What Trump Didn’t Know About Iran

I have found myself struggling to describe the war President Trump has chosen to enter into with Iran. The strange lightness with which he seems to have chosen this. I would say the war is spiraling out of control, but there's never a real pretense that it was under control. I find it hard to say Trump's plan for the war is failing because it is not clear there was any plan at all. There was a decision to strike. There was perhaps a belief that Iranians would rise up and overthrow their government, as Trump invited them to do. But there appears to have been an almost opposite belief held by the same people at the same time that the Iranian regime included senior figures who might take power and make a deal with America much as Delcy Rodriguez did in Venezuela. To the extent America imagined who those leaders might be, there was no policy to identify and empower and work with them. Quite the opposite. Trump himself has said the leading candidates were killed in the initial attacks. We are so used to American wars failing because of the presence of bad assumptions and bad information and bad plans. We're less used to what this appears to be, an almost absence of planning or information at all. There's almost a pride this administration takes in it. Trump appears to believe that it is not his job to know about the world. It is the world's job to know about him. He acts. The world reacts. To do the work of planning, learning, building coalitions, considering consequences, all that is beneath him, beneath a superpower. But now we are at war and any better future will require a fuller understanding of how America, Israel and Iran got to this place. So I want to have someone on who could describe that history, or to be more specific, those histories, because the three countries, narratives and understandings are very different. Ali Vise is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. He is, in fact, himself a nuclear scientist. And he's a co-author of How Sanctions Work, Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow at nytimes.com. Ali Vise, welcome to the show. Great pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I want to start back in the Iranian Revolution, which begins in 1978, topples the Shah in early 1979. We remember it now as an Islamic revolution, but at the time it has liberals, it has leftists, it has feminists, it has nationalists. What did these groups want out of the revolution? And then how did it take the form it ultimately took? Well, the Iranian people had a lot going for them before the revolution. The country was prosperous economically. It had very good relations with the outside world. It's really stunning to think of it, Ezra, but the Shah really didn't have any serious enemies. It had good relations with the Soviet Union. It had good relations with the U.S. It was the strongest military in the Middle East. Iranian society was opening up, and a lot was going for the Iranian people, except one thing. They didn't have political freedom, and the power was strictly in the hands of the Shah and his political elites, who were also very much corrupt. And there was also this impression that he was a puppet of the United States, that he was not acting independently. That was an incorrect perception, but it was widespread among the population. And what happened was that there was this consensus that was formed that he should go without really having a sense of what will come after. Ayatollah Khomeini was seen as a transitional leader, not as the leader of the country in the future. And he was clever enough to portray himself as one. He did say all the right things before assuming power. He said women would be able to have equal rights in the society. He banned the clerics from having any role in politics. This is why we had this extraordinary situation in which you had leftists and Maoists and communists and conservatives and religious people, everybody coalescing around him as the leader of the revolution. But of course, as soon as he touched down in Tehran and there were three million people on the streets welcoming him, he realized that his power is basically unchallenged. And at that point, he started monopolizing power, eliminating and purging all this coalition that came together and established an Islamic republic in the form of a theocracy. And very quickly from there, we have the, what gets at least remembered in America as the hostage crisis. This is something that Donald Trump talks about in his video announcing and explaining the beginning of the war he has launched in Iran now. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries. Among the regime's very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days. What is that? Why is the decision to storm the U.S. embassy made? How do you understand that as both a political decision and as a historical event sort of resetting American and Iranian relations? That is a seminal moment because it created a rupture in Iran-U.S. relationship that has not been healed in the past 47 years. The U.S. embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students. The Americans inside have been taken prisoner. The students want the deposed Shah returned to Iran for trial. The U.S.'s first response to the hostage crisis was to impose sanctions. And Iranians wanted those assets released, wanted the Shah to be returned to Iran to stand trial, and wanted the United States to recognize their independence and promise not to interfere in their internal affairs. But it really goes back to another event. It goes back to 1953, when the U.S. and the U.K. helped topple the popular government of Prime Minister Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iranian oil. Iran, where the government of Premier Mossadegh with pro-Red tendencies is overthrown by royalist supporters of the Shah. Iran, with its rich oil resources, focal point of dispute with the British, is strategically important to democracy. Mossadegh held power at the crossroads of conquest in the very heart of the Middle East. And therefore, there was always this sense of vendetta among segments of Iranian society against the United States. So the embassy hostage crisis was an opportunity for Iran to demonstrate that it no longer is going to be subjugated to the United States. And it also allowed Khomeini to appropriate all means of power in Iran. He wanted to get rid of the more moderate forces of Iranian politics, and he used the embassy crisis to do that. And the entire government resigned, and he could bring his own people to power. I think it's important to stop on what you said a minute ago about the U.S. and the U.K. participating in a coup in Iran. And I think as we sort of unspool this story, there can be a sense in America that we are hated by the Iranian government for no obvious reason. But the counter-narrative is that there has been a longer war of America and the West against Iranian self-determination. And I'd just like to hear you talk for a minute about how those sort of dueling senses of who started what and who has