The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.

Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.

That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.

Although Brewer and other experts I spoke with did not predict that Iran will go nuclear in the near term, they agreed that it is likelier than ever before. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons during the metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, it could become the first country to do so while at war since the United States in 1945. But Iran also has many ways to wield its nuclear program that stop short of getting a weapon, injecting further peril into an already volatile new nuclear age.

In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

[Read: What if Iran already has the bomb?]

The latest rhetoric in official circles could be a response to Iran’s shifting public discourse. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian nuclear decision making at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month seems to have piqued Iranian public interest in their country’s nuclear program. She’s noticed a greater number of Iranian commentators on Telegram discussing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.

“There is this realization that, yes, the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are repressive, but we live in this neighborhood and maybe we need to have” nuclear weapons, Tabaar told me before the latest strike.

That decision belongs to Khamenei, but the increased public interest that Tabaar has observed creates an opening for Iranian leaders to advance the country’s nuclear program. As Tabaar noted, such decisions are often informed by the views of elites and by the regime’s “fear of popular revolt.”

Still, neither Grajewski nor Tabaar anticipates that the regime will immediately seek a bomb. Iran could instead use its near-nuclear status to its advantage, including by escalating threats to go nuclear, announcing progress in uranium enrichment, rebuffing international oversight, or exiting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, Iran could try to reinforce the other legs of its security—by working with partners such as Russia and North Korea to upgrade its conventional military capabilities, and by bolstering proxy groups such as the Houthis in Yemen while seeking to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.

But strengthening these other legs could take years, and Israel appears poised to press its military advantage. That leaves a crucial question for Iran’s leaders: Is the country’s nuclear-threshold capability enough of a deterrent?

If they decide to cross the threshold and go nuclear, Iranian leaders know that their adversaries will likely detect their efforts and try to intervene, potentially undermining the very security Tehran may be seeking. The latest U.S. estimates indicate that Iran might require only a week or two to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But concealing such a move from IAEA inspectors without kicking them out of the country would be challenging. And Iran could need more than a year—or at least several months, by some estimates—to convert its uranium into a usable weapon.

Those months constitute “a pretty big window of vulnerability” in which “Israel or the United States could disrupt Iran’s work to build a nuclear weapon, including through military action,” Brewer explained. So he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the supreme leader will wake up one morning and declare, “Damn the torpedoes. All hands on deck. We’re going to weapons-grade today.”

A more plausible outcome, Brewer and Grajewski believe, is that Iran covertly resumes the research on weaponizing fissile material that it halted in 2003. The goal would be to “shorten the window of vulnerability” between amassing weapons-grade uranium, putting it into a nuclear device, and fashioning a deliverable weapon, Brewer told me. This weaponization work is more difficult (though not impossible) to spot than uranium enrichment, at least at declared facilities still monitored by the IAEA. International inspectors retain access to facilities containing fissile material, but Iran has reduced the frequency of inspections since 2018, when the U.S. exited the nuclear deal. The regime has also ended IAEA monitoring of other sites related to its nuclear program, raising the possibility that it has moved some centrifuges to undeclared facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. officials said this month that they could probably detect any decision to build nuclear weapons soon after Iranian leaders make it.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

American officials often speak about whether Iran’s leaders have “made the decision” to attain nuclear weapons, but Tabaar argued that Tehran’s calculations don’t work that way. Think of a dimmer, not a light switch: Iran is “making sure all components are there to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, gradually more and more.” Tabaar added, however, that there are “two very extreme scenarios” in which he could imagine Iranian leaders suddenly making the call to flip the nuclear switch. The first is a “window of opportunity” in which Iran’s enemies are distracted by, say, a major conflict elsewhere in the world. The second is “a window of threat” in which Iranian leaders fear that their adversaries are about to unleash a massive bombing campaign that could destroy the country or regime.

Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.

But, as Brewer has noted, history offers several examples of regional crises prompting states to “break out,” or race for a bomb. Shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reportedly rushed to assemble nuclear devices out of concerns about possible Egyptian strikes on its nuclear facilities. Amid tensions with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan is believed to have begun building nuclear weapons by 1990. That same year, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein ordered an impractical (and unsuccessful) effort to quickly build a nuclear weapon. “I can give you lots of really good reasons why breaking out would be a terrible decision by the supreme leader,” Brewer told me. “I can also give you lots of reasons why the crash nuclear-weapons program in Iraq was a terrible decision. But [the Iraqis] still made it.”

