The United States and Israel launched an attack against Iran on Feb. 28, resulting in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On this episode of “Deseret Voices,” Shadi Hamid, the author of “The Case for American Power,” tells McKay Coppins that America is good at toppling governments, but it’s not good at rebuilding.
Hamid is not opposed to using American power as a force for good, but he’s worried about what the plan is in the aftermath.
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
McKay Coppins: Shadi Hamid, thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
Shadi Hamid: Hi, McKay, thanks for having me.
MC: I think you know I’m a long-time reader and admirer of yours and we’ve crossed paths a few times. Something that I’ve always appreciated about you is that, you know, sometimes I agree with you, sometimes I disagree with you, but I feel like you always bring a degree of level-headedness and nuance to geopolitics, questions about democracy, certainly the Middle East. And so when bombs started to fall in Iran, I knew that we wanted to have some kind of conversation. You were the first person that I thought of — and part of it is because you have recently written a book that I think is really interesting and provocative and sort of conflicted in ways that we’ll talk about later, called “The Case for American Power.” I guess maybe just to set the table, we could talk a little about the Iranian regime and specifically Ayatollah Khamenei and who he was. He was, of course, killed in these military strikes. Could you just kind of tell us who Ayatollah Khamenei was, what this regime was known for in the region, and why America might have been tempted to try to topple this government?
SH: Yeah, sure. So Ayatollah Khamenei, he’s been in power since, well, he was in power since 1989, so he was one of the longest-serving Middle Eastern rulers and he ruled with an iron fist. He was brutal in his repression of his own people and that’s one of the reasons that you see some of these celebrations, that he developed a reputation for repression above all else. And someone who was simply unwilling to tolerate any dissent at home and he would crack down time and time again. There have been four major rounds of protest in recent years: 2017, 2019, 2022, and then the last couple months. And the last couple months are worth highlighting because this is the most brutal that we’ve seen the Iranian regime, with at least 7,000 killed in the protests, possibly much more than that. I mean, some intelligence estimates put it as high as tens of thousands killed in the most recent round of protests. So clearly, Iranians, or at least some Iranians, have been angry, have been willing to go to the street, they’ve been willing to lay their lives on the line for a different kind of future. And the Ayatollah’s response was one of brutality. I would say that he was — he’s really the one who was — who built up the Iranian state.
His predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, who many people know, that kind of grim face, the one who led the protests of 1979 which led to the revolution. He was a revolutionary, charismatic, he had a kind of mystique about him. His successor was much less charismatic, not particularly inspiring, but he’s someone who built up Iran as we know it today, and he’s also the one who expanded Iranian influence across the region. So when we think of Iran as being the leader of the axis of resistance, of being involved in all these proxy wars and civil wars, he’s the one who was responsible for that. And the fact that he just passed away, I think, raises a lot of questions about what Iran’s role in the region is going to be. And of course, all of this depends on who takes his place and who the new leadership of Iran is, and we just simply don’t know.
MC: Well, that, I think, is one of the key points to make here. Because you can kind of understand on a purely idealistic American perspective, maybe a naive American perspective, the footage over the last couple months of the protesters in Iran taking to the streets, really courageously, I think, right? I mean, it takes an enormous amount of courage to stand up to a brutal dictatorship in a country like Iran. You see these people in the street, and there is kind of an American impulse to, like, help them, right? Like, we’re a superpower, we have the military might, why not go over there and help them? And I think that you saw that instinct manifested in a lot of different ways including from President Trump, who, you know, I think posted on social media “Help is on the way” and said, you know, we’re going to come over there and help help topple this regime.
But of course, when you make decisions about war, you have to think through the consequences of your actions. It can’t just be: “This is a bad regime and the world would be better without them,” because who takes their place? Who takes the leader’s place? You know, will shape not just the future of this country and the region, but the whole world. And it will define whether these military strikes, this war, will be remembered as a good or bad. And so, let’s ask, let’s talk about that. Who is the likely, you know, successor? From the American perspective, what is the goal here? What does the Trump administration hope will happen after toppling this regime, in your view?
SH: Yeah. Well, one thing I’ll just note very quickly is that this is a religious theocracy. So the fact that you have protesters who seem more liberal and open and Westernized, I think that contributes to American sympathies. We see these people up against something that most of us as Americans disapprove of. So that’s one thing that’s playing a role here.
MC: Well, and attitudes toward Islam can’t help but shape some of that, right? Like American sort of skepticism toward Islam.
