What Comes Next for Iran?

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Hello, and welcome back to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I had a slightly different plan for the podcast this week, but the startling news of the Israeli airstrike on Iran beginning... on the night of Friday the 13th, upended plans. And so I've had to improvise something. I want to thank our friends here at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario for making their boardroom space available to me. I will be speaking today to Kareem Sajipur.

a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of the closest study we have on the thought of the supreme leader of Iran. But before I speak to him, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts of my own about the situation unfolding. These are not thoughts in the military situation. I am no kind of military expert in any way.

according 36 hours in advance. So the situation may well be changed. We know a lot about the internal politics of Israel because it's such an open society. We know a little bit less about the politics of the society on the receiving end. of this the israeli exchange the islamic republic of iran and that's what i'm going to talk about with kareem how is all this affecting the iranians what can we expect what we hope for

And before we get to that dialogue, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts. Now, I am in no way any kind of Iran expert or even amateur. Don't speak the language. I've never been to the country. I once had an opportunity to go. I was invited by an international businessman who was closely connected to one of the leading families in the clerical regime. And he wanted to invite me to come in and meet some of the figures. This was at a time in my life when I had.

a kind of outsized notoriety as a figure in Iran politics because I ghost wrote a speech for President Bush that became important and I got sort of credited or blamed or demonizes that figure. And I said, I would love to go. I'd be really interested to come in. How confident are you that I'll be able to leave on time and not 10 years later? And he assured me he was really on the whole.

quite confident. That was not good enough, and so declined to make the trip. I didn't want to end up chained to a radiator for the next decade. But here are the preliminary thoughts I want to offer. American policy to Iran, as long as I've been paying attention to it, has...

veered back and forth between two competing ideas or hopes about what Iran might be. One of them has been the hope that cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran is at hand. We heard a lot of that hope. just after the 9-11 attacks where some diplomats like brian crocker who was then i think ambassador to

I forget where he was a special diplomat, said he had he had worked out a deal with the Iranians to help in Afghanistan. The Obama administration had vast hopes of cooperation with the Islamic Republic. And those hopes always come to grief because it turns out that people who. Staged regular marches chanting death to America are not actually all that interested in cooperating with the United States and the hopes that are constantly that repeatedly appear

We saw them in 2009 when President Obama declined to help the Green Revolution in Iran in 2015 when he tried to reach a diplomatic agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear weapons force. Those hopes come a cropper.

But there's another hope that also has been disappointed again and again, and that is the hope that we're on the verge of some kind of transformational breakthrough, regime change in Iran. Repressive regimes can be very powerful.

and especially those that come to power, not by a coup, but by a kind of mass revolution that brought the Islamic regime to Iran in 1979, they have staying power. That doesn't mean they're going to be here forever. Every one of those regimes sooner or later collapses, and perhaps...

Collapse will come this week or next month or next year. Who knows? But it is a dangerous thing to put too much stock in. I think there's a real chance that when the Islamic regime in Iran changes, it may not change to something much nicer. than what's there now. It may change into a more traditional authoritarian regime that gives up some of its more ambitious hopes in order to consolidate power.

that's what happened to cuba after fidel castro the castro regime is still there it's just not a revolutionary regime anymore it's a criminal regime but it keeps power by being less aggressive toward the world around it it could also be a terrible bloodbath We have, I think, a distorted idea of revolution from the happy experience of the revolutions in the northern part of Central Europe in 1989.

Crowds come out, the leaders run away, the flags are waved, the people cheer, and a transition that is more or less peaceful begins. Revolutions against terrible regimes can often be terribly bloody. Terrible regimes. inflict a terrible blood price on their society and there are there's a lot of payback that often that may be coming the regime change in iran may turn out to be a very very bloody business and that that at a very protracted business that doesn't end soon

All of this is speculative, guesswork really. I think the thing we ought to be thinking about, and this is the thing I think that the Israelis have in mind, is not... the future of Iran, not what will happen inside Iran, not guesswork about transformation, but attention careful to the capabilities of that regime joined to its expressed intentions. We know that Iran had capabilities that were almost on the verge of nuclear breakout.

