Is the Iran War Coming to an End? A Conversation With Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr

23:37And in fact, the results of that June war turned out to be kind of less dramatic from a U.S. perspective than many of us thought beforehand, and also to do more damage to Iran's nuclear program without precipitating some kind of strategically damaging response from the Iranians. Do you think that's a reasonable characterization of where the debate was here? And is there a kind of need for reassessment of the war last June, now that we're a year away from it?

24:05Vali Nasr:Yes, of course. Now, in hindsight, that seems absolutely true. And in fact, if in June, the Iranian people didn't rise up to overthrow the Islamic Republic, which in that point, actually, Prime Minister Netanyahu directly called on them. that this is your moment with Kirlod, these Revolutionary Guard commanders, you should rise up. In January, where there was the mass uprising that now it gets referred to, the Israeli argument was probably to Washington Sea. Actually, the rally to the flag moment has gone. And given that the Islamic Republic so brutally suppressed this uprising, it's now totally alienated its population.

24:42Vali Nasr:And the population is so angry that definitely they would now rise up. And we also know that there were other parts of this that later on became evident that, you know, that the Kurds would invade from Western Iran and occupy territory within Iran. That would then be sort of a force multiplier against the regime. I think, you know, from the Israeli point of view, the war in June was never finished. They went in to destroy the Islamic Republic due to it, what they thought they had done to Hezbollah, finish Iran off. And in the end, after 12 days, there was a ceasefire. And from Iran's perspective, the war was not over.

25:20Vali Nasr:First of all, the revolutionary guards was opposed to the ceasefire that the previous Supreme Leader accepted because it thought that the momentum was on its side towards the end. And at least this narrative of Iran having been battered and weakened would not have helped if Iran had continued for another week, 10 days in June. And also they thought that Israel would come back, that Israel had not achieved these objectives, it would come back. So both Iran and Israel expected the war to resume. It's Washington that had to be pushed in that direction. Iran tried to dissuade the U.S. from going to war through diplomacy.

25:57Vali Nasr:That's the way in which the old supreme leader worked. There was the Geneva talks. Iran was quite forward-leaning, as we saw later on, in the hope of averting a war. But Israel was more successful in basically making a case for war in Washington. I think what we don't see really a debate is the extent to which the U.S. was being lobbied by both of these. And why is it that the Israeli position won? And Israel was able to both appeal, I think, to the president's ego. And you're going to come out of this with another Venezuela scenario. And I think Venezuela was pretty important. You will be the president who solved the 47-year-old Iranian problem.

26:34Vali Nasr:And that's why Trump adopted this language that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years. Every American president has failed because he was positioning himself essentially as being the transformative president when it comes to Iran. And also the regime is really weak. It's going to fall. It's not in a position to defend itself. We just need one big push. Now, you know, these days in Washington, these kinds of decisions are made less by a complete system or a complete administration than by one man. So it largely comes down to, you know, how President Trump ended up basically internalizing the messaging that he was getting from Israel, from Iran, but also from other Arab countries who were not favorable of the U.S.

27:19Vali Nasr:starting the war. And when later on we write the sort of story of this war, there are many elements in it. You know, there was one is, which we try to deal with in our article is why and how did Iran surprise the U.S., right? How did the country manage to come out of a narrative of complete defeat in June to force the U.S. to a stalemate. But the other part of it is really the decision-making in Washington. I mean, what set of assumptions led the president to calculate that this could be a five-day war and that he's going to come out of it with an absolute victory? And then, because I think what will transpire from here on, both in terms of American outlook on the Middle East and the Middle East outlook, is really internalizing what happened on the run-up to this war.

28:03And, Vali, on one of the moves on Iran's part that turned out to be surprising to parts of the administration, though, based on what we know of warnings from the U.S. military and intelligence community, have they been listened to, this should not have been a surprise, was Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Was there a debate in Tehran about how and whether to play that card? And were they surprised by the effectiveness of it, the ease with it, if they seemed to be able to shut down traffic through the strait?

