← Conversations with Coleman
Conversations with Coleman
Niall Ferguson: What Happens Next in Iran Will Change the Middle East Forever
01:06:34
Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Sir Neil Ferguson. Neil is a historian known for writing about empire, war, finance and global power. He's also the Milbank family senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. In this episode, Neil and I discuss the anti regime protests in Iran, as well as the brutal government crackdown that has left thousands of protesters dead. We talk about why the protests began. We talk about what the protesters are demanding. We talk about how this protest differs from the protests over the death of Mahsa Amini three years ago. We talk about the likelihood of the regime actually falling. We talk about whether the sanctions on Iran have worked. We talk about the 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power, as well as the ways in which that history gets twisted by the left and the right. We talk about whether U.S. intervention would risk delegitimating the protesters or not. We talk about how the downfall of the Islamic regime would change geopolitics in the region and much more. So without further ado, Sir Neil Ferguson. Okay, Neil Ferguson, thanks so much for coming back on my show.
- [01:23]
B
It's a pleasure to be with you, Coleman. Always is.
- [01:26]
A
So you've been on my show many times before. I, I think very highly of you. I'm excited to talk to you right now. Today we're going to talk about what's going on in Iran. And I want to talk about it in this order. I want to first start by catching anyone up on the basics of what has happened in Iran, not just over the past two weeks, but a little bit of the lead up to the current protests and crackdown, starting with the financial, economic problems Iran has been facing since the fall of 2025. And once we get the listeners up to date on the basic timeline of events, I want to give a little bit of historical context around some of the narratives that we see. Every time the Iran America relationship or the Iran west relationship at large comes up, which is the narrative that, you know, America meddled in, Iran engineered a coup, which, you know, you know, and all of Iran's problems have been downstream of that. And really we're to blame. So I want to get to that. And then finally, I want to talk about the geopolitics of, of this moment, of what, what Trump is likely to do, what Trump can do, what Trump should do, if he should do anything at all, how this looks from the point of view of Iran's allies like China and Russia, how this looks from the point of view of Iran's regional adversaries, Israel and Saudi Arabia being the two most important. So if that sounds good to you, we'll start from kind of a timeline of events, of recent events.
- [03:14]
B
The interesting thing about the Islamic Republic is that it's a proper authoritarian regime based on a theocracy going back to the 1979 revolution. And it turns out that's not a great basis for running a modern economy, especially one that is under very tight US sanctions. Recurrently going back to 2009, there have been waves of popular protest, often though not always, about the cost of living. It was inflation in 2017, 18, gas prices, 2019, water shortages, 2021. But then you'll remember the protests that broke out in 2022 after a young woman was killed for not wearing a headscarf by the so called morality police. There were strikes in 2023. This regime has a chronic problem of crowd control, and it's sometimes, but not always, a function of economic failure. In the most recent events, two things have driven people out onto the streets initially, the dramatic depreciation of the currency and the associated inflation. You're looking at about 50% inflation rate across the board, maybe 70% for food, plus water shortages, especially in Tehran, and a general feeling of profound economic dissatisfaction that seems to be across the social spectrum. But crucially, one shouldn't explain this exclusively as a kind of economically driven crisis. There is a crisis of legitimacy of the regime itself, which has led so many people to take to the streets. They're not just taking to the streets to say, we have a cost of living crisis. They're taking to the streets to call for the overthrow of the dictator, which is the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
- [05:28]
A
Yeah, so. So the trigger of this particular round of protests was economic. But as you say, the, the wider set of grievances that protesters have are with the regime itself. So my understanding is that what happens is last fall you have a series of events that kind of portend economic and financial collapse. You have the United nations snapback sanctions related to the 2015 Iran deal come back into effect after Iran doesn't comply with oversight measures on their nuclear program. You have a bank that collapses in, in October, and then by December, you're seeing, as you said, 40% or more inflation. And, you know, by January 4, President Massoud Pescheshkian is offering, as a salve to the Iranian people, a $7 per month stipend. And I've heard it variously, variously reported that in Iran, $7 buys two slices of pizza or one bottle of cooking oil, and that this becomes yet another trigger of how out of touch and ridiculous the regime is. And so what begins as an economic protest, in particular among the, the merchant class, the so called bizaeris, which is a, apparently an important sort of political section of the Iranian public, turns into a protest of an order of magnitude bigger than any of the ones that, that you've mentioned. And so I guess one, one question is, how does this protest differ from the 2022 protests related to Mahsa Amini and from the Green Revolution of 2009 and the other Iranian protests we've seen in the past, say, 15 years?
