← The Lawfare Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
Advertisement Voice
Tired of your car insurance rate going up? Even with a clean driving record, you're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit Jerry AI acast today.
- [01:19]
John Limbert
O un historial Persona familiar de cancer de colon paramas informacion en espanol Visita cologuard punto com diagonal. So from the very beginning, the US Developed this reputation in Iran as being hands off, non imperialist. And for those people who actually bothered to study American history, they saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire. So you can see why on multiple levels, the United States was really appealing to Iranians.
- [01:56]
Ariane Tabatabai
Ariana it's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Ariane Tabatabhai, public service fellow here at Lawfair and with John Razvinian today. He is the author of America and A History, 1720 to the Present.
- [02:10]
John Limbert
To me, what's always very important is to recognize that for the vast majority of the history of these two countries, they have actually been very not just friendly, but have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, you know, a really warm, if sometimes idealized idea of each other, and that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly.
- [02:28]
Ariane Tabatabai
Today we're going to zoom out of the ongoing war with Iran and US Iran policy to talk about U. S Iran relations and their history. John I want to start by talking about your vantage point as a historian of the relationship and what the sort of origin story of this relationship is. Because when you ask most Americans where this history begins, it often starts with 1979 and the hostage crisis. For many Iranians, I think you would probably hear 1953 and the coup, which we will talk about. But for you, how does it all start? Your book starts in the 1700s. So what should folks know about this history? Zooming out a little bit from the ongoing tensions.
- [03:14]
John Limbert
I came to this topic as an Iranian American who was curious about the history between these two countries. Basically, as someone who was a trained historian and a journalist, I felt I had some kinds of skills to bring to this. But I think fundamentally I came to this with curiosity, you know, as I think everyone or many people, I guess Many of us who are Iranian and American at the same time and have some curiosity about the extremely fraught and extremely tense relationship between these two countries. You know, we ask ourselves questions about, well, why, how did this begin? You know, what you know. And as a historian, I'm of course particularly curious about the origin story, the beginning. You know, everything has a history. How did this start? So, you know, I will be completely honest and say that that was, that was kind of where I came from on this. And I think that's the kind of question that I get a lot from people as I was working on the book as well as since the book has come out, which is, okay, help us understand why these two countries hate each other so much. What's going to happen? Where is it all going? Who started it? You know, what's the problem? You know, which is, which are all very reasonable questions to ask. Anytime there is a conflict, it is natural to ask, well, who started it? Whose fault is it? But the problem is history doesn't really work that way. And I don't think it's a really useful way to approach history. So what I was trying to do was to ask what I thought were maybe deeper questions. So, for example, when you ask yourself, well, who started it? Whose fault is it? Where did it all go so wrong? There are a lot of other questions that are embedded in that, which is, for example, first of all, there's the assumption that history is some sort of courtroom drama where somebody needs to adjudicate, where Judge Judy needs to come along and say, it's your fault, you need to pay so and so this much for the damages that you caused. You know, history is not that simple. But I think also embedded in these questions is this idea that if everything went so wrong, that perhaps things were great at one point, maybe things weren't so bad. And so then I've become curious about, well, if things, you know, if we're asking ourselves, you know, where did it go wrong? Maybe we should ask ourselves, where did it go right or did it ever go right? Was there ever a golden age of US Iran relations? These are all the kinds of questions. I was trying to grapple with this in this book. And of course there's something quirky perhaps about going all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century. You know, we don't typically think about this as a 300 year relationship. And there are reasons why I, I went back that far. You know, I found as a historian, my first question was, well, where do I begin this story? And you mentioned 1979 and 1953. These are two huge dates in the history of U. S. Iran relations. And I think I would. I think at this point we can say that 2026 is the third big date in US Iran in the history of US Iran relations. Will almost certain down in history that way. But the historian I want to get to out of myself looking back, those are the two big dates. Right. But I think I had a bit of an issue with this because you're right for a lot of not just Americans, but I think for people who fundamentally have a favorable view of the United States and foreign policy, I think is a better way of saying it and a fundamentally critical and negative view of Iran or the Islamic Republic. It is natural to want to begin the history in 1979 because that's when the Islamic revolution, the Iranian revolution took place. When fanatical students got a little out of hand and took the American embassy hostage and held its employees hostage for well over a year and brought about eventually the rupture in diplomatic relations between these two countries. So it's easy to say that's where it all went wrong. Everything before that was great and everything since then has been terrible and Iran has become this evil terrorist state at the heart of the Middle east that has done nothing but cause havoc and destruction of the US Iran relationship in addition to other things as well. Fine, perfectly reasonable narrative to have. There is an equally reasonable narrative that a lot of Iranians have, or shall we say people who are less sympathetic to American foreign policy and more sympathetic perhaps to the Iranian nationalist narrative. Which is 1953, which is the year in which a CIA backed coup brought down the very popular elected government of Mohammad Mossad, the Prime Minister of Iran, who had committed the great sin in the eyes of the west of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and saying that Iran's oil profits belong to the Iranian people. Which is a very popular position for a 1950s sort of third world nationalist to take. But it was of course extremely unpopular with the British oil company at the time, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, which later became British Petroleum or BP as we know it today. So for a lot of Iranians or Iranian nationalists, the story begins there. And there was this idea that everything was fine until the CIA came along and overthrew the government and then caused, you know, that then helped the Shah at the time, the king, to solidify his rule, which became increasingly dictatorial through the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly reliant on American support and of course resulted in the famous blowback or, you know, backlash of 1979. And that is a perfectly reasonable narrative to take as well. But both of these narratives assume this kind of perfect, idyllic past, Right? This prelapserian kind of, you know, perfect kind of paradise. Again, we all know that U.S. iran relations before 1979 were not perfect. They relied on a state to state relationship between the United States and, you know, a deeply, increasingly unpopular and dictatorial and quite ruthless monarchy. And we also know that before 1953, although this is often more vague to people, but we know that US Iran relations were perfect. It was a perhaps more innocent time, But a lot of people forget that the US and Iran actually first broke off relations in 1935 because of a dispute that grew out of a speeding ticket that was given to the Iranian ambassador in rural Maryland, in a town called Elkton, Maryland. So things were far from perfect. So I wanted to go back a bit further and say, well, where should we begin this history? Should we begin it with diplomatic relations in the 1880s, the first exchange of ambassadors? Sure. But then you're writing a purely diplomatic history, a purely political history. And relationships between countries are not always just political and diplomatic. So I thought, okay, maybe I'll start the history, as some people do in the 1830s with the first arrival of Presbyterian missionaries in Iran from the United States, people who went there to build schools and clinics and also to proselytize Christianity, proselytize the locals into Christianity. But I thought, you know, what. What about sort of prehistory? I mean, there is a prehistory sometimes even before people come into contact with each other, the kind of preconceived notions that they have of each other. And I discovered, much to my surprise, that colonial American newspapers as early as the 1720s were obsessed with Iran. And so I'll sort of stop there and say that's why I took the history as far back as I did.
