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- [00:00]
Shashank Joshi
You have a brittle regime, a weak regime, but it's not about to fall apart, although I do wish, I wish it were. And it's full of people who in some ways are younger, more radical, more ideological than the people who have been killed in large numbers in previous days.
- [00:18]
Yasha Mounk
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. Well, for the last weeks, I've been waking up every morning and looking at a few different news stories, sources, to try and understand what is happening in the war in the Middle East. And I have to say that I've had a little bit of trouble making heads or tails of it. I can tell you about all kinds of developments over the last weeks, but I struggle to actually give you a through line, to give you a real assessment of such basic questions, as to whether the United States are achieving the war aims, as to whether Donald Trump still is able to end the war if he decides to do that tomorrow, and as to how long the disruption of the world economy and of energy markets is going to last. So I invited an old friend onto the podcast to help me make sense of these questions and give me orientation in the world, something that he's uniquely able to do. Shashank Joshi was in my PhD program in political science in Harvard, so I've known him a long time. He is now the defense editor at the Economist and just one of the best observers of the world situation military affairs. We talked about all of these questions. He told us about the war of attrition between the United States and Israel on the one side and Iran on the other side, and even made some predictions about how long this war is likely to last. In the last part of this conversation, which is reserved to paying subscribers, I asked Shashank how he actually is covering the war and the ways in which the actions of the combatants is making that harder, from the blackout of the Internet in Iran to pressure by the American administration on satellite companies to not publish imagery that would usually be available in peacetime. And more importantly, I also ask him about a different subject that is close to my heart, which is the war in Ukraine. Shashank gives his assessment of of how seriously to take recent Ukrainian advances on the battle lines and of whether there is any prospect of an end to that conflict in the coming months. To listen to that part of the conversation, please go to writing. Listen, that is writing. Shashank Joshi, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:03]
Shashank Joshi
Thank you very much for having me, Ash. It's great to be back on.
- [03:05]
Yasha Mounk
Well, listen, Shash, whenever there's something that's going on in the world that I'm really confused about, I call you. And so I thought I would do that, since I feel like the longer this war goes on, the less sure I am in what to think about it. Part of this is that the war is really kind of extraordinary in the extent to which the US Administration just hasn't made a very clear case for what exactly its goals are and what exactly motivates the United States. So going not by what Trump has actually said, but going by what you take to be the kind of smartest justification for starting this conflict now, how is this war going for the United States and for Israel?
- [03:48]
Shashank Joshi
Yascha I think that it helps to think about this as a war of attrition, and each side is trying to attrit something different, but they are each having some success in doing it. And for the US Side, this is clearest, that the aim is to attrit Iran's military strength, its ability to project power from its base throughout the region. And the most obvious metric of that is Iranian missile capability. And what you have seen over the course of this conflict is that the US has had some great success in not just striking but also suppressing Iran's launches of ballistic missiles, the stockpiles of those missiles, and the most important bit, I think, for US Strategy, the production facilities for making more of those missiles, including all of the supply chain. So think about the propellant that goes into a missile. If you destroy the factory that makes it, you deny Iran the ability to make these missiles for some period of time. In addition to that, they've also destroyed the Iranian navy, which, of course, has implications for the way in which Iran could project power into the Strait of Hormuz in the future, and as well as certain, certain types of other military capabilities now. The Israeli war, I think, is a little bit different. I think the Israeli war at the operational level is about political attrition as well as the other things I talked about. It's about attritting the Iranian leadership to the point where the regime is weak, degraded, and ultimately much more susceptible to a popular protest movement that then could topple it at the conclusion of hostilities. That's not what the Israelis say in public. This is my supposition. But I think it's a reasonable supposition based on everything they have said at the beginning of the conflict and a reasonable supposition based on the sorts of things they are striking, which includes, in the last day before we spoke on Yasha Ali Larajani, a very senior official in the Iranian regime We can talk about him, as well as individual checkpoints of the Basij paramilitary militia. Now, if I'm right in saying that these are the objectives the US has met with great operational success. Iran is going to be in a really rough position with its missiles capability for some time to come when the guns fall silent. And on the Israeli side, I think there has been mixed success. If the aim is to topple the regime or to leave it effectively incapable of standing on its own two feet, I think that that is very much in doubt. I think the regime will be standing at the end of this, and I have my doubts it will be toppled by a protest movement. But the big issue, Yascha, is if that really is the aim, then it's not just how much damage you have done, it is how much damage you have done relative to the cost you've paid. And that cost includes disruption to global energy markets. It includes things like the closure of Hormuz, the huge impact on the global economy. And it also has to factor in how quickly Iran could rebuild these capabilities after a conflict. And so when I take all that into account, I come up with my view, which is that the US And Israel have been extremely successful at the military level, but their objectives politically are still confused and shifting. And ultimately, to me, the cost they have paid for achieving those has been extremely high. And this war need not have been fought in the way that it has. I think the same things could have been achieved by other means.
