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- [00:52]
Unherd Host
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. Now that we are in the throes of what rapidly looks like a general Middle Eastern war, there are so many different aspects that the Western media is getting excited about and focusing on. There's the internal politics in European countries, in places like the uk, different factions winning out. There's the effect on the economy. People are looking at, quite rightly, the Straits of Hormuz and what that is going to do to global oil markets. There is the question of how many other countries will be dragged in, how wide could it escalate? The question that we think is is more important than all of those is also the hardest one to answer, which is what is going to happen next inside Iran? Because this is a country where we have very little information in the west as to what is going on at the highest levels of the regime or even frankly on the ground, we're going to try to tackle that hard question today by putting in front of you two very different perspectives. The first is, if you like the American perspective, it is what voices inside the Pentagon, inside the American administration believe and hope will happen next inside Iran, the outcome they are looking for. We're then going to present the opposite view, which is an expert who is currently based in the US but a fierce critic of the American action in Iran and can actually tell us what they think is going to happen or the opposite view, what people who are closer to the Iranian side think might happen next. So we're really going to give you two sides of this question and by the end, of course, as ever, you can make your own mind up. First up, in order to talk about really the Pentagon and the administration's predictions and hopes for what happens inside Iran, we have Professor Edward N. Lutback. He is perhaps one of the foremost experts on grand strategy, coup d', etat, the geo, economic and geopolitical fallouts of these kinds of actions. But he's also someone who deeply understands the Pentagon. He has been inside many different administrations. He's been in and out of that building for decades, ever since the 70s, and really has a deep understanding of their way of thinking. So it's hard to think of anyone who can better give us that perspective. Professor, welcome back to Unherd.
- [03:08]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
Thank you.
- [03:10]
Unherd Host
What is your sense of what the Trump administration wants to happen inside Iran?
- [03:17]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
They want regime change without troops on the ground, any troops on the ground. The moment you bring boots on the ground, as the phrase goes, you bring the American army, navy, air force, Marine corps machinery there. All of them want to participate. Their logistic requirements are luxurious and vast. The whole thing becomes very heavy. And then along the way you try achieve your aim and you have accumulated all kinds of costs. People have died because people have died. You can't walk away. You intervene in the country, your troops are killed and you can't go home and say, sorry, I made a mistake. You have to say, no, victory is around the corner, et cetera. To avoid all of that. The principle, the operating principle is no soldiers in Iran, no ground forces enter Iran, period. You have to achieve a kind of levitation or effect from a distance. Now, this was pulled off in Venezuela. In Venezuela, the simple device was, no, we don't destroy the government, we simply remove Maduro and Mrs. Maduro and we put in the number two. Now, strangely enough, this could be done in Iran because as you know, among the peculiarities of Iran, there are many. They actually had a presidential election. The president has nothing to do with foreign policy, revolution, guards or missiles. He just administers the Iranian state at home. That president Masoud Pachidian is actually an ethnic Azeri, which is very important in this case brought up in the Kurdish area. So he's a sort of multi ethnic type. He's also a technocrat and he's not at all a religious fanatic or anything of the sort. So is a candidate in the presidential election along the guide that is closer to the regime, who is a classic extremist Islamist, Shia imperialist, et cetera. He wins the election. The election is a real election.
- [05:30]
Unherd Host
And 2024. Right. So this is around two years ago.
- [05:34]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
That's right, when Raisi, the president, who was a far brand prosecutor, condemned 38,000 people to death. And so he died in a helicopter accident. They had to have a new president. They had an election. And the Khamenei, the boss wanted people to show up at the election. So if they only had candidates who were mass murdering extremists and mass murdering extremists with a beard or something, nobody would have showed up for the election. The big threat was no show up. So they put in British and he wins. How does he win? By saying two things. One, I'm going to save the Iranian economy by removing all these embargoes. How? I'm going to do it by talking to the Americans. And what I'm going to say to the Americans, whatever it is, will remove the embargo. That's how he got elected. The moment he became president, he had only the state administration in his hands. A rather limited role in Iran. He didn't have Revolutionary Guards, he didn't have the Islamic Foundations that had most of the nation's capital in their hands. He had very limited powers. But one power he did have was to occasionally speak. And what he said was he didn't talk about Israel, he didn't talk about Yemen. He talked about one thing. If we do not stop what we are doing and turn around and invest billions and billions of billions, Tehran will have to be evacuated because we have neglected the water supply for 30 years while pursuing adventures. He didn't say the other part said we've neglected the water. Tehran, we'll have to evacuate the city of 12 million inhabitants. And he starts talking about things that redirect the attention to Iran's needs. Now, as you know, and most people in the world know, the Iranians have diverted their foreign currency earnings from exporting oil from their national structural needs to arming, you know, Hezbollah and Hamas and Houthis and everybody else, plus building this gigantic missile construction industry which produced enormous number of ballistic missiles, more than, by the way, Russia or America ever produced in numbers anyway. And what did they do? They did not invest in gas pipelines. So Iran, with unlimited gas that has limited gas supplies which only reach some localities. Most of them they don't reach.
