Iran's New Grand Strategy | Vali Nasr

16:03Vali Nasr:I mean, for a very long time, it's been very easy to dismiss the Islamic Republic by saying, it's all about Islamic ideology. They read the Quran and they want to attack the West. Or that these are mullahs, they belong to the 7th century, they don't understand anything about the modern world, or that they just want to destroy the West, the kinds of things that we hear. But in reality, for the better or for the worse, the Islamic Republic has a very deeply entrenched sense of national security. What is national security? What is national interest? It's rooted in the reading of Iranian history. It taps into the way in which Iranians themselves understand their history.

16:44Vali Nasr:but also it's very much based on the fear that they have of the United States or Israel essentially undoing them. Now, they are partly responsible for the very anxieties that they face because they have been in confrontation with the Indians. But nevertheless, it's the dynamics of this confrontation that accounts for their behavior rather than some ideological dogma that they are reading in the religious text that drives into that. So my argument is that it is self-defeating for the West or the United States to reduce your adversary into a comfortable two-dimensional chivalent rather than try to understand as a chess player, how does Iran see the board?

17:33Vali Nasr:And therefore, why does it move the way it does? If we actually thought like this, we wouldn't have been caught by surprise the way Iran behaved in this war with the United States.

17:43Demetri Kofinas:So I think most Americans don't know anything about Iranian history, but whatever they do know is likely confined to the last 50 years. How important is it to understand Iran's pre-revolutionary history if we want to understand the lessons and beliefs about the world that have shaped it and that have shaped its leadership and government?

18:02Vali Nasr:So the last 50 years obviously loom very large, but Iran's anxieties, I believe, go farther back. I mean, first of all, since 1500, when Iran in this current shape came about, it is alone in the region, in a region that others are not alone. It's one thing to be alone in a region where everybody's alone, as opposed to a region in which you are alone. So Iran language is Persian. The cultural identity is Persian. And they are surrounded by either Arabs, which are a family of 22 countries, which band together. And at the same time, as they see themselves as nation states, they see themselves as a bloc.

18:46Vali Nasr:They have an Arab league. They have Arab soccer tournaments. They have common language, et cetera, right? To which the others are not equally welcome. And then there are Turks all around Iran who also have an identity that is different from Persian. So Iranians are unique in the region. They also are followers of Shia Islam, which is one branch of Islam, whereas the majority or the prevalent Muslims in the Middle East are Sunni Muslims. That's both Arabs and Turks. So both by virtue of their faith and their language, the Iranians have been alone. And this basically has loomed large over Iran's strategic thinking.

19:28And then for the past 200, 250 years, Iran has been weak and has barely survived by the skin

19:36Vali Nasr:of its teeth. During the era of imperialism in the 19th century, Iran, along with Thailand, was perhaps the only Asians that was not actually directly colonized by Europeans. But at the same time, it was deeply penetrated by them. They abused power, they took national resources, they subjected Iran to unfair treaties. And Iran came out of the 19th century barely surviving, but with acute sense of humiliation and weakness. And the Pahlavi period from 1921 onwards, after World War I, put its shoulder to restoring the Iranian state and giving the country integrity. But that sort of shadow of the 19th century was never lifted.

20:27Vali Nasr:And then in the 1950s, the big event that concerns the U.S. is that there was a military coup in Iran that removed a popular prime minister who had nationalized Iran's oil industry. Historically, many believe that this coup was somehow engineered directly in London or Washington. I think it's a lot more complicated that there were also many Iranians for their own reasons who wanted to remove the prime minister. But the coup did get the backing of Americans and the British. Those who carried the Iranian revolution are particularly of the view that the coup was an American project. And so in their eyes, Iran, after 1953, was not an independent country.

21:13Vali Nasr:That imperialism had once again intervened in Iran to shape its destiny. And so the revolution in 1979 happens against this background. And one argument I make in the book is that one of the things the revolution is most proud of and sees as its greatest accomplishment is to give Iran for the first time independence and strength after several decades, after over two centuries. About six months ago, I think, Iran's former foreign minister told the Foreign Policy magazine in an interview that the Islamic Republic is the first government in Iran in over 250 years to give Iran genuine independence.

