The State of Play After the Iran-Israel War — with Karim Sadjadpour

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1:32Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prop G pod. What's happening? A ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump is now in place after a 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The region remains on edge as both sides claim victory and questions grow around how long the calm will last. And also, what actually happened here and was it effective, ineffective? In today's episode, we speak with Kareem Sajipour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace specializing in Iran and U.S. foreign policy. We discuss with Kareem what triggered the latest conflict, how it might shape the future of U.S.

2:04diplomacy in the region, and what comes next for Iran. So with that, here's our conversation with Kareem Sajipour.

2:13Kareem, where does this podcast find you? I'm in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Nice. And how long have you lived in D.C.? I've been in D.C. for basically the last two decades. I'd previously been based in the Middle East. I'd lived in Tehran and Beirut, and I grew up mostly in Michigan. Interesting. So did your parents leave during the revolution, or did you live in Tehran after that? My family was one of the few families that came to the U.S. before the revolution. My father was a medical doctor, and he immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1950s. My mom grew up both in Iran and in Italy, and they came together.

2:55They settled in the U.S. in the late 60s, and I think they probably always thought they would one day go back to Iran. But then when the revolution happened, they stood put. And I grew up mostly in the U.S. I spent years living in Latin America and in Europe and in the Middle East, but the last two decades in D.C. Surely a global citizen. So let's bust right into it. For now, it appears the ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues to hold. Trump says the war is done. Give us your sense of the state of play, because I think one of the frustrating things about this conflict war is that I went back and I looked at headlines the first few days after a war began or a conflict.

3:41And what they were reporting then was oftentimes just not accurate. And it feels even less, it feels like there's even less veracity. Like, have we set the nuclear program back seven days or seven years? I literally don't know who to turn to. So I'd be curious to just get your kind of appraisal, no mercy, no malice overview of the state of play right now as it relates to this war. Sure, Scott. Yeah, so first let me give like one minute of historic context, which is that, you know, these two countries, Iran and Israel, in my view, are actually more natural partners than they are natural adversaries.

4:19There's an ancient history of affinity between the Persians and the Jews. You know, Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king, is revered in the Old Testament for liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Prior to the 1979 revolution, the two countries had good partnership. And even now, if you look at them, you know, in contrast to most modern geopolitical conflicts like China and Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, there's no direct land or border disputes between Iran and Israel. The two countries, in my view, have complementary interests. Israel is a tech power. Iran is an energy power.

4:54And there's natural basis for cooperation. What happened in 1979 was that Iran went virtually overnight from a U.S. allied monarchy led by the Shah to a viscerally anti-American, anti-Israeli theocracy ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeini. And since then, there's basically been three ideological pillars of Iran's 1979 revolution. It's death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, the veiling of women, which Khomeini called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. So going now to the present, the latest battle between Iran and Israel may be over for now, but the war will continue so long as you have a regime in Iran whose entire identity is premised on replacing Israel with Palestine.

5:45I bring a bias here, and my bias is that I feel like one of the biggest unlocks that Americans don't consider, it's not in their lexicon or their dialogue, is the potential for Iran and America to be allies again. because, and this is pure anecdotal evidence. I grew up in Los Angeles. I went to UCLA, largest concentration of Iranians, I think outside of Tehran. And several of my closest friends at UCLA were Iranian. And it always struck me, my comment about Iranians was they were more American than Americans. A love of education, a love of money. And I say that in a positive way, Total capitalists, entrepreneurs, a love of graduate education, an appreciation for ambition and competitiveness.

6:33I just always thought the most American kids we have here are Iranians. And when I see the lack of popularity of the Islamic regime or the Islamic Republic, what is your sense for whether or not when we took this military action, there's always a fear that you have a rallying around the flag when you're attacked. What's your sense of the Iranian, that kind of man or woman on the streets reaction to this military action? It's an important question. And, you know, my view about this is that what tends to happen in these dramatic instances of, you know, military attack or military conflagration with an external power is that it tends to accentuate Iranians' existing political views.