- [08:12]
Unherd Host
Professor, how will the current president, who is already the president, deliver a new outcome for Iran now that the country's been attacked?
- [08:22]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
The way you deliver it is that you kill off his enemies. He is a president with this very limited role because the power goes from the Ayatollah Khamenei. It went to the Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards were running the country. They were receiving the hard currency, earning from oil supply and using them for the nuclear projects and their missile projects. Both of them, by the way, hugely overbuilt. Iran has a huge installation in Natanz. You've heard about it for years. They had the other one in Fordow, another huge installation underground. Then he had the third one, Isfahan. I mean, compared to this, you know, 40 years ago, the Israelis acquired their nuclear weapon in a building that looks like a large garage. Okay? And they didn't spend measurable percentages of their GDP at all to do it. You want a nuclear weapon? What the revolution guards. This became their project to put their hands on the whole economy because everything is grossly overbuilt.
- [09:28]
Unherd Host
The Supreme Leader has obviously been taken out. Khamenei. But he will be replaced. It doesn't seem likely. There's going to be a whole new constitutional settlement that empowers the president to deliver economic reforms, and the role of the Supreme Leader will just stay vacant. How does this play out?
- [09:46]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
If they appoint his mojita, his son. If they appoint his son, then the regime starts collapsing because the Supreme Leader is supposed. This is the system that Ayatollah Khomeini invented. Shia clerics through history were quietest. Quietest. The official doctrine is let's wait without excessive impatience for the return of the missing 12th Imam, who. Who is alive and well. But occult. He's hiding. We have to wait patiently for him. So the tradition is that the Shia clerics were quietists. They were scholars, actually. Scholars and not people who did things. Ayatollah Khomeini totally divert in 1970, not 2000 years ago. In 1970, came out with his doctrine called Velayat Ifaki Kafaki. F A Q I J so I'm not trying to be rude. Is supposed to be a jurist, an expert in Shia law and jurisdiction. Now, Khomeini made himself into a huge hero and he filled this role of the Grand Ayatollah, that he who has authority as this jurist. In other words, he designed this role and then filled this role through this process of exile and everything else. Now he cannot be replaced by just anybody. When Khamenei replaced him, having been his longtime disciple, there were questions raised in Iran about the level of his scholarship. But now they put his undistinguished son there. Doesn't work at all. Shiism rules out dynastic succession. The whole idea of Shiism is that it's not dynastic succession.
- [11:33]
Unherd Host
So your hope or prediction is that somehow the whole constitutional arrangement of revolutionary Iran will change because the function of the Supreme Leader will somehow be disintegrated because the candidate isn't strong enough.
- [11:50]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
They have to find a supreme leader who is plausible, is plausible. The son is not plausible in that role. He will not be attacked by the people who count, which is the academies in Nayaf, which is in Iraq, which is not so convenient for them. Nayaf is number one. Number two is gum, right? Remote from Tehran. No way they're going to accept, in other words, the people who care about Shiism and the whole concept of that religion and its structures cannot accept the saht of because heredity, succession is exactly his. Contrary to what they believe. What they believe is that there's this great scholar recognized by the other scholars, and now we put him in charge of the country. That was the theory.
- [12:35]
Unherd Host
I do see that. And obviously it is an irony that revolutionary Iran rose up in opposition to a monarchy. And now it looks like they're going to have a hereditary succession which is definitely.
