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- [00:01]
A
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is John Alterman, Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the center for Strategic and International Studies, where he previously led the Middle east program for more than two decades. John has also served as a Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs and was a legislative aide to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where he was responsible for foreign policy and defense. John and I spend the first hour of our conversation examining why the Islamic Republic of Iran has refused to capitulate in its negotiations with the United States to end a war that has been devastating to its economy and which has resulted in the systematic targeting and deaths of a broad swath of its leadership structure. We discussed the constellation of tools that Tehran has cultivated to compensate for its conventional military weakness and which have been deployed to great effect in its war with the United States and Israel, and the mismatch between the speed of modern warfare and the speed with which political change is demanded in Washington that has frustrated the architects of this latest military campaign from the outset. We also discussed the institutional and personal factors that have driven Trump and his administration toward escalation, the consequences of deeper U S Israeli military integration following October 7, the implications for peace negotiations of an Iranian political economy whose survival is bound up with its pariah status and what a viable diplomatic off ramp might look like for Tehran, Washington, Tel Aviv, and other countries that have a vested interest in and how this war turns out. The second hour is devoted to a discussion about how Moscow and Beijing are already positioning themselves to exploit the war, the structural challenges that may render China less ascendant than the consensus narrative suggests and the rupture in transatlantic and U.S. canada relations that John believes will leave permanent scars regardless of who occupies the White House at the end of Trump's second term. We also discussed the implications for the Gulf in light of the UAE's announced departure from OPEC, the deepening Saudi Emirati rivalry, the durability of the exit narrative that has flourished among a new class of transnational elites in this more volatile global security environment, and what the war between the U.S. israel and Iran, and other recent conflicts have taught us about the future of warfare and what a direct military confrontation between the US And China might actually look like. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app. Just like your listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third party research and analysis, and in person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to infoiddenforcesio and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly timely and deeply illuminating conversation with my guest, John Alterman. John Alterman, welcome to Hidden Forces.
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B
It's good to be with you.
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A
It's great having you on. John, you are, I guess you could be described as a veteran of the foreign policy and national security space. Is that fair?
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B
Some might say that battle scarred, you could say as well.
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A
So you're currently the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at csis, and before that you led their Middle east program for more than 20 years. You were also Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. You were a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. And you were also, among other things, the legislative aide to the famous Senator from New York, Daniel Moynihan, where you were responsible for foreign policy and defense. How did you become interested in issues of foreign affairs and national security to begin with? Like, what was the, the path that led you to want to have this career?
- [04:24]
B
When I was an undergraduate, I was a public policy major. It was in the waning days of the Cold War. It seemed interesting and important. I had some remarkable opportunities. I had a internship in the State Department between my junior and senior years of college. After college I got the job on Capitol Hill and working for Senator Moynihan, who was not only a remarkable legislator but also thinker about foreign policy and defense. It was just a remarkable experience. I went to graduate school and bounced around in the space a little bit more, was a historian. So I looked at how people dealt with issues in the past when they were still emerging, and got used to the idea of when you're living through it, it's a lot more uncertain than when you're looking back and tried to capture some of that uncertainty and stayed in it. There's a line, there's A very fine line between a groove and a rut. And I kept doing what I was interested in. Before you know it, nobody will hire you to do anything else.
- [05:23]
A
Well, I can't say we've hired you, John, but we're certainly going to put your experience and the proficiency you've built up over a lifetime working in foreign policy to good use. Today, you and I are recording this conversation officially two months from the date on which Operation Epic Fury began. A few days before that, a few days before February 28, you were quoted by ABC News as saying that we were, quote, on the brink of what is likely to be an administration defining confrontation with Iran and that the President was unlikely to come away with an easy and clean win. And in the months prior to that, you spoke very presciently, I should say, about what the challenges and impediments to victory would be and why this was an unadvisable course of action. What was it that you saw that others missed, especially policymakers and key decision makers within the administration, do you think?