I asked my Atlantic Council colleague Danny Citrinowicz, who from 2013 to 2016 led the Israeli military’s analysis of Iranian strategy, whether Iran is more likely to become a nuclear-weapons state today than it was at any point in the many years that he’s monitored its nuclear program. He didn’t hesitate: “Definitely.”

Citrinowicz broke down that answer into relative probabilities. He pegged the chances of Iran “storming” to a bomb—by, for example, detonating a nuclear device for demonstration purposes—at 10 percent, the highest he’s ever assessed it. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, he would have said “close to zero.” He assigned a 30 percent probability to the scenario of Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade, though perhaps only a minimal amount to show off its capabilities.

To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.

[Read: The unraveling of Trump’s North Korea policy]

Still, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran. Russia and China, both parties to the 2o15 pact, are far more hostile to the United States today than they were then. Khamenei has expressed a general willingness to reengage in negotiations, but he has also instructed his government that the U.S. can’t be trusted. And Iran will be much less likely to enter into a comprehensive agreement again now that Washington has already pulled out of one and reimposed sanctions, delivering a shock to Iran’s economy. Getting the regime to agree to anything beyond limited concessions on its nuclear program appears implausible.

One way or another, though, Citrinowicz expects 2025 to be “decisive.” Without a new agreement, Iranian leaders could start procuring a bomb. Or Israel and the U.S. could take military action to stave them off. And either of those scenarios could trigger the other.

If Iran heads for the bomb, or leverages its threshold status for geopolitical gain, that could encourage other countries, including U.S. partners, to develop their own nuclear programs. “I absolutely do worry that we could live in a world in the future of not necessarily more nuclear-weapons states but more countries that have this capability to build nuclear weapons,” Brewer said.

In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.

Should Iran get nuclear weapons, that would likely embolden its regime at home and abroad, elevate the risk of nuclear terrorism, upend deterrence dynamics between Iran and Israel along with the United States, and spur either an extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Arab partners in the Middle East or a nuclear-arms race in the region—among a host of other potential consequences.

But such outcomes are hard to forecast, because so much of what we know about the interplay between nuclear weapons and international affairs is based on the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. We are now in a third nuclear age, in which nuclear and near-nuclear states come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes. Arms-control agreements have unraveled, diplomatic channels between adversaries have vanished, and establishing nuclear deterrence has never been more complicated.

After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.

There is something ironic about the fact that, of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is the one that now finds itself on the brink of war with Israel. Iran is not one of the 22 Arab states party to the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Its population, unlike those of many Arab countries, harbors little anti-Israel sentiment. During the past year, mass rallies in support of the Palestinians have taken place in cities all over the world: Baghdad, Sanaa, New York, and Madrid, to name only a few. Nothing like this has happened at scale in Tehran—when Iranians really protest en masse, they tend to do so against their own regime and its obsession with Israel.

Alas, wars are waged by governments, not peoples. And because the regime ruling Iran has long made hostility toward Israel central to its identity, Iran now faces a direct confrontation with the Jewish state, regardless of whether most Iranians want such a war. For the country’s opposition, the prospect has occasioned a divide—between those who fear that the next round of fighting will be a costly setback to their efforts and those who cautiously hope that it will shake something loose.

In the first camp are many Iranian dissidents, both inside and outside the country, who loudly protested Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in April and October. Now they are also opposed to an Israeli counterattack on Iran: All-out war between the two countries, these activists say, would be a disaster in both humanitarian and political terms, making life worse for ordinary Iranians without weakening the Islamic Republic.

Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights advocate imprisoned in Tehran, and Atena Daemi, an activist who recently fled Iran after years in prison, have issued statements decrying a potential war. Mohammad Habibi, the spokesperson for Iran’s teachers’ union, wrote on X that he opposed “any war”; he added that he considered Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. Sadegh Zibakalam, an outspoken political-science professor at the University of Tehran, has repeatedly criticized the Iranian regime’s declared goal of destroying Israel.

