Filmed June 18
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today, I think for the third time, by my friend Ray Takeyh of the Council of Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow there. Former government official for a year or two, I guess. But most importantly, really, a leading—maybe a leading analyst, I’m not going to rank you with your competitors— of Iran, Iran-American relations. And we had a couple of wonderful conversations in 2022 and 2023, at the height of the protests and what might happen internally, that you were… I think those stand up well in the sense that you were both hopeful as a human, but worried about the ability of the regime to hang on. And they did. But maybe this is different. I don’t know. Anyway, thanks, Ray, for joining me today.
RAY TAKEYH:
Thanks for having me back. Thank you.
BILL KRISTOL:
And since things are so fluid and moving so fast in the region, it’s 10:00 AM, Wednesday, June 18th. And that’s when this conversation is taking place, and just so people know. So, Ray, thanks again for joining me. And I thought I really want to get your thoughts on everything, but especially on Iran, because I feel like here in the US, people have opinions about the US administration. Israel’s pretty well covered. There’s a ton of Americans who know a lot about Israel and stuff. Of the three parts, Iran is the blackest box. And so, you have real insight there. You keep up so well with what’s happening there. Obviously, read the media and the websites and so forth, talk to people. So, here we are. Israel’s had a pretty impressive assault on Iran. Maybe a little unexpected and we’re a few days in. What do you think is the actual situation, both in terms of the nuclear programs, obviously in the general and military might of Iran, but also the political situation?
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, to start with the nuclear program, as far as one knows, because there hasn’t been that many after action reports. Of the main nuclear installation that Iran had at Natanz, that has at least at upper levels been destroyed. It is estimated, I think by the IAEA, that out of some 18,000 machines, centrifuge cascades that were installed there, 14,000 have been disabled. Now, that has something to do with the Israeli strike. But what the Israelis did is knock out the power, electricity grid for Natanz. And what happens with these centrifuges that are spinning at high velocity when the power shuts down unexpectedly, then you have see a lot of breakage. So, Israelis I think probably in their strike destroyed about 1,700, but the breakage. And for some reason, Iran did not have a backup generator of significance in Natanz. Maybe Israelis disable that.
Fordow is obviously something everybody’s talking about. It’s a deeply underground bunker sort of a facility that is inaccessible to Israeli munitions, as far as we know. That seems to be intact. Although, the Israelis, as I understand it, have not just knock off the electric grid, but they do have backup generators there. But also, the two entrances that Fordow has had. So, that kind of has sealed it, at least for now. One of the significant things that the Israelis have done is attack the Isfahan plant, which is a multipurpose plant. And one of the subsections of that particular installation was uranium conversion, where you take essentially uranium and convert it to uranium plates. That can be used for nuclear civilian purposes, but also it is an indispensable step for nuclear weaponization. I don’t know if the Iranians have another conversion facility, but that essentially injects more delays into that.
The Israeli operation is ongoing. And there are aspects of the Iranian program that we don’t know about. Director General Grossi of the IAEA has suggested that for the past four years he has no accounting of where Iran is building its centrifuges. There are a couple of known centrifuge construction plans. I believe there are two of them. I think the Israelis bombed one yesterday. But if there are small workshops here and there, we just don’t know. At least IAEA doesn’t know. That doesn’t mean the Israelis don’t know. David Albright of the International Science Institute estimates the Iranian nuclear program’s probably been set back for at least one year. But these are ongoing assessments and there will be some time before we sort all this out. And also depends what happens in Fordow and what happens thereafter. In terms of the politics of the country, honestly, I think everybody is now—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s so interesting about the nuclear program. So, basically a year, which is I think more than people might’ve expected earlier. And of course, with Fordow, it’s the huge question mark—
RAY TAKEYH:
Correct. Well, there are—
BILL KRISTOL:
… and other question marks, too, I guess.
RAY TAKEYH:
One of the Israeli plans for dealing with Fordow was a commando raid, but that was leaked into The New York Times. So, you have to have five — 1,000 troops to put in there and it’ll takes a while. Now, Israelis do have air dominance, but that’s like… I don’t know if any defense planner at this point would recommend that, to essentially put 1,000 commandos. And that will take time. They have to go through the blast doors, and so on and so forth. It’s not a one-day operation. So, that was one of the options that Israelis have considered. But I’m not sure if they’re considering it today, because essentially, they’re petitioning the United States to use this aircraft and munitions, which they don’t have access to.
BILL KRISTOL:
And just on the military side, generally, I guess before we get to the politics-politics, it does feel like there’s some pretty broad, and much broader maybe than people expected, devastation of the Iranian security forces, both externally oriented ones— and maybe internally oriented ones?
RAY TAKEYH:
I think The New York Times estimated that about 11 Iranian generals have already been killed. All the relevant commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, of the regular military, and the entire Quds Force. The building has essentially collapsed. So, how many people have died of that? Who knows. The top leadership has been so decapitated, but although it is capable of regenerating. They have appointed a number of substitutes, number of replacements. One of them was already killed. I think they’re increasingly making announcement of two substitutes for every job, in case one guy is killed. So, this has been quite devastating to that military leadership. Again, it’s a multi-layered force, so it is capable of regenerating leadership, whether it’s going to be of the same caliber, or less so, that depends to be seen in practice. But that certainly has been one of the cases. Again, it’s an ongoing thing, where you begin to see more of these attacks.
