America and Iran: Is a New Chapter Possible?

The approach that the current administration has adopted, I think, is particularly wise because it's not trying to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran in a segregated manner from other nuclear-related questions in the subregion, in the Gulf region. You know, if we really do care about great power competition, you don't want a country the size of Iran with the resources of Iran to be entirely in the camp of Russia and China.

Few relationships are as fraught or as consequential as America's relationship with Iran. As of June 2025, this relationship is at a fork in the road. President Trump has opened a negotiation with Iran's leaders that could halt Iran's nuclear weapons program, lift economic sanctions, and lead us into a new era in U.S.-Iran relations. But these negotiations could also easily collapse. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for military strikes on Iran's nuclear program. And this path would lead in a very different direction for the region, for America, and for the world. So is war inevitable? Or could this be a Nixon-to-China moment for Trump? And if it is, how would this change the region and even the world? So with me today to discuss this is Dr. Ali Vaez from the International Crisis Group, Ali's one of the world's leading experts on Iran and US policy toward Iran. He's the author of a number of books and especially fantastic articles on this subject. He's also lived in Iran during the early years of his life, which I think makes him an especially fascinating and insightful expert to talk to on this subject. He understands better than almost anyone what strategies do and don't work in negotiating with Iran's theocratic regime. Ali, it's really great to have you come join us on Pivotal States today.

Thank you for having me, Chris. It's great to be with you.

So I want to start with a sort of big picture general assessment from you to get us going. And this is not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. How would you grade America's statecraft with Iran over the course of the last 20 years?

Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would put it at 3.

One being the lowest on the scale. One being the lowest, yes. Okay, so not very good grades.

Not good grades at all. And I think it's easy to measure that if the metric is the concern that the U.S. has about Iran's policies, whether at home or abroad. If you look at Iran's nuclear program, for instance, in the past 20 years, it has gone from a rudimentary program to a program that is basically on the threshold of nuclear weapons. If you look at Iran's ballistic missiles, 20 years ago, it was a much more limited program, primarily aimed at defending Iran itself. Now, Iran has the most sophisticated arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region and is proliferating drones and missiles to state and non-state actors.

Including Russia.

Exactly. And if you look at Iran's internal dynamics in terms of human rights violations, Again, it has become worse and worse and worse with time. So by every measure, the U.S. has not been able to achieve any of its objectives in the course of not just the past two decades, since the 1979 revolution in Iran.

So it sounds like we need to start thinking about different strategies for our policy toward Iran. And that's what I want to really focus on here. And we're going to focus on the nuclear question because that is the issue of the day. And among these, really the most important and central one. Although it's important, I think, to remember that, as you've already laid out quite eloquently, there are several other issues that also are interlinked with the nuclear issue that we will get to if we have time. But because President Trump has been so focused on doing a deal with Iran in the first few months of his administration, I want to talk about that. Before we go there, I want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Iran as an individual, because you were born in Iran, right? And grew up there and then decided to come to the United States. What was it that led you to make that decision? What were the circumstances that made you want to leave your home country?

So I was born and raised in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, actually. And I remember it vividly. It's one of my first memories, basically losing classmates in missile strikes, because I grew up I grew up in the city of Shiraz in the south, which is surrounded by mountains. So it was only until the stage in the war, which is called the War of the Cities, because Saddam started using ballistic missiles and those missiles could actually reach Shiraz, whereas planes really couldn't descend to bomb it. It's only at that stage that we felt the war, but it was maybe worse because at least with fighter jets, you would get some advanced warning. With missiles, you would only get a few minutes or a few seconds of advance warning. And I think that trauma created this incentive in me to try to prevent these kind of things from happening again. And that's one of the reasons that today I work for a conflict prevention organization, the Crisis Group.

But you also were somewhat disaffected with the trajectory of Iran's internal politics. And that's one of the reasons why you decided to leave toward the end of the 1990s, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, so I'm a child of the revolution. I was born after the revolution. And obviously there was a high degree of dissatisfaction within the country, even in the 1990s when I was a teenager. And I participated in some student protests in 1999 because our hope was that given the experience of the revolution, which was a recent experience in the 1990s, it was only 20 years after after the revolution. I think there was this sense in my generation and in my parents' generation that radical change often results in a worse outcome. It ends in grief. It rarely brings about a better situation.

Reform is better.

Reform is better. Evolutionary change is better. So that was the concept that we were pursuing. And in 1997, first time I could vote, I voted for Khatami, reformist president in Iran, and we were hoping that that would bring about gradual but meaningful reforms. It didn't. The system, the deep state in Iran, which is represented by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards, the unelected institutions in the Islamic Republic, basically blocked the reformists from being able to bring about meaningful change. So I was dissatisfied, and I wanted to leave the country to pursue my studies abroad. Then I came to the US in 2009, 2008 actually, to do my postdoc in Boston. And then the 2009 uprising happened in Iran. If you remember, this was this second-term election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which was a rigged election. And I was personally and emotionally very involved in that election. In fact, I organized a voting booth for Iranian students who lived in Boston area. And after that election was stolen, I participated in protests against the regime. But that also coincided with a period in time that a nuclear standoff between Iran and the West had reached boiling point. And in international press, there was always debate about whether Israel would bomb Iran this week or next week, whether the U.S. would be involved or not.

