How Strong Are Iran’s Strongmen?

32:25They can fail across the board. They only have to succeed at one thing, suppression of political alternatives. So the more you can introduce political alternatives, the more you can unbalance them, get them onto the back foot. Again, you don't have to take them down, but you get their attention, and then you can negotiate with them from a position of strength or leverage. Often we think of the democratic opposition as the space to play in here. And so there'll be courageous people who risk their lives to oppose a regime. Many of them will lose their lives. They're a hell of a lot courageous than someone sitting in an office on the Stanford campus in the Hoover Tower.

33:08Or I should say at the headquarters of CFR. So they're very impressive people often, but their ability to destabilize the regime can be limited because they're in prison, in exile, or otherwise intimidated despite the courage that so many of them have shown. And so I'm not against supporting them, but what I'm talking about is inside the regime itself, regime loyalists who often are highly patriotic, but who see the regime is corrupt, full of lies, and hurting the country's long-term trajectory. So ironically, their own patriotism is available to use against the regime. They think, for example, the war in Ukraine is a failure for Russia.

33:59They're not favorably disposed towards Ukraine. It's Russia they bleed for. Or they might think that perhaps it's not such a great idea to try to take over Taiwan. Or it may be having proxies in every country around you and spending billions and billions of dollars and watching that go up in smoke while your own people suffer deprivation, lower living standards, emigration of your talent. Maybe that's not a good idea for the long-term great power base or great power strength of your country. So you can actually find disaffected people who are ambitious and patriotic inside these regimes. And you can try and encourage that and say, well, you know what?

34:48If you guys come to power and you stop the war in Ukraine because it's hurting Russia, these are the following measures that will give you in response. And so you can encourage that behavior. Again, if it doesn't happen, you've still gotten the attention of the regime and you still have leverage. They fear nothing more than this. And they themselves have created the basis for this. They're the ones fostering animosities internally in their repressive apparatus so that it doesn't seize power domestically itself. So they're providing the opportunity. their very strength is your vulnerability to potentially exploit.

35:34And then, of course, we've talked a little bit about the cash flow area and how you can cut the cash flow off. So if the Russians are not able to sell their hydrocarbons globally as easily as they have been, or the Iranian regime is not able to do the same, or the Chinese encounter difficulty with their export-led model of industrialization, which is de facto de-industrializing all the other countries. And what could go on? And then there's counter-narratives where you can invade their public sphere, invade their electronic systems. After all, we invented the internet, we invented social media, and yet it's TikTok where our young people get nearly 50 % of their information from, which is a Chinese Communist Party controlled app ultimately.

36:30And yet we can't seem to penetrate their public sphere, their electronics the same way. But these are technologies that we ourselves have invented. And so can there be proactive ways right now in Iran where they've turned off the internet, for example, and we tried to smuggle in a handful of Starlink terminals or whatever it might be. We need to get more serious about this. It can't be just the old days of Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe broadcasting. There's value in things like that. It has to be more sophisticated, more proactive, better funded, levering the technology. And again, you get their attention and then you can go into diplomacy negotiations where their behavior might be less aggressive, they're not a democratic regime all of a sudden.

37:25They are a repressive authoritarian regime, but they've retrenched somewhat because they perceive that we are proactive, we're on the front foot, they're on the back foot, we have a certain degree of leverage, and then you can do a deal with them. The United States and China have to share the planet. And also, by the way, the ocean is wet. But what are the terms of sharing the planet? Like, we have to share the planet with China. We're not disappearing. They're not disappearing. Same thing with Russia. They disappeared twice and they're still there. They keep coming back. Yeah, well, exactly. And same thing with Iran.

38:04So what are the terms of sharing the planet? Can we get better terms? Are the terms going to be Xinjiang? What happened in Hong Kong? The pressure that's now on Taiwan. Are those the terms? Because I don't like those terms. So I need better terms. I need more leverage. I need them on the back foot, not the front foot. I need us not to be solely reactive. Now, this is not a pie in the sky view. These regimes are not pushovers. These regimes can and do kill their own people. They can and do invest in military capabilities, often asymmetric, that can cause a lot of damage as we're seeing. So I'm not naive about these regimes, nor again is this a regime change agenda.