The position of this part of the Iranian opposition is friendly neither to Iranian aggression against Israel nor to Israeli strikes on Iran, on the grounds that such hostilities are most likely to preserve the power of the current regime. An Israeli attack on the Iranian oil industry would just collapse the country’s infrastructure and immiserate its people, Hossein Yazdi, a social-democratic activist and former political prisoner in Tehran, told me, and attacking the country’s nuclear sites could bring about a humanitarian disaster. Politically, Yazdi said, an Iran-Israel war would have terrible consequences. “Iranians are the least Islamist people in this region,” Yazdi says. “They are mostly secular and friendly to the West. But a war can make fanatics out of people and give a new lease on life to the Islamic Republic.”

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Many of the regime’s most vociferous opponents in exile think along similar lines. Hamed Esmaeilion, a 47-year-old novelist based in Toronto, has emerged as a major voice for Iran’s secular democratic opposition in recent years. His wife and 9-year-old daughter were among the passengers on PS752, the Ukrainian airliner downed by the Iranian regime under suspicious circumstances in January 2020. Esmaeilion became renowned for his advocacy on behalf of those victims’ families. He published a statement on October 5, a few days after Iran’s latest missile attacks on Israel, calling for opposition both to the Iranian regime and to the “fundamentalist government of Israel, which ignores international treaties and kills many civilians.”

By spelling this out, Esmaeilion was speaking to another group of Iranians who oppose their government: those who favor a war with Israel, or at least regard it as a potentially useful lever for toppling the regime. I encountered such sentiments among many Iranians I talked with—and sometimes in surprising quarters. A mid-level manager at a government ministry told me, “We are in limbo now. If Israel attacks, things can be done with the regime once and for all.” I spoke with some Iranians who said they just hoped that an Israeli attack would hurt the regime leaders and not ordinary people, and some who fantasized that a military confrontation with Israel would lead to a mass uprising that would finally end the regime.

Some in this camp, though not all, support the leadership aspirations of Reza Pahlavi, who was Iran’s crown prince before his father was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi and his supporters have drawn close to Donald Trump and other elements of the international right. In April 2023, the Iranian royal visited Israel and met with Netanyahu. Some of Pahlavi’s supporters work for hawkish Washington, D.C., outfits, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Pahlavi spoke at the National Conservatism conference, held in July in Washington. Last month, he was a keynote speaker at the Israeli American Council’s annual summit in D.C., alongside Trump.

Pahlavi has long vocally opposed military attacks on Iran. But in the days after Iran’s October 1 missile barrage against Israel, when an Israeli retaliation seemed imminent, Pahlavi published a video message that some took to be an implicit invitation. He called on the people of the region not to fear chaos if Iran’s regime should collapse. “We will not allow a power vacuum,” he promised, pledging that “patriotic Iranians” would replace the regime.

In the days that followed, Pahlavi clarified that he still opposed war. “We have seen diplomacy fail, and war is not a solution,” he told Fox News on October 16. The West must “invest in the Iranian people,” Pahlavi added, meaning that it should “abandon the policy of appeasement” and exert “maximum pressure on the regime” while also giving “maximum support” to the Iranian people to organize themselves.

Cameron Khansarinia is a well-known Pahlavi supporter and the vice president of a Washington-based Iranian American organization that backs the Iranian royal. I asked Khansarinia whether he supported an Israeli attack on Iran. He said that he disagreed with the “framing of the question.” He told me that he hoped “no innocent Iranians are injured in Israel’s inevitable retaliation,” and that he supported Pahlavi’s policy of “maximum pressure” alongside “maximum support” for Iranians. Khansarinia pointed to Israel’s killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in recent weeks as an effective means of putting pressure on the Iranian regime while supporting the people.

[Read: War is coming. Will our next president be ready?]

I even spoke with an Iranian socialist activist in Washington who has come to support both Pahlavi and Israel’s war (a very unusual stance within his corner of the opposition): Farhad Moradi, who arrived in the United States as a refugee a few years ago, told me that Israel should avoid attacking Iran’s nuclear sites or port infrastructure, because doing so wouldn’t help ordinary Iranians or weaken the regime politically. But he did support Israel hitting military sites or assassinating regime figures.

