Another Iran War? with Professor Vali Nasr (Revisiting Iran 101)

0:00If a person says Iran instead of Iran, do you feel like they're more likely to want to wage war? I actually think they're asking a question. When you say Iran, I say where to? I love it. Yes, but actually if they combine Iran with going to war, that's actually most offensive. Because I say if you want to go to war with the country, at least bother learning the name of it.

0:25I'm Naeema Raza. This is Smart Girl Dumb Questions. and with everything going on in Iran right now, I wanted to bring you a bit of an Iran 101. This was taped with Middle East expert Vali Nasser, who's a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS. He was also a former dean there, as well as a former Obama State Department advisor. Now, very importantly, this conversation was taped in June 2025. A lot has happened since. But because it was taped at the end of that 12-day war between Israel and Iran last summer, there's a lot that actually holds up even better posts because I got to ask him all those dumb questions we have at dinner parties, but instead of asking out loud, we kind of like Google or ask chat under our phones.

1:02Like, does the Ayatollah even do anything? Who would replace him if and when he died, which has happened? And why do the Sunnis and the Shias even have beef? Now, there's a lot that's happened since summer 2025, including massive protests in Iran, the fall of dominoes across the region, and the strikes that we have seen in these last 48 hours. So for all of that, you should check out the news, you should check out Vali Nasir's most recent writings and interviews, including one he just gave to Fareed Zakaria that I thought was great. But what this episode is meant to do is give you some context and some perspective to ground your curiosities outside of that doom scroll.

1:36And so I hope you'll enjoy it. And by the way, I started off by asking Vali Nasser what anyone had learned after that last 12-day war in the summer of 2025. But I think the war has established very clearly that for Israel, Iran is principal enemy adversary in the region. and I think for Iranians it's now established that Israel is its principal national security threat. And that doesn't mean only for the Islamic Republic, but I think even Iranian people understand that the one country that can threaten them and threaten them in this manner is willing to take the kind of actions that it took against Iran is actually Israel.

2:14And would Iran not add the U.S. to that? Because in some ways the U.S. has been Israel's most effective weapon. I mean, if we go back to the whole history of the Islamic Republic, which animosity with the United States and adversarial relations started, at the beginning, the Iranians saw the United States essentially as the enemy. The foreign policy was arrayed against the U.S. to protect Iran's independence from the U.S., to break U.S. containment, to push U.S. out of the Middle East. And they thought that Israel was basically an instrument of the U.S., just like, let's say, they thought Saudi Arabia was or the Arab alliances.

2:53I think in recent years, they have a greater appreciation that actually the tail may be wagging the dog. I think what you're saying is Iran used to see Israel as an instrument of the United States and now they see the United States as an instrument of Israel. I mean, yes. I mean, it was that United States was the great Satan and Israel was the little Satan. And that they had this vision, and still maybe some of it lingers, that the United States with this great imperialist power. And a lot of this came, you know, from leftist literature of the 1960s and 70s, this sort of worldview that they're combating a global imperialist power.

3:31And so the United States was really the architect of the world that they were fighting against. Israel fit into that, but Israel by itself was not a concern to them. Now, increasingly, they've realized that they can't cut a deal with the United States as they did in 2015. Israel comes in and torpedoes that Israel has all this power in Washington to essentially deploy the entirety of American might, financial, diplomatic, military, in order to fulfill what is essentially Israel's national security policy. Before we dig into the more substantive topic of nuclear war and alliances, which 70s pre-revolution comeback do you think is more likely?

4:11U.S.-Iranian relations like they were in the kind of heyday under the Shah or disco? I think disco is more likely in the short... I think going back to that kind of a degree of relationship, it may not happen in my lifetime, But I hope at least see baby steps in that direction. But, you know, I hope I stand to be corrected in a major way because I wasn't great at disco. Well, you know, I like disco too. So this is the thing. But I like peace more, peace and security more. Does this mean that we're going to be back in this exact same situation between Iran, Israel and the U.S. pretty soon? Like, is Donald Trump going to be Bill Murray and Groundhog Day?