- [09:45]
Ariane Tabatabai
Okay, well, now I want to hear about those newspapers. And what were they saying about Iran or Persia at the time?
- [09:52]
John Limbert
Yeah. On a sort of whim, I put the word Persia and Persians into a search engine at the time, trying to look into these colonial newspapers. And I didn't expect to find anything. But what I found was that these newspapers were full of stories about Persia, as they called it at the time. Sometimes a quarter or as much as a third of the newspaper was news about Iran. And I thought, this makes no sense to me. Why in 1722, 1725, 1724, are newspapers published in colonial Philadelphia, in Boston, that come out once a week and that are three pages or four pages. Why do you have a whole page about Iran at the very beginning? You had. You even came across one newspaper from 1724 that said. Whose lead story said, we regret that we have no news from Persia this week. That was the headline story in colonial North America. In 1724, the leading story in the newspaper was, we're sorry, we have no news about Iran this week. Now, that is a little strange. And there are reasons for this. Some of it is just pure coincidence. The very, very first printing presses that started producing weekly newspapers in colonial North America in 1720 happened to sort of be in the early 1720s. And the big international news story of the day in 1722 was the collapse of the Persian Empire, one of many Persian empires throughout history. The last really big kind of glorious Persian empire, the Safavid Empire. And it was at the hands of these Afghan rebels who were rebelling it because the Persians were trying to force them to convert from Sunni to Shia Islamic. And the Americans, the colonial Americans, American settlers at the time, mistakenly believed that because this was a sort of Sunni Shia thing, that therefore the great Sunni evil empire of its day, which was the Ottoman Empire, as they saw it, must be somehow putting the Afghans up to this. Now, they actually weren't. But this was a really. This is a really telling window into the psyche of colonial North Americans before they ever came into contact with Iran, which was that the great evil empire of its day was the Ottoman Empire. Now, remember, in 1722, it had only been about 40 years since the Ottoman Empire in, you know, 1683 had actually come to the gates of Vienna. So for white settlers of North America in the 1720s who saw themselves as Europeans, as British subjects, this was the great. The great threat to Christendom, to European Christianity, the Ottoman Empire. And so they saw the Persian Empire, which they knew had been fighting wars with the Ottomans for years. And in many cases, those wars had a sort of subtle sumit, kind of rivalry embedded in them as well. That they were somehow the enemy of my enemy was my friend. And the Persians were just to the east of the Ottoman Empire. They were seen as more exotic, more oriental, less Muslim. You actually had newspapers at the time saying, this is the holy war between, quote, Muslims and Persians, which is a very interesting way of describing it, right? As if somehow Persians or Shia Muslims were somehow not as Muslim or even not Muslim at all. It was a lot of wishful thinking. You know, they even tried to explain to readers the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam, not very well, sort of said that the Shia worship ali, which is not quite right. But, you know, they were trying. And this was really important to them for some reason. And the reason had to do with biblical inheritance as well, because in the Bible, the Persians come out looking much better than the Babylonians. And so a lot of this kind of stuff was overlaid into all of this. I don't want to get into too much detail of this right now here, but fundamentally, this idea that beyond the evil empire of the east, beyond the Arabs and the Turks and the Ottomans, just to the east, there was a more idyllic, more beautiful, more oriental, more kingdom that was less hostile, less Muslim somehow. I would argue that that mentality stayed with Americans right through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, because as late as the 1970s, you could see on American television Iran being described in this way. You had the Arab oil embargo and these evil Arabs, and they're socialists and they want to destroy Israel and they want to keep oil out of the international markets, and we're all having to queue up at gas lines and. But just to the east, you have this nice idyllic shah and he has this glamorous wife, this empress and so on, and they love America and they're anti communist and they're all these things that we want them to be. You can, and I won't do it here, but you can draw a straight line to connect those dots from the 18th century all the way to the 1970s.
- [14:21]
Ariane Tabatabai
So we've talked a little bit about how Americans perceived Persians, Iranians, you know, throughout the kind of the several centuries that you. You study, what does it look like from the Iran perspective? How are Iranians, or before that, Persians, I guess, seeing this nascent country, the revolution, the kind of like the Civil War and all of the events that follow bring us up to, let's say, 1945. How are Iranians seeing things?
- [14:54]
John Limbert
It's funny because there's an exact parallel. They also had this idyllic view of Americans. It's hard for Americans to understand this today, but until, well, throughout the 19th century and even into the early 20th century, in some parts of the world, including in Iran, the United States was seen as basically a European country, a country that was to the far flung Western fringes of Europe. Even after the American Revolution, there was a lingering kind of psychological view of the United States as fundamentally a very, very distant Western European country. Kind of like Iceland or Greenland. Right. Sort of far flung way out to the west. But still basically part of European civilization in the 19th century. So the Iranians came to this a bit later than the Americans, because in the 18th century, in the sort of 1700s, when these American newspapers were coming out, Iranians didn't really think very much about America. It was called the Yengidonia, the New World. It was seen as this land of cannibals and, you know, savages and so on. I mean, much as, you know, much as it was described in a lot of the European literature as well at the time. It wasn't until Iran began to really decline as a power in the sort of 1820s, 1830s, 40s, 1850s, 1860s, that Iranians started to become a bit more curious about the United States. And there were several reasons for this. One is that Iranians felt themselves to be the inheritors of a kind of a great empire, but recognized that they were increasingly much weaker than the European great powers of the time, particularly Britain and Russia, which were both interfering a lot in Iranian affairs and putting a lot of pressure on it. Remember, Iran was a sovereign country at this point. It was never colonized by Britain or by Russia formally, but increasingly throughout the 19th century in the south, the British exercised huge sphere of influence in Iran, even if they didn't call it that, and the Russians did the same in the north. Iranians felt increasingly resentful. A new generation of Iranian nationalists began to feel very. And reformists began to feel very resentful of this kind of European sort of soft imperialism. At the same time, they recognized, listen, these guys are onto some things that we're not. They have better weapons, they have. They have more dynamic economies, they have more dynamic politics. We are basically a decaying Eastern civilization. This was the way they saw it. We need to learn some things from the Europeans, otherwise we're going to lose this battle. We're just going to get taken advantage of. But they didn't like learning things at the losing end of a gun barrel, right? Nobody likes that. So what they. When they looked at the United States, they saw basically, as they saw a European country that had all of the nice things that they liked about or that they felt they should be learning from, from Europe, better technology, more dynamic economies, et cetera, et cetera, but without the imperialism and the greed. What they saw when they looked at Americans in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the only experience they had with Americans was Presbyterian missionaries who were building schools and clinics and yes, kind of talking about Jesus as well. But at this point, they were pretty low key. The missionaries didn't try to proselytize the majority Muslim population, mostly because there would be a penalty of death for trying to do that. So instead