38:54This is a political deterrence agenda on their vulnerabilities where they are most fearful in order to negotiate better terms for us and our friends to live in a world that is peace and prosperity to the extent possible. I was reminded of this point in your piece where your piece sort of lands on it, and you were just discussing it now about the fact that for the authoritarians, it's their loyalists who are the true enemies within. I was reminded of that very vividly by what happened in Venezuela, which, you know, I think you could see in some ways as an example of the very dynamic you're describing here, where what we've wound up with is not regime change, but a loyalist from within to Maduro.

39:46And I'm talking about Delcey Rodriguez, who is now kind of the acting president. Clearly, there was the kinds of political action that you were talking about to try to find these people within the regime who may pose some kind of alternative, some kind of conception of that went into the policy, I guess, when it came to Venezuela. What did you make of that? I would have to say that the Maduro operation of the Trump administration is an audacious version of my argument. And they clearly had done their homework. And there clearly was a basis where they didn't try regime change per se, but they tried to figure out those loyalists who might be in favor of retrenchment and stop doing things which were detrimental to U.S.

40:40interests across the board. And so that's a good outcome in the short term for everybody, including the Venezuelan people. Let's remember that the Maduro regime and the entire trajectory of this Chavez before Maduro, in a population of maybe 28, 29 million, they have 8 million refugees. They've destroyed the country. Their GDP decline is 80%. So Nazi Germany lost 45 % of GDP in the war and they were incinerated. The United States in the Great Depression lost less than that, lost about a third. There's 80 % of GDP on most estimates. And so the destruction that they did to that country and that they should answer for, nobody should cry for Maduro being in a prison in New York City.

41:32Nobody, in my view. But okay, let's move a little deeper on the Maduro thing. So we can't judge things in the time that things happen alone. Everything is the fullness of time, right? The U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, and in the fullness of time, it won the peace. Vietnam is a pro-American country. Most of the population has been born since that U.S. war in Vietnam and the atrocities that were committed there. And so the fullness of time is what I'm looking for. And so I don't exclude, for example, the fact that one could have a political transition in Venezuela that was election driven. that I don't know when, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but at some point, because the current ruler and her brother and the rest of them, they're on a certain side of the actuarial table and not necessarily on the front end of it.

42:34And also many of the changes over which they're presiding are having consequences that could well undermine their ability to keep this grip. So it's quite possible that we could move to a transition that looks more like a free and fair democratic election, and that the will of the Venezuelan people could be expressed and consolidated in institutions. What I don't want to see is civil war. And so sometimes you can force a transition because democracy is better and democracy is the right thing to do. And it's a little bit morally compromising to take out one dictator to allow another dictator, even though they're retrenching on their aggression, it seems a little bit morally compromising to do that.

43:25And shouldn't we as a country that stands for democratic professors, democratic ideals, shouldn't we be in favor of that? And the answer is maybe we should, but what's the timeframe? Because if you force that issue, there's a big jungle in Venezuela. You know, the Amazon is larger than just Brazil. And you could get an insurgency there with the people with guns, instead of co-opting them into a transition process, you could incentivize them to oppose a transition process and you could end up with smoldering enders for as far as the eye could see you know so i understand the frustration that there's a nobel prize winner and and her party actually won the previous election that maduro stole and i'm in favor of that democratic transition at some point but i think in terms of stages we may not get to that democratic transition This approach may fail because they think they're going to outlast President Trump.

44:30He's only got fewer than three years left in office. And if they can just hold out, they can go back to what it was that their preference is. But again, time passes. They don't get younger. Some of the things they're doing change the circumstances. It changes the interest group dynamics. They have to release political prisoners. They're also arresting new political prisoners. but the dynamics that they're setting in motion could foil a plan, even if they have the plan to wait it out. I like the fact that we've been able to identify, negotiate, and have a transition to another version of the authoritarian regime that is not as opposed to U.S.