In order to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program. Correct.

And so I came to D.C. out of curiosity to see what's the policy debate about Iran. And I have to tell you, Chris, I was shocked by the degree of miscomprehension in this town. In fact, I came to events at Carnegie, Brookings, different places just to see what people were saying. And I, I realized most people who claimed expertise on Iran either don't speak the language, have never been to the country, cannot read its newspapers, have very strong opinions, but really don't know the society that they're talking about. You know, some might have had conversations with cab drivers from which they draw big conclusions. But the reality is that I felt that with this degree of miscomprehension, Iran and the US are going to end in conflict. And that was the one thing I wanted to prevent. Despite my dissatisfaction with the regime, I've always believed that the one thing that is worse for Iran than the Islamic Republic is a war with the US. And of course, the US was now my host country had been much kinder to me than my home country. And I also didn't want the US to once again commit a mistake in that part of the world and get bogged down in unwinnable, extremely costly conflicts.

And here, I guess you're referring to the 2003 Iraq War.

And Afghanistan War.

And Afghanistan.

Because that coincides with when President Obama was deciding whether he would surge troops in Afghanistan or not. And so even Afghanistan, which was seen as the war of choice or the better conflict between the two, Afghanistan and Iraq, even that didn't look that promising at the time. So I decided that if there's anything that I could do about this and to prevent this trajectory from ending in grief, I should. But I knew that I didn't have the expertise. So I left my very attractive academic position in Boston at the time, went back to school, studied international relations, and then ended up coming into the policy field.

And so it's interesting because the way that you describe it, it's clear that you've had these two different sort of poles. On the one hand, a deep desire to see change in Iran and reform. In its domestic politics, but at the same time, a deep concern about what the consequences of a violent war with the United States would mean, presumably for the Iranian people, but also for America and the region, which you— America, where you live, and the region, which you know well.

Absolutely. I think that's a good description of it.

Let's shift a little bit towards— you've already started this, but shift towards the actual policy frame here. And I think it would be helpful if you could just sort of lay out the basics of how we got from the Obama era to where we are right now. For those who may not have followed Iran as closely as you have. So back in 2015, we obviously had the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration had been negotiating for a large part, in large part secretly with Iran, along with the help of some European partners and eventually China and Russia, which resulted— was a major breakthrough in 2015. So walk us from there to where we are right now in terms of the policy evolution.

In 2015, the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, basically capped and rolled back Iran's nuclear program, put it in a box under the most rigorous monitoring mechanism ever implemented anywhere in the world. Look, the IAEA has one mandate, which is nuclear accountancy, basically making sure that every gram of nuclear material, uranium, plutonium, whatever that is, is accounted for so none of it is diverted towards weaponization efforts. Right? Now, what the JCPOA did was it went much further than that. And it basically allowed the IAEA for the first time to also monitor the equipment. So every nut and bolt that would go into a centrifuge, which are these machines that enrich uranium from raw to weapons-grade, all of these were monitored and accounted for by the IAEA so that there was no way that Iran could divert even equipment. Towards a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Yeah. Obviously, the deal was controversial because it was a transactional agreement addressing only one area of disagreement between Iran and the West, which was nuclear weapons, because all of the other areas that you mentioned at the start, the ballistic missile program, Iran's support to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, were also things that more maximalist people here in Washington would have liked to have seen dealt with as well. But the Obama administration chose only to focus on the nuclear weapons program, correct?

Correct. I mean, I remember at the time, you know, one of the things that Iranian President Rouhani used to say was that the disagreements between Iran and the US are so numerous and heavy and difficult to deal with, that if you put all of them on the table, the table would not be able to bear the weight.

Right.

So they decided to, both sides decided to basically prioritize the most urgent issue, which was the nuclear issue, in the hope that then that would be not a ceiling, but a floor.

Unlock the other issues, right? And I mean, but that to me seems like common sense. Negotiating strategy that you don't try to tackle everything all at once. I mean, there may be some situations in which that makes sense, but if you can make progress on one issue, especially one that's as important as Iran's nuclear weapons program, that you should do that and take that win and then hope to make progress on the other issues at a later point in time. But obviously there are many here in Washington who disagree.

Yeah, but, but look, that was an entirely reasonable approach. Which I think we should not pursue anymore because we've lived through that experience and we now know by experience that a narrow transactional agreement will not survive in the broader context of animosity between Iran and the United States and their respective allies in the region. I'm not arguing necessarily for a grand bargain, but I'm just saying that we have to learn the lessons of that experience.