what interest here have sat and persisted and shaped the decisions of the actors for decades now. It's a very good point, Ezra, because I think it's important to understand that Iran, as a weak country during the 18th and 19th centuries, was one of the only countries in the world that did not become a colony to a Western power. There was a very strong sense of Iranian nationalism in the same way that the Chinese have this Middle Kingdom thinking. That sense of Iran having its own dignity and pride is really built into the DNA. And that created resentments towards the United States that then again showed itself in 1979. Some of these historic events have a long tail, especially when you're dealing with ancient civilizations. They have long memories. And it is important to understand that many in the U.S. might not even know what happened in 1953, but every school children in Iran has heard of this event and it's sort of built into their psyche. To your point that the history is a long tail here, I mean, even now, one of the people being talked about, it seems unlikely, but being talked about for a leader in Iran if the current regime collapses is the Shah's son, who is in exile and has become a more popular opposition leader and has better relationship with Israel and is more favored by the West. I don't think that many people think it would work to install him, but you've certainly heard that hope voiced quite often by people who are hopeful that the current regime will collapse. Absolutely. And again, there is precedent. His grandfather, Reza Shah, founder of the dynasty, came to power with British interference in another coup in the earlier 20th century. And his father was restored to power by the United States. And now he's trying to regain power through help from Israel. And this is why, you know, even if a formula like this succeeds, which I agree has a low chance, but we have to see these kind of short-term gains in the longer perspective of how often they come back to haunt us. So let me bring us back to the hostage crisis. How does Iran, how does the Ayatollah Khomeini ultimately agree to give up the hostages? For what, in what context, for what reasons? So this, again, has a lot of patterns that have been repeating themselves throughout these years. They engage in negotiations and talks dragged on until... Day one of Ronald Reagan's presidency and day one of freedom for which was undergoing a lot of turmoil. A lot of the purges that we talked about before were happening in conjunction with this war. Economically, Iran was on its knees. The price of oil had dropped significantly and Iranian oil facilities were targeted. It was a very, very dark and difficult period. And yet, not only it survived the war, it consolidated the revolutionary system in those years. And this is the first war in almost 250 years in which Iran didn't lose territory. It didn't win territory, but it also didn't lose anything. And that created a narrative of martyrdom, of, you know, sacrifice, that really consolidated the regime's power. You mentioned a minute ago how something that people are hearing a lot about now, Iran's ballistic missile program, has its origins in that moment. There's something else we're hearing a lot about now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also has its origins in that war. So tell me about the IRGC, how it emerged, and what it, over time, became. So when the revolutionaries came to power, the moment of revolution's victory was the moment that the Shah's army declared itself neutral in the fight between the state and the society. And the United States did play an important role in convincing the army, which was trained by the U.S. and modeled after the U.S. Army, to take a step back. But the Iranian revolutionaries didn't trust the army. They thought it was too aligned with U.S. interests. And so they had to create a parallel army which would do their bidding. And that's the origin of the Revolutionary Guard. If you even look at the title, it says Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It doesn't have the word Iran in it because it is really designed to safeguard the revolution. And they were really trained in the crucible of this horrible war, traumatic war from 1980 to 1988, which was almost a trench warfare, similar to the First World War, dragged out, terrible affair in which chemical weapons were used, and it was just very, very ugly. And so it created real hard men with very fixed views about the world, the region, the United States, Israel, and how Iran should safeguard its interests. So then there is another dimension of this that I think is worth bringing in in the 80s, which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gets very involved in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It begins to support and help with what becomes Hezbollah. At the same time, Israel is also in the 80s selling weaponry to Iran. So there's a complicated relationship going in both directions here that I think a little bit defies the way we think about the relationship today. So what is happening between Iran and Israel in the 80s? Well, I don't think Israel saw Iran immediately out of the gate after revolution as an existential threat. In fact, Saddam was a bigger threat to Israel. And there is this famous saying that it's too bad that both sides can't lose in this war. And in the initial phases of the war, when Iraq actually had significant territorial control in Iran and the Iranians were using their bigger numbers to try to push back, but they were not succeeding, that I think Israel believed that it would be useful to try to change the balance and make sure that the Iranians would not lose. Part of the broader arrangement that turned out to be the Iran-Contra, which has its own complicated story. But it is really after the fall of Saddam as a serious threat to Israel after the first Gulf War that Israel's threat perception about Iran changes because to a large extent, Saddam was neutralized and Iran was still standing and was becoming more aggressive towards Israel and was putting in place all the tools that it needed to carry on that challenge to Israel's power in the region. Iran also by that time has a different leader. Khomeini dies in 1989. Ali Khamenei becomes the second supreme leader. Who is he at the moment of that elevation and how does he become the successor? Oh, he's an absolute underdog. He's the president of the country at that point, but someone who nobody took seriously because the presidency was a symbolic position. There are these famous stories of Khomeini chastising Khamenei in public speeches and Khamenei going to the roof of the presidential palace and crying out loud because he was humiliated. And the second most powerful man in Iran after Khomeini was the speaker of parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, this very wily statesman, sort of like Cardinal Richelieu or Eminence Greet of the system. And he's the one who ends up becoming the kingmaker. He makes Khamenei the next supreme leader. He says that Khomeini was very close