- [06:21]
B
First, it's nice to cherry pick all the good things I've said, things that haven't turned out to be true as well. But it felt to me like the administration was underestimating the Iranian side. Not so much their strength, but their grit, their determination, their range of tools that they have. Iran has always known that it was weaker than the United States. It's never contested that, but it's developed for almost a half century. A whole set of tools intended to compensate for its weakness has no intention of fighting the US Militarily, military to military, because the way that would play out is exactly the way it's played out. They knew they'd lose, but they have other tools, tools that are harder to frustrate. And shutting the straight of Hormuz is one of them. Not the most obvious, certainly, but one of them. And it seemed to me that, that the idea that they would just fold because they would see that we have superior strength and they just give in never seemed to right to me. The administration, you know, has the same negotiators doing Palestinian, Israeli issues and Ukraine and Iran, sometimes all in the same day. And I just don't think that's a sustainable pattern. Because for all these parties, the issues being negotiated are existential issues. They're really life and death. The consequences affect not only the decision makers, but their children and grandchildren. And the idea that they're just going to fold and move on isn't the way most people live their lives. It might be the way negotiators want to live their lives, but the negotiators on the other side aren't going to. And it seemed to me that this was just going to be much more complicated than people wanted it to be.
- [08:18]
A
Well, how would you say that events have conformed with your preexisting expectations? And what, if anything, has surprised you about how things have played out in the last two months?
- [08:28]
B
I think the Iranians didn't fold, and I think it was clear the Iranians weren't going to quickly fold. I never thought that this decapitation strategy, which was really the principal idea, is that if you take out the entire leadership cadre, something, by the way, we have never done in a confrontation with another country. But the theory of the case was we will just eliminate the leadership and the people will all go the right direction. It's a little bit like the theory that if we remove the Dirty Dozen from Iraq, from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, that everything in Iraq would be fine. But in some ways, it's an elaboration of that, and it didn't work out that way. I think it was, to me, unlikely it would work out that way. What I'm surprised by so far is in some ways, the Iranians escalated as far as they could initially, and the idea of shutting the straight of Hormuz was, to my mind, something they were likely to do later. They haven't done some of the things that I thought they might do. They have a number of cyber capabilities that, to my knowledge, they haven't used. The proxies have been relatively quiet and could certainly be more feisty. They have terrorist cells that are embedded in lots of places that could act against soft targets. We haven't seen many of those other things. I think the reality is the Iranians have lots of arrows still in their quiver, and they could go on with this for quite some time. The bet of the Trump administration is that the Iranians feel more urgency than the United States does. The Iranian government's bet, as they look at political polling numbers in the United States, as they look at gasoline prices, as they look at the statements of political leaders around the world expressing frustration at the United States, is that they can wait out the United States, too. And so each side thinks it has more time than the other. Each side thinks that the other feels an urgency that will make it make a better deal. So neither side really wants to make a deal now. They said we'll get a better deal in a week or two or three or four than we do now. So they're trying to dig in. There are some indications that the Iranians are going to have an oil production problem because they don't have a place to store oil. Shutting off wells can potentially damage them. So there are some people who hope that that is going to create an urgency on the Iranian side. But I think as I read the body language of these guys, they've been waiting for this moment for almost 50 years. They've been thinking a lot about it, and I don't see them on the brink of caving.
- [11:37]
A
So I definitely want to dig into or ask you a series of questions to help myself and my audience understand the thinking in Washington that has led to this kind of these set of expectations that seem to recur over time in our dealings with the Middle east as well as the Iranian perspective. Because you've been speaking and meeting with Iranian officials for decades, and you know the greater Middle east very well. But you said something that makes me want to actually quote something else you said previously. So before the war, you said it was better to think of the Iranian. I'm paraphrasing now. You said it was better to think of the Iranian weapon, in other words, the nuclear option, so to speak, but in air quotes, not as the nuclear weapons program itself, but rather a constellation of tools of which the nuclear program is one, but so are its proxies, its ballistic missile program and its capacity to manufacture and deploy cheap drones, coupled with the. And this is, I think, is very well said and the most important, the Iranian leadership's willingness to endure pain. That, in other words, when the Iranians look at the prospect of a massive strike against their nation, their people, their infrastructure, they look at it as business as usual. And they say, how do we look past this, find a way to endure through it, and exhaust America's political will. Does this mean this opens the door to a conversation about theory of mind here? Because this seems to be. The Americans seem to go in with this perspective, and the Trump administration certainly did that. We have the best military in the world. This is like a recurring theme. We can bomb the crap out of your country and you'll eventually cry uncle. But if I were to take the logic of your statement, the conclusion seems to be that any effort at using overwhelming force to change behavior in any kind of attenuated timeframe would always be destined to fail, at least in this specific case, certainly in others. But in this specific case, do I read you correctly, and is that the right conclusion to draw from what you said in the past?