- [07:10]
Yasha Mounk
So I want to get more deeply into the costs that the United States and Israel and the world economy as a whole is paying for this war in a moment. But before we get there, you know, so if part of the goal of this war is to dismantle the ability of Iran to threaten its neighbors with rockets and other forms of attacks, if it is to really weaken the ability of Iran to sponsor various terrorist groups, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis, to do damage in the region. You know, to what extent has this campaign actually succeeded? If you're looking at the strategic objectives, have you dismantled their ability to do that in the short run, but actually in the long run, this is not going to make a significant difference? Or do you think that 5, 10, 15 years down the line, we're going to think Iran is a really diminished actor in the region because of the events of the last few weeks?
- [08:05]
Shashank Joshi
I think that's a great question and a difficult one. But I think in 10 years time, we will look at an Iran that is fundamentally diminished in terms of its relationship to Regional militant Islamist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi militia, the Houthis and so on. But Yasha, here's the important thing. Most of that diminishment, diminution was done prior to this conflict. Most of that was achieved in the years prior after October 23rd and the attacks of October 7th and the attacks of 2023. Right. We saw the great demolition of Hezbollah by Israel. We saw Hamas significantly weakened. We saw Iran's ability to connect to those groups greatly weakened by the collapse of the regime in sy, which was both a kind of physical and a diplomatic pivot point for Iran to project its influence towards the Mediterranean Sea. It was a greatly diminished actor, in my view. But that was the case before this war began on February 28. If you look at this war itself, what it's achieved is great damage to Iran's missiles. The Israel defense forces, the IDF, say they have destroyed about 70% of Iran's missile launches since the beginning of the war. And you can see that in the levels of missile launches towards the Gulf states, towards Israel, they have come down significantly. And I think it will take, you know, you are not going to see Iran reach the same level that it had pre war in the next 12 months, but in the next five years, I'm not so sure about that. Now, if you keep bombing Iran, you could sustainably keep stripping it away of these capabilities. But my concern is if each time you do that, if each time you mow the grass, to use that, you know, rather macabre phrase that has been used by some Israeli analysts and others, if you precipitate a global crisis, each time you do it, that, to me, is not a viable approach for keeping the Iranian regime in check. So, yes, it is weakened. There is a possibility it will stay weakened for years to come, but only with remedial action at great cost. And the last thing, Yasha, is that we still have, of course, the Iranian nuclear program, right? Ostensibly, that was the rationale of the conflict. And I don't believe that was the real rationale of the conflict. I think the administration is, I'll be quite honest with you, lying when it says this. I think it's being dishonest in its public statements about this question. I was just listening to Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, talk about this today. She was, of course, a known opponent of war with Iran prior to her appointment. And she said very clearly that Iran had made no great steps in its enrichment program. Iran had a lot of enriched uranium. It was buried under rubble at Various sites that were bombed last year, it was moving no closer to being able to weaponize that. And my big concern, Yasha, is that there is a chance, a small one, but there is a chance that what you are left with is a weakened but aggrieved and wounded regime led by people who are more radical than those who have been killed in preceding days, who will now double down on the nuclear program, even if their path to get to a bomb is still exceptionally difficult and fraught with difficulties.
- [11:12]
Yasha Mounk
So tell me a little bit more about the nuclear program, which obviously is one big part of the justification of people who are advocating for this war. Part of the absurdity here is that Donald Trump, of course, claimed that he had completely, completely dismantled the nuclear program with the strikes that he did last June. I believe at the time those intelligence assessments that the nuclear program had certainly been damaged by that much briefer bombing campaign, but that it was not fully dismantled. So, you know, that led to the absurdity that now he couldn't really say that he was starting this war because of a nuclear program, since he had claimed nine months earlier that he had seven, eight months earlier that he had completely destroyed the nuclear program. But realistically, again, where is Iran at with a nuclear program? It used to be said that they're very close to breakout, that if they really make a sprint for wanting to produce atomic weapons, they would be able to do that within a very short span of time. Was the ability of the Iranian regime to do that sufficiently damaged last June? Is it being further damaged in the bombing campaign now? Does it not make a difference? How should we think about the threat of this in the future?