4:53Like, is this going to keep on happening? I think for a while we do, unless and until the United States gets a solid deal with Iran. There is no incentive on Iran's part to stop its activity. Because if anything, Iran's nuclear activity for many, many years, I think, in my opinion, was not intended to build a bomb, but was leveraged in order to get the United States to the table to negotiate over sanctions. That's why Iran went to Geneva in 2015. They didn't ask the United States anything other than, in exchange for X, Y, and Z, we want these sanctions lifted. And then when they came back this time, again, what was on the table for Iran was sanctions.

5:39So the Iranians understand that the United States doesn't come to the table for any issue other than nuclear issue. Right. Not like you could just send an invitation and say, let's have a conversation about Hezbollah or Hamas and the U.S. is going to show up. Yeah, let's just go like in the 1970s now. No, so until now, the value of this was really leveraged. But now, Iran has been attacked by two nuclear-powered armed countries. And their argument is that you're defenseless, we own your skies, we can obliterate you, we can bomb you at will anytime we want. And of course, Iran can hit back with missiles, but it has finite ability vis-a-vis the combined power of Israel and the United States.

6:20So from here on, it's going to be very tempting for them to say, we need a bomb, not for offensive purposes, but because it's the ultimate deterrent. Just to recap for the audience, you're saying your understanding of the Iranian grand strategy here, the Iranian nuclear program was intended as leverage to bring the Americans to the table, not as deterrent necessarily for any kind of foreign intervention. But now those incentives have changed as they have seen actual war in a way that we have not seen in this region. And in fact, even among Iranian people, irrespective of whether they're pro-regime, anti-regime, secular or not, this is becoming a stronger argument.

7:00Because even if it's somebody like yourself, myself, sitting there, they live in Iran, they don't like their government, but they don't like to be bombed. And they say, basically, this can't happen again. So, Avali, you talk, in your book, The Grand Strategy, you talk about Iran as this existential state, right? It exists out of a concept of threat. It's mobilized around narrative and decades of resistance. I guess there's nothing better for selling a book called Iran's Grand Strategy than a war against Iran that captures the headlines and imaginations and World War III concerns of people for, you know, a couple of weeks.

7:37Has it been good for book sales? I hope so, and I expect so. But it's unfortunate. It's actually the wrong reason I would have liked people to paying attention to this, but for a while I had been thinking that Iran is becoming a bigger and bigger issue for the United States, for Saudi Arabia, for Israel, a central point of our foreign policy. And we really don't appreciate or know as a people, not only as policymakers, as a people, how do the Iranians calculate, why they calculate their decisions the way they do. I mean, we're playing a game of chess with them. We have no understanding of the strategy of the other side.

8:18And part of that is that because since the Carter era, there has been no diplomacy between these two countries and very limited intelligence, right, actually. But then you have things like Stuxnet and you wonder, well, isn't there more intelligence than we think there is? Well, intelligence, I learned when I even worked in the government that raw intelligence is like looking at one tree at a time. It doesn't necessarily give you a picture of the forest. And CIA can tell you exactly what was said in Tehran last night, but they're not necessarily very good at telling you, generally, you know, what is the context in which this information is said or this information is received.

8:58The other reason is that we're mesmerized with Khamenei's turban. It just deflects the attention that, okay, because this guy's got a turban on his head, that these guys are sort of fanatical, deranged, illogical, irrational Islamic robots. And that explains their hatred of Israel, hatred of America, and they just basically are a bigger version of the caricature we had of fundamentalists after 9-11, before 9-11. And what I'm trying to say is that don't be distracted by his turban. I mean, he's basically a strategic calculation there. It may be based on wrong assumptions, wrong analysis, wrong conclusions.

9:40I don't subscribe to the way he sees it. But you would be underestimating and deluding yourself if you didn't understand that, you know, he's making strategic calculations. Before we get there, I think we need a little bit of like a 101 for anyone listening here. So can you kind of break down the key forces in Iran, the key political forces, the Ayatollah, the IGRC, the military, the elite Quds Force? Just give us like a one minute stakeholder map. So like many other countries, Iran has military forces. The most important military force in Iran is Revolutionary Guards. They're the sort of elite force that was born up for the revolution.