Okay, I want to get to that, but let's just make sure that we've got the basics of what's happened since JCPOA to today out there. So the Obama administration has this successful negotiation where Iran agrees to what it considers to be very intrusive monitoring that gives the international community confidence that it's not developing a nuclear weapons program. It gets to keep some level of nuclear program, but only for civil nuclear use. That's where we are in 2015. So what are the next big steps in the story?

So the deal is implemented actually in January of 2016. We're already in an electoral cycle and every Republican candidate has said this is a bad deal and has promised to tear it apart. Of course, President Trump is elected in November of that year and starts undermining the agreement almost immediately as soon as he walks into the office.

By casting doubt upon whether or not he's going to comply.

Correct. And he, in fact, Congress required the president every 90 days to certify that Iran is complying with the agreement. And he, I think, begrudgingly signed a few of these certificates and then he stopped doing it before he withdrew from the agreement in May of 2018.

So that was the next big moment, is that the United States withdraws under Trump.

Correct. And the other members of the agreement, France, UK, Germany, Russia, China, European Union, they all say, "Okay, we'll stay in the deal and we try to save it without the United States." So they all make these lofty promises to the Iranians of how they would try to make up for the effects of reimposition of U.S. sanctions that they prove unable to deliver on. So Iran waits for a year after U.S. withdraws from the agreement, still complies with all of its obligations under the deal as verified by the IAEA. But then in May of 2019, Iran starts rolling back its own commitments.

So enhancing enrichment in particular.

Correct.

Correct.

And then—

And refusing to allow monitors to monitor its programs.

Well, there are still—

There are still monitors today, but it becomes more difficult, right?

It becomes— so they start ratcheting down monitoring in the sense that You know, the one big advantage that I described to you, the fact that the IAEA could also monitor the equipment in Iran, that goes away.

That goes away, right. So step by step, they're notching down their participation in the agreement.

Exactly. So like in the past 4 years, we don't know how many advanced centrifuges Iran has produced and where it has stored them. The first Trump administration objective was to get to zero enrichment. So, and as a result of it, you know, Iran started again ratcheting up its nuclear program. And we basically— the zero enrichment turned Iran's industrial-scale nuclear program into a threshold nuclear weapons state, meaning that, you know, Iran is now— it's really literally a screwdriver turn away from being able to weaponize its nuclear program. When President Trump walked into the Oval Office, in January of 2017, it would take Iran more than 12 months to enrich enough uranium for a single nuclear weapon. That is what is known as breakout time. It is not a bomb, right? It's the material for a bomb. It's like you have the ingredients of a cake, you still have to bake it into a cake. So you still have to manufacture the weapon.

You still have to make the weapon, which it could take, you know, another, who knows, 6 to 18 months.

Few months. But the breakout time was the real metric in the JCPOA, and it was 12 months up until Trump withdrew from the agreement. Today, that timeline is 6 days. And this is again, the result of pursuing zero enrichment and withdrawing from the JCPOA. Now, the Biden administration comes in all comprised of people who were critical of Trump's withdrawal from the agreement. And reimposition of sanctions, the so-called maximum pressure policy, and they all promised that they were going to go back into the agreement. But they start posturing. They start seeing if they can use Trump sanctions to extract more concessions from the Iranians, which basically erodes trust on the Iranian side, pushes them to dig in their heels. And then a hardline president is elected in Iran in 2021, President Raisi. And basically, 2 years of negotiations are wasted, although they were at several moments in time pretty close to reviving the JCPOA, but they couldn't cross the finish line. And then—

I just have to say, as someone who was there in the early days of the Biden administration in the government, I was pretty surprised that they took the approach that they did. My expectation was that they would have done a lot more to try to get back into the agreement very quickly. And I don't know what you think, but in retrospect, it seems to me that, you know, doing more to get back into the agreement early might have been the better choice than the one that they made, which was actually to go for a larger, more substantial agreement.

Absolutely. I mean, you just— you don't need the benefit of hindsight to be able to say that it was even obvious then that given the fact that it was the US who had reneged on its commitments under the deal, it was the US's responsibility to try to put things back together.

So the Biden administration basically fails to reignite an agreement which some of the key figures in the Biden administration had actually negotiated under Obama. And at the end of their term, they haven't managed to get back in. So Trump comes in and the expectation would be that he's going to go back to the policy of his first administration, which is hate Iran, hate JCPOA, maximum pressure. In fact, I heard some fairly senior people in Trump's circle say that's what we ought to expect is maximum, maximum pressure from day one of the new Trump administration, but it hasn't quite been that, has it?