SH: Yeah, I mean, let’s be honest. There’s a lot — yeah, a lot of skepticism toward Islam. Islamophobia is rampant in this country, especially within the Republican Party. So anything that can be used as a cudgel against Islam, however you want to define that, I think is something the Republican Party is willing to do. In terms of what replaces this and how we should be thinking about this intervention, I’m a little bit torn. In some sense, if there was an ideal intervention that could save the Iranian people and give them a more free, democratic future, I’d be for it. Who wouldn’t want that, right? I think we instinctively want to see that, so many of us as Americans. But I think this is the worst possible administration to bring that about because they simply don’t have a plan. When Trump has been asked about who is going to replace the assassinated leaders, it’s almost as if the thought is occurring to him for the first time. He said, actually, in a quote that I thought was a fabrication at first but turned out it was true, he said that the strikes were so successful that some of the people that they had in mind to replace the Ayatollah were killed in those strikes. So Trump was like, “Well, we’re kind of stuck now, we killed too many people,” and it just shows that this is an administration that hasn’t really thought through clearly the day after. And one thing we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is that the day after matters just as much as the day. And America is really good at toppling regimes quickly. It can do that. What it’s not good at doing is rebuilding afterwards and coming up with a plan to stabilize.
And Iran in many ways is a more difficult beast than Iraq. It’s a more powerful country, it has a much larger population. And I think at some level we don’t really understand Iran. I think there’s a tendency to just — and I get it — to just always be highlighting the fact that there are all these young, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who want American values and want American ideals, but that’s not the full story. The regime still has a base of hardline supporters who are really committed to the Islamic Republic as it’s known. And they’re not going to go down easily. And you have a very complex bureaucracy and different layers of the regime, and we haven’t seen major defections thus far. That’s what we might have hoped for, that with this intervention, with this kind of spectacular show of force, that Iranians would be — that the regime would be crumbling. The regime has not crumbled so far.
So this is why I think ultimately I come down as being opposed to this intervention, even if I’m sympathetic to the idea of helping the Iranian people, is Trump can’t be trusted. And I think at some point you have to say, well, we don’t — there is no such thing as an ideal intervention, we have to assess the intervention based on the administration as it is. And that’s going to be Donald Trump with all of his foibles. And I think we’ve also seen from statements from Marco Rubio and others in the Republican Party that one of the main motivations of the strikes was we had a sense that Israel was forcing our hand, that Israel was going to launch strikes regardless. So we thought, well, we might as well get in on the game if it’s going to happen. And that’s actually the justification that’s being used by leading Republicans, and that makes me really nervous. That it’s a kind of reactive intervention, it’s not something we really wanted to do. There doesn’t seem to have been a real imminent threat against American interests. In some ways we’re following Israel’s lead and as someone who’s quite critical of Israel’s role in the region, I don’t think we should be dragged into a war because of Israel.
MC: Well, I want to talk about that for one second. Because we did see Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, make this argument. I think we saw Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, make this argument that basically Israel forced America’s hand. That’s not exactly how they put it, but that’s basically the substance of their explanation. You saw a pretty quick and severe backlash from elements of the Republican base to that idea. As you know, there’s a lot of tension within the kind of MAGA coalition over what “America First” means, whether it actually is in America’s interest to engage in these foreign interventions, which Donald Trump himself was very critical of when he ran for president all three times. But specifically the idea that Israel would be the one kind of dictating the terms of intervention there and that America would follow Israel’s lead is very controversial. It’s controversial on the right, it’s controversial on the left, certainly I’m sure it’s controversial in the region.
I just want to push back a little on it, though. Let me pressure test that idea. Because over the last several days we have seen Donald Trump and his allies and members of his administration offer a pretty wide range of explanations for why they engaged in this intervention. Which maybe does speak to your skepticism of Trump’s trustworthiness. It feels like there was not a clear rationale for the intervention that was kind of agreed to within the administration, and instead it feels a little like they are retroactively coming up with reasoning, right? And so, I will grant to you that senior members of this administration are making that case that Israel basically was going to move forward with or without us, so we decided we’d better join. Donald Trump subsequently, perhaps because he saw the political backlash to that idea, has disavowed that theory, said, if anything, we forced Israel’s hand. I don’t really know what’s going on there. And I think it should be said that in any reasonable understanding of the America-Israel alliance, America is the senior partner, right? But what would you say to that?