7:26So if last week or two weeks ago you were a supporter of the government, and I suspect government supporters represent about 15 to 20 percent of society, it's not a popular regime, then you have even more fodder, obviously, to hate America and Israel for the military invasion of Iran. If you were a critic or an opponent of the Iranian regime and you said, you know, this is a regime which always puts its ideological objectives over the national interests of us and the well-being of the Iranian people, then you have even more reason to dislike the regime. regime. I think in the near term, what happens is that the regime has gotten a kind of a, what I would describe as a temporary sugar high.

8:11But when the dust settles three months, six months, nine months from now, I think people will go back to living under this politically repressive, socially repressive police state, which is profoundly mismanaged an economy, which, you know, Iran could be, in my view, it should be a G20 nation under proper management. This is a country which has enormous human capital, as you were referring to, has enormous natural resources. It is not a country which just came to be in the 20th century. It has a 2 ,500-year-old civilization and identity. And I think Iranians will eventually revert back to that profound sense of discontent.

8:53And I'll give you a concrete example of that, Scott. You may remember in January of 2020, Iran's top Revolutionary Guard commander, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated by President Trump. And many people then said, well, this is, you know, the country is rallying around the flag and there were mass protests in Iran. What happened two years later? Two years later, there was a young woman called Masa Amini that was detained and killed in custody for allegedly showing too much of her hair. And that set off massive nationwide protests in Iran, which persisted over six months and had the regime on its heels.

9:34So, you know, I don't doubt that, you know, many people took umbrage to the U.S. dropping 30 ,000 pound bunker bombs. But ultimately, you know, vast majority of Iranians, as I say, they want to be South Korea. They don't want to be living under North Korea. So let's talk about the next generation. So Khomeini, 85-year-old theocrat, and the next level down, I got to be thinking when the Mossad is able to penetrate. I mean, people talk about how Israel rules the skies over Iran. I think what's probably more frightening for the leadership in Iran is it appears they ruled the ground. And what I mean by that is that the signal I think they've sent is that on a moment's notice, an email to a secure device, to an asset spy on the ground in Iran, we can kill any of you.

10:25And I think Americans even have trouble relating to that. Imagine if all of the Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of the Navy, every five-star general we have in the Air Force, within 30 minutes were all murdered. and it's clear, okay, they can take out anybody. My question, when I've been on corporate boards, my question is the strength of a company is not based on the CEO. It's based on, do you have zero or eight people who could step into the CEO's shoes? That's a sign of a strong corporate governance and a strong organization. What do you think the next generation looks like in terms of the regime?

11:03And is this a house of cards with an 85-year-old? What happens when he dies? assuming he's not overthrown. He's an old man. What does the next generation look like? And is there a chill of, what have I signed up for here? It's an important question. And, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei is actually now 86. He's the longest serving autocrat in the world. He's been ruling since 1989. He hasn't left Iran since 1989. And, you know, you put yourself in his shoes right now. He's living in a bunker. We all have known, you know, 85, 86 years old, you have limited physical, mental stamina. And he's expected to lead this three-part war against the greatest superpower in the world, the United States, the greatest military power in the Middle East, Israel, and against his own population.

11:53And he's doing that at a time when you mentioned his top military commanders have been assassinated in their own bedrooms or in their own bunkers. And so, as you mentioned, this really slows down the wheels of state when it's a state which potentially needs to act quickly to address an external or internal security threat. And when people get the notifications on their phones, they don't know if that's coming from their higher-up command or is coming from the Mossad. So, in my view, what I would describe as a Swiss cheese regime. It has so many holes in it penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Now, what happens after the supreme leader's passing?

12:34You know, Ibn Khaldun, the great North African philosopher, sometimes called the father of sociology, he came out with a theory centuries ago, in the 13th century, which he called Asabiya. And it's now known in kind of modern business literature. You may be familiar with it as the power cycle theory. And essentially what he said is that empires are built and destroyed over three generations. The first generation, they have fire in the belly. They come, they build it. Second generation watched what the first generation did, so they managed to preserve it. But by the third generation, by no fault of their own, you know, they're soft.