to him, had designated Khamenei as his successor. There's no evidence to back that up, but everybody believed Rafsanjani at the time because he was so powerful. But long story short, Khamenei becomes supreme leader because Rafsanjani believed that he would remain an underdog and Rafsanjani would be able to run the show without much challenge from Khamenei. But Khamenei wasn't even an Ayatollah when he became a supreme leader. And so they had to overnight make him an Ayatollah, but Khamenei turned out to be a calculating, very clever man who basically over several decades managed to outwit and outweight everybody else in that system because he didn't have the right religious credentials, quickly looked for another source of basically backing up his power. And that became the Revolutionary Guards. And this is why he started militarizing Iranian politics in ways that Khomeini had actually banned. Khomeini had banned the Revolutionary Guards from entering into politics. And it's really an extraordinary turn of events of how he managed to then sideline Rafsanjani and everybody else and reach the pinnacle of power in a way that no other Iranian ruler, even the Shah of the recent past, had that much institutional power. So I think it's easy doing the kind of work I do to sort of focus endlessly on the institutional maneuverings of people in power. But what is life like for Iranians and what are the divisions of Iranian society at this point? I mean, we've gone in just a decade or two from, as you say, a very modern country with good relations with the outside world, a revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and incredible amounts of suffering and, you know, death. And now you have this sort of IRGC and successor government. What is life becoming like for Iranians? How has it changed? So, look, the 1980s were really dark because there was repression at home. There was a war of aggression against the country. It was a terrifying period. But in a decade after one of the most popular revolutions in the world, the system still had sufficient goodwill and support to move forward. But people wanted change to become much more institutional. And this is why in an upset election in 1997, they opted for gradual change rather than radical revolutionary change by voting for a reformist president. And when Khatami was elected, that's the first election that I voted in and the last election I voted in. But there was a real sense of hope that he was saying all the right things. He wanted to do all the right things. And from that point on, I would say it was a downward spiral because the deep state in Iran, by that point represented by Khamenei, his office and the Revolutionary Guards, were absolutely against reforms. And you can understand psychologically where that came from for Khamenei. He came to power in 1989 when the Soviet Union was falling apart because it had opened the door to reforms. And so Khamenei's view was that an ideological system, if you start playing with the pillars of it, the whole thing will unravel. And so it's the beginning of ruptures between the state and the society because the society wanted gradual reforms. But the fact that Khatami's experience ended in failure, I think was the beginning of a lot of people losing hope in this regime's ability to change course. So in the 1990s, Bill Clinton is president in the United States for most of it. And his focus in the Middle East is on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. And you've already had the Oslo Accords. And Iran enters into this picture funding terrorist attacks in Israel through Hamas and others meant to destroy the peace process, meant to destroy Oslo. Why? So one has to understand that, again, going back to the Iran-Iraq war, Iran realized that one of the only ways that it can project power beyond its borders as a Shia nation surrounded by Sunnis, as a Persian nation surrounded by Arabs and Turks, was to pick up a cause that would allow it to transcend all of these inherent limitations. And that was the Palestinian cause that was left on the ground by the Arabs. And that's why as of the early 1980s, it became the champion of the Palestinian cause. For instance, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provided Iran with an opportunity to create Hezbollah in Lebanon. And then with the attack in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines, Iran saw its first impressive victory. I have no regret of the fact that we went in there with the idea of trying to bring peace to that troubled country. Which was that someone as hawkish as President Reagan, in response to that attack, packed his bags and left the region. We are redeploying because once the terrorist attacks started, there was no way that we could really contribute to the original mission by staying there as a target, just hunkering down and waiting for further attacks. And so any solution to the Palestinian cause that would not include Iran and its interests, by definition, would be a threat to this agenda. This is why Iran was trying to sabotage any solution along those lines. And the fact that processes like the Madrid process, for instance Fundamental point, which is this question, and I think we'll keep circling this, of what does Iran want? When I speak to Israelis, and these are not just, you know, Israelis on the right. These are Israelis on the sort of the center-left. They will say, you Americans do not understand Iran. You do not understand this country. It does not just want to survive as a regime. It does not just want a stronger economy. It does not just want better relations with the West. If it wanted that, it could have had that long ago. It ultimately has ideological and imperial ambitions. And as such, deals will only ever be temporary and they will only be in the regime's interest. And the way you know that is this sort of moving back and forth that you're describing a little bit here between acting like any other geopolitical chess player at the chessboard and these more ideological moments where it's not just that they are projecting power out or trying to take up the Palestinian cause, but they are imperiling, arguably, their own regime. And so, you know, the Israelis have said to me for a very long time, and I think this helps explain, you know, Netanyahu's position on Iran and others, that when they hear death to Israel, they take Iran seriously. They take it at its word. And in their understanding, there is no safety for Israeli society and the Israeli government so long as the Iranian regime, as it has been composed in these decades, persisted. And I think you can't understand this war and how hard Netanyahu's been pushing for it for so long without understanding that. And so it raises this question of whether or not he and the Israelis were right. Look, so there is no doubt that what the Iranians might see as defensive could be seen as offensive from the Israelis. And there is no doubt that we are in a vicious cycle, that, you know, whatever Israel does deepens Iran's threat perception and pushes them to double down