Why what happens in Iran matters

I am hoping that by the time you read this, there will have been some form of multinational intervention in Iran—not necessarily bombs or invasions, but the unmistakable presence of outside powers saying, with one voice, that what is happening inside that country cannot be ignored.

Make no mistake. I do not doubt that a fundamentalist current exists in Iran that would do the world harm, but my experience working alongside Iranians who fled the revolution in the early 1980s was that they were educated, Western-minded and deeply proud of a Persian heritage stretching back thousands of years. They were not radicals or peasants. They were the sons, daughters and spouses of doctors, engineers and professors who only wanted the madness to stop so they could go home.

It matters that the theocracy that drove them out has now ruled for more than four decades. As this issue goes to press, estimates of those killed in the current crackdown range from 2,500 to 20,000. The numbers remain uncertain because the first tool of oppression is to suppress the flow of information.

It also matters that the United States and Iran did not become enemies by accident. After World War II, the Middle East was shaped less by ancient rivalries than by imperial mapmaking and Cold War fear. In 1953, when Iran’s elected prime minister moved to nationalize British oil interests, the CIA and MI6 removed him and restored a pliable shah. For a quarter century, that shah modernized Iran with one hand and crushed dissent with the other, planting the seeds of the 1979 revolution that replaced him with a religious state.

The hostage crisis that followed burned bitterness into both nations and that rupture still darkens every conversation today. Iran’s regime was born not just from faith but from grievance, mistrust, and the memory of foreign manipulation.

Iran’s neighbors still live with the aftermath of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are also forced to live with Iran’s lawlessness. They have reason to distrust any solution that puts the United States alone at the center, just as Americans have reason to fear being pulled into another open-ended ground war. Our best hope, therefore, is to place U.S. intelligence and technology behind a regional force aligned with American interests.

It matters that Americans understand that religion is morally powerful but politically dangerous when fused to the state. Our founders believed faith must be voluntary to be real, and that when government and divinity merge, both become corrupted. George Washington wrote that “The Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Jefferson was more blunt: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” That separation is not hostility to belief but the condition that allows multiple belief systems to coexist.

It matters that the Iranian government knows this, which is why it controls what its people can see and say. Newspapers are closed, journalists jailed and online platforms blocked. Earlier this year, the regime cut off the global internet to hide its violence from the world and its citizens from one another.

It matters, finally, that the Arab Spring showed both how powerful ordinary people can be and how brutally regimes respond when their grip begins to slip. That wave of uprisings did not deliver the freedom many hoped for, but it permanently changed what people in the region are willing to accept. Let us hope today’s leaders—here and abroad—have learned from Cairo and Damascus, from Tiananmen Square and from history itself.