45:18interests, in fact, is quite pro-U.N. interests because they're afraid, but also is trying to negotiate this domestically in a way that maduro was not doing quite the opposite right so it's early but it's hopeful of course again there's lots of perverse and unintended consequences and it's not easy to get successful outcomes following an authoritarian regime, but still I regard the Maduro outcome thus far with the potential for an even better outcome as well as the potential for a worse as an example of the kind of arguments that I was making in the piece that you edited and published. We'll be back after a short break.

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47:01narratives, but also a revolutionary narrative about the Shiite revolutionary kind of project. Life chances, I think, you know, maybe not as determinative as some other authoritarian regimes, although I think if you're an Iranian woman, you might say otherwise. And then there's this question of the international system, which, or the corrosiveness or the conduciveness to it, which I think in the past couple of weeks has changed dramatically. But how sustainable those changes will be, that's really the question. So I guess, you know, when you look at what we've done there, what the United States has done there, how do you see it sort of broadly and how do you see it fitting in to all these ideas that you've been talking about, about sort of the, I don't know, sort of humble, modest, strategic, smart way to try to oppose these regimes?

47:50Does this kind of meet that standard or are we doing something that is kind of off to the side? Again, I'm not a regime change person. That's not an argument I would have made. And also the unfolding of the operation in Iran is not similar to the one in Venezuela for all sorts of reasons. we did not seem to have identified beforehand and negotiated with people inside the regime who might have been willing to alter regime behavior and eventually go towards some type of transitional process. These are people who are dedicated to the survival of this regime, not the survival of Iran necessarily as a country, not the survival of the Iranian people, who make up a multi-ethnic mosaic.

48:43But the survival of this regime, this Islamist regime, it is different and it is something that requires a lot more understanding, care, thinking before you decide to act some way against what is a real threat and a real evil regime and has been for some time. So capitulation of regimes like this is not as frequent as we might imagine. we killed the so-called supreme leader i'm not sure that that supreme leader couldn't have gone into a bunker and been less vulnerable to being killed but instead made himself vulnerable and therefore martyred himself to try to rescue the regime when he's 86 and ailing, and his time on earth is limited, and he's worried about the survival of his regime.

49:39Maybe, in fact, he acted in a way to martyr himself. Again, I'm not a specialist. I have no inside information. And so you guys have talked about this. And I'll say, actually, just along that point, we published someone just today, Akbar Ganji, who is an Iranian journalist who was a member of the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard core, became a dissident, was imprisoned, now writes quite critically about the regime. But he sort of made a variant of the point you made, and the subtitle that his piece has is that America and Israel solved Iran's succession problem, right? That whatever Kamene's motivations, there was this puzzle that they had yet to solve that, in a sense, the assassination removed that burden from the regime.

50:22Yeah, I'm not missing him personally. I'm not in favor of assassinating human beings, but there are cases in which you're at war and they're combatants, but let's leave that aside. So this regime is not capitulating the Venezuelan regime. However, we managed it did capitulate to an extent. Again, maybe they're trying to wait the president out. I don't think that'll be successful, but we'll come to see that if that's the case, or maybe they're not trying to wait him out. My point being is that how do you get a regime like this to capitulate or what are the consequences when they don't immediately capitulate?

51:04There's the short run transition to a new Supreme Leader who might be alive. This is Friday the 13th. And I have to say that I've seen no evidence that the named successor is alive. But even if that person is alive, there's no way to exercise the prerogatives of the Supreme Leader office in the current context. So the succession has been resolved on paper in some ways. But whether the Supreme Leader as an institution can survive with that level of centralized power and authority, I think is an open question. this regime has been very severely damaged survival may seem like a victory at some level but the rump that will survive it's not clear how long it can survive and it's not clear it can reproduce itself into the next generation those are still open questions for me but it's not capitulated, that was to be expected, and we didn't actually seem to have a faction in the regime that we were negotiating with.