they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian and Jewish communities, or, excuse me, Christian communities, my apologies, they largely left the Jews alone as well. But they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian community, which they felt followed a kind of deformed, decaying version of Christianity that had been inherited from kind of Eastern Christianity centuries earlier. So we're talking about the Armenians, the Assyrians, Chaldeans, who they referred to kind of disparagingly as Nestorians, followers of nestor from the 4th century. Basically, they looked at the American Presbyterians from New England, looked at these guys and thought, they aren't real Christians. They need to be exposed to a better form of Christianity. So they showed up in Iran. But they would, they were, they were very indirect about it. Instead of trying to go out there and Bible thumping, what they would do instead was build schools, clinics, promote literacy and modern hygiene and things like that, and hope that they would, by doing this, they would uplift the condition of local Christian communities and that then eventually the Muslims and the Jews would also look at these and say, oh, these guys are doing way better than we are. Maybe we should think about Christianity as well. I mean, it was a very convoluted road and a very low key kind of approach to missionary work. And the reason I say this is because ultimately what that meant is that they didn't really convert anyone. I mean, they converted a couple hundred people. The missionaries were there for a century from 1835 to 1935. And in that hundred years, they converted a grand total of about 200 people to American style Presbyterian Christianity. What they did that had way more impact was the schools and the clinics and the uplifting of people's lives and the kind of positive impact that they actually ended up having in a lot of ways. So when Iranian reformists and nationalists looked at Americans in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, they didn't see the US still had no embassy in Iran. Right. Which was unusual because there were Anglican missionaries from England as well. And they were, you know, they were Orthodox missionaries from Russia, but they had embassies, governments that were backing up what they were doing. And so the Russian and British missionaries and the French missionaries as well came across to Iranians as sort of fifth columnists, as sort of tools of their government. Whereas the Americans were just, you know, these kind of innocent, kind of scrawny, you know, School teachers from, you know, Amherst, Massachusetts that were like, you know, trying to help teach people about vaccines or, you know, give them literacy or translate the Bible into, you know, into Assyrian. And the American government had no interest in Iran. So from the very beginning, the US developed its reputation in Iran as being hands off, non imperialist. And for those people who actually bother to study American history, they saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire. So you can see why on multiple levels the United States was really appealing to Iranians. They saw it as this anti imperialist country, this kind of hands off, low key, kind of harmless Western European country that had all the things they liked about Europe and none of the things they didn't like. And the reason I'm going on so much about this is because this also mentality remained with Iranians throughout the 19 educated Iranians, especially throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. And that's what was lost in 1953. Mohammad Mossaddegh himself, the prime minister, this great nationalist prime minister who was a hero to Iranians, who was overthrown by the CIA in the 1920s. You should see the wonderful things he had to say about the United States. He was a great nationalist who hated the idea of any kind of foreign interference. But when Morgan Schuster, the financial advisor, was sent in 1911 by the American government, by the Taft administration to help reorganize Iran's finances, he became a sort of hero to Iranian nationalists because he stood up to the Russians and so on. Ten years later, when Iran, Iran's constitutional government, wanted to actually bring another financial advisor, a lot of people said, we need to bring back shoes there, we need Americans, etc. Mossad was a great nationalist and he said, we don't need, we need, we need to get our own finances in order. We don't need foreigners coming and doing this. But if anyone, you know, if we have any kind of warm feelings towards any country, it's the United States. You know, even as late as 1953, when Eisenhower was giving his approval to the coup that was going to overthrow Mossadegh, three weeks later, you know, he wrote a letter to Eisenhower. He had no idea any of this was being planned. But the British were sanctioning Iranian oil and they were starving the Iranian economy. And it was Eisenhower that Mossadegh chose to write to, because even at that late moment, three weeks before he was overthrown by the CIA, he believed that if there's one country that would understand Iran's, plight, it would be the United States. And that says a lot about the lingering attitude that Iranian nationalists had over the hundred years or so from the 1840s through the 1940s.
- [23:00]
Ariane Tabatabai
So I do want to pause briefly on the Schuster comment because I do think that it is really fascinating. Actually, it's a really nice vignette to maybe flesh out just very briefly a little bit. You know, he wrote this book called the Strangling of Persia, which is very much kind of from an American perspective, talking about how Persia at the time is stuck between these great powers that you've been describing in your research. Is this something that other Americans were seeing? Where was this kind of like a personal perspective from one guy who just happened to be there? Or is this something that you see come up a lot in kind of the writings that you've read from the missionaries and others who, who were. Who. Who spent time in. In Persia and then in Iran?
- [23:42]
John Limbert
Yes, to some extent, the Presbyterian missionaries, you know, did a lot of, you know, they would come back home to fundraise and they would talk, they would sort of give little presentations about Iran. And, you know, why you should give us more money, because look at all the good work we're doing there. And in the process, they were kind of educating about Iran. But I would actually argue that Schuster played a fundamental role in transforming the American, American ideas about Iran. Before Morgan Schuster, Americans had almost no idea about Iran. I mean, they had these very kind of outdated Orientalist ideas or biblical ideas about Iran or classical ideas about the Persian, classical Persian empire. But in 1911, when, after Schuster was kicked out of Iran by the Russians, because he. So he was sent by, you know, said by President Taft, you know, as part of a kind of goodwill mission to help reorganize Iran's finances and so on. He became very popular among Iranian nationalists because he said the fundamental problem is British and Russian imperialism. And he kept trying to help, that Iran needed to stand on its own feet and so on. And he became very popular. But he became very unpopular with the Russians, who basically invaded Iran and booted shifts throughout the country. And as he left the country, his motor car that was leaving Tehran, the route was lined with people waving American flags. But when Shuster returned to the US this is the part of the story that doesn't always get appreciated. He became a kind of national celebrity. He became the first celebrity pundit on Iran in the United States. There was a stampede in Philadelphia to hear him speak. The police had to get called out with barricades and he was at the Carnegie hall the day before. I mean, it sold out. Everyone wanted to hear what Morgan Schuster had to say. He was a young kind of good looking guy, you know, who, kind of, who was in all the magazines at the time talking about Iran, how it was being strangled by these British and Russian imperialists and so on. And so when he came out, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. And you know, after that, you know, there was a, I think it's possible to see a kind of a little spike in sort of American, to some extent Orientalist. Yes, but kind of American kind of fantastical ideas about Iran and what a beautiful country it is. And you know how it's. People want, people wanting to learn more about it. And the National Geographic started doing more stories about Iran and so on in its early days. So I think she played a pretty fundamental role in that.
