How Strong Are Iran’s Strongmen?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Foreign Affairs Interview

Episode Title: How Strong Are Iran’s Strongmen?
Host: Foreign Affairs Magazine (Justin Vogt, Executive Editor, substituting for Daniel Kurtz-Phelan)
Guest: Stephen Kotkin (historian, senior fellow, and Stalin biographer)
Date: March 19, 2026

---

Overview: Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features historian Stephen Kotkin discussing the anatomy of authoritarian regimes, their strengths and inherent weaknesses, and the implications of U.S. and Israeli actions in Iran in 2026. Kotkin draws on his influential essay "The Weakness of the Strongman" (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2026) to illuminate how authoritarian features serve as both pillars and soft spots for such regimes. As the Trump administration pursues regime change in Iran after a joint U.S.-Israel military intervention, Kotkin examines historical lessons, conceptual frameworks for understanding authoritarianism, and the constraints and possibilities for Western policy.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Authoritarianism (03:19–12:14)

• Kotkin’s Five Dimensions of Authoritarian Regimes:
  1. Repressive Apparatus: Central, immense, but internally divided to prevent organizational coups; these divisions foster animosity and instability.
     • "They have an enormous repressive apparatus that is deliberately divided and rivalrous..." (05:08)
  2. Cash Flow: Regimes prioritize always-available cash streams (e.g., commodities, criminal activity, taxes) rather than GDP growth or social bargains.
     • “Authoritarian regimes cannot be held to any bargain.” (05:33)
  3. Control Over Life Chances: The more the regime controls jobs, travel, and educational opportunities, the more it stifles dissent.
     • “The more the regime can control whether you get a job or not...the more it could control your behavior and even your expression…” (07:09)
  4. Narratives About Legitimacy: Authoritarians maintain elaborate ideological stories about enemies, lost greatness, and the regime's role as a restorer.
     • "It's like a well that is bottomless—you could just keep dipping the bucket down and bringing up these stories..." (10:44)
  5. International Order: Global systems, commodity prices, alliances, and economic trends can either support or undermine authoritarian stability.
     • “The fifth and final is the international order and the extent to which it is conducive or corrosive of authoritarian regimes.” (12:01)

2. The "Elephant in the Room": Is the U.S. Authoritarian? (13:31–19:34)

• Kotkin argues that, despite concerns about the imperial presidency, strong institutional limits persist in the U.S. system.
• He cautions against conflating policy disagreements with true democratic backsliding.
  • “If Trump aspires to impose an authoritarian regime in the United States, he's failing miserably across the board.” (13:31)
  • On checks and balances: “We have a gigantic, robust, dynamic, self-organized society as well as a gigantic self-organized economy.” (17:02)

3. How to Weaken Authoritarian Regimes: Policy Toolkits (22:12–39:53)

• Kotkin distinguishes between outright regime change, democracy promotion, and negotiations without leverage—he is skeptical of all three as main strategies.
  • “I'm not a regime change person ... I'm not a democracy promotion person ... I'm not a negotiations without leverage person...” (26:00)
• Proposes a three-pronged “deterrence-plus” approach:
  1. Military Deterrence: Effective but insufficient alone.
  2. Targeted Economic Sanctions & Alliance-Building: Use sanctions judiciously, focus on sectoral impact, build Western supply chains/alliances ("Lend-Lease writ large").
  3. Political Deterrence & Division: The overlooked dimension—exploiting regime rivalries and fostering elite defection from within, rather than focusing solely on democratic dissidents.
     • “You have to break these regimes, divide them against themselves. We can do regime destabilization or regime unbalancing.” (32:08)
• Asserts that support for democratic opposition should be combined with efforts to woo patriotic, disaffected insiders—such as those who believe the regime’s strategies are harming the nation.

4. Historical Examples: Venezuela & Soviet Union (40:00–46:51; 53:15–56:48)

• Regarding Venezuela, Kotkin points out the U.S. approach to encourage regime retrenchment and supporting loyalists as alternatives to regime change.
  • “They clearly had done their homework. And there clearly was a basis where they didn't try regime change per se, but they tried to figure out those loyalists who might be in favor of retrenchment and stop doing things which were detrimental to US interests.” (41:07)
• Uses postwar Soviet collapse to illustrate that regime capitulation is rare and usually requires both internal divisiveness and pro-Western sentiment among elites.

5. Case Study: U.S. & Israeli War on Iran (47:40–71:18)

• Despite killing Iran’s Supreme Leader and military pressure, regime capitulation has not occurred; compared with Venezuela, there appears to be a lack of prior engagement with alternative power centers within the Iranian regime.
  • “We did not seem to have identified beforehand and negotiated with people inside the regime who might have been willing to alter regime behavior and eventually go towards some type of transitional process.” (49:10)
• Explains why regime change is so challenging:
  • Iran’s Islamic Republic is not just a group of senior leaders but a broad social structure (Revolutionary Guards, judiciary, Basij).
  • Fostering elite defection is difficult without a clear positive alternative to defect to.
    • “How do you get them to defect not just from the regime, but to something? You can't defect from, you must defect to.” (59:07)
• Warns that aggressive action without a political strategy—without incentives, a concrete transition plan, or a path for insiders—often leaves a regime weakened but not replaced, heightening risks of chaos, protracted instability, or reprisals.

6. Comparisons & Limits to Western Leverage (63:28–67:56)

• Soviet elites’ willingness to “defect” was shaped by their pro-Western aspirations; Iranian regime insiders are much less likely to share this sentiment.
• The task is more complicated when the regime selects and maintains anti-Western loyalty.
• Urges more creative “carrots” for insiders: investment promises, sanctions relief, educational exchanges, and assurances of status—if they support retrenchment, not just removal.

7. Memorable Quotes & Summary Points

• On overt regime change: “I'm not naive about these regimes. Nor, again, is this a regime change agenda. This is a political deterrence agenda on their vulnerabilities where they are most fearful in order to negotiate better terms for us and our friends.” (39:37)
• On the Iranian dilemma: “The regime is a society. It's not just a handful of leaders in a compound and then their replacements.” (58:03)
• On elite defection: “Defecting from is when you go into exile, you got to defect to. So if we're asking them to lay down their arms or to use their arms against their rulers ... to whom, to what are they defecting to?” (59:24)
• On humility and learning: “War is always surprising. Even when you’re highly prepared, you always have to adapt and react and pivot. ... You have to be humble. You have to be willing to admit mistakes. You have to be willing to say I got some things wrong and that I need to change.” (71:00)

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• Defining authoritarianism & five dimensions: 03:19–12:14
• Checks and balances in the U.S.: 13:31–19:34
• Foreign policy toolbox & political deterrence: 22:12–39:53
• Historical analogies (Venezuela, Soviet Union): 40:00–46:51, 53:15–56:48
• Case study: Iran regime change challenges: 47:40–71:18
• Memorable close & policy takeaways: 66:37–71:18

---

Takeaways for Listeners

• Kotkin provides a nuanced analytic framework for assessing authoritarian regimes, arguing that their sources of strength are also potential sources of weakness.
• He cautions against reflexive American calls for regime change, arguing instead for a subtler blend of military, economic, and most crucially, political deterrence—shifting adversarial regimes off balance by playing to their internal divisions and offering incentives for transition.
• The Iran case in 2026 epitomizes the difficulty of fostering internal change without groundwork; by failing to prepare political alternatives or points of defection, U.S.-Israel policy risks entrenching, not toppling, the regime’s core.
• He urges humility, long-term thinking, and policy adaptation: “You need to have an agreement with the Israelis on what the war aims are.” (71:10)
• The ultimate question is not just how to weaken a regime, but what positive political alternative can realistically be created—one able to attract those with real power inside.

