Confessions from The Situation Room: America's mistakes on Iran's 2009 Green Movement and the lessons for today
Jon Finer, former US Deputy National Security Adviser and co-host of Vox Media’s 'The Long Game' tells 'Global Power Shifts' the US should have done more during Iran’s 2009 uprising.
One of the most enlightening things former Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer told us was not about Trump, oil, or even the Iran nuclear deal.
It was about 2009.
Asked what President Obama should have done during Iran’s Green Movement, Finer said the United States should have spoken out sooner and more forcefully on behalf of the demonstrators, helped them communicate around regime internet restrictions, and directly sanctioned those responsible for repressing the Iranian people.
As we put it to him: “In 2009, there was the Green Revolution, an uprising in Iran. President Obama later admitted that he wished he’d done something. What should he have done and could he have done at the time that would have, I think, maybe changed the course of history?”
Finer’s answer was strikingly direct: “He should have spoken out much more forcefully and much sooner on the side of the demonstrators.” He went on to say they tried to facilitate providing technology to the demonstrators that allowed them to communicate so they could continue to organize and continue to sustain the revolution.
“What we should have done, I think, is singled out people who were involved in repression of their own people, of the Iranian people, shamed their names publicly and sanctioned them too.”
Finer is not just any former official taking liberties with hindsight, he is a former US Deputy National Security Adviser under President Biden, one of the senior American officials most closely associated with the Iran nuclear deal, and worked in the Obama White House in 2009. What sets his experience apart however, is he was a journalist just like us. When he crossed over from press to policymaker, he says his experience as a reporter in Iraq shaped his decision. For someone with that résumé to say so clearly that Washington should have done more during one of the most important protest moments in modern Iranian history is a rare admission from inside the system.
And it lands differently now, in the middle of another conflict.
For years, many Iranians have lived with the consequences of Western hesitation, Western inconsistency, and Western confusion about how to deal with the Islamic Republic. In 2009, the Green Movement was met with brutal repression. In later uprisings, from economic protests to ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the same pattern repeated itself: courage inside the country, caution outside it.
Finer’s answer suggested that even within the US government, there is an accetpance that America did not rise to the moment. That being said, he was careful not to argue Obama should have gone to war on behalf of protesters. He explicitly said he did not believe that. But he did say the US should have shown greater moral clarity, should have helped demonstrators organize in the face of internet controls, and should have named and punished those responsible for crushing dissent.
“I don’t think by the way President Obama was saying I should have gone to war to help that. And I don’t believe that President Obama should have done that.”
Once you accept that the US mishandled 2009, the question becomes whether America is once again misunderstanding the forces inside Iran, overestimating what pressure can accomplish, and underestimating the consequences of what may come next.
That is where Finer’s warning became even more striking.
His central argument was that the lesson of Iraq was supposed to be clear: avoid unnecessary wars in the Middle East, especially those with vague objectives and no credible endgame. In his view, the Iran nuclear deal was born from that lesson. It was not designed to make the Islamic Republic virtuous. It was not designed to solve every problem Iran poses in the region. It was designed to address the nuclear issue by pushing Iran’s breakout time from weeks or months to more than a year.
That extra time, he argued, mattered because it gave the United States room to act if Iran ever cheated.
Finer was candid about what the deal did not do. It did not dismantle Iran’s missile program. It did not end Tehran’s support for regional proxies. It did not magically liberalize the regime. But that was not the point. The point was to stop the nuclear file from becoming a war.
Now, in his view, that war has arrived anyway.
He argued that President Trump not only dismantled the deal, but ignored the core lesson that should have been learned from Iraq in the first place: do not rush into war without clear objectives and a realistic chance of success.
Finer also said the most dangerous outcome may not be regime change at all. It may be leaving a wounded Iranian regime in place, bloodied but intact.
That phrase matters because it captures the strategic fear now gripping much of the Gulf.
In Washington, there is often a tendency to think in episodes. A strike. A response. A ceasefire. A pivot. But the Gulf does not have that luxury - while America can move on, the region cannot. And Finer made clear that officials and analysts in the Gulf are deeply worried about what happens if Iran emerges from this weakened, enraged, more hardline, and still capable of doing enormous damage.
