Special Episode: War in Iran

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Special Episode: War in Iran

Date: March 2, 2026
Host: Tyler Foggatt
Guest: Ishan Tharoor

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Episode Overview

In this urgent special episode, The New Yorker’s Tyler Foggatt speaks with foreign affairs journalist Ishan Tharoor in the immediate aftermath of a stunning US-Israeli joint military operation against Iran. Their conversation addresses the unprecedented assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the rapid escalation into open warfare across the Middle East, the competing goals of global and regional powers, and the uncertain prospects for de-escalation. They also discuss the wider economic, diplomatic, and humanitarian consequences of America’s most overt regime change effort in decades.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Unique Gravity of the Moment

• [00:03–02:46]
  • The US and Israel’s strikes, including Khamenei’s killing, mark a dramatic departure from previous proxy conflicts.
  • Ishan Tharoor:

    “We've not seen this scale of decapitation carried out by the United States before in this manner. We've not seen the kind of very overt attempt to extinguish a near half-century long revolutionary project by the US in this manner.” (01:42)

  • Iran’s size, regional importance, and complex political structure mean this war could have far-reaching consequences.

Comparing Iran with Venezuela and Libya

• [02:46–06:11]
  • The “Venezuela scenario” – swift regime ouster and installation of a client leadership – is not viable in Iran.
  • Iran’s leadership is far more deeply rooted, with multiple powerful centers and ideological legacies.
  • The constitutional process now involves a collective triumvirate choosing a successor, but no clear direction is evident.
  • Ishan Tharoor:

    “It’s much more likely to break than to bend.” (05:53)

Trump’s Endgame—and Its Lack

• [06:11–09:08]
  • Trump’s statements have been contradictory and improvisational, suggesting little strategic foresight.
  • Notable quote from Trump (as reported):

    “The attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead...” (06:23, quoted by Foggatt)

  • Tharoor calls the current approach “a pretty surreal state of affairs,” reflecting an over-optimistic bet on internal revolution rather than planning for realistic outcomes.

Motivations & Timing of Strikes

• [09:08–11:03]
  • Israel’s long-standing push for war with Iran, with Netanyahu finally seeing his 40-year wish fulfilled.
  • US rationale includes preemptive defense, vengeance for Iran’s own brutality, and exploiting perceived Iranian weakness.
  • “Iran is weakened, more weakened than it's ever been... And of course, we cannot forget that in January, the Iranian regime carried out a horrific set of massacres of its own people.” (09:37)

Regional Escalation and Fallout

• [13:36–17:52]
  • Iran’s retaliation has struck a “wide arc” of Gulf countries with hundreds of drones and missiles, upending the image of Gulf oases like Dubai.
  • The strikes risk altering alliances: some Gulf states may double down on US/Israeli partnerships, while others seek arrangements with China, Turkey, India, or Pakistan.
  • Tharoor:

    “It's a pretty complicated scenario, but we're looking at another sort of slow process of the Pax Americana crumbling, mostly by the actions of the Americans.” (17:25)

Economic & Diplomatic Reverberations

• [17:52–19:52]
  • Oil prices rising; disruptions threaten both global energy flows and US relationships.
  • Trump relies on Gulf allies for other regional projects (e.g., Gaza reconstruction), now jeopardized by the spreading conflict.
  • The Board of Peace’s prospects dwindle as partners shift focus to the Iranian crisis.

Military Realities & Chaos

• [21:08–23:53]
  • Friendly fire (Kuwaiti air defenses downing US jets) evidences the war’s chaos and allies’ unreadiness.
  • Gulf military forces are untested; their air defenses and supply chains will be strained by enduring conflict.
  • The instability may play into Iran’s hands, recreating previous Red Sea/Houthi-type standoffs but on a larger scale.
  • Ishan Tharoor:

    “It's a complete strategic shit show there. Forgive me if I use language I shouldn't use.” (22:25)

Endgame Scenarios: Incoherence, Diverging Interests, and Perils

• [24:45–34:11]
  • Trump’s timeline predictions (“two or three days”, then “four to five weeks”) are inconsistent. No evidence of a real negotiating strategy.
  • US, Israel, and Gulf states each have fundamentally different goals:
    • Israel: strategic degradation, not state-building
    • Trump: wants a functioning, friendly regime to claim victory
    • Gulf monarchies: want stability, now in jeopardy
  • Tharoor:

    “On one hand, he [Trump] believes that this is a regime change mission. On the other, he seems to indicate that he wants a kind of Venezuela style solution.” (25:54)

  • Real prospect: “prolonged chaos,” not orderly regime transition.