22:00Vali Nasr:And even this war is happening. As we're witnessing in Iran, millions of people go to the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader. The current leadership of Iran is saying that the war with the United States and its outcome, and forcing President Trump into a memorandum of understanding and backing off a superpower along with its main ally, which is the biggest military in the Middle East is a feat that Iran has not accomplished since the medieval period. So the meaning of even this war against that history is that we have a 250-year history of abuse, of imperial power, superpowers, beating Iran down, taking its territory, imposing unfair treaties on it.

22:49Vali Nasr:And here is the Islamic Republic standing tall and pushing back against this. Now, when you look at this, you see this is not about Islam. This is not about the Quran. This is actually about a deeply entrenched sense of historical grievance that has been animating the Islamic Republic. And the Islamic Republic now actually is trying to seek legitimacy, not in religion, but actually in reversing a verdict that has been dominant in Iran's history. Now, I'm not saying that the language of Islamic Republic is not Islamic, that the leaders are not clerics. But to read this too narrowly, that this is all about Islam, the holy book, and 7th century thinking about theology, misses the point.

23:43Vali Nasr:Iran is a highly nationalistic country with a very bruised ego and a sense of both vulnerability and historical grievance. And the Islamic Republic from the get-go in 1979, even the way they took hostages, American diplomats hostage, has been trying to assert that under its leadership, Iran is no longer weak, is no longer subservient. It's standing up to imperial powers and is not going to be subjugated by the United States. That was extremely helpful.

24:16Demetri Kofinas:I might have a few more, one or two more questions about the Iranian psyche. But before I ask those, let's sit a bit longer here on the 1953 coup. Now, the prime minister at this time was Mohammed Mozadek and the CIA MI6 operation was Operation Ajax. This is one of those stories that is part of the progressive anti-war pacifist lore. and the way that I learned it was that Mozadique wanted to nationalize Iranian oil. He wanted to institute democracy and we weren't okay with that. So we sent Kermit Roosevelt, TDR's grandson, as part of this intelligence operation to overthrow Mozadique and institute the Shah so that we could control the oil.

25:02Demetri Kofinas:And in your book, you argue that it wasn't so much about whether Iran should seek to nationalize its oil industry or become more democratic, because certainly on the nationalization front, that was something that the Shah was also interested in doing, but rather that it was really about what constituted Iran's principal security threat. Was it the Soviet Union and Soviet communism, or was it British imperialism? And what was a convincing, compelling way to address that threat and to sort of thread the needle between contact and integration with the West and confrontation with the Soviet Union.

25:40Demetri Kofinas:Do I have that right? And why is that distinction so important for us to understand if we want to understand Iranian motivations?

25:48Vali Nasr:It's not only important for us to understand, it's also important for Iranians to understand. Let me put it this way. The picture that you drew is by and large the picture that has dominated understanding of 1953. It's definitely the picture that dominated Iran and the United States in 1979. I mean, when the hostages were taken at the American embassy and all three American television channels were broadcasting every night from Iran, they nonstop were talking about this grievance about 1950. There is no doubt that the British wanted to defeat Mossadegh, just like later on they wanted to defeat Nasser and the Swiss crisis, or any other upstart third world leader who dared to demand a fair compensation for their resources or wanted to nationalize their resources.

26:41Vali Nasr:They wouldn't negotiate with Mossadegh, and they wanted to persuade Washington to remove it. As soon as the Eisenhower administration replaced the Truman administration, the Republicans were much more amenable to removing Mossadegh. And yes, they sent Kermit Roosevelt and they were British spies. But they wouldn't have succeeded if there was not actually a lot of Iranians who also had begun to develop their own sets of issues with Mossadegh. Nobody in Iran liked the British. Nobody in Iran thought that the oil deal with them was fair. In fact, the Shah's father had been removed at the beginning of World War II by the British and ignibly sent into exile in South Africa where he died.

