A 360° Crisis Briefing on the U.S., Israel and Iran

Hello and welcome everyone to this Crisis Group event, a 360 briefing on the US, Israel, and Iran. We will be joined by several Crisis Group experts to talk about the unprecedented level of escalation that we've seen in the region after the US and Israel struck Iran. On Saturday and the spread of violence across the region, including into the Gulf. I am joined by our Crisis Group experts to talk about this. Unfortunately, Ali Vaez, the Project Director for Iran, could not join us today, so in his stead we have Senior Analyst for Iran, Naysan Rafati. We also have Mehrab Zomzain, Senior Analyst for Israel, and we will give you a warning ahead that she is in Tel Aviv and therefore might have to run down in the shelter during this webinar. And therefore, we also have Max Rodenbeck, Project Director for Israel and Palestine, that will be able to discuss Israel as well. Also, Michael Hanna, Program Director for the US, and last but not least, Yasmin Farouk, Project Director for the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. Welcome everyone. So just a few practical pieces of information for the audience. This is a live event that is recorded, livestreamed on YouTube. I will be moderating it. We will have two rounds of discussions with the panelists, in which they will also be able to, to respond to each other. During this time, I encourage you to submit any questions that you might have in the live chat box. I will try to integrate some of your questions during the rounds, and hopefully we will also have a little bit of time towards the end for Q&A. So let me go ahead with, with the state of play here. Naysan, we'll start with you. If you could give us an idea of how Iran is faring 4 days into this war and what is the logic behind its current regional campaign, what has it achieved so far?

And thanks, Lahib, and good morning from Washington, everyone. I think that for the Iranian government, the launch of Epic Fury and the Israeli strikes that happened in parallel pose two immediate challenges. One is maintaining cohesion at the top of the system, especially given the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the outset. And secondly, mounting a response despite being caught off guard again against conventionally superior forces. Now, for the first one, the death of Khamenei was a scenario that the regime had obviously long anticipated, if not necessarily under fire, then due to advancing age. The system has put the wheels of succession in motion. They've appointed a transitionary council comprised of the president and the head of the judiciary, along with a member of the Guardian Council, until they appoint a permanent successor to Khamenei. That council has thus far, I think, met 3 or 4 times. For the moment, it seems as though some of the veterans of the system, like Ali Larijani, who's taken on a fairly prominent role in recent months as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who's the parliamentary speaker, they seem to be kind of maintaining a significant degree of influence on decision-making. Now, in terms of its military response, the Iranian officials had warned during the buildup of US forces in January that if there was a strike, there would be a regionalization of the conflict. Khamenei said that, as did many IRGC officials. And the fact that the US moved all of these defensive assets in place showed that the US didn't think that it was mere bluster. The Iranian defenses, as we've seen during the 12-day war, as we saw prior to that in two exchanges with Israel, Iran's air defenses are no match for the US and Israeli air power. Its network of non-state allies is not what it was 2 years ago or even a year ago. And so the Islamic Republic has turned to its most potent and to a certain degree only major retaliatory tool, which is ballistic missiles and drones. And the logic is basically, I suppose you could say, go big or lose home, not even go home, but lose home, or at least the system. And try to expand this conflict horizontally when you can't match what your adversaries can do in terms of air power and other resources. And the strikes on the US bases and widening it across the region, I think reflects the regime's sense that its back is against the wall and its best option is to raise costs as quickly as possible for Washington and Washington's allies. And in this line of thinking, I think they believe that the Trump administration will not only face the prospect of a prolonged conflict conflict, which it doesn't want, but also be pressed by regional partners to bring the hostilities to a close. And I'm sure Yasmin will get into that aspect as well. I think this could backfire for the Iranians because, you know, they're burning diplomatic bridges and potentially prompting the Gulf states to shed any reticence against cooperating with US forces. But I'll defer to my colleagues in the Gulf on that. And quickly, you know, there have been two dynamics that I mentioned, which are internal to the regime at the top of the regime and between the regime and its foreign adversaries. There's a third dynamic which could come into play, which is internal. Obviously, before the start of hostilities, the Iranians had violently suppressed a major wave of anti-government unrest. The system will be looking to counter any mobilization from below, especially as the US and Israel urge Iranians, in President Trump's words, to take over your government. And so aside from the targeting of the regime's upper ranks and its military assets, you can think of that as its head and its muscle, are the targetings being conducted against the system's iron fist, the security forces, the Basij and the IRGC that are actually responsible for cracking down and maintaining the system's upper hand in terms of security. And at this time, we've not seen much by the way of mobilization, not least because because there are active hostilities overhead. But if it does materialize either in the peripheries or in the heartland, it will put the system, I think, in an even bigger struggle for its survival.

Great.