I think the Israelis are estimated, at least from the IDF perspective, that they have one more week of targeting left. After that, they have to go back to the political leadership in Israel and say, “We have executed the target state that we were given. What do you want to do now?” Now, the leadership may decide to essentially expand their target list to economic assets, to civilian plans. That’s the decision for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet to make. But I think the existing target set that the Israelis have is likely to be concluded by next week. And then a series of decisions have to be made within Israel itself about how to proceed forward.
Politics of this? I think everybody is now traumatized and stunned. And the regime at this point has a vast array of problems. There is some unification of the political elites from different factions of the Islamic Republic coming together. So, you have seen that. People more on the left or center, essentially joining together. The establishmentarians and the Iranian political establishment is a notoriously cantankerous one, but they have sort of come together. Now, the gulf between the state and society is likely to be enlarged. The nuclear program was presented as the most important national project of the country. Billions of dollars was spent on it. It was promised that nuclear science would revolutionize Iranian agriculture, Iranian industry, energy, and so on. They had issued stamps. They had the commemoration days, which were national holidays.
Not just billions were spent, but trillions of dollars in economic opportunity was forfeited because of sanctions and investment not coming into the country as the nuclear program moved forward. Well, at least a significant portion of that civilian nuclear program lays in ruin today. And that’s a real experience. And so, the society as large, which I think also show classes at this point, I can say, with some confidence, are opposed to the Islamic Republic. That doesn’t mean they’re energized to come to the streets. In a referendum, the Islamic Republic will lose. Now, that’s different than being overthrown. So, all the social classes that are essentially aggrieved at the leadership, those grievances are not deepened.
And even before this attack, the Iranian economy was a mess. And you have seen all corruption, and inflation, and currency devaluation. They couldn’t keep the lights on and heat in the schools and offices. They had to close offices and schools in order to provide enough heating and enough electricity for people’s homes. So, it’s like America during the pandemic. Schools were on two days here, off one week, two days here. And they would have a list of provinces where schools are open, list of provinces where schools are closed. And so, they were operating on a pandemic mode, but without the connectivity at home that the American people had. Not everybody, by and large. So, this is a huge problem for the regime.
BILL KRISTOL:
And don’t you think, I mean, just feels from the outside that you’ve been told over and over this is our great enemy. We’re going to destroy them ultimately. They’re much smaller than we are. Obviously, one-tenth the size and population, maybe, something like that. And then they’re just being pulverized in a way, really, militarily, and total air dominance by Israel and whatever targets at this point. Almost Israel wants to hit, they hit and so forth. And I mean, just one wonders what that does to faith in the regime.
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, that’s correct. And Israel was not just smaller and was presented in derogatory terms, but the part of the regime’s rhetoric was that Israel is a decaying society that’s fading away. That is all the people around it hate Israel, and so on and so forth. So, Israel was presented as a weak, decaying, and essentially a society on its way to extinction. Now, that’s not the experience today. They’re essentially trying to co-join the Israeli attack with American manipulation, suggesting that Americans were behind this, Americans were providing intelligence. Not unlike what the Nasser regime did in 1967, when it was defeated by Israel. And they said it was the British pilots and so on. That was not convincing to the Egyptians then. It is certainly not convincing to the Iranians today. But yes, they were just defeated with alacrity by the Jews.
For those who claim, and for those who are animated by anti-Semitism, this is not a good experience. It will distort the regime’s cosmology because they have to decide. For a long time they were saying, “The sinister Jews are manipulating America.” Now they’re saying, “The sinister Americans are manipulating Israel.” So, they have to kind of reconsider the anti-Semitic narratives. Now, they can do that. They’re very good at that. But yes, this is a humiliating experience. It would probably have been less humiliating if they were attacked by the United States. Not better—
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s interesting.
RAY TAKEYH:
… but less humiliating to the regime to have been attacked by the Americans, because it’s the superpower, it’s the colossus and so on, so forth. And the second thing that the regime has to explain, it has paid a huge price for its great power allies, China and Russia. It sells oil at discount to the Chinese. The Chinese are very exploitative in their relationship with Iran. And that doesn’t sit well with the Iranian people, because they’re limited to Chinese products which they don’t like. And they’re selling their oil at a discount rate to the Chinese and multinationals. And in terms of the Russian Federation, Iran was involved in a war in Central Europe, for which it had no particular interest at stake, ideological or practical. What happened to those great power allies that were supposed to come together? What happened to this access that was supposed to be so regenerating? The Russians have put out a statement, offered to mediate—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. What did happen? I’ve been sort of struck how much of—sorry to interrupt—the coverage, I take it, accurately. I mean, it’s all about Israel, Iran, and then the US, and it’s sort of like in previous Middle East crises and wars, one immediately asks about Russia and then maybe secondarily about China, but now China’s more of an international power. And it does feel to me like either people are ignoring what they’re up to or they’re not up to much. I mean—
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, the first phone call that President Putin made to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? Yeah.