27:28Vali Nasr:And the Shah had a dislike for him. But the Shah's formative experience as a young king was when the Soviet Union occupied northern Iran and would not leave northern Iran. And it took the Truman Doctrine and President Truman to bully Stalin to leave northern Iran. And so for him, British imperialism was a lesser threat to Iran than this big, voracious bear sitting on Iran's borders. And the lesson the Shah took from 1946 was that the only thing that saved Iran from being broken up and absorbed by the Soviet Union, much like what Russia is doing to Ukraine today, was actually the United States of America and Western Europe.

28:19Vali Nasr:And Iran could not afford to pick a fight with them. Mossadegh, on the other hand, dismissed the Soviet threat. He thought that Great Britain was the worst thing ever created, that imperialism was a true bane and a threat to Iran, and that he can handle communism. Now, increasingly, as Mossad-ebbukh confronted Britain and the US, more and more Iranians became worried that he was being too naive, that he basically was going to be a handmaiden for a communist takeover of Iran. It's not that they disagreed with him on principle that this oil deal is unfair, that oil belongs to Iran. They rather were extremely worried that he, in a Don Quixote way, is charging the windmill without a plan.

29:13Vali Nasr:And if the British put sanctions on Iran, which they did, if the British invaded southern Iran, if the United States and Britain became alienated from Iran, the Soviets would be back. So the Iranian military, and ironically, the senior most clerics in Iran at the time, all gave fatwas in support of the Shah, even though they had many issues with them. And also another important thing is that the Shah then was not a dictator. He was a constitutional monarch. And when Mossadegh began to tangle with them and the Shah left Iran in a huff into exile, that actually damaged Mossadegh because the Shah was popular then.

29:54Vali Nasr:The fact that he was unpopular in 1979 does not mean that he was unpopular in 1953. But these forces began to plan for removing Mossad. And in the end, it was not the CIA and MI6 creating the coup so much as they rode the tide that was being created by these forces inside Iran. But, you know, history is ultimately sometimes at the popular level is understood the way it's taught, which is the opposition in Iran over the years increasingly began to say that this was a CIA. Iranians all were pro-Musad there. Nobody disliked it. It was kind of like a historical amnesia. And on the other hand, CIA took a great benefit from claiming this coup because it would win much bigger budget battles in Washington.

30:52Vali Nasr:Remember the author Scott Lee Anderson in a book about the history of CIA says when the coup happened, they asked Kermit Roosevelt to come to the Oval Office and tell President Eisenhower what happened. Now, from historical documents that have now been released, we know that when the coup was happening, Kermit Roosevelt had no idea. He was having strawberry daiquiris next to the pool at the American embassy because the coup that he thought he was generating had failed three days earlier. But he comes into the Oval Office and he starts telling these James Bond-like tall tales to President Eisenhower, who's mesmerized.

31:30Vali Nasr:And Anderson says, as John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles are listening to this, wheels begin to turn in their head that, hey, wait a minute, using the CIA for dealing with Soviet threat, it's so much cheaper and more effective than putting billions of dollars into the pentagon. Especially Alan Dulles in the CIA saw an opportunity that by claiming the 1953 coup as being an entirety, a successful mission by the United States, that you basically could increase the budget of CIA and make it the forefront force in the fight against communism. It's almost like the Venezuela issue with Trump, right? This happened so easily in Iran, and CIA never came and said it happened so easily because Mossadegh was facing real problems at home, because the senior ayatollahs had turned on him, because the military had turned on him, because there was a political class that he had alienated, because a chunk of his own party actually had left him.

32:39Vali Nasr:None of these were told by the CIA. The CIA basically claimed that it carried out Operation Ajax. But I mean, there's two ways of looking at this. One is, as historians, ends, where does things lie? The other is that historical memory that led to the revolution in Iran had a particular reading of that event. Now, my point in the book is that this fight did not start between the Shah and Mossad over democracy and dictatorship. It was not a domestic issue. It was a fight over who constituted this most significant strategic risk to Iran. And the Shah, at a fundamental level, believed that Mossadegh did not understand the Soviet threat, and the path that it was going down was actually putting Iran's existence at risk.