52:15If we did, they were killed also at some point. Let's think about the Soviet example for a second here about which I've written. Imagine for a second that Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet regime, which was not attacked by the United States and Israel the way that Iran has been. It had destabilized itself, certainly under pressure through the years of the Cold War and bipartisan approach to contain the Soviet Union and to force it to then have to manage its own contradictions, as Kennan said in his original advice on how to approach this. And they failed to manage their own contradictions. In fact, they unwittingly dissolved their own regime.

53:05But imagine if they had acted like Iran and decided that they were not going to go quietly. They were going to bring the whole thing down, not just the whole thing in terms of their country, but the whole world was going to pay a price for what happened to them. They had 40 ,000 nuclear weapons with all the delivery systems you would need to send them everywhere and anywhere. They had chemical weapons. They had biological weapons. They had 5 million soldiers under arms. Not all of them, obviously, might have been loyal if ordered to do certain things, but they had 600 ,000 soldiers in Eastern Europe, the majority in East Germany, and they gave back.

53:49They conceded East Germany, and they removed those troops. The troops were finally removed by 1994, three years after the Soviet Union was gone, and we averted Armageddon. And so it's a kind of spectacular case of capitulation under pressure when they've lost the game. That evidently doesn't happen very frequently because the Chinese and Tiananmen in June 1989 had a million plus demonstrators in the square, and Deng Xiaoping did not capitulate then. And they've shown no signs of capitulation since, quite the opposite. And the Iranian regime the same. And now you could argue the successor in the Russian Republic to the Soviet regime, Vladimir Putin, also seems in no mind to capitulate despite, again, the severe pressure that he's come under, both by his own aggressiveness, mistakes, miscalculations, as well as the coalition pushing back, but ultimately Ukrainian courage and ingenuity at the base of this.

54:54So capitulation is rare, and therefore you have to be careful when you go for something that looks like regime change to prepare the ground for the possibility of capitulation or some type of negotiated settlement transition etc not every country is going to produce a mandela or a havel or fill in the blank and not every country is going to produce an elite that sees the handwriting on the wall and decides as in the soviet case to hold on to the property that they've stolen and to hold on to positions running republics the 15 successor states rather than go to the wall to keep the Soviet Union and the planned economy as it was called together.

55:48So I'm watching the Iranian case for how we're managing not just the military side of it, but the political side of it in terms of what type of solution negotiation with remnants of the regime we can see going forward. And so far, I'm very concerned to see very little work in the political space compared to the military space. Now, again, this Iranian regime is evil and a threat for Israel even more so because it's their neighborhood. It's also been a threat, as I said, to all of those neighbors. You can ask Syrians what they've gone through. You can ask the Lebanese what they've been living through for a long time.

56:31So this is not an imaginary threat. This is not a fake threat. This is not a threat conjured up by propagandists looking to go to war. But the threat I get, the regime is evil. And so what's your answer to getting us to a better place politically, regime-wise? Now, when they say, well, what about the people overthrowing the regime and encouraging the people to do so? well what's the regime the regime is not just the supreme leader the regime is the revolutionary guards and it's the boss each and it's the judges and judiciary in the localities and it's the weapons that they control and it's their islamist ideology or commitment to islamism for which they've made many sacrifices, including that meat grinder war with Iran.

57:27And so the regime is a society. It's not just a handful of leaders and a compound, and then their replacements. And so you need to be able to incentivize that part of society to defect. The thing about defection, let's say the Iranian population is about 90 million. And let's say about upwards of 70, maybe even 80 million people detest this regime and would like to see an Iran with a constitutional order freedom. Let's then say that at least 10%, at least 10 million people, nine to 10 million people are the regime then. And so again, what's your solution for that? How do you get them to defect, not just from the regime, but to something.

58:18You can't defect from, you must defect to. Defecting from is when you're going to exile. You got to defect to. So if we're asking them to lay down their arms or to use their arms against their rulers who have created this catastrophic situation for that great civilization. To whom, to what are they defecting to? That's the part that is troubling me from the beginning of this exercise. I had a similar question in Iraq in 2003. I recognized the evil of Saddam and the evil of the regime. And I wanted to know what the political alternative to that was going to be before I was going to act. And so that's where we are.

