This week was tough. I had dinner with my intelligent friends from European countries, people who have spent half their lives working within the United Nations. We were having a good time until the conversation turned to Donald Trump and Iran. Everyone, without exception, spoke badly of Trump: that he causes problems for everyone, that war is terrible, that it is illegal, and so on. I stayed silent. When everyone finally became quiet, I asked only one question: who is actually going to collect and remove those more than 400 kilograms of uranium? My French friend said: Trump is no better than the regime. On top of that, he has started an illegal war, and many countries have nuclear power plants why shouldn’t Iran have them too? I exploded inside, but I remained silent at first. When I finally broke my silence, I said: was it illegal when the United States helped the French during the Second World War? Was it unnecessary? Then silence returned. I kept thinking about how to express everything happening inside me; how to explain the regime to a European-someone surrounded by left-wing ideology, enclosed within indirect forms of censorship, and always ready to say that war is terrible, yet surprised when I say many Iranians wanted it. How do you explain to people who live in safety that some nations sometimes see outside pressure as the only remaining path when every internal path has been closed? How do you explain that they do not even speak in geopolitical terms, but judge only from a position of moral comfort, while others are speaking about survival? Europeans who, despite democracy and free internet, still do not know what happened in Iran on January 8–9. Europeans who believe every conflict can be understood through the same moral template. Europeans who condemn all violence in theory, but have never had to live under a Islamic system where violence is part of everyday life. And I sat there with the feeling that the distance between our realities was greater than the table around which we were sitting…

Glad to see Khamenei and Ahmadinejad gone, but odds lean against the establishment of democracy in Iran. My colleague Steven Levitsky, looking at the historical record, concluded, “State failure brings violence and instability; it almost never brings democratization." (Levitsky, S., & Way, L. 2015. The myth of the democratic recession. Journal of Democracy, 26, 45–58.) Let's hope this is an exception.

Following the awesome @openclaw meetup in Vienna yesterday, who's up for an Open Claw meetup in Berlin in a few weeks (e.g. March 10 or 12)? 1) "like" if you like it 2) + retweet if you love it 3) + add a comment if you're game so we can keep you posted