Esmaeilion, the novelist and spokesperson for the passengers killed on the Ukraine-bound flight, worries that those who embrace the possibility of war with Israel do so based on delusions about what both war and regime change really entail. Iranians need a “revolution” to bring down their regime, he said in his statement—not a foreign conflict. And doing battle with Israel could be terribly costly. “The current Israeli government has shown that it’s not really committed to international law,” he told me. “Many innocent people have died. If a broad war breaks out between Iran and Israel, many more innocents will die. The regime will also use people as human shields and cannon fodder.”

Esmaeilion is of the generation that can vividly remember the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Many of his novels are set during that conflict, which killed as many as half a million people. The talk of potential Israeli attacks on Iranian infrastructure recalls very specific traumas. “My father worked at the Kermanshah refinery when it was bombed on July 24, 1986,” he said. “He lost six of his colleagues there. Three days later, my uncle was killed when Iraq bombed the aluminum works in Arak. Many of my relatives died at the front in that war. What remained was pain and suffering for many years to follow. War can be terrible.”

Esmaeilion agrees with Hossein Yazdi, the activist in Tehran, that a war with Israel risks strengthening the regime. The opposition is fractious, and the Islamic Republic could use war as a pretext to clamp down on fragile networks that need shoring up: “We must organize our forces, bring about strikes and uprisings and finish this nightmare of a regime once and for all,” he told me. “A war will hurt this process.”

[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]

The divisions within the Iranian opposition are deep and often rancorous. Yazdi told me that he found Pahlavi’s intervention ominous. “It’s very scary for the prime minister of Israel to meet with a fugitive Iranian prince,” he told me. Many Iranians will even back the current regime if the alternative is an Israeli-backed restoration of the fallen monarchy, he said. Last year, Esmaeilion joined an anti-regime coalition that included Pahlavi and others, including the U.S.-based women’s-rights activist Masih Alinejad—but the effort collapsed in less than a month over disagreements about Iran’s future.

In the end, debates among Iranian dissidents over the desirability of an Israeli attack matter only so much. The Iranian opposition does not get to decide what Israel will do. It is watching events, not shaping them—and until and unless it gets organized, that will be true within Iran as well.

A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.

What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power. Iran refuses any public dealings with Israel, clamoring instead for the Jewish state’s destruction and surrounding it with Arab militias that seek to destroy it. Iranian officials deny the Holocaust and chant “Death to America” at events and ceremonies. And yet, at no point does Khamenei intend to get into a direct conflict with Israel or the United States—because he knows very well that such a confrontation could be fatal for his regime.

So what is the point of holding this contradictory posture? Khamenei is a true fanatic. He forged his beliefs as a revolutionary in the 1960s, when he read Sayyid Qutb and Mao Zedong. But he isn’t blind or stupid. Rather, he is patient and pragmatic. He appears to have accepted that his dream of destroying Israel won’t be realized in his lifetime, but he remains ideologically committed to it as a long-term goal for Islamists across generations. He has declared that Israel won’t exist in 2040—a year he will see only if he lives to be more than 100. But he seeks to advance the cause to the extent he can, building the strength of Israel’s enemies, and then handing off the task to his successors.

Khamenei knows that his extreme worldview is not popular among most Iranians, or even among much of the country’s ruling elite. And so he adjusts the institutional balance among the Islamic Republic’s various political factions, using the competition among them to gain breathing space when necessary, but never wavering from his objectives.

He makes international adjustments with similar strategic caution. He pursued the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers to alleviate the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran. But during the negotiations, Iran made clear that its support for regional militias, and its anti-Israeli and anti-American orientation, was nonnegotiable. Iran would talk only about its nuclear program, despite the concerns that Western negotiators expressed over Iran’s “regional behavior.” Then President Donald Trump tore up the deal in 2018 and brought a policy of maximum pressure to bear on the Islamic Republic. Khamenei delivered his response in a sermon in 2019: “There will be no war, and we won’t negotiate.” He was referring to the United States, but the phrase was an apt summary of his approach to Israel as well.

From the point of view of many Iranians, Khamenei’s policies have been disastrous, bringing international isolation, economic ruin, and political repression. But for his own purposes, before October 7, 2023, the leader might have seen his policy as a great success.