RAY TAKEYH:
And the Russians have offered to mediate. The Chinese have issued a ritualistic statement by their foreign minister saying that conflict should stop and cooler heads should prevail. So that’s another alliance that Iran had invested a great deal in. It saw itself as part of this new anti-American axis. They came to the Russians’ aids, they shipped a lot of the drone technology to China, which they could have used today. And the Russians, all they did was offer to mediate this dispute and call for calm. So that’s another angle that hasn’t worked out for the regime as such.
BILL KRISTOL:
And do you think compared to 20… Remember, we had those big demonstrations in 2022, which did show an underlying, of course, dissatisfaction with the regime. Where did that stand a week ago, I guess I would say compared to 2022? And do you think this now supercharges some of those sentiments again?
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, as brilliant as Israelis have been tactically, Israel could not have succeeded if there was not mass dissatisfaction with the regime in the regime’s own bureaucracy and own security organs. If the Israelis tried to bomb London, I doubt if bunch of English people would help them assemble drones in Regency Park. So—
BILL KRISTOL:
So there was really a lot of cooperation.
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
It wasn’t just that the Israelis landed a lot of people secretly. There must’ve been a lot of cooperation from Iranians.
RAY TAKEYH:
Oh, absolutely. The location of all these commanders. The fact that drone technology was smuggled into Iran, assembled within Iran, deployed from Iran against Iran. That’s both brilliant intelligence success, but also the level of dissatisfaction among the people who should not be dissatisfied with the regime, the security elite, the intelligence elites. If you’re losing those people, then you got real problems. The Islamic Republic will always experience a popular insurrection. It always has. In all those four decades, it has experienced demonstrations and protest movements for a variety of reasons.
And it should be noted, it has always emerged triumphant. It did so in 2009, it did so in 2017, ’19 and ’22. ’22 took a longer time because of the nature of the conflict. It has experience dealing with this kind of a situation because it has encountered this kind of a situation so often. But the Islamic Republic honestly has not been in this situation, I would say, ever in this 46 years of existence. The closest comparison would be to the early days of the revolution, 1980, 1979, because a number of things were happening. You had a sort of an internal conflict between various post-revolutionary factions. You had ethnic separatism in the north with Kurds and Baluch and Arabs in the Khuzestan area. You had the Iran-Iraq war, and you had the hostage crisis with America.
But at that time, the revolution still enjoyed popular support, which why the leadership was capable of surviving. Today, it is facing a similar degree of crisis without popular support and with the complicity of a significant, at least a portion of its elite, that are willing to provide state secrets to Iran’s foremost enemy, the state of Israel. So if there is another opposition movement emerge, and at some point I’m confident it will emerge, that opposition movement will confront a weaker regime. Will it succeed? Who knows? That remains to be seen. There’s so many factors involved. But the regime’s vulnerabilities at this point are particularly acute.
Now, this is a dynamic situation. In four or five months, it may look very different. The regime may have regained its control, may have reinforced its domestic controls, may have revamped its security services, at least for the purposes of repressing its population, not necessarily defending its national territory. But still, that the challenge for them would be how do they deal with another particular crisis which could emerge over an issue that we don’t even think about.
In September, 2022, a young Kurdish woman decided she’s going to improperly wear her religious attire and she was killed in custody. That has happened many times in Iran. Women who did not wear their religious attire were apprehended, some killed in custody. That particular occasion led to an explosive national protest movement. The previous one didn’t, and afterwards hasn’t happened. So there’ll be something that will provoke that spark and the regime will have to deal with it with possibly a more weakened state.
BILL KRISTOL:
But your point that I haven’t heard others make much, that it seems like the elites themselves are weaker, perhaps more divided, more insecure. That is very important because that I think is often a key to the actual fall of regimes.
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, it is hard. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s rare that they’re overthrown simply by popular protests from the bottom up. Right?
RAY TAKEYH:
Right. It is hard to see how Israelis could have succeeded without some degree of cooperation from Iran’s security services, intelligence community, Atomic Energy Organization, the Revolutionary Guards, Ministry of Intelligence. You can’t have this kind of a success without that degree of internal cooperation. So that has to concern the leadership as they look to prospectively start purging and determining who’s in, who’s out.
BILL KRISTOL:
And speak to leadership—
RAY TAKEYH:
And any political order that goes into purging itself comes out of those purges weaker.
BILL KRISTOL:
And speaking of leadership, what about the supreme leader who’s, what is he? 86 years old, and—
RAY TAKEYH:
86 years old, yeah. Assuming he physically survives because there are reports that his life could be targeted, was considered a target, assuming he survives. And there is actually a problem with killing a national leader. It is a legally dubious proposition. This is not Nasrallah. He’s a leader of a recognized sovereign government. It’s generally not a good idea to commission the assassination of national leaders. That has to be said as a preamble to this conversation. If he survives, he will not be supreme. He may be a leader, but he will not be supreme because his cascade of miscalculations have led Iran into this position.
By the way, he will have critics on the left, more importantly, on the right. On the right, there will be those who will say to him, and they did say, in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the rules of the game are different now. Israel will approach the Middle East differently than it has in the past. And you saw their intervention in the Gaza Strip. Subsequently, obviously Hezbollah. There were voices within the Revolutionary Guards, we know that by their publications that were saying, “If the Israelis have changed the rules of the game, then we should change the rules of our game. We should actually detonate a nuclear weapon.”