on policies like their missile program or their support for proxies, which deepens Israel's threat perception, which in turn would then drag the U.S. further in and put more pressure on Iran and engages in covert operations and sabotage and so on that, again, deepens Iran's threat perception and the cycle goes on. The real question is, the way that Israel and the West largely have treated Iran in the past four decades can really be summarized in one word, which is containment. Has it resolved the problem or made it worse? It's a very simple question. And even by Netanyahu's own metrics, the problem has become worse. The nuclear program has been warning against for many, many years, according to himself, when he went to war last year, had become an intolerable existential threat. In June of last year, he said that he had set back Iran's missile program. Eight months later, he's back at war because the missile program is now an existential threat. So again, it's a question of not necessarily the concept. I'm not challenging that. I understand why the Israelis see Iran as an existential threat. I understand why the Iranians believe that Israel is a threat to them. But I'm talking about the means of trying to resolve the problem. And again, you know, throughout the past 47 years, with the exception of a very short period of three to four years, we have tried tools that have not worked or made the problem worse. And I think we should learn from that experience. You mentioned the Iranian narrative that much that looks offensive to the rest of the world to them is understood as defensive, that Iran does not understand just itself as a threat to Israel, but Israel and to some degree, particularly right now, America is a threat to Iran. So if I were talking to a member of the, you know, Iranian government and they were giving me their narrative of this or trying to persuade me that the Israeli narrative is wrong. How is the support for Hamas, the support for Hezbollah, some of the actions we see in this period, how is that understood in the Iranian perspective, the race to nuclear weapons, as defensive as opposed to offensive? It's very simple. And they would say the proof is in the pudding. When Hezbollah had hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles aiming at Israeli population centers, Israel did not dare attacking Iran. When Syria was there, when Iran was powerful in Syria, there was no route for Israeli fighter jets to come and bomb Iran through the Syrian airspace. So they are, their argument is that actually this policy worked and protected them for a long time. And now that it has their regional deterrence has been degraded, this is why Israel is coming after them. So if you talk to Iranian officials, they would say that the reason that they were locked into this pathway, there was basically path dependency, was because they never saw a viable alternative. It is not as if they were willing to give up on their proxies or to whatever Israel found threatening, whether it's their missiles or their nuclear program, that the world would then recognize them, would allow this theocracy to thrive in the way that Arab Gulf states have, that all of these were aimed at undermining and toppling them. Nobody was willing to give them conventional weapons to be able to defend themselves. Nobody ever recognized that they had some legitimate security concerns. And so they had no choice other than continuing down this path. That's the arguments that they would make. And even in areas that they had compromised, like on their nuclear program, it resulted in the U.S. not delivering on its promises. And of course, that's just one example. There are multiple other examples as well. You know, the Iranians helped release U.S. hostages in Lebanon in the 1990s. And the George H.W. Bush administration didn't deliver on his promises to them. Obama even didn't fully deliver on sanctions relief. Biden, with whom they had a prisoner deal, as part of which there was a humanitarian arrangement that moved $6 billion of their assets from South Korea to Doha, pulled the plug on their ability to access that money after October 7th, even though the money had nothing to do with Iran's regional policies. So there is a long list of the reasons that they would bring up to say, this was always existential from the other side as well, and so we had no choice other than doubling down. And so there seemed like there was this moment where things could change. After 9-11, Iran is for a moment on the side of the U.S. It's offering intelligence. It's against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, shakes hands with the Iranian foreign minister at the U.N. And, you know, 9-11 was a geopolitically disruptive event, and a lot can change in the aftermath of them. So what was happening then and how did that set of possibilities, if you think they were real, fall apart? So the story of Iran-U.S. relations is really a history of missed opportunities and is replete with misunderstandings. And this episode is one of them. It's quite stunning that there was a real opportunity for a new beginning. Now, in retrospect, it's really quite something when you think about the fact that Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard's expeditionary force, the good force, was first a man to arrive in Afghanistan to prepare it for U.S. fighter jets to land in the operation to get rid of the Taliban. Same commander that President Trump assassinated in 2020. But Iran believed that by cooperating with the United States, even at the military level, intelligence level, to get rid of a common foe, would be the beginning of a new chapter. And then all of a sudden, some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th, but we know their true nature. And 2002, in his State of the Union speech, North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. President Bush designated Iran as a member of the axis of evil. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world. And that shut the door to further improvements of relations. North Korea responds to the axis of evil speech by accelerating its nuclear program, eventually tests a weapon, is now a nuclear power. The U.S. invades Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons. Later on, Libya will give up its nuclear program and Gaddafi will eventually be decapitated from power in U.S. airstrikes and will die in a ditch. So how do the nuclear experiences of other countries that are named into the axis of evil, how does that end up shaping Iranian politics and thinking? So that's not a linear line in the sense that, you know, Iran revived its nuclear program in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, primarily out of fear that Saddam was going to use nuclear weapons against them because he had already used weapons of mass destruction in the form of chemical weapons and was believed to be developing nuclear weapons. But you see, based on U.S. intelligence that the organized Iranian push to develop nuclear weapons stopped in 2003. What happened in 2003? Saddam was toppled. The