How China Is Winning the Iran War | Jon Alterman

0:00Demetri Kofinas:What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is John Alterman, Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he previously led the Middle East program for more than two decades. John has also served as a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and was a legislative aide to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where he was responsible for foreign policy and defense.

0:43Demetri Kofinas:John and I spend the first hour of our conversation examining why the Islamic Republic of Iran has refused to capitulate in its negotiations with the United States to end a war that has been devastating to its economy and which has resulted in the systematic targeting and deaths of a broad swath of its leadership structure. We discuss the constellation of tools that Tehran has cultivated to compensate for its conventional military weakness and which have been deployed to great effect in its war with the United States and Israel. And the mismatch between the speed of modern warfare and the speed with which political change is demanded in Washington that has frustrated the architects of this latest military campaign from the outset.

1:21Demetri Kofinas:We also discussed the institutional and personal factors that have driven Trump and his administration toward escalation, the consequences of deeper U.S.-Israeli military integration following October 7th, the implications for peace negotiations of an Iranian political economy whose survival is bound up with its pariah status, and what a viable diplomatic off-ramp might look like for Tehran, Washington, Tel Aviv, and other countries that have a vested interest in how this war turns out. The second hour is devoted to a discussion about how Moscow and Beijing are already positioning themselves to exploit the war, the structural challenges that may render China less ascendant than the consensus narrative suggests, and the rupture in transatlantic and U.S.-Canada relations that John believes will leave permanent scars, regardless of who occupies the White House at the end of Trump's second term.

2:11Demetri Kofinas:We also discussed the implications for the Gulf in light of the UAE's announced departure from OPEC, the deepening Saudi-Emirati rivalry, the durability of the exit narrative that has flourished among a new class of transnational elites in this more volatile global security environment, and what the war between the US, Israel, and Iran, and other recent conflicts have taught us about the future of warfare, and what a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and China might actually look like. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now.

2:53Demetri Kofinas:If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q &A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly timely and deeply illuminating conversation with my guest, John Alterman.

3:32Demetri Kofinas:John Alterman, welcome to Hidden Forces. It's good to be with you. It's great having you on, John. You are, I guess you could be described as a veteran of the foreign policy and national security space. Is that fair? Some might say that. Battle scarred, you could say as well. So you're currently the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at CSIS. And before that, you led their Middle East program for more than 20 years. You were also Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. You were a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. And you were also, among other things, the legislative aide to the famous Senator from New York, Daniel Moynihan, where you were responsible for foreign policy and defense.

4:14Demetri Kofinas:How did you become interested in issues of foreign affairs and national security to begin with? What was the path that led you to want to have this career? When I was an undergraduate, I was a public policy major. It was in the waning days of the Cold War. It seemed interesting and important. I had some remarkable opportunities. I had an internship in the State Department between my junior and senior years of college. After college, I got the job on Capitol Hill and working for Senator Moynihan, who was not only a remarkable legislator, but also a thinker about foreign policy and defense. It was just a remarkable experience.

4:53I went to graduate school and bounced around in the space a little bit more, was a historian. So I looked at how people dealt with issues in the past when they were still emerging and got used to the idea of when you're living through it, it's a lot more uncertain than when you're looking back and tried to capture some of that uncertainty and stayed in it. There's a very fine line between a groove and a rut. And I kept doing what I was interested in. Before you know it, nobody will hire you to do anything else.

5:23Demetri Kofinas:Well, I can't say we've hired you, John, but we're certainly going to put your experience and the proficiency you've built up over a lifetime working in foreign policy to good use today. You and I are recording this conversation officially two months from the date on which Operation Epic Fury began. A few days before that, a few days before February 28th, you were quoted by ABC News as saying that we were, quote, on the brink of what is likely to be an administration defining confrontation with Iran, and that the president was unlikely to come away with an easy and clean win. And in the months prior to that, you spoke very presently, I should say, about what the challenges and impediments to victory would be and why this was an unadvisable course of action.

6:12Demetri Kofinas:What was it that you saw that others missed, especially policymakers and key decision makers within the administration, do you think? First, it's nice to cherry pick all the good things. I've said things that haven't turned out to be true as well, but it felt to me like the administration was underestimating the Iranian side, not so much their strength, but their grit, their determination, their range of tools that they have. Iran has always known that it was weaker than the United States. It's never contested that. but it's developed for almost a half century a whole set of tools intended to compensate for its weakness has no intention of fighting the u.s militarily military to military because the way that would play out is exactly the way it's played out they knew they'd lose but they have other tools tools that are harder to frustrate and shutting the strait of hormuz is one of them not the most obvious certainly but one of them and it seemed to me that that the idea that they would just fold because they would see that we have superior strength and they just give in never seemed right to me the administration you know as the same negotiators doing palestinian israeli issues and ukraine and iran sometimes all in the same day And I just don't think that's a sustainable pattern because for all these parties, the issues being negotiated are existential issues.