And of course, it expresses its intentions in every way we can see and hear, not just by its chance of death in America, death to Israel, but by its backing for terrorist regimes, terrorist groupings all over the planet and not just in the region.

Iran still has the blood on its hands from attacks in Argentina on the Jewish community center there. They killed dozens and dozens of people in two separate attacks in the early 1990s. Iran has attempted terror operations in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world.

We know their intentions. We know their capabilities. That's the thing we have to focus on and not our hopes or our fears or our imaginings or our beliefs or our opinions or our guesses about the way of the future. I'll be talking more about that in this dialogue. I want to say one last thing, which is conflict is a reality of human existence. It's a terrible reality. It's a reality. And we have to be prepared and meet for it. And we have to sometimes anticipate it and try to.

Avert the worst by acting more decisively in the present. But those necessary actions are not any kind of enthusiasm for conflict. No one wants to see conflict. No one wants to see human suffering. It doesn't go away because you choose not to believe it or postpone it later for other people to deal with after you. This.

The problem of the Iranian nuclear weapon has been postponed for a long time. I think we've now reached the point where it can be postponed no longer. And I think we all have to hope for a decisive resolution, as rapid a resolution as possible. It's past the point of a peaceful resolution, but it can still be.

a stable and successful resolution, stable, successful, not just for the people who are threatened by the Iranian nuclear weapon, but by the millions of Iranians who are oppressed and taxed and stolen from in order to fund the weapon that they don't want and that will do them no good.

You know, Iran is the center of a great and historic civilization. Persia has been the great cultural exporter of the whole Central Asian region from Istanbul to Delhi. for hundreds of years, if you had a new poem, a new recipe, new way of dressing.

Probably it originated in Persia. It came out to you. The game of chess is Persia's gift to the world, one of its many, along with the great poetic tradition. This is a society that has been cut off from its birthright and that has been cut off from its future, from its capability to contribute to humanity. Perhaps.

We will live to see that potential realized and that great connection to its great past revived. In any case, we can hope. I turn now to my conversation with my friend Kareem Sajipour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But first, a quick break. PMS, pregnancy, menopause. Being a woman is a lot.

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I'm joined today by Karim Sabjuhor, who is one of the most sought-after experts in all of Washington on the topic of the internal development of Iran. The author of a 2009... book about Iran's supreme leader that is a classic that is much consulted in the field, son of the Iranian diaspora, a native of the great state of Michigan. I'm delighted to welcome Karim to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

It's wonderful to be with you, David. Thanks for inviting me. Let's first state that we are recording this on the morning of Monday after the opening of the air war in Israel. by Israel inside Iran. There will be a little bit of a lag between the time we record and the time that this posts. So there may be some events that we're unaware of. Forgive us for that. I don't think we're going to talk much about the strictly military events. Those are amply covered by...

people closer to the scene i want to talk more about the situation inside iran let's begin first by uh recalling your book about the supreme leader what kind of man do you take him for he was more vigorous obviously when you wrote about him what's the mentality of the leadership in Iran. Well, I'm sure you remember that wonderful book by Eric Hoffer that came out in the 50s called The True Believer.

And Ayatollah Khamenei is a true believer. He's someone who is now the last of the Mohicans. He's the last of the first generation revolutionaries, the revolutionaries from 1979. And he's someone who is committed to the principles of the revolution. In fact...

We call them hardliners. They call themselves principlists. And that means, as I said, they're loyal to the principles of the revolution. And what are those principles? I think at this point, you can distill it to three big ideas. Death to America. death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, the veiling of women, which Ayatollah Khomeini called the flag of the Islamic Revolution.

And so Khamenei is committed to those principles and he has internalized some of the thoughts of the great philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli, which is that... The greatest danger for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. He took the lessons of Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union to heart, and so that didn't...

prolong the shelf life of the Soviet Union, it hastens its collapse. And for that reason, he's on one hand a very earnest believer in these revolutionary principles. But he also believes that if he were to change those principles, it would actually hasten the Islamic Republic's collapse. So he's now 86 years old. He's not going to change his worldview.