- [13:34]
B
Let me put it in a little bit different framing. We are getting better and better at destroying very specific things quickly, and it will. And that's partly on the intelligence side and it's partly on the munitions side. So we're developing more precise munitions. We can destroy individual rooms in buildings from far away. We have been gathering intelligence on targeting in Iran for a long period of time. And we came up with a very large target set we've hit. We and the Israelis together have hit about 20,000 targets in Iran. That is hard to do. We did it in a relatively short period of time with relatively little collateral damage compared to previous wars. The question is, if the speed of war accelerates, do you also have an acceleration in the speed of politics? The goal of war is to either create a different political reality for the people of Iran, rise up against the government, or to get the government to make a decision that the US Wants the government, Israel wants the government to make. We're getting better at accelerating the military side of war. What can we do? What would accelerate the political side of war? I don't think we've thought about it. When I listened to General Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I think he's very focused on military actions, right? We can destroy this target. We can capture this whatever, right? I mean, it's not about the political effects. The political effects are somebody else's responsibility. And to me, one of the things that we are seeing in this war is you can accelerate and make more precise all of the military effects, but the real goal of war is the political effects. And we seem not to have either thought or discovered how to accelerate that side of it. So the point of war is to have a political impact, as I say, either with the current decision makers or future decision makers. We, for our own political reasons, want wars to be quick and decisive. But on the receiving end, there's a way in which the faster they are, the more urgency we show to finish the war communicates to the adversary. We'll just wait them out. They've run through their targets. They can't sustain a war. So we'll just hang on. Now, you could argue that that's a crazy conclusion to draw after the US Was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. But I do think that we've seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now in Iran, a sense of that we can hang on, and we need to hang on. It's existential. And they can destroy what they want to destroy. And we will show grit and determination, resolve, and we'll come out the other end.
- [17:02]
A
So what explains this lack of patience? It seems to me, because before Operation Epic Fury, it seems that the US and the Israelis were proceeding sort of slowly, dialing up the temperature. They were doing things to methodically degrade the Iranian leadership, the security apparatus, and they were also sowing confusion and paranoia within its ranks. And they had recently, only a few months earlier, seen these large protests. Again, the facts on the ground are somewhat murky, at least for me, but certainly they seemed to be winning in a way that was escalatory and manageable. And then they kind of made this discontinuous decision to assassinate the country's leader, parts of his family, and really dial it up. Does that reflect a lack of patience? Does that reflect not only a lack of patience among the administration, but something more ingrained within Washington when it comes to wanting to see change, wanting to see it quickly? Or is it more just a mismatch between expectations about what's possible in Washington versus in the rest of the world?
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B
So I'll start off that I assume there's a lot I don't know about what we know about what happened when we worked with the Israelis to attack the nuclear facilities in June of last year and how the Iranians responded. But I think there was a sense, certainly on the Israeli side and probably also on the American side, that those attacks didn't really get to the core of the problem, that there was an opportunity, both because of the politics in Iran and some intelligence that the US And Israel had, that there was an opportunity to just change the whole nature of the game. The Israelis, I think, have been more risk accepting since October 7. And Netanyahu, who traditionally was a very risk averse figure, remember, he spent five years deliberating over the negotiations to release Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal who was captured and brought into Gaza. Eventually, he agreed to a prisoner swap of more than a thousand Palestinians for Gilat Shilit, including Yahya Sinwar, the man
- [19:26]
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behind the October 7 attacks.