---

Final Reflections

Stephen Kotkin’s analysis is cautionary, intellectually rigorous, and deeply rooted in historical analogies. His message: regime change is not a simple lever, and dismantling authoritarianism requires both pressure and a vision for what comes next—one compelling enough to bring a society’s insiders along. This episode is essential listening for anyone seeking a grounded, historical approach to current events and U.S. foreign policy in the age of strongmen.

Transcript

[Dan Kurtzpelin]

Dan I'm Dan Kurtzphelin, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Let's say the Iranian population is about

90 million, and let's say about upwards of 70, maybe even 80 million people detest this regime and would like to see an Iran with a constitutional order, freedom.

Let's then say that at least 10%,

at least 10 million people, 9 to 10 million people are the regime then.

And so again, what's your solution for that? How do you get them to defect not just from the regime, but to something you can't defect from, you must defect to?

[Justin Vogt]

I'm Justin Vogt, executive editor of Foreign Affairs.

[Narrator/Host]

Dan is away this week. When America and Israel launched a joint war on Iran two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up and rid themselves of their tyrannical rulers. He seemed buoyed by his success in swiftly removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in January. But the war in Iran has not progressed as smoothly as Trump might have liked. The authoritarian regime that runs the Islamic Republic remains firmly in place. The historian Stephen Kotkin has spent decades thinking about how these regimes function, how they survive and how they come to an end. In the Weakness of the Strongman, an essay in the January February issue of Foreign Affairs, Kotkin anatomized authoritarianism, arguing that many of the features that bolster autocrats also present vulnerabilities. Kotkin is the preeminent biographer of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a close observer of contemporary Russian and Chinese politics, and a sharp analyst of American foreign policy. In our conversation recorded last Friday, March 13, Kotkin explained what makes authoritarian regimes tick, how their weaknesses can be exploited, and what history tells us about the prospects of success for the American and Israeli effort at regime change in Iran.

[Justin Vogt]

Stephen Cochin, welcome back to the Foreign affairs interview.

[Stephen Kotkin]

My pleasure.

[Justin Vogt]

In our January February issue, you wrote this terrific, insightful essay called the Weakness of the Strongmen What Really Threatens Authoritarians Now? Little did you know that just a few months later the United States would launch a war on one of its longtime authoritarian adversaries. And we're going to get to Iran later because you also have great insight into the wider history of geopolitical conflict and regime change and how this war fits into it. But first I just want to step back and talk about why it's so hard to define authoritarianism and to figure out which states are authoritarian states and to talk about the solutions to that kind of conceptual problem that you've come up with, which is to identify what you call the five dimensions of authoritarianism what are those?

[Stephen Kotkin]

Authoritarianism is the absence of constitutional or

institutional limits on executive power.

The fewer limits on executive power, the more authoritarian. It's sort of a continuum. But at some point there are next

to no limits on executive power, except for circumstantial limits like the leader is a fool or the country is very big and takes time for communications. For example, we're talking about institutional limits on executive power. The lack of that, that's authoritarianism.

And so then you can get into typologies. What kind of authoritarianism? This kind, that kind. With a dominant party, a personalist regime. All of that is interesting and important, but I take a different approach. My approach is to say that there

are five dimensions to authoritarianism that simultaneously serve as its strengths and its vulnerabilities,

which therefore enables policy action in response. So you can understand authoritarianism but not

be paralyzed by the understanding.

So the five dimensions that I outlined

of an authoritarian regime's strengths and vulnerabilities are one, obviously the repressive apparatus. You can't get anywhere without a repressive apparatus. And they have immense resources, personnel devoted to repression.

What's interesting is they also are subdivided

into many different competing or rivalrous mechanisms,

so that no one group is too powerful. They're thrown off balance a little bit inside the regime. So they have an enormous repressive apparatus

that is deliberately divided and rivalrous, and therefore lots of tensions and animosities.

The second is cash flow.

We often heard for decades now about GDP growth as critical for authoritarian regimes,

and how there was some type of

social bargain where if you gave up

your freedom in exchange, you got a

rising standard of living.

And that was the bargain of authoritarian regimes. It's never been true. Authoritarian regimes cannot be held to any bargain. If they fail to raise living standards,

you can't sue them.

They don't voluntarily leave power for violating their side of the imaginary social bargain. However, they really do depend on cash flow.

Even if they are not growing the economy and if they're not providing jobs,

cash flow is most convenient for them

when it comes up out of the ground in gushers like hydrocarbons, oil and

gas or other minerals.

But cash flow can come from counterfeiting American currency.

It can come from hacking crypto exchanges,

it can come from hacking central banks.

It can also come from massive manufacturing

export economy, like the case of China. China doesn't do massive export of commodities the way that Russia does, or other

authoritarian regimes that are commodity export based. But China has huge cash flow toward

the regime through taxes and State owned enterprises coming from their export led manufacturing, finalized goods and inputs, economy.

The third dimension of authoritarianism is control over life chances. And control over life chances is the critical one in some ways, for differentiating

authoritarianism and totalitarianism unison.

The more the regime can control whether you get a job or not, whether

you get an apartment or not, whether your kids can go to school or

not, whether you can holiday or not,

whether you can get a visa to travel abroad. And sometimes that means an exit visa, not just a visa to another country that that country would grant, whether you can get a residency permit to move to a place where jobs might be

available, all of that comes under control over life chances.

This third dimension, the more the state controls life chances, the more it could control your behavior and even your expression, your public expression, your private expression, because you'll lose your job or your kids will lose their place in school or worse.

And so this control over life chances means that the more life chances are in your control, the more space you

have to cope with and survive the authoritarian regime. But then of course, vice versa.

So in a totalitarian regime, they have

very significant control over life chances across the board for you, your kids, for anybody you know.

And therefore the private sector can be the friend of external actors because it provides less state control, less authoritarian control

over life chances, although that's complicated by surveillance techniques and other things.

The fourth is narratives about legitimacy or

how the regime got into power, or

why the regime is in power or should be in power.

[Justin Vogt]

These are the stories that the regime tells itself and its people.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yes, and these have to be effective.

