← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
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Sky News, the full story first. Hello and welcome to the world podcast. It's me, Richard Engel. I'm in New York right now. Yalda is taking finally a well earned break this week, but she will be back next week as usual. She was in Beirut covering the news that a 10 day truce was brokered between Lebanon and Israel. I'm out of the region right now, but I have no doubt I will be going back soon. So we are now more than 50 days into this war between the United States, Israel and Iran. And if this war, which President Trump thought would be over quickly, feels complicated and messy, well, that's because it is. You are probably hearing reports of ships being seized in the Strait of HORMUZ under the U.S. imposed blockade.
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President Trump says U.S. forces have taken custody of an Iranian ship that was attempting to pass the naval blockade near the Strait of Hormuz.
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Iran promising to retaliate.
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Hopes of a peace deal between Iran and the US Appear to be rapidly deteriorating. After Tehran vowed to respond to the seizure of one of its vessels in
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the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump threatening to knock out Iran's infrastructure, sometimes promising to destroy the entire Iranian civilization. The strait closing and reopening and then closing again. All of this happening while it's unclear if peace talks are actually resuming and how serious they are. President Trump needs to claim victory. So does the Iranian regime. So how do you square this circle and why? Where the heck is all of this going? Today we are going to get into all of this and I've got someone on the podcast who knows Iran inside and out. He is Hamid Reza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. He specializes in Iranian security. Hamid Reza is also an Iranian. He grew up in the country, attended university there, got his PhD at Tehran University, but has not been able to go back for, for seven years. Hamid, it is very nice of you to join us.
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Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure.
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Let's get right into it. So how do you see this war right now between Iran, the United States, Israel? Do you see that this was an unprovoked war? The way Iran argues it? Do you see that Iran was anticipating this because they seem to have quite a few plans in place on how to, how to react. What, what's your view of the war generally?
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Well, it really depends on the perspective on the time frame. We choose to analyze this because one may argue that, you know, this was already in the making, not for years, but for decades since the establishment of the Islamic Republic Iranian network or the Iran backed network of proxies and non state allies in the region. It was made for a reason. Right. In order to kind of put this so called ring of fire around Israel. And not just that, around all these years there were, you know, quite a few instances of how these groups were used to make life difficult, let's say for the United states, for the U.S. forces in the region, especially in Iraq, also in other places. So in that sense, one may argue that the ideological orientation of the Islamic republics was the root cause for it. But then when we look at the justification that the United States and Israel have provided for especially this round of war, and also of course the previous one last year, the 12 Day War, they really don't seem to be convincing in the sense of, you know, for example, an imminent nuclear threat from Iran. This is something that is not verified by the iaea. Iran did have stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but there was no indication of a breakout towards weaponization. Also other sorts of justification like its missile program and so on. So it really depends on the perspective, I would say.
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Fair point. And yes, those allegations from President Trump that Iran was about to have a nuclear weapon and use one within two weeks sometimes, he says days that hundreds of millions of people would have been killed. He's never backed that up. There's no scientific evidence to suggest anything like that. But as you and your book describe, this is a long, slow moving process that goes right back to 1979 when the Islamic revolutionary government took over. So let's start there. What is exactly the access of resistance? So we'll remind people, 1979, the Shah is replaced. You have what had been a pro Western, pro Arab in the sense that they had very good relations with their, with their neighbors, particularly the Gulf states. Shah overthrown by a new kind of revolutionary ideologically driven system in, in Tehran. And they quickly start to form alliances around the region. That alliance network becomes known as the allies axis of resistance. Whose idea was it? Was this Khomeini, was this Ali Khamenei's project? How did it come about and how did it become as, as powerful as it became? And then how did it become destroyed so quickly? Or do you not think it is destroyed right now?