Internal Iranian Dynamics & Repression

• [29:23–31:11]
  • The regime’s capacity for brutal repression (“mass arrests, disappearances”) is likely to increase under cover of war.
  • “It's a brutal system that probably is on its last legs, but it's still very capable of inflicting harm in the aim of saving itself.” (31:00)

The Pattern of Regime Change: Why Never Learn?

• [34:11–37:33]
  • The enduring “primordial urge” in Washington for regime change: an institutional priority, despite historic failures.
  • The drive is ideological—a mix of “primacism” and aversion to anti-American rhetoric and revolutionary legacies.
  • Tension: Trump’s supposed skepticism about regime change vanishes in the face of “muscular America first globalism.”
  • Ishan Tharoor:

    “It’s a genuine industry of wonks and policymakers and lobbyists who are sustained and motivated by the cause of regime change in Iran...” (35:35)
    “[America’s] embrace of this kind of muscular America first globalism, which is a kind of unvarnished militarist quasi imperialism, I guess. And that's where we are right now.” (37:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We've not seen this scale of decapitation carried out by the United States before in this manner.”
  — Ishan Tharoor (01:42)

• “The attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead.”
  — Quoting Donald Trump (06:23, cited by Foggatt)

• “It's a complete strategic shit show there. Forgive me if I use language I shouldn't use.”
  — Ishan Tharoor (22:25)

• “We're looking at another sort of slow process of the Pax Americana crumbling, mostly by the actions of the Americans.”
  — Ishan Tharoor (17:25)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• 00:03 — Episode opens; overview of the attack, Khamenei’s killing, and interview introduction
• 01:42 — Tharoor explains the unprecedented scale of US action
• 06:23 — Trump’s quote on unknowingly killing all succession candidates
• 09:08 — Motivations: US, Israel, and the timeline of strikes
• 13:36 — Regional escalation: Iran attacks across the Gulf
• 17:52 — Economic fallout and the strategic cost of further war
• 21:08 — Friendly-fire and military chaos among US regional allies
• 24:45 — Varied and unclear visions for ending the war
• 29:23 — Iranian regime’s instability, repression, and prospects for internal chaos
• 34:11 — The historical, ideological drive for regime change in the US

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sobering, in-depth look at the sudden breakdown of order in the Middle East following the US-Israeli operation in Iran. It underscores the absence of sound planning, conflicting objectives among allies, the risk of prolonged instability, and the perennial American fantasy of easy regime change. Tharoor and Foggatt conclude that, contrary to familiar Washington scripts, the prospects for a peaceful, stable outcome in Iran—and indeed the region—are thinner than ever, with profound and unpredictable global consequences.

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Transcript

[Tyler Foggatt]

Welcome to a special episode of the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. Over the weekend, the US And Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, conducting several drone and missile strikes across the country. Among the estimated 200 or so Iranian casualties, which included a range of civilians and government officials, was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In response to Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against Israel and other neighboring states, including on U.S. military bases. With fighting continuing to break out and spread throughout the region, I wanted to talk with foreign affairs journalist Ishan Tharoor about the fallout of this weekend's military operation, the possible paths toward resolution or de escalation, and whether any of those seem likely and what comes next for the Iranian government and its people as well as the wider region. We spoke on Monday morning. Hi, Ishan. Thanks so much for being here.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Thank you for having me.

[Tyler Foggatt]

So part of the experience of living under the Trump administration has been constantly wondering whether we are at war. That was the question after people woke up to the news back in January that the US had captured Maduro. You know, are we at war with Venezuela? And we were asking a very similar question about Iran last summer after the US Bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. But it seems like now, for the first time in the second Trump administration, we are actually at war. Trump is using the word. Everyone is using the word. And so I guess I'm just wondering what makes this moment qualitatively different from the decades of proxy conflict and targeted operations that we've seen.