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By October 7 and the former Hamas leader. Netanyahu was always a very deliberate and cautious politician. After October 7, he took some remarkable gambles. He defied the Biden administration on issues like occupying Rafah and the Philadelphia Carter on the line with Egypt. He had that audacious pager attack in Lebanon. He killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He. He killed Ismail Hania, the political leader of Hamas in Tan when he was there to attend President Racy's funeral. Prime Minister Netanyahu, I think, was willing to roll the dice after October 7th, I think in President Trump, he saw somebody who was potentially willing to take risks. And I think President Trump saw somebody who was refreshingly bold when confronted with a whole bunch of bureaucrats who say, oh, well, it could be bad, it could be bad. You know, President Trump is somebody who went bankrupt six times. You know, failure is an option, I think. And so when you combine the sense that the Maduro capture when was difficult and they said it's going to be difficult and went exceedingly well, I think the president partly felt, with my military, I can do anything. Partly he felt, I'm not going to go through my life being risk averse. And partly felt at the end of the first Trump administration, the president assassinated General Soleimani, which people said, oh, well, he was the head of the Quds Force, the sort of forward strike force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. People said, oh, it'll be a terrible response. There wasn't a terrible response. So I think the president partly felt calculated risk. We shouldn't be so risk averse. The Iranians are really bad.
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A
And that had worked in his favor up until now.
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B
Yeah, and the Israelis are gung ho. We attacked the nuclear facilities in June, and there wasn't really a blowback. So why are we being so cautious about this? And, you know, the answer is because when it becomes existential, and it immediately became existential for the Iranians, once you kill the entire leadership cadre. Right. It's very clear this is existential. And so they said, okay, if you're going to go to the limit, we'll go to the limit. And so rather than a cautious, calibrated attack, which we've seen from the Iranians so far, he said, we're going to pull out a bunch of stops and see what happens.
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A
So one of the questions I wanted to ask you was how much of this or the calculus that went into, or the impetus that drove this war, how much of this was institutional muscle memory? How much of it was special interest and how much of it was something else? And among special interests, there is the US Relationship with Israel. You've written about how the security ties between the IDF and the US And Israeli intelligence have grown deeper in recent years, and that this has played an important role. How important is this role really in explaining where we find ourselves today?
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B
So one of the things that happened in the first Trump administration is the way that US Military is organized overseas. We have these regional combatant commanders who play the role partly of soldiers and partly of diplomats working with foreign militaries and for a whole set of reasons, Israel was Never in the U.S. central Command area of responsibility. Israel has very sophisticated military. It was always connected to the Europeans. And the Israeli military can engage very well with the Europeans as a peer. But that also meant that as the Israelis were preoccupied with Iran, the US military guys they were most connected with were less preoccupied with Iran. And the folks who were preoccupied with Iran were dealing with Arab governments, but not dealing with the Israelis. The Trump administration, the first Trump administration said, well that's crazy. The Israelis and the Arabs have the same threat perceptions. They share interests. One of the ways to build this Abraham Accords framework and cooperation is to bring the Arabs and the Israelis together on their regional threat perceptions and regional efforts to fight threats. And that means bring Israel into the US Central Command. What it also meant was that it brought the Israelis and the Americans together. And I think what you saw over the last year and more is as the United States military was dealing with threats coming out of Iran, it was working more and more and more closely with Israelis who are preoccupied with exactly the same things. Israeli intelligence, military intelligence, Israeli capabilities. That's partly led to the joint US Israeli effort to destroy the Iranian nuclear capability last summer and it laid the groundwork for the current war. Now I don't think there's a single reason. I don't think you can say, well, the Israelis suck the US into this war. Although certainly that was an element that the Prime Minister made it a case. And I'm told the Prime Minister timed his visit at a time when Vice President Vance was out of town. So he was able to get to the President and plant this idea and get the go ahead. But it was, you know, partly Iranian behavior, partly what Arab governments were saying about the Iranians and the threat they feel from Iranians, I'm sure partly about from information about the Iranian nuclear program, some of which we get independently, some of which we get from governments like Israel and, and understand from international agencies. I think the Iranians goal is to be talking to the Americans about the nuclear program. I, I think the Iranians have often seen the nuclear program as almost like one of those old dial thermostats that you can sort of tweak, turn up the temperature, turn down the temperature. If you're talking to the Americans about the nuclear program, you can make concessions and get things. You can show resolve. It gives you a way to engage or disengage with the United States at will. And I think the Iranians like that. The worst thing is if you're isolated and sanctioned and sort of shriveling off in a corner. That's really bad. But the nuclear program gives you a way to talk about whatever you want to talk about, whenever you want to talk about it, and to change the tone of the conversation and find a way to advance your interests. There are a lot of people in the US Government who say, why are we still playing this game with them? They should give up the nuclear program, right? It's clearly a threat and we should destroy it if they won't give it up. But why are we continuing to play this game?