28:30Vali Nasr:I mean, what you hear is that within the guards, they were not because they had been preparing for this for a long time. They had created the arsenal of drones and missiles with which to do it. But the surprising part is how the U.S. discounted this and was unprepared for it. So I guess the president thought that the Iranians won't be even there to make a decision to close the strait. And secondly, that they were taken aback with the fact that Iran was not going to use a traditional navy to create a blockade of the strait. but it was rather using unconventional, asymmetric ways of doing it from the shore.

29:03Vali Nasr:So later on, the president would keep saying, well, we've destroyed their navy. Iran didn't have a navy to write home about at the beginning, and it's immaterial to the balance of force in the strait. And then thirdly was the willingness and capability of Iran to take out so many U.S. bases across the Gulf, in particular the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain that gave them much more capability to do this. I think they had warned us in the sense that even the previous Supreme Leader had said that if war starts this time, it would be regional. But I think it was misread that means that there's going to be attacks in Iraq or the Houthis are going to shoot missiles at Israel or that whatever's left of Hezbollah may act.

29:44Vali Nasr:And this sort of a direct confrontational attack on the Gulf was not taken seriously or was not even war-gamed in a particular way. One way you can basically justify it is that for 40 years, they dealt with a supreme leader that was risk averse. And so their calculation of what Iran will do, could do, was willing to do what risk tolerance Tehran had. Ironically, they had changed that formula themselves with the assassinations. All of the U.S.'s war plans would have been probably correct if Ali Khamenei had not been assassinated and if the generals that Israel killed in June had not been killed.

30:22Vali Nasr:They would be dealing with the Iran around which they had wargamed. But they actually ended up creating a new Iran with which they had no experience. I would say it's the surprise of the audacity of Iran more than anything else that accounts for their ability to impose their strategic will on the Persian Gulf. We'll return to my conversation with Nargis Bajogli and Vali Nasser after a short break.

30:53What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world.

31:10Vali Nasr:In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com.

31:4724th to 27th. To learn more, visit independenthq.com. This July, save$10 on an all-access subscription to Foreign Affairs. Get exclusive access to thought-provoking analysis by the world's leading policymakers, scholars, and thinkers. Join the global conversation on the issues that matter most. Visit foreignaffairs.com slash July to subscribe. That's foreignaffairs.com slash J-U-L-Y.

32:20President Trump said yesterday to the Wall Street Journal that I never cared about regime change and that the new leadership, he calls the third group we've dealt with, is the most rational group yet. We can leave aside the contradictions with his statements around the time the war started about regime change. But focusing on this new leadership group, Nargis, Vali set some of this up, but how do you characterize this new generation? Why are they different? What's the change in their worldview? And to the extent that rational is the right way of characterizing them, how do they think about Iran's position and options in a way that's different from their predecessors?

32:59So this generation that's now in charge in Iran is a fundamentally new generation, as Vadhi was saying. And I think I want to put a really fine point on it, this, which is that the founding generation of the revolution is no longer. This is kind of like exactly what happened in China in the late 1970s, where you have the founding generation give way and you have a completely new class of folks coming into the foreground. And what we see from Iran, what we know of this generation is that this is a generation that for them, proving the worth of the revolution is not their business. The revolution already happened.

33:34It happened in their father's generation. The Islamic Republic is here. And especially after these two wars is here to stay, they are approaching things as defending Iran as a nation and as a nation that is no longer contained and is no longer willing to be contained and is no longer willing to be sort of pushed back into a space in which it will not, in their view, have the heft that Iran is supposed to have in the region. Because this generation, and I think it's key to understand them is that they fought the United States and Israel. Well, they fought the United States in Iraq, and then they fought Israel and the United States in Syria and Israel in Lebanon.

34:20They have a lot of experience on the ground fighting these forces, which is one of the reasons why they also are bolder when it comes to making decisions, because not only did they fight these forces across the region, but in many ways, they won those places, right? They pushed, they made Iraq such a quagmire from the United States that it had to get pushed out. The situation in Syria did not turn out the way that the Americans and the Israelis wanted it to, and so on and so forth. So what you have is a generation that is actually not intimidated by the United States. It's definitely bolder, but at the same time, they are not revolutionary like their father's generation was.