That was the first time in 25 years of a nuclear crisis that the issue of weaponization came to the public. Previous to that, at least in the Republic discourse, the Islamic Republic had exercised message discipline. This is peaceful nuclear energy, this a fatwa, God doesn’t like it. All that all nonsense. This was the first time when things broke into the public and Ali Khamenei and others stepped in and essentially stopped the debate and stuck with their existing strategy of incrementally increasing the size of the nuclear program and putting it in a position where they could detonate at the time and place of their choosing. Well, those voices are going to come back in the deliberations of the state and say, “If we had the bomb, we wouldn’t be getting bombed.”
And the dangerous aspect of this is that the Iranian nuclear program, whatever is left of it, is likely to be a clandestine one now. The Islamic Republic will probably no longer try to reconstitute a large civilian nuclear program, big plants in Natanz and so forth. It will try to have a surreptitious one with a purpose of detonation with alacrity. That’s the argument that they got to be making. Now, that argument has to be made in the context where their intelligence services are penetrated, their scientific establishment is beset, their Atomic Energy Organization building is destroyed, and there’s a possibility of intervention given that air defenses have not been constituted.
But that’s the argument that he will hear from the right. From the left, his misjudgments would be viewed as different. And from the population, his misjudgments would be different. They would be criticizing him for his ruinous policies that has essentially destroyed this country. So he’s in a position where he’s a man without the constituency. Ali Khamenei is a lot like, he will be offended by this, Anthony Eden, the British Prime Minister. If Anthony Eden had never become a prime minister, he will be viewed as one of the greatest foreign secretaries in history of Britain. But he became a prime minister, came Suez, and he’s discredited. Ali Khamenei, if he had died at age 83, he would be remembered as one of the Middle East’s greatest revolutionaries.
He helped defeat America and Iraq. He helped surround Israel with rings of fire. He brought the nuclear program to a point where it was elaborate and on the cusp of detonation. He had consolidated the regime and more importantly, consolidated its revolutionary values. Today, that obituary cannot be redeemed. Today, there’s a big footnote in there saying, “But…” So his authority is going to diminish, and the regime will have to, assuming it survives, recalibrate the elite structure. In Western lexicon, the civil-military relations, the civil-military balance of power is likely to have tilted toward the military and whatever’s left of it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. I mean, it is kind of amazing. I want to ask you in a minute whether that would make it more radical or less, but I also want to say, I mean, I guess it’s easy to say these things after the fact. In a way you’d think when Israel demolished Hezbollah, it turned out to have a very intricate and imaginative plan for doing so, and really one that had taken quite a long time. So clearly despite the disaster of October 7th, what that said about Israeli intelligence vis-a-vis Gaza, and in that region area, they clearly had been working on that other thing for a long time.
You’d think, I suppose people will say this in Iran, right? You’d think, well, gee, if they have done all this planning for Hezbollah, we’re kind of the patron of… Hezbollah is us in a way that Gaza and Hamas are not quite, right? They supported Hamas but it’s not the same thing. And so maybe they’ve got stuff cooking for us that’s sort of analogous to what they did to Hezbollah, right? I mean—
RAY TAKEYH:
The events of past week could not have happened if the events in Lebanon had not happened.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Say a word about that. That’s the word I think.
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, it’s—
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s one of the deterrents was this ring of circle around Israel, right? That could cause so much damage.
RAY TAKEYH:
The idea that Hezbollah missile force could destroy Haifa. The idea that given the geographic proximity, Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of projectiles didn’t have to travel far. And essentially it had the entire Israeli society as a hostage. Once that front was disabled, and it was disabled with imagination and alacrity, once something happened that nobody thought would happen, Nasrallah was buried in his bunker.
Because previously the argument was however bad Nasrallah is, and you’re hearing this argument about Khamenei, however bad Nasrallah is, he kept Hezbollah intact and he can be counted on to be pragmatic because he has learned lessons of 2006 about messing with Israel, and even when he was having rings of fire during the Hamas crisis, he wasn’t fully intervening. And that dispersed Hezbollah into various militias will be more of a security problem for Israel than a cohesive Hezbollah by a leader that has experience dealing with the state of Israel. Once the Israelis—
BILL KRISTOL:
This is an argument made by some in Israel and some in the West, right?
RAY TAKEYH:
And certainly in the West. And Bill, in the past two, three years, Israelis have turned all the assumptions on their head. In the past three years, Israelis have essentially proven that force and power can work. In the past few years, Israelis have proven that everything you taught in your American university about the Middle East is not true. So they have essentially, once they demolished Hezbollah, it made this attack possible. I do think, frankly, Israelis are probably surprised at their own tactical success because I think all of us, Israelis included, had discounted how deep the rot was in the Islamic Republic, institutions had decayed so much. So, yes, it would not have happened, I think without the Israeli daring attack against Hezbollah.
Why did Iran not take more contingency planning? By the way, they may have. They may have dispersed the enriched uranium in various places. They may have essentially dispersed centrifuge construction. They may have done those things. In any nuclear program in order to ensure survivability, you engage in redundancy, which is not cost-effective, but different plants. We do know that they had enriched uranium in all three known plants, Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz. So they did disperse them, and they may have done so to make sure some remnants of the nuclear program and highly enriched uranium survived. So as far as we know that that has not happened, but that remains to be seen. But those contingency measures should have been taken.