[Ishan Tharoor]

That's a great question. And maybe the answer is that it's not that qualitatively different, that this is another imbroglio that ensnares the US for years to come or and leads to loss of American lives and Americans and the squandering of American treasure. But of course, we've not seen this scale of decapitation carried out by the United States before in this manner. We've not seen the kind of very overt attempt to extinguish a near half century long revolutionary project by the US in this manner. And Iran is not a country like Libya with a small population. It's not, you know, a banana republic in Central America. It's a nation of close to 100 million people of tremendous strategic importance and in a region of even greater strategic importance. And so the kind of Pandora's box that the US Is opening this time feels like a larger box than the

[Tyler Foggatt]

ones it's opened before on Sunday, Iranian authorities confirmed that the sweeping strikes carried out by Israel and the United States had killed killed the Ayatollah, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, as well as numerous other top officials. This seems like a huge deal. I mean, this isn't just the loss of a head of state, but the removal of the ideological and theological center of the Islamic Republic. At the same time, The Ayatollah was 86. It seems like he was kind of prepared to be martyred. And after his death, there was this speculation that he would be replaced almost immediately by someone who was even more of a hardliner. And so if we're looking at how Trump is constantly comparing what's happening in Iran to what we saw in Venezuela, you know, we got rid of Maduro, and that was kind of the main thing we needed to do. We can actually keep the rest of the regime the same, even keep Maduro second in command and, you know, work with her. How different is the situation in Iran? Because it seems like these two scenarios are actually not that similar at all.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Well, they're not similar for many reasons, but it does seem the Venezuela scenario being this one where the US Sweeps in in contravention of international law, defenestrates the leadership there and sets up quite rapidly a kind of clientalistic arrangement with the remnants of the regime. As you said in Iran. I think the Trump administration and especially many of its Arab interlocutors in the Gulf and elsewhere would like to see a Venezuela scenario. That's the ideal outcome for them, because it would be the greatest guarantor towards a kind of stability. But we don't have that because the Iranian regime is much more complex. It has different power centers. And to go back to your initial question about Khamenei, look, this is a guy who's been the, as you said, the kind of totemic, spiritual political center of this regime since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He's been there, and he has been this figure of resistance. He's been the ideological font of what Iran is in the region. And so his elimination is symbolically hugely powerful. But as you said, he was ailing. He was 86 years old. For months, for years, frankly, we've been talking about what happens after him. And the Iranian regime, of course, has been thinking about what comes next. It can go in different directions. I don't think anybody really knows right now what direction it's going to go. The constitutional process within the Iranian regime is that we now have this kind of triumvirate of the elected president, president, the head of the judiciary, and a top jurist of this other body called the Guardian Council. They're steering the transition. Their suggestions that they could pick a new supreme leader within days and that fig, we don't know who that figure would be. Obviously, the folks in the White House are imagining a scenario where there's somebody who would perhaps be more amenable to a capitulation. But, yes, most Iranian analysts you talk to really doubt that this is a regime that's willing to capitulate in any way. It's much more likely to break than to bend.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Well, also, we got that quote from Trump recently. I mean, I'll read it. The attack was so basically, he said that the US had identified some possible candidates, candidates to take over Iran. But then he said the attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead, which is just this, like, classic Trumpian bluntness. But it also kind of speaks to the. Yeah, just like what you were saying, like the lack of thinking through and Endgame, which was also the headline of your piece over the weekend. Has Trump thought through the end game in Iran?

[Ishan Tharoor]