- [12:20]
Shashank Joshi
So, I think on Trump's public comments last year and now, you know, I think. Was it Emerson who said consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? Right. He's not constrained by the need to be particularly consistent across these issues. The truth is that Iran last year suffered grave damage to its enrichment facilities, which are the places where it spins uranium gas, uranium hexafluoride, turns it into the more enriched kind that is comprised of a greater proportion of the most fissile isotope of uranium and that can be used in a nuclear bomb. As you know, its enrichment facilities were damaged very badly. It had them at Natanz and Fordeaux inside a mountain. And its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which was enriched to about 60%, which doesn't sound like very much, but is very, very close to 90% closer than it sounds, which is weapons grade, that was buried under rubble mostly at Isfah, which is in the middle of the country at a place called the uranium conversion facility, but some of it also at Fordeaux and Natanz. Now, yes, Iran did have other routes to a bomb. It could have set up new enrichment facilities somewhere else. But it's not clear whether it really had the centrifuges to do that or whether it could have done it without being detected. It would have had to go and get that uranium from under the rubble. Instead, what did it do? It effectively piled dirt over the tunnels of the entrances of those facilities, perhaps in fear of the a potential for a US or Israeli ground raid on those facilities. So those were effectively out of bounds. They were a problem. You know, you still have this 400 kg of enriched uranium sitting underground inside Iran, capable of being used in a bomb, but it was in no way imminently accessible. It was in no way about to be grabbed. There was no indication Iran was setting up enrichment facilities elsewhere. And it's the expertise necessary to turn those things into a usable weapons device, to, you know, shape it into a sphere, to have explosives around it, a triggering mechanism, a neutron initiator to set off a chain reaction, all of those other things you need for a bomb. Many of the people and the places involved in that enterprise which we know Iran was engaged in in the preceding 15 years, 20 years, those were killed or destroyed or bombed by Israel. Iran was not imminently about to make any substantial steps towards a nuclear weapon and it would have been some time away. Now, what has happened in the current war, Yasha? Well, basically, Iran's nuclear program has hardly been bombed to our knowledge. Right. Natanz, one of those sites I mentioned, I think the tunnels have been bombed. And there's been one other site called the Talagan II complex outside of Tehran, which is where Iran supposedly did some nuclear weapons related work, which has also been struck by Israel. We've seen dramatic satellite pictures of that with holes in the roof. But Fordeau has been touched, as far as I'm aware. Isfahan has not been touched. So a war that is ostensibly about the nuclear program actually has seen very, very little to do with nuclear forces so far, although perhaps that's yet to come. You know, we're only three weeks in. President Trump has suggested this is a four to five week campaign. Perhaps there is still more to come.
- [15:34]
Yasha Mounk
So that's remarkable that a war, the sort of most compelling rationale for which is to try and dismantle Iran's nuclear program and at least part of a stated rational for which is attempts to do so for. Again, that's complicated by the fact that Trump claims that it had basically been dismantled soon, hasn't really so far done very much to further damage Iran's ability to pursue this nuclear weapons program. We've been looking at one side of this war of attrition. Tell us about the other side of a war of attrition. Tell us about the damage that Iran has been able to do to the world economy because of its attempts to block shipping and increase the price of oil to the sort of reputation and security. Security of various places around the Gulf, including Dubai and many of the Emirates, as well as to Israel.