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It is fragmented, not destroyed. But let me just mention one thing that I mean was somehow missed in the description of the Shah era that you just provided, which was totally correct. Iran at the time also had a very close relationship with Israel. And that matters more than more than the relationship with the Arabs, because as far as Arab countries, Arab states of the Persian Gulf were concerned. It wasn't like an alliance as such. It was Iran at the time also together with Saudi Arabia as the two pillars of special Nixon's foreign policy, being primary allies of the United States in the region. And of course, the aim was to empower these countries in order to prevent the spread of communism into the region, especially given how close Iran is geographically to Russia. So. But that's a different matter. The way this started, this axis of resistance, it's partly processed, partly project, I would say, because on the one hand it had its roots, you know, all these groups that sometimes are incorrectly, I would say, called as Iranian proxies. I mean, there are Iranian proxies, but that doesn't really catch the core of the relationship, for example, that Iran has with Hezbollah or why don't you tell
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people which who's invol. Who's. Who are the members of this axis
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of resistance, the way it is framed in the Iranian discourse and also the pro Iranian narrative around the region. It consists of, of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran itself, and then Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories. Then there's Hezbollah in Lebanon. There's also a wide range of Iraqi Shia armed. And then we have the Houthis kind of late comers compared to other elements of this network. So what Iran did actually, to put it in a nutshell, was to provide a comprehensive ideological cover or context, better to say, that would fit into the agendas of all these groups and connect them together and also to start provide them with all sorts of logistical, financial, arm support that would enable them to act within the framework that was developed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. So it wasn't Khomeini himself, or Khomeini himself. It started as an idea of exporting the revolution right after the 1979 revolution in Iran. So it was mostly a kind of very vague ideological idea. But then during the war with Iraq, the Eight Years of War with Iraq, 1980-1988, as a result of Iran trying to prepare an extraterritorial network of armed groups that would back up its war efforts against Saddam, for example, that's how the Iraqi militias were formed. It started to become more operationally aligned with Iran. So that's the way it was formed, actually. And it was developed.
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So it sounds like it was Iran cobbling together some similarly minded groups that each had its own origin story. And they formed quite a powerful alliance network. They had a lot of force that they could project and that force went right up to Israel's border. Was that the goal? Was the goal always to have a dangling sword above and below Israel, or was it to just have a defensive alliance? Do you think this axis was defensive in nature, or was it always designed to be a threat over and below Israel to eliminate the Jewish state?
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First of all, I need to clarify something because as I mentioned, the agency really matters, right? In understanding the type of the relationship that exists between Iran and these other actors. So what I'm saying that these actors are not Iranian proxies. It doesn't mean that there's no proxy in this network. So as I mentioned, it was formed primarily as an ideological mission to spread the word of the Islamic Revolution the way that the Iranian leaders saw it. Right. To try to overthrow these unjust, cruel, whatever they describe it, regimes in the Islamic world. And that contributed to some alliances even beyond the formal axis of resistance, as we know, like Iran supporting Shia groups, or let's say political Islamist groups in different parts of the countries around the Gulf as well. So it was an ideological view at first, but then as a result of the war, the Iraq war, Iran, Iraq war, had a very significant impact on Iran's overall military strategy. The need that they felt.
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Almost million people killed on both sides in that war. It's a war that had profound consequences. That is not as well understood in the, in the general public as it. As it probably should be. But. But go on.
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Yeah, absolutely. And that had a profound impact on the way that Iran understood its position in the region and also its military capabilities compared with the rivals and adversaries in the region. So that was actually the cornerstone of Iran's asymmetric warfare strateg that we've seen during this war as well. But a very important element of that was to try to create extraterritorial network of allies and proxies to arm them, to support them, in order to extend the geography of Iranian deterrence and defense as far from Iran's territorial borders as possible. This is understood as forward defense. So this network started to get some sort of strategic meaning as well.
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And that transformation from a ideological springboard and a forward defensive network to a much more aggressive alliance that felt it could exert power and project power across the region after what they saw was great success in Iraq, putting pressure on the Americans, ultimately forcing the Americans to leave Iraq and saving the government of Bashar Al Assad, because Hezbollah, along with Russia, did a lot of the ground fighting for him and kept his regime in power until he ultimately lost it all. Would that have been the period of Qasem Soleimani, the charismatic, very effective general who was leading this axis of resistance and ultimately killed by, by President Trump with a drone attack at just outside of the Baghdad airport. Would he have be the transformative figure leading this more aggressive, now militaristic alliance?