At some level you need the repressive apparatus, but it's not enough.

You need the cash flow, but it's not enough. You need the control over life chances. But at some level you also need

to have these stories, these narratives about

what type of civilization we might be, who our enemies are. Usually you have a panoply of internal enemies in cahoots with external enemies. Usually there's some magnificent great imperial past

where you were the greatest country or one of the greatest countries, but the depredations of the imperialists or the west or the United States forced you off

of that great path. But this regime is bringing everyone back

to that great path that deserves status of civilization, empire, Middle Kingdom,

preponderant power

in some fashion, power under God, providential power in other cases.

There's a formula here.

The enemies plus the greatness and the regime alone can bring the greatness back and suppress the enemies.

The enemies category keeps expanding and Those people who may be ethnically correct from the regime's point of view, who nonetheless dissent from the regime, all of a

sudden go into the enemy box, et cetera. So it's not just the wrong religion or the wrong ethnicity. It's anybody who opposes the regime in any way, including in terms of regime

[Justin Vogt]

perception, being the wrong person at the

[Stephen Kotkin]

wrong time from the regime's point of view.

It's very convenient, very powerful.

And it's like a well that is bottomless.

You could just keep dipping the bucket down and bringing up these stories, propagating them. We sometimes think of censorship as suppression

of information, things you don't want the people to know, voices you don't want them to hear. And that's true.

But these regimes promote stories at the

same time to fill that space.

And sometimes they don't even censor as effectively as we think, but they promote

much more effectively than we think, the widespread what become pervasive narratives.

The fifth and final is the international order and the extent to which it

is conducive or corrosive of authoritarian regimes.

And that varies over time.

And it can be things as like

commodity prices, which of course, affect the regime's cash flow.

So, for example, price of oil of

any given time, or export controls or

tariffs or other mechanisms, the Federal Reserve's

interest rate deliberations, which affect, of course,

all countries in the world that don't have a say in Federal Reserve policy.

So you got repressive apparatus, cash flow, control over life chances, the storytelling and the international order.

Those are the five dimensions that all

provide strength for authoritarian regimes.

But I perceive vulnerabilities there that we can act upon.

[Justin Vogt]

I want to get to the vulnerabilities and how to act on them. First, though, I want to linger just on the question of We've now kind of talked about what makes a country kind of qualify as authoritarian in today's world. And in your piece, clearly Putin's Russia, the Chinese system, the Iranian system, North Korea maybe, is sort of somewhere between authoritarian and totalitarian. That's all fairly clear. Where we sometimes get into arguments these days is with what you call in the peace the elephant in the room. And I want to sort of just acknowledge the elephant, but that is the American President Donald Trump, whose critics frequently will call an authoritarian or claim that Trump is trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian country or has an authoritarian agenda. And the reason it's important, I should note, is that if the idea is that it's the United States which is going to be Opposing these authoritarian powers, that becomes complicated. If you think that, you know, the US Itself is sort of trending in that direction or is already there, what's your response to that kind of very familiar now criticism?

[Stephen Kotkin]

If Trump aspires to impose an authoritarian

regime in the United States, he's failing. He's failing miserably across the board because

we have institutional limits on executive power,

even though they're being tested. So the Imperial Presidency, as it's sometimes

called, was a book by Arthur Schlesinger written in 1973. Schlesinger complained that the president had too

much power, and in fact, it's the Nixon era.

And one can understand the context. Schlesinger complains less about fdr, who invented

the imperial presidency in many ways. And FDR is in some ways the gold standard of imperial presidency.

But if you support the New Deal,

if you support many of the programs that FDR introduced, a lot of which of course didn't work or were not enacted because the Supreme Court rebuffed them,

et cetera, there were institutional limits on

FDR's power in the 30s.

But anyway, so the imperial presidency is

a long standing problem in the United States. It's not something that Donald Trump has

introduced, and it's not something that will

end with Donald Trump either.

It's something written into the Constitution.

In some ways, the arguments of the anti Federalists in the 1780s were that the presidency would be too strong. And others argued that we needed that kind of executive in order to ensure that the union functioned.

But as everybody knows, the Congress is Article 1 of the Constitution, not the presidency.

The presidency is Article 2.

And if Article 1 were functioning as an institution better than it is, the problem of the imperial presidency would be significantly reduced. Article 3 is Functioning the judiciary. Many judges not appointed by President Trump, not appointed by Republicans, as well as judges appointed by previous Republican presidents and by Donald Trump, have been ruling against

much of what the administration has claimed it has the right to do.

Courts move much more slowly than the executive branch does, so it can be frustrating for people on the receiving end of the actions of the presidency.

We should not confuse policy disagreement with degradation of democracy.

Some of us, for example, might be

in favor of immigration, others might be against immigration.

But immigration enforcement is in fact a prerogative of the executive branch. And if the executive branch decides to enforce immigration, that's a policy choice. And we may be on the losing

end of that policy choice.

The issue then becomes the methods of enforcement. And if those methods are illegal because the presidency is acting in a quasi imperial fashion. Then there's a lot of pushback from that. The pushback is from the institutions. The Congress could intervene and hasn't, but

the judiciary has intervened, the federalist system has intervened. The state level part of the United States that is not the federal level of the government, but the state level government and also society can intervene.

We have a gigantic, robust, dynamic, self

organized society as well as a gigantic self organized economy.

And those are a lot of powerful interests that also can push, sometimes with the agenda of the imperial presidency and sometimes against. So this is a problem that I recognize from history. Again, there are legitimate disputes over policy. But I want to study the operation of the institutions and institutional mechanisms and I want to put it in historical context before I start to throw around

words like authoritarianism, because the United States doesn't have a repressive apparatus like the authoritarian regimes we're discussing, and the attempt to build one with ICE has failed. And anyway, the size of ICE is sort of relative to the population of the United States compared to the authoritarian regime. Repressive apparatuses can't be put in the same conversation.

And there's been a lot of pushback against ICE as well. And one could go on, right? We don't have control over life chances.

Our government is not driven solely by cash flow considerations as opposed to providing the well being for the well being of the people.

Because every two years we have congressional elections and every four years we have presidential elections and, and we have those local elections as well that are highly consequential. And one could go on, right? So I understand that people are upset. I understand the imperial presidency is a problem. I understand Donald Trump has aspirations. I understand all of that. And I also know about fdr, I

know about Nixon, I know about Andrew Jackson.

Comparing Andrew Jackson and President Trump, one wouldn't necessarily put Trump on the extreme end of the spectrum there compared to what Andrew Jackson did, the Indian wars,

Florida, abolishing the original central bank. And one could go on.

So this is not a justification, it's not a validation. This is not a political standpoint. But it is a call to be historical and sober and comparative about these questions, as we're disappointed, as many of us are, and as violations of the

law are occurring, which the courts, as I said, are slowly but nonetheless, definitely pushing back on.

[Narrator/Host]

We'll be back after a short break.