10:22They are the ones that are closest to the regime. but Iran also has regular military as well. You put these two together, they will look to you something like Egypt's military, Pakistan's military, and they are intrusive in the economy and politics, just like those militaries in those countries are. Rules are a little different, but the idea is the same. And then Iran has this sort of a... Iran has a very big political class that is kind of very disjointed and has different factions. There are hardliners, there are reformists, there are moderates. Some are clerics and they have ties to religious centers.

11:02Some of them are not clerics, or have ties to varieties of economic and other organizations. And then Iran also has a very amorphous state. So on the top, you have the supreme leader, then you also have an elected president, which is kind of like the prime minister of France. In other words, he's in charge of the administration of the country, but he's not the... Yeah, but he's not Macron. Macron, exactly. The Supreme Leader is unelected and unaccountable. The president is elected and is accountable. You have a legislature which is elected, and it's not just the parliament. You have another body that is elected that chooses the next Supreme Leader.

11:41You have another body that's elected that decides who can run and what laws... What is that body called, the one that selects the Supreme Leader? And is it kind of like a politbro in China or Vietnam? There is one which is called Council of Experts, which is only really, really important when he has to choose on whether a Supreme Leader is senile or who would replace him. So it has only... And how many dudes are on that? I assume they're all dudes. They're all dudes, yes. They're all dudes, because that one all are clerics, actually. Because supposedly, this is a clerical... This is a theocracy on paper, so they're all dudes.

12:14I don't know, there are dozens on that, but then they're elected. And then you have a Guardian Council, which actually has also members of Supreme Leader points to who's on it. The Guardian Council decides, vets all candidates who run for office, from low-level mayor to parliamentarians to president. And then it also has a veto power over legislation that comes out of the legislature. So basically you have a level of state functioning and democratic voting and decision-making, which kind of looks very Western, but it's controlled and overseen. There's this other layer on top of it, which is authoritarian and is not accountable and sometimes not elected.

13:00We got to send Doge to Iran, I think. I'm just kidding. You have to send Doge to Iran for varieties of reasons. But you see, also because this kind of plumbing makes also the economy look like that. these different governments can have their own relationships in the economy. It becomes who knows who, what the networks are, who has relationship with whom. And I've heard you say this elsewhere, that the flow of information is actually happening in Iran. It's a relatively, you know, informed and liberal place for information flow, which always kind of shocks me because Iran ranks 176, I think, out of 180 countries on press freedom when it comes to the report from Reporters Without Borders.

13:49There's also internet blackouts that we've seen at key moments. I mean, we see them in key intervals of, you know, important democratic or activist moments in Iran. So is it really, like, is it relatively well-informed? I mean, how do you think about that? Well, first of all, Iranians have access to information outside, so much so that exiled television stations were extremely important in disturbances in the riots and revolt that happened two years ago. So people watch them. People watch varieties of outside sources. But even within the press in Iran, yes, if there are red lines and they don't criticize the Supreme Leader, there are no-go places.

14:33Yeah, you can't poll about his popularity. There's no approval rating. There is plenty of discussion of corruption in government, corruption here, corruption there. And then you have a population that is 90 % literate. Right. And it's fairly sophisticated. And it's very online. In other words, this is a highly digital society. Iran's entire economy is pretty much digital. Nobody uses cash in Iran. Right. And until there's an internet blackout, but even then there are ways. Well, no, you're right. The reason they need internet blackout is exactly because, short of shutting down the internet, they cannot control information.

15:11as a censor cannot just basically say, okay, there are five newspapers and three television stations and we can control this. So when they get overwhelmed, the only option they have is to pull the plug out of the wall. So we've just painted a picture of all these forces in the state of Iran and also in the society of Iran. But then there's external forces that are proxies. You know, we've talked about some of them, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis. By the way, do you have to have an H to be an Iranian proxy? like Harlem Globetrotters could be eligible. The name of, the collective name of Iraqi militias is also Ashdash Shabi.