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C
Yes, absolutely. I mean the axis of resistance, I mean experience its heyday during Qasem Soleimani, of course, and in a way it would be safe to argue that its decline also started after his killing. I mean, as I mentioned, this was a network that had its root already in local context. And also it was an ideological and a strategic project well before Soleimani took over. But he was the architect of the idea of unity of the fronts, as they call it. The way that it was framed, I mean, however exaggerated it might sound, and it is the way they framed it, I mean, in the Iranian narrative, would be to have some sort of an alliance like NATO, you know, one for all and all for one. And that would be the end point somehow the mission of this, especially if you put it in the context of this long standing ideological enmity between the Islamic Republic and Israel, for the Axis to become so powerful and so entrenched around the region and at the same time so cohesive in terms of the actors working with each other to be able to deal killed the final decisive blow as they framed it, to Israel. So that was of course the mission. But the way that is eventually unfolded by Hamas attacking and then other actors joining but not being able to save themselves, let alone save the whole network, that showed that it was either not planned as properly as it was imagined by Gassem Soleimani, or as some analysts in Iran, actually pro government analysts, put it, the Hamas attack was somehow premature in the sense that it wasn't coordinated with other members of the axis. So the axis was not prepared to enter into the multi front confrontation as it should be.
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And when Hezbollah did join in, they joined in with with rocket attacks, but it was not the full assault that Hezbollah could have done. They seem to be trying to walk a balance of being involved, supporting Hamas, joining in this fight against Israel, but not crossing certain thresholds that would invoke a full military response from Israel that could be devastating in Lebanon. So it seemed like they were joining in just enough so that they could say that they were participating, but not try and have the country flattened by Israel. Is that your impression as well?
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That is true. And I saw some leaked documents from the Iranian parliament. It was shortly after the October 7th, and one of them had to do with a meeting between members of the Iranian Foreign Policy and Security, a national security committee. So they had traveled to Lebanon. They had a meeting at the time with Naeem Ghass, the current secretary general of Hezbollah. And the discussions were like they really thought that that intensity and that's kind of, as they put it, calibrated involvement would be enough because they thought that Israel first doesn't have the capacity and also willingness to enter into a prolonged conflict and also it cannot fight on multiple fronts at the same time. So their assessment, according to that leaked document, was that the war would take something like three, four months and then Israel would, and then there wouldn't be any ground invasion of Gaza, for example.
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Okay, we're just going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in a moment.
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I'm Sam Coates from Sky News.
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And I'm Anne McElrovoy from POLITICO.
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Downing Street Drama, leadership, battles and policy. U Turns. We're on it. Before it breaks.
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We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening.
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Smart insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7:45am so you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics.
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Hit follow and listen to politics at Simon Ans wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome back to the World podcast. So you describe these calculations, miscalculations, Hamas carries out this attack believing that the whole axis of resistance is going to immediately kick in behind it. Instead, it doesn't really happen. You have Hezbollah somewhat half heartedly entering Houthis. Take a while. Iran more or less sits it out for a while until until later joins in. But immediately Prime Minister Netanyahu decides this is an Iranian project, this is all Iran. This is the axis of resistance and we're going to fight the whole thing. And he launched first the war on Hamas in Gaza and flattened Gaza in the process and killed more than 70,000 people, according to medics. Then he shifted his attention, destroyed a lot of Lebanon and did the the pager attack and the walkie talkie attacks and, and dealt significant blows to Hezbollah and is now turning his attention to Iran itself, this time with the help of the United States. How much was it a change that Netanyahu actually got? A blank check more or less. And full political cover and military support from President Trump to take on the the Iranians directly and try and destroy this entire axis of resistance.
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Look, first of all, there's one thing very important. You mentioned about how Netanyahu framed all these things as an Iranian project. So there's two things we need to distinguish here. What has to do with Israel and what has to do with Netanya and his long standing project. What has to do with Israel. I wouldn't blame the Israelis for seeing this as all as orchestrated by Iran because, you know, there's been always this threat of annihilation of Israel, you know, wiping Israel off the map. And this has been reiterated by different Iranian officials. So if I were an Israeli, I would also see this from this kind of existential lens. Right. So we need to deal with the core of the threat, which is Iran. But for Netanyahu himself, it was more calibrated, let's say, because it's been, as we know, it's, it's been a project that he's been pursuing for, not for years, but for decades. This is something that we've heard frequently in recent weeks since the start of the war from American, from former American officials like Anthony Blinken, for example, that this was the idea that Netanyahu pitched to every single U.S. administration and U.S. president, but none of them took it. Donald Trump took, I think, for two reasons. First of all, of course, Trump's, his own characteristics and his different way of statecraft, this idea of his true strength. So that was the incentive that he already had and also the experience of his first term actually vis a vis Iran. So just imagine you are the US President, you kill the most important military figure of Iran and there's nothing, the only thing that, the only reaction from Iran is to bombing an empty base of the United States in Iraq.
