The Carnegie Endowment's Karim Sadjadpour on skyrocketing tensions in and around Iran

It is indeed a very busy time, and I appreciate you inviting me back.

Sure. So, I was born in the United States, but my parents were originally from Iran. They immigrated to the United States. Most Iranian families in the United States came here in 1979 or shortly thereafter when the 1979 revolution happened, but my parents had immigrated to the United States a decade prior to that. And so, my father was a neurologist. We grew up mostly in Michigan. I went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I played soccer. The first person I met in freshman orientation was Tom Brady, a friendship which in hindsight I should have cultivated. And you know, I grew up speaking Persian in our kitchen. I call it kitchen Persian. I wasn't formally schooled in it, but I grew up with English and Persian. And then I spent several years living abroad in college and even in high school. I spent a year living in Mexico. I lived in college in Italy. I wasn't really interested in the Middle East until I felt that things started to change in Iran politically. It looked like there was a political opening in the late 1990s. And so, I started to... after undergrad, I went to graduate school at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I focused on the Middle East. And the first week of my grad school, 9/11 happened. And so that was when it was obviously very clear to me that I wanted to dedicate my career to this topic. And Hugh, had you asked me in 2001 whether the Iranian regime would look the way it does today, I would have said no. It looked like Iran even back then was a country which was on the cusp of change. And so I was based in Tehran with an organization called the International Crisis Group. I was based there for several years until I was nearly imprisoned. I was one of the first of the dual nationals that they warned. You know, I came back to the United States and I heeded that warning. I didn't go back to Iran, but many of my friends, perhaps more than a dozen, tried to go back to Iran and they spent time in prison. And so for the last two decades now, I've been focused on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm a contributing writer at The Atlantic and I teach at Georgetown University.

So I was a young boy. I was born late 1976, so I was just about two years old when the revolution was happening in the state of Michigan. And you know, it obviously impacted our lives in different ways. So much of our extended family had to flee Iran. All of them had been in Iran, and our home in Michigan was kind of the safe harbor for many of them. So they fled Iran and they would come to stay with us in Michigan for a period until they were able to kind of resettle elsewhere. And I think in my parents' head, they probably thought maybe one day they would go back to Iran. But then when the revolution happened, you know, we stayed in the United States. And my father was someone who — he was a neurologist, but he was someone who loved the United States, deeply patriotic American, but he also loved his heritage and his culture. And that duality was very much part of our childhood. He used to always tell us, you know, you guys live in the best country in the world, in the United States, but he was so proud of his heritage and Persian poetry and culture, which is so rich because it's got 2,500-plus years of history.

The regime has virtually no support among, certainly, the diaspora in the United States. When polling is done, I think you probably see less than 1% support because if you're a supporter of the regime, you know, you live in Iran, you don't want to be in the United States. And I think for many years there's been not really a diversity of opinion when it comes to people's desired endgame in Iran among the diaspora Iranians. Even outside the United States, I would say the vast, vast majority of Iranians want to see some form of secular democracy. I think the debates have been about the means to get there and whether, for example, economic sanctions is a viable or useful tool to try to reach that end of secular democracy, whether military action is a means that people would accept to get to that endgame. And obviously the last month, the events in Iran, I think, have really altered that debate. Whereas one month ago, two months ago, probably those who supported some type of U.S. military action inside Iran were in the minority. I would argue now — and I haven't seen polling, so this isn't scientific, but just anecdotal — my guess is that the majority of those who are in the diaspora would like to see President Trump make good on his word. You know, President Trump threatened on eight occasions that if Iran killed protesters, the United States was ready to protect them and take action. And obviously, the Iranian regime drove a giant truck through President Trump's red line. They killed as many as 30,000 protesters. And so I think both within Iran among the protesters and in the diaspora, I would say there's probably a majority consensus, a majority support for some type of U.S. action.

You know, unfortunately, Hugh, I wasn't terribly shocked by the brutality of the regime because at the end of the day, this is a regime which has no friends in the world. They have no great Plan B. So in contrast to the Shah, who didn't want to use a lot of violence against people to stay in power, and both the Shah and all of his political and military elites — many of them were educated in the United States and Europe, they spoke foreign languages, and so they could remake their lives in Los Angeles or London. But the elites of the Islamic Republic and Khamenei himself have provincial backgrounds. They are not people who are worldly. This is a regime which is virtually friendless. You know, its longtime allies like the Assad regime in Syria, the Maduro government in Venezuela — those guys have been deposed or they're out. They have partnerships with countries like China and Russia, but those are not secure partnerships. And so for that reason, they have a kill-or-be-killed mentality. And unfortunately, I wasn't terribly surprised that they were willing to employ that kind of brutality to stay in power because, you know, what I say about this regime, and in particular, is that they're homicidal, but they're not suicidal. What's paramount for them is to stay in power. And so that applies here when — and I don't want to preempt your questions, but you know, as they're facing a potentially existential threat from the United States right now...