Yeah, no, I think there's very minimal work that's been done to actually set up what comes next. You have elements of the Iranian regime, especially the kind of civilian leadership that we know better, like Iranian Foreign Minister Arakchi, for example, suggesting that the hardline Revolutionary Guards are kind of freelancing right now in terms of the military actions we're seeing. But absolutely, when you have Trump telling ABC that, oh, yeah, we had some ideas of who's going to take over, but then we killed them all. Oops. It's a pretty surreal state of affairs. President Trump has been talking to a lot of journalists over the last few days on phone calls, saying a degree of contradictory things. He tells the Washington Post that all he wants is freedom for Iran. He tells the Atlantic that he's open to negotiations still. And then he tells ABC that, yeah, we could. There are people that we have in mind, but we just kill them all. It's quite surreal. I think he generally believes that they are creating the conditions for an internal revolution within Iran by sort of degrading and devastating it and decimating the ranks of the leadership of the regime to the extent that it is. And that seems to be a quite naive view. I mean, Trump has repeatedly said that, yeah, once we're done, you guys can Just take over. And that's a kind of vague gesture to the entire Iranian people. And it's far from clear that there are any conditions on the ground that could lead to a stable kind of pro American takeover within Iran without serious foreign intervention. And it's also very unclear that this White House would consider, or wants to consider the actual intervention it would have to carry out to affect the change that it claims that it wants to see.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I mean, if that's true, then, like, what was the theory of the case here for the US And Israel, given that this is. It's been characterized as a joint military operation by the two of them? Like, why now? What do you think was sort of the immediate goal? Like, is it about degrading Iran's nuclear capacity, deterring regional militias, forcing regime change by way of getting the people in the streets to rise up? Or like all of the above? Like, what were they trying to do and why are they doing it? Why did they decide to do it over the weekend?

[Ishan Tharoor]

We're still going to be picking this apart for months to come, but I think it's first of all very important to recognize that the US And Israel do not have the same set of interests. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much, I think, yesterday or over the weekend that President Trump has now done something that I've wanted to see for 40 years. He has made a signature, part of his political pitch and his political mission for, frankly, decades for Netanyahu has been to provoke this kind of military action against Iran. Now why do they do it? Now the US has come up with a bunch of somewhat dubious claims that they were preempting Iranian activities in a particular way. I think that's something we've got to take with a huge grain of salt because it's quite clear that the Iranians were keen on some kind of negotiation process that the US had walked them down on, but then pull the plug on them again as they had last summer when ahead of the so called 12 Day War. Why now? I think people would say why not now? Iran is weakened, more weakened than it's ever been. Its air defenses are depleted, its naval assets are depleted. Its stockpiles of missiles, although rapidly being built up again, are fewer than they were before. And of course, we cannot forget that in January, the Iranian regime carried out a horrific set of massacres of its own people. We don't even know the full scale of them, but probably in the tens of thousands, according to various estimates.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Yeah, the estimates, it's between like 5 and 30,000. And part of that has been obscured by the Internet blackout that was part of those massacres. And I believe the country is now under another Internet blackout, which has made it harder to get more concrete information on even what's happening as we speak.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Exactly. And President Trump made a lot of statements around the time in late January that help is on the way and we're going to avenge this crackdown and so forth. And I think there's an element to which President Trump thinks this is something he had to do. Now, strategically, there are all sorts of questions about what his actual game plan was, but tactically, we're in a moment now where the US Is acting in this kind of unrestrained way, especially in concert with Israel, because it knows it can. Whatever domestic handbrakes there are on this kind of action are at this point effectively meaningless when it comes to a Congress that has not been able to restrain Trump in most ways. And then international law, it's increasingly proving more and more in various contexts, a kind of fig leaf. There's nothing that the UN Security Council can do to stop the US from doing what it did. And Trump knows this. And I think we're seeing a kind of very. This is the starkest illustration of America first globalism that has defined his foreign policy and his presidency. It's a set of instincts and impulses that take at its center American primacy and and America's kind of muscular ability to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And this is the clearest articulation of that so far.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Let's take a break, and then when we get back, I want to talk about the broader war that's broken out in the Middle East. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there, too, with two nominated short films, which you can [e-mail] video. Two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabel Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short [e-mail] video.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Given world events, we've made some programming changes this week in the Political Scene feed, the Washington Roundtable will run this Wednesday. And be sure to check out conversations happening on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. And go to newyorker.com for the latest reporting and analysis on the Iran conflict. Up until now, we've mostly been talking about the three primary countries that are involved in this conflict, which would be the U.S. israel and Iran. But one of the crazier things about what happened over the weekend is that we saw this much broader war start to break out in the Middle east as Iran began responding to the strikes from Israel and the US by launching retaliatory strikes against its regional neighbors.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Yeah, it's quite astonishing. I don't think anybody really thought that the Iranians would hit this wide arc of countries in their neighborhood the way they have in such a kind of haphazard, relentless manner. We're talking about hundreds drone and missile strikes in the hundreds at this point on every major country in the Gulf, targeting US Assets, but also just kind of targeting anything. And it's quite unclear where it's going to stop. And for the leaders of the Gulf, these are US Allies, many cases, in all cases, rather wealthy monarchs with interesting ties to the Trump administration. This is a kind of worst case scenario because places like Dubai, which is now shut down, places like Doha and Abu Dhabi and Kuwait and Kuwait City and Manama and Bahrain, the central image of these places that these governments have tried to project all these years is that there are kind of oases of stability where expats can come and have the best life they could possibly have, where it's all prosperity and growth and security and stability and safety. And this kind of chaos is not supposed to happen in Dubai. It's very damaging for the image of places like Dubai that this is going on. What the Iranian strategy here is, it's a very dangerous one. I think the assumption must be that if we show our ability to just endlessly escalate in the face of the American Israeli attack, then our neighbors are going to go to the US and say, please stop. This is insane. This is damaging for us. But you may have a scenario, and you're seeing from the reporting and from some of the statements you're getting out of various Gulf capitals that it may have the opposite effect. That now some of these monarchies may think, okay, this is too much. We can't really live with this. For a while we thought the devil we knew was better than the devil we don't. But maybe we should just tacitly back whatever the Americans are doing. But more broadly, it does Open up a huge set of questions for Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia or MBZ in Abu Dhabi or the royal family of Qatar. Insofar as what, in their mind will anchor stability in the Middle East? Will it be American power? Probably not. Will it be a scenario where Israel is running roughshod over the region and striking Iran and Syria and other countries as it sees fit? Definitely not. In that sort of strategic vacuum, you're going to see a world where these governments step up their own kind of military partnerships and strategies and also kind of build bridges to other countries. You could see new partnerships with China. You could see defense arrangements, say, between the Turks and the Saudis or what have you, or the Saudis and Pakistan or the UAE and India that hedge against, say, US Israeli interests in the region. It's a pretty complicated scenario, but we're looking at another sort of slow process of the Pax Americana crumbling mostly by the actions of the Americans.