34:59So they are not trying to export the revolution around you know, the Middle East or the Muslim world. What they are trying to do is to secure Iran's strategic interests, to make sure Iran is no longer contained, to make sure Iran has a place at the table in the region, for sure, and across Asia. And I think we're going to see a much more sort of Iran as a power in Western Asia come about in the aftermath of this. So this generation is a fundamentally new one. It has been trained for decades now within Iran and their entire social milieu is one in which they have been debating these issues. And in many ways, their ideas, similar to what happens in the United States and lots of other places right now, is that the older generation kept telling the younger ones, it's not your turn yet.

35:54These ideas are, you know, like you don't know it yet. Like we're still the boomers. We're still calling the shots. And now you have a whole new generation that's coming in. They don't have to deal with their father's generation telling them it's not your time yet. It's their time, and they're going to be moving in that way. So just a story about Gen X and elder millennials taking power that we'll see everywhere, I suppose. Exactly. What about the role of a Gen X supreme leader? How is his role different from his father's? And what sense do we have of his worldview and his ability to orchestrate the system as it exists now after the war.

36:30So Moshe B 'Aqamane, yes, he's a cleric. He's the son of his father. His father, you know, stepped into a role at a time when the Islamic Republic was much more heavily Islamic than anything else, right? And so his father suffered for years from the elders in the clerical world who never really accepted him or his legitimacy. Because Ali Khamenei, the father, did not have a lot of religious legitimacy when he was pushed up into that role. He wasn't like his predecessor Khomeini was, who was very well respected, whether other religious figures agreed with him or not. Khamenei was not like that, the father.

37:10But this son doesn't care about those things. Iran is not there anymore. Iran is not more heavily Islamic than anything else. Instead, what is coming to the forefront is again this idea of the defense of the nation. And so what drives that is a narrative that comes out of the Revolutionary Guard, which is that they will defend Iran as a nation and it will be under the umbrella of the Islamic Republic. But the Islamic Republic and Iran, basically what this generation is going to do is they're going to say it is one and the same. These are not separate entities, right? So it's not a project of the Islamic Republic that is currently in occupancy in Iran.

37:49They are now basically saying this is one and the same. So Moshe Abba Khamenei is going to not care as much about a lot of the religious debates. That's not his role anymore. Those debates will, of course, continue because, you know, it's as if you're going to say, like, the Catholic Church is going to disappear. Absolutely not. Of course not. Of course these debates are going to continue in Iran and they will be social and economic and political back and forths about them. But as far as the state is concerned now, the Islamic Republic under this new kind of generation is going to be one that is, first of all, we can already see it.

38:25They don't push back on the cultural issues. Women's hijab is completely gone. Completely. Women are out in the cities across Iran now with crop tops. No one is batting an eye. It has become socially accepted. The state is actually featuring a lot of these women and girls on state television. They're normalizing this. they don't care. Again, it's like the issues that their father's generation have, they're basically saying a lot of them are actually not our issues. We didn't even like them when you guys were like harassing, you know, our classmates in school. What were you thinking? So those kinds of things are going to be, it won't be perfect, but it's going to be dealt with on a different level.

39:04Now they're going to be focused on being a highly technocratic system because what has been their Achilles heel is, yes, economic mismanagement and just in general bureaucratic mismanagement. They're going to now be focused on much more like pushing technocratic knowledge and expertise forward and making Iran a functioning state so that it can actually meet their ambitions, which is a strong pillar on the Western end of the Asian continent. I mean, that sounds, if anything, like a version of what MBS is attempting in Saudi Arabia, I mean, this simultaneous, very sharp political crackdown with a lot of opening on social issues and a much more kind of technocratic reformist approach to economics.

39:47Is that a similar bargain that both the Saudis and Iranians are making at this point? In many ways, yes. And again, you can see it generationally in the Saudi case as well, right? And then I think, though, the difference, though, is that Iran has a highly politicized population that has a very long history of making demands of its governing state. So that we're not going to see disappear. They will crack down and it will be a repressive state. But Iranian society, everything that we know of it, and this is absolutely not going to change, is not going to stop making demands and being a thorn in the side of the state.

40:24Vali, as you hear that new bargain, that new formula for legitimacy, how likely is it that this Iranian government will be able to deliver on that?