33:32Vali Nasr:Mossadegh, on the other hand, thought that the Shah was exaggerating the communist threat, and Iran should be engaged in this anti-imperialist fight.

33:41Demetri Kofinas:By the way, echoes of the politics of any country that was enmeshed in the Cold War. Obviously, it led to eventually a coup in Iran and the repercussions were more significant for the domestic population. But we've had similar discussions across both party lines in the United States going back to the very beginning of the Cold War. Of course, this was central to the Kennedy election, right? Whether there was a missile gap or not. That's right. So as you've already stated, this narrative served the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution. How central is the broader war, this broader war between Iran and the West to the self-concept of the Islamic Republic and to the national narrative today?

34:22Vali Nasr:Well, the people who carried out the revolution of 1979, all of whom were not religious, there were also Marxist, Leninists, and liberal Democrats, they may have had very different conceptions at that point in time about what the shape of the government of Iran would be in the future. And each of them thought that the other ones would be basically thrown by the wayside once the Shah's got. But one issue they all agreed on was this reading of the 1953 coup, that the Shah's government was fundamentally illegitimate because it was installed in power by a foreign government, right? Now, Ayatollah Khomeini firmly believed in this.

35:08Vali Nasr:He thought that in 1953, this American imperialist came to Iran and put him in place Why did they do that? Because they wanted to subjugate Iran. So they saw the Shah essentially as a puppet, as an agent of imperialism. And in the environment of post-Vietnam era, where these kinds of ideas about American imperialism was popular on the universities and among intellectuals in the West, you could go to Berkeley. And the Iranian students, the younger generation, were also exposed to these dark views of American imperialism in universities in Europe and the United States. And so you had a sort of consensus among those who carried the revolution that the U.S.

35:58Vali Nasr:had been a force for evil in Iran. It had not only changed the regime, but it was then responsible for all the excesses of that regime. And that Iran had not been an independent country between 1953 and 1917. Now, this is a highly exaggerated view of history, but it's the one that won Iran in 1979.

36:22Demetri Kofinas:You know, my parents were born and lived in Greece up until their early 20s. They were in university during the time of the military junta, the regime of Papadopoulos and the colonels who had the support of the United States. And they came to America with many of the same narratives about the machinations of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration. and similarly my in-laws who grew up in Argentina learned many of those same lessons. And while both of those countries endured military juntas with the support of the United States, and of course Latin American countries endured many more intrusions onto their sovereignties, those national experiences were channeled into a much broader narrative that became popular within the international leftist movement that portrayed America as this cynical neocolonial power that use the threat of Soviet communism to meddle in the domestic politics of other countries.

37:15Demetri Kofinas:And you cite numerous examples in your book where Iran's leadership, having internalized the same narrative of American clandestine preponderance and political meddling, consistently seems to draw the opposite conclusion from events that many of the Western observers do. For example, you cite the September 2022 protests over the death of Masa Amini or the more recent October 7th attacks. Can you elaborate on how the Islamic Republic's leadership interprets these events and why that's important to understand?

37:47Vali Nasr:Well, sometimes these are just purely rhetoric and sometimes there's actually a logic behind it. I mean, in the way in which the Islamic Republic has seen foreign hand behind every uprising and protest in Iran is not that different from Vladimir Putin thinking all velvet revolutions are the work of CIA, or Rajab Tayyip Erdogan blaming every protest in Turkey to be somehow a foreign attempt to overthrow or subjugate the country. Every protest in the Arab world, even in countries that are close allies in the United States, are interpreted as American interference in domestic politics. So in that sense, the Islamic

38:29Demetri Kofinas:Republic is not very different.