threat was gone. So that's the first phase in Iranian calculation, that the immediate threat was gone, but they could now continue to hedge their nuclear policy, basically develop this dual-use technology, put all the elements together, and then maybe at some point down the road, if they needed nuclear weapons, it would be a quick political decision to cross the Rubicon and develop a nuclear program. They also used their nuclear program as leverage at the bargaining table with the West to try to get sanctions relief. So this was way before they saw what happened to Gaddafi Very complex document, but it really boils down to a very simple bargain. Nuclear restrictions and transparency measures in return for economic incentives. That's really it. And Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program, roll back its nuclear activities, ship out 97% of its stockpile, dismantle most of its centrifuges, accept the kind of inspections that no other country in the world has ever accepted, and basically make itself an exception to the norm because among the non-proliferation treaty member states, you basically have already two classes. One are nuclear weapons states and one are non-nuclear weapons states. But Iran agreed to create a category of its own in terms of restrictions and transparency measures that it had agreed to. So this guarantees that Iran would not be able to have a nuclear weapon for at least a period of 15 years. But a lot of these restrictions had sunsets, meaning that they would expire after a period of time. And that is because no country would ever be willing to make itself an exception to the norm forever. That is giving up a right internationally that, again, a regime that had come to power based on the concept of trying to safeguard Iran's independence, went through a very bloody war in which it lost half a million of its people in order not to lose an inch of the country. It didn't want to give away that right. And the JCPOA did secure that right, but it meant that the can was only kicked down the road and the problem was not resolved forever. The other problem with it at the time, I used to say the good news is that we have a nuclear deal. The bad news is that we only have a nuclear deal, that it didn't really address other areas of disagreement with Iran about its ballistic missile program, about its proxies. But the concept for the Obama administration was that you resolve the most urgent problem and then maybe based on that, you can build trust and improve relations and then try to address other areas of disagreement. But we never really got a chance because the deal was implemented in January 2016. Of course, President Trump was elected in November of that year and as soon as he walked into the Oval Office, he started undermining the agreement. So when you say the agreement guaranteed that Iran would not get a nuclear weapon for at least those 15 years, one thing that Republicans said was they'll just do it in secret. They'll create secret facilities. They'll be underground. We won't know where to inspect. So what were the safeguards there? So the entire nuclear inspection regime since the Second World War has always been designed to look at the fissile material, nuclear material with which you can make a bomb. For the first time in the JCPOA, mechanisms were defined to also look after the equipment. So every nut and bolt that goes into centrifuges which would enrich uranium or any other machinery involved in Iran's nuclear program, there were online smart detectors. There were inspectors who had access to them 24-7. There was literally no way that Iran would be able to cheat. And when the deal was being implemented for, as I said, from January 2016 until Iran started rolling back its commitments a year after the U.S. withdrew from it. So that's May 2019. The IAEA conducted very rigorous monitoring and issued quarterly reports. So there were about 15 reports in this period. And in all of them, the IAEA confirmed that Iran was fully committed to all of its commitments under the agreement. Now, we can choose not to believe the IAEA, but even the U.S. intelligence, even the Trump administration's own intelligence officials, were saying that there is no evidence of Iranian divergence from the agreement. Whereas, of course, the same could not be said about the United States. So there's also a political theory to the deal, which is that it was the beginning of trying to create a different relationship over time between the U.S. and Iran that would pull Iran further into the international system, unwind some of the sanctions so there's more economic development, maybe strengthen moderates inside the regime. How did you think about that side of the deal in some counterfactual history where Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 election and there's sort of time to build on it? Do you think that there was a possible other path here or there's also, of course, those who say this would have just given Iran money and time to strengthen proxy networks? It would have given it more freedom to pursue expansionistic objectives. How do you think about what was possible and what was not possible building on that deal? So I tell you how I perceived it. In my view, Iran at the time was a country that, despite years of sanctions, mismanagement and corruption, still had a middle class that was about 65% of the Iranian society. And the Iranian middle class, for anyone who's been in touch with them, is extremely open-minded, pro-Western, even pro-American despite years of being subject to anti-American propaganda by the state. Moderate is basically the West's best ally in that part of the world. And my concept was that if you get 5% economic growth over a period of 10 years, you can grow this middle class from 65% to around 80-85%. And that would coincide with the time that the ruling elites of the Islamic Republic, the original Jacobins of the 1979 revolution, are dying out just by the force of nature. So you have a situation in which these two lines will cross one another. And the country, by definition, would be in a better position to transition to something better. Even if that transition requires a degree of upheaval. So that was the concept. That was the theory of change. It wasn't supposed to magically, in a year or two, make Iran change all of its policies. But it was supposed to put the two countries on a better pathway in which eventually, with building trust, they would be able to address other areas of disagreement and again put the country on a trajectory that when Khamenei would die, there would be enough material to work with to put the country on a better trajectory. When Trump instead takes office, when he wins the election, he, somewhat over the objection of some in his own administration, rips up the deal and begins a policy of what he calls maximum pressure. We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction. Any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons could also be strongly sanctioned by the United States. America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail. So