15:45So that also starts with an H, although in English we call them PNF. But, well, that's actually... Conspiracy here about the letter H, but yes. That's right, that's right. But how are the external forces, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, doing right now? How strong are they, particularly with everything that's happened in Gaza, in the case of Hamas, in Syria and Lebanon in the case of Hezbollah and, you know, Houthis in terms of their kind of checked-outness, I would say, of the Iran war of late, it seems. Well, the Iranians are not using them in this... First of all, Hezbollah has been diminished, Hamas is being battered.

16:21So, yes, Iran's position collapsed in Syria and Lebanon recently, but that doesn't mean that it didn't work for a very long time. Look, in every case that Iran set up in militia, the opportunity was created by others. Israel went into Lebanon in 1982, destroyed PLO, left a vacuum, and occupied South Lebanon, which annoyed the Shias. It gave Iran the opportunity to stand up Hezbollah. The United States went into Iraq, destroyed Saddam's government, created chaos. And that chaos helped, first of all, a Sunni insurgency in the north, which was supported by Syria, who was also an ally of Iran. and that provided an opportunity for Iran to organize militias and organize the politics and basically operate in Syria.

17:12Then you have the Arab Spring, which destroys the central governments in Yemen and Syria, and that allows Iran to also move into those places. So there was opportunity, but the logic was that, you know, when Iran went into Iraq in in particular, it came up with this idea of forward defense. In other words, it is best for us to defend ourselves inside the Arab world against Arabs and Americans rather than inside our own border like they're doing right now with Israel. People might hear what you're saying and say, okay, there were opportunities for all of these groups to be created through other foreign policy that created, or even domestic revolt that created vacuums.

17:56People might think, oh, that's kind of victim-blaming, Vali. You know? No, no, I mean, it was a real strategy. You could read discussions of it in Iran. Right. Was it a wise strategy? Was it not wise strategy? Why couldn't Iran set up a militia in Jordan? Why not? Because it had a state, it's not penetrable, right? It's not like you could actually go get a group of angry Jordanians, organize them around the movement. You're not endorsing the strategy or saying it's a non-belligerent one. You're just saying, hey, these are opportunistic. And by the way, Vali, I think the question about why didn't they do that in Jordan is kind of a smart guy, smart questions episode that I did not know the answer to myself, I have to say.

18:37No, no, but actually, now, first of all, any kind of a military strategy ultimately is not innocent because it's designed to inflict pain, kill, intimidate. That's what military is. It's just to think about where does Hezbollah fit in Iran's strategic thinking is, yes, it's an ally, yes, we want to help him, but Hezbollah is an important deterrence tool against it. In fact, it is the reason, it is the collapse of Hezbollah that leads Israel to say Iran is weak. But the reality is that with Hezbollah and Syria gone, then Israel no longer has a... is... feels deterred from attacking Iran directly.

19:23In 60 seconds or less, can you explain why the Iranians and the Arabs have beef? Explain Sunni Shia and kind of the history here. Well, it's kind of like saying, why did the French and the Germans have beef? I mean, recently I asked somebody, like, if the Germans rebuild an army because the US is leaving NATO, aren't you afraid? He said, yes, but this time we have nuclear weapons. Which means that, you know, yes, it's always on the card. Or you just need to scratch the surface to discover how much the French and the British love each other, or the British and the Germans love each other. Or the Indians and the Pakistanis.

19:56Or the cricket, yeah. At least have a live issue that still hasn't been resolved. But in reality, you know, these ethnic groups' rivalries in the region go a long way. Ashi and the Sunni are like Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Periodically, you know, these things can be part of identity politics or be used by Marx for identity politics. So it's not that mysterious to the outside. It just needs to look at their own history. The IJRC is very closely aligned with the Ayatollah. It is very closely aligned with the Ayatollah. But also, this Ayatollah is somebody who's ruled over everyone for 36 years.

