Karim Sadjadpour: What Kind of Change Is Coming to Iran? | Foreign Affairs Interview

In my view, if we look ahead five years from now and there's another strongman ruling Iran, one prediction I would feel fairly confident making is that that strongman will not be wearing a turban.

Wonderful to be with you.

Well, it's a great question, Kishane. And I do think that these protests have felt existential for the regime, and that they've been happening in every single one of Iran's provinces, nationwide, and the slogans of the protesters are quite ferocious. People are essentially done with the regime. They're calling for regime change, and including in places that we would have traditionally thought of as regime strongholds—the cities of Qom and Mashhad, which are, you know, Shiite strongholds, the birthplace of Ayatollah Khomeini, the town of Khamenei—you saw widespread protest. So in the past, sometimes it was easy to dismiss protests in Iran as, oh, these are just the elites of northern Tehran, but these protests are nationwide and they transcend socioeconomic divides, they transcend ethnic divides, so not just Iranian Persians, but Kurds and Azeris and others. And, you know, there's women and men, young and old.

The thing about the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it's authoritarian in several ways. It's not only politically authoritarian, but it's also economically and socially authoritarian. So there's profound political, economic, and social grievances. And one thing we may have talked about before, Kishane, is that when you are a theocracy ruling from a moral pedestal, you have pretensions of being morally superior, representing God's will on earth, but you are elbow-deep in repression and corruption. That is even more offensive to your population than if you're just a run-of-the-mill dictatorship. You know, Vladimir Putin doesn't have any pretensions of carrying out God's will on earth. And so, for that reason, I think you can see it in the protests that people are just really fed up with a regime which has been, you know, so politically brutal, but has also profoundly mismanaged the country's economy. There's chronic water shortages, chronic power outages, and even then they want to micromanage people's lives. You know, at least in Maduro's Venezuela, they weren't trying to police what you're wearing, you know, whether or not you're showing too much hair or whether or not you're drinking alcohol. And so, I think for that reason, the Islamic Republic is a regime which, from, I would say, upwards of 80% of Iranians, it has no redeeming qualities. And I now describe it as a zombie regime. It's a regime whose ideology is dying, its legitimacy is dying, its economy is dying, its supreme leader, Ayatollah, is dying, 86 years old. But just like zombies, it still has the capacity for lethal force, and that's what keeps it in power.

So one thing I want to emphasize is that the 1979 revolution, it commenced in January of 1978. It culminated in January of 1979. So that process took 12 months until the Shah left Iran and then Khomeini returned a couple weeks later. And so these protests in Iran, even if they are crushed in the near term, which is a possibility, my sense is that the anger, the political, economic, social grievances fueling them will not have gone away. And any attempts by the regime to address these underlying grievances are likely to be insufficient because I think the reality is that a majority of people have realized that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation as long as its organizing principle is death to America and death to Israel rather than long live Iran. You know, one of the slogans you commonly hear from protesters is they say, forget about Lebanon, forget about Gaza, think about us. And so for the last decades, it's been a government which, in the perception of many people, has used the country's national wealth to fund Arab militias, which has only isolated the country. And then a lot of the big national projects which the Islamic Republic tried to mobilize support for, namely the nuclear program, you know, that nuclear program of Iran probably cost the country upwards of half a trillion dollars when you consider not just the sunk cost but also the opportunity costs and the sanctions and isolation, the lost oil revenue for a nuclear program which wasn't producing any oil, and nor did it end up being a deterrent because, you know, both Israel and then the United States bombed it. And so I think there's just been one failure after the other for this Iranian regime, and I'm skeptical that they can rehabilitate themselves. Now, what I also believe is that violence can delay their funeral. That's possible. It can allow Ayatollah to die as supreme leader rather than be killed or deposed. That's possible. But I don't think that this status quo is sustainable for that much longer.

So I think what's different now, as opposed to when I first wrote that in September, was if you remember, you saw the much longer first draft version of it, and I had seven scenarios instead of five. And one of the scenarios was looking at the role of Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran, and I entitled that section "Iran is Spain." Could Iran transition to some type of a constitutional monarchy like Spain? And so the role of Reza Pahlavi in these protests has been elevated because whereas in the aftermath or even during the 12-day war last June, he was also inciting people to go to the streets and there wasn't a single protest, this time around his name is being chanted in many parts of Iran, and not just north, even as I said in very traditional cities, ostensibly traditional cities like Mashhad, and people calling his name and saying, "You Pahlavi will return, long live the king, Javid Shah." And I think because of the fact that to the extent there's like an overarching ideology of these protests, I do think it's nationalism. It's this idea of a national reclamation. You know, our country has not been Iran the last five decades; it's been the Islamic Republic. Our national interests haven't been prioritized. This is not a government that has been advancing the security and well-being of Iranians. It's been trying to destroy Israel. And so I think for many people, he embodies, frankly, by default, that idea of kind of a nationalist leader because the regime is so effective at killing and decapitating effective leadership. And so he's been outside the country for five decades, and through some of the prominent satellite television channels, he's now been able to communicate effectively, especially with younger generation Iranians. And you know, Kishane, this is a society in which three-quarters of Iranians were born after the 1979 revolution, so they have no recollection of how things were. And frankly, that has been helpful because there's a nostalgia about a period that they didn't experience. So, you know, obviously things weren't perfect before 1979, otherwise a revolution would have happened. But when they see the images and they hear the stories of pre-1979, there's a great deal of nostalgia about the country's economy, its place in the world, its social freedoms. And I think to the extent that people are yearning for that normal life, again, he is the inspirational leader for many of them. Now, Jack Goldstone, the great author of a book on revolution, says that every revolution needs two kinds of leadership. You need both inspirational and organizational leadership. And that's been, I think, one of the things that's been lacking is organizational leadership on the ground.