- [26:05]
Ariane Tabatabai
Okay, so we've talked about a couple of centuries going back a couple of centuries. I'm going to come Back to post 1945. So, you know, in the aftermath of World War II and in both wars, we should just kind of briefly say that, you know, Persia and then Iran was dragged into the conflict because of the kind of, you know, the influence of the various countries that we've talked about, the Brits, the Russians, et cetera. So what happens in 1945? You have a new king who ends up being the last king, Right. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who takes over. He tries to continue the modernization work of his father. Part of that is kind of building that relationship with the United States. What does that relationship start to look like from 1945 until 1945? 53. And you know, often I think part of what you, you've mentioned this, people talk about this alliance that Iran and, and the US had. Not really an alliance, but that's a separate story. But what, yeah. What are the tension points that exist there? What does the relationship look like?
- [27:05]
John Limbert
So Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran, came to power in 1941, the beginning in the middle of the Second World War. He, he more than any other king, more than any other leader in Iranian history, by far, no comparison, had a very, very close relationship with the United States. To understand why, you have to, I think, understand his father's reign a little bit. His father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was king from 1926 to 1941, came to power as this kind of great nationalist king who wanted to reduce the role of the British in Iran. In particular, these Russians had already kind of taken themselves out of the game a little bit after the Soviet revolution. They had said that they were going to stop interfering in Iranian affairs. So the British were really much more influential in Iran. The 1920s. Reza Shah ended a lot of the British concessions by 1927, built this kind of militaristic Iranian state. But he was a ruthless dictator. This is the Shah's father in the 1920s and 1930s was very unpopular by the end of his Reign. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Reza Shah declared Iranian neutrality. Iran had always been a neutral power and it was technically neutral in the First World War as well, although no one actually respected that neutrality. For the first two years of the Second World War, the Allied powers, the us, the Soviet Union and the UK kind of tolerated Iranian neutrality. They didn't really care enough. But as they needed Iran's oil more and as the German presence became much more noticeable in Iran informally. But there were a lot of German spies running around in Iran in 1939, 40 and then as the Western Front got closed off to the Soviets by Hitler in 1941, suddenly Iran became strategically much more important because Reza Shah had built a railway connecting the Persian Gulf in the south to the Caspian Sea in the north, which for the Americans who were trying to get lend lease supplies from British positions in the Persian Gulf up to their Soviet allies in the Soviet Union, in the Russia, the only way to do that now, the only other way to do that was either through the northern route around Archangel, you know, this sort of extremely cold northern route, or through Iran using the Trans Iranian railway. So for all of these reasons, the allies demanded that Reza Shah declare or end his neutrality and join the allies or else he said no. Iran was invaded by the Soviets from the north and by the British from the south. And Reza Shah was overthrown and sent into exile in 1941. His son Muhammad Reza comes to power in the shadow of all of this in September of 1941 as a 21, he's about to turn 22. He has seen what's happened to his father. His father, who 15 years earlier had said, oh, we're going to boot the British out and we're going to declare our own. We're going to be much more, stand on our own feet much more and build this great military. And he did. He built one of the largest armies in the Middle East. And so none of it actually made any difference. When push came to shove, the British and the Russians just moved in and within three weeks occupied Iran and removed his father from power. So the Shah never, the younger Shah never forgot that lesson. He said, look. He looked around and he said, look, you can't anger the British and the Russians and the British and the Soviets. Like, you know, these are great powers of their day. But what we need is a third ally, one that we can sort of wave in their faces. And this was not new. This was actually a kind of an unofficial part of Iranian foreign policy dating back to the 1860s, 1840s really, and Amir Kabir and Nasser Al Din shah from the 1840s and 50s. This is part of their policy as well. It's why the Iranians first started to get interested in the United States. But the culmination of this in 1941 was the new young Shah saying, we need a strategic alliance or relationship, I guess, with the United States. The United States is the great up and coming power of its day. It's clear that the British Empire is spent after this war. And they were, they were bankrupt after the war. The Soviets, you know, have their own issues, but if we have, if we are close friends with the United States, the British and the Soviets won't mess with us as much. And he was right about that to some extent. Because, you know, when the Americans entered the war, they forced the British and the Soviets to sign a tripartite agreement that promised that they would vacate Iranian soil within six months of the war, which ended up becoming really important because the Soviets turned out not to want to vacate Iran within six months of the, of the war, in fact. And so the Americans had to really pressure them to do that. So from the very end of the war in 1945, the Shah sees the US relationship as strategically very important to the United States. He's young, he's untested, and the Americans are also very grateful to have him as a kind of anti communist leader, because as soon as the war ends, of course, the US suddenly perceives itself to be a sort of soft war or cold war, famously with the Soviet Union. And it really values regional allies like the Shah's Iran. And this becomes more and more important throughout the 50s and 60s and 70s.
- [32:06]
Benjamin Wittes
Hey folks, I want to tell you a story about the founding of Lawfare. I started Lawfare and it was just a blog. And then we realized we had to create an organization to support it. And all of a sudden I found myself doing paperwork, forms, logistics, personnel stuff. It just completely ate up my day. And I want to say I was bad at it. And it was repetitive, it was boring, and I thought to myself, there has to be an easier way to do this. I didn't know about Gusto at the time, and in retrospect, I wish we had. Small business life means hustling and figuring it all out a lot of times on your own, and I did it a lot of times on my own, and it was bad. But you don't have to make the same mistakes I did. You don't have to spend your evenings guessing at tax forms or tracking down onboarding documents. Gusto handles all of that so that you can spend your time on the parts of your business you actually love. Like in my case, running a magazine about national security and law. That part I love. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software system built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use so that you can pay, hire onboard, and support your team from anywhere. You save time with automated tools that are built right into the system. Offer letters, onboarding materials, direct deposit, and more. It's automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workman's comp, 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. So try Gusto today@gusto.com Lawfair and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months free payroll@gusto.com LawFair one more time Gusto.com LawFair
- [34:45]
Advertisement Voice
tired of your car insurance rate going up? Even with a clean driving record, you're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence, Download the Jerry app or visit Jerry AI acastod.
- [36:05]
John Limbert
Familiar de Cancer de Colonial Diagonal. Hello listeners. Meet Lisa.
- [36:17]
Advertisement Voice
Hey there.
