Bombing Iran Won’t Help the Protesters
Annelle Sheline on Trump’s embrace of chaos in the Middle East.

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Iran is facing upheavals at home and abroad. For more than two decades, the Islamic republic
has faced waves of protests from citizens demanding a more democratic society. Over the past
two weeks, these protests have erupted with a new ferocity and are being met with violent
repression. Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pushing the United States to renew bombing
Iran, a military objective now being given the guise of a humanitarian mission. To discuss the
turmoil in Iran and place it in the larger context of regional instability and competing visions of
the future of the Middle East, I spoke with Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at The Quincy
Institute who studies the region.
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Donald Trump speaks to the press upon returning to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)Iran is facing upheavals at home and abroad. For more than two decades, the Islamic Republic has faced waves of protests from citizens demanding a more democratic society. Over the past two weeks, these protests have erupted with a new ferocity and are being met with violent repression. Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pushing the United States to resume bombing Iran, a military objective now being given the guise of a humanitarian mission. To discuss the turmoil in Iran and place it in the larger context of regional instability and competing visions of the future of the Middle East, I spoke with Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at The Quincy Institute who studies the region.

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The conflict in the Middle East is currently in an intermittent holding action with an extended ceasefire but no diplomatic breakthrough. To assess where things are going, I sat down with the foreign policy analyst Anusar Farooqui, who runs an excellent substack called Policy Tensor and posts on Twitter here. We discussed the resiliency and growing stature of Iran, as well as the signs that unipolar US hegemony is coming to an end, to be replaced by a multipolar world.
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