13:15They're princelings. They're born in the palace. They weren't born with that fire in the belly. You know, the example I commonly use in the American business context is Walmart, right? Sam Walton, through his thrift and grit, built this amazing company. Second generation has preserved it. Now, his grandchildren were born multi-billionaires, so it's clear they weren't born with that same grit. But now going back to the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini is the last of the Mohicans. He's the last of the first-generation leaders in the Islamic Republic. and they don't have any great options for succession, in part because this is a society which is thoroughly secularized over the last 46 years.

13:58You know, the best way to secularize a population is to rule them with a repressive, corrupt theocracy, which is ruling from a moral pedestal. You know, that's insulting to people in a way that living out under your run-of-the-mill dictatorship is in some ways less insulting. Vladimir Putin doesn't have any pretensions of being God's representative on earth, whereas the Islamic Republic's leadership, they have these pretensions of moral superiority. So the question is, if the regime manages to keep it together and they don't implode like the Soviet Union did, which is a big question, is the next strong man and Iran going to be wearing a turban and being another Ayatollah?

14:46Or is it more likely to be someone from the security forces with a military or intelligence background? My sense is that even if they try to anoint a cleric as the next supreme leader, that person is likely going to be a transitional figure, much like Boris Yeltsin was in the post-Soviet Union. And that if the system manages to keep it together, more likely we're going to see someone with a military and intelligence background, not someone wearing a turban. We'll be right back.

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17:10I want to outline a thesis to you from someone who's just obviously observing this from abroad and has a limited view into it. But my general, if someone said, all right, summarize what's going on here, where you have someone who is literally running to stay out of prison. And the best way to stay in office is to get people to rally around the flag and the current administration. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to go on a constant war footing, which results in whether or not you think it was the right idea to respond in Gaza, which I do believe it absolutely was the right decision. And now most people, including, I think, a very large segment of the Israeli populace and former prime ministers are saying it has just gone too far.

17:54And then after diminishing or neutering the proxies of Iran, which is understandable, going in and convincing your ally to come in behind you, who comes in behind you with what I would describe as what looks to me like increasingly a performative attack. that now there's reports that the majority of the enriched uranium was transported out of these facilities. And it was a little bit of a president, very focused on his image, jealous of the macho light that Netanyahu was basking under, so came in with a performative attack, which then inspired a performative response. Where Khomeini ordered an attack on bases in Qatar and Iraq, and my understanding is it gave Qatar and U.S.

18:42forces a heads up that this was about to happen, such that he could flex and say, see, I responded, but not risk any real collateral damage that would inspire an escalation. This whole thing, this whole chapter, the word I would use to describe the last two weeks, performative. Your thoughts? so a couple things number one um you know i've been teaching a class at georgia university for years in the master's school of foreign service and i always joke on the first day with my students that if you really want to understand the middle east you're better off studying psychology than political science because so much of this region is shaped not by the national interests of states but by kind of the manias and political ambitions of strongmen.

19:30And in the case of this current war, America, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, much of what's transpired over the last few weeks is, I think, driven by the person of Donald Trump and his political imperatives, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu and the person of Ayatollah Khamenei. Not necessarily, as I said from the outset, the national interests of these places. Now, one framework I used to think about, certainly the relationship between President Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei. There's a wonderful essay which the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953, which is called The Hedgehog and the Fox.

20:11And he essentially puts human beings into two buckets. He said, you know, hedgehogs really have one big idea, one great passion, and foxes know many things. They do many things. And his example of the quintessential hedgehog was Karl Marx. His example of the prototypical fox was William Shakespeare. Now, how does that apply to Trump and to Khamenei? Ayatollah Khamenei is the prototypical hedgehog. He has basically one great passion, one big idea, resistance, resistance against America, resistance against Israel, death to America, death to Israel. Trump, on the other hand, is someone who I don't think he knows many things, but he says many things.

20:52And he's had a profound, you know, I don't know what you would describe it. I call him the Jackson Pollock of foreign policy. You know, he goes from one month ago, he was in Riyadh, denouncing those previous administrations who engaged in military interventions in the Middle East. He ridiculed them and he said, you know, there were regime changers who destroyed far more, I'm sorry, there were nation builders who destroyed far more nations than they built, and interventionists who had no idea about the reality of their own society. One month later, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had taken military action, as you said, Trump saw that it was perceived to be very successful.

