Middle East Expert Bernard Haykel on the Three Futures for Iran After the Strikes

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1:46Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. This is not a war that has been thought through at all. And my fear is that the Iranian regime still has the capacity to really cause a tremendous amount of chaos in the Gulf. Bernard Haeckel, a Middle East expert who's following events in Iran and is in regular contact with Saudi Arabia's crown prince. Can I ask you which of those scenarios you think is the most likely? My bet is that this regime will survive. This is a very tough regime that still has at least 20 % of the population on side and is willing to kill to remain in power. And I think what MBS will be doing now is telling Trump that we don't want chaos in Iran.

2:35From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:44If, like me, you've been watching the events in the Middle East this week, there has been so much to take in. Strikes by Israel and the United States are of a different order to what they did last year. In Iran, the authorities say hundreds of people have been killed. And Iran's retaliation has seen targets struck in many places, from the Emirates to the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, which makes this a wide conflict and a complex picture, one that could have consequences for years to come. So obviously we wanted to talk about it to at least try and make sense of what's happening now and where it's leading.

3:30And that's when I thought of Professor Bernard Haeckel who has studied the Middle East for decades. He's Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and strikingly someone who looks at politics alongside religion, history, culture and social change. He has a deep understanding of Iran and a particular insight on Saudi Arabia, the most powerful country in the region, because he talks and whatsapps regularly with its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Right at the end of this, we get to Bernard Haeckel's own personal connection with the countries he writes about. And I hope you get from the conversation what I did, some clarity at a turbulent time.

4:20Tell me, first of all, Professor Haeckel, what it was like when you heard the news last Saturday that the US and Israel had begun striking Iran. What were the first thoughts that went through your mind? I wasn't surprised that this attack happened. I was only surprised by how soon it did, given that they were still negotiating, the Iranians were negotiating with the Americans. But, you know, word among the leaders in the Gulf states, people like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was that Israel would sooner or later attack because Iran is at its weakest. They had knocked out most of its, if not all of its, air defenses last June.

4:57And that this was an opportunity to really destroy and defeat the system itself and to topple the regime. the surprise really was more to do with timing and also the fact that the Americans were all in on this because it was primarily an Israeli decision to attack, I think. Were you surprised, though, by how fast it spread to other countries that because of the Iranian retaliation, we soon had all these other countries in the region which found that they were being struck? Yes. only in as much as the Iranian regime felt existentially threatened. The Iranians have been saying this, by the way, to all the leaders in the Arab world, that if they are existentially threatened, that they will attack broadly and widely and try to disrupt oil shipments and gas shipments, and they would do exactly what has happened and what is still happening.

5:52I also knew that within the regime in Iran that there were sort of two factions. One faction basically said that the response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani by President Trump in the first term, this is the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and then later the 12-day war of last year, that the response of the Iranians was very muted and that that basically had encouraged the Israelis and the Americans to feel that they were undeterred and that they would attack again. So the other faction in Iran that's more, say, forward-leaning or more aggressive said, you know, this time if they attack us, we're really going to have to respond.

6:32Otherwise, we have no deterrence whatsoever. Or maybe also it's almost a question of reputation. And there's something perhaps almost, you know, primeval that comes out of like, you just do want to show that you've got it in you to fight back. Yes. And also, I think that within Iran itself, the longer-range ballistic missiles had been very seriously destroyed by the Israelis in the 12-day war of last June. The Iranians now have a much larger arsenal of short-range missiles and drones that hadn't been damaged. So that's why you're seeing so many more missiles going at the UAE and at Bahrain and Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, because that's the arsenal that the Iranians actually still have, relatively speaking, large numbers of.

7:20Before we dive deeper into many facets of what you've set out, Bernard, I want to ask about how you see a moment like this with your knowledge and expertise, because you've studied history, you've studied Islam. So when you see the news, are you always using that longer lens, looking back in time, putting it in that kind of context? I mean, yes, these are modern states and their ideologies, including the Iranian state. You know, its ideology draws on a particular cherry-picked version of Islam, but it's a modern state and it's a modern ideology. And I see the Middle East as riven or divided between two groups or two ideologies, two ways of looking at the world.

