← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
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- [00:01]
A
Hello, I'm Ada Barume and I'm one of the hosts of a weekly investigative show called the Slow Newscast. Over at the observer, we like to take the news slowly, and each week we'll bring you one investigation that really matters and helps you make sense of the world. From the inside stories straight out of the halls of Westminster, to true crime and injustice, to celebrity trials and real human mysteries. Subscribe to the Slow Newscast feed wherever you get your podcasts. Sky News the full story first. Hello, it's me, Yalda, and I'm currently in Boston. Welcome to the World podcast.
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B
The only thing that really matters to me is Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. And if they do, they suffer unbelievable consequences. I would say now there is more motivation than ever before in Iran for developing a nuclear weapon. Even people who don't like this regime, they didn't like their apartment buildings to be bombed, the neighborhoods to be bombed, their historic sites to be bombed. Foreign.
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A
We've been talking a lot over the course of the last few months about the Iran war. And now, after four months, it appears that the Trump administration is about to sign an agreement with the Iranian regime. They'll be doing that in Switzerland. What this agreement or memorandum of understanding is and what it will mean, it's about a page and a half and it will lead to a 60 day ceasefire, which will then give time to the two sides to come together and try and come up with some kind of nuclear deal or agreement. So at the moment, it's unclear what exactly is in the deal, but what it will mean is that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened, the blockade that the Iranian ships faced will be lifted, and the impact that we saw and the concern that we saw around the global economy will be eased. It is shaky and fragile. There are concerns about spoilers. The Israeli government has already indicated that it will defy this ceasefire. Benjamin Netanyahu has said that this is Donald Trump's ceasefire, that he is driving and leading this. It's also caused friction between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Well, we'll be discussing this in this week's podcast. Richard is taking a break. He's been traveling a lot recently and I've been speaking with Ali Vais. Ali Vais is a nuclear scientist. He's also the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group. As always, you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts on Apple or Spotify. You can also follow us on YouTube and you can send us your thoughts or any questions you may have. The usual place the worldatsky.uk. Hi, Ali, it's good to see you again. We've spoken a lot over the course of the last few months since the war began in Iran. And we're now seeing a potential agreement that is going to be signed between the Trump administration and the Iranian leadership. And you've been writing a lot about this deal. You've been speaking about it. One of the things that you've said is that the memorandum is not a finish line. It's a narrow ledge. What do you mean by that?
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B
It's great to see you, Yalda. Look, the memorandum is a page and a half. It's, it contains 14 points. It really doesn't have a lot of depth. The two sides have decided to address the essential and basically defer the substantial. This is what I mean, that it is important because it is addressing the two very essential and urgent issues. Number one, ending the war, and ending the war in a comprehensive way, in a way that it applies to the entire region, including Lebanon. And number two is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which, if it had remained blocked for just another few weeks, it would really generate a massive, massive economic downturn at a global level and it would result in a major food scarcity catastrophe, especially in the global south, basically costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives in a place like East Africa, for instance. So this is very important, but I'm saying it's insufficient because it really doesn't resolve any of the key problems. All of the issues of negotiating a nuclear deal, sanctions, relief, all of those things have been deferred to subsequent negotiations over the following 60 days.
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A
Donald Trump is declaring this is some kind of triumph, but he's essentially resolving the problems that his war of choice created.
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B
That is correct. This MOU is taking us to where, almost to where we were prior to February 28th, before the war, when the strait was open. But again, I don't want to also underestimate some of the things that it is achieving. You know, it is the first time Iran and the United States have, are signing on to a document. There have been some understandings in the past, but are signing on to a document that is not just a nuclear deal. It goes beyond that. In fact, it starts its first point is about almost an amount to
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A
a
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B
non aggression understanding between the two sides. So it addresses regional issues. It is the first time that the US has ever put a comprehensive lifting of sanctions on the table. Yes, that is to be negotiated in the later stages of the diplomatic track, but nevertheless, no. US President had ever in the past put full lifting of U.S. sanctions on the table. It is talking about a $300 billion fund for Iran's recovery from this war that the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf would negotiate the details of. Again, I'm not starry eyed in thinking that it's going to happen, but even the admittance that Iran has to benefit, that a deal has to be mutually beneficial for a president that started this war with demanding Iranian unconditional surrender, I do believe it's extraordinary.
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A
When you say it's quite extraordinary, what do you mean?