Thank you for that overview, Naysan. And we'll come back, of course, to some of these themes. I just wanted to go to Myra while we still have you there in Tel Aviv. If you could let us know how the situation is there and How is Israel viewing its role here? How is it considering the developments of the war? Is it going as planned?

Hi, everyone. So it's the fourth day, but it feels like the fourth month of this war. You know, mostly Israelis, I think, are lacking sleep. The kind of opening surprise on Saturday morning was retaliated very quickly by Iran. And differently from June, the salvos were small but constant. So in the first 24 hours, Israelis didn't get any sleep, could barely, you know, make a sandwich. And it was just very intense in Tel Aviv specifically. That has dramatically been reduced. So the salvos are a little bit more spread out now. The north is getting hit a lot harder in recent hours, both by Iran primarily by Iran, but also by Hezbollah, which has in a limited fashion joined the attacks. And the mood on the ground is, I mean, Israelis have been here before and there's just this kind of, you know, normalization of perpetual war over the last 2 years. So Israelis are very accustomed to this kind of back and forth, even though it's very difficult. And I'm sure a lot of the public is disgruntled. At the same time, there's wide consensus, just like there was in June in the political spectrum, certainly in the defense establishment and to a large extent in the public. I mean, I'm sure there's varying degrees of support. Some people think this might really free Iranians and are supportive of it. They're happy to see how many gone. Others are just hoping that the threat will finally be removed. And I think that Israel's operation being named Lion's Roar is a very clear indication that this is a continuation of Rising Lion in June because they didn't finish the job, and now they're purporting to finish the job. Now, what does that mean? That means primarily, I think, collapsing this regime, at least destabilizing it profoundly, which I think we're already seeing that on some level. And, you know, Netanyahu has been, as opposed to the Trump administration, much more clear that this is what he's after. And this is also his career's dream. I mean, his entire career was dedicated to the threat of Iran. And specifically getting the US to support and now to lead strikes on Iran. So where Netanyahu is sitting right now and with very few casualties on the Israeli side thus far, it's looking very good. Now, what happens in Iran, I think Netanyahu is less interested in. He's, you know, it's going to either be chaos, it's going to be maybe even a much more extreme regime. We don't know what's going to happen to the nuclear program and the enriched uranium. There's a lot of open questions. And, you know, I'm sure that people who planned this took that into account. But the idea that Netanyahu is doing this to somehow, you know, make Iran pro-democracy and pro-Israel regime. I don't think that's the idea. I think the idea is to get rid of threats and to get rid of this regime. And whatever happens next, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter because Iran is much farther away than places like Lebanon and Syria, although, and Gaza, although, you know, the model that Israel is using is very similar in all places. In terms of, you know, going in, taking things apart, causing chaos. There's a lot of similarities, even though there's obviously big differences in all those places. So I think Israel is primarily waiting, just like the Trump administration, to see what successes they're having, how much the Iranian people are, you know, how can they respond to it. And it'll be dynamic. But I think Netanyahu at this point already feels like they've won because they struck with Trump and the full power of the military of the US. And now, of course, as well, the Gulf countries are, you know, victims of this war as well. And that for Netanyahu is probably part of his goal as well, to break the Saudi-Iran detente. And so there's a lot of moving parts. But for now, you know, Netanyahu, I think, is very, very happy. And we'll have to see. How it develops.

Okay, thanks for that, Myrov. Michael, I'll go to you then to continue on this. So Netanyahu is very happy. Is Trump as happy? What does the endgame look like here for the US? And Myrov seemed to suggest that the aim for Israel is state collapse. Is that what the Americans have in mind? Is it regime change? Is it a Venezuelan model?