40:34Vali Nasr:Well, I think they're very cognizant on the fact that they have to deliver on it. In other words, yes, they fought a war. They survived twice between June of last year and June of this year over a one-year period. But they're also cognizant of what happened in January with the social uprising. End of the day, as Nargis said, they want to govern a state. And to govern a state, you ultimately need to build things, construct things. They need to repair the war damage. They need to address varieties of social issues in Iran. Yes, they can bring about technocratic, if you want to call it, technocratic capabilities that they've shown in the war, how well they manage the war to the economy.

41:15Vali Nasr:But in the end, how successful they are depends on how much money they have in order to be able to achieve those things. And that's why they're very focused on what they get out of this agreement, the frozen assets, the sanctions relief. And ultimately, they are, I think, open to a big deal with the United States if it actually gives them sufficient amount of economic bandwidth in order to be able to do what they want to do domestically. I mean, look, I think a point that is important about Mustafa Khamenei, right now, a lot of his legitimacy comes from his father. But in the end, he has to be his own man.

41:54Vali Nasr:He cannot live under that shadow for long. He could claim that he managed the war very well. But in order to become a stable leader for Iran, he needs to be able to govern a society that, as Nagy said, is far less Islamic, is far more driven by economic anger and anxiety. and ultimately, I think, in his motivation to be a different kind of a leader because the old model doesn't work. So I think what they can do is greatly contingent on how much economic breathing room they have. And so this agreement, a pathway to the next one, are going to be pretty important to them. The main debate in Iran today, ideologically, is not whether you should deal with the United States or not because it's, I don't know, it's infidel or it's somehow religiously abhorrent.

42:41Vali Nasr:The main issue is, is it worth your time to deal with the United States because the United States is going to cheat you or the United States is not going to deliver? So it's not that you shouldn't talk to the United States on principle. You should not talk to the United States if you think that it's going to not deliver. And if you look, the most hawkish people in Iran, like the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, General Wahidi, was opposed to an agreement until now, they did not actually deliver on frozen assets in Iran. The advisor to the Supreme Leader, a former Revolutionary Guard commander, said that, you know, an MOU agreement with the United States is contingent on freezing our frozen assets.

43:22Vali Nasr:So yes, they talked about Lebanon. Yes, they talked about a lot of other things. But it's very clear that front of mind for them is the most fundamental thing you need in order to rule a country, which is economic needs. Vali, when I hear Nargis's description of the worldview or the sense of Iran's strategic position that this new crop of leaders has, and when you read some of the more sort of triumphalist statements that have come from parts of the Iranian government around this deal, you can understand that sense of triumph in this moment. But it does sound like there's some degree of cockiness or hubris that could, both domestically and regionally or strategically, really look misguided in the next several months.

44:07that Iran's position may not be as strong as it seems, just given the reactions from some of the Gulf states that have been attacked in the last couple of months, the continuing role of American power. Obviously, this war has not gone well, but you still have a lot of American military assets in the region and plenty of other threats. Do you see the risk of hubris on Iran's part in a way that could backfire?

44:31Vali Nasr:Yes, I think the risk of overreach and hubris is always there. Of course, this kind of language that you described was very important in keeping their base engaged, keeping a lot of Iranians who are not even supportive of the Islamic Republic to basically join in the rally to the flag every night in the squares, et cetera. So they've also created expectations around what they've achieved, which now they're finding it difficult to manage. That's why you saw, for instance, demonstrations in front of the foreign ministry yesterday opposing the memorandum of understanding. You also have military commanders who are obviously quite confident or maybe overconfident in what they have achieved.

45:10Vali Nasr:And I think the challenge for Mushtab al-Khamenei is how to be able to manage this exuberance and be able to, I think the big test for him is not that he has brought, or the Revolutionary Guard have brought Iran to this point. Okay, that's achievement number one. The more important achievement is, can he translate this moment into something substantive for Iran? Can he translate these strategic gains that they have gained into a new reality for Iran, regionally, economically, vis-a-vis the United States? And I have a sense that, at least reading the tea leaves, that by allowing the engagements that have happened, by allowing his close confidant, the Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Boff, who I was actually very, very personally close to him, I mean, it's reputed that in the old days, he had lunch with Mushtab al-Khamenei once a week for decades.