- [12:46]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
But that will not be accepted. That's the very point.
- [12:48]
Unherd Host
So do you not think it's possible, though, that given the attack that has just happened, they might see the sun taking over as just a kind of continuity? It's a sort of way of sticking two fingers up to the US because it says, okay, you can kill our supreme leader, but we have one just like him in the wings. We are carrying on as before.
- [13:07]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
The people who support the entire concept were perhaps 20% before the war. With the losses of the war and with the exposure of the total incapacity of these boastful revolutionary guards, Revolutionary Guard said, the moment there's a war, Israel disappears. Okay, like that is going to disappear. They failed, obviously. They failed in everything they did. This regime had a certain narrow base of support, which has become narrower. 80% of the population are opposed. But the more practical thing is.
- [13:43]
Unherd Host
But can I just challenge that? Sorry, Professor. I mean, how do we know really what percentage of the population is opposed? And it just sounds a little bit like Western hubris to presume that that population will. Will shrink if we attack them.
- [13:58]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
First of all, you may have noticed that there were huge demonstrations in Iran against the regime. You may have noted there were no counter demonstrations. 80% is a very low. I mean, it's a really conservative estimate of the people who oppose the regime. 80% conservative. Now the regime has failed. The regime has failed twice. Firstly, diverted all the resources to these foreign adventures. The foreign adventures, one after the other, the support of Assad, the whole thing, one after. Have failed. And now their basic support cannot be as high as 20%. But the more practical thing is the position is an Azeri and very declared Azeri. The culture is not Azeri nor Kurd. The culture of the political culture in Iran is the culture, classic Persian culture. They all read the Shahnameh, the national epic, which is indeed worth reading, and the poetry and so on. They're all in the national culture. But he is emphatically Azeri. And there are 2 million or 3 million Azeris living right in Tehran who are proud of the fact that he is the president of Iran and who will be willing to protect him if he's attacked. The Azeris have a strong Azeri identity. There was a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The government of Iran supported Armenia, Christian Armenia, against Azerbaijan for plastic reasons. And the Azeris demonstrated in Tehran, strongly demonstrated, because the government was going against Azerbaijan, which is a different foreign country, but inhabited by fellow Azeris. Now they have an Azeri president. If the revolution guards try to pick him up, arrest him and shoot him because he wants to do what he said he would do, namely give up the nuclear project and start restoring the country, the answer is he has 2 million people around him to protect him. He's not defenseless.
- [16:11]
Unherd Host
So sketch for us the ideal scenario as you see it. So they appoint Mujtaba Khamenei, the son who is, as you see, an implausible leader. So somehow that leads to some kind of collapse in the regime or constitutional change.
- [16:26]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
What I see simply happening is that Pajidian, with the support of the Azeris in Tehran, to prevent his murder, his quick murder by the lobbying guards, he starts asserting himself. Why? He asserts himself because he ran for election. He got elected to do this very big thing of giving up the nuclear project and removing all the embargoes on Iran and start rebuilding the country after 30 years of severe neglect, which has affected the water supply, the gas supply, the electrical supply. This winter in Tehran, people could not warm the houses with electricity. They had to burn stinking residual oil. In this environment, it's possible to get to do something like happening in Venezuela, namely that the regime is not destroyed. You don't have American troops running around, but within the regime, somebody emerges that does the things that the United States wants them to do, which I think a huge percentage of the Iranian people want them to do. As in Venezuela, you have somebody who works at the bidding of a foreign power, but does what 80% of the population want. That thing can work.
- [17:44]
Unherd Host
So in your estimation, having had your conversations with people inside the Pentagon and Perhaps in the administration you think that the situation you've just described is what they are aiming for. If there is a strategy, if there is a good outcome, it's that that you get a more assertive Bezechkian president and a diminished supreme leader and that overall the trajectory of Iran veers more friendly to the U.S. yes, except that
- [18:11]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
this is not a complicated scheme. It is simple reality. A American troops are not in Iran, will not be in Iran. So any of those options are out. Therefore, you need to evoke a solution. You cannot enforce it with bayonets because you're not going to send troops. The ready made solution in place is the fact that they do have a president who was elected, who was elected on the promise of doing what the world wants Iran to do. But he was not allowed to do it by the supreme leader Khamenei. He was now dead. This thing is a doable proposition. The elements are there, okay? The elements are there. And you don't. From the guy in the White House does not have to engineer it because as a matter of fact, that's the only thing that can happen. Because a he cannot send troops, you cannot invade Iran, period. You cannot go to Tehran. So it must be evoked internally. And that is so all they have to do is to ensure that if Revolutionary Guards try to get organized to physically they do a coup d'. Etat. If they try to do a coup d' etat there now you can bomb them. That's the only American intervention that can work is for them to attack the Revolution Guards. If the Russian Guards try to assert the control physically in Terra.