When Khamenei ascended to power in 1989, most of the region’s Arab states had long since given up the fight against Israel; Khamenei picked up the anti-Zionist mantle and made Iran the sole supplier for anti-Israeli militias across the region. He built a so-called Axis of Resistance, uniting armed groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to shoot at Israel, call for its destruction, and occasionally skirmish with U.S. forces in the region. All of this was a win for Islamist internationalism. In the service of that agenda, Khamenei has shown little compunction about sacrificing Iran’s potential as a country for its nearly 90 million inhabitants.

But the Khamenei Doctrine was always untenable, and the events of the past year have shown why. The strategy—build up anti-Israeli forces incrementally, without getting into a direct confrontation—required a certain adroitness. At times, Khamenei has had to restrain the Axis forces with calls for prudence. And the Axis is itself a problem—unwieldy, sometimes insubordinate, and unpopular at home and abroad.

[Read: Iran’s proxies are out of control]

Most of the Axis militias are Shiite (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the exceptions), and some have participated in the region’s sectarian civil wars, which claimed thousands of Sunni Muslim victims—Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians. For this reason, not even anti-Israeli populations in the region are unreservedly enthusiastic about the Axis. Within Iran, meanwhile, Khamenei has a hard time selling his animus against Israel to a populace that largely does not share it, and that holds him to account for problems closer to home. When Iranians rise up against their regime—as they did in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—they often use slogans that signal their displeasure with Iran’s support for the Axis. Probably the best-known is “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I give my life to Iran!”

The October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed at first looked like a gift to Khamenei. The conflict would foreclose the possibility of a Saudi rapprochement with Israel and disrupt what Israelis had taken to calling their “growing circle of peace” with Arab countries (Khamenei has long sought to prevent such normalization). But a year later, Khamenei’s doctrine has never looked weaker. Iran and its Axis claim to be the defenders of the Palestinian cause—but they have so far avoided directly intervening in a war that they themselves call “genocide.” At the beginning of the conflict, Iranian hard-liners expressed anger that Tehran was not joining the fight. “Children die under rubble while our missiles rot in their silos,” tweeted a well-known anchor on Iranian state television. Hezbollah, some regional analysts grumbled, was being held back by Iranians consumed by their own narrow interests.

In April, Israel attacked an Iranian consular building in Damascus, and Iran finally did what it had not done in its entire history: It fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Far from being deterred, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has since only upped the pressure on the Islamic Republic, killing Iranian and Axis commanders wherever it can and intensifying the war in Lebanon. It is pummeling Hezbollah with special intensity, killing dozens of its top commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and, most probably, his would-be successor, Hashem Safieddine. After much reticence, Khamenei launched another round of missile attacks on October 1. And Israel has vowed to retaliate.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Khamenei has thus brought his country to the brink of a war that he has long sought to simultaneously suggest and avoid. Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based security expert who supported the Iranian attacks in April and October, assured me that Iran was prepared for whatever force Israel might bring to bear. The country has readied itself with “all of its defense capabilities” on alert, he said; it has invested in domestic air defenses and acquired Russian-made S300 surface-to-air missile systems. Still, Najafi conceded that Iran’s size will make it difficult to defend. Other experts I spoke with took a bleaker view. “It is not clear how Tehran can climb out of this situation,” Mojtaba Dehghani, an Iranian expert with a close understanding of the regime elites, told me. “They are not ready for this war.”

Many in the Iranian opposition argue that Tehran should stop stoking hostilities with Israel and the United States and prioritize economic development instead. The stipulation is found in most opposition political platforms, including those of leftist groups, many of which support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Dehghani agrees with the demand and thinks that some in the regime leadership might concur. But he says that such a big “paradigm shift” will be difficult to pull off with Khamenei still in power. The leader is 85, and no one really knows who will succeed him, or whether that succession will bring in new outlooks and commitments; such uncertainty complicates planning for anything beyond the visible horizon.

In the meantime, Khamenei holds his nation hostage to a doctrine that courts the conflict it also seeks to avoid. Iran needs to make a historic shift if it is to avert a disastrous war that few Iranians want—and begin building a better future instead.