we've talked about what the theory of the JCPOA was. What is the theory of maximum pressure? Both what is the substance of that policy, but what is the political thinking beneath it? Well, I think the theory of maximum pressure was once very clearly described by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said Iran should reach a stage that it should choose between feeding its own people or continuing the policies that are problematic from the perspective of the United States. And so that really turned the concept that I was describing to you on its head, fundamentally, in the sense that it really weakened the middle class and strengthened the hard men in the Islamic Republic. And in this period, again, according to the United States and State Department and intelligence community, the Revolutionary Guards has become even more powerful than before. So we completely changed the dynamics and weakened our best allies and strengthened our worst adversaries in that system through maximum pressure, which was supposed to bring Iran to its knees. Now, the Iranians not only didn't surrender, but they doubled down across the board. They doubled down in supporting proxies. They became more aggressive in the region, more repressive towards their own people. They resumed their nuclear program, first gradually and then really ratcheted up significantly and reached levels that we could not even imagine in the past, like enrichment to 60% or having advanced centrifuges, which eventually, of course, ended up in the conflict that we're currently in. One of the sort of rupture moments in the Middle East that I think leads to where we are now in this period is, of course, October 7th. Hamas is understand by many to be an Iranian proxy, not fully under Iran's control, but Iran is a major funder of it. What, to your understanding now, is the relationship between Iran and the October 7th operation? How much did they know? Did they give it the green light? What was the communication between them and Sinwar? Because that explodes all of this. Right. So this is precisely when you can see the major shortcoming of Iran's policy as a state to subcontract its regional foreign policy to non-state actors because they have fundamentally different interests at the end of the day. And you could see that Ayatollah Khamenei very quickly after October 7th came out and tried to create distance, even though he supported Hamas, but he wanted to say that Iran was not involved. But the reality is that it really was a distinction without a meaningful difference by that point because Hamas was clearly in the Iranian orbit, was clearly financed, trained and supported by Iran. So by that point, Israel was going to go after not just Hamas, but everybody who supported Hamas. And so Israel was going to come after Iran. And Iran failed to adopt this strategy accordingly, not realizing that the so-called octopus doctrine that was already in place even way before October 7th as of 2021 of going after not just Iranian arms in the region, but the head of the octopus by targeting Tehran directly. The Iranians failed to adopt their strategy at every point they miscalculated. They either responded in a bold way when they had to be cautious or were too cautious when they had to be bold. And this created the circumstances that led eventually to this war. When you say they miscalculated, what was the nature of the miscalculation? What did they not understand about Israel or what did they not understand about Donald Trump? They did not At least some months after that. So why didn't they just run over the line? Or is the six-day line not everything you need for a nuclear weapon? Yes, so you're right. This is like having the ingredients for a cake. You still have to bake it into a cake. That's the weaponization process. That takes between six to 12 months depending on which timeline you want to believe. And depending on whether you want to have a crude nuclear device or a more sophisticated one. But that can happen in secret in any facility in any underground laboratory. The part that could be monitored is the enrichment part, which was done under the IEA supervision. And that's why the breakout time was important because we were trying to prevent the ingredients from being prepared because we knew that the weaponization part would not be done in a visible way. And so then on some levels, Donald Trump right that the only way to stop Iran from going nuclear is to attack first the 12-day bombing that we saw some months ago and now what we're in? Or were these negotiations that were happening on and off most recently with Jared Kushner and Steve Woodcoff, could they have succeeded? Was there still a diplomatic path that was viable or was that over now? So look, Ezra, I've looked at some of the briefings that Jared Kushner and Steve Woodcoff have done since the end of the negotiations. And I've now concluded that these negotiations were always doomed to fail. They went in expecting not a complex technical deal, but a yes and no kind of answer from the Iranians. I was shocked that, you know, Steve Woodcoff was surprised that the Iranians were able to manufacture their own centrifuges. And he describes one of Iran's advanced centrifuges, the IR-6 model, which is a pretty powerful centrifuge, as probably the most powerful centrifuge in the world, which is not true. So their technical understanding was never really there. The patience to find solutions that would be mutually tolerable and presentable was never really there. They often didn't take even experts with them to these negotiations. So they were not serious. They were not professional. And it was not going to work unless and until Iran was willing to basically capitulate. And that was never on the books. So in retrospect, I think that these negotiations could have never worked. But let me ask a counterfactual question, which is, what if the Trump administration had sent more serious negotiators? What if instead of Trump's real estate buddy and his son-in-law, he had sent, you know, under Marco Rubio, the State Department does have a lot of expertise. There are people there. They could have sent a special envoy who had, you know, more experience with this question. Would the Iranians have been open to that? Do you think there was openness on the Iranian side? Or do you think, in addition to the Trump side not being that serious about negotiations, that the Iranians at this point weren't that serious? I mean, they'd watched the Trump administration tear up a diplomatic agreement they had made with the Obama administration. They were now under tremendous pressure from Israel and the United States. You know, maybe they were biding for time, you know, at the same time that they would then eventually one day pop up and say, well, the negotiations failed and we have a weapon now. That was certainly Israel's view on what would happen. Well, I do believe that the Iranians were actually desperate for a deal. And I base that, again, based on experiences I've had with this process. It's been very rare, and