46:04Vali Nasr:And to go to Islamabad and sit one-on-one with Vance and to go again to Geneva and sign this deal, which ultimately will have his imprimatur, is suggested that he understands that the military solution to Iran's dilemmas has perhaps reached its limit. You can't keep the strait closed forever. You cannot tolerate the blockade forever. And so if he can translate this into a peacetime gain for Iran, I think that's his preference. And that's also the risk for him. That's because the expectations in Iran that this would be transformative for the country is quite high. That's an expectation that they have created.

46:44Vali Nasr:And if he's not able to deliver, if things fall apart, I do think that, you know, even his position as supreme leader may be fraught going forward. Nargis, what will determine whether they're able to deliver on those expectations? Is that fundamentally about sanctions relief and frozen assets or are there other key dimensions to this? Frozen assets are important as a trust building, but it's not, you know, and it is important for them. What's going to be important moving forward is sanctions relief, especially on Iran's oil and petrochemicals and Iran's ability to be able to access those funds without any kind of interference.

47:23and then, you know, setting up some kind of processing fees through the Strait of Hormuz will probably get Iran, you know, upwards of 10 plus billion dollars a year, depending on what the charges end up being. It's a good amount, but it's not an amount that's going to keep the economy afloat. So essentially what Iran is important and is going to be sort of moving forward is in similar ways that we saw a bolder Iran on the battlefield. We also are seeing a bolder diplomatic Iran and a more sort of aggressive Iran when it comes to outreach. We've seen that with all of the social media Lego videos and social media memes that they put out.

47:58You know, so essentially when I'm saying that Iran is getting out of containment or part of what we're arguing in this article is that this is a fundamentally new Middle East because the Middle East of the past 50 years was built, the entire architecture of it was built to contain Iran. Iran is now out of that. It has maneuvered out of that through these wars. But what we're going to see moving forward is what an uncontained Iran means is it's going to be making a lot more deals with countries around the region, countries around Asia. And in many ways, it's going to try to make moot these kinds of pressures from the United States as well when it comes to some of these sanctions, it's going to be much more engaged on a more peer level with China, especially on trade.

48:44And these are the things that they are sort of depending on. And I see them making plans for and talking a lot about as far as how they're going to be rebuilding the country. And I just want to put a fine point on something you said early in your answer there, which is that you expect that there will almost certainly be processing fees, which we won't call tolls, but will in fact be tolls. And we talked about this earlier, but you put it quite precisely there. Yes. Vali, picking up on some of the grand strategy elements of this, so not totally clear as I both try to understand what's in this agreement and then also read your work and the work of others on how some of the key pieces of the old grand strategy are likely to fit into Iran's approach going forward.

49:26I guess front of mind for me would be just to raise nuclear weapons again, how they think about their options on the nuclear program. Do they need to retain enrichment capacity? Will they be, you know, trying to do things secretly that inspectors will be looking for? And then the second, the axes of resistance. Do they expect that Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias and the Houthis and perhaps Hamas will be important tools for them going forward? Or has Hormuz and these other kinds of tools that they developed since the war started really changed the equations they see it and made both nuclear weapons and the axes of resistance less important than they once were?

50:02Vali Nasr:I think there's two levels to both of these issues, the nuclear and the proxy. I mean, first of all, these issues after decades of being forced front of mind in Iran have now become a political issue domestically. In other words, you cannot give up the right to enrichment easily because it's now become an issue of national right. You cannot really see how a government in Iran would be able to sell that, that we gave this right away after decades of saying this is an inherent right. And similarly, the relationship with Hezbollah, both within IRGC, but more broadly within the body politic that is supportive of the Islamic Republic.

50:38Vali Nasr:And also after, at least since 2023, harping on the importance of a Shia community, which in Lebanon is much larger than Hezbollah, is actually suffering because of this war. Basically, it's also a politically difficult issue in Iran. I mean, the thing with proxies is that it's not a clean weapon. You can't just discard it. that easily. So there is that political dimension, which would be a challenge for IRGC and for Mushtab al-Khamini to manage as they negotiate with the U.S. But I think strategically, these things are still tools for Iran, except they're being used maybe in a different way. So I still don't think that Iran looks at its nuclear program completely in a sense that this is a pathway to a bomb that will become a deterrent.

