Fareed Zakaria on the Endgame in Iran | Prof G Conversations

Sure. So it's a surprising mission because remember, eight months ago the United States and Israel did a very successful series of strikes that destroyed Iran's nuclear program, killed most of the leading Iranian nuclear scientists — something that often isn't talked about — and killed about 20 senior commanders of the Iranian military. So the upside here would be that you get a decapitation of the regime that causes the regime to collapse. That is clearly what the great hope has been, not just for the president who announced that as the goal of his mission, but also Prime Minister Netanyahu, who said that in a video. He said this is a 40-year dream of mine. And remember, the Iranian nuclear program is not 40 years old in that sense. What he's talking about is really getting rid of the regime itself. So that's the big prize. That's the main thing they're looking for on the upside.

Next, really defang Iran. So this is now not just about the nuclear program, but about Iran as a regional power. And you can do a lot of damage. You can destroy their navy. You can destroy their ballistic missile capability. You can destroy the military-industrial complex — the ballistic missile-making facilities, the port facilities that actually house the ships, things like that. And finally, you can use this opportunity also to destroy them and to set them back so much economically that they're not going to be able to fund Hezbollah anymore. They're not going to be able to fund the Iraqi militias anymore — at least not to any substantial degree. So basically, break the back of the regime and hope that the regime collapses. That seems to me to be the big upside.

The downside is this is a highly institutionalized regime. This is not a single dictator. This is not Saddam Hussein. This is not even Putin. This is a very complicated, institutionalized regime with a clerical establishment, a military establishment, and a worked-out relationship between those two groups — a little bit like the Communist Party and the army in the old Soviet Union, and to a certain extent in modern China. And so it's not clear that that's going to be as easy. You know, you can always get lucky, but it seems hard, and it's particularly hard given that you're not going to use ground troops. You're trying to do it from the air. Very hard to do regime change from the air. People, you know, you can look at Afghanistan and Libya, but remember, there were ground forces — they just weren't ours. The Northern Alliance was in Afghanistan, sweeping through province after province while the CIA and American air power helped them. In Libya, there was a huge insurgency that the United States and others helped with the bombing. Here we don't have anybody — there is no army on the ground. So that's the principal limitation, and the principal danger here is at the end of the day: you have defined success as regime change. President Trump announced it in his message. Prime Minister Netanyahu talked about it, and it's obvious survival is victory for them.

The second challenge is going to be the regional element, though I wouldn't put this that high, but it's real. They could disrupt things regionally substantially. My own view is that's a short-term risk. You notice oil prices have not gone through the roof — they've gone up. Gas prices haven't gone through the roof because all these facilities can be repaired. Iran does not have an unlimited supply of these kinds of weapons. What's really striking is how well the air defenses of the UAE have held up, even of Saudi, though we know a little bit less about it. And most importantly, this was the biggest miscalculation the Iranians made: they've united the Gulf in support of this mission. Think about it — you now have the Gulf Arabs supporting an American-Israeli mission against Iran because the Iranians have been retaliating willy-nilly at nine different Arab countries. This was probably the biggest single mistake they made.

And the other downside I think is you could imagine a circumstance where there is now a kind of generic instability built into the region, a little bit like the Houthis in Yemen. You know that you're going to have to deal with the Persian Gulf becoming a kind of dangerous territory. Insurance companies aren't willing to go there. I think the principal danger is the survival. The other two are reasonable dangers, but remember, overall Iran is very, very weak. So it doesn't have a lot of cards that it can play.

It's not a pipe dream, and the conditions you described inside the country are 100% right. I mean, I've been to Iran. I'm always struck by how pro-Iranian people are. Now, I have to be careful — mostly, you know, they only let you go around Tehran, and rural areas are more pro-regime, more conservative, you know, older people are more conservative, more religious. So the way I would put it is that's why I said the principal upside is regime collapse. You need a regime collapse for your scenario to unfold because these guys are going to, you know, they are hardline, very repressive, and they can stick it out. They've got the guns and they're willing to kill, as they showed. So in order for your dream to come true, we need to see some cracks in the regime. You need to see some maybe parts of the army distance themselves from parts of the clerical establishment. That's typically the kind of thing that you see when you begin to see regimes fall.

But if that were to happen, to play out, to spin out the what-can-go-right scenario — look, Iran is one of the great trading nations of the world. It has always been very pragmatic in its foreign policy historically. Iran had relations with Israel, you know, under the Shah. In fact, Tehran's water system was built by Israeli engineers. And if one of the reasons they're running out of water — the president of Iran has talked about maybe having to move the capital from Tehran because they're in such bad shape — and part of the problem is they can't get the Israelis to come in and help them fix it because they're the ones who would probably be the experts at this. So there is a tradition of Persian trading practicality that could absolutely come to be. But I would caution: it's a very tough regime. They are very institutionalized, and I don't want to discount entirely that there is a Shia religious element within Iran that is real.

I'll give you a simple example. Look next door at Iraq, where they have free elections. The Shia population, a large part of the population, votes for parties that are religious and political, often led by mullahs like Muqtada al-Sadr. So there is within the Shia tradition a conflation of religious and political authority. It's very alien to those of us in the West. It's also very alien, by the way, to all the people who I met in Tehran who are like urban liberals who very much espouse the kind of vision of Iran that you described. But there is another Iran out there in the rural areas, and just as a matter of humility, we don't know enough about it. But as I said, they tend to seem to be a little more religious, a little more conservative, a little older. And when you look at Iraq, you see that even with free elections, you end up with a lot of religious and political authority being given votes.