Yeah, I mean, these are all great questions, and I think they are likely questions, frankly, that the Trump administration itself and the president haven't answered for themselves. You know, if we, if we think back on when the prospect of US intervention arose, it was during the protests when Trump, I think, unexpectedly entered the fray suggesting he was going to intervene on the side of the protesters. And then, of course, he wasn't ready to strike then, and we shifted into negotiations and talks about the security files, the traditional security files, mostly nuclear, but then also ballistic missiles and proxies. And so from the beginning, it's a very mixed set of signals. And once the operation began, that continued. There has been talk suggesting that the goal is perhaps regime change. There has been talk that it's simply a time-limited operation to degrade the regime and its military power as much as possible. There's been talk as well of Trump in the initial stages mentioned the possibility of negotiations. He's since backtracked from that position, but there has been also in the air the idea that there could be a Venezuela model like you mentioned, that somehow the United States might decapitate the regime and come to some kind of new understanding with with a reconstructed regime, perhaps led by the IRGC. Today, we've heard murmurings and press reports about the United States potentially supporting ethnic minority groups in an effort to exert pressure on Tehran. And so, you know, as you can see, there has been this panoply of ideas discussed but very little clarity about what the United States, frankly, is trying to achieve. And I think in distinction to Israel, it is much more difficult for the United States to simply collapse the state and live with the chaos that that would produce. Israel is not tied to the Gulf and the rest of the region in the same way. It is not seen as central to the security of the region. And of course, important to remember that different than Midnight Hammer, I think, when the United States basically very quickly declared success, forced a ceasefire on the parties, and was able to just walk away with minimal cost. We're obviously way past, past that point in terms of costs and rising escalation. But it's not at all clear that the United States really controls the escalation dynamics in that way. The Iranians might have a different view. They might not at this point agree to that kind of near-term cessation of hostilities. And so the United States is in a very different position than it was then. And of course, I'm sure we'll talk about the rising costs, but, you know, in distinction to previous rounds of hostilities, even going back to Trump's first term with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranians are in fact this time exacting a price, as Nisarghaghani laid out to start us off. And so it looks quite different. I think there has been maybe some surprise that at the ways in which the Iranians have been willing to escalate, particularly in terms of the kinds of targets they are hitting in the Gulf. Should be noted, of course, that there are still— there is still room for further escalation. They haven't focused a great deal on energy infrastructure. That is a further point of escalation that is still available to them. And then maybe I'll just end on one last point, and that is the question about interceptors and air defense. And it is a bit of an unknown for the United States how long the Iranians can continue in terms of maintaining this pace and intensity. And of course, there is this big unknown about air defense. We know it is a point of pressure. We know it's an issue already for some of the United States' Gulf partners, but this could be— the complexion of this war might look very different very soon if there is a real shortage in air defenses and the Iranians are able to continue to press on with the war in a much more exposed regional setting. And so, you know, I think the United States might hope that this can be a time-delimited operation, but they're not necessarily fully the only one in charge of that dynamic.

Great. Thanks, Michael. Naysan, we'll come back to you to talk about this from the Iranian perspective, but I want to go to Yasmin first. Yasmin, the Gulf states are are facing an unprecedented situation, really. Did they see this coming? And how do you explain their reactions so far? At what point might they consider responding to Iran?

Good evening and good afternoon, everyone. And first, I would like just to express some thought for everyone suffering from this war in the region. They extend across so many countries. And it is not just militaries or military targets, it's really civilian populations everywhere that include kids, that include elderly, that include families. And so I'd like just to spare a thought for them, hoping everyone is going to be safe. Look, Gulf countries, I mean, there's 6 of them, and usually I don't like to speak of them as just one block because they do have differences in their But their assessment since the June war is that this was coming, that the war in June was not the end of it. And hence we have seen what is really exceptional diplomatic activism on their behalf in order to try and delay this as much as possible, or even come up with creative solutions and even creative configuration of mediators in order to avoid the current situation right now. So they invested a lot of time time and a lot of effort in mediation, but also in the detente with Iran, keeping, you know, showing good offices, keeping the dialogue open, facilitating meetings, backchanneling. And they invested also in their defense relations with the United States, but not only. We've seen, you know, a pact being signed with Pakistan. We've seen arms sales and arms purchases from the United States. We've seen a lot of investment of political influence and relations in Washington, and particularly with Trump, in an attempt to influence him when it comes to, first, the bilateral relations in terms of defense, in terms of the US commitment to their defense, but in case this war happens, but also to try and influence how the United States pursues its objectives when it comes to Iran. Because they invested so much in all those three tracks, the defense, the detente with Iran, and the mediation. And I'm not saying it was done to the maximum possible for all the six of them. And I'm not saying that Iran, for example, found this to be satisfying. But we have to acknowledge that an effort was made. There was due to this effort and due to those three tracks, there was some kind of confidence, or I would qualify it honestly, in the case of some states, some overconfidence that one, Iran will not just throw this out of the window. It will not throw the diplomatic weight of Saudi Arabia when it comes to the detente with it. It will not throw away Qatar's mediation attempts, Oman's mediation attempts, by actually attacking all of them, right? There was also some confidence put in the detente itself, that Iran now has something to lose when it comes to Gulf countries. So I would say that in some instances, I found that there was some kind of overconfidence also when it comes to the commitment of the United States. Although the question was always there, does this president have have the bandwidth and the long breath needed to be committed to their security in the region. This is a president that has kind of left Europeans alone. And not only that, he wanted to leave Europeans alone, but also he wanted to even invade Greenland. So these different elements made the attacks kind of a surprise to them, although there was a lot of scenario planning, a lot of scenarios being prepared that this might happen. Iran warned that this might happen. But let's say that those elements made the Gulf countries think that at least there would be some time and space before it happens. Iran made it happen really fast. It started retaliating almost the same day on Gulf countries. And the scope of this retaliation was also a shock to many of them. The fact that the targets, but also the debris, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, fall in residential areas, in ports, in hotels. The fact that, you know, Al Jazeera today published a number that since the war started, Iran hit the Gulf countries with 1,732 projectiles. Most of those went into the UAE. That it would be targeting them as much as it is targeting Israel, that I think came as a surprise when you talk to the Gulf officials. But again, there was planning for this, but all of the options that Gulf countries have today are All of them have downsides, right? Because since the beginning, they did not want to be in the same camp of an offensive operation on Iran, even if there is some kind of overlap in the objectives, in the security perception between the Gulf countries and the United States and even Israel when it comes to Iran. This was not their preferred scenario. But at the same time, there was so much they could do to stop it, and they have tried it, as I said at the beginning of my remarks. So today what they are contemplating is how to defend themselves, but they are faced with many options that are bad because many of those options include them being classified or coming within the same camp as the US and Israel as part of an offensive operation on Iran, which is something that they don't want. But Iran seems to be hitting them as if already they were part of this coalition and of this offensive operation against them. So right now we're at the moment in the Gulf where all options are on the table. But I think the preference remains for a defensive approach. And whatever operation and whatever actions they are going to be taking is very precisely and continues to be presented as a defensive approach and not the approach of joining an offensive against Iran.