The final thing I'd say here, David, is that Khamenei is arguably the longest serving autocrat in the world. He came to power as president in the early 80s. He's been supreme leader since 1989. My math is correct. That's about 36 years he's been supreme leader. He hasn't left the country since 1989. And I just say, in conclusion, you don't get to be the longest-serving autocrat in the world if you're a gambler.

So he has very good survival instincts. And as Hannah Arendt once said many years ago, Even the most radical revolutionary becomes a conservative the day after the revolution because you suddenly have something you want to preserve. So he's up until now had good survival instincts, and we'll see how he gets himself out of what's probably been.

the greatest bind in his political career. Well, one of the great gambles that this regime has taken is the gamble on a nuclear program. Becoming a nuclear state is a very hazardous undertaking. A lot can go wrong on the way there. Once you're there, you get...

Like Pakistan, you get the ability to commit terrorism without fear of consequence, or like Russia, the ability to commit aggression without fear of consequence. But on the way there, you can end up like, remember the Argentine dictators had a nuclear program in the 90s?

That led to the collapse of their regime. The South African apartheid regime had a nuclear weapons program, collapse of regime. A lot of people become much more interested in collapsing your regime if you are on the way to a nuclear program. So you have this terrible zone of danger, and the Iranians seem now to be in that zone of danger. In your assessment, which do they care about more as preservationists, preserving the nuclear program or preserving the regime? Can those be separated?

I think they can in that what's obviously paramount for them is their own survival. And we should emphasize that if you contrast this regime to... the previous government in Iran, the monarchy, the Shah, That was a government which had a very close relationship with the United States, with the West. Many of its political and military elite had studied overseas. And so when things got bad for that government, many of them could remake their lives.

Los Angeles or London or Bethesda, whereas this Iranian regime is deeply isolated. One of the only friends they had was the Syrian government. which collapsed last fall. So for that reason, you know, they have these survival instincts and they've shown themselves able to make tactical compromises, including in the nuclear domain. when their survival is at stake. Now, the challenge that he has, Ayatollah Khamenei, is he's now in this...

situation in which the parameters are, if he doesn't retaliate, if he doesn't show any strength, you know, he loses face. And he loses face not only externally, but also internally.

Every dictator wants to be feared by its own population. So if he doesn't respond strongly, he loses face. If he responds... too strongly he could lose his head and so he's in these very uh tight parameters at the moment and he's long believed that if you compromise under threat and you compromise under pressure that doesn't

alleviate the pressure. It actually signals that the pressure is working and invites even more of it. And so that's why I say he's in a very difficult bind these days. Is this how they see it? I mean, they look like they've been completely, they look like fools. They look penetrated. They look helpless. They look defensive. They look as unintimidating as possible. That's a dangerous way for a dictatorship to look. And their enemies look effortlessly superior over them.

And the regime also seems to be projecting a lot of fear because there's this question of can the Israelis do anything about the nuclear installation under that big mountain? But everyone seems to take for granted that the United States could if it would.

And all the Iranians can do is hope that the Americans choose not to. They have no levers of power against the United States. Their retaliatory terror weapon, Hezbollah, has been taken from their hands. And although we're told there are a hundred killer teams. pre-positioned all over the Western world. After the last few days, those kinds of claims of Iranian fearsomeness look a lot less credible than they used to do. How does that redound on a dictatorship like this, where you just look like...

You look defeated. So you're right that if we look in virtually every realm, militarily, intelligence, financially, technologically, diplomatically. Iran is outmatched in every sense by Israel. There was a very good piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal about how Israel has established total air dominance over Iran.

And so there's no doubt that in this head-to-head conflict, Iran is going to lose. The question is, you know, what comes next once the dust starts to sell? I think for the Israelis... They want two outcomes from this war. They want to significantly degrade and set back Iran's nuclear program, as you alluded to.