- [07:34]
B
I'm not sure that the size of the demonstrations is unprecedented. I think the number of people who have been killed in crushing the protests is unprecedented because hundreds died in previous waves of repression and now we're looking at thousands. It seems fairly clear, perhaps more than 10,000. I think the thing that's really striking about these protests is that they are so explicitly hostile to the regime and they are calling for regime change. Indeed, some of the protesters are explicitly calling for a restoration of the Shah of the monarchy that was overthrown in 1979. That's, I think, a much more radical thing to say than was being said back in the green demonstrations of 2009 when people were demonstrating against corruption, which has been a long standing problem of the regime. So I think we crossed a certain threshold here with explicit calls for a return of the old regime, which is why in the piece I just published for the Free Press, I said, this isn't a revolution that we are looking at here. It's a counter revolution. It's an attempt to get rid of a revolutionary regime and potentially restore the old regime. Though not everybody, I should stress, has signed up for that. Can I add another point, Coleman? A really important one that we haven't mentioned. I don't think that this would necessarily be happening if the regime had not suffered disastrous foreign policy reverses in the past year or so. And in many ways, if you listen to some of the chats that there were that were being heard in the streets, they sometimes include an explicit criticism of the regime's support for Hamas. And that's interesting to me because in many ways the regime's in trouble because it so misplayed its foreign policy hand, not only backing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to launch the October 7 attacks against Israel, but then proving itself incapable of inflicting serious damage on Israel with its direct air offensive, and worse still then suffering pretty disastrous attacks in the 12 day war with Israel, in which The Israelis found that they could get past Iran's air defense systems. And it culminated, of course, last summer, early summer, with the bombing of Fordo by US B2 stealth bombers. So I don't think the protests would be happening just because of inflation. I think part of what's going on is that the regime has suffered really pretty disastrous foreign policy reverses that led to a major unsustained air attack on the country, plus hugely successful covert operations run by the Israelis that inflicted all kinds of damage and disruption to the regime and particularly to its nuclear program.
- [10:54]
A
So you mentioned that one of the protesters grievances is that the Iranian regime prioritizes foreign policy of dubious interest to the people of Iran over actually providing a decent standard of life for its people. To that point, one of the slogans I've heard reported in the media is quote, unquote, neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran. Meaning why is the regime spending so much money? I don't know exactly how much money, but just like billions of dollars on terror proxies, funding Hezbollah, supporting Hamas, supporting the Houthis, supporting the Assad regime, destabilizing the region in many ways when it can't even figure out how to keep the price of eggs from rising, so to speak. And obviously we have a version of this critique in the west as well. We have a frustration with military spending that could in theory be spent on other purposes, but multiply that by a thousand in terms of you've got a regime with far fewer resources than the United States, has an economy that's much poorer and much less stable, and you can understand the, the sense that the government has all of its priorities backwards based on this ideology of hatred of Israel, hatred of the west, when you haven't even addressed the so called kitchen table issues of the Iranian people. One question I have here. So is this sanctions are the first choice of the American foreign policy toolkit. And they often seem toothless in the sense that we've been sanctioning regimes that you know, for 70 years that still exist and show no sign of crumbling anytime soon. Is one lesson to draw here that sanctions has worked? Or is that, is this actually just a case of homegrown economic mismanagement?
- [12:58]
B
I think that an important lesson of the last half century or more is that alone by themselves, sanctions can achieve relatively little. They are part of the toolkit of warfare. But if you only use sanctions. I think this became very clear when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. The use of sanctions after that did nothing to discourage Putin from going further in 2022. And so sanctions alone will not deliver. But what they can do and what they have done in the case of Iran, is to prevent the regime having more resources available to disperse to its terrorist proxies. The critique that the Trump administration makes of the Biden administration was that they eased the sanctions and in an attempt to resuscitate the nuclear deal that Obama had negotiated. And what that did was just to free up resources for the regime to fund Hamas, et cetera. This was always the flaw with the nuclear deal, that it notionally slowed down Iran's progress towards a nuclear weapon, but it did nothing to stop the Iranians dispersing funds to terrorist organizations. So I think that's really what we see here. What has changed, I think, since President Trump's reelection is that the United States is ready to do more than simply apply the sanctions squeeze. It is also willing to use military force indirectly by, in effect, approving of Israeli operations and assisting them directly, as we saw last year in the strikes on Fordo. And I believe we're about to see again, because I think it seems now very likely indeed that the United States will launch strikes against Iran in the coming days, if not hours, because of the way in which the regime is brutally suppressing dissent and committing an act of mass murder against its own people.
- [15:18]
A
Yeah. I've often thought of Donald Trump's second term as like, the heading in my brain is the maximum leverage presidency. And I think this first occurred to me when on so called Liberation Day, when he basically tariffed the entire world to an extent that I think a lot of his supporters were surprised by.
- [15:40]
B
Right.