59:06We're now in deep. It's like the sunk costs argument. Well, we're in this farge. Can we really pull out? Can we allow them to have a victory by surviving? Can we allow them to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and get away with it? And all of those arguments that should have been discussed beforehand and no doubt were discussed in parts of the bureaucracy, but not necessarily the decision-making parts. And so that discussion belatedly needs to happen, and we need to see action on that as well. Again, what would success look like in the real world, and what are those options? And the survival of some version of the regime is not necessarily a failure, if the Venezuelan case can't be pronounced a partial success.

59:57But what are the mechanisms, the actions being taken to move us in that direction i'd like to see a public debate by experts in iranian politics middle eastern politics in in the region more widely you can't just take the exile who's been out of the country for a century or so and plop them down in because again the regime is a society the basage the paramilitary basage who are conducting a lot of the repression, that's a version of social mobility for many people who are from poor regions who don't have other options. And so they're defecting from the bassege to what? Are they defecting to it, as it were?

1:00:44Same thing with those judges who are often local officials who grew up in not rich provinces or not rich settlements in provinces. What's our story? What's our option for them? Not an abstract option. but some concrete options. And how do we co-opt the people with the guns at the top, at least some of them, for a transition that looks like retrenchment in the first phase, and then we'll see what other phases might look like. Yeah. I mean, listening to you, and you said this yourself, it's like, I kind of wish that this had been thought through before we decided to strike. And your comparison to the Soviet example is telling in one way, in the sense that one difference is the United States had not attacked the Soviet Union.

1:01:33And also the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, as you pointed out. So there was a real deterrent to doing that. But my point is that the capitulation that you saw on the part of Gorbachev and those other elites was in a sense possible because we hadn't entered into a hot war. Whereas with Iran, it seems like, well, that would be extremely difficult to see now that we've already launched a war on them. And you can say, yes, well, they were at war with us for all these years as well. And as many deaths as they caused in Iraq and elsewhere, there was nothing like the equivalent of the kind of attack the United States has launched on Iran on the United States.

1:02:09So I guess what I'm saying is that now that we've already done this, right, now that we've already taken this step, does that kind of foreclose all the possibly more constructive steps that you would have preferred to see? Is that out the window now, Or is it possible to still do that kind of stuff, even once you've already started the hot war? So nothing is ever out of the window. You can snatch victory from defeat and you can snatch defeat from victory. Let's call that Afghanistan. So many things are possible still, even if everything is not possible the same way. What happened in the Soviet case is that there was a gigantic faction in the elite that was pro-Western.

1:02:53they wanted to be like the west they wanted to be part of the west they wanted to have their cake and eat it too they wanted the soviet union to remain but they wanted living standards in the soviet union to look like that in the west they wanted to control the society and control the property and continue to rule but in a way that enabled them to holiday in france or etc and so the pro-westernism of a large part of the elite not just the society but a large part of the elite that was the trump card as it were that we had now many of them then became disillusioned that they didn't become part of the west that not everybody got a high living standard that many of the people lost out in the so-called transition you know the post-communist transition and there was a lot of anger and grievances and resentment and let's call that Putin right but the dynamic of being favorably disposed towards the west wanting to join the west and therefore defecting from the Soviet Union to an image a leader a movement a series of institutions defecting to something that was going to approximate the west be part of the west that's what worked In the case of Iran, this regime does not want to be part of the West.

1:04:22These people don't want to defect to the West for the most part. There may be some in that regime that do so, but there are so many who don't. You know, Iran is a highly educated population. And so there is in many ways a pro-Western Iranian society that's very substantial, that shares the aspirations to have institutions like Sweden or like France or even like the United States. And so therefore, since the regime is actually part of the society, it's possible that there is that sentiment inside the regime. Again, your experts will know better. The regime selects for anti-Western sentiment, not for pro-Western sentiment, even covertly.