7:48They're really life and death. The consequences affect not only the decision makers, but their children and grandchildren. And the idea that they're just going to fold and move on, I guess, isn't the way most people live their lives. It might be the way negotiators want to live their lives, but the negotiators on the other side aren't going to. And it seemed to me that this was just going to be much more complicated than people wanted it to be.

8:18Demetri Kofinas:Well, how would you say that events have conformed with your pre-existing expectations? And what, if anything, has surprised you about how things have played out in the last two months? I think the Iranians didn't fold. and I think it was clear the Iranians weren't going to quickly fold. I never thought that this decapitation strategy, which was really the principal idea is that if you take out the entire leadership cadre, something, by the way, we have never done in a confrontation with another country. But the theory of the case was we will just eliminate the leadership and the people will all go the right direction.

8:56It's a little bit like the theory that if we remove the dirty dozen from Iraq, from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, that everything in Iraq would be fine. But in some ways, it's an elaboration of that. And it didn't work out that way. I think it was, to me, unlikely it would work out that way. What I'm surprised by so far is, in some ways, the Iranians escalated as far as they could initially. And the idea of shutting the Shred of Hormuz was, to my mind, something they were likely to do later. They haven't done some of the things that I thought they might do. They have a number of cyber capabilities that, to my knowledge, they haven't used.

9:46The proxies have been relatively quiet and could certainly be more feisty. They have terrorist cells that are embedded in lots of places that could act against soft targets. We haven't seen many of those other things. I think the reality is the Iranians have lots of arrows still in their quiver, and they could go on with this for quite some time. And the bet of the Trump administration is that the Iranians feel more urgency than the United States does. The Iranian government's bet, as they look at political polling numbers in the United States, as they look at gasoline prices, as they look at the statements of political leaders around the world expressing frustration at the United States, is that they can wait out the United States too.

10:41And so each side thinks it has more time than the other. Each side thinks that the other feels an urgency that will make it make a better deal. So neither side really wants to make a deal now. They said, we'll get a better deal in a week or two or three or four than we do now. So they're trying to dig in. There are some indications that the Iranians are going to have an oil production problem because they don't have a place to store oil. Shutting off wells can potentially damage them. So there are some people who hope that that is going to create an urgency on the Iranian side. But I think as I read the body language of these guys, they've been waiting for this moment for almost 50 years.

11:30They've been thinking a lot about it. and I don't see them on the brink of caving.

11:36Demetri Kofinas:So I definitely want to dig into or ask you a series of questions to help myself and my audience understand the thinking in Washington that has led to this kind of, these set of expectations that seem to recur over time in our dealings with the Middle East, as well as the Iranian perspective, because you've been speaking and meeting with Iranian officials for decades and you know the greater Middle East very well. But you said something that makes me want to actually quote something else you said previously. So before the war, you said it was better to think of the Iranian, I'm paraphrasing now, you said it was better to think of the Iranian weapon, in other words, the nuclear option, so to speak, but in air quotes, not as the nuclear weapons program itself, but rather a constellation of tools of which the nuclear program is one, but so are its proxies, its ballistic missile program, and its capacity to manufacture and deploy cheap drones coupled with the lead.

12:26Demetri Kofinas:And this is, I think, is very well said and the most important, the Iranian leadership's willingness to endure pain. In other words, when the Iranians look at the prospect of a massive strike against their nation, their people, their infrastructure, they look at it as business as usual and they say, how do we look past this, find a way to endure through it and exhaust America's political will? Does this mean, this opens the door to a conversation about theory of mind here, because this seems to be, the Americans seem to go in with this perspective and the Trump administration certainly did that we have the best military in the world.

13:02Demetri Kofinas:This is like a recurring theme. We can bomb the crap out of your country and you'll eventually cry uncle. But if I were to take the logic of your statement, the conclusion seems to be that any effort at using overwhelming force to change behavior in any kind of attenuated timeframe would always be destined to fail, at least in this specific case, certainly in others, but in this specific case. Do I read you correctly? And is that the right conclusion to draw from what you've said in the past? Let me put it in a little bit different framing. We are getting better and better at destroying very specific things quickly and at will.