- [16:25]
Shashank Joshi
Well, you know, I don't need to tell you the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, which is this critical waterway. About 20% of the world's oil passes through Hormuz. And we know it includes not just oil, but also liquid natural gas, which is absolutely vital to Europe in particular, not from the Gulf. But the restrictions in the Gulf change the global gas price. But also the bit that people tend to forget, Yasha, is that the Strait of Hormuz is also absolutely incredibly important for commodities and certain types of critical commodities. Right. So the ones I think about here are things like iron ore pellets, aluminium, things like urea used in fertilizers and other areas, certain types of other critical minerals. So there is this huge knock on effect on manufacturing and not just on energy, but also on the food supply. But the immediate shock has really come in the energy markets where oil has been pushed to more than $100 a barrel. And this is partly a supply shock. It's a limitation in what you can get out if you're producing it. And in some senses that's bad, but it's not the end of the world because you will make up for that lost supply once it reopens. But there is also a production shock, have loss of production from gas fields and oil fields that have effectively been shut down amid direct attacks. And that production will never come back. That's lost production. And so this has a direct impact on global growth. And for me, the interesting thing, Yascha, is that there's a kind of externality here. The United States and Israel have launched this war for their reasons. And, you know, they have their own reasons for doing so. But the predominant cost is felt by others. It is felt by Europeans and it is felt by Asians. It's Asians who depend on the majority of energy coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. China, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Pakistan very vulnerable right now. And it is Europeans who don't get their gas from Hormuz. But if there is a choke up in the gas flow, the global gas wholesale price goes up and Europeans are priced out.
- [18:32]
Yasha Mounk
And one of the very interesting sub stories here, which Kiko Taro has written about very interestingly in the pages of Persuasion, and I'd be interested to hear whether you agree with his somewhat provocative thesis, is that in fact it's fracking that really killed Cabernet, which is to say that it is because of fracking that the United States has become basically energy independent, is much less affected by the global price of oil and gas than it used to be. Because a lot of the energy sources that the United States now consumes aren't really part of the global energy market. They get produced in the United States and they get consumed in the United States. And that's one of the reasons why this sort of increase in the price of gas and of oil has affected the United States so much less than other countries, and perhaps one of the reasons why the Trump administration was willing to wage his war in the first place.
- [19:22]
Shashank Joshi
I think you're right. I think that the US Is far less exposed to energy shocks coming out of the Gulf than America would once have been. Right. In the 1970s and 1973 oil price shock, this was a much more profound impact on the United States. And indeed, I think there was energy rationing and speed limit restrictions and all that kinds of stuff. This time around, it's different. However. However, having said that, just because America is less exposed than the rest of the world doesn't mean it is not exposed. You are still seeing an impact on petrol prices, gas prices at the pump in the United States. And for this to be done six months before midterm elections is really quite serious for Donald Trump. His polls have worsened, his prospects of losing the House and the Senate have grown. And so he is not completely immune to the consequences of the war he has unleashed at all.
- [20:16]
Yasha Mounk
The standing the poll of Donald Trump does not seem to have budged very much over the last 14 days, according to analysts like Nate Silver. So while the war is very unpopular, and while certainly any lasting damage to the economy is likely to undermine its chances in the midterms even further than they already had so far, we're not really seeing any negative trend for Donald Trump's standing report, at least over these last two weeks. What is the future of these oil flows? This is also part of this game of attrition, isn't it? Because the world is paying a very high price for these increased costs. That is both damaging to the United States in less direct ways, as we just discussed, and to many of America's allies who are going to try and pressure the United States to make sure that the price of, of gas and oil goes down. Obviously, if it somehow triggers a world recession, that is something from which the United States would suffer as well. At the same time, my understanding is that a lot of Iran's income also is dependent on some of those same straits that they are currently blocking. You know, how long could this blockade continue? Will it continue? Basically, for as long as rockets are flying and this war is hot, Could Iran continue to block those waters even after the end of a war? And what does that mean for the extent to which an end of this war still depends on the United States? If Donald Trump wakes up tomorrow and says, that's it, we've accomplished our objectives, can he basically end the war and a week from now it is over, or is that no longer in the hand of the United States in the way it might have been before the bombing started, or two or three days into this conflict?
