Of all the cataclysmic events I have ever experienced, October 7 affected me like no other. The videos of hateful protests and bloody or charred bodies unearthed memories I’d long kept buried. In one, I am a girl standing in the doorway of our home in Tehran, staring at graffiti that appeared overnight on a neighbor’s wall. Punctuated by a Swastika—something I had never seen before—were three words, scrawled in black paint on red brick: Kikes get lost.

This was in January 1979, just a few weeks before Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and nothing was as it had been. The rest of the world saw the revolution embodied in the figure of the ascetic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seated cross-legged on a cot in a spartan room in the suburbs of Paris. But for those of us in Iran, its signs were uncomfortably close, ubiquitous, and inescapable. “Allahu akbar!” was its soundtrack—an all-purpose call that was at times a plea, at other times a call to arms. The streets were ablaze with bonfires that winter, tires and much else set aflame. Whatever harm the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, had allegedly inflicted on the nation before, at least in those few weeks of a nationwide oil shortage, those countries’ burning flags kept the protesters warm.

Finally came the revolution’s most indelible sign of all: the Islamic dress code forced on women, who could wear only black, gray, brown, or navy blue. The mandatory hijab drained a once-colorful capital of its vibrant hues, casting half of the population into shadow. Women demonstrated in opposition to the order, but they had few allies. Even the secular intelligentsia banded with the ayatollah, dismissing the protests and the blatant anti-Semitic and anti-feminist character of the new leadership as a few minor quirks upon which the great revolution could not afford to dwell.

What brought these memories back on October 7 was a single video on social media. In it, a Hamas terrorist dragged a battered Israeli woman, the 19-year-old peace activist Naama Levi, by the hair out of a pickup truck, chanting “Allahu akbar!”—that ominous, familiar call, as yet another woman suffered at the hands of men who bore an uncanny resemblance to their Iranian precursors. Levi’s blood-soaked pants suggested that she had been assaulted—a tragedy that would bond her to women prisoners in Iran, where, in the aftermath of the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, many women who had been arrested for violating the Islamic morality code were raped by their captors.

[Read: How to be a man in Iran]

Experts have pontificated over whether Iran had a hand in planning the October 7 attack. But perhaps more significant is the common ideology that Tehran’s rulers and Hamas share, composed of equal parts misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamism. Death, to them, is an aspiration rather than a destiny to forestall. And so their subjects become expendable pawns whose demise is never a loss. Sadegh Khalkhali, the Islamic Republic’s Sharia judge from the early revolutionary era, was once asked how he had so swiftly issued orders to execute so many political prisoners. He breezily replied that either the prisoners were guilty, in which case they’d received their due punishment, or they were innocent, in which case he had simply hastened their ascent to paradise.

Both Hamas and the Iranian regime are at war with the West and, as such, with all the laws devised in the West, including the laws of war. The most brutal of the Islamic Republic’s anti-riot thugs do not come to the scene of demonstrations dressed in the uniforms of the police or the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They come as what the protesters call “civilian dressers,” just as Hamas terrorists have done throughout this war to blend in with the public. Both use ambulances to penetrate the ranks of their opponents, to snatch prisoners, or to get away from hostile crowds. They share not a secret manual but a playbook of the lawless, in which nothing is forbidden if it advances the cause of the “righteous,” among whom Tehran and Hamas count themselves.

And yet, what Iran’s regime has done for more than four decades to create a new crop of zealots in its own image has backfired. Iran’s younger generations show a moral clarity that other nations in the region, and even the throngs on the streets of London and New York, do not demonstrate with regard to Hamas’s malevolent program. If Iranians have always been distinct from their predominantly Arab neighbors by virtue of race, religion, and language, now they are distinct in a new way: They are the only people in the region among whom such a large number reject the call for Israel’s destruction. Even a host on one of Iran’s official television broadcasts had to make this admission last week: “The people of Iran have been the greatest supporters of the Zionist regime in the world and by a large margin.”

Diasporic Iranians have been marching alongside supporters of Israel throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada, and a few have been physically attacked while doing so. In Iran, students refuse to stomp on the flags of the United States and Israel that have been painted on the ground at the entrances of their schools. When a Palestinian flag was raised at a soccer stadium in Tehran last month, the spectators began chanting profanities to express their indignation.

Iranians began distancing themselves from the regime’s propaganda nearly two decades ago, when the revolution’s fever had cooled and its promises remained undelivered. The distance only grew as the regime invested more and more in proxy groups throughout the region. The crowds at the annual Qods Day rallies began to thin, and protesters at various demonstrations chanted: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon. I sacrifice my life for Iran.”