Thank you. That's very clear. Yasmin, Naysan, coming back to you. So maybe first, if you can react to some of the stuff that Michael mentioned here in terms of the military constraints, but also the fact that Trump seems to be working according to potentially several timelines here. What do those corresponding timelines look like for Iran? And what would their sort of preferred off-ramp be here? And then maybe considering what Yasmin just said about how the Gulf Arab states are viewing Iran at this point, how is Iran considering its own relationship with these states after having attacked them in such an extensive manner?

Yeah, great, great questions. And I'm glad we put this together because I've been learning a lot over the past 15 minutes. Terrific. So I think that there are elements of this conflict that are essentially picking up from where things were left off in June, right? And we're talking about both the Israelis and the Americans are saying, you know, there's a nuclear issue and a ballistic missile issue. The nuclear and ballistic missile issue were also part of what triggered the initial strikes in June. Those strikes, you know, ended, the 12-day war ended inconclusively, right? It was basically just everyone saying we're done for now and and we're essentially now picking it up. And for the Iranians, I think where they go from here is partly their lessons learned from that experience, which I think speaks both to Michael and Yasmin's points. One is that, you know, the Iranians lost a lot in June, right? It showed they lost big chunks of their nuclear program. They lost big chunks of their upper command. They lost whatever was left of their air defenses. But within the system, there was a victory narrative. Right. And the victory narrative is that we're still standing and that it wasn't the fact that Israel and the US had basically gotten to the point of declining returns on a continuing conflict because they targeted a critical mass of what they needed to hit, but rather it was the prospect of a longer attritional conflict in which, in the Iranians' view, they had the upper hand were more willing to put up with, with hits, more willing to take on sacrifice, more willing to take on deaths and losses and things like that because the Israelis and the US weren't. That is the narrative that they believe in. And there's a second aspect to it, which is that, you know, especially among some of the hardliners in Iran, they say that Iran has been too quick to embrace off-ramps in the past, and that is what has led that led to this situation now. So when the US killed Soleimani under Trump in 2020, the Iranians did a very risky, but ultimately no fatalities, thankfully, attack against Ain al-Assad base in Iraq, and both sides went back to their corners. After Midnight Hammer, the Iranians hit al-Udeid, they telegraphed that attack. And I think, so now their lesson is, no, we shouldn't have gone for this war. One and done. We should have shown that there are costs. And being able to, to do that on U.S. interests and partners in the Gulf is logistically an easier thing to do than, than against Israel. Israel is further away. Israel has multi-tiered defenses that in June succeeded. Israel has to defend on one front. It's defending against the— I mean, Hezbollah coming into the the picture makes it a bit different. But in June, Israel was defending its, its airspace for things coming in from the east and over a stretch of territory that's, you know, 100, 150 kilometers from northern Israel to central Israel. Most of the targeting is done now. You have targets in Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, Iraq, you know, potentially Turkey, you know, and it's embassies, its energy sites. And I think the issue, the way that the Iranians would see it, is that, you know, you just have to get it right once or twice with a major, like, catastrophic type of impact that will make the Americans in this logic, which again, may be deeply, deeply flawed, see that there are major consequences to continuing this and trying to find a way out of it. And in that sense, you know, the parallel might be something like the Marine Barrack bombing, you know, where there was a massive casualty event and President Reagan said, you know, we're leaving Lebanon, essentially. Again, it is a very, very risky proposition for the Iranians to be taking. But I think that in terms of off-ramps, they think that they have the advantage in the long game. They have the short-range missiles, the the medium-range missiles, the UAVs. It's hard to know how accurate that is and whether it's a matter of days, weeks, months before they start running out of it. But I think their sense is that the attritional game works in their favour and that the off-ramp immediately isn't there.