- [19:35]
Unherd Host
I think a lot of people watching have strong memories of Iraq, Afghanistan, many other attempted interventions from afar, some on the ground by the US that have not turned out to go into plan. I guess my question is how can you be confident that the cards will fall in the way that you say when there can be many other outcomes that could be far worse.
- [20:02]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
Those very memories are what drives this process. And those memories are far stronger in Washington than they are anywhere outside Washington. I myself testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Biden as it happens, against the Iraq war of 2003. I said the project to install a democracy in Iraq is a mad project. Iraq is not a nation. There's not a state. There's no unity. There are only rival groups, you know, different Kurdish Talibanis, Barazanis fighting Turkmen and Kurds, the Kurds and Turkmen against the Sunnis, the Sunnis against the Shia, the Shia. I said, you go and my testimony is very clear. You go into Iraq and it's going to be a catastrophe, a disaster. Those memories, it wasn't listened to at the time. Now everybody knows. So in other words, the Americans have learned something from the Afghanistan in Iraq. First, if you try to achieve political change, don't try and do it with bayonets. Because the Americans are not like other people. They're not Genghis Khan, they're not willing to go and massacre everybody in the country who disobeys. They cannot have a North Korean solution. So they don't have to be clever a they cannot send troops. So rule that out without any consideration, any possibility. And indeed the only merit, I mean, I would say the great merit of the Secretary of Defense, who was more of an NCO than an officer and so on, is that he actually served in Iraq, in Afghanistan, therefore realized the futility of it. The absurdity of trying to install feminism in Afghanistan. You recall the madness that the Afghan parliament had the higher female quota than the number of females in the House of Commons or the United States Congress. You know, once you send the Panjadram Army, Navy, Air Force, multi service with all the NGOs, the plague of NGOs that show up, that want to introduce feminism in Afghanistan and fishing in a desert and all kinds of rubbish, everything goes to hell. And the Trump intervention idea is you defank the enemy, you destroy the nuclear, destroy the missiles and then you hope for the best and you try, you know, you might do something like Russian guards and besiege position American airplanes show and blow them up or something like that.
- [22:34]
Unherd Host
One last question for you, Professor. You've sketched a scenario for us which would be a positive outcome for the US. Now tell us what you think the worst case scenario is.
- [22:47]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
The bad scenario is that Perjean is murdered tomorrow morning or tonight while this show is not over. Revolutionary Guard some Revolutionary beard, the Revolutionary Guard general says I'm in charge or something like that. But the attempt to smoothly replace the the Ayatollah Khamenei with his son in violation of every Shiite concept, that cannot work. In other words, their scenario cannot work at all. The smooth succession and nothing happened. And continue broadcasting on television. Iran has won great victories and the world is shaking its boots and so on.
- [23:23]
Unherd Host
Professor Edward Lurkwerk, thank you so much for your time today.
- [23:26]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
Thank you, thank you.
- [23:28]
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- [26:00]
Unherd Host
Our next guest is Dr. Arthur Moeni. He is going to provide a very different perspective. He is Managing Director of the Institute of Peace and Diplomacy in the us, knows Iran and its culture very well. He is a heritage Persian, but also has lived there for quite a long time and probably is more up to date with what's actually going on in that country than most people in the West. Welcome back to Unherd, Arthur.
- [26:26]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [26:27]
Unherd Host
What's your best guess? Let's get straight into it of what happens next. The Supreme Leader has been taken out. We hear rumours that his son Mujtaba is being kind of selected as a potential replacement. What do you know and what should we know about what is likely to happen next inside Iran?
