"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 47

In this episode: Can the U.S. Just Pull Out of the Middle East?

March 26, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 47

Episode 47: Can the U.S. Just Pull Out of the Middle East?

The answer is probably not. And that has to do with oil, the internet, and one of America’s most persistent foes, Iran.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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[SOUNDS OF AN AIRFIELD, A CEREMONY]

There's a metal coffin draped with the United States flag being carried down the ramp of a U.S. Air Force transport plane. You've seen videos like this before, but this one’s from February 2nd, 2024. Six U.S. servicemen are carrying the casket. They're all wearing white gloves and crisp camouflage uniforms, and they’re striding in step. The President of the United States stands grim-faced on the tarmac, watching. His black coat's getting whipped around by the wind, and his hand’s over his heart as the honor guard strides slowly by.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Very somber scene at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware today. That's where the bodies of three U.S. service members arrived this afternoon.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: There to meet them, the families of the fallen soldiers and President Biden.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: President Biden made it clear he holds Iran responsible for the drone attack that killed three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan.

This solemn event marked the latest of thousands of American service members who've been killed serving in the Middle East over the years. After the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are supposed to be over, and as new spasms of violence are rocking the region, you're probably not the only person for whom this latest arrival of flag-draped coffins provoked some pretty basic questions.

ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: Why are we fighting in the Middle East?

ARCHIVAL Rand Paul: Why would we plop Americans down in the desert and allow them to be attacked?

ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: These are the moments where these questions should be asked, which is, why are we there in the first place?

Should the United States stop trying to play a role in the Middle East? Given the cost, could it be better to just pull out and go home?

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

The short answer to that question is probably… no. In a minute, you'll join me in the room with two of my favorite guides to the Middle East. You might say that these two gentlemen have spent their professional lives qualifying themselves to explain why the answer to that question of mine is, “No, America can't really ‘just go home,’" and why that answer has a lot to do with the nation of Iran.

One of these guides is a former CIA station chief and intelligence officer who spent much of his career focused on Iran.

Norman Roule: Iran is a serial arsonist that believes it cannot achieve its strategic goals without fires throughout the region.

The other is a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who regularly advises leaders in Asia, Europe, and the United States about how to understand Iran.

Karim Sadjadpour: You cannot make friends with a regime which needs you as an adversary for its own internal legitimacy.

So, if you want to learn more about why those coffins arrived at Dover Air Force Base in February, and if you want to hear some smart people lay out some smart reasons why the U.S. probably doesn't have much choice but to stay involved in the Middle East, stick around.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Your first guide to Iran — and what Iran has to do with American involvement in the Middle East — is a former CIA officer named Norman Roule.

Before becoming a private consultant to companies doing business in the region, he spent three decades doing super serious work for the Central Intelligence Agency. The kind of job that might've quashed his sense of humor — but hasn't.

Norman Roule: One thing about the microphone. The last session I was on, the microphones were terrible. They made me sound like me. Now what I'm looking for is a Sean Connery brogue with sort of Kissingerian content. [PETER LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: I think we're probably ready to go. Is that correct?

Studio Engineer: Yeah, you guys sound good in here.

Peter Bergen: All right, you worked at the CIA for 34 years, you ran the Iran mission, essentially, from 2008 to 2017, for the U.S. intelligence community, how dangerous is this moment?

Norman Roule: We've certainly been at points where the region was more lethal. We had hundreds of thousands of personnel in war zones, and we shouldn't diminish that. But right now we're watching men and women from the United States and our partner countries. These are our national treasures. They don't get a vote about where they get to go and fight, they're not paid much. They're at mortal risk, and they're at mortal risk because Iran is providing weapons that enable the death of many people. Because Iran does what it does, we have coffins brought back into Delaware. And we'll have more in the future.

Peter Bergen: Every U.S. administration wants to get out of the Middle East, I mean, Obama pulled the U.S. troops out of Iraq, went back in 2014 with the rise of ISIS. Both Trump and Biden negotiated and then went through with the deal to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. There's this kind of constant feeling that we're going to get out of the Middle East. We don't want to be there. And yet we keep getting drawn back in. I mean, since Jimmy Carter, [PETER LAUGHS] every president has had something pretty big blow up on his watch in the Middle East.