- [26:55]
A
So this is really great. Can you flesh this out a bit? Because this is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, you're saying that the Iranians maintain the nuclear program because it gives them relevancy, it gives them a voice, it gives them a seat at the table because they're afraid without it they'll become isolated. But at the same time, the argument from the administration is the reason we're sanctioning you, the reason we are isolating you, is because of your nuclear program. So help me flesh that out for me, and then use this as an opportunity to help us understand better the needs and the imperatives and constraints of the Iranian leadership and what would ultimately be a viable outcome for them. What would success look like in the course of their negotiations with the US pre and post February 28th?
- [27:39]
B
This is a really interesting and important question. I think the fundamental starting point of the Iranian leadership that everybody is unified on, whether you consider them to be on the right or moderates or whatever. The point they all agree on is the United States is hostile to Iran, is trying to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic. That's the starting point. I don't think there's anybody in the Iranian leadership who does not feel that that's one of the governing realities. They differ on how much hostility there should be with the United States, how much hostility there needs to be. President Rouhani, for example, said that while the United States is hostile, the degree of hostility when he came to office was counterproductive for Iranian interests. And while Iran is powerless to eliminate the hostility, it should reduce it to more manageable levels.
- [28:36]
A
Well, I've heard you say that eliminating that hostility is impossible, that they can't imagine that they. In fact, I think you've actually said, and this was insightful for me, that Iranians, and again, you've been speaking with Iranian officials for decades now, cannot imagine a future without conflict with the United States.
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B
I believe that to be true in that the sort of price of admission to be an Iranian government official is that you have to accept that the United States is an existential conflict. To Iran, it's one of the only remaining principles of the Islamic Revolution. The Islamic revolution was in 1979, was based on hostility to the United States and to Israel.
- [29:22]
A
So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like a big part of that mindset is not as much about the perception about what the United States will tolerate or accept, but even more so about what the Iranians need in order to make their revolutionary government viable. Is that also correct that their res on as a government, in other words, is tied to perpetual conflict with the United States, with the Great Satan? Is that fair or is that a Western?
- [29:51]
B
I don't think it's so much purposive as I think it's just the reality is they've. It's something they all agree on and there's never been a set of circumstances that have either cause them or force them to rethink that premise. I think they accept the premise.
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A
Could the leadership survive without conflict?
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B
So that's another interesting question. One of the things that I think is systematically overlooked is the bad guys in Iran, which is to say the Revolutionary Guard and these parastatal foundations that are under clerical establishment and are completely opaque financially and everything else. They make money off smuggling to get around the sanctions. So you could make an argument that if you eliminated sanctions and opened up the Iranian economy, it would hurt all the people you don't like and it would help all the people you do like. Whether it would actually work out that way is a little bit less clear. But what is clear to me is, is there, there are certainly deeply vested interests in Iran who believe that their survival is in some ways tied to Iran being a pariah state and them finding ways to get around sanctions and profiting from getting around sanctions. The other piece of this, from a less sort of paranoid point of view, is that the Iranian economy is built around all of these non tariff barriers and all these weird realities that embed the political leadership and fund the political
- [31:41]
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leadership and create winners and losers.
