Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in this quite extraordinary world of ours. I hope you're safe, sound, and well. I'm Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and welcome to Carnegie Connects, a series of conversations on issues of critical importance to America and to the world. Originally, this conversation was titled, when the invitations went out, 'Is there a way out of the US-Israel war with Iran?' It seems in the last several days a partial, I might argue a very partial answer to that question seems to be maybe. And the question now, of course, is under what circumstances and will this pathway work, and what does working actually mean? We're now, what, four months into this war, quite, I think we're beginning the 16th week, seemingly, my bias here, a war of choice where the Trump administration seems to have overestimated its own capacity and underestimated the capacity of its adversary. We now find ourselves in what someone has called a potentially flawed and dangerous peace of necessity, in which many of the administration's probably unrealistic war aims and Israel's, to be sure, have not been achieved, and the Iranians seem, at some cost to them — economic, financial, military degradation — to have achieved significant successes as a consequence.
I'm also struck by one other thing, and that is the degree to which this international crisis, unlike any I can remember, a crisis that held the global oil market and the international economy hostage, impacting in extraordinary ways, was dominated basically by three principal players: the US, Israel, and Iran. Where is everybody else in this crisis? Where are the Russians? Where are the Chinese? What about the Europeans? What about the UN Security Council, the Global South? I find it remarkable, and frankly, I can't think of a crisis of similar consequence. Maybe there's a — maybe therein hangs the tale. I don't know. But I think it's worth noting. More questions clearly than answers. What about the mysterious MOU? CNN apparently released a text based on a US official, although the administration appears to be denying it. What kind of financial and economic relief has been offered, and what are the mechanisms to deliver that relief formally according to the purported MOU and informally maybe throughout via other channels? Having weaponized geography in an extraordinary way, will the Straits of Hormuz really be opened unconditionally? Does the agreement cover Lebanon? It seems to, but what are the new rules of engagement between Israel and Hezbollah, set for the next 60 days and beyond? And of course, what about nuclear matters? Highly, highly enriched uranium, the issue of Iranian nuclear infrastructure, moratorium on enrichment.
To answer all these questions in 45 minutes, I don't think I would turn to any two others than Karim Sadjadpour and Suzanne Maloney. Both of them have the rare capacity to gain thematic altitude and not to lose sight of the granular, which I think is really, really important. And both are extraordinarily objective and detached analysts, scholars, and observers of Iran, and I might add, as mysterious as it may be, US policy as well. So I want to — I'll forego the formal introductions. I want to welcome the two of you back again to Carnegie Connects. I want to divide our conversation maybe into three 15-minute segments: first dealing with the past, then the present, and then some speculation about where we're going. I don't want to relitigate the past. There are no rewind buttons here. But I really do want to get both of you to comment, and I'll give you an opportunity. Suzanne, you first on US thinking and the assumptions on which the war was based. Then Karim, to you on the Iranian conception of Epic Fury. Why was it different than the June war? And then I'll give you each a chance, Suzanne, you to weigh in on Iran and on the Trump administration. So let's present to you first on administration thinking.
Sure. Well, thanks, Aaron, for having me back to Carnegie Connects, and especially for having me back with Karim, who has been just masterful on this issue for many years. You know, I would say that the fundamental strategic dilemma that we've had since the outset of the war relates to the miscalculations that fed the decision to go to war in the first place. American presidents have contemplated military action against Iran for 47 years and have occasionally used both coercion and direct military action against Iranian forces on multiple occasions, including most recently in June of 2025 with the operation that did set back Iran's nuclear program in significant ways, that was conducted jointly with the Israelis. The decision to go to war again in February of this year appears to have been driven by the ambitions of a president who had seen the use of force in his second term undertaken very successfully, at least in his own presumption. Both the June war, the decision to unseat Maduro and to install a more sympathetic-to-the-United-States figure at the helm of the Venezuelan regime back in January, did not in fact produce many of the negative consequences that skeptics had warned against, particularly with Iran over many, many years — that, you know, a strike on Iran's nuclear program would produce devastation across the region, would, you know, leave the United States bogged down in the Middle East, and really set back US interests. And I think, you know, those two factors — the success of the June war and the apparent success of the initial raid in Caracas — gave the president this, you know, sense of, I think, real ambition and, you know, overconfidence about what he might be able to do.