Great, Nikson. Thanks. Max, I'll come to you now. So So what Naysan is suggesting is that basically this will be going on for a while. And although some of the pressure is elsewhere on the Gulf, how long can Israel sustain this camp and this campaign? Sorry. And how does it, how does it square with, with the other theaters, including Hezbollah, that is weakened but has still been striking Israel in the last few days?

Thanks, Laila. Well, I mean, really, the $60 billion question is really, is this question of math. So, I mean, you know, how long will the Americans and Israelis and others in the Gulf be able to keep throwing up interceptors? And how long will Iran be able to keep shooting off projectiles while being degraded on the ground by bombing missions? And we just don't know the math exactly. I mean, it's hard to know I mean, everyone knows that there's a kind of short time for the majority of these things to run out. The trouble is that there can be a kind of long tail-off. So, you know, 90% of Iran's missiles could be destroyed, its launchers destroyed, and Iran could retain the capacity to still toss up a few missiles every now and then just to keep everyone on their toes. That is possible. But it's a kind of, you know, losing battle. But that could go on for some time. And as far as the Israelis are concerned, I mean, you know, as Mira was pointing out, it's been a fantastically successful war so far, you know, really extraordinarily few casualties in Israel considering what's been thrown at it. And Israel has been joined by the US so fully this time. You know, the last time, if you recall, the US helped Israel with some defenses, but didn't really join the war last June until the final day when it sort of flew these long-distance bombing raids on Iran. This time the US is in all hands on deck from the very beginning with everything it's got. And so this process of, you know, bombing Iran, we don't know what's happening on the ground, but you can imagine it's pretty brutal. You know, it's all the capacities of the United States plus Israel trying to chisel away and destroy Iran's missile capacities. And so it's very difficult to put a number on in terms of days how long this can last, but it can last quite a long time. I mean, it's interesting just to notice that Iran has claimed a couple of times in the past couple of days that its volleys against Israel have, you know, it claimed to have tried to strike Netanyahu's own office and that missile never appeared in the sky. So, you know, it's claimed other hits in Israel that just haven't been true. So it seems that the Iranians may have been anticipating to done more damage. So it hasn't really done that. You know, and another thing from the Israeli perspective is that there was an anticipation that the proxies of Iran, groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, would enter this war and do some damage of their own. And in fact, at the beginning of the war, the Houthis in Yemen declared that they would join in on Iran's side. In fact, nothing has happened. They haven't joined. Perhaps they still will. Maybe it's a matter of time before the Houthis join in. But in the last round, last June, the Houthis were firing off a couple of missiles a day at Israel. And so that had become a major danger in Israel and kept the sirens going along with Iranian missiles. This time there's nada. So that's a big change. Hezbollah has, of course, over the past couple of years been hugely diminished in its strength by, you know, a series of Israeli attacks. And this time around, all we've seen from Hezbollah, despite the fact that, you know, Hezbollah used to declare fealty to the Supreme Leader in Iran and he was assassinated, you'd expect some kind of major reaction from Hezbollah. But Hezbollah is in a very difficult situation in the Lebanese context. You know, they're isolated. Other Lebanese blame them for picking fights with the Israelis. So they have a very delicate situation and also weakened. And so this time around, Hezbollah has only fired off one rather small salvo of, you know, primitive rockets that did almost no damage. And Israel has turned around and used this as an excuse for this morning expanding its sort of its armed footprint in Lebanon and invading more of Lebanon and bombing all over Lebanon. And, you know, so Israel is doing what it wants in Lebanon. And then, of course, the other front for Israel is Gaza, the West Bank, and, you know, the Palestinian population that is, you know, essentially under Israel's control. And Israel has, during this war, has kind of preemptively locked it all down in a rather abrupt and complete fashion. So the doors to Gaza were simply closed off completely to all aid reopened this morning, apparently. So that's a good thing because we don't want Gaza going back into famine. But on the West Bank, where there are 3 million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule, the Israelis simply closed off virtually all of the checkpoints and issued leaflets warning people that they could be shot if they try to get from one village to the next. So the whole place has been locked down for this war. So, you know, it's— Israel is not facing the kind of security backlash that it might have expected. And from that perspective, it can keep going for quite a while. So really, it comes down to the math about the missiles from the Israeli perspective. That's the thing that is really crucial.

Thanks, Max. Maïdav, do you want to come in quickly here? Sure.