The big question mark will be what happens to that deep underground facility in Fordow. And do the Israelis have the wherewithal to damage it badly, or would that require Donald Trump's intervention? That's one big question. But the other big question is the Israelis have also defined it is that, you know, how does this impact the stability of the Iranian regime?

And how does this impact the future of the Supreme Leader? You know, we've had so much discussion in the United States about President Biden's cognitive and physical abilities during his presidency. In Iran, you have an 86-year-old Supreme Leader, as we talked about, Khamenei, who his only education was in the seminaries of Qom seven decades ago now. You know, he doesn't have the wherewithal to be leading this.

very high-tech military, financial, technological war. But what happens to his leadership and what is likely to happen to the system? You know, there's a possibility that it could... transition into a system, a government whose organizing principle is no longer the revolutionary ideology of 1979, but the national interests of Iran. That certainly is a possibility.

But there's also a danger, David, as you alluded to earlier, that you could have some more aggressive military commanders come to power who also... Take the same lesson you did, which is that the regimes which didn't have nuclear weapons, right? Gaddafi's Libya, Saddam's Iraq, Ukraine, when it gave up its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They all were vulnerable to external intervention, whereas regimes like North Korea, which had the nuclear weapons, provided themselves a cloak of immunity. So Israel, no doubt, they've tactically... This war, they will prevail. The question is strategically six months, a year from now, what is the state of the nature of the regime and the nuclear program? So we hear the phrase regime change a lot.

I think those of us of a certain age, that conjures up memories of 1989, where at least in the northern part of Central Europe, East Germany, Hungary, the Czech... and Slovak republics, the process was bloodless. The crowds came into the streets, the leaders resigned or went away. There was a rapid transition to a Western-oriented system, and everybody 20 years later is much more prosperous, and you have some nostalgic extremists, but really these are successful societies.

So that's the model of regime change I think we all want to imagine. But of course, revolutions tend to be usually much bloodier fairest. And even in Eastern Europe, there was the case of Romania, where hundreds died. So Iran must be riddled.

When you think of the number of people who've been prisoners, the number of women who've been abused, the number of families that have lost loved ones to the revolutionary forces, when that regime's power breaks, you could be looking at a very, very bloody... confrontation and where maybe there isn't a transition of power. Maybe there's just bloodshed for a long time until some Napoleon Bonaparte figure emerges at the top. You know, it's, it's so there's a piece that I, um,

preparing for foreign affairs for later in the year about Iran's potential, five potential futures for Iran. And they do vary dramatically. There's the bloodless coup option.

There's something that could be more violent. The challenge we have at the moment is you have a regime which... has very limited popular support. I would put it at most perhaps 20%, most likely lower than that, let's say 15% of society. Because, you know, just to take a step back for a second, this is a regime which is not only...

politically authoritarian, but it's also an economic basket case and socially authoritarian. So, you know, a lot of places, they're just... dictatorships, but you're allowed to pursue economic advancement or you're allowed to at least watch.

what you want or drink what you want or eat what you want you know this is a regime which it polices your private activities uh as well so there's very few redeeming qualities but The challenge is that they may not have much in terms of the breadth of their support, but they do up until now, you know, their support does have some depth, meaning that...

The Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia have shown themselves willing to go out and continue to kill and die for the cause. And there was... A book which came out about a decade ago, which was based off of an article in the Journal of Democracy, which was, I believe it was called the...

the durability of revolutionary regimes, and essentially made the argument that revolutionary governments, meaning those authoritarian regimes that are born out of a revolution, whether it was Soviet Union, Cuba, tend to be more durable than just your run-of-the-mill dictatorship because there is an organizing principle that helps the security forces cohere.

killing and staying in power to enrich one man and his family. And so that's a big question, you know, because you have a society, as I said, perhaps 80, 85% of society is opposed to the regime. But at the moment, they're unarmed, they're unorganized, they're leaderless. And I say this to their credit, not to their detriment, but it's a society, it's a regime which believes in martyrdom.

but a society which doesn't believe in martyrdom. We're trying to separate mosque and state, not join it, which is distinct from a lot of the Arab opposition movements. And so... In some ways, the portrait I'm painting, David, is I see light at the end of the tunnel in Iran, but there's no tunnel at the moment for people to get from where they are to where they want to go. Is there going to be any, do you think...

