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How Strong Are Iran’s Strongmen? A Conversation With Stephen Kotkin
When the United States and Israel launched a joint war on Iran two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up and rid themselves of their tyrannical rulers. He seemed buoyed by his success in swiftly removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. But the war in Iran has not progressed as smoothly as Trump might have liked. The authoritarian regime that runs the Islamic Republic remains firmly in place.
The historian Stephen Kotkin, who is the Kleinheinz senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has spent decades thinking about how these regimes…
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