It hasn't. It is actually moved in a very surprising way, but I think it's because Look, the president had the right instincts on this from the beginning. He wanted his own deal. He wanted a stronger deal, but he always wanted a deal. He didn't want a confrontation with Iran. He didn't want war with Iran, even in the first term. His problem was that he was wrapped in an anti-Iran ecosystem. And I think the president learned the lessons of the first experience. That is not going to listen to hawks and neocons who are putting Iran and the U.S. on a collision course. He's not going to listen to people who are going to ask for a set of unrealistic maximalist demands. You know, when Bibi Netanyahu came to D.C. in February of 2025 as the first foreign leader visited Trump, you know, one of the ideas that he put on the table as the ideal solution for the Iranian nuclear issue is the so-called Libya model. In 2003, Libya agreed to completely pack its nuclear program up and send it to the U.S. as a means of getting sanctions relief. So that's considered the gold standard of how you get rid of a nuclear program that you're concerned about. The problem is that Iran in 2025 is not Libya in 2003. This nuclear program has deep roots. Yeah, there is indigenous knowledge. There is infrastructure. Libya's nuclear program was imported from the black market and wasn't even installed fully. And the Iranians have now, in the course of these 22 years of a nuclear standoff with the West, in terms of direct and indirect costs of this program, it has probably cost their economy upwards of $5 trillion.

So there's a sunk cost issue from an Iranian perspective, having spent so much on this program, both financially and also in terms of political capital. I mean, this has been such an important issue issue for Iran, it's much, much more difficult for them to let it go entirely.

And there are two more things, Chris, here as well. One is from a strategic perspective. It is, you know, the Iranians believe that if they give in on something like this, that they have described as a red line, what would that teach the United States? Would it result in the United States dropping its animosity or would it actually whet the U.S.'s appetite to put more pressure on Iran to get more concessions on other things that Iran describes as red lines, right? So that's one big area.

So it feels that it needs to keep at least, it needs to have at least some win out of the negotiation in order for it to take the U.S. commitment to future restraint seriously.

Correct. And also, you know, there is an imbalance. This is not arms control negotiations between Iran, between the United States and the Soviet Union. Iran is a much weaker country. So if you prove to the much stronger country with a big stick in its hand, which is the tool of sanctions, that it can actually use that tool to force you into concessions and to zero-sum outcomes, then you're basically pushing yourself on a slippery slope with no end.

Exposing yourself to future demands of this kind. So very interesting.

But there's also another element, which again, I say this as someone who has roots in Iran which is often difficult for people to understand, is the Persian pride element.

Okay.

You know, for many Iranians, and I'm sure this applies to the Supreme Leader as well, sometimes if you're faced with a choice between losing face or losing your neck, you would choose the latter.

Losing your neck.

Yeah. Losing face is something that is very, very, very difficult for Iranians to do. And the Supreme Leader is 86. He is one of the original revolutionaries, right? And this was a revolution that came to power primarily on the premise of resisting U.S. diktats. So for him to end his reign now after being in power for almost 40 years with surrendering to the United States is from a legacy perspective disastrous.

Can you just briefly clarify one important point here, which is the relationship between the Supreme Leader and the president? Because obviously, this is something that we don't have in really any Western political system. So both are important, but the Supreme Leader is the ultimate arbiter of Iranian policy, correct?

Yes, he sits at the pinnacle of power in Iran. It's a lifetime position. And he has the final say on all matters of state. Governments come and go and they have different tendencies. They are hardline conservative, more pragmatic, more centrist, more reformist. But at the end of the day, it is really the Supreme Leader who makes all the key decisions.

Okay, that's helpful, I think. So I want to talk about what's at stake here. So you said recently in an article in The New York Times, you were quoted, by Steve Erlanger as saying that the alternative to doing a deal is terrible. Iran with the bomb or Iran bombed, both have bad consequences. Let's try to unpack that a little bit. Let's talk first about what a successful negotiation with Iran would bring for the region, for the United States. And for the world?

So there are several factors here. The approach that the current administration has adopted, I think, is particularly wise because it's not trying to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran in a segregated manner from other nuclear-related questions in the subregion, in the Gulf region. So as you know, Saudi Arabia now is very keen to have a nuclear program of its own, right? And is also very keen to have access to nuclear fuel cycle technology. So meaning being able to enrich uranium itself, to fabricate fuel, and all the other steps that it takes in between. It wants to be independent and not reliant on buying fuel from the international market. The other country that has nuclear reactors in the region is the UAE. If there is an agreement with Saudi Arabia that gives Saudis enrichment, then we probably have to renegotiate the deal with the Emiratis and still have to negotiate a deal with Iranians. Instead of doing this separately, it makes so much more sense to put all of this in the same basket and basically negotiate one agreement. Agreement, which basically brings all of these countries together as part of a consortium. The advantage of consortium, I think, is twofold. One is that everybody's watching over each other's shoulders and basically making sure, you know, it's kind of a bear hug of a nuclear program, that everybody is making sure that the other side is not doing anything that is not related to civilian nuclear power. On top of the IAEA inspectors. So you have additional sets of eyes and ears on the ground, but it's also useful because, you know, this is one of the regions in the world in which there is no inclusive institution or cooperation.

So it has a potentially political benefit as well.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, let's remember that the European Union started with cooperation over coal.