[Tyler Foggatt]

In a conversation where the larger context is that people are getting killed, it almost seems crass to ask this question. And yet I must, because I do think it's something that is very much on Trump's mind, just in the sense that it can't be a coincidence that he keeps starting these operations over the weekend when the markets can't respond. The Middle east is obviously very much wired into the global economy. You've got the oil markets, shipping lanes, cyber infrastructure. And so if this conflict continues to expand, what are the choke points here? What is the potential economic fallout that we're looking at?

[Ishan Tharoor]

Well, we're already seeing oil prices rise significantly, the extent to which the US can sustain these kind of disruptions itself. The American economy could be quite insulated, but the neighborhood won't be. And the political pressure on the US to create exit ramps for Iran to calm things down is going to be there, I think. It's hard to tell right now how much the ordinary American is going to feel the pinch. But certainly we may see it in the stock market, we may see it in the energy markets. And Trump, of course, is often influenced by what happens there and what his financier friends tell him.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Speaking of his financier friends, before you wrote this piece about the war in Iran, you wrote a piece for us about the Board of Peace and Trump's kind of larger reconstruction efforts in Gaza, which are anchored by this organization. And as part of that piece, you got into how Trump is kind of relying on the Gulf monarchies to help fund that reconstruction of Gaza. And so I guess I'm just wondering how the idea that these countries are being sort of pulled into a larger war might jeopardize Trump's broader agenda in the Middle east when it comes to the reconstruction of Gaza and trying to be a peacemaker.

[Ishan Tharoor]