Norman Roule: I think the less you know about the region, the easier it seems to pull out and the more reasonable it seems to pull out. The phrase "Middle East" has an important word in it: middle. It is in the middle. The vast majority of the internet traffic, communications traffic between Asia and Europe goes through a series of fiberoptic cables that concentrate themselves at the base of the Red Sea in the Bab-el-Mandeb — I think there are 11 of them — head north and then go primarily through Egypt, which is one of the great hubs for telecommunications in the world. Now, if you have a concern for anything from global economies, global security, et cetera, et cetera, you can't let that sit unprotected. The Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb at the base of the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. You can't have a global economy operate efficiently, smoothly, or without significant negative consequences to unemployment and GDP if those are interdicted or in turmoil. Everyone will come in saying we've got to walk away from this, but you end up having the problem of it is the middle, there's a lot going on there.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Today, the U.N. Security Council demanded that Houthi rebels in Yemen stop attacking international ships in the Red Sea. The U.S. military says there have been more than two dozen attacks in the last seven weeks, the most serious yesterday, when Houthis fired more than 20 drones and missiles right at U.S. and allied warships. The Houthi escalation…

Peter Bergen: The average American consumer probably wasn't aware that, somewhere between 12 to 15 percent of global trade transits this area where the Houthis are taking potshots at commercial shipping and American warships. And so, when you buy at Target or Walmart or H&M or whatever, the cost of those goods are going to go up, because these ships will have to go around Africa. In fact, they're already going around Africa. So, what do you think the global economic consequences are of the Houthis’ attacks on commercial shipping?

Norman Roule: So you're absolutely right. So let's unpack this just a little bit. The cost of shipping between Shanghai and Los Angeles — so your listeners should think about this: there's no Middle East in that line — has gone up at one point by 30 percent and it's probably higher now. Why? Because the ships that could have been used in that area are now involved in handling the shipping that's being delayed because of the Red Sea interdictions. You've got the trucking industry of the United States on the East Coast, shifting resources and personnel to the West Coast because they've got to handle a greater number of ships that people are now trying to send across the Pacific instead of going through the Red Sea area. So now, let's go back to the Red Sea. The Red Sea issues now add about six to seven days onto the timeline of something reaching the East Coast of the United States. And if you're taking shipping around Africa to Rotterdam or to the Mediterranean, you're adding as much as 12, 14, 21 days. So there are inevitably delays and distortions going on in this global system.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

It's easy for a phrase like “world trade” to sound like an abstraction. But a lot of world trade is just items like bananas, T-shirts, or televisions getting packed into shipping containers and loaded onto the boats that sail them from maker to buyer. And nearly a third of all of the world's shipping containers pass through the Red Sea and Suez Canal before reaching their destinations.

It's also easy to think of “the internet” as an abstraction, but in fact the internet is just a bunch of computers all over the world connected mostly by cables and wires. And some of the most important of those wires are several hundred undersea cables that connect continents and keep whole countries online. It's actually 16 of these crucial cables that run under the Red Sea before snaking over a narrow slice of Egypt and plunging back into the Mediterranean on their way to Europe.

When one of those cables got severed in 2022, it caused internet blackouts for millions of people, nearly taking a couple of countries entirely offline. That incident inspired Wired magazine to nickname this bit of the Middle East as “the internet's most vulnerable place on earth.”

And then of course, there's the oil. Countries in the Middle East produce about a third of the world's oil. And those countries control roughly half of the world's known reserves.

So, no matter where you live, if you buy stuff in a store, if you do any work online, or if you travel anywhere, ever, in a car, a mess in the Middle East has the potential to mess up your life. And according to our guide, Norman Roule, there's a country that's been hard at work for years trying to make a huge, hot mess in the Middle East.

Norman Roule: The way you should look at this is Iran is a serial arsonist that believes it cannot achieve its strategic goals without fires throughout the region. But Iran does not wish to be held accountable for that. So what Iran does is it subcontracts out this capacity to individuals it believes are ideologically sound and who will conduct operations that achieve the same goals of Iran.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

You've probably heard some news recently about these groups who share Iran’s ideology and goals, and all the hell they've been raising, from Lebanon in the north to Yemen 1,500 miles to the south.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Kata'ib Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia accused of the killing of three American service members in a drone attack….