- [36:18]
John Limbert
Lisa runs an online boutique specializing in sustainable fashion. With Acast, she found a whole new way to reach eco conscious shoppers.
- [36:25]
Advertisement Voice
Yep, I recorded a quick ad targeted listeners interested in fashion and sustainability using Acast's audience attributes targeting feature and set my budget. Before I knew it, people all over were hearing about my shop.
- [36:37]
John Limbert
Now that's a smart way to grow your business. Hey, Lisa, what's trending right now?
- [36:41]
Advertisement Voice
Shopping sustainably. And my sales, of course.
- [36:44]
John Limbert
Start reaching your ideal audience through podcast ads with Acast. Visit go.acast.com advertise to get started.
- [36:56]
Ariane Tabatabai
So now let's talk about 1953. So, you know, the Yangsha has a little over a decade to kind of get settled. And then you have the famous events, or infamous events, we should say, of 1953. You mentioned briefly that it had to do with Iranian oil being nationalized. Tell us a little bit more about the events that lead to the coup itself and the US Role in the coup, because it doesn't actually start with the United States. Right. It starts with a US ally. So how did, how did we end up in this moment that essentially becomes a defining moment in this relationship?
- [37:34]
John Limbert
Absolutely. I mean, the story of 1953, of course, is pretty well known and lots of people have written about it much better than. With much more authority than I have. But look, the short version is that by the late 40s and early 50s Iran, there's a new generation of young, educated, middle class Iranians who are really passionate about the idea that they should control their own oil resources and their own money. And their hero is a guy named Mohamed Mossadegh. He was a parliamentarian, and he is elected prime minister in 1951 on an explicit platform of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and kicking the British out, because they had had a monopoly on Iranian oil since 1907, and Iran had seen almost no money from almost 50 years of British oil exploration in Iran, despite having one of the largest reserves of oil in the world. And Iranians were pretty fed up with this. And Mossadegh made this his kind of cause. But he was also a great democrat and a great believer in self determination and that Iranians should not just control their own oil money, but they should also control their own destiny as a people. Which meant that he was not a huge fan of absolute dictatorship. He was a monarchist. Like any mainstream politician of his day, he was absolutely loyal to the monarchy, but he felt that the Shah, the king, should reign and not rule. In other words, he should become a sort of constitutional monarch in the European tradition. Mossadegh himself was a trained constitutional lawyer who had been, you know, who had received his education in Switzerland, in France, and he was a great admirer of the Western constitutional legal tradition. This might be of some interest to your kind of legal listener lawyer listeners. He was really the first Iranian to receive that kind of training in the early 1900s, actually. And he was an old man by the time he became prime minister in 1951. But he became a hero to these young Iranian liberals and nationalists who felt he wanted more democracy, more, say, more popular participation, and who wanted the British out and who wanted Iranian control over Iranian assets. He became prime minister in 1951. Immediately, the British felt. The government of Winston Churchill felt that this was not acceptable, because within three weeks of Mossadegh becoming prime minister, the Parliament passed a very popular nationalization bill. And the British then fought an epic battle over the next two years with Mossadegh, with his government trying to imposing sanctions and military blockades and so on, trying to starve the Iranian economy and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They kept trying to convince the Americans to join in this, because in 1952, Mossadegh gets wind of the fact that the British are actually plotting to overthrow him, and he breaks off relations with the United Kingdom. He says this is not what diplomacy should be about. And he closes the British Embassy, kicks out all the British diplomats and so on. So the British are now no longer in a position to be able to overthrow him, and they try to convince the Americans to do it instead. And in 1952, the United States is still led by Harry Truman and his government, and his administration is dead set against the idea of a kind of imperialistic, kind of dirty tricks campaign to overthrow a foreign government. State Department, run by Dean Atchison at the time, was famously full of kind of, you know, sort of New England liberals who didn't really, you know, who were strident anti communists, but believed that the way to fight communism was by, you know, giving, you know, giving people more, you know, kind of more bread and, you know, thus, you know, kind of, you know, fewer weapons, right? This idea of, you know, we needed more social welfare programs and education and healthcare and things like that, and that would make people less willing to turn to communism. The Republicans famously had a completely different approach, which is that the only way to defeat communism was to build up Third World governments militarily to avoid any kind of Soviet invasion, and then worry about kind of, you know, internal domestic development. It was just two very different ways of seeing things. So when the Republicans finally came out of the wilderness in 1953, remember, they had not held the White House for more than 20 years. And when Eisenhower was elected on a kind of wave of red terror and kind of red baiting, and the idea and the sort of McCarthy era overlapped with this, the Churchill's government saw that they had a fellow traveler, they had someone who they could talk to in the United States. And they immediately got to work on the incoming Eisenhower administration tried to convince them that Mosaddev was flirting with communism, which he absolutely was not. He was a strident anti communist, but he had a big tent, kind of a big umbrella for his governing coalition. And, you know, that included all, all manner of leftists as well as, you know, religious, you know, conservatives and so on. Long story short, they, the incoming, the Dulles brothers, the head of the CIA and the State Department, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, were very much open to this argument. And they convinced President Eisenhower that, that Mossadegh was not to be trusted. And that a freewheeling, very open, very liberal democratic government in a country like Iran was going to be inherently unstable and could inherit and easily be manipulated by the Soviets. And that Mossadegh had to go. And so they put into operation Operation Ajax, which had been basically a plot that had been fed to them by the British. And the CIA did the dirty work of the British for them. And what that meant was that the United States was never forgiven. Over the next 25 years, and the Shah was, for the next quarter century of his rule, was seen as a, basically as an American puppet, as a guy who owed his throne to the United States and to the CIA. That reputation never left, which might have been fine had he not also gradually drifted towards autocracy and dictatorship and human rights abuses by the 1970s. So now you had a very unpopular dictatorial government that were seen as overly pro American as well. And of course that had famous repercussions for the United States and me.
- [43:30]
Ariane Tabatabai
Rob, before we actually talk about that period and then the revolution briefly. You know, one of the things that's been really interesting to me, watching the war play out, is the amount of kind of commentary around the 1953 coup that is being, you know, it's almost become a meme, right, in many circles where people talk about, by the way, Iran had this democratic couple government. We overthrew it. And you know, this is like basically the extent of what people tend to say about it. On the other side, I think on the right, you've seen kind of folks write about what we have gotten wrong historically about 1953. And perhaps we've overplayed the role of the United States and the kind of scholarship on the topic. Can you briefly kind of, you know, opine on the different, you know, what do people get right and what do they get wrong about 19, 1953? What are the myths that are sort of floating around this notion.