8:06So you have the status quo powers. Those are powers that basically want to develop their countries and they want peace and stability to economically advance. And they include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, also the UAE, despite what they're doing in Sudan and Yemen. And then you have this other group that is revisionist. I would call them revisionist in the sense that they want to redraw the map of the Middle East. They want to change the power dynamics. And they include, surprisingly, both Iran and the Israeli right wing. And the Iranians want to see Israel destroyed. They want to see America thrown out of the region militarily, as well as its economic and political and cultural influence.

8:49And the Israelis also, the right wing in Israel also wants to reshape and reimagine the Middle East according to its own political agenda. And so what we're seeing today is one of the revisionist powers, that is the Israelis, attempting to do just that, to destroy the Iranian regime. and to see either something replace it or chaos for that matter. And that's a real fear of mine, is that if you end up with a failed state in Iran with 92 million people, you could end up with a catastrophic situation for Iranians and for the neighbors. It's interesting to me that you do call Iran a modern state because in so many ways its structure, the theocracy, the fact that it has, well, had in the form of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and Ayatollah at the top of the pyramid.

9:39So should we not see it as a theocracy? Should we see it as a modern nation state in which the leadership are called names other than what we're used to? So it is a theocracy in as much as you have a cleric who, you know, heads it, now a dead cleric, and Khamenei, and before him Khomeini. But if you look at the ideology of Iran, of the state. You see it's a combination of different strands. So you have anti-imperialism, you have anti-colonialism, these are modern ideologies. You have social justice ideas from communism and Marxism, those are modern as well. But you also have elements of pre-modern medieval theology as well that are repackaged in a modern guise.

10:24And then you also have Iranian nationalism, which is again a modern ideology, not an ancient one. So what you have is sort of a hybrid regime in Iran in its ideology. And this is true, by the way, of other Islamist ideologies like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a combination of elements of traditional Islam with modern ideologies. Let's dig in then to the peril of this moment and the complexity of this moment, particularly in relation to Iran. I think for most people, what they're imagining is either the regime survives or it doesn't survive. And if it doesn't survive, then most people hope something better comes out of that.

11:04You're raising the prospect that the state could fail and there is just anarchy? Yes. So I think there are three possibilities from what we're seeing today. So the regime survives as it is and gets hardened even further in its determination to be a revisionist power and the theocracy that Ayatollah Khomeini set up in 1979 with the Revolutionary Guard Corps in control and a cleric as a supreme leader. So that's one possibility. The other is a Venezuela-like solution. So the regime stays, but you have a new leadership that's more nationalist, less revolutionary, and that is willing to cut deals with the Trump administration.

11:47That's what I just termed the Venezuela solutions. So same regime, but reformed. And the third possibility is the regime, you know, the falling of the regime or the downfall of the regime. And in that case, you could end up with a civil war. You could end up with different ethnicities. Iran is only about 50 % Persian by ethnicity. So you have other ethnicities, the Baluch, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Arabs. and they could be armed by outside powers and you could end up with a very chaotic and a very weakened central state. And that would spell a disaster for Iran and for the region itself. Because Iran is a large country with a super talented population, has massive resources in oil and gas and seeing a Libya-style war in Iran would be catastrophic.

12:39Can I ask you which of those three scenarios at this point in time you think is the most likely? My bet is that this regime will survive. This is a very tough regime that still has at least 20 % of the population on side and is willing to kill to remain in power. And we saw this in the response to the demonstrations that took place in January. The regime was willing to kill tens of thousands of its own citizens. So this is not a regime that's going to easily disappear. It has deep roots in Iranian society. And, you know, frankly, it has delivered, despite all its problems, it has delivered on basic services for its population, whether it's health care, education and basic infrastructure.

13:24So I don't see it disappearing. I think the Americans are hoping for a Venezuela-like reform regime. And the Israelis probably would prefer chaos in Iran. But if that first scenario of yours, the survival of the regime and the possible strengthening is the most likely in your view, we will be asking in time, what was this war for? Yeah, I don't think the Americans, by the way, have thought through, that is the Trump administration have thought through scenarios for after this war at all. I think they just went into this thinking they could, you know, it would be a very quick and easy decapitation of the leader and that somehow the regime would immediately come to a Venezuela-like accommodation with the Americans.