There are the Houthis in Yemen:

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have been targeting Israeli, and other shipping in the Red Sea.

There's Hezbollah, the Party of God, the army that Iran’s sponsoring in Lebanon.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Tensions flaring now along Israel's border with Lebanon as Iran-backed Hezbollah is exchanging fire with Israel.

And the most outrage lately has probably been focused on Gaza, where Iran has funded Hamas.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: Iran is partnering with Hamas, and both are responsible for the killing of civilians and the kidnapping and murder of Americans.

Hamas fighters killed more than 1,000 Israelis in an unprecedented terror attack on October 7th, 2023. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground invasion that Palestinian authorities say has killed some 30,000 people in Gaza.

Iran's recipe in each of these cases is similar: find violent groups who may or may not be all that well-organized or effective to begin with, and give them money. Give them weapons and training. And then stand back and watch the increasingly violent results.

Norman Roule: I often say that Iran uses a cookie-cutter approach across the region. But the dough in each country is different and the cooking time is different.

Peter Bergen: Well, let's dig into the Houthis then. My impression of the Houthis, if you go back 20 years, they were kind of a ragtag militia that may have had some sympathies with Iran, but weren't really very closely allied to Iran. And obviously, you can't build an anti-ship ballistic missile in your basement in Yemen, you're gonna have it supplied by somebody. So, how do the Houthis emerge and how did their relationship with Iran develop?

Norman Roule: Well, it goes back to the first days, even hours of the Iranian Revolution. I think, in the third day of the Iranian Revolution, the head of the Houthis went to Tehran and spent six months saying, these are our kind of people. For the Iranians, they didn't have a lot of interest in Yemen. It was an on/off relationship handled by intelligence operatives at a relatively modest level. But then the Arab Spring occurs. And in the Arab Spring, the Iranian view is that the Middle East is corrupt. Not corrupt as in terms of crime, but like a rotted apple. And this is Iran's moment to move into the Middle East and knock over the monarchies that it has opposed for so many years. The Houthis become part of this entire palette. Iran fails in the Arab Spring. It's one of the great successes of the region. Iran was not able to achieve any of its external goals. However, the Houthis achieved their goals, and it was a surprise to everyone to include the Houthis. And suddenly the Houthis take Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, but they also acquire all of the armaments that the Yemeni government had purchased from Russia and other countries.

Norman Roule: And I think what's been missing since this time is that when we often think of Iranian support to the region, we look at planes going to a country delivering people and weapons. That's true. Those planes go back to Tehran. And they take people with them to Tehran, sometimes for official meetings, indoctrination, but also for long-term training, in-depth training. And missile training took place not only in Yemen, but also in Iran. And that allows the Houthis to develop this capacity to use Iranian missiles, smuggled in through various routes, but also to then, if I can use the phrase, to MacGyver their own missile drone force.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

If you want to know why the Houthis have recently sent their missiles and drones to attack dozens of commercial cargo ships passing by Yemen and the Red Sea, they'll be happy to tell you. The Houthis have a spokesman, and he's told the media frequently that the group is attacking ships to protest the killing that Israel is carrying out in Gaza.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF HOUTHI SPOKESMAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC PLAYS UNDER PRECEDING NARRATION]

The Houthis are standing in solidarity with Hamas, just like their sponsors back in Iran.

Norman Roule: Iran provides hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas, as well as weaponry that has been smuggled up the Red Sea. Hamas takes general guidance, might even take strategic guidance. But there's not as the same type of connection with Lebanese Hezbollah or the Houthis where you have Quds Force officers on the ground, occasionally even involved in fighting.

Peter Bergen: So when you look at the history of Hezbollah in Lebanon, you know, this was just a bunch of dudes hanging out in southern Beirut, and, Iran comes in, starts supporting them. Today, Hezbollah is effectively not only controlling the government in Lebanon, but also their forces are much stronger than the Lebanese military.

