Trump May Be Turning Iran Into Another North Korea

 

Opinion

Nicholas Kristof

Trump May Be Turning Iran Into Another North Korea

April 4, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET

 

Nicholas Kristof

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/opinion/trump-iran-war-power.html

 

The United States has a long history of bungling Iran.

 

On New Year’s Eve 1977, President Jimmy Carter hailed Iran as “an island of stability” and toasted the shah for the “love which your people give to you.” Just over a week later, mass protests began that eventually forced out the despised shah.

 

The American ambassador, William Sullivan, suggested in 1978 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the brutal architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, might play a “Gandhi-like position.” Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested in early 1979 that Khomeini would “be somewhat of a saint.”

 

Now, once again, we’ve botched our way into an Iran cul-de-sac, and in the process we appear to have inadvertently strengthened the most dangerous and extreme forces in that country. President Trump is right that we have significantly degraded Iran’s air force, navy and missile systems — but conversely Iran has gained leverage by controlling passage through the Strait of Hormuz. So one bizarre result of the war is that Iran is now earning almost twice as much per day in oil revenue as it was before the war, partly because of higher oil prices, according to The Economist.

 

It’s healthy that President Trump is talking about wrapping up his war in Iran: “We will be leaving very soon,” Trump said. The problem is that while President Trump could start the war, he can’t end it on his own; Iran has a vote on that.

 

Trump is now blustering less about seizing Kharg Island, but he still preserves options for reckless escalation and indulges in bombast about bombing Iran “back to the stone age.” Does Trump understand that (a) targeting civilian infrastructure is likely a war crime, and (b) Iran’s response to such attacks could be counterstrikes on oil and gas infrastructure and desalination plants around the region?

 

After having started the war that led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is now framing its reopening as a task for other nations. “We’re not going to have anything to do with it,” he said at one point. He also advised other countries: “Go get your own oil.”

 

If Trump leaves Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz, charging hefty tolls and barring the passage of ships linked to the United States or its military partners, he will have significantly set back the global economy, weakened the United States and strengthened Iran. And American ships will remain stuck, unable to leave.

 

Iran could earn $500 billion over about four years just in tolls charged to passing ships, Reuters estimated. If that sum were allocated for weaponry, Iran would have one of the five biggest military budgets in the world.

 

“This war, in general terms, I think it’s an operational success but a huge strategic failure,” said Danny Citrinowicz, formerly a longtime Iran analyst for Israel’s military intelligence agency.

 

Perhaps the most apt description of Trump’s policy toward Iran is an “incoherent maze” — a phrase Pete Hegseth applied in 2016 to Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Lost in his own labyrinth, Trump granted sanctions relief to Iran even as he bombed it, and careened from threatening war crimes unless Iran opened the strait to suggesting that the strait wasn’t our concern.

 

One fundamental misstep may have been a strategy of killing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a deeply unpopular octogenarian, along with a top security aide, Ali Larijani. Both men, while responsible for innumerable deaths, also counted within the Iranian system as relatively pragmatic and cautious; their replacements appear more aggressive.

 

“Definitely we got a change in the regime, like Trump said, but a very, very bad change in the regime,” Citrinowicz said. He described the killing of Khamenei as “a major mistake,” saying that if the supreme leader had died naturally, his hard-line son, Mojtaba, would have had little chance of succeeding him. Instead, the successor might have been someone like Hassan Khomeini or Hassan Rouhani, both perceived as somewhat more open to change.

 

As Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, told me: “We essentially removed all the people who were still a restraint on the system and replaced them with the most hawkish people.”

 

The new leadership is weighted toward the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, so we may see Iran evolving in an even more militaristic direction. That’s my fear: We’ve put Iran on a path to become another North Korea.

 

That would mean a state that is run less by clerics and more by generals, who seem even more repressive and determined to get nuclear weapons. If Trump walks away from this war without a peace deal — thus without nuclear inspections and limits on uranium enrichment — I worry that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons over the next five years.

 

American intelligence officials assessed last year that the previous supreme leader supported uranium enrichment but did not authorize taking the next step by making nuclear weapons. That’s apparently because he wanted to avoid the sanctions and isolation that North Korea had suffered.

 

But the new leadership may view that restraint as a historic mistake and prefer the North Korea model: Iran’s uranium enrichment led to sanctions and war anyway, without the deterrence and grudging respect that come with an actual nuclear armory. Nobody messes with North Korea.

 

Indeed, some of those same American intelligence officials also concluded last year that “Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader,” as The Times put it at the time. Trump and his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did both.

 

“Iran can never be trusted with nuclear weapons,” Trump said Wednesday, but he offered no plan to prevent that disastrous outcome, just as he offered no plan to reopen the strait (“It’ll just open up naturally,” he claimed). Any commando mission to try to recover enriched uranium from underneath rubble in Iran would be a reckless gamble with American lives.

 

Perhaps the biggest losers are ordinary Iranians. It was their pro-democracy protests in January, and the massacres that followed, that indirectly led to this crisis — and they now endure greater oppression in a bombed-out country as they mourn innocent war victims who include schoolgirls and volleyball players. In one sign of broadening repression, family members of a heroic human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, say she was arrested Wednesday and taken to an unknown location.

 

The least bad option to end this war is to try to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, using as a basis the constructive five-point peace plan that China and Pakistan have put forward. But Iran appears to believe it has the upper hand, and negotiations will be difficult.

 

As I watch this war, my mind goes to an old proverb: A fool may throw a stone in a well, but 100 wise men cannot remove it.