13:45And that's partly on the intelligence side and it's partly on the munition side. So we're developing more precise munitions. We can destroy individual rooms in buildings from far away. We have been gathering intelligence on targeting in Iran for a long period of time. And we came up with a very large target set. We've hit, We and the Israelis together have hit about 20 ,000 targets in Iran. That is hard to do. We did it in a relatively short period of time with relatively little collateral damage compared to previous wars. The question is, if the speed of war accelerates, do you also have an acceleration in the speed of politics?

14:37The goal of war is to either create a different political reality for the people of Iran, rise up against the government, or to get the government to make a decision that the U.S. wants the government, Israel wants the government to make. We're getting better at accelerating the military side of war. What can we do? What would accelerate the political side of war? I don't think we've thought about it. When I listened to General Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I think he's very focused on military actions, right? We can destroy this target. We can capture this whatever, right? I mean, it's not about the political effects.

15:26The political effects are somebody else's responsibility. And to me, one of the things that we are seeing in this war is you can accelerate and make more precise all of the military effects. But the real goal of war is the political effects. And we seem not to have either thought or discovered how to accelerate that side of it. So the point of war is to have a political impact, as I say, either with the current decision makers or future decision makers. We, for our own political reasons, want wars to be quick and decisive. But on the receiving end, you know, there's a way in which the faster they are, the more urgency we show to finish the war communicates to the adversary, we'll just wait them out.

16:24They've run through their targets. They can't sustain a war. So we'll just hang on. Now, you could argue that that's a crazy conclusion to draw after the U.S. was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. But I do think that we've seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now in Iran a sense that we can hang on and we need to hang on. It's existential and they can destroy what they want to destroy. and we will show grit and determination, resolve, and we'll come out the other end.

17:01Demetri Kofinas:So what explains this lack of patience, it seems to me? Because before Operation Epic Fury, it seems that the US and the Israelis were proceeding to sort of slowly dialing up the temperature. They were doing things to methodically degrade the Iranian leadership, the security apparatus, and they were also sowing confusion and paranoia within its ranks. and they had recently only a few months earlier seen these large protests. Again, the facts on the ground are somewhat murky, at least for me, but certainly they seem to be, quote, winning in a way that was escalatory and manageable. And then they kind of made this discontinuous decision to assassinate the country's leader, parts of his family, and really dial it up.

17:50Demetri Kofinas:Does that reflect a lack of patience? Does that reflect not only a lack of patience among the administration, but something more ingrained within Washington when it comes to wanting to see change, wanting to see it quickly? Or is it more just a mismatch between expectations about what's possible in Washington versus in the rest of the world? So I'll start off that I assume there's a lot I don't know about what we know about what happened when we worked with the Israelis to attack the nuclear facilities in June of last year and how the Iranians responded. But I think there was a sense, certainly on the Israeli side and probably also on the American side, that those attacks didn't really get to the core of the problem.

18:40That there was an opportunity, both because of the politics in Iran and some intelligence that the U.S. and Israel had, that there was an opportunity to just change the whole nature of the game. The Israelis, I think, have been more risk-accepting since October 7th. And Netanyahu, who traditionally was a very risk-averse figure, remember he spent five years deliberating over the negotiations to release Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal who was captured and brought into Gaza. Eventually, he agreed to a prisoner swap of more than 1 ,000 Palestinians for Gilad Shalit, including Yehich Asinwar. The man behind the October 7th attacks.

19:27By October 7th, and the former Hamas leader. Netanyahu was always a very deliberate and cautious politician. After October 7th, he took some remarkable gambles. He defied the Biden administration on issues like occupying Rafah and the Philadelphia corridor on the line with Egypt. He had that audacious Pager attack in Lebanon. He killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He killed Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran when he was there to attend President Raisi's funeral. Prime Minister Netanyahu, I think, was willing to roll the dice after October 7th. I think in President Trump, he saw somebody who was potentially willing to take risks.

20:22And I think President Trump saw somebody who was refreshingly bold when confronted with a whole bunch of bureaucrats who say, oh, well, it could be bad. It could be bad. You know, President Trump is somebody who went bankrupt six times. You know, failure is an option, I think. And so when you combine the sense that the Maduro capture was difficult, and they said it's going to be difficult, and went exceedingly well, I think the president partly felt, with my military, I can do anything. Partly he felt, I'm not going to go through my life being risk averse. and partly felt, you know, at the end of the first Trump administration, the president assassinated General Soleimani, which people said, oh, well, he was the head of the Quds Force, the sort of forward strike force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.

21:19People said, oh, it'll be a terrible response. There wasn't a terrible response. So I think the president partly felt calculated risk. We shouldn't be so risk averse. The Iranians are really bad.