Norman Roule: And Lebanese Hezbollah had one of the first drone factories. They have about 130,000 to 150,000 weapons dispersed in civilian populations, with varying degrees of precision that they would fire against Israel, and that's their primary weaponry. 80,000 Israelis have had to flee their homes in Northern Israel. Their businesses are broken, schooling interrupted, families taken apart, et cetera, et cetera. They can't return until Hezbollah and some Hamas elements stop firing rockets and missiles from Lebanon into Northern Israel.

Peter Bergen:The Biden administration has said repeatedly since October 7th, versions of, “we've got this,” you know, “we don't want a regional war and we're trying to tamp things down.” Do they got this?

Norman Roule: Define “this.” If you say we don't have 200,000 American boots on the ground, the answer is yes, they've got this. If your answer is ending a regional conflict, certainly not.

I happen to agree with Norman Roule on this. It seems useless to pretend that the flames of war aren’t burning right now across the region. And it sure seems like Iran is holding a lot of the matches. And a bigger fire, a wider war — in a region that holds so much sway over global flows of commerce, oil, and information — is bad for the world, no matter where you live. So what does Iran get out of all of this?

Well, we tried to ask them. But Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York City did not respond to several requests for comment.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

So, to answer that question, let's turn to the second of our guides to the region. Karim Sadjadpour. He's the writer and researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who regularly advises leaders about how to understand Iran.

Karim Sadjadpour: I was born in the U.S. to Iranian parents. My father was a neurologist who left Iran in the late 1950s, and he emigrated to the United States. My mother is also Iranian, and I think they always probably thought that they would one day go back to Iran. Then when the 1979 revolution happened, they stayed put in the United States. And so I was raised mostly in Michigan, and I had zero interest, truly zero interest in Iran and the Middle East. I joke that, to the extent I had any kind of religion, my religion was basketball and my prophet was Michael Jordan. And then my first week of graduate school was September of 2001, when 9/11 happened. And when that moment happened, it became clear to me that I was very interested in dedicating my professional life to the Middle East.

Peter Bergen: Let's start with a pretty basic question. What does Iran want?

Karim Sadjadpour: I would say there are three things that the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to achieve. Number one: they want to evict America from the Middle East. Number two: they want to replace Israel with Palestine. And number three: they want to help bring down the U.S.-led world order. And I know those sound like ambitious and lofty goals, but Iran feels that over the last two decades, it's made progress toward those goals. You know, right now, Iran is dominating five Arab countries, five Arab lands: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza and the Palestinian Territories. And what I tell people is if you, uh, asked the Taliban what they wanted in 2005, and they said they want to retake Afghanistan, people would say, “Well, that's not going to happen.” But I think one thing the U.S. experience in Afghanistan shows is that you may have 100 X capabilities of an adversary, but if they have 10 times or 100 times your resolve, they can still prevail. And I think that's what the Islamic Republic has in its favor is this revolutionary resolve.

Peter Bergen: And if you truly believe God is on your side, which I presume the regime believes, that's a pretty powerful form of belief.

Karim Sadjadpour: You know, I'm always reminded of that wonderful poem from Yeats, The Second Coming, and that line in which he says, "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Since 1979 to the present, Iran has only had two leaders, Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled from '79 to '89, and now Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled from 1989 to the present. And I think what both of these individuals have had in common is that they really don't seem to have any doubts about their worldview, the certainty of what they're doing.

Peter Bergen: And what is that worldview?

Karim Sadjadpour: I think if you distill the revolution now down to its essence and say, okay, what is this revolution all about? What does it stand for? It's death to America, death to Israel, and, the mandatory hijab, the compulsory veiling of women. This is kind of the flag of the Islamic Republic.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CROWDS CHANTING DEATH TO AMERICA IN FARSI]

A moment particularly emblematic of that hatred is seared into a lot of Americans’ memories.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: The American Embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. They stormed the Embassy, fought the Marine guards for three hours, overpowered them, and took dozens of American hostages.

Angry Iranians took 66 Americans hostage and held most of them for 444 agonizing days. But Iranian anger against the U.S. dates back even further, to one of the most brazen of the CIA’s plots in modern history. In 1953, Iran's elected prime minister was taking over and nationalizing Western oil companies operating inside the country. So the CIA staged a coup to get rid of him, and strengthened Iran’s pro-Western monarch, the Shah.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: The king of kings was back in control. American oil companies took over almost half of Iran's production.