[Rebecca Patterson]

Trying to stay on top of what's happening in a 247 world of news can feel, well, frankly, overwhelming.

[Sebastian Mallaby]

That's why we launched our new podcast, the Spillover. I'm Sebastian Mallaby.

[Rebecca Patterson]

And I'm Rebecca Patterson.

[Sebastian Mallaby]

We want to highlight the most important global events each week and think through not just what they mean, but also the second and third order effects.

[Rebecca Patterson]

Exactly. And we have a special opportunity for our Spillover listeners to back Sebastian.

[Sebastian Mallaby]

Yes, we do. Starting March 18 through April 1, you have a chance to win a copy of my latest book, the Infinity Machine.

[Rebecca Patterson]

All you need to do is head to cfr.org giveaway and submit a question to be answered right here on the spillover. Ask us anything you're curious about, from geopolitics to policy or financial markets and

[Sebastian Mallaby]

economics or related to my book. You can ask us a question about technology or AI. Again, that's cfr.org giveaway. We'll be picking five lucky winners to receive a copy of my book and get their questions answered by us. Sounds like a pretty good deal, I'd say.

[Rebecca Patterson]

So tune into our episode on April 8th to see if you've won. And don't forget to subscribe to the Spillover wherever you get your podcasts.

[Indiana University Announcer]

The world doesn't wait. Neither should you. At Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, nearly 96% of graduates are employed in service or continuing their education within six months. With programs in international studies, foreign languages and global policy, and faculty who are active voices in the field. You won't just learn about the world, you'll be ready to work in it. Take the next step. Apply [e-mail].

[Justin Vogt]

Okay, so having kind of reminded ourselves that whatever our frustrations or, or, you know, disappointments are at the moment, that we are still a liberal democratic republic, faced with some adversaries who are much less ambiguously authoritarian and have systems that are genuinely, you know, that meet your criteria very clearly. I want to talk a little bit about what you write in the piece about how to craft a foreign policy or a set of foreign policies that can make that international system, as you put it, more corrosive to powers like

[Narrator/Host]

that and not conducive to them.

[Justin Vogt]

And then I think we'll sort of get to Iran as an instantiation of that. So, broadly speaking, what does make the international system more corrosive or more conducive? And to the extent that these powers exist and seem to be becoming more powerful in some ways, why is the current system seem to be so conducive to them?

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yeah, that's the challenge, isn't it?

I should say that I am not

against authoritarianism in every specific case. That something needs to be done about it. Right.

There can be authoritarian regimes that are

pro Western supportive of the United States.

There are disappointments domestically in how they

treat their own people, in the lack of limits on their power and behavior and also the lack of corrective mechanisms.

But there are cases and one can

enumerate the ones that people like. I'm not going to take sides here, but one could imagine that Singapore would not necessarily be a system that we would say is a threat to the United States. We might put the UAE in that category. We might then debate all sorts of other liminal cases.

And I'm not saying in a blanket

fashion that we should go out and throw off balance every authoritarian regime in the world.

[Justin Vogt]

Right. No, I'm glad you made that distinction. This is not a sort of call for an anti authoritarian crusade or a foreign policy that is predicated on the idea that the point of American power is to oppose authoritarianism wherever it finds it. That's a very good point. But I guess what I am there are in fact some adversaries that we have for geopolitical reasons, for reasons related to our interests who happen to be authoritarian. And that kind of opens the question about, okay, what, what do you do about these types of states?

[Stephen Kotkin]

So I'm concerned about the, the old

Eurasian land mass empires that see themselves as civilizations. So I'm concerned about China, Russia, Iran. Now Turkey is an interesting case and it's in motion. And of course, if there's a successful outcome from a US point of view in Iran, it will empower Turkey the same way that the Iraq invasion by the United States empowered Iran. There are always these unintended consequences and Turkey's a very interesting case that is, let's say, in motion. And we're not sure what the future of Turkey might be, but it's one of these ancient Eurasian landmass empires that sees itself partly as a civilization, a neo Ottoman fashion.

But Turkey is not in the peace

and is not in the same category as the countries that are in the peace. And that would be the cases of again China, Russia, Iran and North Korea being another case that's complex and smaller, but also important to discuss.

So if you have this analysis of

the authoritarian regimes, and certain of them are quite inimical to U.S. interests, not just detrimental to their own people, curtailing their own people's freedoms, not solely detrimental to their neighbors, which is a big problem. And some of those neighbors are our allies, threatening those neighbors, but also directly threatening US interests more broadly.

And so I would put them in that category. And I would say, well, we cannot do nothing.

What would be my policy prescription for them?

And so I'm not a regime change

person, and the piece is not in

favor of regime change.

I'm not a democracy promotion person, and the piece is not in favor of democracy promotion.

And I'm not a negotiations without leverage

person, which the peace doesn't support either.

So if you're not in favor of regime change, you're not in favor of democracy promotion, and you're not in favor of negotiation without leverage, what actually do you think you can do here?

[Justin Vogt]

Right.

[Sebastian Mallaby]

What does that leave you with?

[Stephen Kotkin]

It leaves you with deterrence, but with

a political dimension to deterrence. And that, I think, is the differentiating

factor here to get the authoritarian regimes onto the back foot and to get us onto the front foot, rather than

us being reactive to their highly proactive policies.

Now, I'm not an apostate who once

favored regime change and now I'm against it because I've seen the stupidity of my ways, although I've seen the light.

I'm not a former democracy promotion person.

I'm not a former negotiation, let's have talks without leverage. I'm a person who believes that it's deterrence plus diplomacy, but that the deterrence has a political dimension. So history is very clear about the failures of these various different approaches, their costs.

Sometimes they succeed, often they fail. There are instances of success when it

comes to these evil regimes.

So these regimes are evil. So those who are against regime change, fine, because it's historically been mixed record at best. But what are you going to do about the evil regime?

Do you just say, oh, it's totally

fine, it's totally okay, you know, so you're against the Iraq invasion, but then therefore are you kind of de facto pro Saddam?

And.

And so that's the navigation I'm trying

to do here, which is to say,

I don't want to engage in something that historically has been troubling, but I also don't want to throw up my

hands and say, okay, therefore, it's perfectly all right for those regimes to continue to do what they're doing.

[Justin Vogt]

Right? Nothing we can do about it.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yes.

Or we're just reactive.

They do something, and we have to figure out, oh, boy, what do we do about that?

And so I want to be proactive. And this proactive involves this political dimension of deterrence. We're very willing to build up our arsenal.

We have the greatest drone ever invented, known as Tomahawk missile. We just don't have enough of them

and we're trying to put more into Indo Pacific theater, for example.

I'm all in favor of the military dimension of deterrence. Of course that requires an understanding of trade offs and an understanding of your defense industrial base and everything else.

But the pages of Foreign affairs have

been illuminating this quite well for some time, as have the podcast.