Right.

Right. So cooperation over nuclear I think is a good way of starting to establish something that could eventually become a much more inclusive security architecture.

Stabilizing factor for a region that's been very divided. Let me just ask you briefly, when we talk about a consortium, this would mean joint production and sharing of nuclear energy? Is there any clear picture of what it actually involves?

So the devil is in the details, and we don't know the details yet, but it has to be related to nuclear fuel cycle because, you know, that's where, that's the area of contention, right? So that's the main issue that has to be tackled in the negotiations. Now, I am sure that the US does not want Iran to have enrichment on its own soil. But would it agree to Iran having elements of an enrichment program? For instance, there are a group of Princeton scholars who have just published a piece in which they're suggesting Iran produces the components of centrifuges in Iran, but that enrichment happens in Oman and fuel fabrication happens in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Does the management of this joint project. So everybody basically has a role.

The Iranians could still say in that arrangement that it is enriching.

Yeah, the Iranians will insist that they would want to have their own enrichment as a guarantee against the U.S. once again basically reneging on its commitments. So I think there is a lot of space there for negotiating the details.

But I think the idea of a consortium is a good idea because by enlarging at least that dimension of the nuclear problem, it might be easier to find a solution that works for the parties that could stop it otherwise. But let me ask you again, I want to go back to the question of the stakes. So just say, okay, so say the way that they're approaching it, you think, actually deserves more credit maybe than it's being given out there in the broad sort of press. Now, but if they— let's go to the question of if they succeed without speculating about whether or not that's going to be the case, what are the big headlines for the future of the region, America's relationship with Iran in the world?

I don't think this would be transformational immediately, right? First of all, we can't get to a consortium overnight. It takes time to build it. And so you would first need an interim solution, which would be similar to what we had before, which is a series of restrictions and transparency measures that would basically limit Iran's nuclear program. But the number one advantage of a diplomatic solution is that you won't have an additional layer of turmoil and war and instability and refugees and radicalization in the region, right? So that's number one. Number two is that because this is a different moment in which a deal is happening compared to 2015, and I describe what I mean by that, it has the potential to put Iran and the US and Iran and region on a transformational trajectory, which again would not happen immediately, but has the potential.

Sure.

The reason—

It would be a different path.

Different path. So the Gulf countries in 2015, when the JCPOA was finalized, were against it. And in fact, when Trump withdrew from the agreement, they welcomed it because they believed that a transactional narrow nuclear agreement is empowering an adversary in the region, providing it with more resources to project power in the region. And they were against that. Now, they have experienced what a no-deal situation looks like.

Doesn't work well either.

It doesn't. And they remember the hot summer of 2019 when the U.S. managed to bring down Iranian oil exports almost to zero and Iran lashed out and they were caught in the crossfire.

Right.

And they don't want to see a repeat of that. It will completely undermine their very lofty economic ambitions in the coming years. So they, you know, when the president was in the region, at every stop, all the key regional Gulf countries' leadership asked him to do a deal with Iran, which is such a sea change compared to 10 years ago. The second reason is post-October 7th, the region has changed so much, and Iran's reliance on its network of partners and proxies in the region as its forward defense policy of deterring an attack on its soil has lost a lot of value in the eyes of the Iranian leadership, because instead of protecting Iran, it actually invited a direct Israeli strike on Iranian soil for the first time since the revolution. And so, you know, there is, there is possibility of putting things on the table now that the Obama administration could never even imagine or the Biden administration could imagine, couldn't imagine. For instance, the possibility of Iran committing not to send weapons to Hezbollah. You know, this is acknowledging reality, by the way, because the land corridor through Syria no longer exists after the fall of the Assad regime. And the possible air bridge through the Beirut airport is also closed now. There are no more direct flights between Iran and Lebanon. And so, so there are things that are possible now on the non-nuclear dimension that were not possible back then.

Iran to make concessions that it would not have ever made in 2015.

And by definition, that also opens the door for the U.S. to do more on sanctions relief, including touching the U.S. embargo against Iran, which are mostly related to Iran being a state sponsor of terrorism. So, you know, and that opens opportunities of U.S. companies potentially getting into the Iranian market, which creates skin in the game. Yeah. And creates more reason for the U.S. to sustain an agreement with Iran and for the relationship to start changing.

Build a more normal relationship.

Slowly. And again, all of this happens at the moment that the Supreme Leader's succession is looming large on the horizon, right? So this is where a deal could potentially put us on, and, you know, a better and more stable region, a potentially better relationship between Iran and the US and the West.