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B
And the winners of course, are the people with power and the losers are the mass of the population. One of the approaches the Trump administration has often taken is to talk to leaders and say, look, we could bring in all this investment. Look at how well off you'd be. I don't think that a lot of the Iranian leadership think that that's actually practical realizable for them. I think they think The United States would try to use openness to undermine them. They think that capital wouldn't come in. They think complain about their economic situation, but also don't do the obvious things to relieve it, which is to stop being a pariah state, to have a functioning economy with transparency, with judiciary that works, with a legal environment where people can come in and get money out. Right. I mean, you can imagine a path forward for Iran that would bring in investment, that would relieve some of the economic problems which are profound in Iran. It's the most worthless currency in the world, 1.5 million rials to the dollar, 1.5 million to the dollar, and huge inflation. But there's a fear that if they open up, everything falls apart and they lose control. And they lose control. So that's a reality of political economy, that there are a lot of people who argue that Iran kind of run like a mafia state and it's run on protection rackets and everything else. And if you take that away, there are a lot of people in power who lose a lot. Now can you reform it? I think what the President is trying to do, what the President has been trying to do, is to say, well, we don't want to abandon the whole system, but we need to make the system responsive to citizens. It doesn't work. There are electricity shortages, water shortages, people can't get justice, people are arbitrarily detained. We have to stop those things from happening. And I think you do have people in the system who are trying to make the system work. You have a lot of people who say, I don't care about the system. I just want to live a life. And you have a lot of brain drain. People leaving Iran say, there's no place for my kids, there's no future here, so let's just leave. All the brain drain creates a system which is harder and harder to revive. And then you have this system where you have a bunch of paranoid people who are convinced that the United States is trying to destroy them, that Israel's trying to destroy them, and therefore the only thing they can do to compensate for their profound weakness is have a nuclear program and other tools to inflict pain, to say, you have to deal with us on our terms.
- [34:36]
A
So if we're dealing with a country that cannot imagine a future without being in conflict with the west, that cannot imagine a future where it is not isolated, where its leadership elements have embedded economic incentives to maintain the status quo, what should the correct policy be and should have been? And I don't know if those are both the same today for the United States in dealing with Iran.
- [35:03]
B
Well, so there's the sort of pre February 28th policy and there's the where do you go from here? Policy. I think they're probably a little bit different. I think that this was a system which was failing, which understood it was failing. And there were opportunities to both apply more pressure, potentially create opportunities for a change in government or a reform in government. But that patience and a calibrated engagement could provide incentives for positive behavior, disincentives for negative behavior, and you could sort of manage Iranian hostility. They were going to have a leadership challenge when Ayatollah Khamenei died.
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A
We didn't even have the patience to see that through.
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B
Right. And so, you know, he was, I think, 86 and ailing, had been, you know, less active. So that was a potential opportunity. I always think that, you know, in those moments of opportunity, you can sort of show a choice between a pathway toward a better relationship or worse relationship. And that would have given us some chances. I think in some ways we're in the worst of all possible worlds because we are acting virtually alone and mostly militarily in a way that allows the government to double down on security, to excuse its own failures as we're fighting a war. So how do you expect us to provide services and all those kinds of things? And I'm not sure we have shown any positive choice for the government or made it less likely the government can survive. I mean, granted, it's hard to understand what's happening Iran with all the Internet cuts and everything else. But I don't get any sense that the protest movement has been invigorated by the US military action. If anything, it's been suppressed and given the government more chances to suppress it. Whether in a post conflict environment, two or three years that changes. People say, look, this doesn't work. I mean, maybe that's where we have to point to or look to. I think that this issue of how do you unblock the Strait of Hormuz is really hard. Because if there's anything the Iranian government has learned, it's that even a profoundly weakened government of Iran can shut off the Strait of Hormuz at will. You just talk about your intention to block it. You announce the possibility you've released mines and it's game over. And the the straight is blocked. It may be that that where this all leads to is the Iranians get some sort of payment to let shipping through other similar waterways also exact payments. The whole issue of freedom of navigation is undermined and the way the world works changes. I don't think that's a very good outcome, but it may be the outcome we get. I think the world is pretty eager to open the strait because the effects of this trade being closed on prices around the world for energy, for fertilizer, for all sorts of manufactured goods. A huge amount of Chinese goods that go to Europe go through Dubai. Helium, you know, and other gases. There's a huge amount of economic activity in the Gulf that is being strangled. The costs are escalating. And I think the rest of the world is saying, you're not moving forward on any of the security issues. Let's just open the strait and deal with it. And I think that there's a way in which the Iranians would take a set of negotiations as an acceptable outcome to just move things along. They feel they've made their point and they're happy to be negotiating. From a US Perspective, with all those troops in place, took a while to get them all there. I think we have a third aircraft carrier in the area. If you don't use them, then it's hard to get that moment of strength again. On the other hand, what are you going to use them against? That's going to change the political calculus. So, again, it's a question of how do you go from target sets to changing the political decisions of your adversary?
