Everything Trump doesn't understand about Iran

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0:33Lewis Goodall:This is a Global Player original podcast. Almost impenetrable from the outside, or it feels, is the nature of internal Iranian politics and the politics of the Iranian state. We had to basically, every single day before going to our classrooms, chant death to America, death to Israel. What difference do you think that will make? It has made all of the problems that we were dealing with with regards to Iran, whether it's domestic repression or regional aggression or nuclear ambitions or relations with Russia and China, exponentially harder to solve. The US-Iran-Israel war is now 45 or so days old.

1:13Lewis Goodall:There has been so much analysis, counter analysis, fire and brimstone about its causes, its effects, its aims. The fog of war has seldom felt thicker. Though Iran has long been a security menace. This war at this moment was a war of choice launched by Trump and Netanyahu. Much has been written and explored on this show and many others about the mistakes from its first days, the lack of a clear plan, the overestimation of American military might and underestimation of Iranian political resolve, a belief that regime change would be easy from the air. But there is a longer story here too, about two nations, well three really, Iran, the US and Israel, which never understand each other, which have competing and contradicting versions of their own histories and how they interplay.

2:04Lewis Goodall:Donald Trump is just one manifestation of that lack of understanding, but the most important one as the most powerful man in the room and on the planet. So on this episode, we're going to explore perhaps the most important factor to this war starting and it's going wrong. What exactly Trump didn't understand about Iran and what he didn't understand about the closely woven history of his own nation and the Islamic Republic. For that, we've turned to Ali Váez. There aren't many who can truly claim to know Iran, its people. It's often bewildering politics and political structures. But Ali can. Ali is Iranian himself, though long based in the West, and is one of the most influential voices and analysts shaping Western understanding of Iranian strategy and politics as part of his work at the International Crisis Group, which has advised states on dealing with Iran, especially during the Obama era nuclear agreements.

3:04Lewis Goodall:He's seen it all and knows the history. So this is what Donald Trump didn't understand and where Donald Trump went wrong with disastrous consequences in Ali's mind for America, his own country and the wider world. Welcome to the News Agents.

3:25The News Agents.

3:27Lewis Goodall:Ali, thanks so much for joining us on the News Agents. It is such a complicated subject, Iran and its politics and its relationship with its neighbours and even just what it wants at this stage of the war. But if we could try and unpack it and maybe start with that latter question. At this point now, over 40 days on since the war started, in the political position that we're in, what do you think Iran at this point wants? Look, Iran, I think, has been able to already secure the most important thing that it wanted, which was survival. for a regime that had come under an onslaught by two nuclear powers, the world's strongest military power, the region's strongest military power, to survive and to be able to even set conditions for negotiations.

4:17You know, like the basis of these talks is the 10-point plan that Iran sent to the U.S., not the 15-point plan that the U.S. had put on the table. So this is for the regime, you know, already considered a victory. However, having said this, the most important thing going forward is not necessarily surviving in a hot war, which they have already secured, is not freezing in a cold peace. And that requires reconstruction after this war. This is why they need a source of revenue. This is why the most important thing that they want is either sanctions relief that could be reliable, meaningful, concrete, verifiable, or that they remain in control of the Strait of Hormuz, this critical trope point in the world, and use it as a source of revenue by charging transit fees.

5:14So that is, I think, the most important thing that they would put on the table in the ceasefire negotiations in the coming days.

5:21Lewis Goodall:It's absolutely clear, isn't it, that Trump misunderstood much about Iran. I'm sure that his knowledge of it was pretty limited going into the war. But it is also clear that at the start of the conflict, whatever he says now, at least at that moment in his mind, proper regime change was an objective, or at least it was at the forefront of his thinking at that time. And we know that because he explicitly said it and he called upon Iranians to rise up. That has not happened. Something hasn't happened yet. Have you, though, as an expert, unlike Trump, been surprised at just how robust the regime has been in terms of its own survival?

6:02Well, I have to admit, I did not expect the regime to be able to preserve this much cohesiveness throughout the conflict, Just simply by the fact that it's just so difficult to communicate for leaders who have to be in bunkers all the time, given how deeply penetrated the system was by Israeli and Western intelligence. You can imagine a degree of paralysis in decision making. I didn't expect the regime to implode or fall apart, but I didn't expect it to be able to preserve continuity of governance throughout this conflict and to also preserve command and control in a way that it would actually pursue a rather coherent strategy in the war.