Supported by the U.S., the Shah became more and more brutal.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: The Shah's secret police tortured and murdered thousands of his opponents.

ARCHIVAL 1980s News Interviewee: Nearly everybody in Iran has had a brother, or a mother, or a sister, or a son, or a father, tortured, jailed, deprived of property without…

But in 1978, a cycle of protest and violent crackdowns erupted into a revolution.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Led by the mullahs, the Muslim priests, the crowds assembled and then choked the center of the city.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHANTING CROWDS GROW, THEN STOP]

The revolution installed Iran’s current ruling theocracy, a theocracy that has looked to export its ideas, via the sponsorship of Islamist terrorist organizations, around the world. And in response, the world community has saddled Iran with decades of crippling economic sanctions.

Karim Sadjadpour: Now, 45 years after the 1979 revolution, I would argue internally Iran is kind of running on revolutionary fumes. Very few people believe anymore in the ideology, much like the Soviet Union in its last decade or two, when very few people believed in communism. But what Iran has done pretty effectively is export that ideology and that culture to its regional proxies.

Peter Bergen: There's been a series of protests in Iran, most recently over the question of the hijab, women veiling. There's very strong sanctions on Iran for a long time. The economy is pretty weak, except obviously, they have oil. You say there are fewer adherents to the revolutionary ideology, and yet the regime seems to be very much in power. These protests, which were pretty large, have petered out, it seems.

Karim Sadjadpour: You know, I remember the son of a prominent cleric in Iran, I asked him, I said, you know, how much support do you think this regime really has? Because this is a regime which is ruled by an 84-year-old man who purports to be the Prophet Mohammed's representative on Earth. You know, that's not a winning formula in the 21st century, [PETER LAUGHS] especially for such a young, sophisticated society. The Islamic Republic is basically an economically failing police state, which wants to police every aspect of your life. So how much support could a regime like this really have?

Karim Sadjadpour: And I'll never forget what he essentially told me is that what matters in countries and regimes like Iran is not the breadth of your support, but the depth of your support, meaning you don't need to have 50 or 70 percent popular support. Even if you have 10, 15 percent support, but you have the support of the security services, and their support is deep, meaning they're willing to go out and kill and die for the regime, you can continue to maintain your hold on power. And that's so far what the Islamic Republic has been able to do well. And the basic dynamic you have right now is a regime which is very unpopular, but it's armed, organized, and willing to kill against a society, which is unarmed, unorganized, leaderless, and in my view, not willing to die.

Peter Bergen: I remember meeting you at a discussion about the Middle East many years ago and you quoted Henry Kissinger and he said, “Iran has to decide if it's a cause or a nation.” Now, clearly, the French revolutionaries saw themselves as a cause and a nation. Clearly, the Soviet revolutionaries saw themselves as a cause and a nation. Has Iran ever settled that issue?

Karim Sadjadpour: You know, when Kissinger said that quote, that Iran has to decide whether it's a nation or a cause, I really think that was the most incisive comment that had been made about the Islamic Republic of Iran. And at that time, the country was much more at a crossroads. But I think that this regime has decided that they're not a nation, that they’re a revolutionary cause; their interests are not the national interests of Iran, which is the economic prosperity and security of its people. Its interest is this revolutionary ideology.

Peter Bergen: Our show is called In the Room, and you have advised quite a number of senior U.S. officials and officials of other countries about Iran. I mean, what are those discussions like, and how have they evolved over time? One thing I'm taking away from reading your writings and also talking to you today, it's like, there's a problem that we all have and that intelligence communities try and avoid, which is mirror imaging, which is just assuming that basically if everybody just got their act together...

Karim Sadjadpour: Yes.

Peter Bergen: ...they’d basically arrive at the view that I have sitting in my desk in Washington, D.C.

Karim Sadjadpour: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] And you're saying that's a fundamental misreading of this regime.

Karim Sadjadpour: Yes. So, It's obviously challenging, very challenging, if you're a U.S. official, by virtue of the fact that for 45 years, the United States and Iran have been estranged. There's been no U.S. embassy in Tehran. There's been no Iranian embassy in the United States. So, at this point, I don't think there's a single U.S. official who has served in Iran. There was a study that came out a few years ago, which noted that the U.S. State Department has more Albanian speakers than Persian speakers. I think there's probably no country in the world in which there's a greater gap between its importance to U.S. national security and our level of expertise in it, right?