At this point, my shortcut for understanding Iran is to just think about a pyramid, and Ayatollah is at the very top of that pyramid. But the most important rungs below him are military people, Revolutionary Guardsmen. So in theory, we still call this a clerical regime. But in my view, it's become more of a military regime and clerical guard. The institution of the Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful political and economic institution in Iran. They've long eclipsed the institution of the clergy, and they have become kind of a military-industrial complex. They run major businesses. They run the country's ports. Friends of mine who have done business in Iran say that you can't really become prominent in business without having to work with the Revolutionary Guards. Khamenei has been a skillful commander of the Revolutionary Guards in that he very meticulously appoints their top few tiers of leadership, and he shuffles them with some frequency every few years so none of them can get too comfortable in their role and feel like they have an independent power base. And the relationship between Khamenei and the IRGC, I would describe as symbiotic. It's been politically expedient for Khamenei, it's been economically expedient for the Revolutionary Guards, and you know, he relies on them. And so if you see the security forces start to fray or splinter, which we haven't seen at all, that would really probably be the end of Ayatollah's rule.

That's a great question, and I love that quote from a friend of mine who was a professor in Tehran, who indeed said that at the beginning of the revolution, the regime was 80% ideologues, true believers, and then 20% charlatans who didn't really believe, but it was politically and financially expedient for them. And now it's the exact opposite. There are only probably 20% at most kind of true believers left in the regime, and 80% are just charlatans who go along for the ride. And many of my friends who studied the Soviet Union would say the same thing about Moscow in 1985, that there were few really true believing communists left at that point. What's relevant here is that, in my view, the supreme leader still is a true believer. He still believes in revolutionary ideology. And what's key to understanding Khamenei is that he also believes that if you deviate from revolutionary ideals, meaning if you try to reform the system, that's not going to prolong your shelf life. That's going to accelerate your collapse. And for many, the experience of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union was very formative. And he cited this before, that the Soviet Union collapsed when Gorbachev tried to reform it. And I think that's probably the view of Vladimir Putin. And frankly, Kishane, this is an observation pointed out by some of the great political philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli, that the most dangerous moment for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. So we commonly refer to people like Ayatollah and their ilk as hardliners. They refer to themselves as osul-ha, principalists. And what that means is that they're loyal to the principles of the revolution. And in my view, there's kind of three grand principles left: death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, which Khamenei called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. And it's notable, Kishane, that even though, you know, I'm told like now in the city of Tehran, more women than not are no longer even wearing the hijab, and that's throughout the country as well. Even though the Berlin Wall of the hijab has fallen, Khamenei has still not lifted the ban on it because he believes that once you start to cede your principles and abandon your principles, that's like taking a sledgehammer to the pillars of a building, the whole thing will collapse on top of their head.

Absolutely.

So, I think in the immediate term, the conversation is we need to restore order at all costs, even if that means killing a lot of people, which they have done. That's what we're going to do. And you never take a step back when your population is rising up. There was an iconic moment in the 1979 revolution in late 1978, I believe November 1978, when the protests against the Shah were mushrooming. The Shah went on state television and he apologized to people. And he very famously said, "I've heard the voice of your revolution." And one of my first projects at Carnegie was a monograph I did on Ayatollah two decades ago. And I found a speech from him in which he said, you know, the Shah thought by going on television and apologizing to us that we were going to accept his apology and, you know, he was going to pacify the protesters and we were going to go home and the revolution would stop. And just the opposite happened. That's when we, the protesters, the revolutionaries, saw how weak and vulnerable the Shah appeared. We smelled blood and we pounced. And for that reason, his mentality now is that do everything to restore order, including shoot and kill. Once you get beyond that, I do think that he will allow his diplomats to try to send out feelers. You know, his public voice is always going to remain defiant, defiant both towards protesters internally and defiant towards the United States. That's not going to change. You're not going to hear conciliatory gestures from Khamenei, but he may allow Foreign Minister Araghchi to go send out feelers to Steve Witkoff, as we've read about in the last couple of days, or to go try to talk to the Europeans. But for me, the best and perhaps only indication to really understand Iran's conduct is to listen to the statements of Ayatollah and his senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. Now, what happens when and if they restore order and they now feel that, okay, they can make a decision about the future? The challenge he's going to face is that there was really only two people in the conversation for succession to him that we know of. One was the former president, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a plane crash two years ago, and the other person is his son, Mojtaba. And the profound challenge he faces is that Khamenei came to power opposing hereditary leadership of the Shah, you know, issued these fatwas saying hereditary leadership is un-Islamic, and so him bequeathing power to his son is not going to have any legitimacy. Khamenei himself had been president for eight years before he inherited power from Ayatollah in 1989. But I would say if he tries to bequeath power to his son or any like-minded hardline official, a hardline cleric, in my view, it's not going to be sustainable. And I don't want to get ahead of the conversation, but that is one of the scenarios we looked at, which I described as Iran as North Korea.