So this is a regime which is politically, economically, and socially authoritarian. Every aspect of people's lives are disrupted because they're living under a totalitarian dictatorship that polices their personal lives. There's routine power outages, water shortages, and I think people are just so exhausted from this reality. It's the most sanctioned country in the world, and I think the people are desperate for a transition from an ideological regime to a nation-state, a government that prioritizes economic and national interests before revolutionary ideology.

You know, anything is possible with these dictatorships. There's an old line that all dictatorships look good until the last five minutes. Any of these authoritarian regimes that looked so strong before, you know, collapsed fairly abruptly. So it's my view that even if the United States doesn't take military action, this is a regime which is — this current status quo in Iran is not tenable. So there's 150,000 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

So the military is a conscript military. So it reflects Iranian society. I have one kind of personal anecdote about that. Years ago when I was living in Tehran, I went with a group of friends to the Caspian Sea, and I saw there was some military folks from the regular army, conscript army, who were just kind of walking down, walking along the shore of the Caspian Sea. And I initially kind of — you know, when you see military folks, especially Revolutionary Guards and Basij in Iran, especially back then, you would freeze and hesitate a little bit. And my friends kind of continued as they were, including a young woman who wasn't properly covering her hair. And I looked at them, and they said, 'No, don't worry about it. These guys are — these guys are punks. They're one of us, you know, from the army.' So the way the Islamic Republic has managed the regular army is that obviously the top commanders have been handpicked by the regime. So up until now, they've always been loyal, but the body of that military are reflective of Iranian society at large, and I would suspect for the most part deeply unsatisfied with the status quo, deeply unsatisfied with their lives.

Listen, I don't want to pretend like I'm a military expert, and I obviously haven't. What we've learned from so many of U.S. military action over the last two decades in the Middle East, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, so much of it is the execution. And to our credit, to our military's credit, they've done an exceptionally good job oftentimes with execution. But on first, the question of whether to target the regular army, it would seem to me that would be a bad idea because, as I mentioned, this is a conscript army for the most part and reflective of Iranian society. And you don't want anarchy. You don't want total disorder. We saw what happened in Iraq when the Ba'athist army was disbanded, and I think everyone fears that possibility of anarchy. So I think you would want the regular army to remain intact.

So let me say a couple things to you. One is that one of the things I would have liked to have seen happen already, in fact, early days in the protest, would have been to lift this iron digital iron curtain that the regime has subjected people to. They've cut off internet, satellite connections. They've cut off cellular connections, and connectivity of the country has been about 1%. So they've slaughtered people in the dark. So to the extent we have capabilities, whether it's kinetic or cyber capabilities, to tear down that digital iron wall, in my view, that's very, very important. Even if that means, for example, because the regime has their own internet, their state television is functioning okay, their officials are doing TV interviews broadcast to the United States. And so in some ways, you know, one option is to take out their internet system so then they have to plug into the system that everyone else uses. So that's one thing that I would have liked to have seen happen already. Second is, you know, the organs of repression in Iran, whether that's command and control outposts of the Revolutionary Guards. I think that the Israelis will certainly want to target their missile stockpile because Iran is a country which, you know, really can't control its own skies right now, and you would want to prevent them from replenishing their missile capacity. Then we start to get into much more sensitive questions, and obviously the most sensitive one, arguably, I think that the current — the Trump administration is probably debating as we speak, is whether to target the supreme leader. And you know, I've spoken to folks who served in the first Trump administration who are still close to this one who believe that if military action is taken, they are likely to target the supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The only note of caution, and Hugh, I think that — you know, I don't want to claim to speak for people inside Iran, but I think most protesters, those who took to the streets against the regime, welcome some kind of military action. The only note of caution I'd make, Hugh, is that we know historically that when authoritarian regimes collapse or when they transition, about four out of five times they unfortunately don't transition to democracy. About four out of five times they transition to another form of authoritarian regime. The Soviet Union is a good example of that. We went from the Soviet Union to Putin's Russia. The Iran of 1979 is a good example of that. We went from the Shah to the Islamic Republic. But so I'm not making the argument that military action can transition Iran to Denmark, but I think what people want to see, as I suggested from the outset, they want to see a government that is a national government that puts the economic and national interests of the nation first, not 'death to America' and 'death to Israel.' They want a government whose ethos is 'long live Iran.'