I'm also in favor on occasion of limited targeted effective economic sanction toolkit, including export controls. I'm probably less favorably disposed towards the full gamut of them because I think

the more you do, the less you do.

And I think enforcement is a challenge

and enforcement can only happen multilaterally and in alliances.

I'm more about the proactive, less weight, some weight, but less weight on the export controls, more weight on the cooperative

nature of producing, developing, securing supply chains and final goods.

So I'm, I'm in favor of kind

of bombing the other sides military industrial capabilities through non kinetic means like sanctions.

But I'm also in favor of Lend

Lease as it were, which is to

say a sharing of technology, supply chain production facilities with friends, allies, those who

are inside the security perimeter and security treaties of the United States. So what you might call a GATT versus a WTO approach, or you might call Lend Lease writ large.

And so again, economic deterrence is critical,

but pro economic cooperation can be superior over time.

It's the third dimension, the political dimension

of deterrence that's often decisive and often the place that we don't do as much. So for example, we'll say things like, well, we've taken regime change off the table.

We still get accused of promoting regime change by all the authoritarian regimes, whatever

we publicly state about it.

And in fact that area is the one that they perceive to be the

one they're most vulnerable in.

And so by not doing anything in the political space, we put too much weight on the military and economic deterrence, both of which are important but insufficient.

[Justin Vogt]

What's an example? Just to stop you there for a second, when you talk about doing something in the political space, what's a kind of practical example of that or a historical example of that?

[Stephen Kotkin]

So if you have a repressive apparatus that's gigantic, but divided against itself on

purpose by the regime and full of

rivalries and animosities, that's a space to recruit in. That's a space to say there are a lot of disaffected people. If someone got the stolen assets, someone

else didn't get the stolen assets.

If someone got the medal or the promotion or someone's kid through nepotism, got the promotion, someone else didn't. And so you have this space to play in.

We do recruit, I understand.

My view is we have to play more strongly in that space and we have to break these regimes, divide them against themselves. So we don't have to do regime

change, but we can do regime destabilization or regime unbalancing.

And what that means is to use the ambitions and animosities of people inside the regimes to throw the regimes off balance, not solely by recruiting them to

provide us with information, the kind of information that's available on the homepage of our newspapers or the telegram channels or, or elsewhere.

Right, but I'm talking about trying to threaten them with the possibility that there's

a political alternative to themselves coming from inside the regime.

And so what that means is these regimes can be terrible at everything. They can fail across the board. They only have to succeed at one

thing, suppression of political alternatives.

So the more you can introduce political alternatives, the more you can unbalance them, get them onto the back foot again. You don't have to take them down, but you get their attention and then you can negotiate with them from a position of strength or leverage. Often we think of the democratic opposition

as the space to play in here. And so there'll be courageous people who risk their lives to oppose a regime. Many of them will lose their lives.

They're a hell of a lot courageous

than someone sitting in an office on the Stanford campus in the Hoover Tower

[Justin Vogt]

or I should say the headquarters of cfr.

[Stephen Kotkin]

So they're very impressive people often. But their ability to destabilize the regime

can be limited because they're in prison, in exile or otherwise intimidated, despite the courage that so many of them have shown.

And so I'm not against supporting them, but what I'm talking about is inside

the regime itself, regime loyalists who often

are highly patriotic, but who see the regime is corrupt, full of lies and hurting the country's long term trajectory. So ironically their own patriotism is available to use against the regime. They think, for example, the war in Ukraine is a failure for Russia. They're not favorably disposed towards Ukraine. It's Russia they bleed for.

[Justin Vogt]

Or they might think that perhaps it's not such a great idea to try to take over Taiwan.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Or it may be having proxies in every country around you and spending billions and billions of dollars and watching that go up in smoke while your own people suffer deprivation, lower living standards, emigration of your talent. Maybe that's not a good idea for the long term great power base or great power strength of your country. So you can actually find disaffected people who are ambitious and patriotic inside these regimes and you can try and encourage that and say, well, you know what, if you guys come to power and you stop the war in Ukraine because it's hurting Russia, these are the following measures that we'll give you in response. And so you can encourage that behavior. Again, if it doesn't happen, you've still gotten the attention of the regime and you still have leverage. Again, they fear nothing more than this. And they themselves have created the basis for this. They're the ones fostering animosities internally in their repressive apparatus so that it doesn't seize power domestically itself. So they're providing the opportunity, their very strength is your vulnerability to potentially exploit. And then of course we've talked a little bit about the cash flow area

and how you can cut the cash flow off. So if the Russians are not able to sell their hydrocarbons globally as easily

as they have been, or the Iranian

regime is not able to do the

same, or the Chinese encounter difficulty with

their export export led model of industrialization, which is de facto de industrializing all

the other countries and what could go on.

And then there's counter narratives where you can invade their public sphere, invade their electronic systems.

After all, we invented the Internet, we invented social media, and yet it's TikTok

where our young people get nearly 50% of their information from, which is a

Chinese Communist Party controlled app ultimately. And yet we can't seem to penetrate their public sphere, their electronics the same way. But these are technologies that we ourselves have invented. And so can there be proactive ways right now in Iran, where they've turned

off the Internet, for example, and we tried to smuggle in a handful of Starlink terminals or whatever it might be?

We need to get more serious about this. It can't be just the old days

of Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe broadcasting.

There's value in things like that. It has to be more sophisticated, more

proactive, better funded, leveraging the technology.

And again, you get their attention and then you can go into diplomacy negotiations where their behavior might be less aggressive. They're not a democratic regime all of a sudden. They are a repressive authoritarian regime. But they've retrenched somewhat because they perceive that we are proactive. We're on the front foot, they're on the back foot.

We have a certain degree of leverage

and then you can do a deal with them. The United States and China have to share the planet.

And also, by the way, the ocean is wet. But what are the terms of sharing the planet?

We have to share the planet with China. We're not disappearing. They're not disappearing. Same thing with Russia. They disappeared twice and they're still there.

[Justin Vogt]

They keep coming back.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yeah, well, exactly. And same thing with Iran. So what are the terms of sharing the planet? Can we get better terms? Are the terms going to be Xinjiang, what happened in Hong Kong, the pressure that's now on Taiwan? Are those the terms? Because I don't like those terms. So I need better terms. I need more leverage. I need them on the back foot, not the front foot. I need us not to be solely reactive. Now, this is not a pie in the sky view. These regimes are not pushovers. These regimes can and do kill their own people. They can and do invest in military capabilities, often asymmetric. That can cause a lot of damage, as we're seeing.

So I'm not naive about these regimes.

Nor, again, is this a regime change agenda. This is a political deterrence agenda on their vulnerabilities where they are most fearful in order to negotiate better terms for

us and our friends to live in a world that is peace and prosperity to the extent possible.