Maybe I'll just add that 2 small things. One, that, you know, it's a— I mean, now that we have this war in Iran, none of the attention is on Gaza and the West Bank, which is already challenging to have because of all the stuff happening in America and in general in the news. And so it's important to remember that Israel is continuing to do basically de facto, but almost a year annexation in the West Bank. Settlers are killing Palestinians, which used to be a huge headline and now barely makes it into the news, and just a lot of destruction and just constant, just destruction of Palestinian society in the shadow of this war. And the other thing, I guess, I would say that domestically, politically for Netanyahu, like the opening was, of course, very strong, and he's happy now. But if there is a major mass casualty event, or if there is infrastructure hit in Israel, that would be, I think, a big game changer. So the question is, you know, there's a lot of risks for both the US, even more than Netanyahu maybe, but Netanyahu must have taken into account that, you know, if this is successful, then he's looking very good. But if it goes badly, then he's looking very, very bad. And so, you know, I don't know how he's accounting for this because there's just so many factors that he can't control. And the interceptor issue is an issue for Israel as well. How, you know, how many drones and how many missiles How many missiles can Israel intercept for how long? These are questions that nobody in the Israeli public has any answers. Nobody's giving them any answers for that. So the uncertainty of it, I think, is very harrowing. And, you know, I don't know what Netanyahu is gambling on, but right now it looks okay, but it could go very differently.

Great. Thanks, Maira. Michael, coming back to you. So I'll combine my next question with a similar question that we got from the audience. So the US has, has not suffered immensely, but we have 3 fatalities, I think, so far. Is it possible that Trump will sort of pull the brake soon, you know, within a week or two, if, if the pressure mounts, if we have, you know, further fatalities, etc.?

Yeah, I think we're up to 6 fatalities, and basically in a trailer on unenforced trailer in Kuwait, which is its own small scandal about preparedness. But clearly, I mean, casualties are— would be, you know, as Mehrav mentioned in the Israeli context. But to the extent that the United States suffers casualties in this war, it would obviously be a very serious point of pressure on Trump. I mean, I think Stepping back, when Trump entered this war, he entered emboldened. He had undertaken quick military operations, very spectacular operations previously, Midnight Hammer that we've been discussing, but also the Maduro operation in Venezuela, high risk and without casualties, quite stunning tactically. And so that's been the kind of baseline, and maybe that is the kind of assumption that has been guiding Trump, that this is going to be another low-cost military operation. And so to the extent that changes, obviously it changes the context in which he operates and the pressures that he will face. There will be— and I'm sure maybe Yasmeen might want to touch on this— but there could be rising partner pressure from the Gulf. I think in many ways the kind of Gulf model is under real stress. You know, I don't think many of the expatriates that live in Dubai imagined living through this kind of experience. And so at some level, at some level, it becomes almost existential for their— for the kind of model that they've constructed in the Gulf. Clearly, if this continues, there could be rising pressure from Gulf countries on the United States to try to end the war sooner rather than later. And then, of course, there are the associated global shocks that are quite possible. We've already seen spikes in the oil markets, but, you know, if equities around the world and oil prices have further shocks, that is going to be a real point of pressure on Trump. And then maybe I'll touch on US politics because the polling on the war so far is quite astonishing. You usually see a little bit of a rally around the flag effect when the United States launches military operations, and this war is majority unfavorable, disfavorable from the get-go. We're talking 59% unfavorable in some polling. That's really quite remarkable for a war that has just been launched and suggests, I think, real political dangers from Trump. We know that there are existing divisions in terms of support for this war within the base of the party. There is a kind of restraint, non-interventionist wing that has lost out on these discussions and these debates, uh, previously. But to the extent this war doesn't go as planned, you could see those internal divisions really come to life and take on a force of their own. And for a war that is unpopular already, you can imagine a lot of ways in which the politics of this become quite difficult for administration.

Great.

Thanks, Michael. So Yasmin, coming to you— oh, sorry, Naysan, did you want to come in on this?

I just wanted to jump off a thought that Michael raised, which is, you know, if we're thinking— I mean, Michael's absolutely right, right? Midnight Hammer and the Maduro operation, quick, impactful, minimized risk. The counterexample is the Houthi campaign. Several weeks, somewhat inconclusive, pulled the plug on it. I think with Iran, it's very different than that kind of Houthi scenario. And again, part of why we are where we are right now is because of the shortcomings of pulling the plug, as was the case in June. So let's take nuclear or missile, right? If that is your concern, and you want to get rid of the capacity, Iran on the missile front reconstituted to a certain extent, to— on the nuclear front has not reconstituted in terms of enrichment. But again, it's not a long-term solution. You end up in the scenario where you are right now, where you can degrade substantially, but then in 3 months or 6 months or 8 months or 12 months, you have to go through this process again. Unless, A, you think you've deterred them from rebuilding, B, they no longer have the capacity to technically rebuild because they don't have parts or they don't have the money for it, C, they have given it up through an agreement of some sort, or you've negotiated a way where they've minimized the threat, or D, there is no regime, or it's not this regime. Because if you don't have any of those, then you end up with, you know, the Israelis talk about mowing the grass, you essentially now have scorching the grass, right? And you have to do that on a semi-frequent basis.