- [39:35]
A
So, I mean, it sounds. I was going to ask you whether this is a diplomatic stalemate, but it sounds like maybe that's not what you're saying and that actually we might be closer to some kind of resolution that creates conditions that are better for the Iranians today than they were prior to February 28th. So, one, I want you to clarify whether you feel that that's the case, and I'm curious, what do you understand or intuit about what sorts of conversations are happening within the White House? Because that is a sort of, at least for me personally, a bit of a black box. And I mean, I could imagine Trump. In fact, I don't want to take credit for this. I actually heard this somewhere else, and it resonated with me. I could imagine Trump coming up with some, at least the optics of a deal whereby they split the revenue from the straight. And he kind of declares this as a win because it's kind of like tariff revenue. And it's like, well, we got this great deal. We're getting all this money now that we weren't getting before. So my question is essentially one, what do you intuit about what people are thinking in the White House, and two, are we more likely to get a deal sooner rather than later because of just how economically damaging this is?
- [40:43]
B
So your first question is, are the Iranians better off than they were February 28th? I think they're worse off. They suffered a lot of destruction. They had their leadership layer killed. They are operating largely in secret because clearly they don't have security in communications. So even their decision making is constrained. I think it's hard to argue they're better off, but I think they got two things out of this. One is they've demonstrated their resolve and second, they've demonstrated just how easy it is for them to cut off traffic in the street if they want to. So I think worse off, but feeling like they have more tools than they had February 27th. I think that the White House, as far as I can tell, has sort of changing views depending on who's spoken to the President last and, and what else is going on and, and what he thinks can happen, that I think he's frustrated that his negotiators haven't been very successful with the Iranians and the Iranians don't really want to engage with them. Whether that prompts a change in strategy shifting negotiators, I don't know.
- [42:00]
A
That assumes there is a strategy. By the way, is that a fair assumption to make?
- [42:04]
B
I think the President's strategy is it's good to be in negotiations and we have the upper hand.
- [42:11]
A
Pressure, apply pressure is essentially the strategy.
- [42:13]
B
Yeah, but also, you know, the President also believes that when you act in unpredictable ways and make bold demands, you shift the negotiating table in a way that favors you. I think this is what came out of his, his real estate experience, I think is what he's trying to apply to the negotiations here. Again, I think the Iranians see this as a sign of US Urgency, which makes them back off a little bit. And I think the Iranians do see a lot of opportunities building up external pressure with foreign governments, whether it's the Chinese, Europeans and others and Gulf Arab states.
- [42:58]
A
Now don't those governments, like for example, China is an important economic pardon for Iran, maybe the single most important lifeline it has. Aren't those governments in the long term incentivized to see that the strait reopened?