The second thing is just prior to this attack, the Trump administration offered Iran a deal that they should have taken because it was a fantastic deal. Whoever came up with it was brilliant because it met the domestic requirements of both United States and Iran, if the Iranians were not so ideological. It was essentially the proposal for a regional enrichment bank that would be constructed. Iran would be permitted to enrich uranium at home at the level of below 5% while that multinational enrichment plan was being constructed.
Now, here’s what that deal meant. Iran can continue to enrich uranium, protect and safeguard it while that multinational enrichment bank was being created, which means half past never. So it met Iran’s essential requirements and it met America’s because the president can say, “I got an agreement that’s zero enrichment. But once we get this plan, it’s going to be a beautiful plan, it’s going to be the best plan ever, Iranians come into it, everybody comes into it.” So Donald Trump would have been the advocate of domestic Iranian enrichment.
All Ali Khamenei had to do was say, “Hey, if there is an enrichment plan at this point, at some point, we’re happy to participate in it and forgo domestic enrichment.” He didn’t do that. Whoever devised that agreement for Steve Witkoff did a brilliant job. Nobody believed there’ll be a multinational regional enrichment involving American, Saudis and others. And by the time, if they got there, the Iranians could easily have said, “The Zionists have infiltrated it so we’ve got to do more investigation.” If they had taken this deal three weeks ago, we wouldn’t be in this position.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s amazing how much I always like to talk about the contingency of history and dislike people who think everything is deterministic, give deterministic accounts. But I’ve got to say the Middle East, which generally seems to foil that notion of determinism, I mean, the last two years is really unbelievable. If it were a novel, you wouldn’t believe it. October 7th, the greatest failure in Israeli intelligence, certainly since ’73, basically. Netanyahu utterly discredited, really. I mean, how could this happen on his watch? The stain that he could ever overcome in his career, the whole society, I mean horrified and not—
RAY TAKEYH:
The ongoing hostage crisis.
BILL KRISTOL:
Then the hostage crisis. Two years before that, you had the demonstrations against Netanyahu, clearly representing a majority of the country, or at least very much a large part of the country. And then the war in Gaza, which is very difficult for Israel and a lot of domestic criticism. Are we really doing too much? Are we really accomplishing what we need? Can you really get Hamas out? That one, that one looks more like a classic Middle Eastern, endless kind of slogging along, sort of mowing the grass every now and then but not really solving the problem. And then they have the Hezbollah’s success, and now we’ll see. But, maybe—
RAY TAKEYH:
And Syria, here’s what the Israelis—
BILL KRISTOL:
And Syria. I mean, it’s really like it is jaw dropping just to have all this stuff reverse so quickly. Right?
RAY TAKEYH:
In Syria, the Iranians were planning to intervene militarily. The Israelis sent a message to them saying any military convoy that comes is going to get bombed. So in one sense the collapse of the Assad dynasty is also attributed to Israel.
Bibi’s political fortunes, others know, Israel, as my dear friend Elliott Abrams say Bibi’s whole thing… he’s like Churchill in 1945. Thank you for winning the war, now could you go away?
BILL KRISTOL:
Still it’s pretty… Better to go out of office with… if he’s demolished thoroughly or at least in a major way, the Iranian nuclear program. Maybe lead to even the fall of the government there, the regime, then to go on right after October 7th. So you got to say… I mean, I’m not saying that’s whatever his motive, I think he’s always cared about Iran a huge amount.
RAY TAKEYH:
Yes, that’s right. That’s right.
BILL KRISTOL:
It just, as a kind of novelistic thing almost it’s kind of amazing. Amazing.
RAY TAKEYH:
Yes, he stands as one of the most consequential Israeli leaders, but I’m not sure if that helps him politically three months down line.
BILL KRISTOL:
No. That’s another…
RAY TAKEYH:
Because the nature of Israeli politics, such divisions in that, and Bibi is a divisive person within the Israeli body politic.
BILL KRISTOL:
Very much. What do you think? So it sounds like you think some chance of the regime fracturing. I mean, there’s some who are very worried about that in the sense of it could end up worse for us, worse for our allies in the region. There’s some who say, look, whatever might be chaotic, it might be unpleasant, the new leaders might be military junta or something, but very hard to see how it’s more dangerous, and at least you buying… Will take them a while to get things back together anyway. Which of those is the better?
RAY TAKEYH:
I have always believed that the post Islamic Republic Iran will be substantially better than the Islamic Republic. You know why? Because what went before was better. This is a country with 2,500 year of history. It has a very sophisticated civil society. It has 95% literacy rate. It has a middle class that is interested in participating in politics. It has political experience. It has a constitutional revolution. It has one of the oldest parliaments in history of the Middle East. It is certainly emasculated today, but even the Islamic Republic did not disband the parliament because it has a sort of a stature within the Iranian political imagination.
So I think… I have enough confidence in the Iranian people to believe that they will construct a society that will meet their political demands, economic demands, and try to live peacefully with their neighbors. I think it’ll be like France— prickly, nationalistic state with asserting his nationalist priorities, particularly in the Gulf. I do think that. I don’t think it’ll be an easy ally of the United States. The Shah was not an easy ally of the United States, he helped bankrupt the American economy in the 1970s. He was one of the principal actors behind the price hikes.