- [21:59]
Shashank Joshi
There's a lot there, Yasha. So just to start with, first of all, we are still seeing escalation on the energy front. You know, as we're speaking and having this conversation, we've just seen an Israeli strike on the South Pas gas field in Iran. That is a gas field that Iran shares with Qatar. I think it's the world's biggest. If I'm not mistaken, I may be wrong about that. And that's a big escalation. Israel has struck Iran's oil storage tanks, but America wasn't happy about that. It was unhappy about that. In striking the gas field, it has reportedly done so with American approval. And I think it is inevitable the Iranians will try and intensify attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab oil and gas production facilities. So you are going to see a tightening of this. And I think in the coming days, it is inevitable Iran will try to aggressively go after more of the oil facilities. Now, on the Hormuz itself, here's the interesting thing. Iran has constrained the flow for other countries. However, it isn't a complete blockade. So between March 1 and March 15, there were about 89 ships that got through Hormuz. About 20% of those were Iran affiliated. Many of the others were Chinese, Greek affiliated. But they were done with deals with China, excuse me, with Iran, they were basically, it's allowing some through. So it did a deal with India to allow a couple of Indian vessels to come out. So Iran's playing a very clever game. And actually, what surprises me, Asha, is that Donald Trump hasn't said, I'm going to seize Iranian oil coming out of Hormuz myself and sell it, just like his approach to Venezuela. I'm surprised he hasn't done that, because that would keep oil flowing, keep prices down, but it would also choke off that revenue to Iran. I'm not recommending it, but I am saying I would have expected Trump to do that. Now, to get to your core point, which is, where are we on this? You know, could Trump stop this now and Hormuz reopens? My feeling is that, no, he couldn't. You know, he can call a halt to this, he can stop this, but it is now in Iran's interest to exact a heavy price for the rest of this war, if nothing else, to deter future attacks like this, to deter that purpose of periodic, sporadic mowing of the lawn that I described. And so for that to happen, they need to show they control the tempo of escalation. And right now, I think that they've shown that very well. So if Trump declared a ceasefire today, I think Iran would keep the strait closed for a certain period and then say, now we are opening it now. It's our choice to reopen the strait by force. That's a very difficult proposition. We can talk about it, but I think that's something that takes weeks and compounds the duration of this major energy shock on global markets.
- [24:43]
Yasha Mounk
Why is that Iran hasn't used this weapon in the past. What is it that changed? Which means that Iran now is saying, actually, we have control of this incredibly important waterway for the world economy, and why don't we use that as an incredibly potent bargaining tool? If they're able to do that now, why didn't they do that earlier?
- [25:05]
Shashank Joshi
Well, they have done it to some extent. If you think back to the 1980s, you had the Iran Iraq war. And as part of that, you had the tanker war, in which Iran did go after shipping in the Persian Gulf region, and. And to the point where America was eventually drawn in, in Operation Earnest Will, escorting tankers. And when one of those ships was attacked and destroyed, America then bombed Iran's navy, destroying about half of it. That was called Operation Praying Mantis. But the core of the point, Yascha, is that in the wars of the last 15 years, whether that is last year's attack on nuclear sites, whether that is, you know, the kind of shadow boxing we've seen in other parts of the region, Iran has not felt its back to the wall. Iran has not been desperate. The reason it has gone after the Hormuz is because it feels the regime is at risk and anything is worth trying. But of course, Iran is paying a cost for this as well, right? It has permanently alienated all of its Gulf allies, including those who tried to moderate, have a functioning relationship with Iran, like Saudi Arabia in recent years, including those who mediated on behalf of IR with the United States, the government of Oman. Now, what it's going to result in is a permanently militarized, very angry set of Gulf neighbors who will then also diversify their oil and gas exports to pipelines over land to the West. So this is a very costly decision for Iran. That's why it hasn't done it. It's basically pissed off a lot of countries, and not just regional countries, but also countries like China, countries like India. You know, they are not delighted by the shock to their own economies. But if you're desperate and the regime is at risk and you're going to fall, why not do it? Why not pull the temple down with you?
- [26:52]
Yasha Mounk
So speaking of that, what is the situation within Iran? I mean, part of the ostensible purpose of this war originally was regime change. It is clear that the Iranian regime is very unpopular along large stretches of the Iranian population, for of course, they also do have pockets of support, particularly among the people who profit from the regime in various ways. We saw this extraordinary wave of protests against the regime unlike anything else that has happened in the now 50 year history of a regime which ended in the slaughter of likely tens of thousands of protesters. You know, the regime is now very weakened. Many of the leading figures in the regime have been killed or seriously wounded. It is unclear to what extent. And there is a coherent command structure that is capable of actually delivering on a strategy. And yet the regime for now seems to be relatively firmly in the saddle, perhaps more firmly in the saddle than it was about two months ago. And it is clearly able to exact a lot of costs from the other side in this war of attrition that you've described for us so eloquently. So how should we think about the extent to which the Iranian regime regime is itself now in existential danger? And is there any hope of genuine political change in Iran after this conflict ends?