Up until now, the security services, the Revolutionary Guards and Khamenei have seen their fate intertwined. They've basically seen themselves as stuck at the hip. They live together, they go down together. Now, what we saw during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 is that when protests against the leader of Tunisia, Ben Ali, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, when they began to proliferate and endure, at some point the militaries in those countries, in particular Egypt, said, "We're going to have to cut loose the dictator in order to preserve our own power and authority." And we see now in Egypt, you know, 15 years later, Sisi rules probably with much greater authority than Hosni Mubarak did 15 years ago. That is the big question inside Iran. Could the Revolutionary Guards, if protests persist, at some point could we see a scenario whereby they decide to cut loose Ayatollah to try to preserve their own economic and political power? Absolutely. I think because at the end of the day, human beings are self-interested, and so if they see that the ship is sinking, they may try to eliminate the 86-year-old man and try to maintain power for themselves. The question is, it's rare in history that that works because when protests have gotten to that point, they usually reach a tipping point whereby any last-ditch efforts a regime tries to make are unsuccessful. And so, you know, that's why we call it the tipping point. And so, I'm also skeptical that that can be kind of a sustainable new equilibrium of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders who have been espousing hardline revolutionary ideology for two, three decades suddenly becoming, you know, secular autocrats overnight.

I think absolutely, given the regime's regional humiliations by Israel, Israel having decimated a lot of Iran's regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the June war in which, you know, Iranians woke up one day and they read the news that almost two dozen senior Revolutionary Guard commanders were just eliminated overnight in their bedrooms and in their bunker. And so that was deeply humiliating for the regime. And I do remember at the time, Kishane, in the immediate aftermath of the June war, there came to be a conventional wisdom among many analysts of Iran that there was a rallying around the flag effect. In my view, this was only going to be a short-term, temporary sugar high for the Islamic Republic because what we've seen throughout history is that when revolutionary governments have, or there's an external military intervention, it oftentimes can help them consolidate power. That's what happened to Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion. It happened to the Islamic Republic in 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded. It helped Khomeini and the revolutionaries consolidate power. But when you have a late-stage military dictatorship which is engaged in what I would describe as like an elective war, a war of choice, you know, death to Israel, a war with Israel is an elective war for the Islamic Republic. It's an ideological war. Those types of military humiliations for late-stage dictatorships can actually serve to accelerate their demise. The Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan is a good example of that. The humiliation of Argentina and the Falkland Islands as well. So I do think that the Islamic Republic's global, regional, domestic military humiliation has certainly played a role in the view of its people that, you know, this regime is incompetent and it's much weaker than we thought.

Well, I really look at historic precedent. You know, what are the precedents of external military invasions against a brutal autocrat repressing its population where that's ended well? And, you know, unfortunately, there are not many examples of that throughout history. I think for probably many Americans, obviously there's the Iraq war and Afghanistan, but, you know, perhaps more recently for many people, Libya, right? The NATO operation against Gaddafi, which on one hand I think potentially did prevent the mass violence of Gaddafi, but, you know, it hasn't in hindsight been viewed as a success. The operation against Milosevic I think would be considered more of a success. But I guess in my view, Kishane, if I were thinking about this in the US government, one of the things that I would have already started doing or at least started thinking about are offensive cyber operations to try to tear down Iran's digital iron wall. Because what this regime has been doing, and they've telegraphed this, they've done it so many times so we knew to expect it, is that they essentially throttle the internet and they throttle satellite dishes and cellular networks in order to kill people in the dark. And the country has had for the last four or five days 1% connectivity, so the people in Iran can't communicate with the outside world, they can't communicate with one another. None of the images or videos are coming out with the exception of some people who have access to Starlink terminals. We don't know what's happening in Iran. And so I do think that would be, whether it's the US government or the Israeli government or anyone else, anyone that can restore Iran's connectivity to the world, that's going to be hugely, hugely appreciated and will actually make a difference for protesters. But I don't think that there is, you know, there's unfortunately no kind of surgical operation in which you can just eliminate Khamenei and bring about quick change inside Iran because you have 150,000 Revolutionary Guardsmen, and the trick for any Iranian opposition is how do you flip those people, you know, how do you flip the mentality of those people to think that they're actually better off jumping off from the regime than staying with it? And that's a task which, you know, the US can be partly influential, but also it has a lot to do with how people anticipate the day after is going to be in Iran.