21:37Netanyahu was getting, you know, great reviews on Fox News, and, you know, he wanted to be associated with that. And so, So I think we will look back years from now. And Scott, when you're watching these things in real time in the Middle East, as we've seen, if we were having this conversation in spring of 2003, we would say the Iraq war is a great success. We took out Saddam's army in three weeks. Five years later, things look very differently. So years from now, things could look very differently. But I do think when the history of this war is written, much of it will be about the psychology and political calculations and domestic political expediences of these three men, Netanyahu, Trump, and Khamenei, rather than the interests of nation states.

22:26So another thesis I'd like to put forward and get your reaction to, I feel as if the unsung hero in this or the unsung force here is the Ukrainian army. What do I mean by that? if Russia had barreled into Kiev as Putin's generals were guaranteeing, and immediately Ukraine fell, and Russia held this perception and reputation as this fierce fighting force, not to be trifled with, to be very scared of, that Syria would not have fell, and we would have thought twice, as would have Netanyahu, and perhaps would have received more military logistical and perceptual support around its surface-to-air capabilities, and neither Israel nor the U.S.

23:14would have had the confidence or the ability to do what they had done had Russia still been intact in terms of its actual and perceived power. Your thoughts? Well, I think that's one important data point among others. I mean, the other important data point is what happened on October 7th, 2023, when Yahya Sinwar and Hamas invaded Israel, which, you know, turned out to be one of the most profound miscalculations in modern history, because, you know, they thought that that was going to delegitimize Israel and lead to its eventual demise. And what we've seen in the last year and a half is exactly the opposite.

23:57And, you know, Iran's leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei was the only leader in the world that praised the Hamas attack of October 7th. And that led Israel. And then, you know, Iran kind of unleashed its other proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, to commence this multi-front war with Israel. And those proxies have been decimated the last year and a half. So that was also an important factor. But back to Ukraine and Zelensky. One of the most important observations that stayed with me over the years about geopolitics is an observation which Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs that he said, you know, before he went into government, when he became Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, he was a professor at Harvard, and he thought that history was driven by impersonal forces.

24:55Nations basically follow their own interests regardless of who's in power. And he said after he served in government, he reached the opposite conclusion, which is that the individual profoundly shapes history. Academics oftentimes don't like this because they call it the great man theory of history. But I've also come around Kissinger's worldview, that the individual has a profound impact on history. Leadership has a profound impact on history. And so your point about Ukraine for me, you know, obviously the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian people is critical, but the person of President Zelensky is someone for me who has played an incredibly important role in the history of his nation.

25:41And we saw, you know, just a year prior to that, and perhaps it was one reason why Vladimir Putin invaded, was that in Afghanistan, You know, it was a country, a president who, he fled the country within, you know, 24, 48 hours and the entire system collapsed. So it just goes to, you know, both in business and in politics and geopolitics, the importance of leadership. So I'll go even further afield. We had what was sort of a political earthquake with Zoran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary. And I wonder how much of that is a new generation of American voters, quite frankly, very fed up with Israel.

26:27And that this was not only an outstanding campaign run by someone who really understood new media, representing youth, a pushback on the established democratic machine. machine. What is your sense as you reverse engineer activities in the Middle East in terms of its impact on the U.S. political landscape, what's happening both in Iran and Israel and the dynamics there? Do you think it will? How do you see it reverse engineering to to what happens here in the United States? So that's an important question. Let me react in a couple of ways. Number one, we've seen the impact that America's failures in the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of the Arab Spring in 2011 to bring about democratic change, the impact that's had on American politics, whereby, you know, it used to be that Republicans were national security hawks and more supportive of U.S.

27:26military interventions. Now, you know, a strong wing of Trump's base are, you know, they wouldn't like the term isolationist. They would call themselves restrainers or non-interventionists, but that's an important part of his political base now, including, I would probably put in that category, Vice President Vance and people like Tucker Carlson. And so that is probably a majority view because it's also, it's a widely held view on the left as well, that, you know, America should just kind of stay out of military interventions, especially in the Middle East. Now, second, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you know, when I first started doing this work, Israel was a bipartisan issue in Washington.

28:15You know, whenever there was a bill in Congress about Israel's security, it was oftentimes like, you