I mean, this is one of the main things to watch in the months to come. Of course, there are plenty of reasons already to be skeptical about what the Board of Peace is and what the Board of Peace can do. The facts on the ground in Gaza remain very much at odds with the visions the border peace offers of, you know, what they want to create and this kind of slightly bizarre enclave of high end resorts and prefab housing. And, you know, we're seeing very little progress on the ground towards that, especially with Hamas still holding sway over chunks of Gaza. And yes, I think we may see in the months to come that the participation of countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the UAE and Qatar in the Board of Peace happened less because they have any belief in it doing anything, and more because they recognize that this was the game in town that they had to be part of. And as the game in town shifts to a totally different context, where we're watching the disintegration of the Iranian state with all the kind of spiraling implications that that may have, people are not going to be focused on the kind of complicated diplomacy and collective efforts that need to still happen to make the Board of Peace a success when it comes to its stated plans for Gaza.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I'm also interested in how the general chaos in the Middle east can be detrimental to the US's military goals. I mean, I saw that US Air Force fighter jets were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses and the pilots are safe, but still it feels like this kind of like staggering incident of friendly fire. That doesn't bode well for the rest of the war. I mean, I have no idea how competent the Kuwait military is, but is it safe to say that some of these Middle Eastern countries that are being brought into the war are not necessarily as ready for war as, you know, the Iranian military or the American and Israeli military? That I feel like that doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.

[Ishan Tharoor]

I mean, that's definitely not too much of a stretch. I think some of these militaries, until not long ago were kind of symbolic parade show militaries that spent a lot of money on US weaponry but never had to use them. We are seeing places like the UAE and the Saudis and so on using sort of defense systems they have set up with American cooperation and help. But Absolutely. It's a complete strategic shit show there. Forgive me if I use language I shouldn't use.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I think that is the right way to characterize what is happening.

[Ishan Tharoor]

And when you have a scenario where Kuwaiti air defenses cannot tell American planes from Iranian drones or whatever it may be, it shows how fraught the landscape is there in terms of what's happening. And also the Iranians capacity to, to create chaos. They have asymmetric abilities here. And where you have these Gulf states depleting a huge amount of their stockpiles of, you know, air defense missiles and so on. And that's not a small part of the story here. These, these governments in the Gulf are going to want to re up pretty fast, and they're going to be very nervous about the defense supply chains that they rely on right now because suddenly they've been brought into a huge conflict that they were not perhaps ready for. And I think the Iranians still have in their minds what happened with the Houthis and Trump. This is the Yemeni faction that was firing rockets and destabilizing shipping in the Red Sea in their mind as a resistance act against the war in Gaza. And the Trump administration began a big kind of shock and awe campaign against them and pretty quickly realized that they weren't going to get very far and kind of called it off. And the Iranians may think that they can be another version of the Houthis at home, that they can create enough, raise the stakes enough and complicate things enough that the US would just feel that it's not worth pressing further.

[Tyler Foggatt]

So on that note, I'd like to talk about potential scenarios for how this all might end, if it's kind of even possible to look ahead to an end right now. But we're going to try. This is the Political Scene from the New Yorker. We'll be right back.

[Ishan Tharoor]

Hey there, it's David Plotz, host of Slate's Political Gabfest, the longest running politics podcast. It can be hard to know what news is worth your attention, which is why every week my co hosts Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson and I find the most important stories of the week, so you don't have to. We dig into everything from Trump's immigration policies to critical court cases and everything in between. We also keep some good humor while doing it.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Why is the tic tac shaped that way?

[Ishan Tharoor]

Listen to the Political Gabfest now and join us as we go even deeper

[Tyler Foggatt]

on the Daily News you're already following.

[Ishan Tharoor]

That's Political Gabfest.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Wherever you get your podcasts. So going back to this question of the end game, not only has Trump been kind of going back and forth about, you know, whether the US Is open to negotiations with Iran, but he's also gone back and forth on how long this conflict might last. He told Axios two or three days, potentially. And then he told the Times not long after that that it could be something more like four to five weeks. And, you know, you start to immediately think of, like, Russia and Ukraine and just something that's supposed to be, you know, kind of brief spiraling into something that is very prolonged as of Monday morning, which is, you know, when we're recording this, do you have a sense of where the Trump administration is currently at in terms of, like, looking to negotiate a deal versus just continuing a bombing campaign? Like, as I was on my way to the recording studio, I saw a CNN headline that was like a quote from Trump, and it was like, you know, they haven't even seen the worst of it yet or something like that. And so I just have, like, no idea whether we're escalating or de. Escalating.