- [15:40]
A
Like I think even Ben Shapiro before the election said, oh, well, this is a classic case of Trump making a massive threat in order to negotiate back to something a lot more reasonable. And in the long run, it might have been that. But the truth is, no one really thought, maybe not no one, but I didn't think I'll speak for myself. I didn't think he would actually even risk the stock market crash, the short term stock market crash that was precipitated by tariffing the entire world. But in a way, what that signal sent to the entire world is I'm willing to do things that everyone will call me crazy for. And we've always sort of known that about Trump. But Trump's second term has been much more a demonstration of that to the entire world. Now, you double down on that by bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, which was less of a surprise to me. But still, the fact that he really did pull the trigger is something a lot of. A lot of people around the world took notice of and updated their view of Trump's willingness to act accordingly. And then you triple down on that by the. Again, you know, the surprising extraction of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. The signal Trump has sent to the world is, there is nothing so crazy that I won't maybe do it, even if it pisses off my base, they'll come with me. I'm willing to do almost anything. And this gives him an enormous amount of leverage in a situation, much more leverage than any other US President, Republican or Democrat, would have in this situation. The Iranian regime has to take his word seriously when he says, if you start shooting protesters, it's going to be very bad for you.
- [17:27]
B
This is one of the ways in which President Trump is rather Nixonian, because Richard Nixon liked to tell Henry Kissinger to tell the Soviets and the North Vietnamese that Nixon was so crazy that he was capable of doing anything, even going nuclear. It was madman theory. That was how they talked about it. The problem was that the Soviets didn't think Richard Nixon was really mad. They thought he was a ruthless political calculator. And so it didn't work. But Mike Pompeo said, I remember a year or two ago with Trump, he didn't have to tell anybody that Trump was crazy and might be a madman. He had CNN doing that for him every night. So Trump's a successful version of madman theory. The Russians, the Iranians, everybody now understands that he's capable of taking great risks. Scott Besant said a couple of months ago, the President has a higher risk appetite than I do. Scott Besant used to run George Soros hedge fund. So his risk appetite is, let's put it this way, in the tail of the distribution, Trump is even more ready to take risk than one of the top hedge fund managers of Wall street. And that's a superpower. And it's only really the Chinese, who so far have successfully stood up to that. Remember last year when Trump was imposing tariffs, as you said, on just about everybody, even uninhabited islands? Back in April, he'd already raised tariffs on China, and he continued to maintain higher tariffs on China than on most other countries. The Chinese weren't intimidated. They retaliated, tit for tat, all the way down the line on the turf war. And then they played their trump card, which was their ability to restrict the export of rare earth elements, which they dominate and which are crucial to very important parts of the Western manufacturing system, particularly automobiles. So China is The exception to the rule that everybody is intimidated by President Trump. The Chinese actually have shown they're not intimidated. And by the way, don't forget, just before Maduro's extraction from Caracas, we saw the biggest demonstration yet of Chinese naval and air power in and around Taiwan. So there's an exception to the rule and it's an important one.
- [20:01]
A
So back to Iran. One of the things that comes up anytime Iran is in the news and you get this from the so called anti war right, and I guess you could say the anti war left, anti imperialist left, let's say, is that in 1953, the US engineered a coup that implicitly would not have otherwise happened. Got rid of a beloved leader of Iran, Mosaddegh. And this downstream of this was basically the 1978 and 9 revolution that was in a lot of ways anti foreign influence broadly, and then became an Islamic. The Islamic regime emerged from the chaos of that moment and therefore in some way all of this is on us. What do you make of that narrative?
- [20:56]
B
Well, it exaggerates the US role. In the 1950s. It was really a British operation that overthrew Mossadegh. It was MI6 more than it was CIA. And one must remember that in the 1950s, the Persian Gulf was really an area of continuing British influence. And the British didn't really wrap up their dominance of the Gulf until they went more or less bust in the 1970s. It's as recently as 71, 72 that the Americans are having to decide to take over what had been British responsibilities in that region. So I think there's a tendency so often in American discussion of 20th century history to exaggerate the importance of the United States. The United States became increasingly important to Iran in the 1970s, became by far the shot of Iran's most important partner. But that really hadn't been true back in the 1950s. And you have to understand what happened in the Iranian case as part of a wider pattern where the dominant forces in the Middle east, which had been the European empires, were confronted by a whole bunch of different nationalist challenges, most obviously in Egypt. And the British and the French were trying to salvage what remained of their imperial power. This produced the Suez Crisis. Iraq was another place that was struck by revolution that brought the Ba' Athist regime to power. So one has to understand the history in that kind of context. What's interesting, I think, is the history of the 1970s because Iran became increasingly important to the United states in the 70s. For Nixon, the Shah was an obvious and ideal partner who was willing to buy any amount of American military hardware and mostly tow, not always, but mostly tow, the US line in the Middle east, which was focused on keeping the Soviets at bay and making sure that the Soviets did not have significant leverage in the region. All of that seemed to be going swimmingly, apart from one small detail, namely that the Shah's regime was increasingly unstable, partly because it was a deeply unequal society and the Shah and the elite around him did very well. But for ordinary people, it was a regime that offered grinding poverty. And the Shah's downfall in the 1978-79 revolution, which produces the Islamic Republic, is a disaster for American foreign policy that destroys the Carter presidency. Jimmy Carter's downfall is inextricably bound up with events in Iran and then the extraordinarily complex problem of what to do with the Shah when he sought medical treatment in the United States for his cancer. That, of course, led to the hostages crisis in Tehran. The rest I'm sure listeners and viewers will recall. So