Karim Sadjadpour: But I do think now, by virtue of the experience of the last 10, 15 years, that there has been a broad consensus formed that you cannot reach amends, you cannot make friends with a regime which needs you as an adversary for its own internal legitimacy. I mean, the Obama administration really tried hard to change the nature of the U.S.-Iran relationship. And President Obama wrote in his memoirs that he had written private letters to Ayatollah Khamenei saying, you know, we're not interested in being adversaries. Let's try to work together. We have no interest in regime change. And Obama described Khamenei's response as the equivalent of the middle finger.

Karim Sadjadpour: I think under the Biden administration, similarly, their hope was to just revive the nuclear deal with Iran. And they appointed an envoy, a U.S. Special Envoy to Iran, who was very friendly to Iran. And the Iranians refused to even meet with him. And as we've seen, the relationship has grown worse, but I think there's also a critique so I kind of critiqued a little bit what has been oftentimes the progressive view on Iran. And there's, I think, a critique of the right-wing view on Iran, which is that they've also not really had a strategy. They thought if we only just increase the pressure on Iran — and it's all about sanctions and military threats — we can force the regime into either capitulation or collapse. And so, in some ways, the kind of simplistic critique I would have of the left and right is that, you know, the folks on the left would oftentimes think, “Well, we're the problem. It's not Iran. We're the problem.” And the folks on the right would say, “Well, no, we're the solution,” right? The progressives will say you know, “We overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953.”

Peter Bergen: The CIA —

Karim Sadjadpour: CIA did. And, so if we behave nicer towards Iran, they will reciprocate. I think that's a flawed view, ‘cause it doesn't take into account the interests of the Iranian regime to have this enmity with the United States for their own internal legitimacy. And then, on the right, it's not a banana republic, the Islamic Republic of Iran — that if only you increase sanctions and you make a few military threats that within a couple of years, the regime will just implode. That was the attempt of Secretary of State Pompeo and John Bolton during the Trump administration. Didn't work. So my view is that, you know, you really have to devise an effective strategy toward Iran based on the nature of this regime.

And Sadjadpour says the nature of the Iranian regime suggests the U.S. ought to recall lessons it learned when dealing with Soviet Russia — an outwardly formidable rival whose repressive politics and bankrupt economy left it internally weak.

Karim Sadjadpour: I describe Iran as this bodybuilder with failing organs, right? [PETER LAUGHS] I actually do think that the Soviet Union and the U.S. strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, especially in the ’80s under Reagan, is probably the best strategic template for the Islamic Republic. It was a policy of containment. And then you want to advance the cause of internal change. And during the Soviet Union, we put far more emphasis on that, whether it was, you know, the hundreds of millions of dollars we spent on information outlets, uh, media outlets. There would be constant statements of solidarity: calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, telling Gorbachev to tear down the wall. There were prominent Russian and Soviet dissidents who were, you know, almost household names in the West. None of that exists now, with the Islamic Republic. And I want to emphasize that ultimately it's going to be on the people of Iran to change the government and get a government which they deserve, a government which is accountable and representative. But I think that the United States has done very little to think creatively about how to advance that goal.

Karim Sadjadpour: I'll give you a concrete example. So, one of the ways this regime stays in power is whenever they’re faced with popular unrest, they shut off the internet, right? And they want to shut off the internet so they can kill people in the dark. There are now technological ways to inhibit the regime from doing that. Starlink terminals are a good example of that. We, the United States, have helped Ukraine get Starlink terminals, which have provided internet access to hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine. Things like that have not really been thought about seriously in the Iranian context.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, I mean, people in Iran must look over the border to like countries like Qatar and Iran and Qatar share the world's largest natural gas deposits. And Qatar is, per capita, one of the richest countries in history. [PETER LAUGHS]

Karim Sadjadpour: Yes.

Peter Bergen: And Iran is not. And obviously it's a much bigger country. You're sitting on a vast amount of oil, gas. It should be a very rich country.