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B
I truly believe that this had turned into a lose lose dynamic for both sides. Yes, it is true that the Iranians survived the hot war, but they also need to survive the peace or what comes after. Right. And their economy was already in dire straits prior to this conflict. Now to recover and to reconstruct with so much damage that they have suffered and infrastructure that lies in ruins, it is going to be extremely difficult for them. So the United States does hold some cards. But it is true that, you know the Iranians, their definition of victory was survival and so they have survived it. Yes, it's a Pyrrhic survival, but nevertheless it is a win for them. And I think the mistake that the US committed was that it went into this war based on wishful thinking and a set of wrong assumptions that the war as now clearly proven that did cost the United States probably in the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars and did not meet any of the strategic objectives that the US and Israel had in mind. And it has also turned into a losers dynamic for them as well. But also they have ended up with an Iran that is also in some ways weaker, some of its military capabilities have been degraded and again economically is in a very difficult situation. But I think the US by now has tried every course of policy you can imagine. In the case of Iran, every. It's the most sanctioned country in the world, years of sanctions and it is been the target of two attacks in the course of a year by not just the strongest military power in the world, but also the mightiest military power in the region, Israel, and also the mightiest intelligence organization in the world, Mossad. They've done, they've thrown everything they had at the Islamic Republic and they didn't succeed. And so I do believe in the person of Trump and in this approach that has been adopted in this one pager you see the beginning of the realization that maybe there is a need for a different approach.
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A
What about this last four months has surprised You. And what can we learn more about Iran and the authorities in Iran?
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B
Well, I have to admit what surprised me was the degree of discipline and unity that the regime was able to preserve under very difficult circumstances. You know, we're talking about several hundred senior Iranian officials, political and military leaders being eliminated. And yet there was no gap in continuity of governance in Iran. There was no chaos. You know, even if you talk to ordinary Iranians, there was no shortage of fuel or water or blackouts, which is again, quite extraordinary. I mean, how many countries do you know in the world who can stand up to the United States and Israel and basically be able to hold ground and push back? What I'm saying is that this degree of coherence was a surprise to me. The other thing that was a surprise to me is that we always knew that this regime had about 10 to 15% of the Iranian society as its core constituent. But I was also truly surprised that they could mobilize them in the way that they did every single night. And even to this day, these regime proponents are coming to the streets and occupying the public squares and expressing support for the regime. And finally, the fact that in the aftermath of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in this new Islamic Republic, you have a group of leaders who are bolder and more decisive and do not hesitate to do whatever they believe is in their in the interest of the regime or the state. Right. Ayatollah Khamenei would ban direct talks with the Americans only because they had, you know, a US President had made a harsh speech about Iran. But we had the highest level meeting between Iran and the United States after the US Killed Iran's supreme leader, the head of state, and basically inflicted so much harm on the country. The new Iranian leadership did not hesitate to meet with Vice President Vance in Islamabad directly. And if there is a signing ceremony in Switzerland on Friday, is still, again, an extraordinary thing to see. So, yes, there have been a lot of surprises, even for as much of an avid observer as myself.
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A
So what do you think then their game plan will be how do you think this, the leadership in Iran is going to move forward?
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B
Basically, in the short run, this MOU is a double test for President Trump from an Iranian perspective, is a test of whether he is able to reign in Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel in general. The second test is to see if Trump actually delivers on sanctions relief. And this is a big question, right? Because with the exception of a year in 2016, half a year that the US delivers some sanctions relief to Iran, there is really not a lot of positive experience there. And if President Trump delivers on the frozen assets and on Iran's ability to export oil in this period of 60 days, it's a very important test. So if this experience works, then there are two options in front of Iran. One option is to try to now do what they have repeatedly tried to do with the United States and hasn't worked, which is to try to solve their problems, to try to get out from under US sanctions in a much more comprehensive way, improve relations with the west and then balance the relations between the west and the East. That's one approach. If this doesn't work, if we end up in a situation that, just like the Gaza ceasefire, this deal never goes into a phase two, it remains at the level of an mou, or we relapse into conflict, then Iran would go a very different pathway in which it would double down on Russia and China. It needs to basically mortgage out whatever it can to an outside actor in order to get a lifeline and survive. So it's two very different trajectories. But again, the test for it is exactly this period of the implementation of the mou.
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A
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B
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A
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B
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A
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B
So look, if you had asked me prior to the 12 day war how long it would take for Iran to enrich enough fissile material to weapons grade, given that it had a stockpile of 60%, and just to explain to your audience that 60% enriched uranium is 99% of the effort that it takes to get to weapons grade, so that one last step really doesn't take a lot of effort, I would tell you it would take Iran six days to enrich enough uranium for a single nuclear weapon. Now, that's not a nuclear weapon. It's the ingredient for a cake. You still have to bake it into a cake, you still have to weaponize it, manufacture a weapon. And there, there were different timelines depending on whether they wanted to have a sophisticated nuclear warhead or a more rudimentary one. It will be a matter of, you know, three months to a year. If you ask me. Now what's the timeline? I tell you, it's the exact same thing because Iran still has that 60% stockpile. It still has a stockpile of advanced centrifuges, it has scientists, it knows how to do this. That's all it takes, right?