I think the kind of way they put it, I really dislike because it's as if there is this nefarious Israeli, you know, kind of grip on American foreign policy, and it's raising all kinds of anti-Semitic tropes that I think are both terrible and wrong. And you know, I think people should really be careful not to do that kind of thing. I think in this case, remember, the United States has been, you know, opposed to the Iranian government since its founding. The Iranians took American hostages. The Iranians have tried to attack Americans in various places all over the world. This is a very adversarial relationship the United States has had with Iran.

I think it's fair to say that Bibi Netanyahu has personally a lot of influence with Donald Trump, and Trump is a man very swayed by personalities, by people, and he likes Bibi, and he likes, you know, listening to him, and he likes the idea of doing things with him. And I think Bibi Netanyahu sold him a dream that you can be the guy who liberates Iran. Every other president has had to tolerate them. You can be the guy who liberates them. And Trump is, I think, amenable to that kind of idea. I think he sees himself as a man of destiny, you know, a person who's going to do big things, particularly when dealing with countries like Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. You know, you can see it that like he wants to bring them to heel. So I think Bibi Netanyahu convinced him that there was a great moment of opportunity. Iran would never be weaker. The forces are right in the right position. So I think that's the way to think of it, and I think that is accurate.

But I think the whole idea that, you know, the United States is doing Israel's bidding misses the fact that the United States has been in, you know, existential opposition to the Islamic Republic, and the Islamic Republic has been, of course, in a deep existential and violent opposition to the United States for 47 years.

I think their rationale, the Iranians' rationale, is: we are going to sow instability throughout the region. You want a war, it's not going to be confined to Iran. We are going to make it so that, you know, Saudi oil facilities are damaged, the Qatar natural gas facilities are damaged, the Straits of Hormuz, the shipping starts slowing to a crawl. The problem is they don't actually have the firepower to pull that off. So what they've ended up doing are pinprick attacks that militarily have very little significance. The facilities are going to be repaired in a few days, if not a few weeks, but the political effect has been to take all the Gulf states that were neutral — many of them had said you can't use our facilities, some of them had said you can't even use our airspace — now all the Gulf states are all in, and they're telling the United States and Israel privately, go for it. In fact, some of them even want to participate to show the Iranians that you can't do this kind of thing to their territory. So I think it was a big miscalculation, as I've said from the start. But their rationale, I suppose, was: look, we've got to hit somewhere. You know, hitting American naval ships is impossible — they're very well protected. So this is where we can go. But they didn't think through the fact that this has had a political boomerang effect on them.

It seems like that was what they were hoping. And look, you can always get lucky. And if they keep at this and they continue to pummel the regime, who knows? All I can say is historically that has, you know, I can't think of a case where that has happened. It's tough, right? Because these guys still have machine guns. You're not going to be able to get rid of those, and they'll use them. They've used them in the past.

Yeah, this is their biggest mistake. They don't have clear objectives. To the extent they have one, it's a very hard one to achieve, which is regime change. And it's very hard, short of that, to understand what they would define as success. They should have laid out a series of — you know, this is what we would like to degrade: Iran's ballistic missile capability so that it no longer threatens its neighbors. We want to degrade Iran's navy so that it no longer poses a threat to the safe flow of oil in and out of the Straits of Hormuz. We want to degrade Iran's command and control so that they can no longer run these militias around the Middle East. Those would have been goals that you could understand. Frankly, they could kind of define success because, you know, a lot of the information would be classified. But by defining success by something very large and very public — we can all see, right? And it's hard to say that they've achieved that goal because the regime has not fallen. And again, they may get lucky, but so far the regime has not fallen.

Yes, I think that's true. I think it's important to remember Iran is a destabilizing factor. It has been supporting these militias. It has been, in many ways, you know, trying to intimidate. I've always thought its nuclear program was designed to intimidate more than to use. They always wanted to be one step before nuclear weapons as a way of saying, you know, we could have these. And they are, you know, a kind of very brutal, repressive, millenarian regime. Remember, this is the only military innovation that Iran has produced is a drone, the name of which is Shahed, which is used by the Russians in Ukraine. And a Shahed means martyr. So even their drones they call martyrs, right? There's a kind of cult of martyrdom about it, which is, you know, we're willing to pay these prices. And you're right, nobody else in the Middle East is like that, and that's a very big transformation.

You know, it's only 20 years ago that the Saudis used to host telethons for Palestinian terrorists whom they called Palestinian martyrs. The Gulf Arabs have been totally transformed. Egypt has been transformed. Turkey is still, you know, kind of a complex power. But yeah, in general, you would have a much more stable, predictable Middle East if you didn't have this particular regime in Iran. And maybe you will find that what ends up happening, Scott — this is another kind of what-could-go-right scenario — is that the regime survives but in a form that it essentially becomes more of a military dictatorship than a theological-military dictatorship. And as a result of that, it is more practical. And you know, maybe it's a little bit more open at home, but most importantly, it is much less meddlesome abroad. It realizes that that game is over.