Is the U.S. About to Go to War With Iran? | Prof G Conversations

President Trump had said that he had obliterated Iran's nuclear program and it was end of story. You know, the program was done for. Now he's saying that we need to get a nuclear deal with them. But there is a tension there because, you know, he declared success, the program was obliterated, and now the question is, well, why are we negotiating, wanting to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program if we already obliterated it?

I'm in snowy Washington, D.C.

It's not as bad as New York City. I think the worst is probably behind us in D.C.

So I think, Scott, we're in a game of chicken right now between two individuals. That's President Trump and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. I think President Trump thought he could essentially recreate the strategy that seemingly worked in Venezuela, which is to subject Venezuela to enormous economic and military pressure as a prelude to decapitating that regime and forcing its capitulation or compromise. And in the case of Iran, this is the largest military buildup in the Middle East that the United States has had since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iran is obviously under enormous economic pressure. And Trump's top advisors have actually expressed confusion as to, you know, why Iran hasn't yet compromised. And I think that has to do a lot with the will of Iran's 86-year-old dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, whose one big idea over the last few decades has been resistance against America.

So I think in President Trump's heart he would prefer to have a peaceful resolution to this matter. If he can get a deal from Iran, major concessions from Iran without having to go to war, I think that's a preferable option for him. And, you know, every conflict, especially one of this nature, entails potentially enormous risks, right? Iran is a more powerful country than Venezuela. It has thousands of short-range missiles which it's threatened to use against U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf. It's threatened to go after oil installations to spike the price of oil. Even, you know, individuals adjacent to Iran's Revolutionary Guards have threatened to destroy places like Dubai. So this isn't a totally risk-free proposition for President Trump. And I think if he could get a deal without having to fire a single shot, that would be the preferable outcome. Now I agree with you that, in my view, the likelihood of a deal at this moment appears not very high. And for that reason, I think the likelihood that the United States takes military action is much higher.

Scott, I wholeheartedly agree that this is a malicious regime with virtually no redeeming qualities. I've often said there's no country in the world with a greater gap between the aspirations of its government and the aspirations of its people than Iran. Right? You have a government that behaves like North Korea, a society which wants to be like South Korea. And, you know, this gap, in my view, is not sustainable and it's also irreconcilable after what Iran did to its own people last month, which is, according to some estimates, it killed as many as 30,000 people in the course of 48 hours. So I totally agree with you there. And I also agree with you that the state of U.S.-Iran relations today is a very unnatural state. I always quote Henry Kissinger who said, 'There are few nations in the world with whom the United States has more common interests and less reason to quarrel than Iran.' But what we've seen since the 1979 revolution is that Iran hasn't behaved like a nation state following the national interests and economic interests of its people. It's behaved as a revolutionary cause. And in my view, that is not sustainable. The question is whether the United States has the ability with military force to totally change that reality. And, you know, the last two decades of American history in the Middle East doesn't lend an enormous amount of confidence. We invested a great deal of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq and we weren't able to dictate the outcomes that we wanted. So I believe ultimately, Scott, Iran's future is going to be decided by its people. Now I should say that this is based purely on what I observe anecdotally. I don't think there's any scientific polling on this, but it seems to me an overwhelming majority of people inside Iran who oppose the regime, and I would say it's probably around 80% if not more of society, would like to see outside help. They actually would like to see President Trump make good on his promise. President Trump promised on more than eight occasions that if Iran kills protesters that the United States would intervene, that America would have Iran's back, the backing of the Iranian people. And that changed people's risk calculations when they took to the streets because they thought, you know, the United States is going to support us. And that support hasn't come. And I think that's why overwhelmingly people in Iran want to see that support. But, you know, one thing I'm always mindful of, Scott, you mentioned, you know, your days in the UC system. I'm a University of Michigan guy, and every year during March Madness, I fill out two brackets. One with Michigan winning it all and one with what I think might see happen. And here it's, you know, we have to be mindful not to conflate our hopes and emotions and analysis. I think everyone would love to see a magic bullet that just eliminates this regime and empowers an Iranian democracy which once again becomes friends with the United States as it should be. There's not a lot of great examples from history that there's such a clean operation that exists.