The significance of this shift in attitude among Iranians transcends Iran. If Ukrainians’ fight against Russia is about the future of democracy in Europe, then the struggle of Iranians against their regime is about the future of the Middle East without radicalism. For 44 years, Iran has been the region’s political laboratory for Islamist governance. The country gave theocracy a try, and it failed: A country with immense promise only 50 years ago is now a menace to people within its borders and beyond them. The narrative that the regime has peddled about itself—a religious utopia fighting for the well-being of downtrodden Muslims—has no currency among its own subjects. What Iranians have learned the hard way is what others around the world who dream of living under an Islamic state have yet to discover.

[Read: Forget the bomb and help Iranians fight their regime]

One of the most poignant moments of Iran’s 2022 protests came when a Palestinian woman named Rasha, moved by the uprising, recorded a statement saying that the demonstrations had made her see through the lies she had been told since childhood about Iran’s regime: “I now see that a government that kills its own people, oppresses its own people, cannot help liberate my people, cannot help liberate me.”

In 1978, Iranians euphorically followed a Shiite cleric in pursuit of what they thought was a noble cause and staged a popular resistance that was to deliver greater freedom and democracy to them. But he quickly led them into war, chaos, global isolation, and economic ruin. This is the dark legacy of Hamas’s chief patron. Those who have embraced Hamas have yet to know this truth—that their heroes are not liberators but brutal tyrants detested by their people.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I noted that presidential candidates in the 2024 election will discuss U.S. foreign policy toward China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, Mexico, and beyond, and asked, “What foreign-policy matters are most important to you and why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Caroline focuses on the movement of people:

When I started thinking about this question, my immediate response was: the wars. Gaza and Ukraine. But no. That’s not the biggest foreign-policy issue we face today. A far bigger issue is the worldwide migration of people, from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, caused as much by climate change as by political threats. As climate change makes the southern half of Earth less habitable, freedom and food and water all get unbearably scarce, forcing the mass movements we’re seeing today. How governments in the north respond to this crisis, or fail to respond, is crucial to world peace. Sadly, because of the nasty political situation in Washington, the U.S. government has no coherent policy to deal with this. It’s an international issue and urgently needs attention.

V.F. flagged the war in Ukraine:

This situation has profound implications not only for Ukraine itself but also for regional stability and international security. First and foremost, the conflict jeopardizes the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty, which are fundamental tenets of the international order.

Moreover, the war in Ukraine has a significant impact on the geopolitical landscape in Europe. The annexation of Crimea by Russia and the strife in eastern regions of Ukraine have resulted in extensive devastation and human losses. Such instability may provoke alarming reactions from other nations and lead to further strained relations.

Additionally, it is crucial to consider Ukraine’s geostrategic position as a key player in contemporary geopolitical and economic processes. This country serves as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe, and the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine could shape future relations between Russia and the West. Ensuring peace and stability in Ukraine becomes a vital component of foreign-policy strategy to guarantee security and promote democratic development in the region. In general, it is essential for candidates in the 2024 elections to address the issue of resolving the conflict in Ukraine, examining it within the context of international relations and democratic development, and implementing measures to secure peace and stability in the region.

For Jaleelah, “it’s Palestine”:

Of course it’s Palestine. My family in the West Bank are actively under threat. The IDF arbitrarily invades their homes and degrades them at checkpoints. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt and toothless organization that allows Israeli soldiers to throw their children in prison. What American would stand by if their family was in that position? What American would vote for a government that dropped even a single bomb on one of their cities in order to root out cartel members suspected to be hiding there?

A sizable [number] of Arabs and Muslims oppose Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Lots of non-Arab and non-Muslim Americans agree. But political parties refuse to take even mild, wildly popular stances that criticize Israel. This is baffling to me. The Democratic Party ignored its working-class base for years, and it culminated in a loss to a clown in 2016. Now it believes that it can ignore its base’s calls for peace without facing repercussions simply because the Republicans are also bad. But the hundreds of thousands of Arab voters in Michigan and Ohio do not care that Donald Trump moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem; they care that Joe Biden is sanctioning the murders of thousands of innocent people. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would probably rather drop out of the race than adjust their stances, but Trump is unpredictable. All it would take is a single social-media post calling for a ceasefire—or even a post that says “I condemn Israel’s killings of civilians”—for him to capture massive support in very important areas!

For Nati, it’s Israel:

For the average American, U.S. foreign policy is a problem that rarely affects their lives. As an expat Israeli who belongs to the Jewish people, I have great fear for my people, wherever they are. The way candidates plan to protect us will be a deciding factor for me. Cracks in Biden’s support for Israel are forming and expanding. These are not mainly due to sudden changes in Israel’s response, but to mounting pressure from young “progressives” in American universities and on the streets throughout Europe. Perhaps more important than the candidates’ 10-minute pitch on their foreign-policy focus, I want to know how they are going to sell it to the American people.