SH: But America doesn’t act as the senior partner. We are the superpower, you’re precisely right about that, but we let Israel push us around. I think that, look, we have to take any administration’s justification with a grain of salt and they’ve been all over the place on this. But there’s no doubt at the very least that Israel has been pressuring the U.S. to intervene for many months now. And there was a recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where Netanyahu was lobbying hard and Trump is very susceptible to the last person he’s talking to. And there are strong pro-Israel elements in the Trump administration who see Israel’s interests and America’s interests as intertwined. In that sense, they’re not really “America First.” I think that’s part of the problem is that when you claim to be “America First,” then you probably should be “America First.” If it seems like you’re susceptible to lobbying from a junior partner in the bilateral relationship, that’s not a good look. And I think it’s fair to say that Israel has been pushing this for a long time. It’s wanted to see the Iranian regime overthrown.
And so you have essentially what was supposed to be a pro-peace presidency. I mean, Trump was portraying himself, as you noted, McKay, as the pro-peace president, drawing a contrast between him and the Democratic Party. But what we’ve found out is that Trump actually likes military intervention, he likes to use the U.S. military. And I think he’s developed a little bit of a god complex after the Venezuela operation went so smoothly. I think he’s fallen in love with this idea that he can just do these interventions which topple anti-American regimes. But I think he’s bitten off more than he can chew when it comes to Iran. And Venezuela is one thing, Iran is a whole another can of worms.
MC: Yeah, it’s funny. I remember writing a piece for The Atlantic, like, just a few months into Donald Trump’s first term and I can’t remember even what the peg was. It was some strike that he had ordered, perhaps in Syria or somewhere, and the headline was “Donald Trump: Inevitable Hawk.” And I don’t want to take too much credit because a lot of people were making this point, but, like, it did seem clear to me that as much as he understood the political benefits of being an anti-war president, a pro-peace president, railing against military adventurism on America’s part, certainly after decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq that was an appealing idea. I think there was also something about his kind of persona, his approach to politics and the world, that was going to lead him toward more military interventions. At some point he was going to discover what it felt like as commander in chief to order missile strikes on weaker countries. And I think we’re seeing that happen now.
I actually talked right after the Venezuela operation with Richard Fontaine, who had been, you know, worked in the Bush administration, and he actually kind of predicted this. He said, you know, presidents when they see an operation that they’ve ordered go well — and you know, the capture of Maduro was praised for its logistical effectiveness and how quickly he was removed — they start to feel like, “Oh, I’m on a roll,” right? “And I want to — there are a bunch of other problems I could solve here.” And we see it with Iran.
We’re already seeing reporting now that he might be looking at Cuba next, you know. And I guess this gets at kind of my bigger question for you, because you are not a default skeptic of America using its power for to advance its ideals, right? Even to promote democracy and oppose authoritarianism and autocracy and theocracy. Like, there are people on the left, especially, who are universally opposed to that. You’re not one of them. So when you see what’s happening in Iran, is your opposition primarily coming from your belief that the administration just doesn’t have a good plan, or is it coming from a deeper kind of ideological resistance to what’s motivating this operation?
SH: Yeah. So for me it’s more about the lack of a plan for the day after and the fact that I don’t trust the Trump administration. I don’t trust anything Trump says or does and you can’t separate the message from the messenger. And so I think I’m not someone who’s ideologically opposed to the use of American power. I mean, I wrote a book as you noted that is titled “The Case for American Power.” I think that there is room for the U.S. military to advance, as you said, American ideals and American values. I believe in an America that supports democracy abroad, but I was — but I also at the same time I cut my political chops and became politicized during the anti-Iraq War protests. So I’m someone who from a very early age saw that this was a dangerous way of looking at the world, that there should be very specific conditions in which we intervene militarily and we should always have it as our last option, not our first option. And so in some ways, and I return to this word being “torn,” because I’m someone who can kind of see both sides of this and I kind of waver back and forth. I do have a vision for American power that could be better.
I think we’ll have to wait for a Democratic administration to actually see a better alternative to what Trump is offering. Also I should say, Trump is a problem for me. He gives American power a bad name and he makes it harder for me to make my arguments. He’s tainted the idea of American power. I think American power has to be matched with constraint. It has to be matched with morality. If we don’t have any kind of moral guidance or moral aspiration that guides what we do in the world, then we have power unconstrained. We have “might makes right.” And I think that if I had to describe the Trump administration’s approach I would say that it’s in love with power for power’s sake. I don’t believe in power for power’s sake. I believe in power for a higher purpose. I believe in American leadership that actually makes the world more peaceful and more democratic.