- [28:14]
Shashank Joshi
Well, here again, we have to keep in mind the baseline, the pre war baseline, which is that the Iranian regime was weak, weak in every sense, economically, politically, ideologically. It had lost legitimacy at home, as you described having to kill tens of thousands of its own people to survive. It was despised widely. It was economically destitute and unproductive, having squandered the wealth of its people. And, you know, it was in really poor shape. Really poor shape. The war has in some ways weakened it further. Right? It's weakened it further. And from my colleagues reporting from inside Iran say there are indications that there are growing numbers of the security services who, you know, are staying at home as you would expect them to when bombing is happening. You know, we've seen a sense of decentralized command. Command and control in Iran is weakened because, you know, you can't communicate with different branches of the government. So commanders lower down have to make their own decisions. So it is a more fragmented regime. The problem, Yasha, is that it is also fundamentally a more hardline regime than it was two weeks ago. That is the nature of decapitation. You often see that. You know, think about Hassan Nasrallah from Hezbollah. He came about because Israeli assassinations of his predecessors led to more coherent, organized, capable figures rising to the top. So look at the example of someone like Ali Larajani, right, who was just assassinated. You know, he was a really, really, really, really interesting guy. He was the head of the country's Security Council. You know, he was the kind of figurehead of the regime in recent days when Khamenei had been killed. Majtapa Khamenei, the new supreme leader, was keeping a low profile. He was probably injured, didn't want to show his face. Laurajani is a really fascinating guy, right, because he was, you know, he was a. By the way, you'll find this interesting, Yasha. He was a. He was. He taught philosophy and he specialized in the Western Enlightenment.
- [30:12]
Yasha Mounk
He was a scholar of Immanuel Kant, I think, which confirms all the bad things I always thought about Immanuel Kant. I'm joking.
- [30:18]
Shashank Joshi
Yeah. You know this. You know this already. He was also kind of an irgc, a Revolutionary Guard veteran. But if you look at his death and what has it done in the days, in the day after his death, just like in other areas, you have, you know, hardliners maneuvering to try to put in people like Saeed Jalili, who is a more hardline ideological figure. Are these people going to be more or less likely to negotiate a deal with the United States in terms of handing over nuclear material, abandoning their nuclear commitments? What are they likely to do on these issues? That is what concerns me. You have a brittle regime, a weak regime, but it's not about to fall apart, although I do wish, I wish it were. And it's full of people who in some ways are younger, more radical, more ideological than the people who have been killed in large numbers in previous days.
- [31:10]
Yasha Mounk
I think the last time I had you on the podcast, I asked you to make a prediction about what might happen and you hummed and hawed a little bit and emphasized the difficulty of doing so. And then you predicted nearly perfectly what was in fact about to happen. So. So would you care to repeat that feat in Iran?
- [31:28]
Shashank Joshi
I think this regime is still likely to survive. I think when the bombs fall silent, you may see, you will see enormous pent up anger in Iran over what this regime has invited upon the country. I have no doubt about that. I don't think there's a huge rally round the flag effect in terms of a sudden outpouring of support for the regime. But, but the population has also gone through profound turmoil. And if these attacks on energy infrastructure continue, the Iranian people are going to suffer a really rough time because they rely upon this gas for domestic electricity and production. So I worry that Iranians will turn inwards. They will focus on survival as beleaguered populations often do. And while you may see pockets of protest and unrest as the Israelis are calling for, in fact they're calling up individual IR GC commanders, telling them to stand aside and saying, if you stand aside, you'll avoid death. If you stay in service, we'll kill you. So the Israelis are trying to clear the way for this. But I still, unfortunately, would say Yasha protests will be crushed with brutal, overwhelming force. And I see a regime that will continue to atrophy and be weak, but will not necessarily crumble and dissipate, not least because there is still, still the lack of a coherent, organized opposition that could take over. And if you're Iranian, what do you fear the most? Is it the regime and its brutality and its tyranny, or is it the prospect of becoming Syria, a state that is coherent and repressive but functioning, and that then falls apart to result in warlordism and gun smuggling and ethnic warfare from Baluch Azeri and Kurdish minorities? I think that the Iranian population, although who can speak for them really, certainly not me, is deeply afraid of that.
- [33:27]
Yasha Mounk
What about the broader conflict? How long is this conflict going to go on? What is the off ramp and what is the region going to look like in its wake?