I think Iran's hugely important for the US in the 70s, first as a source of strength in the Middle east, and then it becomes a huge problem that, as I said, destroys the Karter presidency. And it remains a problem right through the 1980s. It's embroiled in the war against Iraq. The Reagan administration is trying to find a way to restore some kind of contact there that produces Iran, a Contra. I could go on. So the really important event, as far as the United States is concerned, is the Revolution 1979, which creates one of the worst adversaries in the history of the United States, a state committed to a war with the Great Satan as well as the little Satan, Israel. And it's a thorn in the side of American policymakers to have to deal with this regime, because the regime is a major sponsor of terrorism and a source of trouble not just in the Middle east, but all over the world. So we've been grappling with this extraordinary regime, this strange theocracy, for approaching half a century. And the exciting thing about the events of 2025, 2026, is that for the first time the possibility has become imaginable that the regime falls. And that has got a lot of commentators very excited. Though I have to say, as a student of revolution and counter revolution. Counter revolution's really, really difficult. Very, very rarely succeeds. A revolutionary regime with a full range of repressive capabilities that at this point show no signs of dividing, can crush the largest popular protests in the way that we're currently seeing. And Final point, foreign intervention doesn't always work. If you think about the foreign interventions historically in the French Revolution didn't work, backfired. Foreign intervention in the Russian revolution didn't work, backfired. It's hard for foreign intervention to work for a reason that you alluded to earlier and that is that revolutions nearly always have some nationalist component. And the same is true of the counter revolution. It's very awkward indeed for counter revolutionaries to be accused of being in league with foreign powers. That's exactly what Khamenei said on Sunday when he called on the security forces to slaughter the demonstrators. He accused them of being in league with foreign powers, that is the United States. This is a perennial problem for any counter revolution.
- [27:07]
A
Yeah. The irony about the history from my point of view is that people take from the CIA and MI6 involvement in the 1953 coup and the long run consequence of that being the Iranian Revolution of 79. People take from that history the lesson that meddling by Western powers always backfires. But that lesson can only be drawn if you start the clock in 1953. If you ask the question, okay, and that so called golden age of Iranian democracy, if you want to call it that, between 1941 and 1953, how did that arise? Well, it arose because Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in 1941 and made it a democracy. It had previously canceled its own democracy of its own choice and effectively become a monarchy again. It was Western meddling that created the democracy, the golden age that the anti imperious left and the anti war right point to as then the thing America took away. So how you look at all the history and come away with the lesson that western meddling is always bad to me seems intellectually dishonest. Now when it comes to the question of like is it good in this case? Well, that's a separate. That's a separate question.
- [28:33]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. The, the tendency on the left is to create a kind of Chomsky esque narrative of Western intervention being the root of all evil. And this is only possible if you are very selective with your sample. But if you actually take a much broader sample of all the different interventions. Was Western intervention in support of dissidents in the Soviet bloc bad? No, it was extremely important that Voice of America, for example, reached listeners in Eastern Europe. And one could go on. When the United States intervened and failed, as in Cuba and Nicaragua, you ended up with illiberal regimes that have proved that very long lived. There are also interventions that have much better outcomes. Were we wrong to intervene in the Korean War to keep South Korea from becoming a communist state? I don't think so. Nor do South Koreans. And so on we go. I wrote a book more than 20 years ago now called Colossus the Rise and Fall of the American Empire, which tried to give a balanced account of America's, quote unquote, imperial role in the world, going all the way back to the 19th century and to ideas like the Roosevelt Corollary, which was the basis for American interventions in Latin American Caribbean nations beginning 1904. It's a very long and complex story, and one of the points that I make in the book is you can't just choose the cases that go badly. You have to also include American intervention in World War II. Hard to be against that, really, when you think about what the consequences were, both in the European War and in the Pacific War. So you can't just pick the cases that suit your Chomskyite Marxist rants. You have to recognize that American intervention has very often been a force for good. And it would clearly be a force for good if it could overthrow the dictator Ali Khamenei and his murderous Islamo fascist regime. And anybody who thinks that's not true, anybody who would like to side with them, or for that matter, with Nicolas Maduro, good luck in taking that position of support for regimes that have systematically violated the rights of their own citizens.
- [31:15]
A
So you mentioned that Khamenei, in his speech just a few days ago, alleged that all the protesters are doing the bidding of the United States and doing the bidding of Israel. We've seen a lot of talk indicating that Israel has Mossad agents all over Iran and is intimately involved in the protests and so forth. And some of that is almost bragging from the Israeli point of view, bragging about capabilities. But all of it can risk the perception and the genuine stain of foreign influence among the protesters. And this goes back to Obama's decision in 2009 during the Green protests not to say anything publicly, not to say anything too publicly supportive of the protests, lest he give the impression that the protesters were basically agents of American influence, which would undermine their legitimacy to some extent. Obama said in an interview a couple years ago that he regretted not supporting the protesters in that case. And in that case, he was just debating between rhetoric. Basically, he was debating between whether or not to make a public statement. And you can question how high the stakes are in that kind of a decision. In this case, the decisions seem to be military options. By the time this episode comes out, it's very possible that there is some kind of strike. In your view, is it smart for America and or Israel to muscularly take the side of the protests in terms of military strikes, or do you think that could risk backfiring on the perceived legitimacy of the protests?