Biden’s remarks after October 7 are all but an echo now. Obama described the “[extraordinarily] complex situation” in the region well, but stopped short of addressing protesters directly, in a way that could have shifted the rhetoric significantly worldwide. Nikki Haley’s hawkish arguments are only sold to those who already bought into them to begin with (me included).

Dale wants candidates to debate an international policy aimed at eradicating drug cartels. He writes:

For generations, American youth who experiment with drugs have had to plug into a criminal subculture run by violent predatory gangs to get their drugs. As a licensed marriage and family therapist with a two-year certificate in alcohol and drug counseling, I have had many years to observe how corrosive this contact can be. The predatory attitudes of dealers and suppliers have, I believe, been normalized over the years in many individuals who use street drugs, and my guess is that they have spread into youth culture in general.

American administrations from Reagan on have continued doubling down on the War on Drugs while refusing to provide equal amounts of money to support treatment for addicts. Nobody has the political will to point out that 50 years of this war has left us in worse shape than we were in 1990.

Leo argues that strength abroad depends on changes at home:

What we seem to see in the rise of nations like China and India, as best I understand them, is not just the promotion of their own interests but also the assertion of their own worldviews. They don’t just want to win a conflict; they want to redefine the terms of engagement.

To whatever extent the West (the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., the European Union, and other nations with similar ideals) still promotes a cohesive vision for the world, that vision involves what the West understands as basic human rights, the primacy of individual liberty, and the principles of an open and diverse society. Some of the most powerful nations of the 21st century, however, do not seem inclined to accept these values as a fundamental, let alone obligatory, aspect of their own international relations.

Countries like the U.S.A., of course, often fall short of their own aspirations. We suffer from a MAGA movement that seems keen to elect a candidate openly embracing the language of fascists. We also suffer from a leftist movement opposed to free speech, contemptuous of dissent (other than its own), and seemingly oblivious to its own narrow-minded tendencies. Showing we can counter these dangerous movements at home might be the most productive thing we can do to maintain a convincing voice abroad.

This newsletter will be off next week. We wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, and we’ll be back the week of December 4.

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The ABC made-for-television movie The Day After premiered on November 20, 1983. It changed the way many Americans thought about nuclear war—but the fear now seems forgotten.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation. What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?

A Preview of Hell

We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. But at least it’s not 1983, the year that the Cold War seemed to be in its final trajectory toward disaster.

Forty years ago today, it was the morning after The Day After, the ABC TV movie about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Roughly 100 million people tuned in on Sunday night, November 20, 1983, and The Day After holds the record as the most-watched made-for-television movie in history.

I remember the movie, and the year, vividly. I was 22 and in graduate school at Columbia University, studying the Soviet Union. It’s hard to explain to people who worry about, say, climate change—a perfectly legitimate concern—what it was like to live with the fear not that many people could die over the course of 20 or 50 or 100 years but that the decision to end life on most of the planet in flames and agony could happen in less time than it would take you to finish reading this article.

I will not recount the movie for you; there isn’t much of a plot beyond the stories of people who survive the fictional destruction of Kansas City. There is no detailed scenario, no explanation of what started the war. (This was by design; the filmmakers wanted to avoid making any political points.) But in scenes as graphic as U.S. television would allow, Americans finally got a look at what the last moments of peace, and the first moments of hell, might look like.

Understanding the impact of The Day After is difficult without a sense of the tense Cold War situation during the previous few years. There was an unease (or “a growing feeling of hysteria,” as Sting would sing a few years later in “Russians”) in both East and West that the gears of war were turning and locking, a doomsday ratchet tightening click by click.

The Soviet-American détente of the 1970s was brief and ended quickly. By 1980, President Jimmy Carter was facing severe criticism about national defense even within his own party. He responded by approving a number of new nuclear programs, and unveiling a new and highly aggressive nuclear strategy. The Soviets thought Carter had lost his mind, and they were actually more hopeful about working with the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan. Soviet fears intensified when Reagan, once in office, took Carter’s decisions and put them on steroids, and in May 1981 the KGB went on alert looking for signs of impending nuclear attack from the United States. In November 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and was replaced by the KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. The chill in relations between Washington and Moscow became a hard frost.

And then came 1983.

In early March, Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and accused it of being “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Only a few weeks after that, he gave a major televised address to the nation in which he announced plans for space-based missile defenses, soon mocked as “Star Wars.” Two months later, I graduated from college and headed over to the Soviet Union to study Russian for the summer. Everywhere I went, the question was the same: “Why does your president want a nuclear war?” Soviet citizens, bombarded by propaganda, were certain the end was near. So was I, but I blamed their leaders, not mine.

When I returned, I packed my car in Massachusetts and began a road trip to begin graduate school in New York City on September 1, 1983. As I drove, news reports on the radio kept alluding to a missing Korean airliner.