[Justin Vogt]

I was reminded of this point in your piece where your piece sort of lands on it, and you were just discussing it now about the fact that for the authoritarians, it's their loyalists who are the true enemies within. I was reminded of that very vividly by what happened in Venezuela, which, you know, I think you could see in some ways as an example of the very dynamic you're describing here, where what we've wound up with is not regime change, but a loyalist from within to Maduro. And I'm talking about Delsey Rodriguez, who is now kind of the acting president. Clearly there was this, the kinds of political action that you were talking about to try to find these people within the regime who may pose some kind of alternative, some kind of conception of that went into the policy, I guess, when it came to Venezuela. What did you make of that?

[Stephen Kotkin]

I would have to say that the

Maduro operation of the Trump administration is an audacious version of, of my argument.

And they clearly had done their homework.

And there clearly was a basis where

they didn't try regime change per se, but they tried to figure out those loyalists who might be in favor of

retrenchment and stop doing things which were detrimental to US Interests across the board.

And so that's a good outcome in the short term for everybody. Including the Venezuelan people. Let's remember that the Maduro regime and

the entire trajectory of this Chavismo, Chavez before Maduro, in a population of maybe

28, 29 million, they have 8 million refugees, they've destroyed the country. Their GDP decline is 80%. So Nazi Germany lost 45% of GDP in the war and they were incinerated. The United States in the Great Depression lost less than that, lost about a third. There's 80% of GDP on most estimates. And so the, the destruction that they did to that country and that they should answer for. Nobody should cry for Maduro being in

a prison in New York City. Nobody, in my view.

But, but, okay, let's, let's move a

little deeper on the Maduro thing.

So we can't judge things in the time that things happen alone.

Everything is the fullness of time, right?

The US lost the war in Vietnam, and in the fullness of time, it won the peace. Vietnam is a pro American country. Most of the population has been born

since that US war in Vietnam and the atrocities that were committed there.

And so the fullness of time is

what I'm looking for.

And so I don't exclude, for example, the fact that one could have a political transition in Venezuela that was election

driven, that I don't know when, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but at some point, because the current ruler and her brother and the rest

of them, they're on a certain side of the actuarial table and not necessarily on the front end of it. Also, many of the changes over which they're presiding are having consequences that could

well undermine their ability to keep this grip.

So it's quite possible that we could move to a transition that looks more like a free and fair democratic election and that the will of the Venezuelan

people could be expressed and consolidated in institutions.

What I don't want to see is civil war. And so sometimes you can force a

transition because democracy is better and democracy is the right thing to do. And it's a little bit morally compromising

to take out one dictator, to allow

another dictator, even though they're retrenching on their aggression.

It seems a little bit morally compromising to do that.

And shouldn't we, as a country that

stands for democratic, professes democratic ideals, shouldn't

we be in favor of that?

And the answer is maybe we should. But what's the timeframe? Because if you force that issue, there's

a big jungle in Venezuela, you know,

the Amazon is larger than just Brazil, and you could get an insurgency there.

With the people with guns.

Instead of co opting them into a

transition process, you could incentivize them to oppose a transition process and you could

end up with smoldering enders as far as the eye could see. So I understand the frustration that there's

a Nobel Prize winner and her party

actually won the previous election that Maduro stole. And I'm in favor of that democratic

transition at some point.

But I think in terms of stages, we may not get to that democratic transition. This approach may fail because they think

they're going to outlast President Trump. He's only got fewer than three years left in office and if they can just hold out, they can go back

to what it was that their preferences. But again, time passes.

They don't get younger.

Some of the things they're doing change the circumstances. It changes the interest group dynamics. They have to release political prisoners.

They're also arresting new political prisoners.

But the dynamics that they're setting in

motion could foil a plan, even if

they have the plan to wait it out. I like the fact that we've been

able to to identify, negotiate and have

a transition to another version of the authoritarian regime that is not as opposed

to US interests, in fact is quite pro UN interest because they're afraid, but

also is trying to negotiate this domestically in a way that Maduro was not doing. He was doing quite the opposite. So it's early, but it's hopeful. Of course, again, there's lots of perverse

and unintended consequences and it's not easy

to get successful outcomes following an authoritarian regime. But still, I regard the Maduro outcome thus far with the potential for an

even better outcome as well as the

potential for worse, as an example of

the kind of outcome arguments that I was making in the piece that you edited and published.

[Narrator/Host]

We'll be back after a short break.

[Indiana University Announcer]

May 14th through 17th. Independent brings together over 100 artists for a four day art fair in New York. Among the highlights, Comme des Garcons will present more than 20 recent semi unique selections created by the House's founder, Ray Kabakubo. This will be the first New York presentation of its kind in nine years. See why the New York Times calls Independent an art world institution and discover what's next in contemporary art. Visit independenthq.com to learn more and book your ticket today.

[Justin Vogt]

Let's go to the other sort of prominent example of an attempt to either change a regime or change a regime's behavior, which is obviously Iran. Iran clearly kind of fits the bill for an Authoritarian state in terms of the dimensions, major repressive apparatus, cash flow in the form of commodities, the civilizational narratives, but also a revolutionary narrative about the Shiite revolutionary kind of project. Life chances, I think maybe not as determinative as some other authoritarian regimes, although I think if you're an Iranian woman, you might say otherwise. And then there's this question of the international system or the corrosiveness or the conduciveness to it, which I think in the past couple of weeks has changed dramatically. But how sustainable those changes will be, that's really the question. So I guess, you know, when you look at what we've done there, what the United States has done there, how do you see it sort of broadly and how do you see it fitting in to all these ideas that you've been talking about, about sort of the, I don't know how a sort of humble, modest, strategic, smart way to try to oppose these regimes. Does this kind of meet that standard or are we doing something that, that is kind of off to the side?

[Stephen Kotkin]

Again, I'm not a regime change person. That's not an argument I would have made. And also, the unfolding of the operation

in Iran is not similar to the one in Venezuela for all sorts of reasons.

We did not seem to have identified beforehand and negotiated with people inside the regime who might have been willing to

alter regime behavior and eventually go towards some type of transitional process. These are people who are dedicated to the survival of this regime.

Not the survival of Iran necessarily as a country, not the survival of the

Iranian people who make up a multiethnic mosaic, but the survival of this regime, this Islamist regime, it is different and

it is something that requires a lot

more understanding, care, thinking before you decide to act some way against what is a real threat and a real evil regime, and has been for some time. So capitulation of regimes like this is not as frequent as we might imagine. We killed the so called Supreme Leader.

I'm not sure that that Supreme Leader couldn't have gone into a bunker and been less vulnerable to being killed, but instead made himself vulnerable and therefore martyred himself to try to rescue the regime. When he's 86 and ailing and his

time on earth is limited and he's worried about the survival of his regime.

Maybe in fact he acted in a

way to martyr himself.

Again, I'm not a specialist. I have no inside information. And so you guys have talked about this.