The obsession that would overtake Craig Unger’s life, get him labeled a member of the “tinfoil-hat brigade,” and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. Scanning The New York Times and drinking his coffee, he came upon an op-ed detailing a treasonous plot that had sabotaged Jimmy Carter’s reelection efforts a decade earlier—a plot that would become known, somewhat ironically, as the October surprise.

Gary Sick, a former Iran specialist on the National Security Council, was alleging that during the 1980 presidential campaign, while more than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran, Ronald Reagan’s team made a backroom arms deal with the new Islamic Republic to delay the hostages’ release until after the election. Carter, bedeviled by the international fiasco, would be denied the narrative he needed to save his sinking chances—an October surprise, that is—and Reagan could announce the Americans’ freedom just after he was sworn in (which he went on to do).

This story was “literally unimaginable,” Unger writes in his new book, Den of Spies—a crime of the highest order. He was hooked.

American hostages depart an airplane on their return from Iran. Their release was announced minutes after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. (Getty)

Speaking with me about the October surprise from a leather booth at a Greenwich Village tavern more than three decades later, Unger, now 75, lit up. Uncovering exactly how Republican operatives had improbably and secretly worked out an agreement with Ayatollah Khomeini would give him a chance to be Woodward and Bernstein, or Seymour Hersh—journalistic heroes whose crusading investigations he revered. “For anyone who had missed out on Watergate, the October Surprise seemed to offer another shot,” he writes in Den of Spies. But it would not be Unger’s Watergate. It would be his undoing. Within a year, the story was downgraded to a hoax and Unger was both out of a job at Newsweek and being sued for $10 million. He had become, he writes, “toxic.”

Now, though, on the strength of newer and more credible evidence, he is returning to the story. Den of Spies is not just a summation of his years of steady research into the plot, and not even just a play for redemption; it’s a referendum of sorts on a style of journalism that once ruled the day.

Unger is what anyone would call an old-school reporter. His instincts were formed during the Watergate era, when the public’s reflexive trust in government was high (somewhere near 70 percent before Richard Nixon took office, as opposed to about 20 percent today) and journalists began fashioning themselves as adversaries with the presumption that the worst abuses of power were happening behind closed doors. Their role was to break Americans’ credulity—and they did. When I met Unger in mid-September, a second apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life had just occurred. I asked him for his first thought. “Cui bono?” he said. “Who benefits from it?” He wasn’t saying it had been a false-flag operation. But he definitely started from the premise that it might have been.

[James Fallows: An unlucky president, and a lucky man]

This is how Unger thinks. His previous two books tried to cement the idea that Donald Trump is an asset of Vladimir Putin. Unger’s modus operandi is to point to many different dots and then wonder at how they might connect, even when he can’t connect them himself or when those dots are being served up by deeply unreliable sources, such as a former KGB agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt. One negative review of his book American Kompromat in The Guardian described it as “dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all ‘too good to check,’ in the parlance of old-time journalists.”

When it comes to the October surprise, Unger couldn’t give up on it, even after it rapidly moved from news to apparent fake news. A friend called the story his “white whale” (“I did not need to be reminded that things had ended badly for Captain Ahab,” Unger writes). Without any publication to support his continued pursuit of the story, he traveled to Paris and Tehran on his own to interview sources, made his way through thousands of pages of documents and sales receipts, combed through it all year after year. His book contains all of this evidence, published during another consequential October—and landing, as a sort of personal gift, on Carter’s 100th birthday.

But the world in which Unger is now laying out his proof is very different from the America of 1980, or even of 1991, when his fixation began. Trust in leaders has eroded so completely that no one is moved anymore by the revelations of secrets, lies, or treachery—if you want to hear about stolen elections, just tune in to any Trump rally. Definitive evidence will now have to compete with loopy conspiracy theories. This is unfortunate, because the once-debunked October surprise has shifted over the same decades into the realm of high plausibility (though nothing close to agreed-upon history). And Unger and a few other reporters of his generation are responsible. They think that what actually happened still matters.   

“I don’t like to be wrong,” Unger told me, glaring through tortoiseshell glasses. “And worse, I don’t like to be called wrong when I’m right.”