- [44:24]
John Limbert
Yeah, like everything else in the history of US Iran relations, it quickly becomes very political, particularly everything after the mid 20th century. It's very difficult to talk about these things in neutral, fact based ways because the reality, which is that the CIA played a critical role in the overthrow of a popularly elected prime minister in Iran in 1953 is inconvenient to a certain narrative. I don't think it needs to be. I think if you, look, if you're a diehard supporter of Reza Pahlavi and you want to bring the monarchy back to Iran and you want regime change and you're supporting the idea of Trump bombing Iran, do all this. You can do all those things and still acknowledge that the CIA played a critical role in the overthrow of Mohammad Bossada in 1953. I mean, if I want to put myself in the shoes of someone who feels that way, it's not difficult to simply say, yes, we did that. It wasn't a great idea. It brought about, you know, it actually delayed Iran's democratic development and it, you know, it helped to solidify this and consolidate kind of royal dictatorship. And that led unfortunately to the Islamic Republic. But, you know, a lot of time has now gone by since then. It's no longer 1953. You know, those lessons, while they're important, should not immediately inform our policy. And we should still bomb Iran and, you know, bring Reza Pahlavi to power. That's not, to me, that's a perfectly coherent intellectual argument. I don't know why someone who is a die hard supporter of the former monarchy should feel threatened by the simple reality of 1953. But again, unfortunately, as you know all too well, you know, debates around Iran and US Iran relations just very quickly become strident and irrational. And that means that even to this day, there are people out there, I won't name names, but who go around masquerading as legitimate serious historians who try to portray the 1953 coup as an event in which the United States had no meaningful role whatsoever. Them, which is simply absurd. I think you can debate the degree and the decisiveness of the CIA's actions. Perhaps you could argue that, you know, Mossadegh might have fallen under his own weight anyway or this, that or the other thing. You know, I would disagree with that, but I think that's a reasonable position to take and you can have reasonable discussions about this. But I mean, I think the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence, and again, there are people who've looked at this stuff way more closely than I have. But the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence, including documents that continue to get declassified year after year after year, points to the fact that the CIA played a critical, if not the decisive, role in the overthrow of the Saddak in 1953.
- [46:55]
Ariane Tabatabai
So now let's talk to the revolution itself. You start to kind of paint a picture a little bit, right, that the shock resumes power in 1953, and he becomes more and more kind of autocratic and builds this whole kind of internal security apparatus to crush the scent and also invest a lot in the military. And then 1979 begins to happen. You have a revolution that kind of brings together these different factions that were essentially only unified in their. Initially in their opposition to the Shah. And then ultimately you get the Islamic revolution out of it. Can you talk briefly about the drivers of the revolution? And then what was the US Approach to the revolution? As the United States is watching these events unfold, what is the thinking in Washington?
- [47:49]
John Limbert
The drivers, very simply are. I mean, there are many. There are cultural ones, there are economic ones, there are social ones, there are religious factors. There are all kinds of factors. But fundamentally, I think, to grossly oversimplify this, the shahs and his father, I mean, the Pahlavi dynasty, the last two kings of Iran from 1926 to 1979, fundamentally prioritized the modernization, quote, unquote, of Iran on very Western lines, by which they meant factories and railways and military strength and air force and things like that, and yes, things like literacy and, you know, healthcare campaigns as well, and even to, you know, with varying degrees of success, but you know, in kind of redistribution land, land redistribution campaigns and things like that. But the one thing they didn't do was, but they. They didn't believe in modernizing Iran's politics. They didn't think that if they believed that you could have modernization in every way and uplift the material condition of the Iranian people while still telling them they couldn't really participate in political decision making. The feeling, Even in the 1970s, you can see it in all the interviews that the Shah gave to 60 Minutes and so on in 1970s, he simply didn't believe his people were ready for democracy. He didn't think that that's something that they wanted or needed, that they loved their king, that they loved their government because he was making their lives better and he was dragging them into the 20th century and was giving them increasingly European way of life and so on. It turned out to be a catastrophic mistake that you ended up with an increasingly Educated, knowledgeable, informed public that was increasingly frustrated by the fact that it was living under a dictatorship and that it had no mechanism for addressing that because it couldn't create political parties in any meaningful sense or newspapers or what have you, because they saw what had happened every time they tried to do that. So you had three nodes of opposition to the Shah. By the end of the 1970s, there were kind of hardcore leftists and Marxists, Communists who were becoming increasingly radicalized. I mean, Iran had a huge Communist party dating back to the 1920s and 30s, but it was largely a pro Soviet party, the tudet. By the 1970s, they had been largely discredited among young people in Iran who were much more likely to follow kind of Maoist guerrilla groups, you know, similar to, like, you know, the Red Brigades or the, you know, bottom Meinhof gang in Germany. You know, very classic 1970s kind of, you know, guerrilla groups. You had increasingly a religious conservative opposition, which was very new in the 1970s. I mean, religious radicalism was unheard of, completely unheard of in Iran before the 1970s. You had small. When I say unheard of, there were small, you know, kind of, you know, Nayab Safav, you know, these kinds of, like, you know, sort of largely obscure kind of, you know, radicals who would blow things up and so on.
- [50:46]
Ariane Tabatabai
But not as a movement is what you're saying. Right? There were. They existed, but not as a movement.
- [50:51]
John Limbert
Yes, and they were very small. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini was not particularly well known in the 1960s and 1970s. He was increasingly well known to his followers. Right, but they were outside them. They were sort of in the fringes of Iranian society. But by the 1970s, they were getting more and more radicalized, smuggling cassette tapes of his sermons while he was in exile in Iraq and so on. So now you have these leftists, radical Maoists, you have these religious radical. All these young people running around on university campuses getting into fistfights with one another. And then in the middle, somewhere in the middle, you have these kind of liberal nationalists, the kind of heirs of Mossadegh, the kind of people who believed in democracy and political parties and petitions and things and having poetry readings and things like that. And they were democrats, and they were, you know, these were the people that should have been pro Western right, but these were the people who, you know, they were largely an aging generation of activists from the 1950s who felt, you know, what? We tried to do things by the rules. We tried to, like, play by the. We tried to create you know, this kind of liberal democracy and the world's greatest democracy, the United States came in and overthrew our government. So they were largely. So for young people, this idea of like liberal Western democracy just didn't have a lot of purchase in the 1970s. It was all about religious radicalism or leftist, you know, kind of Marxist radicalism. And the irony is that all three of those groups, for different reasons, hated the United states by the 1970s. Leftists just naturally did, because that's what leftists do. You know, the religious radicals did as well because they saw the United States as the beacon of kind of decadent Western sinfulness in American movies and so on. And the Shah was like the epitome of that problem. The government and everybody around it, you know, all the kind of sycophants that were surrounding the, the Shahs, who were very pro shah kind of elements in the 1970s. These were kind of the wealthy elites of Tehran society who were largely pro shah and so on. And they hated these guys because they were basically wealthy Western cosmopolitans. And then the liberals, the liberal democrats in the middle, who should have naturally been pro Western and pro American, were still kind of angry about 1953. And that was a terrible combination for the Shah and for the United States because it meant, you know, you had this ruler who was increasingly hated and dictatorial, who was associated with the US and all of the different types of opposition to his rule, all kind of associated him with the US and kind of hated the US for different reasons. So when the revolution came about, it was a revolution against the Shah and his dictatorship. It wasn't a revolution against the United States, but it was very easy for the Ayatollah Khomeini, who nursed the religious leader who was in exile, who nursed a long standing hatred of the United States, to become this kind of unifying figure who was seen as the only person who could unify the opposition and overthrow the Shah. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. But after the revolution, surprise, surprise, all of these different strands fell out with one another. And there's a long complex history of the, of the early 1980s, of how they were all crushed basically by Khomeini and his and his closest supporters and solidify that helped to cement the Islamic and the Islamist nature of the Iranian revolution.