Of course, all of this was unfolding as Iranians went to the streets in record numbers and also suffered and died in record numbers in January, in the protests that were precipitated by the decline of Iran's currency and the larger long-term frustrations with both the economic conditions but more generally with the regime itself on the part of Iranians, and the massive backlash, the horrific massacre that took place in January. I think also, you know, clearly engaged the president. He was tweeting about the promise of the United States to come to the rescue of the Iranian people, clearly signaling that he was prepared to take military action. And I think that set a point of US credibility that he actually had to follow through on in some respects. He was, of course, being egged on by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who saw this as, you know, sort of a historic moment for his own long-term desire to see military action to unseat the Iranian regime. And I think, you know, the other factor in the president's thinking was that he had a circle of cabinet officials who were not prepared to push back in the way that he had during the first term. At that time, people like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and others resigned their positions rather than go along with decisions by the president that they thought would jeopardize American security. In this case, you know, what we have, I think, is a circle of advisers who see their role as providing the president with options and his role as making the ultimate decision. And I think, you know, realistically, this is not a president that has deep depth on US strategy, on the international environment, and he fundamentally miscalculated about how simple it would be to decapitate the Iranian regime, how resilient the regime could prove, and how deeply entrenched it was as a system, and that there were other tools at the disposal of the regime to push back, and most notably the long and almost ritualistic threats to close the Strait of Hormuz would be a huge strategic dilemma that would not be easily resolved. And I think that was fundamentally what led to the war and what led to the stalemate that emerged quickly after the war.
Yeah, the telling point you make on the absence of cabinet counsel, despite the reports that we got on the February 11th meeting. You're quite right. I mean, Trump had several secretaries of state, four national security advisers, six directors of Homeland — Secretary of Homeland Security. The lesson was quite clear: you embarrass or oppose the president and you're out. This time there wasn't the kind of pushback that was necessary. Karim, let me turn to you now on Iran's calculation with respect to Epic Fury. How did the Iranians read this, and then what was their conceptual strategy in responding?
Thank you, Aaron. It's terrific to be with you and Suzanne. So from my perspective, I would cite three important dates and data points to understand the Iranian perspective. Number one is 2018, when Trump pulls out of the JCPOA. The second is January 2020, when Trump assassinates Iran's top IRGC commander, Qasem Soleimani. And then the third is last summer's — the 12-day war in which Trump dropped, I believe, 12 to 14 bunker busters on Iran's nuclear facilities. In each of these instances, I think Iran looks back and says that they didn't punch back hard enough against the United States, against Trump. They really didn't exact any meaningful costs on President Trump on those three occasions. He put his hand on the stove and felt he didn't get burned, and he felt emboldened as a result of each of them. And so last summer was a significant escalation, the assassination of some of Iran's top military commanders by Israel. And I think in the aftermath of that, they realized that the next war could be going for the jugular, could be existential, as I believe it was. I do believe that the intention of this war was to bring down the regime, whether to implode it or, as Suzanne alluded to, the Venezuela-style model where you decapitate the top guy and get a more pliant successor. And for that reason, it was an existential war. This war has been an existential war for the Islamic Republic. It's a 10 out of 10 crisis, and they threw everything they could back at it. And so I think they did a few things that were unique. Number one, they recognized that the country's top leadership could get assassinated, as exactly what happened. And so they had already in place a decentralized approach in which the 31 different provinces in the country would have each a Revolutionary Guard outpost and would essentially be like 31 heads of an octopus. They didn't need to have a central commander in Tehran giving them orders. They knew what the plan was, and obviously the plan was to close down the strait and wage an almost all-out war on America's partners in the Gulf, launching many thousands of missiles and drones against the UAE in particular, but also Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And the strategy was essentially to — you know, I say, you know, Iran understands that it can't defeat America on the battlefield, but it can defeat America in the living room. Spike the price of oil, sour public opinion against the war in the hopes that the American public will eventually restrain President Trump's ambitions. And, you know, in my view, they were successful in achieving that. Obviously, they've been hurt badly as a result of this war, but for them, for the Islamic Republic, the metric of success was survival. And they did that and then some.
