The Global Fallout of Donald Trump’s War on Iran

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2:03Robin Wright:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

2:12Dexter Filkins:Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week, Donald Trump launched a war against Iran. And in the days that followed, the administration's rationale has shifted on a nearly daily basis. Talking with one reporter after another, the president, and his advisors as well, seem to road test ideas and potential outcomes in public, frequently contradicting one another. The administration seems to want things both ways, or always. Pete Hegseth scoffs at nation building, calling that concept dumb. No more endless wars, he says. And yet Donald Trump apparently wants regime change, an entirely new government in Iran, and he won't rule out boots on the ground.

2:59Dexter Filkins:J.D. Vance says Trump won't allow a long war, while Trump himself muses that we have enough weapons to fight forever. There's a very familiar and ominous ring to all of this. To understand where this war may lead, for Iran, for the Middle East, and for the United States, I called on two of my colleagues with decades of experience covering the region. Dexter Filkins has reported from all over the Middle East and much of the world. And his best-selling book, The Forever War, is a defining history of our campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively over the years.

3:37Dexter Filkins:And she even met with Ali Khamenei before he became the supreme leader of Iran. Rock the Kasbah is Robin's book about the Arab Spring. After the war began, I spoke with Robin Wright and Dexter Filkins.

3:53Dexter Filkins:Well, here we are, five days into this war. And last week, I had on the program somebody you both know, Kareem Sajjadpur, who is an Iran expert. And very subtly, Kareem said a few things. One was that he didn't think it was necessarily a great idea to martyr an 86-year-old leader of Iran, no matter how pernicious his record. And he also said a lot of outcomes could ensue, but what we are most likely to see is a tremendous amount of chaos. This war has spread all over the Persian Gulf region and now even to Turkey. And I want to ask you, Robin, what did the Trump administration intend? Why did it begin this war?

4:45I wish more of us knew more specifics because we haven't had very much. Originally, there was talk of regime change, and it didn't sound as grand or as dangerous as has played out on the ground. I think the danger is that the United States hoped that there would be a protest movement arising from this that would topple the regime. And the prospects of that are very limited. And the danger is that killing Khamenei, for some, will deepen their passions. This could totally backfire on the Trump administration.

5:30Dexter Filkins:Well, Dexter, I don't even know what the intention was. I've heard the president of the United States say on day one that this was about regime change. Then I heard the secretary of war, Pete Heggseth, say this is exactly not about regime change and it won't go on forever. Then we had the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, backtracking comments about who got us into this in the first place. He had indicated to some degree that it was Israel that had pushed the United States in. And then the president of the United States said, no, it's actually quite the opposite. Wouldn't the average American be quite right to be utterly confused?

6:12Robin Wright:Yes. I think, you know, the cliche in the military is no plan survives contact with the enemy. And that's certainly clear here to whatever extent there was a plan. I think the goal is regime change, but it's we'll bomb everything that we can. You know, everything from we'll take out the leadership all the way down to police stations, which they're bombing. So I can sort of see how this is being set up for a moment when I think President Trump can say, OK, we've done our part. Now it's up to you. And we close up and go home. And whether the regime is still standing, then we'll see. Actually, you covered the Iraq War.

6:55Dexter Filkins:To what degree does this resemble your experience and understanding of Iraq, and how does it not follow that pattern?

7:05Robin Wright:Iraq's very different from Iran in the sense that it was a broken, traumatized, very fractious society, heterogeneous, very, very diverse, groups at odds with each other. And that had all been held together by the kind of the steel frame of Saddam's dictatorship, which we went in and broke. And when we broke that steel frame, it all flew apart. Iran's a very different country than that. I think what worries me here is that we are destroying the state and we are destroying the thing that held the country together. And so without that, without order, without law and order in the streets, what can be accomplished?

7:49Robin Wright:And I think that's what disturbs me right now.

7:51Dexter Filkins:Robert Leonard Robin, we've heard from the President of the United States that in his understanding that Iran was preparing to attack American interests, preparing to potentially attack Israel. How credible is it the notion that Iran was preparing to attack American interests, much less the United States, and so the United States launched a preemptive war? Well, it sounds like wag the dog to me, and it's a little bit like saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, you know, creating a pretext for an attack. I don't think there's any prospect that Iran was going to be aggressive against the United States or American interests, including Israel.

8:38After the June war last year, Iran, I think, has been much more careful in making its military calculations. It also has been deeply weakened, whether it's military at home, after the protests, I think the government felt vulnerable. So, you know, the idea that it was in this weakened state militarily and politically going to attack the United States is hogwash. Let me ask you this.

9:12Dexter Filkins:You had the rare experience, Robin, of having met the late Ayatollah Khamenei. What was he like, and what does his death mean for the situation now? Well, we had a working breakfast, and I remember being very struck by here, the president then of Iran at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, set to go off to speak to the United Nations, the first revolutionary to come to the outside world. And he struck me as rather unworldly, a bit naive. He speaks in a spoke in a raspy voice. I was struck when the revolutionary guards who were protecting him came over to cut up his breakfast meat because he lost one of his arms in a tape recorder bomb in 1981.