- [43:10]
B
So from a Chinese perspective, I had this article in Foreign Policy with my old student Ali Baez about a week ago. I think that the Chinese view is that the United States making a hash of all of this and getting embedded in an open ended conflict in the Gulf is a gift that keeps on giving. It undermines U.S. global leadership. It commits the U.S. military to the Middle east instead of the Western Pacific, which is to the advantage of the Chinese. The US has gone through a whole bunch of munitions. The Chinese have been able to observe the way the US Fights. There's a strong way in which, while the Chinese suffer economically to some degree, and they've long been concerned with energy security, so they've built up significant buffers of oil. But there are ways in which the Chinese see this as the way that the Biden administration saw the Ukraine war, that here's a way to tie down an adversary somewhere far away from us, let the adversary tire himself out, and we will go and do our thing. And I think the Chinese feel the world will be much more congenial to Chinese leadership after this conflict because US Leadership has. Has shown itself to be so reckless. So I think that the Chinese sort of like that. Again, as you say, there are costs. The Chinese have much more trade with Saudi Arabia than with Iran. That the issue for the Chinese, Iranian trade is China represents about 30% of Iran's overall trade, but Iran represents less than 1% of Chinese overall trade. The Saudis export more oil to China than Iran does. So I think that the Chinese frequently abuse the Iranians. They don't respect the Iranians. They think the Iranian approach to things is crazy. But given that the Iranians are in a fight with the United States, the Chinese are going to say, okay, how do we exploit this moment?
- [45:09]
A
No doubt about that. But the reason I bring up the economic incentive of the Chinese is not because of their dependency on oil from the Middle east, but because of their dependency on export markets. And if the rest of the world goes into an economic recession driven by potentially a very deep depression, driven by a perpetual closing of the strait that's ultimately not good for China's economy and for Chinese innovation. And so it seems, am I wrong in thinking that at some point the Chinese want to see some kind of resolution and a resolution that is on terms that are more favorable to the Iranians and to them, but ultimately they want to see some kind of resolution, that enough is enough at some point? I mean, how would you answer that question?
- [45:52]
B
I guess the question is if by resolution you mean the United States can go back to focusing on China as the overwhelming center of American strategic thinking, American military engagement, all those things. I think the Chinese are happy for the United States to be preoccupied with Iran. But I agree with you. They do want the strait to be open. They do want the ability to tranship, do all their logistics work in Dubai, get all the petrochemical supplies out of the Gulf, the helium, all the, the fertilizer, all those things. I think their hope is that there's a lower level of conflict, but I think they would still like the United States to be engaged in enduring conflict with the Iranians because they see US Global attention as limited. And if the US Is focused on the Iranians, it's focused less on the Chinese.
- [46:52]
A
So you mentioned your foreign affairs article with your co author Ali Vaez. The title of that article is How China and Russia Can Exploit the Iran War. An excellent article on foreign affairs. I recommend people read it. In fact, that was what prompted this conversation. That's what I want to shift our focus to in the second hour, John. I also want to talk about the rupture in relations between the US And Europe, as well as some of its Asian allies. This to me seems to be a very big issue, very big issue. And I think it's one area where the president's instincts, I think, are counterproductive and have failed him. And you've mentioned this a number of times about his real estate experience. I think this is also interesting. I've thought quite a bit about this in terms of what is it about Trump's career life experiences that made him a successful operator in business as well as a successful candidate? Which of those skills have transferred over and which of them are detrimental? And one I think distinction is that in the private sector, I mean, you mentioned this one, which is that Trump declared bankruptcy. There's no limited liability corporation for US Foreign policy. And so that's, I think, one important difference. You can't simply encumber people in discovery or sue them to death. But also the private sector offers a replete number of intermediated transactional opportunities, whereas in the international realm, Trump's reputation is much more important than and the reputation that he seems to have developed, let's say in this particular case with the Iranians, but in other cases where he's a bad faith negotiator, I think has created significant setbacks. So I want to talk about that as well. I think this analogy of Ukraine is, I think, very concerning and I think also resonates. And I have another, a number of other questions related to multilateralism and what you think. I think ultimately we can expect to see what are some of the most likely long term outcomes, not just, you know, what the deal is going to look like. What does this mean long term for US grand strategy for anyone new to the program. Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access the second hour of today's conversation with John, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our Premium Feedback, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app. Just like you're listening to this episode right now. John, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the Premium Feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and join our Premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces IO, you can follow me on Twitter ophinas, and you can email me at infoiddenforcesio. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.