But I do think it’s better than an ideological regime that explains its environment through conspiracy theories and harbors deep enmities predicated on anti-Semitism, anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism. And so whatever happens afterwards I think is likely to be better than what is in place today, for the Iranian people, first and foremost, and people of the region, and to some extent the United States and the international community as well.
BILL KRISTOL:
And it doesn’t seem to be, I mean, they’ll be prickly, but I don’t see why they would have inevitable massive conflicts with others in the region. They just don’t like each other much. But I mean…
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, they would assert their influence in the Gulf. They would be more of a participant in trying to dictate oil prices, like the Shah did. It would be a nationalistic… It would be animated by Persian nationalism.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting.
RAY TAKEYH:
Now, the Shah, people always talk about his imperial grandeur. He actually didn’t care much about the Arab East, about Syria. He mucked around a little bit in Lebanese politics, but he couldn’t understand it, nobody can understand it. He obviously had a very good relationship with Israel, with America. By the way, it wasn’t just America. By the end of his rule, he had a good relationship with all the leading powers. China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and all the leading regional powers, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt. It was in Egypt in exile that he died.
He was very cagey in the international scene, not so much in the domestic scene. So I think his successors will approach politics in that manner, international politics, and of course the successors of the Islamic Republic will be very much preoccupied with the mission of national reconstitution after damage that this revolution has done however many years is still in existence. The revolution has been profoundly damaging to the country. It’s been damaging, not in terms of international program sanctions and military intervention. The country has water shortage problems. It can’t generate electricity. Standards of living are persistently declining. It’s been catastrophic for the Iranian people themselves, and I always thought they deserve better.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, I think that’s correct. You know a heck a lot more about the Iranian people than I do, but there’s no reason they should have to put with this, and maybe this does bring that home.
I’m curious, over the next week, three weeks, I don’t know how long a perspective makes sense, a month, what should people look for? What would be the tip-offs for you as you get up each morning and read 5,000 websites and catch up on the news that things are going in one direction or another in terms of the internal cohesion of the elites, in terms of the popular support, in terms of could Iran, could we see a blockage of the Strait of Hormuz or terror? Are they still even capable of doing that kind of thing? I mean, what would you tell you which way or what way things might be going?
RAY TAKEYH:
The first thing that I think is notable is whether there’s an American intervention and how this conflict ends. If it ends with Fordow intact, then I think the Israeli military success has to be viewed as a qualified one, if not entirely redundant because if they have sufficient things in there, and assuming there’s not an elaborate clandestine program. So first of all is the question that David Petraeus was asked: “tell me how this ends.” The Israelis, I understand that IDF suggests it has one more week of targeting, and then it goes to the political leadership and say, what do you want me to do? And the political leadership can at that time say, we’re going to focus on the economic assets and so forth.
If there’s a plan for more of a regime change military strike, then you would have to attack the economic sites as well, economic assets, because then essentially you want to cripple the country’s economy. You would have to attack the siege bases as well, because they’re the paramilitary force that tends to be deployed in—
BILL KRISTOL:
So you would watch for that after, maybe not this coming… Let’s bracket Fordow, either we hit it or we don’t, either the Israelis have some fantastically imaginative way of dealing it or they don’t. But you would watch for whether maybe after a few days now the Israelis start to target non-nuclear related sites that would threaten the regime, actually?
RAY TAKEYH:
Correct. Yes, that’s right. That means they’re essentially trying to undermine the regime, and there’s already some indication that they’re doing that. They hit the state TV, that essentially prevents the regime from communicating with this population. So we’ll see what happens with that. In terms of actual the politics of the country sorting itself out, it would have to be subsequent to this crisis. Subsequent to this crisis, we’ll see who’s left in the military. We’ll see what happens to Ali Khamenei. We see if there’s a call for his succession. We see what the pressure is coming from the left or the right, and which one is he responsive to. It could go very dangerously. He could finally concede that we’re going to build a nuclear weapon, we’re going to do whatever we have to do.
And also we are going to see, once the population takes account of this, right now the people are leaving their homes from the cities, they’re leaving their home from Tehran, once they come back and recalibrate their lives and take accountancy of all this, how they will react to the next regime outrage. And there’s always another regime outrage. So that the notion of how this will sort out for the Iranian politics is a post-crisis situation, is a post-crisis development, that’s when you see it. But we’re still very much in middle of a crisis, or at the beginning of a crisis or a beginning of the beginning of crisis, I don’t know where we are. But that’s kind of what you look for to see what kind of a regime can actually limp out of this, if any.
And there’s another online possibility of a simple military coup by the Revolutionary Guards against the civilian leadership. I don’t see that happening because they’re very much intertwined. They require religious sanction for their violence. That’s just the way… They’re revolutionaries. The Soviets kept talking about Lenin and all that, Karl Marx and Engel and all that nonsense because they may not have understood it, but they needed those foundational text to justify their misrule. So that’s another thing you can look for.
Moving forward, the other question you would have to ask yourself if the regime survived, what does a weakened but significantly aggrieved Islamic Republic mean for the future of the Middle East? Certainly weakened. It’ll be weakened for some time to come, but much more aggrieved and perhaps less cautious in terms of its approach to international.