6:55For instance, if you look at how they went up the escalation ladder, if Israel targeted a petrochemical company in Iran, they responded in kind. Or, you know, some of the things that they did in the Gulf states at times decided not to escalate too far or decided to bring in the Houthis in Yemen at the right time in terms of, again, the escalation curve. All of this required a degree of, you know, sort of cold minded, very sober decision making. It was very hard to do under these circumstances. And yet they managed to do it. That surprised me. I didn't expect regime collapse, but I didn't expect this degree of basically discipline.

7:42Lewis Goodall:Is it possible, though, that I've seen this theory posited in some places that, OK, it looks as if the regime has survived, but that we can't know, of course, what will happen in the medium to longer term. And that it is possible that although they appear robust now, that what the Americans have done is start the process by which they may eventually be dislodged, i.e. that the damage, the military damage that has been incurred, their actual internal external power is actually weaker now than it appears to be because we're all so distracted by what's going on in terms of their chokehold over the strait.

8:20So, yes and no, in the sense that in the short run, the regime has been strengthened because of two facts. One is that it managed to mobilize its own core constituents in ways that, again, was unexpected. It used the assassination of the Supreme Leader, Trump's rhetoric about civilization and erasure in Iran, or changing the map of the country or taking over the oil, whatever was the kind of rhetoric that could be portrayed as animosity towards the country, not just towards the regime, was used to mobilize its own core constituents. It validated the narrative of the regime. They had every single night for 40 nights, their own core constituents coming out to public swears for pro-regime protests.

9:21And then the second thing that has happened is that, of course, as a result of the militarized situation inside the country, now is so much more difficult to express any kind of dissent because you would be then portrayed as colluding with the enemies, with hostile forces. And there is much less space for any kind of opposition inside the country. So, you know, and of course, this is now a much more militarized regime at the top as well in terms of its political elites. You have the Revolutionary Guards leaders who are really in key positions and calling the shots. And so in a way, in the short run, I think the regime has become stronger.

10:13But you're absolutely right that this doesn't mean that in the medium to long term, it will be stable. unless it manages to either bring about some meaningful reforms and changes that would allow to address at least one of the elements of the people's grievances. Either it has to be economic improvements, or it has to be more social freedoms, or it has to be, you know, some sort of achievement that could rewrite the social contract with the society. If they fail to do that, they would definitely face serious challenges down the road because, you know, we've seen repeated protests in all these years and the fundamental grievances of the population are not going to go away.

11:04Lewis Goodall:To take something else that Trump has been by some people credited with, I just want to take it on its own terms, see what you think. Obviously, there was horror in many quarters, not least in the United States, but elsewhere, to see the president this week deploy language which was clearly on the face of it genocidal. It was talking about the erasure or the wiping out of Iranian civilization. Trump's allies would say, and people who even don't like the use of that language, but might have said that perhaps the threat of that was enough to get the Iranians to the table and agree to the ceasefire.

11:39Lewis Goodall:Do you agree with that? No, I don't agree with that because, you know, if you look at the way this whole process of talking about even a ceasefire started, it was the U.S. that first sent a 15-point plan through the mediators, the Pakistanis, to Tehran. While the president was already making very serious threats before talking about civilization, but he had already talked about going after civilian infrastructure. The Iranians didn't even respond to him for several days. And then they responded with their own 10-point plan, which was as maximalist as the U.S.'s 15-point plan. This is not behavior of a regime that is afraid.

12:26And then in the back and forth that the Pakistanis had between the two sides, yes, they balanced the 10 points to a certain extent, but it is still largely tilted in the interest of the Islamic Republic. So I do believe that President Trump had come to a point that he knew that the continuation of the conflict could result in the kind of escalation that would spiral out of control and would be very difficult for him to then justify in the eyes of constituents at home who were unhappy about increasing energy costs, about the number of fatalities. You know, he had tried a lot of different things.

13:13Obviously, he targeted a massive bridge in Iran. None of it changed the posture of the Iranian regime. And so I don't think that his threats actually worked. I think the conflict just arrived at the stage that it had become a truly lose-lose dynamic for both sides. And that's why they decided to take a step back.

13:36Lewis Goodall:And of course, it also doesn't make sense, that theory, in a sense that if it were true that the Iranians were that terrified of the apocalypse that was to come, and were that on their knees, as Hegseth said, and were begging for an agreement, then it seems unlikely the Iranians would less than 24 hours later, blow up the ceasefire or renege on a ceasefire by suddenly saying, actually, actually we're not going to do so because of what is going on in Israel and southern Lebanon. Can you give us a sense of how do the Iranians see what is happening in southern Lebanon and with what the Israelis are doing?

14:12Lewis Goodall:And in particular, because it seems so often Byzantine from the outside, how the Iranians view Hezbollah and their relationship with Hezbollah and the importance of that relationship? Right. So, look, I think it's important to understand a few different elements here. One is that, you know, in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, which was another traumatizing conflict for Iran, in which it was isolated, almost the entire world and superpowers were supporting Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had invaded Iran. Iran realized that it needed to have some sort of an alternative military strategy that would allow it to basically compensate for its shortcomings in conventional military capability.

14:58And that's why it opted for asymmetric means, including having partners and proxies away from Iran's borders who would then deter an attack on Iranian sohid. And this is sort of the raison d 'etre of Hezbollah in all these years. And the Iranians believe that it actually worked, that the reason Israel didn't attack Iran's nuclear program in the 2000s or 2010s, it was because Hezbollah was the deterrent that was fully functional. But then October 7 happened, Hezbollah was weakened, Syria was lost, the logistical backbone to Hezbollah was blocked, and therefore Israel found an opportunity to go after them.

15:43Now, in this war, for the first time since Hezbollah's creation, Hezbollah went to war on behalf of Iran. Hezbollah had never done this before. It was always based on its own national calculations, based on what they believed was good for Lebanon. This time, they went in because they wanted to support Iran. So, it's the first time actually that sort of the Article 5 equivalent of NATO in this relationship was activated. And so, for the Iranians, it's very difficult to agree to a ceasefire and basically throw Hezbollah under the bus. They also believe that not only Israel is a spoiler, doesn't want the ceasefire to work, but Israel could potentially use the two weeks of the ceasefire to degrade Hezbollah's capabilities to the extent that when after the ceasefire ends and the war resumes, when it goes back after Iran, Iran can no longer count on Hezbollah's support.

16:50And Iran's betrayal of Hezbollah means that other groups like the Houthis in Yemen or Shia militias in Iraq would also turn their back on Iran because it's an untrustworthy ally. Another key consideration, strategic consideration for the Iranians in this regard is the question of, you know, because this was one of the terms from their perspective that was agreed to as part of the ceasefire, the Pakistani prime minister, when he announced the ceasefire, he explicitly mentioned Lebanon. So somewhere, you know, in the text that has been going back and forth, Lebanon was mentioned. And the Iranians believe that if the U.S.

17:35cannot rein in Israel, now that it wants a ceasefire, would it be able to rein in Israel in the future? So in other words, why agree to an end to the war when a spoiler can resume the war a month from now, six months from now, a year from now? And this is an important test for the Iranians to see if Trump can hold Netanyahu back.

18:02Lewis Goodall:We are used to hearing from Israeli prime ministers, and of course, in particular Netanyahu, because he's been there for so long, about the existential and apocalyptic threat that Iran poses to Israel and how central Israel is to the thinking of the IRGC and the Iranian leadership. I was wondering if you could just talk a little to what extent that is true. Not that Iran dislikes Israel and Israeli leadership. Obviously, that is clearly the case. But how central, how central is Israel and the future of Israel and Gaza and the peace process? How central actually is it to Iranian thinking about itself and its country's future?

18:45So, again, going back to the 1980s, the only way Iran could overcome its inherent limitations as a Shia nation among Sunnis, as a Persian nation among Arabs and Turks, to project power all the way to the Mediterranean, was to overcome these shortcomings by portraying itself as picking up a cause that was basically borderless, and that's the Palestinian cause. This is why they opted for animosity with Israel. It was a strategic choice that would help them project power beyond their borders. So it was instrumentalized. And if you look at, yes, Iran does pose a threat to Israel. I would never agree that it's an existential threat because Israel is just so much stronger from a conventional military perspective and is also a nuclear weapon state.

19:48So it has the ultimate deterrent at the end of the day. Iran doesn't really pose an existential threat to Israel.

19:54Lewis Goodall:Even if it was a secure nuclear weapon itself? Well, that's a different question. But even in the run up to this war, US intelligence assessment was that Iran was not on the verge of getting nuclear weapons. And if the objective was one, but well, even if even if they wanted one, they were willing to delay getting a nuclear weapon by a very long time when they agreed to a nuclear deal in 2015. That deal would have basically constrained their ability to go nuclear until 2031. But Netanyahu was not happy with it, of course, and we know that he pushed Trump to get out of it and so on. But the point I want to make is, yes, Iran was a threat.

20:39It was never an existential threat. It was always a manageable threat. And the question, I think, in front of Israel and the United States was, what is the best way of containing Iran's bad behavior? because we had tried everything. We had tried sanctions. We had tried covert operations. We had tried military action. And in all of using all of these tools, the threat had become bigger and bigger and more aggressive every single time. Whereas the only thing that had rolled back bad Iranian behavior has been diplomacy. And if surprisingly, that's the one thing that has been used less often and less effectively than anything else.

21:21Lewis Goodall:I want to return to how Iran sees itself and its history, but we'll do that just after this.

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22:09Lewis Goodall:How in particular is the US viewed as part of that story? And obviously this has got a sort of long pedigree and long history to it. But how would would what is happening now be viewed simply as the latest iteration of American imperialism, religious expansionism, whatever it happens to be? And and if that's the case as well, to what extent actually is the US simply a victim of not understanding that this latest approach will just be viewed as that latest example of conquest? Yeah, so, I mean, look, first of all, let me put out a point of caution, which is that, you know, I'm simplifying here.

22:53Of course, it's a very complicated country.

22:55Lewis Goodall:It is. I mean, we're talking about 90 million people with different views. Some people actually wanted the U.S. military intervention this time around to the extent that it was a shock to me, you know, Because it's not just about the Trump administration and its own behavior. You know, obviously, President Trump has undermined even democratic norms inside the U.S. You know, how can you expect him to bring democracy to Iran? Or, you know, when he went to Venezuela, he clearly said it was not for democracy. It was for, you know, taking the oil. It's appropriation. Or if you look at what the U.S.

23:31has done, you know, to Iran's east in Afghanistan, to Iran's west in Iraq and so on. But nevertheless, again, there were some people who were supportive of this. But I think if you take a step back, you know, the U.S. had a relatively positive image in the minds of Iranians because it was not like Britain and Russia after Iranian resources or was seen more as an honest broker until 1953, in which it was involved with MI6 in overthrowing the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh over disputes that British Petroleum had with Iran over its oil resources and nationalization of them. And from that point on, the image of the U.S.

24:30I think was tainted in the minds of many in Iran because it was seen as basically behind turning the Shah, which was restored to power with the coup in 1953, as an autocrat. And so there's a direct line between 1953 and the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and takeover of the U.S. embassy. And then from that point on, you know, there is this very strong view in Iran that it is the U.S. who has taken Iran as hostage because it has been subject to isolation, to sanctions, to all sorts of pressure, etc. And now with this act of aggression, you know, last time the U.S. joined Israeli aggression for only 45 minutes, this time, obviously, it was much more damaging.

25:24The civilian toll, the attack on historic sites, the infrastructure, you know, all of that, I think, has created a lot of negative feelings about the United States. It's, you know, when I was growing up in Iran in a very anti-American regime, you know, we had to basically every single day before going to our classrooms, chant death to America, death to Israel, before we could go and sit in the classroom. And yet many people in Iran were very pro-American. They had families in the U.S. They would see satellite TVs beaming from the United States. And so the soft power of the U.S. was undeniable despite all the regime's propaganda.

26:10I'm afraid that now there is much more bottom-up anti-Americanism, which could have longer-term problems, generational problems, in ways that we cannot see and imagine at this point.