The New Yorker Radio Hour · WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

What Could Go Wrong, or Right, in a War with Iran

February 27, 2026·34 min·2 clips

A Tehran activist who survived prison compares Iran's wait for U.S. intervention to waiting for Godot.

The frame is stark. Remnick starts with protests in Iran, reports of killings, and a Pentagon buildup around the Gulf after Trump threatened intervention. This is not a distant policy puzzle. Some Iranians who oppose the regime, he says, have reached the painful point of hoping America might strike their own country. Their voices are protected. The program says conversations with people in Iran were altered or overdubbed because reprisal is a real risk. The moral pressure is easy to understand. If a government is killing thousands of demonstrators, doing nothing can sound like its own kind of choice. The strategy is where the conversation tightens. The guest weighs Iran against the American record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. None of the examples helps the case much. A full invasion, a partial intervention, and nonintervention all come across as failures in different forms. That history puts a ceiling on what force can promise. The guest argues that the United States cannot choose who governs Iran after an attack. Still, Iran is not treated as just another case. The conversation turns to Iranian society as secular, unusually open to America, and exhausted by a theocracy built around hostility to America and Israel. Nostalgia matters too. Many Iranians, including many born after the revolution, are described as longing for older stories of social freedom and national dignity. Remnick keeps pressing the hard part: people have a right to resist brutality, but war is never a clean tool of liberation.

As heard by us

A sober, human-scale look at Iran, intervention, and the dangerous hope that outside force might change a country.

The New Yorker Radio Hour takes a grave, unsettled question and keeps it close to the people living with it: what happens when Iranians facing state violence begin to imagine a U.S. strike as a possible way out.

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Why you'd press play

The episode where someone explains why Iranians are quietly rooting for airstrikes on their own country.

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