- [33:35]
Shashank Joshi
Well, this is the really tough one. I think that President Trump suggested four to five weeks. But of course we know that there's no real point in putting too much weight on anything. He says that would be foolish. I think that he failed to anticipate the scale of Iran's response, rooted in desperation, of course, failed to anticipate the intensity of their attacks on the Gulf states, failed to anticipate the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the level of military response that would be required to reopen it. I think that's the key problem. And he can now do that. But you can't just put ships in the Strait of Hormuz right now, even military ships. They would be struck by missiles. They would face an onslaught of drones, of cruise missiles, of fast attack boats, etc. You need to degrade those Iranian missile launchers on the Persian Gulf coast. You might then be in a position in a week's time or two weeks time to put some destroyers and escorts in. Although it seems without European assistance, Europeans seem very reluctant to do this. And you may begin to get some energy flowing out of hormones. And if President Trump wants to avoid a situation in which it looks as though he has terminated the war with the Strait of Hormuz, closed on terms favorable to Iran, then I think he has to do that. And that means a conflict that will stretch well into April, well into April to achieve any of those objectives. And if you do that, at the same time, you have to contend with a situation in which Iran will be in extremely difficult choice, very bad shape, but it will still be firing missiles at the Gulf states, and they will be running low of the interceptor missiles necessary to shoot those Iranian missiles down. So you may see more damage in the Gulf states, in places like Dubai, Bahrain and Riyadh, than you do today. So my baseline scenario is a war that stretches into April, but I think you have a pretty good prospect of a pause, if not a full fledged ceasefire by the end of April, if you get into maybe. I think the shock on global energy markets is so severe, is so bad that it would begin to have real, very nasty political ramifications for Donald Trump at home. There are implications on his domestic administration, as you saw, with the departure of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism center and a sort of a close ally of Tulsi Gabbard, someone who was very much from the restrainer camp of American foreign policy. And I think that that is just. Trump doesn't have the stomach for that. I don't think the president has the stomach for that.
- [36:16]
Yasha Mounk
We haven't talked very much about Israel and we haven't talked about Israel's campaign in Lebanon and what situation all of this will leave Israel in the Middle East. It seems that for the last few years, Israel has achieved a lot of its military objectives, but it also is politically weakened and isolated in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. Tell us about how you're seeing the war aims from the perspective of somebody like Benjamin Netanyahu and whether Israel is achieving them.
- [36:48]
Shashank Joshi
I think the Israelis feel pretty happy about their war aims. I think that they've done lasting damage to the Iranian regime. But I think that their attempt to try to weaken the regime to the point of collapse is looking unsuccessful at this stage. That doesn't mean it won't be successful, although I'm skeptical, as I've just said. But I think that they understood that Trump could have pulled the plug on this on day three. So they struck their priority targets on the first few days, and then they have accepted it could end at any time. So they have had a careful hierarchy of targets. I think at the end of this, they will have a weak Iranian regime and they can live with the possibility of having to attack it again. Again, because it is the region that pays the cost of that. I'm not saying Israelis don't pay the cost, because, you know, let's acknowledge the fact that Israelis have died. Iran has launched cluster munitions over Tel Aviv and other cities. You know, Israel has paid a substantial cost for this. In that sense, you know, we should always recognize that civilian cost inside Israel, but it is really the Gulf region and those countries that have borne the brunt of retaliation. So from Israel's perspective, you know, they are also, to a degree, insulated from this. And from the Israeli mentality, it has always been to buy time. It has never been to solve a problem for good. It has been to buy time. And in that respect, they would see this as a success. Now, in Lebanon, what they have had is a situation where Hezbollah is very badly weakened, but it did join the war on behalf of Iran. By the way, the Houthis in Yemen didn't, which is very interesting, because they could have caused real disruption to the Red Sea, and that would have made life even worse. Worse for oil shipments coming out of the Red Sea. But they didn't. Hezbollah did. And Israel basically sees an opportunity to say to the Lebanese state, look, either you control Hezbollah, you disarm this parastatal group, or we go in and we do it. And that's why you've seen these really destructive strikes in the heart of Lebanon. In Beirut, there is a debate in Israel that says, to what extent can we do this? Because it requires going in on the ground and in southern Lebanon up to the Litany river, occupying some of that territory and going into basically a lot of Lebanese Shia villages and finding Hezbollah arms caches, finding Hezbollah strongholds and destroying them. That carries a huge cost to those northern communities in Israel who live under rocket fire and to the reservists who are called up in going into Lebanon and conducting those missions on the ground. And I don't need to tell you, Yash, Russia, southern Lebanon is Israel's Vietnam. They recall their decades long occupation of southern Lebanon and the enormous cost that was paid by the IDF and by Israelis in pursuit of that mission. So there are many people in Israel saying, look, call it quits. Let's draw a line under this. We've had a lot of success. If you get sucked into southern Lebanon in, in the, you know, pursuit of trying to destroy Hezbollah for good, this will be disastrous for Israel, Israel's long term security, and it will bog us down. And I think that debate is underway in Israel. But the final thing to say is Bibi hasn't really paid a price politically. His support is, you know, slightly up. I think he's still unpopular, of course, you know, politically, but the war is broadly supported in Israel. And indeed, I think on the first day we had Yair Lapid, who's the leader of an opposition party, write an op ed fertility for my colleagues at the Economist in support of the campaign.