- [33:07]
B
I think we're talking here about some unfinished business. Remember, the United States and Israel went to war with the Islamic Republic last year and inflicted tremendous damage on its military infrastructure, its nuclear program, but also its air defenses, but then stopped. The decision was taken not to take Khamenei out, which I think the Israelis should probably have done. I mean, Israelis were really running amok in Tehran last year. The problem about that decision to leave the regime intact is now clear that the regime may be an economic basket case, but it is still a source of hideous organized violence that can be deployed either in the region through the various terrorist proxies or directly at the Iranian people. It's worth stressing that the Iranian people are very, very alienated from this regime, partly because Iranian society has changed so much since 1979. One thing that the theocracy didn't do was to sort of turn the clock back. Socially. Women have very restricted rights in Iran, but they are educated. And although the regime polices the way that people dress and the things that they can do and see, in practice, the Iranian population in the cities is probably as secular as any population in the entire Middle East. So I think we just need to ask ourselves one simple question. Does it make sense to do nothing and sit back and watch the regime massacre thousands of people, re establish its domestic authority and then resume normal service as a source of terrorism in the region? Presumably also resume normal service in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction? Or do you finish the job off that came close to being complete last year. Now, I think the Iranian regime has been a beneficiary of an earlier chapter in American foreign policy, which was the intervention in Iraq. If we go back to the events after 911 and the decision that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the one big mistake. Of course, there were many mistakes at that time, but the one big mistake that nearly everybody made was to underestimate how far Iran would benefit from the disruption of Saddam's regime and indeed turn parts of Iraq into areas that Iran, if not controlled, then certainly had great influence in. And so there was this fundamental problem with the post 2003 regime in the Middle east that Iran was too powerful. And we haven't really had a solution to that problem ever since. The best solution I can think of would be to get rid of the theocracy. It's deeply unpopular. Very few Iranians would lament it and help if there is a way to do it, a transition, maybe to constitutional monarchy, maybe to a liberal republic. But it would be without question a benefit not just to ordinary Iranians. It would be a benefit to the region as a whole and indeed the world, to remove this evil regime which is once again proving its moral repugnance from the face of the earth. Let's do it.
- [36:50]
A
One thing I've learned in talking about Venezuela, really just in the past 10 years of political commentary is that Americans think about every potential regime change in terms of Iraq specifically, sometimes Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes Libya is thrown in there. But it's really Iraq is the main reference point for most Americans in terms of regime change. And so every subsequent potential regime change is assumed to be similar to Iraq in crucial ways. Iraq was a highly sectarian society like Syria. It was in many ways a civil war waiting to happen. Whether or not Saddam fell because of us or because of, you know, an Arab Spring type of event, it was really a society that was just held together by brutal repression. And the moment that repression led up, Sunni and Shia were going to start slaughtering each other. Right. And so that was, you know, that was a known risk to the American, to American military personnel. But I don't think Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell necessarily predicted it or predicted the extent of it. So the question is, in what ways is Iraq a good comparison for Americans to have in their mind for what could happen in Iran if the regime fell, and in what ways is it a bad comparison?
- [38:27]
B
Well, it's not a good comparison in the sense that the problem in Iraq was not getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Does anybody miss Saddam? I sure don't. The problem was that the United States then tried to run Iraq. The entire Ba' Atist system was hurriedly dismantled and a relatively small US military force with some allied support was then deployed and tried to run the country.
- [38:54]
A
And.