- [53:59]
Ariane Tabatabai
So revolution happens and then we have the hostage crisis, right? That is 444 days of the US embassy staff in Tehran being held hostage by this group of student militants, activists. And you know, it's also as we said at the outset one of the kind of big events that shapes the way Americans see, see, they See Iran and U.S. iran relations in part because the hostage crisis gets, you know, it's at the beginning essentially of the 24 hour news cycle. And so a lot of people are watching the news unfold every day. They're checking in to see what's going on with the hostage crisis. As the hostage crisis is going on, you also have the start of the Iran Iraq war, which goes on for eight years. It is a very complicated policy decision for the United States on what to do with this war. And I'm quickly walking through these because I want to kind of reset us in 1988. It's the end of the revolution, the hostage crisis, the Iran Iraq war. What is the status of this relationship at the end of this, with this kind of new generation of Iranian leaders? I guess they're not that new anymore at that point. They're a decade essentially in. But where do things stand at the end of the, of the 1980s?
- [55:20]
John Limbert
Yeah, I mean, 1980s and the Iran Iraq war was a massive collective trauma for the Iranian people in a way that I think we in the west don't often appreciate because we don't see that war as being particularly about us. But Iranians and Iraqis, I mean, went through eight years of absolute hell, lost hundreds of thousands of people, deep savage trench warfare, sort of First World War style trench warfare, chemical weapons, all of that. And they came out the other end, steeped in blood and trauma and suffering. But also the revolution had been consolidated fully in the course of the Iran Iraq war. Because in 1979, 80, 81, you know, not everyone in Iran supported the idea of an Islamic revolution. The revolution itself was pretty popular, but not the Islamist direction it ended up taking. But very quickly, all of that was all of those internal disagreements were overshadowed by the fact that Iran had been invaded in September of 1980 by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And perception in Iran was that the US had sort of given a green light. I mean, this is all debatable, but to Saddam Hussein to invade. Whatever the case, fast forward eight years later and Iranians have been through absolute hell. And the kind of Islamic republic is fully entrenched. A year later, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader, dies and the constitution is amended and some additional changes are made to kind of consolidate the Islamic Republic. And there is a new supreme leader, someone who seems much more pragmatic and much more politically savvy in some ways than Khomeini and that's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and that is the Supreme Leader. He would be. He was Supreme Leader from 1989 until a couple of weeks ago when he was killed in the US military operation. So in the 1990s, there's a whole new generation of Iranian leaders. And the Cold War has come to an end as well, which has effects in every country's politics. A lot of the old leftists kind of reinvented themselves, and Iran went in a more kind of capitalistic, neoliberal kind of direction of trying to attract foreign direct investment from the west and so on, and began to open up a little bit financially, economically, financially as well as politically and culturally to the west, famously in the 1990s. And there was some real opportunities there for some detente with the West. I mean, there was a new, very popular Iranian President elected in 1997, Mohammed Khatami, who really tried to liberalize Iran's culture and politics to some degree. He was ultimately not successful in doing that, but he really. He did a lot of outreach to the West. He famously proposed the dialogue among civilizations and travel to Europe and all of that. And there were some early contacts with the Clinton administration as well. Didn't quite work out. So then George Bush, W. Bush, gets elected and becomes President in 2001, September 11th happens. Iran under Khatami sees this as an opportunity to kind of make the case to the American public and to the world that Iran is not actually your problem. Your real problem are these Sunni radicals and jihadists in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and so on. The US doesn't buy that argument. The US Is still very fixated on the idea of Iran as the bad guy. And George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January of 2002, famously lumps Iran in with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and with Kim Jong Il, forgive me, North Korea at the time, and calls them all an axis of evil, which plays very, very badly in Iran, because at the time, Iran is secretly cooperating actually with the United States to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, which nobody really knows about, nobody wants anyone to know about. Neither the Iranians nor the Americans want anyone to know that they're cooperating secretly in this.
- [59:00]
Ariane Tabatabai
So that, actually, that brings us to the 2000s and 2010s, which is essentially kind of like a series of mismatched. Iran is ready for dialogue at some point. The US Is not, then the US Is ready, then Iran is not. And you kind of have this back and forth, and then you have this moment of opportunity with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of action, the JCPOA, that is reached in 2015 under President Obama. And then from there, things kind of go back to, let's say, a mismatch. But, you know, we have the election of President Trump, who pulls out of the JCPOA in 2018, and then you have a series of tit for tat kind of actions and escalation throughout the first Trump administration. There's an attempt at diplomacy again in the Biden administration. And then we, we kind of come to present day. So, I guess, having kind of gone through this whole history, what are. I want to ask you to kind of, you know, start to wrap up here by talking to us about what are the through lines that you see in this very complex history. And, you know, we've, we've tried to hit all of the, the kind of big events, but there's so much more. We could have. We could have spent an entire podcast series talking about some, some of these events. Right. So what are the through lines here that you see as a historian?