And also, it occurs to me, and this is somewhat obvious, but I think we should note it, that it could have a big impact on global energy markets too, right? I mean, if suddenly Iran, which is, I believe the world's fourth largest reserves of oil were to be supplying the world freely with oil, that would have a pretty big impact. And also, it would be not great for Iran's relations with Russia and China, which could be to America's interests. I mean, it seems to me that China has actually benefited from Iran's isolation because China has not China participated in that isolation and is now getting a lot of much cheaper oil from Iran. But if Iran's oil is going to the global markets, this makes things more difficult for China. And obviously, if global energy prices go down, that makes things more difficult for Russia. Not to mention the fact that simply some kind of not normalization, but improvement in America's relationship with Iran is going to naturally complicate Iran's relationship with Russia, which has been very problematic, as you know, as well as anyone over the course of the the last year, 3 years or so since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So I'm just trying to get a sense here of, you know, what the world would look like if this Trump initiative actually works.

Yeah, it's such an important point because, you know, if we really do care about great power competition, you don't want a country the size of Iran with the resources of Iran to be entirely in the camp of Russia and China. You know, for 400 years, Iran's foreign policy has been based on negative balancing between great powers. That's their comfort zone. The reason they can't do it now is that they're not given that option. But if, again, there is a deal that could be a gateway to additional understandings, then I think, you know, that would basically be the option of choice for Iran, not to rejoin necessarily the Western orbit, but at least to hedge its bets and not be entirely reliant on Russia and China. And that's, I think that's beneficial for the United States.

So I think we have a pretty good picture then of, you know, how things would look more positive if the path of negotiation worked. Let's talk about the other scenario. Path of negotiations fails. What does the military What does that path look like? This is a path that has been raised by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it's a path that, you know, there is some degree of support here in Washington for taking.

Now, let's realistically play out the military scenario. So as you know, Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. It bombed Syria's reactor in 2011, I believe. But those were all individual sites. Iran has multiple locations in which it's doing enrichment and it has elements of nuclear fuel cycle. And a lot of these are well-protected underground bunkered facilities that are very difficult to reach. Israel can do what it did in its confrontation with Iran in October of last year, which is to park its F-35s in the Iraqi airspace and not entering into the Iranian airspace and fire air-to-land ballistic missiles towards these facilities. So it can destroy what's on the ground, but it cannot really destroy what's underneath.

Yeah.

And what's underneath is the highly enriched fissile material.

Right.

So if you pursue it that way, the risk is that Iranians have already said if there's, if there is a strike, they will take the nuclear material away from those facilities. And the problem goes back to what I told you initially, which was that it is possible that Iran already has multiple locations of clandestine facilities in which there are advanced centrifuges ready to be fired up. They are just waiting for the material. Right. And by that point, the game is lost. So unless we know where these facilities are, The only option left to the United States after that point is to carpet bomb a country 5 times the size of Iraq. It's just not possible. So the game will be lost. The other next level for Israel is to go in, destroy Iranian air defense systems entirely, because it has damaged them, but it hasn't fully destroyed. Go and completely destroy those facilities, destroy command and control, and basically put commandos on the ground who can go into these bunkered facilities and either destroy them or remove the material. Israel. This is a very difficult, risky undertaking.

Very far-reaching operation. We're talking about weeks, if not more, of Israel basically invading Iran.

Correct. And it cannot happen without the United States, right? Sure. It needs U.S. support. Now, Iranians are also not going to sit idle. They are going to fire back.

Yeah.

And in their attack on Israel in October, they fired about 200 ballistic missiles. One-third of those missiles got through Israel's multilayered defense system. So you can imagine if they fire 1,000 or 2,000.

Do they have those kinds of stocks?

This is their only reliable conventional military capability. And they have put everything they've had into their missile program. And nobody knows for sure how many they do have. But usually, you know, from a military strategist's perspective, You know, they fired around, I think overall, 300, 400 in last year's confrontation with Israel. That cannot be 10% of their stockpile because you never, in one sort of like signaling exercise, you never exhaust 10% of your stockpile. So they do have enough to cause serious damage. The problem, I think, is if we get into that kind of tit for tat and there are Israeli fatalities, and casualties, then we're in an entirely different world because last year in the two confrontations between Iran and Israel, thankfully no one was killed. But if we get into a much more serious confrontation, that could change.

And then inflame Israeli politics and you can easily see how the escalation takes off from there. I mean, you could see how Iran could also strike other oil production facilities in the region just in order to punish the world oil markets. And you could see the United States getting drawn quite deeply into a conflict like this, especially if it's in a, in a context where, you know, Iran has been blamed for the failure of negotiations or Iran's intent to build a nuclear weapon has been widely broadcast around Washington, D.C. Yeah.

And Chris, all of this without actually resolving the problem.

Right.

Right, because the Iranians already have the know-how on how to reconstitute their nuclear program, and they would be able to do it unless the US commits to every few months bombing Iran and getting into this never-ending cycle of conflict.

Well, the thing that always concerns me about this path is that it's hard to see how it doesn't lead to an argument for regime change. In Tehran. And we know, and if you ask anyone in Washington, D.C., would trying to conduct a regime change operation in Iran be a good idea? 99% of people will say, obviously, that's a bad idea. But the problem is, is that the further you go down the path that you just described, the more that argument is going to gain momentum. Doesn't mean that it's going to be a better idea. You're just going to hear more people out of desperation because of overreach and the dynamics that overreach creates making that case.