- [38:55]
B
And that was never going to work. And I remember pointing out at the time why it wasn't going to work because the force was too small and there wasn't a public commitment to running Iraq as a quasi colony for any length of time. So that much was predictable. It was also predictable that there would be some kind of insurgency and civil war as there had been when the British had tried the exact same thing after World War I, when the Iraqi population was much smaller and much less well armed. Nobody is talking about deploying a large American military force to Iran. The question here is simply can the Islamic Republic be toppled as a regime? And I think it's conceivable. I mean, it's hard and I don't want anybody listening to think that this is an easy thing that is likely to happen. I think it's perfectly possible that the US can launch airstrikes, can do all kinds of cyber and covert operations and still fail to dislodge the regime because the regime still has a pretty large and well organized security, internal security force. But I can't help feeling that this is the moment that we could just make it happen. And given the obvious popular disenchantment with the regime, that seems worth a try for the reasons I already said. So it's not the same at all as what the Bush administration was trying to achieve in Iraq, because we're talking not just about regime change in Iraq. We were talking about building from more or less scratch an entirely new regime. I don't think anybody has that in mind. Regime destruction is different from regime change. I think the United States and Israel would welcome the destruction of the Islamic Republic. The question is always what comes next. We didn't intervene in Syria and what happened was that the Assad regime then waged a sustained and brutal civil war to re establish its power, which ended up killing more people than the US intervention in Iraq did. And so non intervention doesn't exactly win the prize if we compare the foreign policies of Bush and Obama. I think if anything, Obama's handling of Syria was even worse than the way that the Bush administration handled Iraq. And I would add that Iraq is not an utter and unmitigated fail the way Afghanistan was. Afghanistan is the big failure because there the United states intervenes, fights 20 year war and then leaves and the Taliban resume normal terroristic service. Iraq turned out better than that. And I sometimes think that we lose sight of that fact because there's so much ill feeling about the very protracted military involvement the United States had there. But I think Iraq overshadows decisions in the way that Vietnam used to. I mean, throughout the 1990s, there was sort of paralysis in the Clinton administration about war in the Balkans and war in Somalia, just about anything, because they were convinced that any steps that they took would be the beginning of the next Vietnam. This is the wrong way to think about foreign policy. The thing you have to bear in mind is that the United States as a superpower has global responsibilities, global commitments, global allies, global interests. The Trump administration is quite interesting in that it talks the language of realism. It's hostile to neoconservatism. It has been critical of so called forever wars. What Trump wants to do is to flex, exercise American power in short, sharp bursts that establish credibility and, it is hoped, produce better outcomes. Now take Venezuela. Nobody is trying to occupy Venezuela and create an ideal democracy there. Right now, Venezuela is essentially being run by the Chavistas ex, Nicolas Maduro. Again, the model is different. It's not as ambitious as the neoconservative vision, which way back in the aftermath of 911 was to remake the Middle east in the American image and create a vast new and mostly democratic utopia. We're a long way from that. And I think the objectives here are much more circumscribed and realistic.
- [43:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, one thought I've had recurringly over the past many months is that what calls itself the America first movement is really the America only movement in the sense that it opposes literally any effort of America to influence the world in our. In, well, in the interest of the people that lives live in those countries in our interests. And so, you know, I have no problem with the idea of putting the interests of Americans first on a list of many goals, but I do have a problem with the idea that the only thing that matters is spending every single dollar of the US budget domestically, never spending any money on using the military anywhere in the world. And also having no sense that as the world's superpower, that we have a responsibility, a lesser responsibility to be clear to the world than we do to American citizens. But that doesn't mean we have no responsibility at all. And so that's why I can't in good conscience call myself America first if what that really means is America Only, if it really did mean America first on a list of many other priorities related to the world as well, then I would happily sign on to that. And then the second thing you said I think is interesting is, yeah, the neoconservative movement wanted to remake the Middle east in our image, in a mostly democratic image. You know, one of the most interesting challenges to that is, and I think you talk about this in your piece in the Free Press, is that insofar as there have been bastions of stability in the Middle east and North Africa, they have largely been the monarchies, Jordan and Morocco and the UAE and so forth. And, you know, is it possible that for cultural and historical reasons, monarchies work better in the Middle east and that should influence, that should unsettle our very kind of navel gazing sense that because we are a democracy and we love democracy and it works in Western Europe and America, that therefore that should be our priority everywhere in the world.
- [45:49]
B
Well, this takes us back to the 1950s, when the British vision was that you would have a bunch of monarchs in the Middle east and the Hashemites would not only be in Jordan, but also in Iraq. Americans then were very dismissive of this and thought of it as Old World and were much more inclined to embrace the idea of a Pan Arab Republic, that the republics that were formed in that period turned out to be highly unstable, with a propensity for illiberalism as well as for conflict. The monarchies, by contrast, have been sources of stability. And so one lesson, I think, is that it was a mistake to bet on Arab republics or republics generally as the political model for the region. The problem is that it's very hard to restore a monarchy once you've lost it. There are very few cases of successful restoration, as I tried to point out in the piece, and I'll be truly amazed, and the drinks will be on me. If Reza Pahlavi is able to be restored as the Shah of Iran. That's a really low probability outcome, not because he's a bad guy, but because it's really hard to get the opposition to the Islamic Republic to agree on that kind of outcome. There are just bound to be a whole variety of different desired outcomes if you look at all the different opposition forces at work. And we haven't even mentioned the ethnic heterogeneity of Iran. Iran's itself an empire, a Persian empire, and it's a very ethnically heterogeneous country. One scenario that's quite plausible is that if you topple the Islamic Republic, the thing just breaks up. That is the kind of thing that you're paid to worry about if you're on the National Security Council or the State Department. Because when a big country like Iran breaks up, then there are usually other countries close by who stand to benefit. I'm enough of a Kissingerian to believe that balances of power are real, and they're usually threatened by either revolutionary powers that want to remake the map or by the breakdown of a state and the emergence of these regional anarchy. So these are the kind of things that we have to bear in mind when we are enthusiastically cheering on the protesters or hoping that President Trump intervenes on their side. We do need to bear in mind that the scenarios for the day after the overthrow of Khamenei, if it can be achieved, are quite numerous and they're not likely to be what we would ideally like if we were writing the script. I remember saying at the time of the Arab Spring in a conversation with Richard Haas, you know, the chances that the Google execs in Tahrir Square end up running Egypt are like basically zero. And what of course happened was, as my wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali correctly predicted at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood took control in Egypt and then had to be got rid of in what was in effect a military coup that put El Sisi in charge. So let's not pretend there are nice happy endings. Syria, you know, good example. Fantastic that Assad was got rid of one of those things that it's hard not to cheer. Look who's running the show now, you know, Al Qaeda in effect, or at least some remnants of it. So the Middle east is not going to produce Hollywood happy endings. But there would certainly be, I want to stress this point, real benefits for the people of Iran and for the people of the region and indeed for the people of the world if this awful regime were finally toppled. And this is probably the best chance that we've had to do that at any point since it came into existence.