The alleged linchpin of the October surprise was William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager through most of 1980. Casey was the head of secret intelligence for Europe in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, and for the rest of his life maintained a broad network of contacts among the spies and dodgy arms dealers of the world. He was a furtive, mumbly guy; a Manichaean thinker; a Cold Warrior; and, as Unger put it to me, a “dazzlingly brilliant spy.” Casey also seemed to have few scruples about doing what was needed to win. He was accused of having obtained Carter’s debate briefing papers during the 1980 campaign. And once the election was over, Casey was made director of the CIA.

Then–CIA Director William Casey accompanies President Reagan after signing a bill prohibiting the exposure of CIA agents in 1982. (Bettman / Getty)

Much of Unger’s book focuses on Casey and the connections and motives that would place him at the center of such a plot, one that would involve breaking an embargo to illegally supply Iran with much-needed spare parts and weapons and using Israel as a conduit to do so (a shocking collaboration to consider today).

After Sick’s 1991 op-ed, every major news publication sought to follow up and investigate. Most of the reporting focused on whether Casey was present at meetings in Madrid at the end of July 1980, when the plan was supposedly hatched. Endless minutiae surrounded this question. Unger showed me a copy of an attendance chart from a conference in London around the end of July, at which Casey was a participant. For the two days he was supposedly in Madrid for the meetings, some of the check marks on the chart indicating his presence in London are in light pencil, not in pen, meaning that he was expected but possibly never showed; did he sneak off to Spain? “Anyone can see this, right?” Unger said, squinting at the chart.

The pieces of this puzzle were that tiny. Or they involved shady characters who said they were at the Madrid meetings or their follow-ups and could attest to the plotting—people such as the brothers Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi, Iranian businessmen who were acting, Unger alleges, as double agents, pretending to negotiate the hostage release with Carter while working with Casey to stall it for Reagan’s benefit.

Unger, who had been a freelance investigative reporter, was hired by Newsweek, shortly after Esquire published his first article on the October surprise, to join a team dedicated to tracking down the plot. Like Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate, Unger imagined the team would do a series of stories leading, eventually, all the way to the White House. One version of the theory even placed George H. W. Bush, who in 1991 was beginning a reelection campaign, in Paris for the final planning meetings with the Iranians.

Craig Unger (pictured, right) points to an allegedly incriminating chart in his new book, Den of Spies. (Benedict Evans for The Atlantic)

And as with Watergate and other conspiracy investigations of various credibility—whether the cigarette industry’s cover-ups or Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction—this one relied on a rogues’ gallery of sources. Unger made contact with Ari Ben-Menashe, an arms dealer who claimed to be an intelligence asset for the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Ben-Menashe gave Unger details about the deal and described Casey’s participation. Unger knew that Ben-Menashe was not exactly to be trusted—most Israeli intelligence officials dismissed him as a low-level translator—but Unger considered it worth the risk. “The truth is, people who know most about crimes are criminals,” he told me. “People who know most about espionage are spies. And what you want to do is hear them out and corroborate.” When he tried to do that, Unger said, he was “eviscerated.”

Newsweek was not interested in an incremental Watergate-like build. Instead of Unger’s scoops, they published an article about how Ben-Menashe was a liar who had helped invent the story of the October surprise. Other publications followed. Unger had no time and no outlet to make his case, and he looked like he’d been taken for a ride. These characterizations, he said, “carried the day in terms of creating a critical mass that overwhelmed any data we could surface.”

Unger was soon out at Newsweek. Then he and Esquire were sued for libel by Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser (the case was thrown out, and McFarlane lost his subsequent appeal). Two congressional investigations looking into the plot were launched in the early 1990s; the House produced a nearly 1,000-page report. Both inquiries concluded that no proof of a conspiracy existed. According to the chair of the House task force, the whole story was the product of sources who were “either wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”

There was no question that if you pursued this, you were finished,” Unger told me. He tried to rebuild his career, eventually becoming the editor of Boston magazine and then moving back into freelance journalism. He wasn’t exactly the Ahab of the October surprise; that dubious honor belongs to Robert Parry, another old-school type who modeled himself on I. F. Stone, the paragon of independent journalists. It was Parry who kept discovering more clues, including, in 2011, a White House memo that definitively put Casey in Madrid for the July 1980 meetings. Parry died in 2018, leaving behind all of his collected files, including 23 gigabytes of documents. Unger used this material to reopen his own investigation.