[Ishan Tharoor]

I mean, short answer, No, I don't have a clear sense. I don't think anyone has a clear sense. I wonder if the Trump administration really has a fixed idea of what its plan is hour by hour. At this point. I think when we talk about the prospects of an end game, we kind of just have to go off the very uniquely incoherent things that Trump is saying. On one hand, he believes that this is a regime change mission. On the other, he seems to indicate that he wants a kind of Venezuela style solution. Here it's very unclear whether a Venezuela style solution is at all possible. And then there's what maybe the Israelis want, which is something we haven't really talked about too much, which is it doesn't really matter what the end game is, that we can let the Iranian state reconstitute itself however it wants, as long as we just keep on, you know, calling the shots in whatever ways that may be. And that would probably be, for the Israeli point of view, just the periodic bombardments that, you know, keep Iran in check, reduce its military facilities and capacities, and really bring Iran down to size in the Israeli mind in the way that Israel has done in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime or even before the fall of the Assad regime. The Israelis don't really have much invested interest in these countries reconstituting themselves in any kind of strong centralized way. And they're happy to have just weakened foes. The state collapse of Iran does not matter to Israel, but it does matter to the US Principally because it's not something US Allies in the region want. Now, Trump will probably, especially given how much he cares about being a peacemaker and having that legacy, he will not want to have the complete failure of the Iranian state on his watch. So what he does to mitigate against that, we'll see, I can't begin to predict. But from what we're hearing from the regime, and as you said, it's very difficult to understand what's happening happening in Iran, inside Iran, given the lack of communication access that we have and the Internet blackouts that exist. But from what we're seeing, you know, the regime is in survival mode. It's lashing out in various ways. The IRGC could easily the IRGC being the Revolutionary Guards, the kind of hardline military wing that controls huge swaths of the Iranian economy and of course, major elements of its high end, top end military programs like its missiles and so forth. The IRGC may have a different set of interests from the civilian leadership that remains. The preservation of the theocracy in Iran may not be something that matters to certain figures within the Iranian military establishment. You could see a kind of more secular and this is now entirely in the realms of speculation here, but we could see whatever force is remaining, kind of shedding the trappings of the Islamic Republic, but reconstituting in a fashion that is still quite adversarial toward other countries in the region and towards the United States. We don't know where this would begin, but there is still the possibility of major civil strife and unrest and the emerg of some kind of domestic uprising. Although the one thing Iran is very good at is quashing domestic uprisings. They're quite incompetent on many other fronts, but they've been proven very successful at, you know, putting down their own people.

[Tyler Foggatt]

And do you think that the COVID of war will also give them the ability to do that with even more ease, like just having edited pieces about, you know, sort of post the massacres in Iran? I think there was a lot of concern on the ground there that if there were to be a full on war, that the regime would basically use that as an excuse to execute prisoners and just sort of clamp down on the people even harder during a time when no one is really paying attention to that aspect of civilian treatment.

[Ishan Tharoor]

You know, I don't think there's any reason to discount that. I think this is a regime that's ideologically hollow at this point, where many top figures are clinging on desperately, where its mandate domestically is so thin, its popularity is so limited to maybe 10% of society at this point, that there are elements of this regime that could decide that we just have to be brutal right now. We have to be ruthless about consolidating what we can and eliminating threats that we see, and that could happen again. I'm speaking entirely out of speculation here and from understanding what's happened in the past. Whenever there's been an uprising in Iran, an uprising that's been put down, we've seen in the months that followed, after the news attention shifts away and after the eyes of the Western media and international leaders drift, that the Iranians have carried out pretty hideous repression, mass arrests, disappearances of top political figures or potential civil society figures. So, no, it's a. It's a brutal system that probably is on its last legs, but it's still very capable of inflicting harm in the aim of saving itself.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I want to go back to what you were saying earlier about the US And Israel having different goals here. I feel like before we had this conversation, I was under the impression that the US And Israel, you know, that there was this, like, fundamental misalignment of their goals. But hearing you speak now, it seems like it's far more than that. Their goals are, like, fundamentally in contradiction of each other in the sense that Israel wants a weakened Iranian state, and you would assume that Trump wants one that's functioning right in order to declare victory here. So how does that work? I mean, is there any scenario in which the US And Israel are both happy with the outcome in Iran? And is there any. Any kind of, like, plausible post Islamic Republic scenario if this regime change, you know, is. If they're able to actually achieve that, that doesn't produce prolonged chaos in the country?