But oftentimes, we don’t use our power in that way. Take the Venezuela operation. We didn’t actually promote democracy there. We actually left the old regime intact because what we want more than anything else is a compliant regime that does America’s bidding. That’s what makes me uncomfortable. And I worry we’re going to make the same mistake in Iran where it’s not about making Iran more democratic, it’s about having an Iran that is weaker, that is more susceptible to American interests. You already see reports about how America is going to support — America and Israel are supporting resistance movements, ethnic separatist groups in Iran. That’s just going to divide the country and make it more likely that there’s a civil war between these different factions. But do we actually want to see a proud unified Iran that is more democratic? I suspect no, in part because Israel doesn’t want to see a proud and unified Iran. They’d rather see a weaker Iran.
MC: This is, I think, a good place to pivot to the bigger ideas in your book, because one of the points you make really well is that it is incredibly rare historically to have a global superpower that is a democracy. In fact, you could argue that America is the first and only democratic superpower in history, right? And the only superpower, dominant global power, that is organized around ideals, rather than just self-interest. You know, when you talk about uh this “might makes right” philosophy, that is actually kind of the default attitude of every superpower in history, and including today. The other, you know, great powers, China most notably, really does kind of act out of self-interest, and sort of open about it, right?
What was supposed to make America different, and what I think a lot of Americans still believe in, is a superpower that is motivated by its highest ideals, and even when it’s failing to live up to them, still has those aspirational ideals, right? And what it seems like bothers you about this era is that it’s not America wielding its power, it’s that it’s almost kind of dropped any sort of even rhetoric around spreading democracy and advancing human rights and flourishing, that even at its kind of most, you know, cynical moments in its history, that rhetoric was still there in the past, right?
SH: Yeah. So a couple points. I mean, one is that power is a fact of life. It’s inevitable. So someone has to wield it. The only question is who should wield it? Will it be America or will it be one of its competitors like China and Russia? And I think when you look at it that way in relative terms, it becomes very clear what the preference should be. Also, I think there’s something to be said for the fact that we as Americans should want our country to be dominant in world affairs. There’s a kind of pride that doesn’t even have to be justified — it’s our country. Of course we want it to play a role in the world. Why wouldn’t we?
But what you point to is really important: that we are one of the few nation-states in the world that is founded with an ideological mission. We have a distinct moral purpose. That is very rare. Most countries just want to promote their own narrow national security interests and that’s it — no ideals, no higher aspiration. And I think that when we lose sight of that, then we become like any other country. And now some people might say that that’s a good thing, that we should be like other countries; maybe Trump wants that. But that would undermine the raison d’être of the American project, which is that we aren’t a normal state.
And this might sound kind of naive and a little bit old school — I’m using the language of American Exceptionalism — but I don’t think we should hide away from our exceptionalist pedigree. I think it’s good to be exceptional. Obviously, it can also be bad if it’s turned in a kind of dark direction. But I think the other part of this, though, is pretense matters. So as you said, even if we’re failing to meet our aspirations, at least those aspirations are there. So it serves as a kind of North Star. It reminds us. We as Americans know, no matter what we do abroad, that there are these higher ideals that should guide us. So when people on the left tell me, “Well, Shadi, America doesn’t live up to its ideals,” I say, “Well, even the fact that you would frame it that way tells us something: you’re acknowledging that there’s a gap between reality and what we should aspire to.” And as long as we can see that gap, then we can at least try to close it. There’s something valuable there.
MC: No, I thought you write really well in your book about growing up going to, you know, Sunday school, basically. You were taught that hypocrisy was one of the greatest sins, right? And, you know, that the hypocrites are kind of the villains of history and in scripture. And you kind of push back against that idea in a provocative way, saying, “Well, you know, at least hypocrites, you know, there exists some kind of higher ideal that they’re not living up to.” Hypocrisy is born out of an existing moral architecture where there is this kind of higher ideal. And the hypocrite is not living up to it — they’re saying one thing and doing another — and that’s bad, but it’s probably not as bad as, you know, being like a moral sociopath who has no higher ideal and is acting purely out of their own self-interest all the time.
SH: Yeah. So yeah, in the book I have a whole chapter on hypocrisy and how hypocrisy can sometimes be a good thing. The way that I put it in the book is, I say hypocrisy is the cost of trying to be better than we actually are. There is that reminder of the higher aspiration. So I think the fact that, no one looks to China and says China is hypocritical, because no one expects more from China. China doesn’t actually claim to be a real democracy. It doesn’t claim to promote democracy abroad. It doesn’t claim to stand for anything beyond its own national interest. So it’s not a mistake, then, that when people are protesting for their freedom across the globe, they’re not looking to China and Russia to support them. They look to the U.S.