I don’t think they’ll close the Strait of Hormuz because they’ll alienate their last consumer of oil, the Chinese. I don’t think they’ll target American vessels because the last thing they want is further American intervention into this affair at this time.
I do think down the line, they will try to, if they survive, get the Houthis or somebody to try to attack American installations or bases or something in the Middle East, try to revive terror networks to the extent that they still exist and that sort of a thing.
But the principal challenge moving forward after this is what does a weaker Islamic Republic mean for regional security? And regimes that lose wars tend to behave in a very unpredictable ways. Because what the regime will have to do is reconstitute the fear barrier that it relies on for its rule at home.
The regime, the rule is to fear. It has to have a success. Detonation of a bomb could be a success. Success saying to the Israelis and the Americans, “You gave us your best shot. Here’s your mushroom cloud.”
And also to the Iranian people, not that a nuclear weapon would regenerate nationalism on behalf of the regime, but just to say to their public the argument that they made to the Americans. No matter what happens, we’re strong enough to survive, we’re strong enough to defy, and we’re strong enough to do the unthinkable, and we can do that to you more easily.
That regime will have to essentially restore fear of itself, fear that the public has toward it, and also everybody else in the region. So a weakened but more dangerous Islamic Republic is also something to think about.
BILL KRISTOL:
Are you surprised? We’re closer to this here by what it seems to me, but again, very much from the outside and not being at all expert and not knowing the languages, are you surprised by the relative lack of response in a way, by the neighbors, by Arab states, by others? I mean, they’re not really, I mean, someone asked me this. I’ll just preface the question this way.
Someone asked me a couple of days ago, “You were in government,” he said. This is someone who was barely born in 1990, ’91 said. “You were in government back then. Didn’t Iraq attack Israel with missiles? Scuds?”
RAY TAKEYH:
Scuds, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I said, “Yes, and we put Patriots over there. We helped people who were… some of them made it through, of course.” And he said, “Well, what happened? Did I read that Israel didn’t respond? Why was that?” And I said, “It was a huge issue, but Bush and Baker felt very strongly and maybe correctly,” I don’t know.
Certainly that was basically the international consensus that they couldn’t respond. You could not make it an Israel versus Iraq thing because once Israel’s in, it’s kryptonite for every Arab state, and they all have to get involved almost against Israel. Or in any case, it destroys our ability to hold our coalition together, even including maybe some of the Europeans, et cetera.
I mean, I am struck that Israel has now attacked Iran, and I’m not saying this in a judgmental way as it were, but I mean, they did launch this attack. They would say that Iran’s nuclear program is progressing, et cetera, and the rest of the Arab Middle East, which not that long ago, was pretty allergic to Israel. It’s like, okay, well, I mean I don’t know. Are they doing anything about it? Are they even calling ambassadors? The ones that have ambassadors, are they even cutting off business relations? It seems pretty minimal, honestly. I don’t know.
RAY TAKEYH:
They didn’t even recall, I think Bahrain and Morocco may have recalled ambassadors during the intervention in the Gaza enclave.
I think the Gulf Arab states want nothing to do with this because the last thing they want is a repeat of Iranian missiles attacking Saudi oil installations. And however bad Iranian missiles are, they could actually inflict damage on Saudi oil infrastructure. And given the lack of air defenses that Iran has had, even the Saudis may actually be able to return fire, which they ordinarily wouldn’t do. So at this point, they want have nothing to do with this.
There had been, before this, an ongoing detente between the Gulf Arab states and the Islamic Republic. And the Gulf Arab states were essentially advising the Trump administration for some kind of a nuclear accommodation, some kind of a nuclear deal.
Now, if the Iranians were smart, they would struck the Saudi oil facilities because that would make Prince Salman an advocate for the Iranian position in Washington. He would come and say, “Look, [inaudible] You guys got to stop Israelis. You got to put [inaudible] because this…” And that made have affect the Trump administration because at least momentarily it would have impacted global oil prices and put pressure on the American economy and the global economy with all the tariffs and all that. That would be a smart move for the Iranians to do just in terms of getting some lobbying effort on their behalf.
But I think at this point, the variable that they have to think about is how the Chinese would react to that. Because China, as you recall, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago. And the essence of that agreement was that the Iranians would not attack Saudi oil facilities, and the Saudis would essentially tamper down their operations in Yemen where they were already losing the war.
But Ali Khamenei didn’t get anything out of that agreement. They didn’t even care what happens to Yemen. So that’s the angle that they would have to think about at the time, should they come out of this conflict, they will need the Chinese commerce even more. Because that’s the only source of revenue they have for reconstituting an infrastructure that was dilapidated before this, and it’s been battered at this point. So they have to think about that.
Also, whether or not the Trump administration will invoke the Carter Doctrine, namely the security of these matters to us, and we will intervene. It didn’t last time. Whether it will this time, who knows? So that’s a complicated calculation.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, it is complicated, but it just strikes me so much. This is, I guess, an obvious point that people of my generation, older than you, but I guess our generation, I mean, the way we thought about Middle East politics for many, many years and decades, and I don’t think it was wrong to think about it that way. That’s just sort of the way it was. Israel is this outlier state, and, of course, there’s still many aspects of that. The Gaza conflict in a way, much more fits much more into that traditional, if you will, narrative.
