Inside Iran’s Fragile Regime — with Karim Sadjadpour | Prof G Conversations

What is your sense as you reverse engineer activities in the Middle East in terms of its impact on the US political landscape? We've seen the impact that America's failures in the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the failure of the Arab Spring in 2011 to bring about democratic change, the impact that's had on American politics. You know, it used to be that Republicans were national security hawks and more supportive of US military interventions. Now, you know, a strong wing of Trump's base are, you know, they wouldn't like the term isolationist. They would call themselves restrainers or non-interventionists. But that's an important part of his political base. Now that is probably a majority view because it's also a widely held view on the left as well that, you know, America should just kind of stay out of military interventions, especially in the Middle East.

I'm in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington DC.

I've been in DC for basically the last two decades. I had previously been based in the Middle East. I lived in Tehran and Beirut, and I grew up mostly in Michigan.

My family was one of the few families that came to the US before the revolution. My father was a medical doctor and he immigrated to the US in the late 1950s. My mom grew up both in Iran and in Italy, and they came together. They settled in the US in the late '60s, and I think they probably always thought they would one day go back to Iran. Then when the revolution happened, they stayed put, and I grew up mostly in the US. I spent years living in Latin America and in Europe and the Middle East, but the last two decades in DC.

Sure, Scott. So first, let me give like one minute of historic context, which is that, you know, these two countries, Iran and Israel, in my view, are actually more natural partners than they are natural adversaries. There's an ancient history of affinity between the Persians and the Jews. You know, Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king, is revered in the Old Testament for liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Prior to the 1979 revolution, the two countries had good partnership. And even now, if you look at them, you know, in contrast to most modern geopolitical conflicts like China and Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, there's no direct land or border disputes between Iran and Israel. The two countries, in my view, have complementary interests. Israel is a tech power. Iran is an energy power, and there's natural basis for cooperation. What happened in 1979 was that Iran went virtually overnight from a US-allied monarchy led by the Shah to a viscerally anti-American, anti-Israeli theocracy ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeini. And since then, there's basically been three ideological pillars of Iran's 1979 revolution: death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, the veiling of women, which is called the flag of the Islamic revolution. So going now to the present, the latest battle between Iran and Israel may be over for now, but the war will continue so long as you have a regime in Iran whose entire identity is premised on replacing Israel with Palestine.

It's an important question. And, you know, my view about this is that what tends to happen in these dramatic instances of, you know, military attack or military conflagration with an external power is that it tends to accentuate Iranians' existing political views. So if last week or two weeks ago you were a supporter of the government, and I suspect government supporters represent about 15 to 20 percent of society, it's not a popular regime, then you have even more fodder, obviously, to hate America and Israel for the military invasion of Iran. If you were a critic or an opponent of the Iranian regime and you said, you know, this is a regime which always puts its ideological objectives over the national interests of us and the well-being of the Iranian people, then you have even more reason to dislike the regime. I think in the near term what happens is that the regime has gotten a kind of a, what I would describe as a temporary sugar high. But when the dust settles three months, six months, nine months from now, I think people will go back to living under this politically repressive, socially repressive police state, which is a profoundly mismanaged economy, which, you know, Iran could be, in my view, should be a G20 nation under proper management. This is a country which has enormous human capital, as you were referring to, has enormous natural resources. It is not a country which just came to be in the 20th century. It has a 2,500-year-old civilization and identity. And, you know, I think Iranians will eventually revert back to that profound sense of discontent. And I'll give you a concrete example of that, Scott. You may remember in January of 2020, Iran's top Revolutionary Guard commander Soleimani was assassinated by President Trump. And many people then said, ah, this is, you know, the country is rallying around the flag, and there were mass protests in Iran. What happened two years later? Two years later, there was a young woman called Mahsa Amini that was detained and killed in custody for allegedly showing too much of her hair. And that set off a massive nationwide protest in Iran, which persisted over six months and had the regime on its heels. So, you know, I don't doubt that, you know, many people took umbrage to the US dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters, but ultimately, you know, the vast majority of Iranians, as I say, they want to be South Korea. They don't want to be living under North Korea.