Karim Sadjadpour: Exactly, I think that's how people feel in Iran, is this kind of lost prosperity. You add on top of that, this enormous pride people feel in their history that we were once this superpower — right? The Persian empire — and we're now this pariah.

Peter Bergen: If Iran was to acquire nuclear weapons — and obviously, it's pretty close — what does that change? How worried should we be?

Karim Sadjadpour: I'm always reminded of that quote from Hannah Arendt. She said that the day after the revolution, every revolutionary becomes a conservative, because suddenly they have gained something that they want to conserve, right? The reason why I say this is that I view Iran differently than, let's say, ISIS or al-Qaeda in that they control this nation-state. Iran is not suicidal. The greater danger here is that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would feel this kind of cloak of immunity to be able to double and triple down on these proxy forces. And I think, frankly, the greater danger here is not Iran transferring nuclear weapons to a group like Hamas or Hezbollah, but their continued improvement and sophistication and gaining more precision rockets, missiles, and drones.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

So let's just say Sadjadpour is right, and we can worry a little less about Iran's nukes, at least for the moment. Iran is still funding violent proxy groups, fanning the flames of conflict, and — despite public statements to the contrary — seeming to hand out more matches and gasoline all the time.

Iran’s doing this in a region the world depends on for oil — where key arteries of global information and commerce are quite easy to block. You might be seeing all this violence there and worry we're watching the opening salvos of World War III.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Growing fears of the Israel-Hamas war expanding across the region tonight.

ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: We're on the brink here of getting drawn into something, like a World War III something.

ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: The Iranian regime has made up their mind. They have launched a world war. They are using…

Sadjadpour is less worried. He actually thinks the world's dependence on the Middle East is a convincing reason there won't be a world war that starts there.

Karim Sadjadpour: So Iran is significantly weaker than the Soviet Union was. You know, Iran is an economically failing regional power. It's not a global superpower like the Soviet Union. Neither the Chinese nor the Russians are going to go to war on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And, frankly, I think that America and China probably have more overlapping interests in the Middle East than China and Iran, so I'm not as concerned that the current conflicts in the Middle East could deteriorate into a third world war because the most powerful countries in the world today — in particular, the United States and China — want to avoid that outcome.

Our other guide, Norman Roule, the former CIA station chief you heard from earlier, agrees.

Norman Roule: So I think ”World War” implies global reach, and that's really the United States, Russia, China at this point, those adversaries. Could the Middle East precipitate that? Unlikely, but, you know, we want to be careful about predicting the undiscovered country of the future. But we can say that global damage can be conducted and executed by what happens in the region because we're watching that play out with the Red Sea. So global damage, yes. World War III, that's a bigger issue, that involves outside actors.

Our two guides to the Middle East also agree on something else. They say the U.S. must remain active in the region. Smart people can — and often do — disagree about how active the U.S. should be, or in what ways, or on behalf of which countries. But both Roule and Sadjadpour think the United States is best positioned to cool down a region that the world can't afford to just watch go up in flames.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Karim Sadjadpour: We have to realize that, you know, power vacuums are not filled by Norway and Denmark, right? When you look at the last couple of decades in the Middle East, and the more there have been vacuums, the more it's created opportunities for, whether it's Iran or, frankly, ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Norman Roule: We have an aircraft carrier task force at the base of the Red Sea, the Dwight Eisenhower. It has sufficient military power to destroy small countries' militaries. This is an extraordinary amount of power, raw power. Now that's not the same thing as willingness to use that power, or what issues will compel you to use that power. But the United States — not China, not Russia — has sent its forces out and put their lives on the line to keep a global artery important because it's important to our economy, our people. It's important to the economic health of Ohio and Wisconsin. But, we're putting people on the line. And I have spoken with, recently, regional leaders who recognize that fact and say only the U.S. can play this role.

[MUSIC INTENSIFIES, SOUNDS OF WIND, ENGINES ON A RUNWAY]

The U.S. has military resources that literally no one else can match. And as importantly, it remains willing to live with the consequences of using them. And those consequences, unfortunately, sometimes include watching flag-draped caskets coming home at Dover Air Force Base.

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If you are interested in hearing more about some of the stories and issues we discussed in this episode, we recommend All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer and Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy. Both are on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Erik German, with help from Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

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Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

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