Yeah. Suzanne, a comment on Iran's reaction? Anything you want?
I think Karim put it very aptly. You know, Iran used its asymmetric capabilities to essentially put a stranglehold on the global economy, and over time that meant that time was on their side. Whereas the president certainly could have continued the war, but that was at a price of continued depletion of really key munitions that are not just essential for protecting and supporting our partners and allies in the region, but also for preserving our leverage in other theaters around the world, particularly the Indo-Pacific. And it also came at a price for the global economy and for his own prospects and his party's prospects in the upcoming midterm elections. And so I think, you know, that just gave Iran a certain leverage that I think was unimaginable at the start of the war, given, you know, the huge disparity between American military capabilities, especially after air superiority was established over the entirety of the country, and what Iran has in terms of its own conventional military capabilities. It was this asymmetric power that Iran leveraged on its own behalf.
Yeah. Karim, anything you'd like to add on the Trump administration before we have a brief discussion on Iran in general?
I thought Suzanne put it really well. The only thing I'll add, Aaron, is I was thinking this morning about, you know, perhaps the last time we had this scale of a debacle. You could say it was perhaps the 2003 Iraq war. And when I was comparing the two in my head, you could argue that the 2003 Iraq war was prosecuted by perhaps one of the most experienced US national security teams in modern history. And this was among the least experienced US national security teams in modern history. And they both led to a similar strategic defeat. And I was thinking, what is the through line? And the through line is what the ancient Greeks first taught us about over 2,000 years ago, which is hubris. And this is, you know, unfortunately a common theme. And President Trump, I think, succumbed to it. He believed that he was going to be the guy that ended this 47-year menace of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And, you know, unfortunately, he may have unwittingly revived this — what I used to call a zombie regime.
Yeah. You know, there are two transgressions that great powers, when they get themselves into trouble, commit. And Putin may be along in this as well. The transgression of omniscience: they think they know everything. And the transgression of omnipotence: they think they can do everything. And it's an extraordinary example of Putin's invasion of Ukraine in the fifth year. A country three times the size, with an industrial base three times the size, with nuclear weapons, could not subdue or anger Ukraine, and the US could not break Iran. Cautionary tale. I want to have a brief discussion before we get to the present, which I'm sure is what everyone wants to know your views on, the MOU and where we're going. I think we need to spend a few minutes talking about Iran internal. There's so much opacity here. I mean, it's hard to see. Suzanne, can I start with you? Could you offer a comment or two on how we should interpret and read the decision-making process in Iran? The notion that we've gone from divine power with clerics dominating to hard power with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps dominating. Can you give us a sense of — and is there a first among equals here?