- [26:47]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
I don't know if Mushabu Khamenei is going to be the next Supreme Leader of Iran. I think there are many people who use that to create sort of a sense of hereditary transfer of power. But so far as we know, Khamenei, he was very clear that he doesn't want that sense of hereditary change. He is a very powerful person. He's very connected with the irgc and I think that's the key line. Iran is a very entrenched, has a very entrenched social order and very entrenched political system. It is highly decentralized. It is very layered. It is horizontally organized.
- [27:22]
Unherd Host
What does that mean? Just for our viewers and listeners, what does it mean to say something is horizontally organized?
- [27:27]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
There are a lot of redundancies. There are many different people that sort of work within their networks and the networks are all sort of parallel to one another. So you can't just decapitate ahead and expect the regime to fall. The closest systems to the Iranian system we have to think about are the USSR or China, perhaps even North Korea. Definitely not the sort of the sultanates and the dictatorships that were person centered in the Middle East. A lot of the critics of the regime think that the regime just doesn't care about human life.
- [28:00]
Professor Edward N. Lutback
Right?
- [28:00]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
As if it doesn't care about the people. It doesn't care about human life in general in the sense that it's thinks that life is in the service of the system. So it also didn't care about the life of the Supreme Leader and its military leaders and others. So everybody is expendable for the system, right?
- [28:17]
Unherd Host
So what you're saying there, which is sort of point one for Western strategists to try to absorb, is that just because you've taken out the number one guy, the Ayatollah Khamenei and a number of his lieutenants, it doesn't mean that the system is decapitated in the sense that it would be if it was like a pyramid system. And suddenly it all falls over. You think there's a kind of resilience there because it's networked and there are all these different parts of the state. It's more resilient to that kind of action than other countries might be.
- [28:52]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
You could not have gotten the Soviet Union to fall with a war. You could not have gotten China to do anything or change fundamentally. Just China today is a different China than it was under Mao, for example, but it didn't come through war.
- [29:05]
Unherd Host
So you think the revolutionary Iran, the state as it is right now, a few days after these attacks, is still robust and intact, even despite the protests we've seen over the recent year? Your feeling is that Western commentators are overestimating the amount of damage they've done?
- [29:26]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
That is correct. I think again, the way that the west thinks about Iran was always as sort of a fragile paper tiger, couldn't do much. But it is a regional state, it is a regional power and there is a reason for that. The ideological character of the regime has to be understood in the context of the geopolitics and the kind of unique characteristics of the Iranian state itself. And the Iranian state as we are seeing today, was not just created in 1979.
- [29:55]
Unherd Host
We've just had Professor Edward Lutback on the show. So he is someone who has been around a long time. He's seen many American administrations. He's very familiar with the way the Pentagon thinks about these kinds of things. And his analysis is that what the administration and inside the Pentagon, what they are thinking is that the current president, Pezesh Kiyan, is their hoped for candidate for someone who is going to get more influence than he used to. His analogy is Delsey Rodriguez in Venezuela there, supposedly they have been successful. It's early days yet, it's worth saying, but they have been successful and they took out the top guy and there was someone there who can gently pivot the country to be more friendly to America. The analogy is that the elected President Possesskayan had spoken in ways that were more reforming. He was being held back by the Ayatollah and now he's going to be able to be more dominant in this new world. Is that right?
- [30:58]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
I think this is an absolute mistake. I kind of see where Ed is coming from. I just think that the entire analysis on Iran has been mistaken over and over again. They don't understand the unique structure and characteristics of the Iranian state, not just because it is the cultural and religious and political nuances of a different culture and society, but also the unique structure of a modern state. It doesn't work on personality. No one person can tame the beast. The Leviathan the Minotaur, as Bernard de Jouille would call it. Once you birth these kinds of states, the state rides you. You don't ride the state.
- [31:38]
Unherd Host
Yeah, but I'd like you to be a bit more specific, if possible. Like why is that theory wrong? So the president is still there. He is still the president and has whatever powers he has. Not as many as a president of a Western republic perhaps, but he has some influence. The language he's used has been about, you know, trying to get rid of sanctions and improving the economic situation. Why is it wrong to hope that he might have more influence now?