you can ask any European or other negotiator who has been involved in this process, for the Iranians to come up with their own initiatives. They often prefer to react to other people's ideas. And yet in these negotiations, they were coming up with one working paper after another, putting ideas on the table in the hope that it would work. I do believe that they were willing to give President Trump way more than they gave President Obama. Maybe not last year, but certainly this year. And he could have gotten a better nuclear deal if he wanted to. But again, it was not about marginal improvements. It was about Iran surrendering to America's terms. And from the Iranian regime's perspective, the only thing that was more perilous than suffering from a U.S. strike would have been surrendering to U.S. terms. Because again, all of this history of, you know, sort of the raison d'être of this regime, of safeguarding Iran's independence, of not being subjugated, especially by an American president. All of that would be undermined. And for a regime that in the process, in all these years, has also lost, you know, starting from that very high point of popularity at the beginning of the revolution, to a point that it now relies on maybe 5 to 10 percent of the Iranian society who constitute its core constituents. It cannot afford to alienate them because then it has nothing to stand on. And that's why it could not ever afford to capitulate to the United States. But if Trump wanted the better deal than what Obama got, that was certainly on the books. I think part of Trump's calculation, I mean, he said this explicitly, is that the Iranian regime was under tremendous pressure at home as well. It wasn't just Israel. It wasn't just America, although the sanctions from America were meaningful here. There were huge protests. The Iranian regime had killed thousands of Iranian protesters, you know, just in January. And there was a sense certainly in America that it was weak enough that if America pushed, if it bombed, if it began to destroy and degrade the regime's capacity to exert force, that there might be another revolution. Trump explicitly invited the Iranian people to rise up and take their government back. So what can be said right now of the relationship between the state and the society? You say this is a regime with only 5 to 10 percent support, you know, by this point. Now it's a regime that doesn't have much support and does not have the leadership it has had for some time. Is it weak? Will it crack? Is there some possibility of an Iranian revolution coming up from the ground? Well, so this is now an example of American miscalculation because it is true that the Iranian regime, especially with its recent act of massacre against its own people, created the kind of rupture that is really unrepairable. But nevertheless, it is a regime that is very entrenched and is also deeply avenged. You know, one has to understand that there are two elements that keep this regime in place. One is the fact that its political elite and security establishment don't see a plan B, don't see an exit ramp, don't see a day after for themselves. These are not the Shah's elite who had their villas in Côte d'Azur or in Swiss Alps or in Southern California. These people have nowhere to go. Second is that, you know, with bombs and missiles, of course, you can degrade military capabilities and kill political leaders, but you cannot manufacture a viable political alternative. And that alternative does not exist in Iran today. There is no opposition with a ground game, with organizational capacity. And so for these two reasons, regardless of how weak the Iranian regime is or how hated it is, it is very difficult to get rid of it, especially through the sole use of airpower without boots on the ground. Iran's strategy since the beginning of this assault has been to expand the war in both time and space so they cannot effectively strike Israel or the United States, but they can strike Bahrain. They can strike, you know, the UAE. They can strike into Dubai. So they are setting much of the Arab world on fire, which is, I think, destroying many of their relationships. And there seem to be some schisms in the regime around this. There was an apology from one leader, but they are continuing the missiles and the drones. How do you understand that strategy? What do they get out of that or not get out of that? Is it working for them? I mean, how would you assess where we are at this point? Look, I think the Iranian strategy can be summarized in this way, that they know that they're outgunned, but they think that they can outlast Israel and the United States. It is true that the U.S. and Israel, as the world's most powerful army and the region's most powerful military, have the upper hand in terms of inflicting pain on Iran. But the Iranians believe that they have a higher threshold for pain. The 12-day war last year, Iran lost about 1,000 of its citizens. And yet it portrayed that war as a victory because it survived. If there were 1,000 American or Israeli casualties, there's no way that this could be portrayed as a win. And this time, the Iranians, I think, based on the lessons of the 12-day war, decided to escalate in a horizontal manner and spread the pain. Spread the pain not just to the rest of the region, but to the global economy. That has resulted in energy prices shooting up. And this is only because the export of energy out of the region is disrupted now. If this crisis continues and production is also affected, either because countries would have to shut down production as storage spaces fill up or that they would have to, if production facilities are targeted and destroyed, and then you would have long-term shortages in the market. Definitely the price of oil will go above $200 a barrel and that will be an economic disaster for the world. And it's a policy that is also based on stretching out the timeline because, again, based on the 12-day war, they realized that there is another shortage, which is a shortage of interceptors to shoot down their ballistic missiles and drones. And so in the first few days of this war, they have tried to deplete the Gulf states' but I don't think that's really available. So all we are left with is either a rock post 91 or continuing this and ratcheting it up in ways that we haven't seen so far during this conflict in a way that would actually break the state. Of course, the U.S. has the power to do so. But then what that leaves behind is probably Libya post-Gaddafi's removal in which you would have the country breaking apart along ethno-sectarian fault lines or in between rival generals, similar to what is happening in Sudan right now. And that would be a disaster for the rest of the region and the world security as well. So all is left as some sort of a soft landing is a ceasefire now, followed by some more reasonable negotiation aimed at either a series of smaller deals that would be beneficial for both sides or an out-of-the-box idea in which political change is also put on the table. Because as much as that's hard