[Justin Vogt]

And I'll say actually just along that point, we published someone just today, Akbar Gandhi, who was an Iranian journalist who was a member of the irgc, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, became a dissident, was imprisoned, now writes quite critically about the regime. But he sort of made a variant of the point you made. And the subtitle that his piece has is that America and Israel solved Iran's succession problem. Right. That whatever Khamenei's motivations, there was this puzzle that they had yet to solve that, in a sense, the assassination remove that burden from the regime.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yeah, I'm not missing him personally.

I'm not in favor of assassinating human beings, but there are cases in which you're at war and they're combatants, but let's leave that aside.

So this regime is not capitulated. The Venezuelan regime, however we managed, it did capitulate to an extent. Again, maybe they're trying to wait the President out. I don't think that'll be successful, but

we'll come to see that if that's

the case, or maybe they're not trying

to weed him out.

My point being is that how do you get a regime like this to capitulate?

Or what are the consequences when they don't immediately capitulate?

There's the short run, transition to a new Supreme Leader who might be alive. This is Friday the 13th, and I have to say I've seen no evidence

that the named successor is alive.

But even if that person is alive,

there's no way to exercise the prerogatives of the Supreme Leader office in the current context.

So the succession has been resolved on paper in some ways. But whether the Supreme Leader as an

institution can survive with that level of centralized power and authority, and I think is an open question.

This regime has been very severely damaged. Survival may seem like a victory at

some level, but the rump that will

survive, it's not clear how long it can survive, and it's not clear it

can reproduce itself into the next generation.

Those are still open questions for me. But it's not capitulated. That was to be expected. And we didn't actually seem to have a faction in the regime that we were negotiating with.

If we did, they were killed also at some point.

Let's think about the Soviet example for

a second here, about which I've written.

Imagine for a second that Mikhail Gorbachev's

Soviet regime, which was not attacked by the United States and Israel the way that Iran has been.

It had destabilized itself, certainly under pressure

through the years of the Cold War and bipartisan approach to contain the Soviet Union and to force it to then have to manage its own contradictions, as Kennan said in his original advice on how to approach this. And they failed to manage their own contradictions. In fact, they unwittingly dissolved their own regime.

But imagine if they had acted like Iran and decided that they were not

going to go quietly, they were going to bring the whole thing down, not just the whole thing in terms of their country, but the whole world was going to pay a price for what happened to them. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons with all the delivery systems you would need to send them everywhere and anywhere. They had chemical weapons, they had biological weapons.

They had 5 million soldiers under arms. Not all of them obviously might have been loyal if ordered to do certain things, but they had 600,000 soldiers in Eastern Europe, the majority in East Germany, and they gave back, they conceded East Germany and they removed those troops.

The troops were finally removed by 1994, three years after the Soviet Union was

gone, and we averted Armageddon. And so it's a kind of spectacular

case of capitulation under pressure when they've lost the game.

That evidently doesn't happen very frequently because the Chinese in Tiananmen in June 1989

had a million plus demonstrators in the square and Deng Xiaoping did not capitulate then, and they've shown no signs of capitulation since.

Quite the opposite. And the Iranian regime the same. And now you could argue, the successor

in the Russian Republic to the Soviet regime, Vladimir Putin, also seems in no mind to capitulate, despite again the severe pressure that he's come under, both by his own aggressiveness, mistakes, miscalculations, as well as the coalition pushing back. But ultimately Ukrainian courage and ingenuity at the base of this.

So capitulation is rare, and therefore you have to be careful when you go

for something that looks like regime change

to prepare the ground for the possibility

of capitulation or some type of negotiated settlement, transition, etc.

Not every country is going to produce

a Mandela or a Havel or fill in the blank.

And not every country is going to produce an elite that sees the handwriting on the wall and decides, as in the Soviet case, to hold onto the

property that they've stolen and to hold onto positions running republics, the 15 successor states, rather than go to the wall to keep the Soviet Union and the planned economy, as it was called, together.

So I'm watching the Iranian case for how we're managing not just the military

side of it, but the political side

of it in terms of what type of solution, negotiation with remnants of the

regime we can see going forward.

And so far I'm very concerned to see very little work in the political

space compared to the military space.

Now, again, this Iranian regime is evil and a threat for Israel, even more

so because it's their neighborhood.

It's also been a threat, as I

said, to all of those neighbors.

You can ask Syrians what they've gone through.

You can ask the Lebanese what they've

been living through for a long time. So this is not an imaginary threat. This is not a fake threat. This is not a threat conjured up

by propagandists looking to go to war.

But the threat I get, the regime is evil.

And so what's your answer to getting us to a better place politically, regime wise?

Now, when they say, well, what about

the people overthrowing the regime and encouraging the people to do so?

Well, what's the regime? The regime is not just the supreme leader.

The regime is the Revolutionary Guards and it's the Basij and it's the judges

and the judiciary in the localities, and

it's the weapons that they control and it's their Islamist ideology or commitment to

Islamism for which they've made many sacrifices,

including that meat grinder war with Iraq.

And so the regime is a society. It's not just a handful of leaders

in a compound and then their replacements.

And so you need to be able to incentivize that part of society to defect. The thing about defection, let's say the

Iranian population is about 90 million and let's say about upwards of 70, maybe even 80 million people detest this regime and would like to see an Iran with a constitutional order, freedom.

Let's then say that at least 10%,

at least 10 million people, 9 to 10 million people are the regime then.

And so again, what's your solution for that? How do you get them to defect not just from the regime, but to something you can't defect from, you must defect to. Defecting from is when you go into

exile, you got to defect too.

So if we're asking them to lay

down their arms or to use their arms against their rulers who have created this catastrophic situation for that great civilization,

to whom, to what are they defecting to? That's the part that is troubling me

from the beginning of this exercise.

I had a similar question in Iraq in 2003. I recognized the evil of Saddam and the evil of the regime, and I wanted to know what the political alternative

to that was going to be before I was going to act.

That's where we Are we're now in deep.

It's the sunk costs argument. Well, we're in this far. Can we really pull out?

Can we allow them to have a VICT by surviving? Can we allow them to blockade the

Strait of Hormuz and get away with it?

And all of those arguments that should have been discussed beforehand and no doubt

were discussed in parts of the bureaucracy, but not necessarily the decision making parts.

And so that discussion belatedly needs to happen and we need to see action

on that as well.

Again, what would success look like in

the real world and what are those options?

The survival of some version of the regime is not necessarily a failure if

the Venezuelan case can't be pronounced a partial success.

But what are the mechanisms, the actions

being taken to move us in that direction?

I'd like to see a public debate

by experts in Iranian politics, Middle Eastern politics in the region more widely.

You can't just take the exile who's

been out of the country for a century or so and plop them down

in because again, the regime is a society. The Basij, the paramilitary basis, who are conducting a lot of the repression. That's a version of social mobility for

many people who are from poor regions

who don't have other options. And so they defecting from the Basij

to what are they defecting to it, as it were?

Same thing with those judges who are often local officials who grew up in

not rich provinces or not rich settlements and provinces.

What's our story?

What's our option for them?