- [32:04]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
He represents what we have seen over and over again, a kind of a reformist faction in Iran. But the reformists, especially after this war, but over time have been increasingly marginalized. What happens is the IRGC has increasingly, and not just irgc, security establishment in Iran, other networks, the regime base of support, let's say. So this is also a social phenomenon. I think they are. They have become more hard line as they're as the, as the. As the sort of a secular Iranian segment of society has become more anti regime and fundamentally broken with the regime. You have the IRGC actually saying, you know, we cannot deal with the west any longer because this is the. This is what I think the audience needs to understand. Khamenei developed this culture of resistance about everything. He was trying to show that his mythos was all about resistance, that he captured this religious symbolism of the previous mos of Shiism, whether Ali and or Hossein. And he was trying to show that to his audience, to his people. A lot of the programming, a lot of the media, it's directed at the base of the regime, not at the society at large. And that has been one of the major aspects of the problem.
- [33:17]
Unherd Host
Your thesis then is actually that by taking out the Ayatollah, you enhance the hardline element because he will now have the aura of a martyr about him. And that kind of groundswell of support for the more hardline approach will be expanded. Is that what you think will now happen?
- [33:37]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
Yes, I think a lot of the Iranian sort of establishment are Western oriented. So Hassan Rouhani, Jawad Zarif Peseshkian, there is this sort of fascination with the west that even exists within the regime, and it also exists within the diaspora and within liberals in Iran. There's this kind of schizophrenia between loving the west and hating the west constantly for generations. And this has also permeated the regime. But that faction, which was basically the original, it came out of the original Leftist inclinations of the Iranian revolution, the socialist Islamists basically ended up being the ones that pushed for more Western openness and more democracy or more representation for the people. And they got shut out because the politics didn't allow for that. And I think to this day it doesn't allow for that even after all this.
- [34:26]
Unherd Host
So why is there not a chance that that kind of politics will have more power or more sway in this whatever comes next.
- [34:36]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
They were kept at bay because their orientation, their worldview was viewed as threatening to the cause of the Islamic revolution doctrine. But the original basis of the revolution was a sovereignties revolution. And Islam was then used and Khomeini was able to bring everyone together under this sort of like Shia doctrine. But the original impetus was anti imperialism Iranian sovereignty. And that's why it had a lot of secular leftists, nationalists, students, laborers. It had all of these people, not just a traditional clerical establishment, not just the bazaar, but it was a national revolution.
- [35:18]
Unherd Host
In which case, what happens next? I mean, what is the most likely next step or two after Iran has now received this massive attack which has taken out the supreme leader of the past 36 years? I mean it's a major event obviously for that country at the very least. And who knows how long or how deep those attacks and that conflict will go on. But what's your best guess as to the next steps inside the kind of
- [35:47]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
governing elites Khamenei was deterring, was wavering as to what to actually do. So he was, you know, he had one foot in resistance, but then the entire Iranian economy ran on the dollar. He was developing missiles, but then those missiles functions on the American GPS. But since the 12 Day War increasingly they understood that this is that any kind of openness with the West. I'm talking about the security establishment and the more realist and hardline voices, the pragmatists even they understood that any kind of opening with the west in that sense may actually create more existential threats for the regime down the line, that they don't want Iran to be, let's say, viable as a state. And so in a sense they are going to come out of this thinking further east rather than west, thinking China rather than the United States.
- [36:38]
Unherd Host
So first of all, you think it may be counter effective or as it were, this attack because the deceased Ayatollah will be kind of martyred in a sense. Second of all, you think it might pivot Iran long term to being even more isolationist, even less interested in a Western relationship and if anything more keen to join a Kind of non Western bloc. But all of that hinges on the idea that they are able to choose. I guess the counter argument must be if they are being pounded by American missiles and the insistence of the US is that the nuclear program has to stop and some more reasonable person needs to present themselves as the leader, you know, they may not have a choice.
- [37:23]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
That's the US view of this. All the talk about negotiations, we were never interested in negotiating with the Iranians. We gave them terms and we asked them to capitulate. And again, this is what I mean, the cultural mistranslation, the misreading, didn't understand that just because even if you offer them favorable economic terms, removal of sanctions, investments, they even offered to pay for the, for the, for their nuclear fuel. But there's this lack of trust from the Iranian side. They think that they have staying power and they're resilient and they don't. And the Trump administration thinks that in terms of power balance they can pound Iran and they're doing it. It would work in a sense, if you're thinking about a much more centralized state. The Iranian state has all of these redundancies and is decentralized. So if you keep hitting them, there are going to be more people that are going to replace and they're willing to wait you out.