In Iraq in 2003, also Saddam, after, you know, 15 years of stifling sanctions, there was a need for boots on the ground to get rid of him. And the Iranian system is also hard to imagine that without boots on the ground, you can actually get regime change. And boots on the ground in the case of Iran means a million troops.

Talk a little bit about sanctions. This is a subject that you've written about a great deal. There's obviously a lot of people in Washington who believe that sanctions is a way to try to get, you know, either regime change or at least, you know, a lot more flexibility and malleability out of the Iranian leadership. Is that the case? I mean, have sanctions been working or what's the effect been on Iran?

Well, again, we can judge it by the results, right? There is now—

Has it made Iran more flexible?

I think it has made Iran much more aggressive in the region.

But explain how that works, because a lot of people still find that hard to understand. What is the mechanism by which sanctions don't make them back down?

So first of all, one has to understand Iran is a big country. It has 15 neighbors through land and sea. So you can never really impose the kind of sanctions regime on Iran that doesn't have holes, serious loopholes.

If it's the U.S. and American allies in Europe imposing the sanctions in particular, because Iran's still got other friends around the world, notably Russia and China.

So it's never going to be 100% effective. Now, in a world in which you have great power competition and China and Russia are no longer on board, they were under the Obama administration, they were actually enforcing sanctions. Even in President Trump's first term, China was much more on board with enforcing sanctions. Now they're not. So there is a limit to what you can achieve already with sanctions. Second, this is an economy that has Iran has basically developed a degree of resiliency because it has lived under sanctions for more than 4 decades. So it's very good at figuring out ways of skirting sanctions. And in fact, there is a constituency among the political elite in Iran that benefits from sanctions because they're the ones who control the black market and the smuggling networks. And they don't want change. This is one of the reasons that the IRGC—

They're getting rich off the sanctions.

Exactly. Enriching the IRGC. And again, at the end of the day, I think sanctions are only as effective as the prospect of relieving them in response to real policy changes. And this is where I think most people who work on sanctions in this town and the Treasury Department are making a major mistake because I think the US is excellent at designing sanctions. It's very good at implementing and enforcing sanctions, is really bad at lifting them. And if you can't lift sanctions, basically you cannot use this as a tool to advance—

It's not credible that Iran could undertake behavior that would lead us to lift sanctions because we're not good at lifting sanctions for technical reasons, but also for political reasons. Why would Iran do what we want them to do in the first place? So that really diminishes the coercive capacity of sanctions. But okay, that's really helpful on sanctions. Let's focus. I mean, all of this clearly suggests that the Trump administration is right to try to pursue this deal, and we can complain about the fact that the Trump administration is— a lot of these are the same people who tore up the JCPOA in the first place, but that's in the past now. So good that they're trying to do this. The consequences could be very serious if they fail. And very positive if they succeed. So let's just in the last few minutes here, talk about the deal that's actually on the table and where things stand with the important caveat that here we are, it's June 4th and the negotiations are— it's very unclear what's actually going to happen. But can you give us a sort of basic picture of what the deal might be in its broad outlines as of now?

Sure. So the U.S. submitted a proposal to Iran in the last round of negotiations, which was the fifth round of negotiations. These talks started about two months ago, slightly less than two months ago, and this was the first U.S.-written proposal. Iranians have had ideas, but the U.S. Really didn't have a team of experts and enough institutional knowledge and memory to be able to put ideas on paper.

Most of these negotiations have been Whitcoff going and negotiating with his Iranian counterparts. So it's really at the political level, not at the technical level.

Correct. Until recently, until the last two rounds. And now there is a U.S. proposal on the table. To the extent that we know, it is this consortium idea that I mentioned. With some kind of a limited Iranian nuclear program as an interim between the time that the deal was concluded and the time that the consortium is set up and is functional.

So Iran— so the United States has offered to say it's okay if Iran keeps its limited nuclear programs, basically something that would be similar to the original JCPOA, with the expectation that over time it will transfer to this regional membership in this regional consortium, which will provide it more or less the same level of civil nuclear benefit as if it were doing all of its enrichment in Iran itself.

Correct. That seems to be the model. Now, realistically, this cannot be finalized even if the parties agree on the concept. All the details would take literally months to negotiate. And this is obviously without the sanctions relief elements, which in and of itself is going to be very difficult to negotiate.

Right, because that's obviously what the United States would give in return is supposedly significant sanctions relief.