I think it's a great question, and of course we're all looking through the glass darkly at this point in time because of the difficulty in, you know, accessing Iran directly or even obtaining reliable, credible, sustained information about the way things are operating right now. But I think what's clear from the track record over the course of the past several months is that this is a regime that was very well institutionalized, that, you know, even with the immediate collapse of — catastrophic for the regime — death of the supreme leader and a number of other senior officials in the top echelon of both the security and the diplomatic bureaucracy of the regime, that the regime was able to function, as Karim said, in part because of this decentralized defense doctrine, but also because it is so deeply embedded over the course of the past 47 years, widely institutionalized. There's this huge amount of capacity within the regime and a lot of experience, and experience particularly in managing crisis, because this is a system that has lurched from crisis to crisis, both internal and external, throughout its history. It's clear, obviously, that, you know, the balance of power now favors the men with the guns rather than the clerics, but this has always been a symbiotic relationship, and I would be cautious about assuming that the ideological dimensions of the regime have in any way modulated as a result of putting a set of military officers who are, you know, whose experience is not just the Iran-Iraq war, but more recently and probably more tangibly for the way they make decisions today, the proxy wars that they waged across the region with clients and militias in Syria drawn from across the Muslim and Arab worlds over the course of the past 25 years. And that, I think, leaves them with probably a greater sense of their own capabilities than the men who learned the hard lessons of taking a war too far during the 1980 to '88 war with Saddam Hussein, which ended in a draw and a forced drinking of the poison chalice by the Iranian leadership. This outcome is very different as well. And I, you know, I think that we're going to have to be on guard for a set of leaders who are a little bit heady with their own success. There are those — and I hear these voices both in the media and behind the scenes — who say, you know, look, these are different. We're hearing this from the Trump administration that the Khamenei and others have economic interests. They want to see Iran actually reintegrated into the global economy. They want to do business. I'm quite sure they would like to do business. Whether they want to do business in a way that is going to open up the system, liberalize the system, I am deeply, deeply doubtful. I think what we've seen is that, you know, a security bureaucracy with control over the levers of economic and political power will certainly be opportunistic, but it will not be a country that is — not be a leadership that is interested in the betterment of Iran and, you know, a more liberal economy or political system.
100% agree with Suzanne, Aaron. I've been working on a study which I haven't yet published, looking at, just as a shorthand, who are the top 20 men now ruling Tehran, and I put them into two camps: those who would describe themselves as principalists, being, you know, loyal to the principles of the revolution — as Ahmadinejad used to call himself, we call them hardliners, they call themselves principalists — and then those who favor putting economic interests before that ideology, whom we can call pragmatists. And of the top 20, by my count, probably around 17 of them would define themselves as so-called principalists. 17 of those 20 also are IRGC men, whereas if we were having this exercise at the beginning of the revolution, it would have been mostly clerics, or even a decade ago, perhaps half clerics. Now you only have a few people left of that top 20 most powerful who are wearing turbans, and one of them we haven't seen or heard from. And I think Suzanne's point is very important about, you know, what is the takeaway — what is their takeaway from this war? You know, we may think that perhaps they've reached the conclusion that the organizing principle of the nation being 'death to America' and 'death to Israel' is a bad idea because it's led the country now to two incredibly ruinous wars. I actually think they have reached the opposite conclusion to that, which is that our principles, our revolutionary identity, is the glue that has kept our system together, that has kept the cohesion of the security forces, and it has allowed us to withstand a national uprising, which happened in January, as well as withstanding the most powerful military in the world, the United States, and the most powerful military in the region, Israel. So I actually think that their lesson from this war is: let's double down on our principles.
Yeah. Let me ask you to offer a personal comment, each of you, on whether or not the new sense of confidence, the emboldening of the regime, the risk readiness of the regime, is it tethered to reality or is it to some degree delusional? I mean, Iran has suffered greatly as a consequence of this, right? Deterrence, however, seems to have been so undermined on the part of the United States and Israel. I mean, Iran survived the largest deployment of American missile, naval, and air assets since the Second Gulf War, married to the world's most formidable power, married to the region's most formidable military power, Israel. And they survived. Not just survived, they've cohered and gained, you could argue, significant advantage. Is that an accurate reading to explain much of their self-confidence? This is going to be an important point going forward in terms of how they behave and what they seek to accomplish. In that, assuming things are on track tomorrow or Friday and we run into a 60-day period of negotiation, how emboldened and risk-ready are they? Suzanne.
Well, I think you're quite right. You know, the regime survived not just the onslaught that you described by two militarily and technologically superior adversaries, its most longstanding and fearsome adversaries. It survived by escalating, and so escalating against its neighbors and holding the global economy to some extent hostage by disrupting the flow not just of energy but all of the other critical commodities that flow through the Strait of Hormuz ordinarily. And they are going to take some lessons from that, which is that they can continue to push their luck, they can continue to bully their neighbors, they can continue to make threats that will result potentially in concessions or conciliation even from their adversaries, and that they can do that even as they attempt to reintegrate into the global economy, which does appear to be the undercurrent of whatever we know is in the memorandum of understanding. It does appear to provide Iran with reconstruction support in the billions. It does appear to provide a pathway to sanctions relief and access to blocked assets. And so I think what we're going to see is a regime — and it's not unfamiliar, there are others like this — that intend to be part of the broader global economy but don't intend in any way to restrain their readiness to pose threats to their neighbors.