- [60:12]
John Limbert
Yeah, I mean, of course, there are some great ruptures which we've already talked about, like 1979 especially. It's the biggest one, probably. So it's difficult to describe, I mean, obviously, the history of US Iran relations over the course of 300 years as some sort of static, sort of generalizable entity. But I think that if we're talking about through lines, I think it's, to me, what's always very important, just to recognize that for the vast majority of the history of these two countries, they have actually been very, not just friendly, but have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, a really warm, if sometimes idealized idea of each other. And that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly. When you look at it that way, maybe this is naive and overly idealistic, and I recognize that, and I started ending in my book in this way. But to me, there is no real reason why the United States and Iran need to be perpetual enemies. Ronald Reagan, I mean, I use them quote from Ronald Reagan in the epigraph to my book at the very beginning, because in 1986, in the midst of the Iran Contra affair, which we didn't talk about. I know, but, you know, this big scandal, this big scandal in the Reagan presidency, he comes on television to level with the American people in a live TV address, and he says, you know, the Iranian revolution is a fact of history, but between American and Iranian basic national interests, there need be no permanent conflict, which is an extraordinary thing for especially someone like Reagan, this kind of this great tough guy Republican hero, to say just five years after the end of the Iranian hostage crisis, when Iran is deeply hated in the United States much more than it is today, when it is the ultimate embodiment of evil, more even if arguably as much, if not more than the Soviet Union at the time. And he says there does need to be a permanent conflict between our two countries. That's more than a lot of Democratic presidents have said since Reagan. Franklin. And I think, and I actually think he was, you know, I think it's actually quite a moving quote, and that's why I wanted to open the book with it, because we've come such a long way from that kind of approach. I think, you know, I think that if someone, a Republican tough guy president five years after the hostage crisis can say that about Iran, surely in both countries today, we could be talking about a very different kind of future. Now, I'm not naive. I know that recent events especially have made that almost impossible. I mean, impossible, let's just say, I mean, I think that if I was giving, if I, when I gave some version of this conversation, had some version of this conversation, you know, six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, I would always say, you know, it's almost impossible. I'm idealistic, but I'm not very optimistic. I mean, it's extremely unlikely, you know, where things are pretty bad. Like it would take something really fundamental to shift, you know. But, you know, never say never. But I don't see it happening right now. You can say it absolutely is not going to happen unless there is some kind of regime change, successful regime change on the part of the Americans in Iran. I mean, that's the only way it can happen. I mean, that's the choice that we have now taken. So in a way, the only positive quote, unquote, outcome for US Iran relations is in fact a successful military operation that removes the Iranian government, the Islamic republics in power, and installs some kind of pro American government. Now, do I see that happening? No, I really don't. I mean, the odds of that are actually pretty low. I mean, for all kinds of reasons that I'm sure you and other guests have discussed in recent weeks, but that's where we are. But again, the through line to me is that this is a wholly unnecessary conflict and it's a deeply tragic one. When we look at some of the adversaries the United States has had in the 20th and 21st centuries, from Nazi Germany to Vietnam to the Soviet Union, all of them, all of those countries, with the exception of Russia. And even that. It's kind of an asterisk around that. I mean, we had reasonably good relations with Russia actually up until relatively recently. But all of those are hatchets that we managed to bury. And yet we cannot for some reason get past this enmity. And I don't blame the United States alone for this. Both countries are at fault for this. But for some reason we cannot bury the hatchet in either country, you know, with this country that is one of the weakest militarily in the world and is no real threat to us. And it's unfortunate that we've chosen to tackle Iran in the way that we have in recent weeks.
- [64:32]
Ariane Tabatabai
So, John, I want to, on this note, you know, you started with you think that 2026 is going to go down as one of the milestone events in the history of the two countries. So you've started talking a little bit about the present day. Let me ask this final question, which is if I can ask you to think about what comes next, where do you see this going and what does your historian training you kind of make sense of the present moment?
- [65:01]
John Limbert
I have absolutely no idea. I mean, as a historian, I try to stay away from the present, much less the future, much more comfortable in the past. But look, what I would say is if we in the United States have any sense, I think that, that there is an off ramp that is available. You know, we can declare, I mean, there's nothing original or unique about what I'm about to say. Plenty of other people have said it. We can declare victory. We assassinated the supreme leader of Iran. I mean, no one's ever done well, we assassinated numerous very high ranking Iranian leaders from Ali Larijani to, I mean, you know, revolutionary IRGC commanders. I mean, the current supreme leader hasn't even been seen yet, supposedly because he's been so badly injured by the American assault. I mean, we have made our point. You know, we've, if not obliterated, quote, unquote, at least significantly set back the Iranian nuclear program. You know, I know that it isn't satisfying to kind of step back now and say, well, we're going to leave the Islamic Republic in place. I know all the problems that go along with that. But the alternative is a long drawn out war that no one knows the end of. And when I say we can declare victory and move on, you know, I, I say that in full awareness of the fact that that is a highly, highly, highly Undesirable, you know, outcome. It's not, you know, I recognize all the flaws that that has of, you know, leaving the Islamic Republic in place and leaving it, you know, kind of with its back against the wall and like a wounded snake, you know, even. Even more reckless and more likely to kind of lash out at the United States and all these things. And. But I do think that that outcome, though it's terrible in a lot of ways, is the least bad outcome because it allows the United States to declare victory. The Iranians can kind of declare some victory. They can sort of say, look, we're still standing. The Israelis can declare their version of victory by saying, you know, we've set back, you know, we've kind of contained Iran even more and so on. You know, I think that the war will probably move to Lebanon, sadly for the Lebanese people. And the kind of Arab states of the Persian Gulf will do their best to try to win back their sense of normality because, of course, they have a lot at stake in preserving, you know, the kind of narratives that they've built over the past 20 years or so. And so they won't be in a rush to kind of save the Lebanese people, you know, or the lab or the Palestinians either, any more than they usually are. And so I can, you know, I think there's a real exit strategy there that is far from perfect, but leaves the Gulf Arab states reasonably satisfied, leaves the Islamic Republic feeling like, you know, they kind of got away with, you know, some things. United States feeling like Trump administration declaring victory and going into the midterms, you know, kind of crowing with a certain kind of narrative about, you know, what they did to Iran and leaves the Israelis reasonably satisfied as well. I don't know why we don't take this. Maybe we are going to take this option. I don't know. Maybe, you know, they're trying to give Iran more of a bloody nose before they do. I don't. I have no idea. And you probably have way more insight into this because you, I think, are much more involved in these kinds of sort of think tank discussions than I am. But I don't know. That's my best guess as a, as an ignorant historian.
- [68:07]
Ariane Tabatabai
All right, well, that's a great place to leave it. Thanks so much, John, for, for joining.
- [68:12]
John Limbert
Pleasure.
- [68:16]
Ariane Tabatabai
The Lawfare podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter@lawfairmedia.org support supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath, and Escalation. Our Law Fair Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work@lawfaremedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Patya and our audio engineer for this episode was Kara Schillen of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening.
- [69:09]
John Limbert
Want to turn challenges into chances?
- [69:12]
Advertisement Voice
Go digital enterprise and adapt to every
- [69:15]
John Limbert
change by combining the real and digital worlds. Transform the everyday with Siemens.