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This was when they killed Qasem Soleimani and Iran responded firing ballistic missiles at Iraq, at a US Military base in Iraq.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. So, so I think Donald Trump himself already had this view and because he wanted to have a better deal on the nuclear issue than Obama and Iran was resisting. So he had enough incentives. What Netanyahu did was, I think, to present this moment as a one time opportunity to once and for all destroy, remove this Iranian threat. Why? Because, so I think that's, that might be the way that Netanyahu has presented it. So we have taken out most of the capabilities of Iran's allies in the region. There's no Hezbollah in the sense that it was before. The Iraqi militias are constrained by their own domestic kind of problems and so on. Iran itself is now weakened compared to the period before last June, before the 12 Day War. So now is the time. So that's why I have said this Again and again, that in my assessment, this war started not based on a threat assessment, but based on an opportunity assessment.
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And all of this brings us to where we are today. Do you think that Iran has been profoundly changed by this bombing campaign? The supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah, is dead. He was replaced by another ayatollah, his son, who was elevated to the point, a position of Ayatollah. The Revolutionary Guard, a lot of their leaders have been killed. The Navy is at the bottom of the sea. The military facilities have been destroyed. There are negotiations, but Iran was able to close the Strait of Hormuz, send up oil prices around the world, attack Gulf countries, which did not have much defenses because they didn't see it coming. The US President Trump didn't expect this kind of ferocious response. He thought the Iranian government would collapse quickly and there would be a popular uprising. That didn't happen. So has Iran changed? Is this. Is there a regime change in Iran, as President Trump says? He said, no, it's the same regime, but it's. It is regime change because they're new, more amenable leaders, or has Iran just weathered this, hunkered down, or has the Iranian government and regime been profoundly changed?
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Iran has changed. Not to the better. That's the way I can frame it. And, of course, what we are seeing is not a regime change. I understand why President Trump says this, because he wants to promote this narrative of victory, you know, being able to change something fundamentally despite the fact that, you know, it's the same bunch of people. If anything, the war has accelerated. I'm not saying that it has led to. It has accelerated the promotion of the security military elite to the top leadership level. So they were still there. I mean, they were already there when Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader. But under Ali Khamenei, it was more like a hybrid system. So we did have a very strong military security core around the irgc, the Revolutionary Guards. But at the same time, the clerical and ideological establishment was another pillar. There was a trajectory, already visible for over a decade, of the Guards dominating more and more in almost all internal matters and also in foreign policy. But it was still contested. There were still different camps.
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Are the clerics still in charge? You know, Iran, going back to 1979, became a theocracy. And people underestimate that because there aren't that many theocracies in the world. But Iran really was a theocracy. You had the Revolutionary Guard, which was the. The armed wing, and its. Its besieged militia and other security services, but it was run by clerics who consulted holy texts for guidance. And in recent years, those clerics were getting older, generationally, physically getting older. The Revolutionary Guard was getting more and more powerful, more wealthy, as many of the top leaders enriched themselves and enriched their families. And this trend was that the. The clerics were getting weaker, and the uniforms, the men in uniforms were getting stronger. Did that change now with the death of Khamenei and the elevation of his son, who never had the same kind of credentials that his father did, religiously or otherwise, is he now just a figurehead leader and the generals are in charge? Has that transition actually taken place? Is that which would be a kind of regime change in Iran from a true theocracy to a military state with an Islamic overlay?
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Yeah. This final part is very important because there's a nuance that is sometimes overlooked in the mainstream debate. Let's put it like this. Clerics being in charge is one thing, and then the clergy being in charge is a totally different thing. So what we are seeing now is that the clerics are still there. They hold positions, but it increasingly seems that they are not the ones who are in charge of setting the strategic priorities or making strategic decisions of the country. The caveats needed here is that it's still too soon to make any kind of firm assessment of the situation. We still don't know how capable physically, Mustafa Khamenei is to govern the country, because there's a lot of reports, also rumors that he's seriously injured or not. My impression is that because he doesn't have the same political background and also he doesn't have the same clerical credentials as his father did, the system overall, it's not going to be the same as it was under Ali Khamenei. The way I describe it at the moment is that we are seeing signs of the system moving from a vertical structure toward a more horizontal one. So now, at least at this moment, it seems that Moshe Khamenei is one among the few, most of them from the Military Security Corps, who are in a process of consensus building or consensual decision making. Ali Khamenei was the final arbiter. There's no indication that most of us has the same place right now in the system. So this is the way it has changed. I can frame it.