51:24Vali Nasr:It's still by and large something that they're willing to leverage at a negotiating table for something substantial from the United States. I think they no longer view that these proxies are sufficient deterrence against Israel. In fact, the fact that Israel and the U.S. went to two wars with Iran without giving a second thought to these proxies suggests that the value that the proxies fulfilled for decades, namely holding Israel's hand against Iran, is no longer there. But that does not mean that they have no value at all. It would have to fit into a completely new war strategy in Iran, which is no longer dominated by the Quds Force and its regional capabilities, but by the missile division of IRGC and its drone and missile capabilities.

52:13Vali Nasr:So whatever the Quds Force had is of military importance, but not as the premier military importance that it had before. And the missiles and drones matter a lot more. So I think that the role of the proxies in Iran's strategic thinking is radically shifting between the collapse of Hezbollah and Syria to today. But it's not either everything or nothing. It's just that the way Iran thinks of them as to how they fit into the defense national security approach that they have is different from the past. And similarly with the nuclear issue, I think what Iran understands that even after a massive bombardment of Iran's nuclear facilities, the U.S.

52:55Vali Nasr:still, its mind is not addressed with Iran's nuclear program. The president claimed it to be obliterated, and yet it's still on the table. So the question for them is, do they want to spend billions of dollars rebuilding it for it to be bombed again? Or do they want to actually negotiate over it and get something for it? That I don't think has fundamentally changed in reality. And how do you expect Iran's Gulf neighbors will respond in the months ahead? Obviously, there's been a real divergence, especially between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But as you look at the regional picture and the regional balance, as it appears from Tehran, how might that change or how has that changed the result of the war and what might that look like in the months ahead?

53:39Vali Nasr:I would say the best way of thinking about right now is that everything in the Gulf has changed. In other words, its view of Iran being a manageable aggressor from their point of view has changed. In other words, Iran has crossed lines with them that you cannot undo now. It's a bigger threat at some level. Secondly, their view of the United States has changed. In other words, the U.S. is not a protection. U.S. bases were supposed to be there since the Carter-Reagan years to protect them against the war with Iran. So the Gulf countries operated on the basis that if you created normalization with Iran, Iran won't attack you and the bases need not be used.

54:16Vali Nasr:And in fact, everything was turned upside down because the U.S. went into an offensive war with Iran, which had nothing to do with the Gulf. And in fact, the Gulf was opposed to it and they ended up being collateral damage. So the U.S. brought a war to the Gulf and then was not capable or willing to defend the Gulf against that collateral damage. So regardless of how angry they are about Iran, how afraid of Iran they are, they also know that the old model of the protection the U.S. provided is no longer there. So they have to think out of the box. And the answers that are coming up among themselves is actually creating massive fractures among them.

54:52Vali Nasr:In other words, UAE's solution to this is to be aggressive with Iran and invite Israel into a much deeper strategic partnership, which means bringing Israel in a much bigger way into the Gulf, which the Saudis are not comfortable with, the Qataris are not comfortable, the Omanis are not comfortable with. And in fact, if UAE's plan is to become a military juggernaut by doubly investing in military warfare capabilities, supposedly it's against Iran, but it will be viewed in a threatening manner by all of its neighbors. And so a lot of other issues have come to the fore. And unfortunately in Washington, I don't see any serious thinking about this.

55:29Vali Nasr:There's a sort of a Pollyannish view that the past would be a prologue. In other words, we just sort of would revert back to having a unified GCC. relying on U.S. bases, and the Gulf will be what it was before. And I just don't imagine it's going to be that simple. I want to close by returning to the prediction that Nargis really started with on the possibility of a transformed regional order. I was struck in listening to Vice President J.D. Vance, especially yesterday, talking about what this deal could mean. He said things like, if the Iranians comply with this deal, it is going to fundamentally transform the Middle East for the next 50 years.