- [50:04]
A
So in the category of downstream risks, I want to add another variable to the equation here. What are the Saudis thinking right now? And, and you know, obviously the Saudis, as their primary threat geopolitically has been Iran for the better part of the last 50 years. But we've seen this potential warming of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel and the potential of Saudi Arabia coming into the Abraham Accords, which is widely cited as the reason Hamas chose the time it did in order to thwart the potential of that deal. We've seen what would be a monumental change for the Middle east, for the country which controls the two holiest sites of Islam to thaw its relationship with Israel and to formally recognize Israel. The basis of that cooperation, in my understanding, has been the threat of Iran, the enemy of my enemy. Insofar as the Islamic regime in Iran falls or the country fractures or the threat is in some way less pressing, does that potentially have a downstream consequence of getting rid of Saudi Arabia's incentive to form a better relationship with Israel?
- [51:25]
B
Well, that's a tough one because the Saudis began hedging during the Biden administration by trying to improve their relationship with the Iranians. It was, I think, largely precautionary measure because the last thing the Saudis want is to be targets of any Iranian proxies missiles. So Saudi Arabia is A risk averse power, partly because it doesn't have great military power of its own, but mostly because Mohammed bin Salman wants to focus all his energies on the extremely ambitious economic and social plans that he has to transform the kingdom. The other thing that's important is that the Saudis are, along with the other Gulf monarchies in some measure competing with their neighbors. They're currently rubbing up against the Emiratis. It's quite hard, in other words, to keep all these different players on one side. And the side that was very creatively built in the first Trump administration was the side of the Abraham Accords. That was a major success of the first Trump administration to begin a process where Israel would normalize relations with a whole group of Arab neighbors and near neighbors. That process was entirely derailed by the Biden administration's wrong headed attempt to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, which was then a precursor of October 7. Trump too, in the second series, is trying to kind of reassemble all of that. Part of the reason for Jared Kushner's return to the scene, and I think we should all be cheering them on because that was a very, very successful strategic rethinking of US Policy in the region. One way you got the Abraham Accords process moving, and this I think reflected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's strategic vision, was to make everybody hate on Iran, make Iran the problem, focus everybody's minds on that problem. Of course, if the Islamic Republic's gone, then at least some part of the Iran problem has gone too. And that's bound to have, as you put it, downstream consequences. But every action in foreign policy has downstream consequences. And here's the bad news, so does every inaction. There isn't a kind of neutral option when you're sitting trying to make American foreign policy because even when you do nothing, as Obama discovered, you've actually done something. And that too will have downstream consequences. I think that we are in a place where it's imaginable that Israel can go on improving relations with its neighbors and near neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and others too. I think that's conceivable. I think Israel is sufficiently impressive now as a regional military power. It's shown that you really don't want to mess with the idf, that that makes some sense regardless of where Iran is. And I think that process can continue because partly economically motivated. I mean, if you're running a petro state and you've got a near neighbor that happens to be a cutting edge, technologically innovative state, you probably want to have Good relations with those guys, and a lot of Gulf money is now being invested in Israeli tech companies, I think that process can continue. Is there a risk to toppling Khamenei? Yeah, there is. Is there a risk to leaving the guy in power and whoever succeeds him when he finally croaks? There's a big risk to that. I would say, on balance, it's a bigger risk to leave this regime in place. It's just shown what it's capable of. It is, as we've been saying for many years, a lethal regime that thinks nothing of slaughtering its enemies. And it will do it with conventional weapons, and it will do it with weapons of mass destruction if it's able to get them. So if one just weighs up the costs and benefits of a decision like this, particularly once you've committed yourself, and I think President Trump essentially did commit himself in the past week, if you don't follow through, then your credibility's dented, but you've also left the regime intact.
- [55:55]
A
Okay, final question. One of my. I guess one of the lucky aspects of American foreign policy is that our adversaries, when they're allied with one another, rarely come to each other's side in their hour of need. Hamas, when they invaded on October 7, was expecting that the cavalry was coming in terms of Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, and so forth. And they got a very limited version of that cavalry. They got some firing from Hezbollah and the Houthis, and basically nothing from Iran. Venezuela would have hoped that Russia and China and Iran would have been there to back the Maduro regime. They were roughly nowhere to be found. And that's something to celebrate. Now, in this scenario. My question to you is, what does this look like from the point of view of Russia and China right now that have. That have developed deep partnerships with Iran, both militarily and economically? What are Russia and China thinking, and what are they likely to actually do?