Not an abstract option, but some concrete options. And how do we co opt the people with the guns at the top,

at least some of them, for a

transition that looks like retrenchment in the

first phase and then we'll see what other phases might look like.

[Justin Vogt]

Yeah, I mean, listening to you and you said this yourself, it's like I kind of wish that this had been thought through before we decided to strike. And your comparison to the Soviet example is telling in one way, in the sense that one difference is the United States had not attacked the Soviet Union. And also the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, as you pointed out. So there was a real deterrent to doing that. But my point is that the capitulation that you saw on the part of Gorbachev and those other elites was in a sense possible because we hadn't entered into a hot war. Whereas with Iran it seems like, well, that would be extremely difficult to see now that we've already launched the war on them. And you can say, yes, well, they were at war with us for all these years as well, and as many deaths as they caused in Iraq and elsewhere, there was nothing like the equivalent of the kind of attack the United States has launched on Iran, on the United States. So I guess what I'm saying is that now that we've already done this, right, now that we've already taken this step, does that kind of foreclose all the possibly more constructive steps that you

[Sebastian Mallaby]

would have preferred to see?

[Justin Vogt]

Is that out the window now? Or is it possible to still do that kind of stuff even once you've already started the hot war?

[Stephen Kotkin]

So nothing is ever out of the window. You can snatch victory from defeat and you can snatch defeat from victory, let's call that Afghanistan.

So many things are possible still, even

if everything is not possible the same way.

What happened in the Soviet case is that there was a gigantic faction in

the elite that was pro Western.

They wanted to be like the West.

They wanted to be part of the West.

They wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted the Soviet Union to remain, but they wanted living standards in the Soviet Union to look like that in the West. They wanted to control the society and control the property and continue to rule, but in a way that enabled them to holiday in France or etc. And so the pro Westernism of a large part of the elite, not just the society, but a large part of the elite, that was the trump card,

as it were, that we had now. Many of them then became disillusioned that they didn't become part of the west, that not everybody got a high living standard, that many of the people lost out in the so called transition, you know, the post communist transition, and there was a lot of anger and grievances and resentment and let's call that Putin, right?

But the dynamic of being favorably disposed towards the west, wanting to join the west and therefore defecting from the Soviet Union to an image, a leader, a movement, a series of institutions, defecting to something that was going to approximate the

west, be part of the West.

That's what worked in the case of Iran. This regime does not want to be part of the West. These people don't want to defect to

the west for the most part.

There may be some in that regime that do so, but there are so many who don't. You know, Iran is a highly educated population. And so there is in many ways a pro Western Iranian society that's very substantial that shares the aspirations to have

institutions like Sweden or like France or even like the United States.

And so therefore, since the regime is

actually part of the society.

It's possible that there is that sentiment inside the regime.

Again, your experts will know better.

The regime selects for anti Western sentiment,

not for pro Western sentiment, even covertly.

And so it's quite possible that there's

a whole lot less secret or open pro Western types inside the Iranian regime than there is in Iranian society as a whole.

But without that wanting to join the west, wanting to have a political and

economic system that approximates the most successful countries in the world, without that, you

have a more serious challenge on your

hand of eliciting capitulation.

So in the China case, we see this as well. We see these people who are victims of the Cultural Revolution, including Xi Jinping, and we think they must think that

the system was bad to them and

therefore they must incline towards reform. And so here we are trying to figure out how could they be victims of the Cultural Revolution, and yet they double down on the very Communist Party

rule that victimized them.

And the answer is because they're not pro Western, they're anti Western. They think the west is decadent, corrupt, and more than that, even anti China and out to get them. And so they're not going to capitulate, they're not going to join the West. That's a true trick.

That's an illusion.

That's an operation the CIA is running.

You know, if. If only we were running that operation.

And so the Iranian regime is an even harder case in that direction because of the Islamism. And so the population, it's one of the most secular countries in the Middle east because they've experienced, you know, Islamist rule. Yeah, right. Not Islam. We're not talking about the religion Islam. We're talking about political Islam or Islamist

rule, which is not Islam.

As you know, they've experienced it firsthand. It has failed at everything. It's impoverished them, it's imprisoned them, and they're secular. The Iranian society is very secular and often Pro west, not 100%, but significantly. So it's the regime that's not that way. And so figuring out how to appeal to the regime that's anti Western and committed to something that they sacrificed for even when they've been victimized by it, that's a harder problem. And I don't see us tackling that problem. You know, calling on women to rise

up, well, they did that already, and

they were incredibly courageous, and they suffered

the consequences of that.

Calling on the Kurds to rise up,

which I think is more coming from

Jerusalem than it's coming from Washington. And the Bellucci and these kinds of things. That's not the way you're going to rally those people who are pro Iran but think the current trajectory of Iran is self defeating. You have to figure out how to entice the pro Iranian elites with guns who hurt for their country but are suspicious of the west and may be fundamentally deeply anti Western for good reasons or bad. I'm not judging whether they have cause

or don't have cause. I'm bracketing that.

And I want to appeal to them in order to get a solution to this, which is a version of the regime that's less threatening to its neighbors and that could potentially evolve through a transition. Maybe they could agree to elections in three years or whatever it might be, or in five years or next year. And maybe the candidates can be more open than they've been with the Guardian

Council canceling all the candidates.

And maybe an investment package could be

offered for those who go along this way.

Sanctions lifted, rebuild university ties, all sorts of positive incentives.

[Justin Vogt]

Lots of carrots.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Yes. And so I'd like to see that that's, I believe, still possible, as hard as it is and as dug in

as we are about this, and we

could certainly manage to do better than we're doing now. War is always surprising. Even when you're highly prepared, you always have to adapt and react and pivot. And you know the old line from Mike Tyson, right? I had a plan and then I got punched in the face. It actually comes from von Moltke.

He wasn't a boxer. He was the head of the general staff in old Prussia and Germany.

[Justin Vogt]

I'm not sure that's where Tyson got

[Stephen Kotkin]

it, but maybe not. He got it from experience in the ring. But my point being is that you can learn, you can adapt, you can pivot if you're willing to do so. You have to be humble.

You have to be willing to admit mistakes. You have to be willing to say I got some things wrong and that I need to change. You need to be willing to settle

sometimes for less than your maximalist goals. And you need to have an agreement with the Israelis on what the war aims are.

[Justin Vogt]

Okay, that's a long list of things that we hope that we might see from Washington, from the Trump administration. I guess I would say from. From your lips to God's ear, Steve, because so far I'm not seeing any of those things from where I sit. But I want to say thank you for all of the insight that you've brought to bear on these questions, both on our pages. And just in our conversation today. Thanks again.

[Stephen Kotkin]

Thank you for this opportunity to publish in your pages and to reach all of your audience here on these podcasts. It's really an honor and it's, it's a privilege to be in this position, and I'm very grateful.

[Dan Kurtzpelin]

Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show@foreign affairs.com this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Rose Kohler and Kanish Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to original make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.