I happen to agree with your instinct, Scott, that Iran is perhaps weaker than it's ever been. It's essentially a government which is in between two fires, an internal fire and an external fire. It's probably one of the loneliest countries in the world that has very, very few allies. And, you know, if we try to get inside the head of President Trump and you look at his 10-year history with Iran, well, on three major occasions he's rolled the dice. In 2018, he left Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. In 2020, he assassinated Iran's top military commander, Qasem Soleimani. And then last summer was Operation Midnight Hammer. He dropped 14 bunker busters on Iran. Now, on every single one of those decisions, people predicted that it would trigger World War III or at the minimum a major regional war. That didn't happen on any of those occasions. And I think President Trump feels that he was vindicated each time. And now when Iran doesn't even control its own airspace, as you alluded to, their regional proxies have been decimated, I think he feels very confident that if he rolls the dice again, Iran is a paper tiger and ultimately it's a regime whose paramount goal is to stay in power. They're homicidal, but they're not suicidal. And so for that reason, their willingness and ability to respond in a major way against the United States is not likely to happen because they know if they were to unleash massive amounts of missile fire against America in the region or against our allies, that it could trigger a massive U.S. response. And I agree with what you said, Scott, that 100% the United States is going to be coordinating this with Israel. But I also agree with the quote you mentioned. Lawrence Freedman wrote the definitive book on strategy. And that book, which is about 700 pages, starts with that sentence from Mike Tyson that everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth. And we don't know how Iran is going to respond this time to a potential U.S. attack. It may be that they exercise restraint and they're going to hunker down like a hedgehog because they want to stay in power. Or it may be that their lesson from the previous conflicts was that by not really retaliating in a meaningful way, they projected weakness and they didn't exact any cost from the United States, and it's now a moment to stand up to this American bully. We don't know that. And so I want to emphasize that it is a risk. And if you're President Trump, you perhaps like your odds because American military power has prevailed in the past and the United States is several thousand miles away from Iran. But if you're sitting not that far from Iran in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, you have much greater ambivalence about what Iran is capable of doing and whether the United States will maintain that massive military presence to protect against them.

Well, we can start with Israel by saying that Israel is both, you know, publicly supportive of a strike. They're privately encouraging the president and they will very likely be part of any U.S. operation against Iran. And then if we move to our partners in the Persian Gulf, countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, as I said, there's much more profound ambivalence. Publicly they're going to oppose a U.S. strike and they've publicly said they're not going to allow the United States to use their airspace to attack Iran because they don't want to be complicit in any operation because they fear the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran has attacked them in the past. They've used their regional proxies like the Houthis in Yemen, who are still a menace, to attack those countries. And one of the lessons I learned, Scott, I did a Fulbright in Beirut over 20 years ago. And my big takeaway from that year is that it takes decades if not centuries to build things and it takes weeks to destroy them. And those countries, I take my hat off to them, in particular the United Arab Emirates. You know, I tell people in 1979, Iran and the United Arab Emirates went to the same elevator and Iran pushed down and the United Arab Emirates pushed up and the gap between these two countries is really enormous. When you think about it, Iran is more than 20 times the size of UAE. Iran has the human resources, the natural resources, the history to be a G20 power. But it's none of those things. It's a global pariah. And the United Arab Emirates, which was really a backwater five decades ago, has emerged as this global hub for transport, for technology, for geopolitics. And they have a lot to lose here because they know that Iran could come by in a week or so unleashing its missiles, rockets, and drones and destroying what has taken them many decades to build. And for that reason, none of those countries in the Gulf are going to publicly support U.S. military action against Iran. I think privately the advice they give is probably a little different. But one of the things I would argue that they are all worried about is what they call a hit-and-run attack. They're worried that President Trump could attack Iran and then a week or two later, his attentions are diverted back to whether it's Venezuela or Taiwan or another issue and they're left naked and vulnerable and they don't have the luxury of being many thousands of miles away from Iran. Now, you mentioned earlier and people can look online at this map of this incredible American buildup right now in the Middle East. If you talk to people at the Pentagon, they will tell you that most of that buildup is for defensive purposes. It's not that we're going to unleash all of that firepower against Iran. That buildup is there in great part to protect our allies, protect our bases against an Iranian retaliation. But the reality is that those forces aren't going to be able to remain in the Middle East forever. And there's no guarantee that any U.S. military action will topple the regime in Iran. And so that is a risk that I think President Trump and the vast majority of Iranians are prepared to live with. They're prepared to roll the dice in that way. Those Gulf countries have a lot more to lose.