iran. He has been an unofficial foreign correspondent for the Review since the spring of 1999, when he wrote a dispatch from Mumbai about the growing Hindu nationalist movement in India. Since then, he has reported dozens of articles for the magazine from India, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Brazil. His reporting and commentary have also appeared in, among other publications, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of eight books, including In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran (2004), The Islamic Enlightenment (2017), and the first two entries in a three-part history of Suleyman the Magnificent, The Lion House (2022) and The Golden Throne (2025).

I called Bellaigue this week to ask him about daily life in Iran and the future of the Persian Gulf.

---

Daniel Drake: What is your sense of how this war might be resolved? 

Christopher de Bellaigue: I think one should pull back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and consider the balance of forces in the longer term. The Iranian regime was, if not on the ropes, then in very serious trouble as recently as January, when, amid a terrible economic situation with an eviscerated middle class, a large proportion of the population—disgruntled, unhappy, insurrectionary, revolutionary—came out to protest on the streets. The regime’s reflexive exercise of force was a big message: we’re ready to kill thousands of our own citizens. In fact, we don’t really regard them as our own citizens but, essentially, enemy combatants in our midst. They killed thousands of Iranians and left tens of thousands more bereft, which in the end cost them even more credibility, in particular among Iranians who had otherwise been unsure where they stood on the question of regime change. There was a crisis of ever-straitening economic circumstances, terrible violence, and an ever-more unhappy population. Back in January it seemed there was only one way this was going to go: disaster for the regime and possibly for the populace. 

But then the war started, and it returned to the regime a lot of the legitimacy it had lost. The very government that had slaughtered its citizens in the streets was now, it seemed, heroically defending the country against the most powerful militaries in the world, and with very little in the way of advanced military hardware. And they were doing so with extraordinary bravery, dedication, and ingenuity. 

There have been two important moments in the war so far. The first was when Ayatollah Khamenei was killed. Many Iranians were pleased with that; they had wanted him to be taken out in part because they thought the regime, once decapitated, couldn’t survive. But then almost exactly at the same time, American bombs obliterated a girls’ school. Trump blustered and lied and displayed himself in the worst possible light, of course, but Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son who lives in the United States and who many Iranians had reluctantly come to regard as a possible leader, also played his hand extremely badly. Instead of condemning the murder of those schoolgirls, the youth of the country that he claims to represent, he was most exercised about the disappearance of a couple of American servicemen over Iranian territory, publicly praying for their safe recovery. 

So the moral argument that the United States and Israel were making for regime change is dubious at best. Iranians who had wanted regime change at any cost now came to see how horrible the cost could be. They don’t want insecurity, and they no longer want, for example, the police to be disbanded because, during wartime, some force needs to prevent looting and rioting and chaos. The other surprising outcome was how little Khamenei’s death mattered. I lived in Iran for years, and have been writing about it even longer, and I was sure that after Khamenei’s death, power would be up for grabs. But in fact, the regime has rallied, and whatever complexities there are in the decision-making system that is now in place—and we really don’t know much about it—it has been functioning. After forty-seven years of the Islamic Republic, there is enough harmony among the different arms of the government and military and there’s an effective enough command and control mechanism that the regime can continue. 

The Middle East is in a state of great flux. That sense of imperviousness and safety that the principalities and sheikhdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf enjoyed for many, many years—and that they employed to offer themselves as safe havens for investment—is now in doubt. From that perspective, Iran is in a strong position. Where Iran remains weak is that the economy is getting worse, so dissatisfaction will return. How that will manifest is difficult to say because it is now comprehensively a security state. There is zero tolerance for political disobedience.

I just spoke to someone in Iran today—I got a call from an Italian number, which is the convoluted way Iranians have to make international calls now, through VPNs and rerouting and such workarounds. Anyway, it was an elderly woman calling to express her condolences because my father recently died. This is a typically Iranian thing to do in a time of extraordinary stress: to think of other people, to think about their moment of loss. But then she said to me, Everything’s been worse since Mr. Khamenei died. And this was someone who’d been praying for the end of the Islamic Republic and for the demise of Khamanei. Now that he’s dead, people are wondering if he was in fact a restraining influence on the regime.

Have you been in touch with anybody else in Iran—friends, sources, family—from your many years there?

Some have started leaving Iran—not many of them can take flights, so they cross one of the country’s many land borders. But from those who have stayed, I get a strange sense of a people who have somehow continued to live their lives as best as they can. I suppose it’s a form of resistance to continue living your life. It is a humiliating position—for millions of people—to be stuck between Netanyahu and Trump on one side and the Islamic Republic on the other, between the devil and the deep blue sea. One of the mechanisms that Iranians seem to use to cope is to be sociable, to show solidarity with others. There is a strong cultural civil society that has been thriving for years within Iran, in the absence of all the retail opportunities and travel opportunities and all the other liberties that the regime stamps out. There are classes and get-togethers and unofficial groups in which people celebrate literature or music or spirituality. They go for walks in the hills and the mountains, get away from the city, away from the pollution, away from the war.