Yeah, and there's so much mistrust on the Iranian side that they would ask for, in terms of sequencing of sanctions relief, in terms of guarantees that it would remain in place even if there's political change in Washington. It is going to be tough, very, very tough negotiation. So the most realistic, I think, approach is to have some kind of a framework political agreement before the time for snapback runs out. So in the next 2 months that the parties agree to say something in very broad strokes that Iran commits never to develop nuclear weapons, that the U.S. Recognizes Iran's right to civilian nuclear power, that the two sides would continue negotiating to try to put a consortium in place, for instance, and also some very broad language about sanctions relief. That if they achieve that, then they have to go to the Security Council and postpone the date of the expiry of UN Resolution 2231 by 6 months or 12 months. To put more time on the clock to negotiate comprehensive.

They're basically buying time on the assumption that some kind of a deal would be possible.

Right. They have the framework, then they would have to negotiate a final agreement. There might be an interim step here as well, which by the way, there's precedent for this. When Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan working for Hillary Clinton went to Oman for secret negotiations with Iran in 2013, they produced a two-page, very broad document, which then turned into an interim agreement, which also had some practical steps attached to it. Iran rolled back—

That was the JPOA, correct?

JPOA, interim agreement in November of 2013. It rolled back Iran's nuclear program and subjected it to more monitoring in return for some partial sanctions relief. And then that bought time for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the full deal. So I think it's a similar approach now. But, and so the approach is reasonable, and I feel the most important element in any diplomatic initiative, which is a question of political will, is there. President Trump really wants a deal. Iran really needs a deal. And that's a good combination to have sufficient political will. And also the alternatives, as we discussed, are not really attractive for either side. And so without really being too hopeful about it, I mean, I would put the odds of reaching some sort of a framework agreement in the next 2 months at about 60%. So there is still a significant chance that this can go south.

One of the obvious things that Trump has is that he has so much sway over the Republican Party, which has been one of the big obstacles to getting an agreement in the past. So I think it'll be also an interesting test of Trump's capacity to control his own party, to see whether or not this works out. Let me ask you, by concluding, because I think it's important for American listeners here in Washington to understand. So you're someone who grew up experiencing the negative effects of the regime in Tehran, left the country, came to the United States. And remain critical of that regime. But at the same time, you're among those of us who think that the path of diplomacy is more likely to be effective than the path of military action and are even somewhat skeptical about the effects of sanctions, although I think, you know, we all would acknowledge that diplomacy does involve some element of coercion in it. You can't entirely separate these things. But many people here in Washington who have negative views about the regime want to see it suffer. They want sanctions, they want military action. So how come it's not the same for you?

It's a very good question. And, you know, because of my position, I've paid a high price personally and I've been burned by both sides. You know, I can't go back to Iran because if I do, it will be a one-way ticket to even prison. Because the hardliners believe that I'm an agent of the United States government. And there are all sorts of conspiracy theories of how I dictated the JCPOA to the Iranians on behalf of Israel. They've made documentaries about this. And then in the U.S., I've also been blamed and portrayed as an agent of Iranian influence. Of course, when you're blamed by hardliners on both sides, you must be doing something right, right? Otherwise they wouldn't come after you. But, you know, for me, it's very simple. I don't have, you know, I don't look at this with starry eyes of thinking that destroying the middle class in Iran is the best path to democracy in the country. It's just as simple as that. I don't believe that. And I've seen it elsewhere, you know, again, in Iraq. Saddam in 2003 was as strong, if not stronger, than Saddam in 1991 during the first Gulf War. It literally took a foreign invasion to get rid of him.

Yeah.

And by that point, the fabric of the Iraqi society was torn apart to the extent that putting it back together is not yet a job fully done. You know, 20 years, 22 years after invasion. So yes, I've seen this movie before. I know that sanctions hurt the Iranian people much more than they hurt the regime. And people tend to forget that the Shah's regime was under no pressure from the West, was under no sanctions. Nobody from the outside, if you're not a conspiracy theorist, was trying to topple the Shah's regime. But it fell because it was not standing on strong legs. It didn't have legitimacy at home. And the Islamic Republic, even today, according to their own surveys, there's 85% of the Iranian population who wants to see its back. And there is no way that this system would be able to reform itself and be able to redeem itself. It has proven that again and again. So it is doomed eventually to fail. What I want is a soft landing because, you know, Chris, we got rid of the evil empire of the Soviet Union only to replace it with Putin's Russia, right?

That's an interesting, interesting thought that certainly we should bear in mind.

And this is a country that has been the other of the West for several millennia, whether it's been Iran against the Persians against the Greeks or the Persians against the Romans or the Persians against the Ottomans and, you know, and to this day. So I want a soft landing for it because I think if the Iranian society is empowered, it can bring about the kind of change that is lasting, that is beneficial to the region, to the West, and particularly to the United States.

Ali, thanks so much for joining us here on Pivotal States. I could go on talking to you for another hour or two. I've learned a lot and really enjoyed it.

Great pleasure. Thanks for having me.

This podcast was recorded on June 4th and reflects developments up to that time. This has been Pivotal States here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm Chris Chivis, the director of the American Statecraft Program. We hope you'll sign up for our newsletter, Next Gen Statecraft, and tune in for future episodes of Pivotal States.