10:12Dexter Filkins:Right. His arm was paralyzed. And it was a microcosm of how much he depended on the Revolutionary Guards as his political base, too. Because he came in only as a mediocre or mid-level cleric without a power base except a few of his own followers. And had to build something that would institutionalize him, legitimize him. And he did that through the military. and he managed to hold on to power for 37 years because he could always rely on that military. It seems that the state is now going to put forward a new supreme leader, but it also seems that the most important political player still on his feet is Ali Larajani.

11:01Dexter Filkins:Now, this is someone that you, Dexter, have had encounters with in the past and maybe Robin has as well. Lurajani is by no means a radical departure ideologically from the regime. In fact, he played a key role in the recent brutal crackdown on protesters.

11:19Robin Wright:I met him for the first time, geez, like 20 years ago. He was a national security advisor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president then. And I arrived in Tehran very late at like 11 p.m. there was a note at the desk saying, Mr. Larjani will see you in his office at 7 a.m. Not a good hour. He arrived here normally. Not a good hour. And he'd already been there for a couple hours, clearly. Bloodshot eyes. Very driven man, you could see. And I remember he said to me, he launched into a, and Robin probably has a lot of experience with this, but the first thing he did for 10 minutes was launch into a lecture about the glories of Persian civilization.

12:07and something he said something like you know we invented algebra when when when your ancestors

12:12Robin Wright:were still you know dancing naked on the cliffs of dover something to that effect and and so there was a kind of a a kind of a cultural chip on his shoulder that he had but um but a very serious man and i and i think the guy that until recently was was running the government day to day if anybody's going to make a deal. I think it's going to be him.

12:34Dexter Filkins:We've seen thousands and thousands of people come out into the streets, not just recently, but over the years. This has happened periodically. But the other side has all the guns, and it also has the willingness to kill thousands of people, as we've seen recently. So where does the idea of regime change hit reality? We're likely to end up, at least according to where we are now, eventually with some kind of rump state that has a new supreme leader that still controls the main levers of power, but is weakened. and has a population that may be alienated and angry, very angry over pocketbook issues.

13:25You know, water and electricity are in short supply. Life is unaffordable for a lot of people. So the question is, based on the people I've talked to in Iran, whether there is a little bit of momentum because there is a strong sense of nationalism in Iran that dates back 5 ,000 years, and they've been attacked by the United States. If there's still a rump state in place, then sanctions will still be in place, and there'll still be questions about will Iran try to rebuild its missiles, if not its nuclear program. So the U.S. goals, I think, are, you know, very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

14:12And the danger is that you get a sense of, you know, chaos, uncertainty, a leadership in place, and people not willing to protest as much because they've lost relatives in the protests in December and January. And they don't know whether the regime that's left will still use the tools against them. I mean, the one thing everybody's been waiting for is any defection from within either the Revolutionary Guard or the conventional military or the police. And that's, in the end, what brought down the shawl when they refused to shoot at protesters and dissidents after 14 months of unrest. Who knows if that begins to happen as this war proceeds.

14:59Dexter Filkins:I'm speaking with Robin Wright and Dexter Filkins, both writers at The New Yorker. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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18:25Dexter Filkins:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking with two reporters who've covered conflicts in the Middle East going back decades. Dexter Filkins and Robin Wright are both writers at The New Yorker, and they've reported from conflict zones all over the world. We spoke last week about the war that the United States, along with Israel, has launched in Iran. We'll continue our conversation now. It always strikes me that there's something called a Washington Consensus that takes hold on not only in the Capitol, but on cable television and the punditocracy. And the one that I'm hearing all the time now is called Regime 2.0.

19:04Dexter Filkins:The idea that the United States and Israel have essentially wiped out much of the upper echelon and that somehow magically there's going to emerge a figure who's more accommodating, shrewd, less threatening, and that we'll have something like Venezuela. Well, clearly it can't be replicated in Iran if that was the plan. Tell me, Dexter, about this notion of regime 2.0, where it's realistic and where it's fantasy.

19:37Robin Wright:It doesn't seem realistic to me at this point. I mean, there's no evidence of anything like that emerging. You know, it's possible to imagine that, let's say, after the United States has pummeled the Republican guards and all the police stations, the whole apparatus, there's a moment of calm. maybe there's months of calm but at some point there'll be another uprising and and and the people the crowds in the street can take over overthrow the government i can i can imagine that but but i think the the regime 2.0 thing is so yeah the shooting stops and the bombing stops and then out of the rubble emerges um you know a group of moderates who reach out to the united states and are ready to take control of the state.

20:24Robin Wright:And I just, the state, as we know it, it's going to be in ruins and it may not even be functioning. And there may be more radical people who take charge, not less. Maybe the White House gets lucky and it all turns out well. But our experience in the past is that when you roll the dice like this with the stakes so high, it doesn't always work out so well. There are a lot of young Nelson Mandelas in Iran. There is no African National Congress, which was the infrastructure for Nelson Mandela to create an alternative. It had existed for years, had in effect, you know, a game plan, a structure. It had a kind of militia.

21:13If the U.S. wants to see something change, the protests to emerge, it's going to take a while. We're creating a kind of uncertainty with an ill-defined endgame that makes us vulnerable as well as, you know, the many countries that Iran has hit.

21:35Dexter Filkins:Dexter, you speak to people in the Pentagon and other government agencies. tell me about your impression of Iran's military strategy.