[Ishan Tharoor]

Well, I think the Israelis and the Americans, or especially the Israelis, will be delighted for a kind of monarchical restoration that brought back the son of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, I see, into Iran and a political dispensation there that was very much aligned towards a kind of pro Israeli agenda in the region that was opposed to any kind of political Islam that was pro Israeli? I think there are sort of conversations about how wonderful Iran would be under a restored monarchy, but that's a kind of pipe dream. I think Reza Pahlavi has very much pinned his sail to the Trump mast and has welcomed what Trump is doing, along with many Iranians in the diaspora and probably some Iranians inside Iran too. But it's very unclear how much actual support this would have domestically. And even in the sort of outside diasporic opposition, a figure like Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, is not universally admired or supported. And so he's already quite divisive. And he'll be even weaker and more divisive if parachuted in by the West. So absent that kind of very friendly scenario, no, it's not clear to me what the Israelis would want to see in Iran. They would not want to see an Iran where there's a furious population that recognizes Israel as a strategic threat, that says, okay, actually, we do definitely still need that nuclear weapon, because the Israelis have one and they have pummeled us for years. And yes, we have squandered so much of our national wealth on these proxy wars and funding military groups elsewhere. But at the same time, we are are a proud nation that needs to rebuild ourselves and hedge against Israel. And that's not necessarily something Israel wants to see happen. The Americans, there's no reason why they shouldn't want to see a strong, stable Iran. But a strong, stable Iran is not necessarily something that the right wing government in Israel would want to countenance.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Just to conclude, there have been 25 years, at least, of American attempts at regime change in the wider Middle East. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, just to name a handful. And now we have Iran. And this is, of course, something that's been talked about for a very long time, and we finally see an American president trying to do it. And I guess I'm just wondering your thoughts on why US Presidents keep trying to enact regime change. Like, why is this, like, a constant thing that keeps coming back into the conversation, even though it doesn't really seem like it ever works, that it hasn't worked anywhere or for really anyone? You know, I guess you can quibble with, like, the definition of work. Like, do we mean, like, are you successfully able to get rid of the head of state and replace them with someone else? Yes, maybe. But it doesn't seem like it ever really leads to prolonged stability, a thriving nation. And so I'm wondering why it's like, still remains this kind of, like, eternal desire of American presidents.

[Ishan Tharoor]

I mean, it's a deeply important question and it gets at the heart of America's sense of itself in the world and how America imagines its foreign foreign policy goals and missions. But I live in a city where there is a genuine industry of wonks and policymakers and lobbyists.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Sounds like you're describing D.C. yes, exactly.

[Ishan Tharoor]

So there's a genuine industry of wonks and policymakers and, and lobbyists who are sustained and motivated by the cause of regime change in Iran and the Iranian look, the story in Iran is a dramatic Cold War era story of a revolutionary project that initially had huge Marxist Leninist elements to it that overcame a kind of autocratic state that was propped up by the west and has been a thorn in the side of America since then. And it's ideologically anathema to American interests in the Middle east than in the world. It is politically a constant challenge to the US you can't have American primacists cannot live with a set of guys who go around chanting Death to America all the time. And so I think there's a very kind of primordial urge in this city, in Washington, to defeat them. And there is of course, a sense that no matter the missteps of the past, the calamity that befell Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the complete disaster of the Iraq war and what followed thereafter, that America's capacity to affect change in the world is paramount and ought to remain paramount. And I think this is the major tension in Trump world is that they believe in American power and they believe in America's unilateral ability to do what it wants, but that just does not work alongside their stated skepticism of these regime change wars and projects. And I think now we're seeing that whatever stated skepticism they had about earlier misadventures, it pales before their embrace of this kind of muscular America first globalism, which is a kind of unvarnished militarist quasi imperialism, I guess. And that's where we are right now.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Thank you so much for your time, Ishan. I really appreciate you breaking this down with us.

[Ishan Tharoor]

My pleasure.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Ishan Tharoor is a writer and journalist based in Washington, D.C. he was previously a global affairs columnist at the Washington Post. You can find his latest piece, has Trump Thought through the Endgame in Iran? @newyorker.com. This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggit. This episode is produced by John Lamay with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bang. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for joining us. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to yours. Feed is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ishan Tharoor]

From prx.