- [38:14]
Unherd Host
You've said that Iran is a surprisingly resilient and distributed network state and therefore, although it's a blow, it will survive this kind of attack. But I've got to push back and ask what are the limits? Because it looks quite like Iran has been exposed as really very weak. In the past week they have had an enormous attack on them from the US and Israel. It has killed their de facto head of state, the supreme leader. And all they have been able to do in return is kind of shoot random missiles to 10 different regional countries without landing any major destruction anywhere. Frankly, a few missiles have landed but you know, it's not a very almighty response frankly from such an almighty country. And a lot of people will be looking at this. You know, they've been terrified at the idea of war with Iran because they thought some great all hell was going to break loose. And where is it?
- [39:19]
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- [39:54]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
But the Iranian strategy is not about that. The Iranian strategy is an asymmetric strategy, and all you need is to have more resolve than your enemy. That's all you need to do and you'll survive.
- [40:05]
Unherd Host
So what does that look like practically? So is this to do with disrupting global trade via the Strait of Hormuz? What else can they do?
- [40:12]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
So, for example, already what they have done, first of all, they have taken out major radar stations and they have gone after US Bases in the region for the specifics of taking out surveillance and radars of the United States that's used for air defense for the Thaad missiles and everything else. You basically bring that region and not just the energy, but the economies of those regions to a halt. You create a sense of insecurity. You have them call the White House and ask for a ceasefire. And Donald Trump has already asked the Iranians for ceasefires and they didn't want the ceasefire. So if it was just about like not being pounded by American bombs, they should have accepted the ceasefire or they should have capitulated earlier. But they didn't. So the question is why? Right? So I think there's a major thing here that's being missed, which is they have more stocks of missiles that they can use, and the interceptors that the United States and Israel and its allies are using is being increasingly depleted. And if they probably will run out of that in, in a week or two. And so their strategy is to get them to that point and then use it, use the missiles as a bargaining tool, not to give it up, but to basically, they can pound Israel once they can't intercept Iranian missiles.
- [41:26]
Unherd Host
You can discover more of these kind of conversations with an Unherd digital subscription. You get 12 weeks of unlimited digital access to unmissable articles from all of our writers such as Kathleen Stark, Glenn Lowry, Wolfgang Munshal, Yanis Varoufakis, and many more for just £12. As a subscriber, you can also watch exclusive weekly events here at the Unherd Club and read more in depth subscriber only. Investigations and deep dives. Not only that, we'll send you a free limited edition JG Fox Illustrated mug which features a punk protesting against offensive speech, which I hope you notice is ironically capturing our mission here at Unherd, which is to serve as a home for those still willing to speak their minds. Go to unherd.com podcast to claim this offer now. Do you think the Iranian regime, such as it is, wants to draw the US into a deeper conflict? Is that the strategy that trying to hope, for example, that they will send more military to defend the Straits of Hormuz, that Iranians can then attack it? Do you think that's part of their longer term plan?
- [42:35]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
The Islamic Republic didn't want this conflict with the United States. It's bizarre why we are in a war with Iran. No one can give a straight answer as to why. You saw what Rubio's imminent threat was, that Israel was about to attack Iran. Well, stop Israel from attacking Iran, but they didn't do that. There is no real national interest of the United States. And I will say that clearly and without any hesitation in trying to change or collapse or do anything in Iran. I think the ultimate goal of the Israelis is kind of a civil war in Iran.
- [43:06]
Unherd Host
Is that possible, do you think? I mean, a civil war must be one of the outcomes. I mean, if you mentioned how Khamenei was very good at sort of being ambiguous and bringing together all these different factions, you take that influence away and there are the Azeris and then there are the hard liners and then there are the reformers and all the rest of it. How likely is a civil war is
- [43:28]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
much deeper than a normal civil war even. I think the Iranian people in general are deeply polarized. They live in fundamentally different moral and ontological universes. This is, I would call it, the first ontological civil war. If it happens and is a disaster for Iran if that does happen.