14:08But even President Trump said that the success of that initial attack that killed Ayatollah Khamenei was so successful that they knocked out several of the potential leaders who they were hoping to take over the regime and then make this accommodation. So this is not a war that has been thought through at all. And my fear is that the Iranian regime still has the capacity to really cause a tremendous amount of chaos in the Gulf. And we see this now with the Strait of Hormuz is blocked. No one will insure a ship going through there. And that's about 20 % of global oil and a lot of the world's gas.

14:46And so we're going to see a lot of chaos if this war doesn't end soon. Can I ask you, Bernard, to explain something else that we've been seeing in a number of countries, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Iraq, Nigeria, and that is Shia Muslims protesting and publicly mourning the Ayatollah. Now, would you say that is religious or political or a mixture? How should we understand it? So the Ayatollah in Iran subscribes to a particular version of 12-year-ish Islam. And the doctrine itself is called wiliyat al-faqih, which means the guardianship of the jurist. This is a distinctive modern doctrine that Ayatollah Khomeini came up with.

15:34And most Shia in the world, most 12-year-ish in the world, and they represent about 15 % of the Muslim population in the world, don't adhere to this doctrine. They don't see it as legitimate. But they have tremendous affinity and affection for the regime in Iran and for the leadership of the regime, even though theologically they're not connected to it. So I see most of the Shia lamentation and response to what is happening in Iran and the killing of Khamenei as more political than theological. Okay. So when you said that that public mourning, the lamentation is political, it is then, it is directly against the United States and Israel.

16:15it is not just mourning for a spiritual leader. Yeah, I think it is more of a political sentiment. And it's one, by the way, that's shared by others. I mean, people who see Iran as a country that is resisting empire, that's resisting Israel, that's resisting colonialism, have tremendous sympathy for Iran. People who identify with it on that basis as well. So you'll have many leftists, for instance, who will feel very sad. about what's happening in Iran and the death of its leader.

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19:00Let's talk then about Saudi Arabia and particularly about the leadership of Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. You've got a forthcoming book about Saudi Arabia today, and you do talk to the Crown Prince on a one-to-one basis. First of all, can you give us your sense of these conflicting reports about what Mohammed bin Salman wanted to happen between the US and Israel and Iran, whether he was behind the scenes pushing for these strikes on Iran? Yes. So I've spoken to Mohammed bin Salman specifically about this issue over the last two or three years. He's been very clear and categorical that he does not want a war with Iran.

19:43He does not want Israel to attack Iran. And that he has tried to reduce tensions with Iran. And you see this in a detente agreement that was signed in March of 2023 with the help of the Chinese that reopened embassies between Saudi Arabia and Iran and resumed visas and so on. Which was a really striking moment given their relationship over a long period of time. That's right. I mean, the regime in Iran since the time of Ayatollah Khomeini, so since 1979, has vilified Saudi Arabia and the rulers in Saudi Arabia and seeing them as illegitimate puppets of the West. And they've used, even Ayatollah Khomeini used very abusive terms when referring to the Saudi royal family, calling them the camel grazers of Najd, Najd being the central province of Saudi Arabia.

20:30And so the history is one of great tension. And initially, when King Salman, the father of Mohammed bin Salman, acceded to the throne in 2015, Mohammed bin Salman, he's known as MBS in the West, actually attacked Iran verbally and compared Ayatollah Khamenei to Hitler and said that, you know, we'll take the fight to them if they fight us and so on. And then he toned down his rhetoric and then tried to reestablish better relations with the Iranians. Those relations having broken off in 2017 when a prominent Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia was executed for resistance to the regime and for promoting revolution to the regime, according to the Saudis.

21:10Anyway, MBS realizes that Iran has this arsenal of short-range missiles, that they can do a tremendous amount of damage to not just his oil facilities, but also his vital installations like salination plants, electricity generation plants, communication systems, and so on. And he has no effective way of blocking that swarm of attack that the Iranians can send against Saudi Arabia. And we saw this in September 2019 when the Iranians, in a display of their firepower, attacked a major oil separation facility in Saudi Arabia called Abqaik and damaged it very severely and knocked out 50 % of their production.

21:51So he's very wary and worried about what Iran can do and so did not want the war. So the Washington Post article saying that MBS was supporting an attack on Iran is not true. You're sure of that? Absolutely. Their reporting was that four people familiar with the matter said that he made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack. I mean, the Saudis have pushed back against this publicly. You're sure that version's true? Yeah. He did call Trump several times asking him not to attack. So that's the true version of it. Having said that, he also warned the Iranians, because the Iranians did threaten him, that if they are existentially threatened, that they would attack him.