But I mean this, what’s happened over the last few years with Hezbollah and Iran, and then, of course, the Israeli rapprochement with some of the Gulf states or the Gulf states rapprochement with Israel, depending on how you think about it, the normalization of relations in some cases, which turned out to be stickier and stronger, I think, than a lot of people felt with Egypt and stuff. I don’t know. And then China and Russia having their own roles, but of course, Israel relations, there is some relations with Russia and China, too, right? So I mean—
RAY TAKEYH:
Yeah. Well, less so with China. China has more of this little anti-Semitist language that the Chinese have embraced has not sat well.
BILL KRISTOL:
As you say, it is interesting that Putin called Netanyahu before he called anyone.
RAY TAKEYH:
Well, the other thing for the United States to think about is, is Israel now a regional power?
It’s not an Arab East power that patrols its near abroad, but is it a power that can be relied upon to police the Middle East? And that actually, if we think about it that way, and I think we should think about it that way, essentially brings together different factions of the Republican Party. The traditional Reaganite faction that is attached to Israel, people like me, and the people in the Trump movement that want less footprint in the Middle East. Because now you have a power that properly armed, properly advised, properly intelligence briefings could potentially do it.
The fact that Israel could reach that far and do that damage in this period of time, maybe Israel can now become the principal American power, essentially the Nixon two-pillar policy, but with one pillar, that pillar being Israel. And as you said, I’m not quite sure if the Arab states would find that displeasing, and in that context, why do you need the Abraham Accords?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, yeah, they help, I guess, just they can coordinate more the Israelis and the Saudis. Well, I think it really is another conversation we need to have in three, four, five months, because it really indicates how much this moment is not just pivotal for Iran, though that’s extremely important, maybe pivotal for Israel, but could be pivotal for the region.
RAY TAKEYH:
Pivotal for the United States.
BILL KRISTOL:
And for the United States.
RAY TAKEYH:
No, pivotal for the United States. Yeah. Suddenly, we have a very reliable, credible democratic ally that could do things in the region that all of us thought, frankly, were exaggerated and perhaps inconceivable.
BILL KRISTOL:
I’ve also been struck, just again, before I let you go, but the Europeans, the G7 Summit that just finished in Canada, there was a joint statement that was pretty pro-Israel, I’d say, given the Europeans occasionally not being so pro-Israel, and especially given Gaza where they’ve been very much critical, obviously. And this was, I mean, the Israel versus Iran dynamic, if I can put it this way, is so different—I guess I should’ve known, of course, I should have known this, but I just didn’t really focus on it—than the Israel versus Palestinian dynamic. I mean, everyone has agreed that Iran shouldn’t have nuclear weapons. What everyone thinks of the JCPOA, the Europeans were on board it, and in being on board, they were saying, too, we need to have, they thought diplomacy would be the way to do it, but that we can’t, we have to diplomatically work very hard to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons. Why else put all that time and effort into—
RAY TAKEYH:
By the way, that has to do with the way Iran has messed up his relationship with the Europeans. What Germans don’t talk about is how often Germans are beat up in Iran. The diplomats are beat up. There are a lot of Germans in Iran—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, the assassinations in Berlin and so forth, it’s very striking that Merz, I thought, went out of his way to say, “Israel’s doing our job for us,” because—
RAY TAKEYH:
Correct.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah.
RAY TAKEYH:
Yeah. So that has to do with how Iranians have messed up their relationship with the Europeans.
One thing I would say, if the JCPOA was still in existence, we would be talking about how the Iranian nuclear program is coming online and has all the legitimacy and legal sanction of an international accord. We wouldn’t be in this position of disarmament.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting, interesting. Well, that’s another—
RAY TAKEYH:
For all those people in 2015, and I was obviously, as you know, fighting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, they were accusing us… When it was finally negated, abrogated by Trump, they kept saying, “Are we better off because of this? Are we better off because of this? Yeah, I think we are.”
BILL KRISTOL:
But again, we might not have said that, as you say, three weeks ago, if Trump had accepted, if Khamenei had accepted Trump’s deal and suddenly would be in JCPOA, too, but even less enforceable or something and the snapback. So I mean, it is amazing how quick that reversal—
RAY TAKEYH:
And by the way, we might be in another US-Iran deal again.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s right. I mean—
RAY TAKEYH:
Who knows?
BILL KRISTOL:
We don’t know. I mean, that’s the main thing, too.
Well, this has been a really stimulating and fascinating conversation. We do need to have this conversation again when we have more clarity, which I guess we’ll have at some point.
But as you say, I think you make one very important point that is lost in some of the discussion, which is these things can take time, too. I mean, the way it might look at the beginning of July could be very different from the way it might look in September or December, right? I mean, the after effects a major—
RAY TAKEYH:
But, but, but this is a hinge moment. Things afterwards are going to be very different than before, and we just don’t know how different.
BILL KRISTOL:
That is a good note to end on. Ray Takeyh, thanks so much for joining me again.
RAY TAKEYH:
Thank you.
BILL KRISTOL:
Great conversation. And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