During the Iran–Iraq War, when Iran was subjected to stringent sanctions, they still managed to feed the population, keep the trains running, educate the populace in one way or another. The functions of the state didn’t entirely fail. The same seems to hold true today. It’s not an impressively functioning state by any means—it’s a totalitarian state with a great many cracks—but the schools open in the morning, or they tend to, and there are traffic cops on the corners. I know two filmmakers who have spent the war traveling around making films, and I asked them, How do you do that? Surely you were just arrested as soon as you were seen with a camera. They tell me that occasionally they have gotten into trouble and had to explain themselves to the police, but they largely managed to evade detection. For some people, that creative spirit has offered a way out of the spiral of despair. 

In my essay for the Review, I compare the current moment to the winter that followed the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, the result of an Anglo-American coup that seemed to extinguish all hopes of a liberal, democratic form of government. We are back in a deep winter in Iran, but what is so inspiring about the country is the ability of its citizens to continue to lead generous lives. 

For some years you were an Iran correspondent for The Economist. How does that experience—writing without a byline as a sort of anonymous commenter—compare to your other work as a foreign correspondent writing from India, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran? Were you subject to different anxieties related to the Iranian regime’s oversight of work under your name? 

Funnily enough, I have on occasion written anonymously for The New York Review, when I felt that either I or people close to me could be put in danger as a result of the reporting. (Those essays have now been de-anonymized.) It’s not something that I enjoy, but sometimes the circumstances warrant it. I stopped writing for The Economist many years ago, in part because you could never make a name for yourself there, and in part because you had to subsume yourself to a larger machine. I felt the creative spark of writing getting snuffed out. My association with The New York Review—which began in 1999 and which I think is probably the longest one I have had with any publication—has been valuable because, while any one writer’s contributions are part of a bigger organism that has its own, albeit evolving, way of doing things, I can also write in a more personal way. 

As to my safety or security as a foreign correspondent, I have two main concerns. The first is that I never want to write something that gets anyone, any source into trouble. And the second is that I want my employer to trust me. If I don’t want to reveal a source’s name, I want my employer to trust that I’m still reporting truthfully. As a journalist, I don’t want to go into the field, to sweat blood to get a story, and then face some editor sitting in comfort in New York City insisting that I provide proof that some conversation actually happened. That’s almost insulting. A trusting relationship with editors feeds into how you relate to sources and the way that you can use information that could be compromising. 

Iran is a really different place to report from because, in many instances, people there really do put their names to the most outlandish and extraordinary and revolutionary statements, and they somehow get away with it. And then five years later, they get hauled in and someone says, you said this five years ago, and now you’re going to get into serious trouble. The time lag between a supposed infraction and the actual punishment can be really long, or there can never be any punishment happen at all. 

When were you last in Iran? Do you hope to go back? 

I certainly have the hope of going back. I haven’t been to Iran for nigh on five years now, and I’m conscious of that in my writing: Despite the fact that I talk to people who were there recently or who live there, and that I can glean a great deal from social media and other forms of media, I think it’s important for readers to know that I haven’t been there for some time. That’s a huge caveat that you need to be aware of when you’re writing or commenting on political developments. I find it lamentably absent from a lot of what gets written about Iran, because it should be built into how people read that commentary. Even if a writer is highly intelligent and perceptive, if they haven’t been there for years, there’s a gap between what they say and the facts on the ground. 

We have such a need for old-fashioned foreign correspondents, someone who lives in country and sends reporting home. I love it when writers come from a long way away to, for example, Europe or Britain, and cast a fresh eye onto life here. It gives us perspective, and I don’t think there’s enough of that. The job of a foreign correspondent is increasingly hard to imagine for young writers. It’s financially hard; news organizations often rely on social media rather than reporting, and there’s the challenge of being an outsider, of wondering whether you are in any way competent to comment on what you see. 

There does seem to be this illusion that encountering the world through the Internet and social media is a sufficient substitution for actually going somewhere.

The last foreign reporting I did for the Review was from India, and I loved writing that piece. I was able to write critically about the Modi government in a way that journalists from India might have a harder time doing because of the potentially disastrous consequences. If as a result of my reporting I don’t get a visa the next time I want to write from India, so be it. At least I’ve published what I believe to be the unvarnished truth about what I saw.