1:05:10And so it's quite possible that there's a whole lot less secret or open pro-Western types inside the Iranian regime than there is in Iranian society as a whole. But without that, wanting to join the West, wanting to have a political and economic system that approximates the most successful countries in the world. Without that, you have a more serious challenge on your hand of eliciting capitulation. So in the China case, we see this as well. We see these people who are victims of the Cultural Revolution, including Xi Jinping, and we think, you know, they must think that the system was bad to them, and therefore they must inclined towards reform.

1:05:59And so here we are trying to figure out how could they be victims of the Cultural Revolution, and yet they double down on the very Communist Party rule that victimized them. And the answer is, is because they're not pro-Western. They're anti-Western. They think the West is decadent, corrupt, and more than that even, anti-China and out to get them. and so they're not going to capitulate they're not going to join the west that's a trick that's an illusion that's an operation the cia is running you know if if only we were running that operation and so the iranian regime is an even harder case in that direction because of the islamism and so the population it's one of the most secular countries in the middle east because they've experienced you know islamist rule yeah right not islam we're not talking about the religion islam We're talking about political Islam or Islamist rule, which is not Islam as you know.

1:06:58They've experienced it firsthand. It has failed at everything. It's impoverished them. It's imprisoned them. And they're secular. The Iranian society is very secular and often pro-West, not 100%, but significantly so. It's the regime that's not that way. And so figuring out how to appeal to the regime that's anti-Western and committed to something that they've sacrificed for, even when they've been victimized by it, that's a harder problem. And I don't see us tackling that problem. You know, calling on women to rise up, well, they did that already. And they were incredibly courageous and they suffered the consequences of that.

1:07:41Calling on the Kurds to rise up, which I think is more coming from Jerusalem than it's coming from Washington, and the Belushi and these kinds of things. That's not the way you're going to rally those people who are pro-Iran, but think the current trajectory of Iran is self-defeating. You have to figure out how to entice the pro-Iranian elites with guns who hurt for their country but are suspicious of the West and maybe fundamentally deeply anti-Western for good reasons or bad. I'm not judging whether they have cause or don't have cause. I'm bracketing that. And I want to appeal to them in order to get a solution to this, which is a version of the regime that's less threatening to its neighbors and that could potentially evolve through a transition.

1:08:36Maybe they could agree to elections in three years or whatever it might be or five years or next year. And maybe the candidates can be more open than they've been with the Guardian Council canceling all the candidates. And maybe an investment package could be offered for those who go along this way. Sanctions lifted, rebuild, university ties, all sorts of positive incentives. Lots of carrots. Yes. And so I'd like to see that. That's, I believe, still possible as hard as it is and as dug in as we are about this. And we could certainly manage to do better than we're doing now. War is always surprising, even when you're highly prepared.

1:09:23You always have to adapt and react and pivot. And you know the old line from Mike Tyson, right? I had a plan, and then I got punched in the face. It actually comes from Von Moltke. He wasn't a boxer. He was the head of the general staff in old Prussia and Germany. I'm not sure that's where Tyson got it, but. Maybe not, but he got it from experience in the ring. But my point being is that you can learn, you can adapt, you can pivot if you're willing to do so. You have to be humble. You have to be willing to admit mistakes. You have to be willing to say, I got some things wrong and that I need to change.

1:10:08You need to be willing to settle sometimes for less than your maximalist goals. and you need to have an agreement with the Israelis on what the war aims are. Okay, that's a long list of things that we hope that we might see from Washington, from the Trump administration. I guess I would say from your lips to God's ear, Steve, because so far I'm not seeing any of those things from where I sit. But I want to say thank you for all of the insight that you've brought to bear on these questions, both on our pages and just in our conversation today. Thanks again. Thank you for this opportunity to publish in your pages and to reach all of your audience here on these podcasts.

1:10:52It's really an honor and it's a privilege to be in this position and I'm very grateful.

1:11:02Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Rose Kohler and Kanesh Kharoer. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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