- [40:20]
Yasha Mounk
You've been following this campaign very closely for the Economist, and you wrote a really interesting article about how the way in which people now follow campaigns generally relies on a lot of open source intelligence and so on. And some of it, open source intelligence has disappeared over the course of the last weeks at the pressure of the US Administration. How have you been trying to keep up with all of these developments and how has the US tried to roll back some of the publicly available information to make it harder for its enemies, among others, to use that information?
- [40:52]
Shashank Joshi
You're right, Yasha. First of all, let's begin with the fact that the Internet has been shut down in Iran. And that's a huge problem in terms of us who want to get news out of Iran. You can still get some of it. There are Starlink terminals. And by the way, that's one of the great things that Elon Musk and the United States government has done, which is try to get Starlink terminals inside Iran. A great commitment to kind of openness and freedom of communication that I think Is is one of the few steps I really applaud the administration for in this process. But that's not enough. And so we rely on commercial satellite images to see a lot of what's happening, right? So we rely on it to see when there was a strike, an American strike on the girls, a girls school in Minab in Iran, which was a catastrophic error of targeting. I relied on satellite images to see the damage that was done. What has happened is satellite companies in the United States, like Planet Labs and like Van't or formerly called Maxar, have realised the risk is that by publishing these things in the past, that was not a big deal because you had single one off Iranian missile strikes like against Al Assad air base in Iraq in 2020 after the Soleimani assassination last year, after Operation Midnight Hammer, an attack on Al Udeid air base in Qatar. Publishing an image of the strike wasn't a huge problem because Iran was, was kind of doing the strike in a very symbolic way and it wasn't doing follow on strikes. Now, in a campaign that is lasting weeks and weeks and weeks, when you publish that image, the risk is that Iran can use it to refine its targeting. It can say, look, I know I hit that building right to the left of the American radar. I'm now going to aim slightly differently next time. So satellite companies have worried about this and they're trying to be responsible and they have shut down the flow of images. They've put a two week delay on this in the case of Planet and other companies won't even release any images, including of Iran itself. That is a huge problem at the same time because it makes it much, much less amenable to scrutinizing the conduct of all sides in this conflict, including the Iranians, but also the Americans and the Israelis. When they conduct targeting inside Iran, it shuts off our ability to see that conflict. The Trump administration at the same time has been putting pressure on satellite companies to say, stop doing this, stop publishing these things, we don't want you to do it. And of course they have enormous regulatory control. I think the interesting question in the longer run, Yascha, is to what degree do Chinese and Russian companies step into the breach Right now? They don't have an awful lot of imagery, but we're beginning to see them publish some quite interesting stuff.
- [43:28]
Yasha Mounk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. To listen to the rest of this conversation in which Shashank explains to us how he covers the war and why that has become so difficult over the last weeks, as there has been a total blackout on the Internet in Iran and many of the satellite images that American companies usually publish have no longer been available. And in which we talk about the war in Ukraine, about the ways in which Ukraine's defenses have defied expectations, making some moderate progress in the last months. But the war in Iran may actually be helping Russia, in part by fortifying its economy. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support the work we do here, to make sure that you get every episode in full length, without ads, directly into your favorite podcast app, Please go to writing.dotmonk.com Listen. That's writing.
- [44:31]
Shashank Joshi
Sam.