22:31and he warned the Iranians that if they were to attack him, he would have to defend himself and that he would launch attacks against Iran. And I think that's exactly what's likely to happen. You're going to see the Saudi Air Force getting involved in this war on the side of both the US and Israel. He is a nationalist, MBS is a nationalist, and he has to show his own population that he can defend the country against these attacks because the attacks have been on civilian targets and industrial targets. The major oil refinery has been attacked and so on. And so he needs to, like the Iranians, reestablish deterrence vis-a-vis Iran.

23:07That would be another widening of this war. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I think we're going to see that if the Iranians don't stop soon. And if this war doesn't stop soon, you will see a widening of it. And you'll see Gulf states involved in defending themselves. And so this was his fear. His fear is that he can't defend his vital installations. And, you know, you have to imagine if you're MBS, for instance, and you have a city like Riyadh with seven, eight million people that relies very heavily on desalination, that is the boiling of seawater to produce fresh water. And if those plants are damaged, you have no water and you would have to evacuate your cities.

23:47That's an existential crisis for Saudi Arabia. That is why he was against this war. Would Saudi Arabia not have seen a prize in a potentially weakened Iran? I'm imagining the conversations between him and the Trump administration or President Trump himself, would it not benefit from a weakened Iran? I know you think that we're not going to end up with a weakened Iran, but would he have been tempted by that possibility? Well, he has no love for the Iranian regime. There's a long history of animosity. But his main concern is not a weakened Iran, but an Iran that has no state or a failed state that ends up in chaos and civil war.

24:31See, this is where the perspective of a country like Saudi Arabia is radically different from that of Israel. And I think this is where the United States shares more with Saudi than it does with Israel. Because the Saudis see the Iranians as neighbors. They're not going to go away. And chaos in Iran would spill over into Saudi Arabia. whereas Israel is a thousand kilometers away from Iran and doesn't care what happens there. So you have a very different perspective, a much more prudent view on the future out of necessity. I mean, this is not love for Iran. This is just pure pragmatism and realpolitik.

25:08And I think what MBS will be doing now is telling Trump that we don't want chaos in Iran. Yeah, but he didn't manage to deter President Trump from being part of this and being right at the forefront of it. And yet, from what President Trump has said, he seems to admire Mohammed bin Salman a lot. He likes him a lot. He said that publicly. Yes. I mean, it is very true that Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel has prevailed in convincing President Trump that this war should be waged by the United States and that MBS has not been able to convince Trump otherwise. President Trump came to political awareness in the 1970s when you had the two major oil crises of 1973 and 1979.

25:54He sees the Arab sheikhs as the richest and most powerful people who need to be cultivated. Because that's what he saw in the 1970s with characters like Adnan Khashoggi and Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani and all these super wealthy Saudi oil sheikhs. Won an arms dealer. Exactly. Won the oil minister of Saudi Arabia for a time. Correct. And he saw the massive transfer of wealth from oil-consuming countries to oil-producing countries. And Saudi Arabia became one of the richest countries on the planet almost overnight. That's very appealing to President Trump. And I think he sees the Arabs, the Arab sheikhs in particular, as sources of revenue for the United States.

26:34He doesn't see them as serious strategic allies or thinkers or influencers when it comes to U.S. policy, but rather as sort of cash cows, if you like, for the American industry and for the American economy. And the other way, what does Mohammed bin Salman think of Donald Trump? My suspicion is that he, look, let me put it to you very bluntly. A Saudi, this is not MBS, a very kind of well-connected Saudi told me that, you know, you Americans can elect a monkey to the White House and we would have to like him. So the view of any Saudi leader when it comes to the United States is that you have to have a good relationship with the president.

27:15That's why they've almost always insisted that the ambassador, the U.S. ambassador in Riyadh should be a personal friend of the president who can just pick up the phone and call him. They have to get along with the U.S. because they depend for their security on the U.S. Their investments are in the U.S. And their culture is oriented towards the United States. So he has to deal with President Trump. And I think that my sense when I've asked MBS about the comparison between the Biden administration in the last year of the Biden administration, when relations got very warm with the Saudis and President Trump is that he had great appreciation for MBS, that is, had great appreciation for the institution to institutional relations that had developed between the U.S.