38:32Vali Nasr:But on the other hand, the Islamic Republic also for a very long time came to see that the new middle class that has begun to emerge in Iran and wants change to be both a natural ally of the US, kind of like wanting to go back to the pre-revolutionary relationship with the West, but at the same time being encouraged by the West. So yes, they're paranoid, but there is some grounds in their paranoia. For instance, now that the war has happened, it's now become very evident, for instance, how much money has gone into exile television stations operating out of London, beaming into Iran, mostly very negative about the Islamic Republic.

39:17Vali Nasr:But at some level, it's also a facet of a country which is in every sense is organized around a singular threat that it's facing from the outside, which is from the United States. So domestic protesters are either put up to it by the United States, or they are haplessly and unconsciously helping the American cause by weakening the Islamic Republic, particularly when the protesters are protesting policies that are directly associated with Iran's foreign policy, like supporting for Hezbollah or Hamas, et cetera. The attack of October 7th and what followed in the Gaza war is a bit more complex because I think the debates among the actual decision makers was much more sophisticated and nuanced.

40:09Vali Nasr:But the way that it was then communicated to broader constituencies was designed to say that Iran alone is the one who supports the organizations that are standing up to Israel and is standing up for Palestinian rights. And therefore, the fact that Israel is lashing out against Hamas, is going after Hezbollah, is going after Iran, is proof that Israel sees Iran and its proxies as genuine threats to Israel. So in the sense of Iran taking the fight to Israel, the rest of the Arab world has basically abdicated. Iran alone is the one that is carrying this fight. What they don't say is that it also then increases certain risks to Iran because then US and Israel actually went after Iran in a way that actually escalated a national security threat for Iran.

41:04Demetri Kofinas:So there's a working assumption in Washington that if we besiege our adversaries long enough through the ratcheting up of sanctions, targeted assassinations of their leaders, as has been the case in Iran, and occasional bombing of their infrastructure, that they will eventually exhaust themselves and seek some kind of peaceful accommodation. I mean, this remains the consensus view, the operating consensus view in Washington. But what you seem to imply in the book is that it is the United States that seems to be showing signs of imperial exhaustion. Do I have that right? And can you elaborate on that argument?

41:39Right.

41:40Vali Nasr:So what you described is actually absolutely correct. Even as you and I are speaking, there is a lot of pressure in Washington on President Trump that you need to escalate pressure on Iran to exactly exhaust it, force it to collapse. What we are seeing is a much more heightened version of the containment of the Soviet Union, the US put in place after the famous Mr. X article in Foreign Affairs.

42:07Demetri Kofinas:George Kennan sources of Soviet funding. That's right.

42:10Vali Nasr:That's right. So at that point in time, economic sanctions was not a part of it. Now, economic sanctions are part of it. At that point in time, assassination was not part of it. Now it is. But the idea is that you don't invade a country. What you do is to put so much pressure on it that ultimately it collapses. Now, with the case of Iran, this is running to a counter-Iranist -

42:33Demetri Kofinas:By the way, it doesn't matter if that hardly ever works.

42:36Vali Nasr:You're absolutely right. It doesn't work for other reasons as well, because it actually brings a much harder, harsher, security-conscious leadership to the court. The US read into the weakening of the Saddam regime that it works. But I agree with you, it's become a lazy...

42:52Demetri Kofinas:Except it didn't work because we had to invade Iraq, so it didn't actually work.

42:56Vali Nasr:No, you're correct. It goes to not objective analysis, but what you want to read, right? The United States has now become enamored with sanctions and this kind of pressure because it doesn't want to go to war and it doesn't want to do nothing. So it basically claims that these strategies are working. Well, in fact, they're actually not working. But in the case of Iran, the Iranians basically have followed their own strategy, which comes out of a guerrilla war mentality, which came out of Vietnam, came out of experiences of guerrilla movement, which is you keep harassing the US and you defeat it by a thousand cuts.