Or do you expect any kind of rally around the flag effect, which is we hated the regime, but now the Israelis are bombing us, so we rally to our leaders because at least they're ours? I don't think so. I think what tends to happen in these situations is that...

People's existing political disposition is simply accentuated. So if prior to this Israeli bombing, you were a supporter of the regime, a defender of the regime, and you blame everything on America and Israel, you obviously have much more ammunition to hold those views. And if prior to this, you were an opponent and critic of the regime and say that this is a regime which has never prioritized the security and well-being of the Iranian people.

there's far more evidence to continue to support that view. But how that plays out in practical terms up until now, what we've seen is that those supporters of the regime... are willing to go out into the streets and show off that support, whereas the opponents of the regime, whenever they've done that, they've been brutalized. And so that dynamic hasn't yet changed. We see these clips circulating on social media of Iranian. soccer fans booing any mention of Palestine, of people walking.

amending their paths so they do not step on the flag of the United States when it's painted on the sidewalk. So those obviously have great currency in our world. It's what we want to believe is going on. Are we kidding ourselves? Or is there some...

fondness or attachment to her fantasy about the outside world. No, I think that's right, that after having lived under a repressive theocracy for 46 years, it's a society. which is desperate to be part of the outside world. I think people recognize that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as long as its national slogan is death to America and death to Israel. a winning slogan. So I think that's right. People are patriotic. They're prideful.

And I think they recognized that prior to the revolution, when Iran did have a good relationship with the United States, the country's status was so much better. So I don't think we're being... delusional about the nature of Iranian society. But this is, as I said, kind of a lesson I've repeatedly come to see, which is that leadership is so important.

There's a huge popular demand for change in Iran, but we haven't yet seen a supply of kind of an opposition leadership which can, as I said, lead people from where they are now to where they want to go. Why did the regime want an atomic bomb or a nuclear bomb so badly? I mean, we tend to take it for granted. It's an obvious thing. You're trying to terrorize the neighbors. Of course, you want a nuclear weapon. But it's very risky to go from here to there.

It's the nuclear weapon that involved them with a conflict with Israel, whereas without a nuclear weapon, they could easily dominate all of their Arab neighbors and Afghanistan to the east. Why did they make this choice? It was made a long time ago, and it's been persisted in, in the face of tremendous difficulties, sabotage from both the United States and Israel. Why bother? Why not concentrate on developing your...

building up the strength of your Hezbollah arm, for example, and having a less confrontational approach that would allow you to maximize your power in a more enduring way. So their nuclear... program has really been now a six-decade odyssey. Obviously, it was started during the time of the Shah. And after the revolution, the revolutionaries shut down the program. They said, you know,

pursuing nuclear program is un-Islamic. And at that time, if you recall, Chernobyl had happened, Three Mile Island, and so nuclear power was out of vogue. This was a civilian, but under the Shah was a civilian nuclear program. Well, even under the Shah, it was a program in which I think they were hedging. It was obviously cloaked in a civilian guise.

But even the Shah himself, I think, wanted to keep his options open. But during the time of the Shah, they had access to elite technology. It was American companies that were... providing Iran that technology. Obviously, things shut down. The revolutionaries shut it down. And after the Iran-Iraq war, when they realized that it was a country... which was largely friendless, very few allies, they began to restart the program then.

in the late 80s, the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan provided them some of the intelligence to try to build it. But I think the challenge they've always had is that, as you said, it's such a deeply unpopular regime, and it actually has been for quite a long time, that... There's been so many, not only Iranian civilians, but also regime insiders who have been willing to collaborate with whether it's U.S. intelligence, Israeli intelligence too.

to out elements of the program. And they've always, certainly in the last decade since the program was exposed to the public in the early 2000s, just before the Iraq war, they've tried to maintain this facade that it's a nuclear energy program. The reality is that this is a program which has cost the nation, if you want to measure it both in terms of sunk costs.

but also ancillary costs and opportunity costs in terms of sanctions and lost oil revenue. Price tag is, I think, a conservative estimate, been at least $500 billion, considering how much... Oil revenue and oil production, Iran is lost. And that's for a program which barely provides just over 1% of Iran's energy needs. And it hasn't provided a deterrent either.