In the years since that first op-ed was published, a lot of other testimony and evidence had helped bolster the October-surprise theory, some of it from more reliable sources—notably Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the president of Iran in 1980, who insisted to anyone who would listen that he had been aware of the plot. Unger went to meet with Bani-Sadr at his home in Versailles, and traveled to Iran in 2014 to see if he could pick up any leads. Among the new material in the book, Unger reveals records he uncovered that appear to document shipments of military equipment from Israel to Iran around the time of the November 1980 election.

[David A. Graham: The Iranian humiliation Trump is trying to avenge]

And just last year, The New York Times published a bombshell report in which Ben Barnes, a prominent Texas politician, revealed a secret he had been keeping for nearly 43 years: In 1980, he traveled throughout the Middle East with John Connally, the former Texas governor, seemingly at the behest of Casey to ask Arab leaders to persuade Iran to delay the hostage release. Barnes said he wanted to add to the record while Carter was still alive. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told the Times.

After this story, The New Republic ran an essay co-authored by Sick, the former National Security Council official; Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic-policy adviser; and two prominent Carter biographers, Kai Bird and Jonathan Alter. Under the headline “It’s All but Settled,” they wrote that they now “believe that it’s time to move past conspiracy theories to hard historical conclusions about the so-called October Surprise.” Like Unger, they had little doubt that Casey “ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election.”

The odds that Unger will get a renewed hearing for the October surprise—vindicating himself and maybe Carter too—are low. The most recent bizarro episode in the current election might explain why. As anyone following along will recall, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, seeking to stoke fears about immigrants, helped spread a rumor that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ cats and dogs. This was not true—and he knew it. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he recently told CNN.

Unger wants to unmask politicians and reveal the truth. But we now live in a country where politicians seem to openly brag about lying, and enough people despise the media so much that they’re willing to believe those lies anyway. We have an epistemic problem that no Woodward or Bernstein could solve. Detailing a nearly half-century-old conspiracy theory, even with Unger’s mass of evidence—the receipts, a videotaped interview with Jamshid Hashemi, those little pencil check marks on an old attendance chart—would read like old news to one half of the country and partisan revisionism to the other half.

Benedict Evans for The Atlantic

Reporters used to be able to change the “national conversation,” Unger told me. That’s what he was hoping to do, impossible as it seems even to him. Once upon a time, the large newspapers and television networks had, Unger said, “enough authority that a big story would really just land big and change the conversation, and that the organs of government would suddenly click into action to respond with congressional investigations. It is so hard to get that done.”

I wondered, though, in my discussions with Unger, whether reporters like him bore some of the responsibility—whether the kind of skepticism and mistrust that marked his generation of journalists had helped create our post-truth reality. There were moments when he slipped from crusading truth teller to something closer to a conspiracy theorist willing to believe the most outlandish speculations. In the book, for example, with very little proof, he entertains the idea that rogue spies looking to undermine Carter sabotaged the helicopters used in a failed hostage-rescue mission in April 1980, which ended with eight soldiers dying in a crash. I asked Unger whether he really believed this. “Well, I think it is a possibility,” he told me.

It was easier to sympathize with Unger—to see the genuine idealism behind the swagger—when he explained why he couldn’t ever let go of the theory that had so hobbled his career.

He grew up in Dallas; his father was an endocrinologist and his mother owned the biggest independent bookstore in the city. Unger told me about a visit he took to the Dachau concentration camp when he was 14, in 1963. This was instead of a bar mitzvah. While there, he saw Germans atoning for their national sins, not even 20 years after the end of the war, and it stayed with him, that honest reckoning with the past. He told me it made him think of his city’s own Lee Park, named after the Confederate general and defender of slavery, and how shameful it was that so long after the end of the Civil War, Lee’s name was unapologetically honored.

“When my colleagues and I first took on the October Surprise more than thirty years ago, we became actors in a case study of America’s denial of its dark history, its refusal to accept the ugly truth,” Unger writes in his book. After Unger told me the story about his childhood and Lee Park, I looked up the green space and saw that it had been renamed Turtle Creek Park in 2019. Ugly truths, even in America, do occasionally get acknowledged—but it can take longer than one journalist’s lifetime for that to happen.