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Do you think that Iran has won this war? And I know the word won and lost are very difficult questions to ask, especially to authors and historians, but did Iran win? Did it suffer a huge loss because it has lost many physical assets, people, military equipment, etc. How would you rate if you were a judge in a boxing match? How would you score it?
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Well, first of all, as we know, the war doesn't seem to be over yet, at least until this moment. So there's a ceasefire ending probably in a day or if, even if extended, we don't know if there's going to be a deal. So it might start again at any moment and then it can change everything. But so far, what we can say is that when you are on the defense side, if you are not defeated, it means that somehow you won. That's the way I describe it. Because if you are to judge it based on the goals that the initial objectives set by the US and Israel, like a regime change taking hold of Iran's highly enriched uranium, destroying its missile capabilities, everything, none of these has happened. So in that sense, Iran is not defeated. But on the other side, of course, and this is interestingly something that Muhammad Balakhali Baf, the Speaker of Parliament, who's also a very strong, has a strong background in the Revolutionary Guards and he's
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the lead negotiator for Iran currently.
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Absolutely. He's one of the inner circle of strategic decision making at the moment. He said it the other day on state TV that we haven't defeated the United States. And that was. That is significant. You know, in the Islamic Republic context, when everything has some sort of an ideological color and the way it is presented to the public is that the Islamic Republic is invincible. So they know their limits as well. And that's why, actually, that's why we are where we are. Because if either side had been able to reach its objectives, and the objective for the US and Israel, we all know, for Iran has been, as they have also said it publicly, for this war to end, not just to lead a pause, that would, you know, keep them somehow up in the air and then it would resume after some time with more devastating results. So because none of the sides has been able to dictate their terms on the battlefield, now they are negotiating with each other. So it's a kind of maybe, we can say, a draw. That would be maybe the best way to describe it.
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Finally, before I let you go, I know it's speculation and this is a moving target, but you study the region, how do you see it ending?
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I really don't see any conclusive end to this war as long as the hostility between Iran, the Islamic Republic and Israel persists. So even in the best case scenario, if, say, we have a deal tomorrow between Iran and the United States that satisfy somehow both sides that would deal with Iran's nuclear issue. Iran would preserve control, somehow maintain control over the Strait of Hormones as well and things like that. So how Israel is going to deal with this situation, they really see the very existence of the Islamic Republic as a source of threat. And we also discussed, we mentioned that the other elements of the axis are there. So in that sense, the worst case scenario would be a deal between Iran and the United States that would end the current war. But then Iran and Israel will most probably go back to the so called shadow war that they conducted for years through proxies, through sabotage, through indirect means and so on and so forth forth. And in the worst case scenario, we may end up, I mean, if Donald Trump insists on the maximalist demands and on the other side, Iran doesn't also see enough incentive to abandon its own maximalist demand, we may end up in a, in another forever war that would be destructive for the whole region.
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Hamid Reza Azizi, thank you very much. I enjoyed our conversation. I thought it was fantastic. I hope you people did as well because sometimes this, this background is, is lost in, in the conversation about Iran and anything we can do to help people understand the world, understand why things are happening, understand how these geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting. And as we're there watching history change, understanding the background, the context, the perspective, speaking to authors and historians is a real delight and a real pleasure and thank you for elevating this conversation.
- [35:31]
C
Thank you so much. It was a great pleasure. I also enjoyed very much our discussion.
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That was Hamid Reza, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and walk away understanding these complex, complicated events a little bit better than you did before. I'll be back next week with the great Yalda Hakim. Until then, thank you for listening.
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I'm Sam Coates from Sky News.
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And I'm Anne McElrovoy from POLITICO.
- [36:19]
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Downing Street Drama, Leadership battles and Policy U Turns we're on it before it breaks.
- [36:25]
D
We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening.
- [36:28]
B
Smart insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7:45am so you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics.
- [36:36]
D
Hit, follow and listen to politics at Sam and Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.