Great, thanks, Naysan. You already responded to some of the questions in the chat here. Yasmin, I also wanted to come to you based on what Michael just said. So do you think that that there will be partner pressure mounting on the US. And now, considering that the Gulf countries themselves are immediately affected, is there still a path whereby some of these countries that have had a mediating role before will be able to pick that up again?

So let me start with your second question, because for the time being, It's kind of easy to answer it. A country like Qatar that has been exerting a lot of effort in mediation with Oman has announced that officially it is no longer talking to Iran and expressed even that they think that it is because they continued mediating, because they continued talking to Iran after Iran attacked them, that Iran thought that it was okay to attack them in that way again, and that obviously this strategy is not working. Qatar is a country that had to close its LNG exports. But also today, Qatar Talker said that even derivative products are no longer being exported and produced. So Qatar has shut this door, at least for now. Oman, I don't think it has, and it still is trying to make some calls and try to find an off-ramp for everyone. We have seen also the countries that were involved in what was some kind of a novel configuration in the effort to prevent this war continuing to play this role. So you've seen, for example, the Turkish president trying and saying publicly that he called all the Gulf leaders, but also he called President Trump, he called the Omani authorities in order to try and find an off-ramp and de-escalation. The same thing with a country like Egypt that had brokered some kind of agreement between Iran and the IAEA, and that was supposed to have a role in whatever reinforced inspection and monitoring regime by the IAEA in Iran in the case of a deal. And then today you had also Pakistan saying the same thing, that while it has reminded Iran that it has a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, It still thinks that the way to go now is de-escalation and trying to go back to a diplomatic track. The caveat I would make in this is that all these countries think that the original problem is the war between the US and Iran, and this is where their good offices should start. The Gulf countries today, most of them, I would say the other 5, think that nothing justifies what Iran has been doing. Nothing justifies this this suicidal thinking of really fighting like there is no tomorrow in the relationship with them. So in terms of going back to a negotiation or mediation, these are the countries that today are trying somehow to play this role. The problem is that the trust has gone between, you know, those countries and Iran. It's not that there was, you know, a significant capital of trust to start with, and I'm sure Naysan would agree with me on that. But there was some confidence building in the channel that continued, especially since the detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. So the countries, while they were preparing for the scenarios where Iran would attack them, they thought that there would be a certain threshold in those attacks and that it would not go as far as it has right now. Now, to your first First question on what the Gulf countries, I think your first question was about what is the position or what they're trying to do right now, right?

In terms of pressuring the US.

In terms of pressuring the US. First of all, we should not overestimate the pressure that those 6 countries could have on President Trump, right? He has now launched the war and he's a president who likes winning, who likes to claim victory. But at the same time, there might be an opening in the fact that he wants a victory, but we see different definitions of this victory, right? The objectives of this campaign are as many as the people you ask and as many as the people who make statements in the Trump administration. So there is room there. But I think that the priority for Gulf countries right now is really about their defense. So this is the approach when talking to the American administration. It is not really, I think, an approach of, you know, mediating between Iran and the US like it was the case before. It's really an approach of defense. What are you going to do to defend us? If this includes ending the war, then great, but other sorts of defense are now more imminent and more needed by those countries.

Thanks, Yasmin. I'll attach two questions from the audience right away here. So one of them, to your knowledge, is there any of these GCC countries that have already opened its skies to American air operations? And then the other one was suggesting that I think it was the Washington Post reported before that MBS has privately been lobbying for the US to attack Iran. So what specifically on the Saudi goals and interests, then, if you can say a few words about that?

So, you know, I think we tackled this actually in a recent podcast with Crisis Group. Saudi Arabia has really, over the past few months, been trying really investing in the diplomatic track, again, not out of confidence or trust in the relationship with Iran, but that because this is the safest option. But what was even new is that Saudi Arabia itself had a vested interest in a nuclear deal that could open the way for its own civilian energy program, civilian nuclear energy program, sorry. So it was part, even if it was not leading on the mediation, inasmuch as Qatar and Oman were leading on the mediation, it was part of it, and it did see for itself a role in any potential deal that was going to come out of these negotiations. Again, there is this idea that the Gulf countries have a very significant capital of influence in Washington across the board. The difference I always make is that these countries have a lot of influence when it comes to the bilateral relationship with Trump. There we see a qualitative difference with the Biden administration, for example, or even before that. But this capital is really limited when it comes to the regional issues, especially when Iran— when, sorry, Israel is involved. And then I would say also when Iran is involved, because this is a subject that is unlike Syria, for example, that Trump has been campaigning on since his first administration. This is not Yemen that he thinks is not very important until the Houthis had to block the Red Sea shipping. This is not Syria where he was thinking since the first Trump administration of withdrawn the troops. This is a subject that he knows well that involves Israel, and Israel is a very strong voice in Washington. So I don't— and if you compare the Saudi policy, if you look at the Saudi policy over the past 5 years, that included a detente with Iran, that included normalization discussions with Israel itself, you see that the Saudis have been taking a turn of being very risk-averse. Even again, as I said in my previous remarks, even if they still have the same threat perceptions vis-à-vis Iran and they still put Iran as the number one threat to the national security, they no longer want to get into the kind of confrontations that backfire on them. So, and I would end this with the official Saudi denial of, of pushing for the war, but all those countries are very realistic, very pragmatic. If Trump has already taken his decision to go to war, there is only so much the Gulf countries, including a country as important as Saudi Arabia, could do. So I don't think that this article was actually very accurate in the assessment. I would say there's a difference between not leading on the mediation to prevent the war and pushing for the war. That was not the case.