The jet was Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was downed by Soviet fighter jets for trespassing in Soviet airspace, killing all 269 souls aboard. The shoot down produced an immense outpouring of rage at the Soviet Union that shocked Kremlin leaders. Soviet sources later claimed that this was the moment when Andropov gave up—forever—on any hope of better relations with the West, and as the fall weather of 1983 got colder, the Cold War got hotter.

We didn’t know it at the time, but in late September, Soviet air defenses falsely reported a U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet Union: We’re all still alive thanks to a Soviet officer on duty that day who refused to believe the erroneous alert. On October 10, Reagan watched The Day After in a private screening and noted in his diary that it “greatly depressed” him.

On October 23, a truck bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the Marine barracks in Beirut.

Two days after that, the United States invaded Grenada and deposed its Marxist-Leninist regime, an act the Soviets thought could be the prelude to overthrowing other pro-Soviet regimes—even in Europe. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began a military communications exercise code-named Able Archer, exactly the sort of traffic and activity the Soviets were looking for. Moscow definitely noticed, but fortunately, the exercise wound down in time to prevent any further confusion.

This was the global situation when, on November 20, The Day After aired.

Three days later, on November 23, Soviet negotiators walked out of nuclear-arms talks in Geneva. War began to feel—at least to me—inevitable.

In today’s Bulwark newsletter, the writer A. B. Stoddard remembers how her father, ABC’s motion-picture president Brandon Stoddard, came up with the idea for The Day After. “He wanted Americans, not politicians, to grapple with what nuclear war would mean, and he felt ‘fear had really paralyzed people.’ So the movie was meant to force the issue.”

And so it did, perhaps not always productively. Some of the immediate commentary bordered on panic. (In New York, I recall listening to the antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott on talk radio after the broadcast, and she said nuclear war was a mathematical certainty if Reagan was reelected.) Henry Kissinger, for his part, asked if we should make policy by “scaring ourselves to death.”

Reagan, according to the scholar Beth Fischer, was in “shock and disbelief” that the Soviets really thought he was headed for war, and in late 1983 “took the reins” and began to redirect policy. He found no takers in the Kremlin for his new line until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and both men soon affirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought—a principle that in theory still guides U.S. and Russian policy.

In the end, we got through 1983 mostly by dumb luck. If you’d asked me back then as a young student whether I’d be around to talk about any of this 40 years later, I would have called the chances a coin toss.

But although we might feel safer, I wonder if Americans really understand that thousands of those weapons remain on station in the United States, Russia, and other nations, ready to launch in a matter of minutes. The Day After wasn’t the scariest nuclear-war film—that honor goes to the BBC’s Threads—but perhaps more Americans should take the time to watch it. It’s not exactly a holiday movie, but it’s a good reminder at Thanksgiving that we are fortunate for the changes over the past 40 years that allow us to give thanks in our homes instead of in shelters made from the remnants of our cities and towns—and to recommit to making sure that future generations don’t have to live with that same fear.

Related:

We have no nuclear strategy. I want my mutually assured destruction.

Today’s News

The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to one of the most severely gerrymandered legislative district maps in the country. A gunman opened fire in an Ohio Walmart last night, injuring four people before killing himself. Various storms are expected to cause Thanksgiving travel delays across the United States this week.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ricardo Rey

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?

By Ross Andersen

(From July)

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had captured the world’s imagination like nothing in tech’s recent history. There was grousing in some quarters about the things ChatGPT could not yet do well, and in others about the future it may portend, but Altman wasn’t sweating it; this was, for him, a moment of triumph.

In small doses, Altman’s large blue eyes emit a beam of earnest intellectual attention, and he seems to understand that, in large doses, their intensity might unsettle. In this case, he was willing to chance it: He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

If you want to engage in nostalgia for a better time when serious people could discuss serious issues, I encourage you to watch not only The Day After but the roundtable held on ABC right after the broadcast. Following a short interview with then–Secretary of State George Shultz, Ted Koppel moderated a discussion among Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the professor Elie Wiesel, the scientist Carl Sagan, and the conservative writer William F. Buckley. The discussion ranged across questions of politics, nuclear strategy, ethics, and science. It was pointed, complex, passionate, and respectful—and it went on for an hour and a half, including audience questions.

Try to imagine something similar today, with any network, cable or broadcast, blocking out 90 precious minutes for prominent and informed people to discuss disturbing matters of life and death. No chyrons, no smirky hosts, no music, no high-tech sets. Just six experienced and intelligent people in an unadorned studio talking to one another like adults. (One optimistic note: Both McNamara and Kissinger that night thought it was almost unimaginable that the superpowers could cut their nuclear arsenals in half in 10 or even 15 years. And yet, by 1998, the U.S. arsenal had been reduced by more than half, and Kissinger in 2007 joined Shultz and others to argue for going to zero.)

I do not miss the Cold War, but I miss that kind of seriousness.

–Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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