Yeah, we'll get to that when we talk about Lebanon and Hezbollah. Karim, a thought on this — a new risk readiness. Maybe the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would not have chosen, maybe he would have been more risk-averse. What do you think?
I think you both put it well, Aaron, that this is a regime with a newfound confidence that didn't have this kind of swagger four months ago, in part because they're also following very closely, you know, our commentary, Western media commentary. I mean, when I speak to people in Tehran, they cite academics who say, you know, Iran is now emerging as the fourth great power in the world, an emerging superpower. I think if you're from their vantage point, from the IRGC's vantage point, you know, the two things they do well are repression — you know, they have perfected that over the last five decades — and resistance. What they're terrible at is governance. And so at the moment, they do feel that, you know, they prevailed. I think their willingness to take risks has gone up. One very specific point I'll mention, Aaron, is that, you know, President Trump on the night of the war, February 28th, he had three, four objectives that he announced, you know, to further obliterate Iran's nuclear program, to raze its missile production down to the ground, to defang its regional proxies, and implode the regime. Now, obviously, none of those were attained, but what's interesting is that what I hear Iranians talk about, Iranian officials talk about, is not Iran being forced to abandon its regional allies and proxies like Hezbollah, but the United States potentially abandoning Israel. You know, that is what they're talking about as the outcome of this war. And so, yeah, unfortunately, I do think we now have a much more emboldened regime than we did four months ago.
Okay, let's move to the present and start with getting your sense of the mysterious MOU. Various iterations of this have been floating around, 14 points. It's remarkable. They've read several of them. They seem to more or less — there are variations here or there. Before we get into the details, give me your big picture view, Suzanne, of the importance, relevance of this document. Is it just a ticket to buy the time and space to get Iranians and Americans, presumably directly, let's hope, into a negotiation? Does the language here actually matter? Is it akin to the Gaza one-and-done approach that the Trump administration took, where phase one was implemented and Gaza remains broken, dysfunctional, sporadically violent, and the MOU will increasingly evaporate in importance? What's your big picture view of this document?
Well, the big picture view of where we are today is that we don't know precisely what's in the MOU. You know, there are reports circulating. It appears to be incredibly favorable to the Iranians. The administration has denied, in fact, that the texts that are out there publicly are precisely accurate, but it also hasn't refuted the general gist of what we are hearing about what's in the MOU. So I think, you know, the big picture is that the Iranians believe that they have achieved not just the survival and preservation of the regime, but they have achieved a position that will enable them and has enabled them to change the strategic equation in the region. That's a phrase that they have used repeatedly. And that means an Iran that is no longer isolated, an Iran that is no longer under siege from external powers and its own neighbors, but an Iran that is in fact setting the tempo, that is setting the agenda for the region, that can protect its proxies rather than relying on its proxies to protect the regime, and that can extend its influence directly, not simply through the force of those militia groups that it supports. And that's a very different Iran than has existed for many years. And it is, you know, in some respects, it's the apotheosis of the ambitions of the revolution. So, you know, we will see what this means in practice. I think we also — my other understanding of what I can interpret from the various versions of the document that are circulating is that Iran will be reintegrated in the region in economic terms that can be quite beneficial to the regime, to the people within the regime, and, you know, ideally to the people of Iran, although that is always very questionable with this set of people in power. So, you know, that regional reintegration, I think, also just reflects a calculus by Iran's neighbors that they can no longer rely on the United States to protect them, that they are prepared to kind of hug the danger closer rather than to try to police it through a third party. And that also will have consequences for not just the Islamic Republic, but also for American influence in the Middle East and more broadly around the world.
Yeah. Karim, the MOU, what do you think?