That is the nightmare scenario - a regime that survives, learns, and lashes out.
He also said this should not have surprised anyone. In US war games, he noted, two assumptions were always built in: that the Strait of Hormuz could be disrupted and that Iran would retaliate not only against American targets and Israel, but against US allies in the region. In other words, the idea that the Gulf would somehow be spared was always a fantasy.
And yet there does appear to have been a false sense of security after the last round of confrontation. This time, Finer argued, Iran sees the conflict as existential. When regimes believe they are fighting for survival, they become more dangerous - and he was also blunt about the fantasy of clean regime change.
When we asked about the people inside Iran and the possibility that cracks in command and control could point toward regime collapse, his answer was sobering. He said the next phase, if this continues, is more likely to be military rule than democracy. In his view, the Islamic Republic could move from clerical rule into more overt IRGC control. Even if that eventually collapses, the next stage still may not be democratic; it could look more like fragmentation, or even failed-state conditions.
That is not the answer many people want to hear. But it is probably the answer more people need to hear.
Too much Western commentary about Iran swings between two extremes: fatalism on one hand and fantasy on the other. Either the regime is permanent, or it will fall tomorrow and freedom will neatly take its place. Iranians know better. They know both how brutal the regime is and how brutal a vacuum can be.
In 2013, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Iranian regime ally now now living in exile in Russia, used chemical weapons against his own people. This had previously been set as a ‘red line’ for President Obama. But when push came to shove, Asssad got away with it. War drums beating on Capitol Hill for a few weeks ultimately went quiet. Two months later in November 2013 it was revealed secret nuclear talks had been going on with the Iranians. Did Obama not act against an Iranian ally in Syria to preserve the chance of nuclear deal?
We asked him directly: “Was the desire for a nuclear deal part of the calculation for not doing anything in 2009?” Finer replied: “I think it was part of it,” before adding that officials also feared that overt US support would allow the regime to discredit demonstrators as American puppets.
But his conclusion was clear: “The problem with that argument is that the Iranian regime is going to make it anyway. They’re going to say this whether we help or not. So if they’re going to say this either way, better that we help than that we don’t.”
On figures like exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, and current foreign minister representing the Islamic Republic Abbas Araghchi now frequently seen on the American airwaves fully making use of the first amendment while denying their own people access to the internet and freedom of the press, Finer was measured. He acknowledged that Pahlavi appeared more central in the imagination of recent demonstrators than many expected, but he did not suggest there is a realistic near-term path for someone outside Iran to return and lead it. As for those associated with diplomacy toward the West, his point was simple: once the US abandoned the very deal they defended, their credibility inside Iran was deeply damaged.
The conversation also turned to information warfare, where Finer made another sharp point. He argued that the Trump administration has been effective in one narrow sense: talking down the markets. Even amid significant supply disruption, prices have not responded as dramatically as many expected. In his view, that reflects a deliberate effort to calm market reaction and relieve pressure on Washington.
But on the more important question of the US’ actual strategy, he was scathing.
According to Finer, the administration’s messaging on war aims has been incoherent, changing from day to day and sometimes multiple times in the same day. Wars need a theory of success. If those waging them cannot explain what they are trying to achieve, they will eventually struggle to justify the price.
He was equally clear when we asked whether Netanyahu had manipulated Trump into this conflict. Netanyahu has wanted this fight for years, Finer said, but a superpower does not get to outsource responsibility for its own decisions. If Trump chose this war, then Trump owns it.
That leaves us with a painful irony. A former top US official is now saying America should have done more when Iranians rose up in 2009. But he is also warning that military escalation now is not a shortcut to the democratic outcome so many people understandably want.
Washington was too cautious when it came to the protesters. It may now be too reckless when it comes to war. In both cases, it risks misunderstanding the reality that Iranians live with every day: that toppling a regime and building a free country are not the same thing.
Finer’s warning is that the most dangerous outcome may be neither peace nor liberation, but a bloodied system that survives long enough to make the region, and the world, pay for underestimating it.
And if that happens, we will once again be left asking the question America never seems to answer in time:
Did we learn anything at all?