This is Neil Irwin here today with Alon Goldenburg, who is the director of CNAS's Middle East Security Program. We're here to talk about the protests in Iran. Thanks, Alon. Great to be here.
So what is happening now? We've heard about these protests. What is going on? What are these protests about?
Well, it's not 100% clear. And we have to, I think, first and foremost, approach the whole situation with a sense of humility as people who are not actually physically on the ground. Before what we can tell, it looks like protests started a few days ago, not in Tehran, not sort of in the traditional liberal areas where you might expect protests, in other parts of the country, really initially potentially put together by hardliners against President Rouhani, who's more of a pragmatic figure. That was the initial plan it looked like, and then the protest got out of control and shifted very quickly from being anti-Ruhani and anti-reformist to being anti-regime overall with protests against the Supreme Leader and the overall Islamic Republic.
So here we are now six days in, and you have these pockets of protests across the country in traditional conservative strongholds, which is fascinating and really unprecedented. And are these big protests? Do we have a rough sense of size? I don't think I don't have a good sense of size now.
In 2009, when we had the green movement, the last major set of protests in Iran, we were talking hundreds of thousands. It doesn't look like the numbers are at that level, but the difference was those numbers were all in North Tehran and sort of the upper middle class areas where you might expect this type of thing. This seems to be reaching a much broader portion of the population or more working class, which lends its own interest in unique flavor to it. So then these are fundamentally different than the Green Revolution?
Yeah, I think they are, again, still too early to tell, but it's again, just by monitoring a lot of Iranians on Twitter, you see things like the fact that most people who are in the Green Revolution don't necessarily know people who have been out protesting in the streets, and that just gives you a bit of an indicator of the types of folks who are doing it. But it's unclear if this is going to catch on, if it's going to expand and start to hit off to this other, you know, if you have both this broader base of the population and you get the the Green Revolution types and you can see a broader protest movement and what the implications of that are, thus far the government has started to crack down, you've had a number of deaths, but you haven't had the full crackdown. The government is trying to modulate its response to not trigger a massive blowback, though right now there's no indicator that they're restraining themselves completely or that they, if they need be, you know, this regime has shown a willingness to crack down very harshly. Yeah, I remember the Bissish at the, you know, from 2009.
So this strikes me as an opportunity for the US somewhat. What should the US response be? Sure, well, there's a lot few things the US can do. First of all, I do think we need to recognize that we're not the main player in all this.
Iran is a huge society country, you know, roughly 80 million people. We're not going to be the ones who turn the tide one way or the other. There's a few things we can be doing, I think that are positive. The first is, I think it's good to be publicly out there supporting Iranian protesters, making clear that the world is watching, making clear that there will be consequences if there's a violent crack down in order to try to protect the protesters.
Now reality is there's only so much that can be done doing that, as I said, but there's also nothing wrong with doing that. I mean, some argue well, that just makes the protesters targets, allows the Iranian regime to claim that that this is all an American led conspiracy or Western conspiracy. I mean, my view, they're going to claim that no matter what anyway, we should both recognize that speaking up, we should speak up if it's the right thing to do and what we believe in. And President Trump has credited his credit as being out there on Twitter doing just that.
I believe that's also to be realistic about what the consequences and how much influence we have. There's other things we can do, try to make these statements together with European partners, try to signal to the Iranians more broadly the isolation they would face if they crack down violently. There's also American companies and Western companies operating in Iran, especially tech companies that sometimes fuel communication in these types of countries, and trying to pressure them to keep their platforms open, to not give in to governments pressure from the Iranian government. There's a lot of protesters communicating.
Those are the types of things I think we can be doing to send a positive signal. Great. And what are the implications then for the JCPOA? I mean, it seems like that's always on the razor's edge right now.
Is this going to have an effect on it? So in my view, what I would like to see is I believe we can both support the Iranian protesters and keep a nuclear agreement, which is in our national interest to keep the Iranian nuclear program constrained. I'm afraid that's not what's going to happen. I think that the protest could significantly increase the likelihood that the United States walks away from the nuclear agreement.
We have actually have a deadline in just 10 to 15 days where President Trump needs to sign a whole bunch of documents. Secretary of State needs to sign a whole bunch of documents, but the president needs to essentially wave a whole bunch of sanctions and make sure they're not implemented. This was part of the nuclear agreement requires the president every 120 days to wave US sanctions and keep the deal in place instead of re-imposing those sanctions. And there was always going to be an open question about whether the president decides to do that or not, even though folks like H.M.
and Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson all support, keeping the Iran deal alive and not walking away unilaterally. There's always been a question about the president would do. And in this already dicey context, now he's tweeting out every day about support for the Iranian people and opposition to the JCPOA, I can see it increasing the likelihood that he just says, no, I'm not doing this. How can I both wave the sanctions and tweet my support for the Iranian people?
And he might also convince himself that maybe the Iranian government is on the brink of collapse, and if only the sanctions were re-imposed and would cause his collapse, that's possible. It's not the most likely scenario in my view. I think more likely is the nuclear agreement just falls apart. And if anything in this environment, the question is how strongly does Iran react if the US walks away from the nuclear deal?
And if it's in an environment where Iran is facing a lot of domestic pressure and it can distract by taking it over the top response to the United States, it will. So I think this is a very dicey moment for the nuclear agreement. Nobody's really talking about that now, but they might be in about 10 days or so. Well, then there'll be a lot to talk about in 10 days.
Thanks so much, Alon, really appreciate it. Absolutely.