It's really been a colossal failure to have spent this much time and money on a nuclear program, which neither provides you energy nor deterrence. But just on this point, David... You know, it's possible that a conclusion that some of the Revolutionary Guard commanders are reaching is not that Iran shouldn't have pursued a nuclear program.

But it's possible the conclusion they may draw is that they shouldn't have pursued the program so deliberately that instead of this marathon approach of inching towards nuclear weapons capability, They should have tried to sprint out and done what North Korea has done, which they have this cloak of immunity. The sprint out, is that going to be a feasible thing? You know, one of the...

You quote this program. It's not exactly a positive program, Death to America, Death to Israel. It sounds pretty negative. Death to America is just a slogan and a fantasy. Death to Israel is something that you can imagine actually a nuclear-armed Iran could achieve. And since the Israelis are not going to agree to be done to death, the slogan Death to Israel means war with Israel before we become a... nuclear power. And that was always, I mean, if you played, I mean, chess was invented in Iran.

If you play the chess moves out three, well, we tell them we want a nuclear weapon in order to murder all of them. We start developing a nuclear weapon. They've got one already. We don't. They've got a better air force. We don't. What's going to happen here? How did they not see that the logic of this was they get hit very hard by a temporarily superior enemy before they before they can achieve the thing that can realize their fantasy of annihilation?

Well, I always remember something you told me over lunch, David. It was almost 20 years ago now. You probably don't remember, but you said you can... in rich uranium, and you can call for Israel to be wiped off the map, but you can't do both at the same time. And that proved to be prophetic, your words there. And one thing I want to emphasize is that... We really need to distinguish between...

the ideological objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the national interests of Iran, which in my view are two totally separate things that are at odds with one another, right? Because... From the perspective of the national interests of Iran, you know, Israel and Iran actually have complementary state interests, right? Israel is a technological power. Iran is an energy power. That was a source of great cooperation prior to the revolution. There's a...

millennial, thousands of years, history there of Persian Jewish affinity. Iran to this day, although it's dwindling their Jewish community, has one of the longest. continuously inhabited Jewish communities in the world. So this ethos of death to Israel does not reflect the national interests of Iran and obviously, you know, death to America. any state which is trying to advance the national interest and security of its people, the last thing you want to do is...

gratuitously pick a fight with the world's greatest economy and superpower. So you're right to say that this was always going to be a losing game if you're the Islamic Republic. But as I said, going back to what I said earlier, starting with Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khomeini, their worldview has always been driven by revolutionary principles, not the national interests of Iran.

The national interest, and this is maybe a point that Americans don't appreciate enough, is Iran is the center of a great cultural zone and a long, continuous cultural tradition. It's like the France of Asia.

It's the place where the food was invented. It's the place where the poetry was invented. It was the place where the fashions were invented. If you were an important person anywhere from Istanbul to Delhi, your idea of a luxurious, elegant life... was probably based on an idea that started in what is now Iran.

That zone stretches into what is now Afghanistan, stretches into what is now Uzbekistan, stretches into what is now Russian Central Asia, stretches, of course, into what is now Iraq, stretches a little bit into what is now Syria, but only at very maximal moments did it ever come.

to touch the mediterranean it was always looking the other way and that's the zone of the great persian language and all its many affiliates and you would think that a sort of a persian iran would be looking north and east not westward and this is this this religious

fervor that has gripped this regime, but that also seems to be not again consistent with the longstanding religious traditions of Shiite Iran, which were never all that interested in going all the way to the Mediterranean. Yeah, I'm a big... believer, who said the quote that all history is biography?