It's an important question. And, you know, Khamenei is actually now 86. He's the longest-serving autocrat in the world. He's been ruling since 1989. He hasn't left Iran since 1989. And, you know, you put yourself in his shoes right now. He's living in a bunker. We all know, you know, 85, 86 years old, you have limited physical, mental stamina. And he's expected to lead this three-part war against the greatest superpower in the world, the United States, the greatest military power in the Middle East, Israel, and against his own population. And he is doing that at a time when, you mentioned, his top military commanders have been assassinated in their own bedrooms or in their own bunkers. And so, as you mentioned, this really slows down the wheels of state when it's a state which essentially needs to act quickly to address an external or internal security threat. And when people get the notifications on their phones, they don't know if that's coming from their higher-up command or it's coming from the Mossad. So it's, in my view, what I would describe as a Swiss cheese regime. It has so many holes in it penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Now, what happens after the supreme leader's passing? You know, Ibn Khaldun, the great North African philosopher, sometimes called the father of sociology, he came out with a theory centuries ago in the 13th century, which he called asabiyyah, and it's now known in kind of modern business literature, you may be familiar with it, as the power cycle theory. And essentially what he said is that empires are built and destroyed over three generations. The first generation, they have fire in the belly. They come, they build it. Second generation watched what the first generation did, so they managed to preserve it. But by the third generation, by no fault of their own, you know, they're soft. They're princlings. They're born in the palace. They weren't born with that fire in the belly. You know, the example I commonly use in the American business context is Walmart, right? Sam Walton, through his thrift and grit, built this amazing company. You know, second generation preserved it. Now, you know, his grandchildren were born multi-billionaires. So it's clear, you know, they weren't born with that same grit. But now, going back to the Islamic Republic, Khamenei is the last of the Mohawks. He's the last of the first-generation leaders in the Islamic Republic. And they don't have any great options for succession, in part because this is a society which is thoroughly secularized over the last 46 years. You know, the best way to secularize a population is to rule them with a repressive, corrupt theocracy which is ruling from a moral pedestal. You know, that's insulting to people in a way that living under your run-of-the-mill dictatorship is in some ways less insulting. You know, Vladimir Putin doesn't have any pretensions of being, you know, God's representative on earth, whereas, you know, the Islamic Republic's leadership, they have these pretensions of moral superiority. So the question is, you know, does if the regime manages to keep it together and they don't implode like the Soviet Union did, which is, you know, a big question. Is the next strongman in Iran going to be wearing a turban and being another Ayatollah, or is it more likely to be someone from the security forces with a military or intelligence background? My sense is that even if they try to anoint a cleric as the next supreme leader, that person is likely going to be a transitional figure, much like Boris Yeltsin was in the post-Soviet Union. And that if the system manages to keep it together, more likely we're going to see someone with a military and intelligence background, not someone wearing a turban.

So a couple of things. Number one, you know, I've been teaching a class at Georgetown University for years in the Master's School of Foreign Service. And I always joke on the first day with my students that if you really want to understand the Middle East, you're better off studying psychology than political science, because so much of this region is shaped not by the national interests of states, but by kind of the personas and political ambitions of strongmen. And in the case of this current war, America, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, much of what's transpired over the last few weeks is, I think, driven by the person of Donald Trump and his political imperatives, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the person of Khamenei, not necessarily, as I said from the outset, the national interests of these places. Now, one framework I use to think about certainly the relationship between President Trump and Khamenei, there's a wonderful essay which the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953, which is called 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' and he essentially puts human beings into two buckets. He said, you know, hedgehogs really have one big idea, one great passion, and foxes know many things. They do many things. And his example of the quintessential hedgehog was Karl Marx. His example of the prototypical fox was William Shakespeare. Now, how does that apply to Trump and Khamenei? Khamenei is the prototypical hedgehog. He has basically one great passion, one big idea: resistance. Resistance against America, resistance against Israel, death to America, death to Israel. Trump, on the other hand, is someone who I don't think he knows many things, but he says many things. And he's had a profound, you know, I don't know what you would describe it. I call him the Jackson Pollock of foreign policy. You know, he goes from one month ago, he was in Riyadh denouncing those previous administrations who engaged in military interventions in the Middle East. He ridiculed them and he said, you know, there were regime changers who destroyed far more, I'm sorry, there were nation builders who destroyed far more nations than they built, and interventionists who had no idea about the reality of their own society. One month later, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had taken military action, as you said, Trump saw that it was perceived to be very successful. Netanyahu is getting, you know, great reviews on Fox News, and, you know, he wanted to be associated with that. And so I think we will look back years from now, and Scott, you know, when you're watching these things in real time in the Middle East, as we've seen, you know, if we were having this conversation in spring of 2003, we would say the Iraq war is, you know, a great success, right? We took out Saddam's army in three weeks. Five years later, things look very differently. So years from now, things could look very differently. But I do think when the history of this war is written, much of it will be about the psychology and political calculations and domestic political expediencies of these three men, Netanyahu, Trump, and Khamenei, rather than the interests of nation states.

Well, I think that's one important data point among others. I mean, the other important data point is what happened on October 7th, 2023, when Yahya Sinwar and Hamas invaded Israel, which, you know, turned out to be one of the most profound miscalculations in modern history, because, you know, they thought that that was going to delegitimize Israel and lead to its eventual demise. And what we've seen in the last year and a half is exactly the opposite. And, you know, Iran's leadership, Iran, Khamenei was the only leader in the world that praised the Hamas attack of October 7th. And then, you know, Iran kind of unleashed its other proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Yemen to commence this multi-front war with Israel. And those proxies have been decimated the last year and a half. So that was also an important factor. But back to Ukraine and Zelensky. One of the most important observations that stayed with me over the years about geopolitics is an observation which Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, that he said, you know, before he went into government, when he became Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, he was a professor at Harvard, and he thought that history was driven by impersonal forces. You know, nations basically follow their own interests regardless of who's in power. And he said after he served in government, he reached the opposite conclusion, which is that the individual profoundly shapes history. Academics oftentimes don't like this because they call it, you know, the great man theory of history. But I've also come around to Kissinger's worldview that the individual has a profound impact on history, leadership has a profound impact on history. And so your point about Ukraine, for me, you know, obviously the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian people is critical, but the person of President Zelensky is someone for me who has played an incredibly important role in the history of his nation. And then we saw, you know, just a year prior to that, and perhaps it was one reason why Vladimir Putin invaded, was that in Afghanistan, you know, it was a country, a president who fled the country within, you know, 24, 48 hours, and the entire system collapsed. So it just goes to, you know, both in business and in politics and geopolitics, the importance of leadership.