- [57:04]
B
From the Russian vantage point, it's bad that the US Scores a win in Venezuela and even worse if it scores a win in Iran, because these were part of Russia's sphere of influence. Russia can't even win a war in Ukraine. It's now in a negotiation where a sympathetic president is getting less sympathetic when he sees how Russia negotiates. None of this is looking good from President Putin's vantage point. What does he do while he steps up his air attacks on Ukrainian cities? Not accidentally Farza hypersonic missile at Lviv. Just to say, by the way, you can do that, but I can do this. So that's The Russian perspective, keep pushing to grind out that victory in Ukraine. You've got more men, you've got greater resources, and you've got Chinese backing, whereas the Ukrainians have less of everything. And the somewhat unreliable source of American support and the somewhat feeble source of European support. The Chinese case is more interesting because from Xi Jinping's point of view, it's also bad. After all, Venezuela was also supported by the Chinese source of oil for the Chinese. They're not a big one. Iran was a much more important source of oil for the Chinese, and Iran was a more important part of the axis of authoritarians. And so if China's policy has been to build an axis of authoritarians, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, it's hardly good news if one of those countries is close to regime collapse. On the other hand, China is playing for a bigger stake, which is Taiwan. And Xi Jinping can look and say, very good. Trump involved in Venezuela, Trump involved in the Middle East, Trump involved in a claim for Greenland, which can only drive a wedge into the transatlantic alliance. All the more reason for me to plan to make my move against Taiwan in the next couple of years. I don't think it'll be this year. They're not ready. But I do think that next year, or possibly in 2028, the Chinese are going to make a move on Taiwan. Not an invasion, but a move to assert the Chinese claim. And that will be the moment of truth. Because if. If the United States has misplayed its hand and Xi is able to do to Taiwan what he's already done to Hong Kong, then we lose, because Taiwan is just a far more valuable asset at this moment than Venezuela plus Ukraine, plus anywhere you'd care to name in the Middle east, because it is the very center of the semiconductor ecosystem where the most valuable chips for AI are manufactured. So I think from a Chinese point of view, while it's clearly negative for the United States to be so successfully flexing its muscles in the Western Hemisphere, in the Middle east, that is not the number one priority. The number one priority is becoming the dominant power in the Indo Pacific and particularly taking control of Taiwan. That would be the key question for me. If all of this serves to enhance American credibility and make the Chinese see that they are not capable of winning a war against the United States because the United States is just too good at war, then good. If the outcome is the opposite and the Chinese are able to exploit American distraction to successfully gain control of Taiwan, then I think the United States is the net loser from all of this because that is the much more important prize.
- [60:55]
A
Let me ask you one question about your prediction that China could make a move in the next two years. From the Chinese perspective, why would they not simply wait till the madman is gone? Because Trump is liable to do anything. And a 5% chance that he'll go crazy on China is something they cannot dismiss. Why not wait for a JD Vance or a Democrat who is likely to behave in a much more isolationist way?
- [61:22]
B
Two reasons. One, with every passing year, the United States can arm Taiwan better and improve its own military capabilities in the Indo Pacific, particularly Hellscape. Admiral Paparo's plan to make it impossible for the Chinese to take control of Taiwan to Donald Trump has made it clear that he's open to a grand bargain with Xi Jinping in which Taiwan might well feature. The Chinese hope is that they can ultimately do a deal with Trump on trade, on technology, on Taiwan, on anything else you care to name. Because Trump has a vision of himself doing that great big beautiful deal in Beijing, Nixon style, that's been part of Trump's vision for a very long time. And the Chinese are trying to lure him in to a position in which he gives them what they want, which is A, Taiwan control over Taiwan, B, access to Nvidia's most sophisticated technology and so forth. So I think when Trump told John Bolton in the first term that it wasn't worth going to war over Taiwan because Taiwan was just a Sharpie, whereas China was the Resolute desk, very famous scene that played out in the Oval Office, he told the Chinese something very important, which is that unlike every previous US President, he was willing to cut a deal on Taiwan. I think that's what the Chinese want to achieve. Their ideal scenario is that they have enough military capability that when it comes to the crunch, Trump realizes any fight over this could go very badly for the United States. It's not worth the risk. I'll cut a deal. And do remember, final, final, final thought. Trump's preference is for the deal. The military action always comes after the counterparty has basically proved impossible to do a deal with. That was true of Maduro, it was true of the Iranians. I think the Chinese are not going to make the mistake of giving Trump no deal and driving him to the military option. The Chinese know that the key thing is to make the military option way too costly for the American president and the American people. That's why I think this happens on Trump's watch.
- [63:39]
A
Okay, Neil Ferguson, thanks so much for coming on the show.
- [63:42]
B
Been my pleasure as always, Coleman.