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A
So, so, you know, so I wonder then, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu sounding this alarm constantly, is he right to.
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B
So look, it, it kind of turned into a self fulfilling prophecy. What President Trump doesn't say, what Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't say, is that if the US had stayed in the JCPOA and President Trump had not exited the deal in 2018, Iran would not have a stockpile of 60% enriched uranium that was banned until 2031. The entire deal was designed so that the amount of time that it would take for enriching enough assignment material for a single nuclear weapon, the so called breakout time, was more than a year until we get to 2031. So by destroying that deal, Netanyahu basically brought the timeline forward and then again by pushing the Iranians. For instance, the Iranians were not enriching to 60% until he sabotaged Israel, I mean, sabotaged Iran's key nuclear facility in Natanz. And in response, the Iranians started enriching to 60%.
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A
So it all backfired essentially.
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B
Exactly. The Iranians were not enriching even to 20% even after the US exited the agreement, but they did so when Israel killed the top Iranian nuclear scientists in reaction, they started enriching to 20%. So yes, it all backfired. And if you look at U.S. intelligence assessment, every Director of National intelligence in yearly briefings to Congress, I mean, this is all public, they always say Iran has the technical capability to develop a nuclear weapon, but it does not. It has not yet made the political decision to do so. And the political decision comes from what? It comes from your threat perception. Right? And if you attack a country twice in less than a year, you're basically arguing for developing a nuclear weapon when they have again, the know how, the machinery, the manpower and the material.
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A
I mean, that's, that's quite extraordinary because you've laid it out in quite, you know, basic terms there for US in a, in a way that we understand. So you're saying the capability is there, the green light hasn't been given. And part of that also was that the Supreme Leader himself, you've just described him as a very cautious figure and conservative on these issues and, and risk averse, had issued this fatwa to say we're not going to develop a nuclear weapon, you know, but, but why are we being restricted in terms of our nuclear programs?
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B
Although you're, you put your finger on a very important thing which is that, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei had a religious edict against, against developing nuclear weapons, but that wasn't really the main obstacle. He had calculated that if Iran crosses the Rubicon and goes towards developing nuclear weapons, it risks inviting a devastating US attack, which is something that now has already happened and the Iranians are no longer afraid of it because they have survived it. And the second thing he was worried about was that there might be a domino effect in the region of other countries in the region trying to acquire or develop nuclear weapons. And then the balance of power in the region will become a game of nuclear deterrence, which is extremely costly and Iran would not have the resources to win that. When a lot of other countries in the region have the US umbrella and much more resource, financial resources available to them. Even you can say that game is now to a certain extent lost. Because we've seen Saud, the deepening of relations with Pakistan, we have seen the UAE deepening relations with Israel, all of these nuclear weapons states. So I would say now there is more motivation than ever before in Iran for developing a nuclear weapon, even at the popular level. Right? Because even people who don't like this regime, they didn't like their apartment buildings to be bombed, the neighborhoods to be bombed, their historic sites to be bombed, to be subject to threats of civilizational erasure. So there is now even more bottom up support for weaponization. And again, this is why a wise policymaker at this moment would look at this picture and would say time has come to pursue a different strategy towards Iran. Containment, coercion, all of these things that we have tried again and again in the past haven't really worked. But again, I'm not starry eyed because I know I lived in D.C. for 15 years. I know the culture in that town. I know it's a city surrounded by reality. And a lot of people will continue to say true communism hasn't been tried, true coercion hasn't been tied. A little bit more sanctions, a little bit more bombing. And this would magically conjure the victory we have in mind.
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A
All the while, as you were saying, the threat level has increased for the Iranians, as has the motivation. So while DC Is mulling this over and trying to figure out what to do over the course of the next 60 days, there's a lot of clarity, it seems, for the Iranian leadership in terms of what the threat level is, what red lines no longer exist that they thought perhaps probably did exist. And so their calculus is going to be very different to what D.C. or the Trump administration, or frankly, even the Israeli government is going to hope that it will be.