And, you know, Kissinger has observed that before he was in government, he didn't think that the individual mattered that much in history. After he served in government, he reached the exact opposite conclusion, which is that individuals shape history. And in the case of Iran... We're still living in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was the one that essentially...

invented this ideology. The Islamic Republic was an essay that he wrote in exile in Najaf in 1970. And when you go back to Khomeini's writings, he was someone who... It's not an exaggeration to say he was deeply anti-Semitic. He was obsessed with Israel. And when he talked about Israel, it wasn't just about Israelis. He would use very...

At that time, I think now the modern Iranian officials have realized that they shouldn't use that language and they use Zionists, but he didn't do that then. And so that's obviously profoundly shaped the character of the... Islamic Republic. And you're absolutely right that if you look at where Iran has invested its political and financial capital over the last four or five decades, you know, Lebanese.

Hezbollah, they've spent billions, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Iran's axis, what they call their axis of resistance. It was essentially five failing or failed states. And, you know, now that we're on the topic, David, I remember in around 2008, I was at one of these track two diplomacy conferences in Europe.

And I was seated next to a senior Iranian official. And I asked him after this dinner, I said, you know, think of all the money that the Islamic Republic has spent over the decades on.

on Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At that time, it was billions. Since then, it's been tens of billions. I think of how Iran could have spent that money on... you know, sending abroad and educating these Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites and how much better off those societies would be now, even vis-a-vis Israel, you could say, you know, you're educating these folks.

you know, advancing them economically. And I'll never forget his response. He looked at me and he said, well, what good would that have done for Iran? And I said, you know, what do you mean? He said, well, he said, do you think had we sent these people abroad? to become doctors and lawyers and engineers that they're going to want to come back and fight for Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. No, they're going to remain professionals. And so it just kind of occurred to me.

What a cynical strategy Iran has had for the Middle East. And I kind of think of the region as there's two kinds of actors in this region. There's those who... aspire to be falcons and those who are vultures, right? You have some countries that, you know, they're in the business of trying to build things. You know, they want soaring societies, cities, economies.

And then you have Iran and its proxies. And they're not in the business of building. They're in the business of destroying. And they prey on the misery of others. The problem, though, is that... And this was my big takeaway from a Fulbright I did. I spent a year in Lebanon in the early 2000s in Beirut, that it takes decades to build things and it takes weeks to destroy them.

And so that, unfortunately, that strategy, that resistance strategy has proven effective up until now. I should say I did until last November, last fall. A last thought on this. It does seem like there's a strange convergence between people in the region and people in the West. The people in the region say, we don't care what happens to us so long as we can blame it on somebody else.

And the people in the West will say, so long as we can find someone, some reason to blame things on ourselves, we don't care what happens to the people in question. And that there's this craving for blame and accusation that becomes a motor that just crushes.

the lives of potentially productive others you know it's an interesting exercise to go to the world bank or imf site and look at the chart of iranian growth through the 1970s and say if this had continued where would iran be today and by my crude math it'd be a country as wealthy as portugal or spain Yeah, you know, what a lot of Iranians will tell you is that if you look at GDP in around 1978, 77, just a year or so before the revolution, Iran...

Turkey and South Korea were at the same level. And what's happened five decades after just shows you all the difference that the vision and leadership makes. I say this is a regime which aspires to be like North Korea, and you have a society which aspires to be like South Korea. Yeah. Well, one more of those comparisons, as people are marking the extraordinary achievements of Poland.

this year. The point is made that in 1990, Poland was as poor as Iran, and today Poland is as rich as Japan. But another way to put that is, in 1990, Iran was as rich as Poland was then. Why couldn't Iran be as rich as Poland is now? if they'd made other kinds of choices. But the implications of this are very unsettling for a lot of people because the answer is, well, the correct answer to your economic development strategy is aligned with the United States.

Open your markets. Have free markets. Have capitalism. Get out of the military ambition business. And there are a lot of people, not just the Iranian leadership, but a lot of people say that's not the path. We don't want to admit that. the neoliberals were right. Well, I think the other thing, David, is that on one hand, I say that this is a regime whose priority is not the national interests of Iran.