to imagine at this moment, if the Iranian regime survives, it would have a real hard time governing. I mean, these people were really struggling to keep the lights on even prior to the war. And now with the cost of this conflict, it would be very difficult for them to govern. So survival is certainly victory from their perspective, but it's not enough for sustaining themselves. And that's when there will be potentially a chance for some sort of negotiations. But again, it would require a fundamentally different approach. The president Trump so far has demonstrated no sign that he has the appetite or the ability to pursue. And then there is another great power competition element here that Ezra, I will add to the table, which is if Iran survives this, you know, which is not a mean feat. I mean, it's a David Goliath kind of situation. And if they survive it, I think Russia and China will start looking at Iran in a different way. We know already Russia has been helping Iran and targeting U.S. assets in the region. We know China has been providing Iran with weapons and with financial support, but they haven't really gone the extra mile of trying to like go all in and supporting Iran as a shield against the United States and against U.S. domination of the Middle East, where hydrocarbon resources of the world are still the majority are located there and will be for the foreseeable future. That, too, is not necessarily a good outcome because it turns Iran into an arena of great power competition without the United States having any plan other than containment. And so you're saying that in much a way that the United States thinks one thing that has happened to Russia is it is now bogged down in Ukraine, that it could look to Russia and China like this is an opportunity to bog the United States down in an unending conflict that would distract us, that would take our missiles and our interceptors, that would spend down our capital. I mean, other Arab states are not happy about what is happening to them. That, you know, you don't have to have ground troops to be engaged in a quagmire of sorts. Precisely. And there is also another consideration here, which is that as much as the Arab Gulf states and Iran's neighbors are angry at Iran for firing at them, and they're also angry at the United States, by the way, for starting this. They're also worried about a region in which there is no power left to challenge Israel's ability to project its influence and power beyond its borders. They were against Iranian hegemony for sure, but they're also uncomfortable and against Israeli hegemony in the region. And they see the collapse of Iran as the last obstacle to that prospect. And this is also another thing that one has to consider about what comes next. America really seems to have entered into this without, forget an endgame, without actually a plan. The initial video invited the Iranian people to rise up. There's been some talk about arming Kurds to have a sort of ethnic insurgency. I think we do care if there's a civil war or an out-migration crisis that destabilizes nearby regimes. We do have relationships with these other Arab states that very much do not want that to happen. But I cannot actually for the life of me tell what Donald Trump thought would happen and what he now believes will happen. I couldn't agree more with the way you're reading it, Ezra. I think the U.S. followed Israel into this and was hoping that the day after would arrive very quickly and would magically work in a way that things would be better. The problem would solve itself. And hope is not a strategy. The U.S. does not have a strategy for the day after. And the game, I think, is very clear on the Israeli side. Whatever comes out of this, if Iran is weak and wounded but still standing, that's fine. There will be enough reason to mow the lawn again a few months down the road. If the regime collapses and the country descends into civil strife, that's also fine. It's too far away from Israel. Others would have to deal with the consequences of refugees or instability spilling over borders. If magically the Iranian monarchy is restored or Iran rejoins the Western orbit, well, so be it. Now, that's fine, too. Whatever outcome comes out of this, I think Israel is comfortable with. But the United States has not thought this through, is not aware of the kind of long tail of events that we started this conversation with, that how short-term victories, even if they are achievable, and at this point in the conflict, I'm not even sure of that, but even if they are achievable, sometimes come back to haunt you down the road. I think that is a place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first book I want to recommend is called The Persians, the Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Leon Jones. And this is a really interesting book because most of the stories that have been written or histories that have been written about ancient Persia have been based on Greek sources. But what this author has done is that he's actually gone to the Persian sources, and you see how the history recounted through the original references and Persian books is actually quite different than the way that the Greeks perceived Iran. And it helps you also understand that a lot of the problems that we're talking about, Ezra, in this episode are not new, that Iran has always been the other of the West, this bellwether state that the West has had difficulty understanding, whether they were Greeks or Romans or Ottomans and Europeans and so on. The second book is The Mantle of the Prophet, Religion and Politics in Iran by Roy Motahadeh, which also does something rare. It adds texture to the Iranian society and helps you understand the post-revolutionary Iran with all of its contradictions and societal trends and culture. And it really defies this caricature of things being black and white and how sometimes U.S. policy completely papers over all of these things. And that's why it results in the U.S. committing mistakes. And finally is a book that is not about Iran, but it kind of again brings, fits into this trend that these conflicts endure when every side clings to their own narrative, whether it's victimhood or virtue. It's called Tomorrow is Yesterday, Life, Death and Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine by Husan Agha and Rob Batty. And one thing I really appreciate about this book is that it helps you understand how, in complex situations like this, there's plenty of blame to go around, how tragedies that happen are not often the result of one side being evil or making a mistake, but that there is plenty of mistakes by everyone that leads to the kind of Gordian knots that we are unable to untie. Ali Vaj, thank you very much. Great pleasure. This episode of Ezra Conscious was produced by Jack McCormick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, Emma Keldak, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Marion Lozano and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samulsky and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.