- [43:51]
Unherd Host
Is that good or bad for the West?
- [43:52]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
It's horrible for the West.
- [43:53]
Unherd Host
Why?
- [43:54]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
Lack of stability in the region will have spillover effects in Iran will have spillover effects like the United States has never seen. Iran is again the world. The world, sort of geopolitics of the world has certain linchpin states and if they are destabilized, you get regional and then global instability. One such state is Iran. And I call them middle powers. They're civilizational powers. The reason that they are, they're staying in their regions is because of historical reasons, geographic reasons. Like you can go back and you can see always there is, there is a kind of a kingdom and an empire controlling that domain of land. And it's quite large. There is a reason for that.
- [44:31]
Unherd Host
Let me ask a question that I asked Professor Ludback. What is your view of the best case outcome for the west at this point and what is your view of the worst case outcome?
- [44:44]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
I mean the least bad outcome is some sort of sense, common sense, coming back to the Trump administration. We stop this war, we stop the Israelis from doing this. We find an understanding that basically tries to bring Iran into the fold, economically and otherwise, and basically do what Nixon did to Egypt after Nasser, but respecting Iran's sovereign rights.
- [45:08]
Unherd Host
What's the worst case outcome, do you feel? What is it? What's the outcome that you think would be most frightening for the West?
- [45:16]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
I think the worst case outcome is Trump doesn't put his foot down with Netanyahu. Rogue elements, whether they're chords or the mek, are somehow brought into Iran, they take a few cities, you end up starting a civil war. And I call this sort of the Syrianization of the Iranian problem. But except that Iran is not Syria. It's not a sort of a post colonial state. It's an ancient state that has structural staying power. And that civil war is going to devastate, it's going to bring America in a way that you have not seen before. It's going to completely change the dynamics of the region. Persian Gulf countries can say bye to their economies because the entrenched elements, that will be the irgc, that will continue to be entrenched, will continue to send missiles and bombs into the Persian Gulf as the civil war is going to go on and the dominant state is going to disappear. So you're going to get a lot of violence and a lot of migration flows. All these right wing pundits who talk about immigration, you're going to see huge refugee crisis across the world that you haven't seen it before. And the global economy, I mean, this is the World Energy center. And so you're going to have that problem as well. And ultimately also strategically, it's disastrous for the west because the winner is, I think China for sure. The post war order that was based on sort of American power, you are seeing the bombs and their tactical power and the awesomeness in that sense of their power. But I think when they don't achieve strategic ends and when countries don't do what the United States says, that actually discredits U.S. power. The Ukraine war was the first phase of this change to a new order. And the Iran war today, it's going to be the culmination and it result in a rupture and that rupture so that we will go look back at some point to this war as the moment that sort of this US Air of invincibility has completely vanished. So I think the Trump administration is in for a big surprise and I think they will also have political repercussion because of this war domestically. This is horrible for JD, Vance, Rubio, whoever wants to run. They gave a huge benefit to the Democrats for no reason at all. And none of this is in US Interest. Donald Trump promised to focus on domestic renewal in the United States and he's just going from one war to another. The United States cannot make munitions and ammunitions fast enough to compete with all the wars and all the bombing campaigns that we're conducting. And so in that sense, all the other parts, regions of the world are going to benefit from this dissentering of the United States. And I think that's a tragedy for us and doesn't have to happen. But we have to understand that we live in a post unipolar world and we can't dictate terms to middle powers around the world. This is what I've been saying. This kind of sort of extra regional faraway war can no longer us, you know, do anything for the U.S. interests. It actually backfires.
- [48:12]
Unherd Host
Arthur Moeni, thank you for your time today.
- [48:14]
Dr. Arthur Moeni
Thank you.
- [48:15]
Unherd Host
That was Dr. Arthur Moeni putting a very different spin on the events of the last week. His view is that it was a catastrophic mistake for the US to attack Iran directly and that whatever the next outcomes, if they continue down this path, whether it is civil war or whether it is an even more hardline spirit and regime in that country, that would be bad for the United States. A very different point of view than we heard from Edward Lutback. As always, it's up to you to decide who you thought was more convincing. Thanks for tuning in. This was unherd.
- [48:54]
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