So they're not interested in advancing people's economic well-being and security. But at the same time, they're deeply interested in staying in power. David, you were friends with Christopher Hitchens as well, right? Indeed I was. And he was once a judge at an Iranian film festival. He was able to get into Iran, which is kind of amazing. They must have made some like clerical error or something.

Yeah, he had a deep interest in Iran. And so he used to have these salon dinners at his home in Kalorama. And one night, you know, I was living close to him at that time, and he kindly invited me. One of the guests that evening was the actor Sean Penn. And Sean Penn was at that time very interested in Iran. He had just made a visit to Iran himself. And, you know, he asked me a pretty simple question, which is...

you know, why does the United States have this problem with Iran? Why don't we just normalize relations with Iran? And I said, you know, that's not a unilateral choice that we can make. I agree. It's in the U.S. national interest too. to normalize relations, but you can't force a regime which needs you as an adversary to normalize. And he said something which I always did with me.

just come from Havana. And he said, you know, Fidel always jokes that if America were to remove the embargo, he would do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated, because he understood that his power is best preserved in this closed bubble. And that very much is true about the current leaders of the Islamic Republic, which is that they fear normalization with the United States in some ways more than they fear continued Cold War with the United States.

They understand that if you crack open Iran to the forces of international capitalism and civil society, it's much more difficult to preserve the rule of a theocracy who's... led by a guy who thinks he's the Prophet Muhammad's representative on earth. That's not a winning model. And so they thrive in isolation. And isolation may be what they're going to get. Last question, and then I will...

Thank you for your time. How optimistic should Americans be about their ability to have any influence on the outcomes in Iran? You know, it's an important question, and invariably what we've seen in the Middle East over the last two decades is that our ability to shape outcomes in the region is somewhat limited. I would say that there are more things that we could be doing right now, which we're not doing. I'll give you one example. So one of the things that President Trump did...

in his first weeks in office is they shut down Voice of America. And you could argue, you know, Voice of America is not that relevant in a lot of other contexts, but in the Iranian context, it still was able to reach. many tens of millions of Iranians. And it's true, the product needed to be updated and reformed to be made for a great television network. But that's one way in which it's a huge tool and we have in our toolkit.

The regime was obsessed with Voice of America. And rather than at least getting some concessions from them for shutting it down, we did it for free. I think they've now realized that this was a mistake and we need this communication tool with Iranians. And so we've summoned back some of those employees. But I think the biggest impact we can have.

is in terms of media and communication. Because one of the other things that the regime tends to do during times of crisis is to shut off the internet. They want to prevent people from communicating with the outside world. And so that's actually... A technology, frankly, which Starlink and Elon Musk, that would be a very important factor in inhibiting the regime's ability to...

to shut down communications between Iranians and the outside world. So there are things we can do, but ultimately, the future of Iran is going to be decided inside Iran. Well, as I often express speaking on the internet, on Twitter, one of my great hopes in life is to someday embark on an art and archaeology tour of the wonders of Persian civilization. I hope I'll live to see that.

And that it will be possible in an open Iran to rediscover firsthand with one's own eyes, not just in a museum, but in the place, the extraordinary achievements of this amazing civilization that has self-darkened itself. so unnecessarily and with such lash not not just for the people of iran for the world thank you so much for joining us today what a pleasure to have you thank you david it's great to be with you

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Use birth control during and three months after Xtandi. Common side effects include muscle and joint pain, feeling unusually tired, hot flashes, constipation, less appetite, diarrhea, high blood pressure, bleeding, falls, fractures, and headache. Talk to your doctor and visit extandy.com. Thanks to Kareem Sajjapur for joining on such short notice. I appreciate his scholarly and his personal insights into these urgent questions.

that we're discussing about Iran and peace in the region. Thanks to our friends at the Royal Hotel here in Picton, Ontario, for making space available to us. If you enjoy the program, I hope you will share it, subscribe and like, but make others aware of it too. That really strengthens our ability to bring content to you.

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Claudine Abeed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Fromm. Thank you for listening.