43:37Vali Nasr:that the United States ultimately will exhaust itself in sort of continuous guerrilla warfare, largely because the United States in the Middle East is not defending its own territory. The stakes are not really as high as it often claims it to be. Like even in this most recent war, it really, according to its own declaration, went to war at the behest of Israel, right? Not on his own, or he went to war thinking that it's going to be a three-day event. But as Iran basically is defending its territory, it's an existential fight for it. And the calculation is that you could get to a place, which is what Henry Kissinger said about the Viet Cong, that the guerrilla wins by not losing, and the larger military loses by not winning.

44:26Vali Nasr:And ultimately, defeating a guerrilla army is extremely difficult. and we saw the US give up in Afghanistan after 20 years. So Iran is basically waging a guerrilla war at a regional level against the United States with the goal of exhausting the US. So the American strategy of containing Iran has run head on into Iranian strategy of waging guerrilla warfare against the United States.

44:53Demetri Kofinas:And it's a lot easier not to lose than it is to win because winning looks very specific, whereas not losing can come in many, many different tastes and flavors. That's right. So one more question for you before we move into the second hour. I haven't really established or asked you to establish why it's important whether or not Iran's foreign policy is motivated by ideology or rational national interest. So can you lay that out for me? Why is that an important distinction for policymakers and the public to understand? And how does it inform the correct policy for the United States, for Israel, and for Western countries?

45:30Vali Nasr:I mean, there's two ways. Sometimes you prefer to call someone else's policy as ideology because it's an easier way to cast them as unreasonable, and the only way you can confront them is by aggression. But in reality, if a state or a movement is guided by ideology, it's kind of like, let's say, a movement that believes in messianism, then it's not guided by rational calculation towards the objective, right? You cannot change its mind about things. But if it's not guided by ideology, it's guided by decision goals and decision making we can understand, then we can actually confront it. It's like we look at Russia today and say, yes, its intentions towards Ukraine are evil, are bad, should not stand, but we don't attribute it to some kind of a millenarian ideology.

46:25Vali Nasr:It's a kind of behavior that we've seen in history before, that Putin wants land or is calculating this is how he's going to get it. Why it's important is because ultimately, the United States is always in a game of chess with its adversaries. And it's important that it recognizes that the person or the country that is sitting across the table is playing chess.

46:49Demetri Kofinas:And doesn't have a suicide vest strapped to its chest. Exactly.

46:52Vali Nasr:And if you saw it that way, and even if it uses what you call a suicide vest, nevertheless, there is a method to the madness if you want. Because the only way that you can defeat it is essentially by understanding that it is making a calculation. So you can change this calculation by changing the assumptions that are in front of them. For a very long time, we have not assumed that the Iranians are playing chess. That's not what American presidents tell American people, that these are unreasonable ideologues, religious ideologues.

47:28Demetri Kofinas:Well, and the one obvious place where that is especially material is in the nuclear negotiations. Because if you think your counterparty is a suicide bomber, then of course, you're going to stop at nothing to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. Whereas if you view their desire to acquire a nuke or their resistance to terminating their nuclear program as a bargaining chip within a larger negotiation or something that they're doing to achieve deterrence because they're afraid of you, then you come to a very different set of conclusions about what you're willing to tolerate and also what the larger objective is to the negotiations and what you can get out of them in the first place.

48:07Demetri Kofinas:So I'm going to move us to the second hour, Vali. There are a number of things that I'd like to ask you about in that part of our conversation. One thing that I would like to clarify from the start is how the Iran-Iraq war changed the country and what lessons it imparted on today's leaders who came of age during the war and for whom it was the formative experience of their political lives, because these are the people that now wield power in today's Iran. I also want to revisit the nuclear negotiations. We mentioned them briefly just now, as well as Iran's policy of forward defense and the maximum pressure campaign and how it changed the country's economy, its power structure, and its politics.

48:47Demetri Kofinas:And lastly, I'd love to know what the most likely outcomes are here that you foresee, whether a grand bargain of some sort is possible, the probabilities you'd assigned to that happening, and what the default scenario looks like for Iran and the region if the status quo persists for the foreseeable future. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Vali, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join one of our three content tiers.

49:26Demetri Kofinas:All subscribers get access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Vali, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page.

50:01Demetri Kofinas:Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. You