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B
Yes, I think that's absolutely right. But there is also something else that I should add to the picture, which is that in this process where we're talking about a weapon of mass destruction, the Iranians also discovered a weapon of mass disruption, which I would say, again, this war gifted to them, which was their ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and therefore take the global economy hostage. Now, that is a tool that has an expiry date, meaning that now that, that the world economy has suffered through these past few months, over the next few years, there will be reduced reliance on the Strait of Hormuz and also diversification in terms of energy, so that the risk of this would be diminished. But this is not a short term thing. It's sort of a medium to long term phenomenon. For instance, again, the pipelines that the Saudis or the Emiratis had to go around the Strait of Hormuz, that's a legacy of the Iran Iraq War and the realization that the Strait is vulnerable in war times. But it took years to develop an alternative. And so, yes, it would take some time to develop an alternative. But in the short run, Iran has that very powerful tool and deterrence at its disposal as well. So, yes, the threat perception has changed, but there are also new tools available to the Iranians. Again, all of these things are important to understand in order to come up with a realistic policy that has a chance of working. I always said to my students at Georgetown that half of the battle is understanding your enemy. If you don't understand your enemy, you're by definition going to make mistakes. And of course, this war was a strategic blunder of epic proportions.
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A
Yeah, Operation Epic Fury, as you say. A strategic blunder is what it's being described at. But clearly lessons have been learned despite the failure from both sides. I just wonder. There are a lot of reports over the last couple of days that there's like this fracture in the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Do you think that's real? And what kind of conundrum does the Israeli Prime Minister now face?
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B
It's a very good question. Look, I think Netanyahu, in the short run, doesn't really have a lot of good options in front of him because he can't really challenge Trump beyond a certain limit. President Trump, at this point, really needs the strait to reopen, really needs energy prices to start coming down in the run up to the midterm elections in November, which is after the Israeli elections. And in that sense, the timeline is designed in a way that Netanyahu would not be off the hook before President Trump's political calculations would shift. And one downside of military operations against Iran twice in the course of a year is that it becomes more difficult to do it. The threshold for convincing President Trump that this is a slam dunk, that it's easy to achieve, that the Iranian regime is on the brink of collapse, that the Iranian people come to the streets and would cheer him as a liberator, etc. This is very difficult to do multiple times in a row, especially when some of his assumptions turn out to be so inaccurate. So I do believe that that horse has left the barn in the short run. And finally, in Lebanon, I think Israel will continue to put pressure on southern Lebanon, whether it will cross the Iranian red line of targeting Beirut or not. Again, I'm skeptical because I think his arm has been twisted, but we will see it does provide Israel, Lebanon does provide Israel with a way of undermining this understanding.
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A
I think what this war has also shown us from the greatest military power in history is its limitations as well. It's another US President dragged into a war in the Middle east that they promised they wouldn't get sort of caught up in. And I remember for Joe Biden, it was the, you know, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which felt like the beginning of the end of his presidency. And sort of every president seems to have some great challenge that they deal with. And perhaps do you think that for Donald Trump, this is it?
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B
I think that's absolutely right. President Trump, by the way, is going back to his initial instincts in his first term. Also, Israel wanted President Trump to. To strike Iran, and he resisted. In the second term, I think a first of all, some experience with Iran, including killing Iranian top general Soleimani in 2020, which resulted in very limited performative Iranian response by firing missiles into US Bases in Iraq. And also last year, in response to US Bombing Iranian nuclear sites, again because of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's cautiousness, Iran responded with a symbolic attack in Qatar. President Trump had concluded that he would be able to get away with using kinetic options against Iran. Plus he had a hot hand because he was coming out of the Venezuela experience and he had started to really believe that this mighty tool of American military could be used in a limited fashion to achieve objectives that other U.S. presidents could not because they were not bold enough and not creative enough. I think that image has now broken and has been shattered in his mind. I'm not saying that the United States would not once again commit these mistakes. I was looking at that some of the conclusions that President Kennedy and Johnson's Secretary of Defense McNamara had drawn from the Vietnam War, which is that the US should never go into a war in a unilateral fashion that doesn't have a support of a wide range of US allies. But that lesson has been lost again and again and again now for the next two years. I think President Trump is probably going to be more risk averse. I'm not saying he's acted in erratic ways at times. So I'm not predicting that there will be no additional wars against Iran or no mistakes that the US Would come into in that part of the world. I'm just saying that the bar for doing it is now higher and I think he would be more risk averse.
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A
Oliver, it's always great to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and analysis expertise with us.
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B
Great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Elsa,
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That was Ali Weiss. Thanks so much for listening. And of course, if you have any questions about the Iran war or anything else, please send us your thoughts@theworldsky.uk.
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How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.