What’s more powerful than dropping bombs?

One of my most surprising interviews in Iran came two decades ago, on one of my first visits, when I dropped by the “den of spies” as the building that once housed the US embassy was known.

- Nicholas D Kristof

A monument to anti-Americanism, it was then plastered with posters denouncing the United States as the “Great Satan’, but I managed to chat privately with a uniformed Revolutionary Guard there.

He was a young man, curious about the United States, very amiable. His favourite movie turned out to be Titanic.

Iran’s government was then denouncing America for “disgustingly sick, promiscuous behaviour’, and I asked him if he shared that view. He brightened, and it became clear that he considered this one of America’s selling points.

“To hell with the mullahs,’ he confided. “If I could manage it, I'd go to America tomorrow.”

Reflecting on that conversation over the years, I've wondered how an Iranian regime that is so unpopular can have so much staying power. Everywhere I've gone in Iran, on each visit, I've found many people (while out of the hearing of the secret police) to be scathing about the government's corruption, hypocrisy and economic mismanagement. And though it has been a while since I've been allowed into the country, Iranians tell me that people are seething all the more today with frustration and anger at the oppression and misrule; the government's brutal and misogynistic suppression of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising appeared to compound the anger.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are therefore right in their aims: to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and, ideally, to nurture the emergence of a better government. The question is how to advance these goals.