21:30Demetri Kofinas:And that had worked in his favor up until now. Yeah. And the Israelis are gung-ho. We attacked the nuclear facilities in June and there wasn't really a blowback. So why are we being so cautious about this? And, you know, the answer is because when it becomes existential and it immediately became existential for the Iranians, once you kill the entire leadership cadre, right, it's very clear this is existential. And so they said, okay, if you're going to go to the limit, we'll go to the limit. And so rather than a cautious calibrated attack, which we've seen from the Iranians so far, they said, we're going to pull out a bunch of stops and see what happens.

22:11So one of the questions I wanted to ask you was how much of this or the calculus that went into

22:18Demetri Kofinas:or the impetus that drove this war, how much of this was institutional muscle memory? how much of it was special interests and how much of it was something else. And among special interests, there is the US relationship with Israel. You've written about how the security ties between the IDF and the US and Israeli intelligence have grown deeper in recent years, and that this has played an important role. How important is this role really in explaining where we find ourselves today? So one of the things that happened in the first Trump administration is the way the U.S. military is organized overseas.

22:54We have these regional combatant commanders who play the role partly of soldiers and partly of diplomats working with foreign militaries. And for a whole set of reasons, Israel was never in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. Israel has very sophisticated military. it was always connected to the Europeans and the Israeli military can engage very well with the Europeans as a peer. But that also meant that as the Israelis were preoccupied with Iran, the U.S. military guys they were most connected with were less preoccupied with Iran. And the folks who were preoccupied with Iran were dealing with Arab governments, but not dealing with the Israelis.

23:44The Trump administration, the first Trump administration said, well, that's crazy. The Israelis and the Arabs have the same threat perceptions. They share interests. One of the ways to build this Abraham Accords framework and cooperation is to bring the Arabs and the Israelis together on their regional threat perceptions and regional efforts to fight threats. And that means bringing Israel into the U.S. Central Command. What it also meant was that it brought the Israelis and the Americans together. And I think what you saw over the last year and more is as the United States military was dealing with threats coming out of Iran, it was working more and more and more closely with Israelis who were preoccupied with exactly the same things.

24:40Israeli intelligence, military intelligence, Israeli capabilities. That's partly led to the joint U.S.-Israeli effort to destroy the Iranian nuclear capability last summer, and it laid the groundwork for the current war. Now, I don't think there's a single reason. I don't think you can say, well, the Israelis suck the U.S. into this war, although certainly that was an element that the prime minister made a case. And I'm told the prime minister timed his visit at a time when Vice President Vance was out of town. So he was able to get to the president and plant this idea and get the go ahead. But it was, you know, partly Iranian behavior, partly what Arab governments were saying about the Iranians and the threat they feel from Iranians.

25:29I'm sure partly about from information about the Iranian nuclear program, some of which we get independently, some of which we get from governments like Israel and understand from international agencies. I think the Iranians' goal is to be talking to the Americans about the nuclear program. I think the Iranians have often seen the nuclear program as almost like one of those old dial thermostats that you can sort of tweak, turn up the temperature, turn down the temperature. If you're talking to the Americans about the nuclear program, you can make concessions and get things. You can show resolve.

26:11It gives you a way to engage or disengage with the United States at will. And I think the Iranians like that. The worst thing is if you're isolated and sanctioned and sort of shriveling off in a corner, that's really bad. But the nuclear program gives you a way to talk about whatever you want to talk about whenever you want to talk about it and to change the tone of the conversation and find a way to advance your interests. There are a lot of people in the U.S. government who say, why are we still playing this game with them? They should give up the nuclear program, right? It's clearly a threat and we should destroy it if they won't give it up.

26:52But why are we continuing to play this game?

26:55Demetri Kofinas:So this is really great. Can you flesh this out a bit? Because this is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, you're saying that the Iranians maintain the nuclear program because it gives them relevancy, it gives them a voice, it gives them a seat at the table, because they're afraid without it, they'll become isolated. But at the same time, the argument from the administration is the reason we're sanctioning you, the reason we are isolating you is because of your nuclear program. So help me flesh that out for me and then use this as an opportunity to help us understand better the needs and the imperatives and constraints of the Iranian leadership, and what would ultimately be a viable outcome for them?

27:31Demetri Kofinas:What would success look like in the course of their negotiations with the US pre and post February 28th? It's a really interesting and important question. I think the fundamental starting point of the Iranian leadership that everybody is unified on, whether you consider them to be on the right or moderates or whatever, the point they all agree on is the United States is hostile to Iran and is trying to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic. That's the starting point. I don't think there's anybody in the Iranian leadership who does not feel that that's one of the governing realities.