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21:12And the military, the other military, they're just not good enough. No, that's not, they're not positioned in a way that they could stage a coup. Yeah. But this guy is no spring chicken. I think he's like seven years older than Trump, four years older than Biden. You know, he's got those good Persian genes. They don't have a Biden situation. They don't have a Biden situation. Yeah, he's got those Persian genes. But what is the succession plan? Everything in Iran is about the succession, including this war, the nuclear deal, et cetera. Khamenei has ruled Iran for 36 years. That makes him, like, I think, maybe the third longest ruling leader of Iran in the past 200, 300 years.

21:51Right? You have to go, right? So there was one in the 19th century, which was 49 years, and the Shah was 37. So next year, if Khamenei survives, he would be the second longest and on par with the Shah. Yeah, but that makes me feel like his time ahead is shorter, Vali, not longer. I'm not sure about that. Okay. I think, first of all, the read is that Iran lost this war. I think that's much more the Western narrative than necessarily the way they see it, or the way that Iranians see it. They see it that they went against the world's greatest superpower and the most advanced military in the Middle East, and they held their own.

22:32The military didn't collapse. They have the nuclear, most of the nuclear things intact. They're still standing, and they actually forced a ceasefire in Israel. I mean, they don't need to look, they don't need to, you know, prove that. Just listen to President Trump and Steve Bannon. They're making the case that Israel was getting a beating. Steve Bannon, for instance, said today, yesterday, that this ceasefire was as much to bail out Israel as it was to bail out Iran. And I'm not saying this is a factual thing that you need to factually... Yeah, you're saying it's the narrative, the understanding.

23:06No, then victory is a political narrative. Yeah. Victory and defeat is in the eyes of the beholder. So first of all, he hasn't lost the war. He basically has come through. The Iranians will have a lot of questions about why were we at war, how the war was conducted, and where do we go from here? But there is not a crisis of leadership in a sense, right? I mean, this is much more the regime change narrative abroad and this expectation that, okay, the whole military must be angry with them. saying the conduct of the war is failing, we should take over. That's not the case. Then they would say, oh, there's going to be tens of thousands of Iranians on the street, and the IRGC will feel compelled to stage a coup, either to lead the people to something better or to put them in prison and shut it down.

23:55That's not happening either. I mean, you have a picture today, which is the commander of the Quds Force, which was reputed to actually have been assassinated by Israel, is walking in the middle of the crowd in Tehran in the celebrations of the end of the war and Iran's victory. That doesn't give you a sense that these guys feel humiliated, they need to take... Maybe they should. I'm not saying they shouldn't, but as I said, conception of victory and defeat is in the eyes of the beholder. Yeah. What about this... Okay, there's this dude in D.C. who has become a meme, the heir to the Pahlavi fortune, the son of the last Shah.

24:33What about him? Because people seem, you know, kind of obsessed with this story. They are, but this story, yes, I think he did have a lot of following in Iran. But he had no ground game, no coalition. I mean, you know, just to be liked, it makes you an influencer. It doesn't make you a political leader. You could have one and a half million followers. Everybody may do time you, love you, But to be a political leader, you have to have a ground game. You have to have a political organization, political muscle. Not only he doesn't have it, which it doesn't tell me exactly how would he become leader of Iran unless there are American troops in Tehran the way they were in Kabul or Baghdad.

25:19If you have troops in Tehran, you could decide who's on the throne, who's off the throne. And then you could keep your troops there like we did in Afghanistan for 20 years to keep the regime that we set up in power. Most of this picture is before he became a collaborator with Israel. Right? I don't think his reputation would survive this war because he didn't have the political acumen to off the bat come out and say, I condemn the violation of my country's territorial sovereignty. I condemn an invasion of Iran, and I'm standing with my people, and I feel they're suffering because civilians have been killed.

25:57and I give my condolences to all of those innocent civilians who've been killed. So he came out, didn't condemn Israel, said it's Khamenei's fault, but I'm not condemning Israel. No civilians have been killed. All the people who have been killed has been essentially regime people. And he said that he doesn't believe that Israel is actually targeting Iranians. He didn't say anything with Israel or Trump, said that Tehran has to be evacuated. So essentially, he looked like the Vichy government in France. after Hitler took over. And I don't think he can survive that. I think this is yesterday's news now.