Thank you very much, Yasmine. Michael, do you want to come in here quickly to react on what Yasmine said?

Yeah, I mean, I agree that, you know, I think the immediate questions for the Gulf are around defense. There are some immediate questions about their participation in the war. But I do think if we enter a kind of longer-term war of attrition, that I think views will shift along with Gulf views. And I do think they are an important constituency for the Trump administration, and we could see some quite difficult tensions arise and divergences is in terms of the United States managing its relationship with Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu and then managing its relations with its Gulf partners. We're not at that point yet. And of course, we might see divergence occur between the United States and Israel. Right. I mean, it's very clear that Netanyahu has a very maximalist view of where he wants to take this campaign. It's not necessarily clear that the United States is on board forward for that maximalist vision. But that's another kind of divergence that could happen. But, you know, the questions multiply the longer the war goes on. And if we are in an attritional phase, the costs really are not just going to be limited to the Gulf. They're going to be global in terms of scale.

Great. Thanks, Michael. Naysan, coming back to you. So we have many questions on the various scenarios that Iran might face internally. So I will try to summarize these, and hopefully you can flesh them out for us a little bit. So one, the US does not go all the way and actually ensure regime change, but the regime survives. What does that mean for its network in the region? And what does it mean for stability inside Iran? And then in the case of regime collapse, state collapse, how might that evolve in Iran? Could we see fracturing along ethno-sectarian lines? Are there any viable alternatives that could take the place? There are many detailed questions here, but I think I'll stop there because we're running out of time.

Sure. I'll try to answer these extremely large questions in as short a period of time as I can. Look, let's say for the sake of argument that the military end of this peters out, some vestige of the Islamic Republic, individuals who are part of the system, Revolutionary Guard remnants are still they still have to deal with all of the fundamental issues that led to the most recent uprisings in January. Like, these structural issues will not have gone away. They're fundamental governance issues in terms of an economy that is already at 40-plus percent inflation, already at record low. And that's without factoring in the costs now of, you know, the devastation that's going to come from infrastructure and things like that. That. So, yes, you can have a system that survives. It's going to be a question of what does it actually rule over and how will it get out of these fundamental, you know, strains that the regime has faced for several years. And certainly in terms of the pressure from below has also just, you know, we talk about attrition a lot. It's an element of that as as well, right? Like, what's your exit strategy even if you get out of this conflict towards an Iran that does not have protests every year or two, that does not get attacked every year or two, that does not face all of these points of vulnerability? And in terms of regime change, regime collapse, regime unraveling scenarios, I mean, again, the fault lines are wherever you want to look at it. We've seen and we've written two reports reports at Crisis Group on the tensions that we've seen in Khuzestan and Balochistan, two of the Iranian provinces with ethnic minorities and a lot of discrimination and economic underdevelopment and things like that. You have the Kurdish areas in the peripheries as well. But then within the Iranian heartland, again, you know, millions of people have come out in cities like Tehran and Esfahan and elsewhere. You know, just in the past few months. And the only thing that was, you know, keeping the system there was its coercive apparatus. And how much of that still exists is also an issue. There is one thing I would just footnote to, which is that, you know, when this war started, I thought the system's ability to hope for any kind of rally around the flag effect was going to be extremely mitigated by the fact that the system itself has killed thousands of people in the past few weeks. If you start to get more and more countries involved, and especially if these reports of the US looking at, you know, supporting, you know, ethnic-based groups with some form of either training, intelligence, or financial assistance, then I think the system will seize on that and say, look, this is about a fundamental disillusionment of Iran as we know it, and that even if you hate us as a regime, you have to stand with us now or else the country crumbles. That, I think, is the argument they're likely to make.

Great. Thank you very much, Naysan. I'm afraid we will have to wrap up on that note despite many questions coming in. So I would really like to encourage you, especially if there are questions of journalists, feel free to reach out to us at Crisis Group. Our experts are, are happy to be in touch with you. I really want to thank all of you, the speakers and the audience, those of you that fielded questions. Again, I'm sorry that we weren't able to get to all of them. This event has been recorded and will also soon be up on our YouTube channel. And so for now, I thank you very much and hope to see you at forthcoming events. Thank you.