And I remember this during the Arab Spring when I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt when the old dictator Mubarak fell. People were hanging on Barack Obama’s every word because they had this sense that America was capable of doing the right thing. We didn’t always do the right thing — maybe even most of the time we didn’t — but because people knew about our ideals, they thought maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama in this speech will put pressure on our dictator to step down from power and that could be a good thing. And people were were waiting for that and hoping for that. So that’s really inspirational to me that in our best moments, that sense of higher aspiration is something that resonates with people in other parts of the world.
MC: Yeah, I encountered the same kind of idealism mixed with disappointment about America when I was reporting in Europe in 2024. I remember, like, you know, with the war in Ukraine, there were still all these people, especially in Eastern Europe and Poland, who have these memories of the U.S. kind of helping to end the Soviet Union and liberate so many people, and they grew up learning these kind of stories about America as a “city on a hill,” right? And even though they know that America’s never fully lived up to its ideals and never fully lived up to that image, they still kind of longed for it, right?
And I thought there was kind of a lot of pathos in those interviews, honestly, because I was like, you know, it made me sad that these current generations of Europeans — and I think it’s probably true around the world — who are coming of age in this era are starting to think of America as just another superpower, as opposed to a flawed democratic superpower that still wants to do the right thing or believes that it should do the right thing, right?
You write a lot in your book about this popular narrative that has taken root about America being a declining empire, right? That it is, domestically become decadent and divided, that in foreign affairs it is increasingly lashing out recklessly, that it’s acting kind of like Rome in the late stages of its empire. As you kind of note, this is actually a narrative that’s been around for a long time. It’s very popular in the last few years in the circles that you and I travel in, but really it’s kind of been around for decades. And you’re resistant to that narrative. Can you explain why?
SH: Yeah, declinism is a national pastime. It’s been there since the end of World War II, if not before, where we’re always thinking the worst is ahead. The worst is yet to come. We’re falling. It’s the rise and fall. And it makes sense that we would be attracted to this kind of rhetoric, it has an epic nature to it. It makes us feel like big things are happening. But if you look at, say, the 1960s and ’70s, the ’60s had a lot of political violence, the 1970s were the decade of American malaise. And I cite in the book the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith who says that the best way to publish a book in the 1970s was to title it “The Crisis of American Democracy.”
MC: I loved that because that’s absolutely true today too. You and I both write books, you know that publishers are gravitating toward those projects today, decades later.
SH: Exactly. And what I try to say in the book is that what makes us distinctive is that we’re a democracy. The fact we’re a democracy means that we can renew our purpose even if we seem like we’re falling. We can actually elect leaders who have a different vision for the country, so it’s never static. The problem with autocratic regimes is you have to depend on the “Dear Leader.” If the “Dear Leader” is doing good, then things are great, but if he loses his way, if he starts making mistakes, there’s no mechanism for self-correction. We have a mechanism for self-correction.
But what really worries me is that so many Americans are losing faith in the American project. The polling on this is incredible. In the early 2000s, even after the Iraq War started, around 85% of Democrats said they were either very or extremely proud to be American. That number in 2025 dropped to just 36%. It’s one of the most precipitous drops I’ve ever seen in recorded polling on any issue. So Democrats and progressives and liberals are not as excited about the American project and part of that has to do with Donald Trump. They’ve let Donald Trump basically sour them on the American idea and I want to push back against that.
And I’ve also been struck in recent years, I’m a child of immigrants, so I’ve seen what the alternative is. I’ve lived under authoritarian regimes. My parents grew up under an oppressive regime in Egypt and they came to America and were able to live a better life in part because of the freedoms that we have in this country. And that’s where I think children of immigrants can really actually offer a more optimistic message about America even more than people who have been here for hundreds of years. There’s something to be said for immigration more broadly for that reason.
But I would also say that when I tell my white liberal friends “I love America,” when I use that language, they’ll look at me as if I’m weird. “Shadi, how can you use the word love to describe your attachment to this country considering all the bad things America has done?” And it’s true, America has a terrible record in the Middle East. We’ve done a lot of bad things. But just because we’ve made mistakes in the past and done awful things and caused destruction doesn’t mean we’re doomed to repeat that for the rest of our history. The fact that we’re a democracy means that we can change for the better and I want to leave open that possibility in people’s minds.
MC: I think that’s a great place to stop with a prayer on both of our parts that in both America and Iran and around the world that we can ultimately reach those higher ideals. Shadi, thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.
SH: My pleasure, McKay. Thanks for having me.