56:07This region of the world has been a basket case for my entire life and longer than that. You know, it really sounded like the Obama administration, some of the kind of gazier predictions from the Obama administration around the Iran deal a decade ago. Nargis, if you do kind of take seriously the idea of a transformed regional order flowing from this moment, how do we get there and what does that order look like? I think what was tested in the past year was essentially the regional order that had been constructed over the past four decades, which was, again, a security structure in the Gulf, as you guys were just talking about, and more thoroughly throughout the rest of the region as well, that was there primarily to contain Iran and sort of Iran's allies around the region.

56:47If this deal sort of goes through and what you're stating about J.D. Vance's statements and things like that is essentially an understanding that, as you're stating very correctly, the Obama administration also came to the conclusion, which was the policies of containing a country the size of Iran, with the history that Iran has in the region, with, you know, I mean, it is, it makes absolutely no logical sense. And so this idea of full containment only leads to continued conflict throughout the region and will only continue to do so. What we're going to see moving forward now, the contours of it are yet to be seen.

57:23But I think for the first time, we now have an understanding that came about through warfare, unfortunately, which is that the containment of Iran is something that is nonsensical to U.S. national interests, that it only sustains forever wars in the region, and that if we are very serious about ending these forever wars so we can actually think about our real and actual national interests, then we need to have a fundamentally different approach to the Middle East. And so this has now been forced on the battlefield. The question is, can the United States accept this? It seems at least for now that this memorandum of understanding is leading in that direction.

58:04Obviously, there are a lot of forces across different states that don't want, they've benefited off of the modus operandi being what it was. But the reality is in the material world, that can no longer sustain itself. So the bigger question is, how long does it take us to get there? And until we can get to a place where the United States is dealing with Iran in the region by having it at the table and actually engaging with it, as well as Iran with the rest of its neighbors, we will continue to see conflicts flare throughout the region. Vali, let me get your perhaps similarly optimistic sense of where regional order could be going, but also to focus a bit on the U.S.

58:45policy options. If you were back in government trying to encourage this kind of transformation, what would you be doing now? What should Washington be doing now to try to get us there?

58:55Vali Nasr:Well, you know, I think Vice President Vance's comments basically put the onus of the future of the Middle East on Iran abiding by disagreement. But it doesn't show a pathway about even if Iran did abide by disagreement, how does it get us to somewhere better that he claims would be the case? What I see missing then is that there is no serious thinking in Washington about what is his vision for a future Middle East order? And then what are the set of policies that is going to get it there? And you should have a policy after you have a vision. So where do they go from here? Right now, it only looks like they want to get out of this war as fast as they can.

59:33Vali Nasr:And they just put it in the rear view mirror and then leave the Middle East to its own devices. And I think Middle East understands this, whether you're Israel or Saudi Arabia or UAE or Iran, that basically the U.S. has no plans for actually bringing order to the region. And I would say that it has to begin with a realization that the old order is gone. Good and bad with it, it's all gone. As Nargis says, you cannot bring it back. And so you have to think about how you will bring a balance of power between Israel and Iran to sustain peace, sort of at least no war situation. How do you restore a kind of a relationship between Iran and its Gulf neighbors that allows the economy of the Gulf to return where it was?

1:00:17Vali Nasr:And then where do you go from that? In other words, then how do you sort of bring stability to the Levant, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian issue? And then down the road, the biggest piece of this is what are the mechanisms by which you can put Iran and Israel on a pathway to go from war ultimately to something less, to de-escalation, and then, you know, maybe not in our lifetime, to an actual peace in the region. And none of that actually exists. And the reality is that we're at a moment in the Middle East, which is like a Versailles moment for Europe, or a post-World War II moment for Europe, that begs, if you would, for really fresh thinking about what's possible, and then, you know, how do you get there?

1:01:02Well, that is a great charge for our authors going forward, and for American policymakers. So that's a good place to leave it. Vali Nargis, thank you so much for the great essay on our new issue and thanks for doing this today.

1:01:13Vali Nasr:Thank you. Thanks for inviting us.

1:01:20Thank 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 Rachel Powell, Mary-Kate Godfrey, and Connish Theroux. Our audio engineer is Christopher Cook. 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.

1:02:09We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview. Don't forget to visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to sign up for Dan Kurtz-Falen's free weekly newsletter featuring more of the clear-headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. Sign up today at foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight.