Special Episode: War in Iran

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2:29Tyler Foggatt:Welcome to a special episode of The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Over the weekend, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, conducting several drone and missile strikes across the country. Among the estimated 200 or so Iranian casualties, which included a range of civilians and government officials, was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In response, Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against Israel and other neighboring states, including on U.S. military bases, with fighting continuing to break out and spread throughout the region.

3:05Tyler Foggatt:I wanted to talk with foreign affairs journalist Ishan Tharoor about the fallout of this weekend's military operation, the possible paths toward resolution or de-escalation, and whether any of those seem likely, and what comes next for the Iranian government and its people, as well as the wider region. We spoke on Monday morning.

3:28Tyler Foggatt:Hi, Ishan. Thanks so much for being here.

3:30Ishaan Tharoor:Thank you for having me.

3:31Tyler Foggatt:So part of the experience of living under the Trump administration has been constantly wondering whether we are at war. That was the question after people woke up to the news back in January that the U.S. had captured Maduro. You know, are we at war with Venezuela? And we were asking a very similar question about Iran last summer after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. But it seems like now, for the first time in the second Trump administration, we are actually at war. Trump is using the word. Everyone is using the word. And so I guess I'm just wondering what makes this moment qualitatively different from the decades of proxy conflict and targeted operations that we've seen?

4:09Ishaan Tharoor:That's a great question. And maybe the answer is that it's not that qualitatively different. This is another imbroglio that ensnares the U.S. for years to come and leads to loss of American lives and the squandering of American treasure. But of course, we've not seen this scale of decapitation carried out by the United States before in this manner. We've not seen the kind of very overt attempt to extinguish a near half century long revolutionary project by the US in this manner. And, you know, Iran is not a country like Libya with a small population. It's not, you know, a banana republic in Central America.

4:55Ishaan Tharoor:It's a nation of close to 100 million people of tremendous strategic importance and in a region of even greater strategic importance. And so the kind of Pandora's box that the U.S. is opening this time feels like a larger box than the ones it's opened before.

5:13Tyler Foggatt:On Sunday, Iranian authorities confirmed that the sweeping strikes carried out by Israel and the United States had killed the Ayatollah, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, as well as numerous other top officials. This seems like a huge deal. I mean, this isn't just the loss of a head of state, but the removal of the ideological and theological center of the Islamic Republic. At the same time, the Ayatollah was 86. It seems like he was kind of prepared to be martyred. And after his death, there was this speculation that he would be replaced almost immediately by someone who was even more of a hardliner.

5:52Tyler Foggatt:And so if we're looking at how Trump is constantly comparing what's happening in Iran to what we saw in Venezuela, you know, we got rid of Maduro and that was kind of the main thing we needed to do. We can actually keep the rest of the regime the same, even keep Maduro second in command and, you know, work with her. How different is the situation in Iran? Because it seems like these two scenarios are actually not that similar at all.

6:18Ishaan Tharoor:Well, I mean, they're not similar for many reasons. But it does seem, I mean, the Venezuela scenario being this one where the U.S. sweeps in, in contravention of international law, defenestrates the leadership there, and sets up quite rapidly a kind of clientelistic arrangement with the remnants of the regime, as you said. But in Iran, I think the Trump administration, and especially many of its Arab interlocutors in the Gulf and elsewhere, would like to see a Venezuela scenario. That's the ideal outcome for them, because it would be the greatest guarantor towards a kind of stability. But we don't have that, because the Iranian regime is much more complex.

7:01Ishaan Tharoor:It has different power centers. And to go back to your initial question about Khamenei, look, this is a guy who's been, as you said, the kind of totemic spiritual, political center of this regime since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He's been there. And he has been this figure of resistance. He's been the ideological font of what Iran is in the region. and so his elimination is symbolically hugely powerful but as you said he was ailing he was 86 years old for for months for years frankly we've been talking about what happens after him and the Iranian regime of course has been thinking about what comes next it can go in different directions I don't think anybody really knows right now what direction it's going to go the the constitutional process within the Iranian regime is that we now have this kind of triumvirate of the elected president, President Pesekian, the head of the judiciary, and a top jurist of this other body called the Guardian Council, they're steering the transition.

8:08Ishaan Tharoor:There are suggestions that they could pick a new supreme leader within days. And that figure, we don't know who that figure would be. Obviously, the folks in the White House are imagining a scenario where there's somebody who would perhaps be more amenable to a capitulation. But yes, most Iranian analysts you talk to really doubt that this is a regime that's willing to capitulate in any way. It's much more likely to break than to bend.

8:37Tyler Foggatt:Well, also we got that quote from Trump recently. I mean, I'll read it. The attack was – so basically he said that the U.S. had identified some possible candidates to take over Iran. But then he said the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead, which is just this like classic Trumpian bluntness. But it also kind of speaks to the, yeah, just like what you were saying, like the lack of thinking through an endgame, which was also the headline of your piece over the weekend.

9:09Tyler Foggatt:Has Trump thought through the endgame in Iran?

9:11Ishaan Tharoor:Yeah, I think there's very minimal work that's been done to actually set up what comes next. you have elements of the Iranian regime, especially the kind of civilian leadership that we know better, like Iranian Foreign Minister Araqchi, for example, suggesting that the hardline revolutionary guards are kind of freelancing right now in terms of the military actions we're seeing. But absolutely, when you have Trump telling ABC that, oh yeah, we had some ideas of who's going to take over, but then we kill them all. Oops. It's a pretty surreal state of affairs. President Trump has been talking to a lot of journalists over the last few days on phone calls, saying a degree of contradictory things.

9:57Ishaan Tharoor:He tells the Washington Post that all he wants is freedom for Iran. He tells the Atlantic that he's open to negotiations still. And then he tells ABC that, yeah, there are people that we have in mind, but we just kill them all. It's quite surreal. I think he generally believes that they are creating the conditions for an internal revolution within Iran by sort of degrading and devastating and decimating the ranks of the leadership of the regime to the extent that it is. And that seems to be, you know, a quite naive view. I mean, Trump has repeatedly said that, yeah, once we're done, you guys can just take over.

10:32Ishaan Tharoor:And that's a kind of vague gesture to the entire Iranian people. And it's far from clear that there are any conditions on the ground that could lead to a stable Iranian takeover, a stable kind of pro-American takeover within Iran without serious foreign intervention. And it's also very unclear that this White House would consider or wants to consider the actual intervention it would have to carry out to affect the change that it claims that it wants to see.

11:01Tyler Foggatt:I mean, if that's true, then like what was the theory of the case here for the U.S. and Israel, given that this is it's been characterized as a joint military operation by the two of them? Like, why now? What do you think was sort of the immediate goal? Like, is it about degrading Iran's nuclear capacity, deterring regional militias, forcing regime change by way of getting the people in the streets to rise up or like all of the above? Like, what were they trying to do and why are they doing it? Why did they decide to do it over the weekend?

11:33Ishaan Tharoor:You know, we're still going to be picking this apart for months to come. But I think it's, first of all, very important to recognize that the U.S. and Israel do not have the same set of interests. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much, I think yesterday or over the weekend, that President Trump has now done something that I've wanted to see for 40 years. He has made a signature part of his political pitch and his political mission for, frankly, decades for Netanyahu has been to provoke this kind of military action against Iran. Now, why do they do it now? The U.S. has come up with a bunch of somewhat dubious claims that they were preempting Iranian activities in a particular way.

12:23Ishaan Tharoor:I think that's something we've got to take with a huge grain of salt because it's quite clear that the Iranians were keen on some kind of negotiation process that the U.S. had walked them down on, but then pulled the plug on them again, as they had last summer when ahead of the so-called 12-day war. Why now? I think people would say, why not now? Iran is weakened, more weakened than it's ever been. Its air defenses are depleted. Its naval assets are depleted. Its stockpiles of missiles, although rapidly being built up again, are fewer than they were before. And of course, we cannot forget that in January, the Iranian regime carried out a horrific set of massacres of its own people.

13:09Ishaan Tharoor:We don't even know the full scale of them, but probably in the tens of thousands, according to various human rights groups.

13:15Tyler Foggatt:It's between like 5 ,000 and 30 ,000, and part of that has been obscured by the internet blackout that was part of those massacres. And I believe the country is now under another internet blackout, which has made it harder to get more concrete information on even what's happening as we speak.

13:29Ishaan Tharoor:Exactly. And President Trump made a lot of statements around the time in late January that, you know, help is on the way and we're going to, you know, avenge this crackdown and so forth. and I think there's an element to which President Trump thinks this is something he had to do. Now, strategically, there are all sorts of questions about what his actual game plan was, but tactically, we're in a moment now where the U.S. is acting in this kind of unrestrained way, especially in concert with Israel, because it knows it can. Whatever domestic handbrakes there are on this kind of action are, at this point, effectively meaningless when it comes to a Congress that has not been able to restrain Trump in most ways.

14:19Ishaan Tharoor:And then, you know, international law, it's increasingly proving more and more in various contexts a kind of fig leaf. There's nothing that the UN Security Council can do to stop the US from doing what it did. And Trump knows this. And I think we're seeing a kind of very, this is the starkest illustration of America first globalism that has defined his foreign policy and his presidency. It's a set of instincts and impulses that take at its center American primacy and America's kind of muscular ability to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And this is the clearest articulation of that so far.

14:58Tyler Foggatt:Let's take a break, and then when we get back, I want to talk about the broader war that's broken out in the Middle East. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

15:14Tyler Foggatt:Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothy Chalamet and Tiana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there, too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch at newyorker.com slash video. Two People Exchanging Saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films at newyorker.com slash video.

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17:39Tyler Foggatt:To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. Given world events, we've made some programming changes this week in the political scene feed. The Washington Roundtable will run this Wednesday. And be sure to check out conversations happening on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast and go to newyorker.com for the latest reporting and analysis on the Iran conflict.

18:15Tyler Foggatt:Up until now, we've mostly been talking about the three primary countries that are involved in this conflict, which would be the U.S., Israel, and Iran. But one of the crazier things about what happened over the weekend is that we saw this much broader war start to break out in the Middle East as Iran began responding to the strikes from Israel and the U.S. by launching retaliatory strikes against its regional neighbors.

18:39Ishaan Tharoor:Yeah, it's quite astonishing. I don't think anybody really thought that the Iranians would hit this wide arc of countries in their neighborhood the way they have in such a kind of haphazard, relentless manner. We're talking about hundreds of drone and missile strikes in the hundreds at this point on every major country in the Gulf, targeting U.S. assets, but also just kind of targeting anything. And it's quite unclear where it's going to stop. And for the leaders of the Gulf, these are U.S. allies, in many cases, in all cases, rather wealthy monarchs with interesting ties to the Trump administration.

19:27this is a kind of worst case scenario because it it you know places like dubai which are which is now shut down places like doha and abu dhabi and you know kuwait and kuwait city and manama and

19:40Ishaan Tharoor:bahrain the central image of these places that these governments have tried to project all these years is that there are kind of oases of stability um where expats can come and have the best life they could possibly have, where it's all prosperity and growth and security and stability and safety. And this kind of chaos is not supposed to happen in Dubai. It's very damaging for the image of places like Dubai that this is going on. What the Iranian strategy here is, it's a very dangerous one. I think the assumption must be that if we show our ability to just endlessly escalate in the face of the American-Israeli attack, then our neighbors are going to go to the U.S.

20:24Ishaan Tharoor:and say, please stop. This is insane. This is damaging for us. But you may have a scenario, and you're seeing from the reporting and some of the statements you're getting out of various Gulf capitals, that it may have the opposite effect, that now some of these monarchies may think, okay, this is too much. We can't really live with this. For a while, we thought the devil we knew was better than the devil we don't, but maybe we should just tacitly back whatever the Americans are doing. But more broadly, it does open up a huge set of questions for Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia or MBZ in Abu Dhabi or the royal family of Qatar.

21:06Ishaan Tharoor:Insofar as, you know, what in their mind will anchor stability in the Middle East? Will it be American power? Probably not. Will it be a scenario where Israel is running roughshod over the region and striking Iran and Syria and other countries as it sees fit? Definitely not. In that sort of strategic vacuum, you're going to see a world where these governments step up their own kind of military partnerships and strategies and also kind of build bridges to other countries. You could see new partnerships with China. You could see defense arrangements, say, between the Turks and the Saudis or what have you.