Dr Arta Moeini: US does Israel's bidding; failure in Iran will finally kill unipolarity. #iranwar

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ian Proudhon. I am the Peacemonger. It is Tuesday, the 10th of March, in the afternoon. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Arta Moeini PhD PhD, who actually I met last year in two consecutive weeks in two consecutive European cities, in Budapest and in Tbilisi. And we're going to repeat that feat again this year, or at least certainly in Tbilisi. But Arta is actually the Managing Director of the Institute of Peace and Diplomacy based in Washington, DC. He's like me, he's a, he's a realist, and, uh, he watches global events carefully and of course is also a keen Iran watcher too. Uh, Arta, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ian. Good to see you again, and I'm glad to be here.

Great to see you too. Now, how do you interpret, uh, events over the past 10 days but also 2 days, you know, uh, as it relates to Iran. I mean, Trump now seems to be rushing for the, for the exit door, but trying to polish it as a success. I mean, what's your interpretation of where DC is at right now?

So first of all, the first thing to say is that I think the Trump administration is very surprised about the sort of turn of events in Iran. They did not expect Iran to have the resilience to defend the way that it did. They had this Venezuela model. Of we are going to go in, we are going to decapitate the leadership, they're going to just sort of cave and capitulate what we had wanted them to capitulate to in the first place. And basically, we get a new leadership in Iran and they will be US-friendly and we will change the dynamic in the Middle East and we make Israel very happy. Again, all of this has proven to be fantasy. And a lot of people had thought so, including US intel reports, including the National Intelligence Council. Including even Pentagon assessments of what the Iranian capability is. And so I think that's where we are in terms of the general sort of, you know, putting things in a general sort of category of how we got here. The war in the— you know, the 12-day war didn't really end. The 12-day war was stopped and paused. And we're always going to come back because Israel wanted to have a nuclear monopoly and regional hegemony. And it cannot have that so long as Iran has the stock of missiles that allows it to act as a deterrent to Israeli actions. And so the goal of all this from the American perspective was to satisfy Israel by removing Iranian capability that would be able to deter and be a threat to Israel. And they have said that openly. Right. And so we are in this war not for America's interests, but for Israel. And yet it hasn't worked out quite as they imagined it. So you can be, you can have a lot of bluster and you can have a bit of a madman routine when you're doing politics, but you can't do that when it comes to strategy, when it comes to, you know, real fighting on the ground. So it is true that America is tactically superior to Iran. Israel is as well. They are basically, they have corridors of aerial superiority to Western Iran and to Tehran. But that doesn't mean that they're, first of all, completely dominating Iranian skies. More than 40 drones have been shot down, which that by itself tells you that air superiority is in pockets, not air supremacy, for example. So this is very similar to the Vietnam situation. We could do operations, we bombed, we threw thousands of bombs on them, but yet it wasn't true to say that we had air supremacy over Vietnam. Also, the Iranian strategy has been calibrated based on what happened during the 12-day war. And so the Iranian sort of recipe for victory is very clear. It's sort of, we are going to be resilient. We are going to have more resolve than the other side. We're going to raise the costs of this aggression and provocation. And we're going to have to do it in a way that we cannot, you know, have this kind of pause or this ceasefire situation where they're going to attack us in 3 months or 6 months and degrade us further. So we are going to go all in this time. This is an existential war right now, not just for the regime, really, but also for Iran as such. And so, you know, even though the Israeli and the American sides have different targets, it seems, as to what they want Iran to ultimately be like, I think from the Iranian perspective, it makes very little difference. And, you know, the attacks on the Iranian infrastructure, on its missile programs, on its nuclear program, these are attacks on Iranian sovereignty, on Iranian sovereign rights, so far as Iranian officials see it. And so they are doing everything they can to show that, first of all, they're resilient, they're not a paper tiger, but they just have a different understanding of war, and it's based on asymmetric warfare. And I think they're doing a perfect asymmetric war scenario.

Yeah, absolutely. And it proves again the fact that kind of strategy wins, uh, every day. And actually, the politics, you know, trumps, uh, strategy. And the people define victory in very different, uh, you know, terms as well. All of this talks to the decay of the international, uh, system in terms of the role of the UN, because the key word that you mentioned there was, was sovereignty. Now, increasing numbers of Western leaders, at least it seems to me, want to completely ignore sovereignty and claim that their national interest trumps another nation's sovereignty. So stop complaining to us about international law when we're bombing Iran. I mean, is the UN now dead, do you think?

Yes, I think the UN, international law, I think whether you are pro-realism, pro-peace or not, I think our position, or you think these wars are always the wars to end all wars, as Lindsey Graham just said again, or as others have said in the sort of war camp. This is the thousandth war to end all wars within the past 30 years. And yet, so with this, irrespective of which side you are from, I think it's very clear that there is no international law, the fabrication of the international law that happened in the post-war era, has ended. It was always about power. It was always about US power. And whether in the bipolar setting or in the unipolar setting, and I think with the US increasingly saying itself that, you know, we are not bound to any of those, you know, legal frameworks and power speaks and might is right kind of attitude, it also shows that, you know, the other side has to, whether, you know, the Global South, if you like that term, whether middle powers in various regions, they need to understand that this is a world in which they got to be strong and they got to defend themselves. And I think increasingly you'll see that kind of reaction from these states because that's ironic if you think about it. Russia, Iran, especially China as well, I mean, they have been promoters in a way of international law. They believe from their perspective that international law hasn't been applied fairly, that the US side and the West was hypocritical. They never come out and say they don't believe in international law because they think that gives them righteousness. But at the same time, I think even for them, they got to wake up to the fact that all of this is about power and you got to be able to defend yourself ultimately to defend your sovereign rights. No nation has a right to exist. Every nation must fight to exist. And I think we are in that kind of a world, but it also doesn't mean that America can fundamentally reshape the international order and the international power structure because the United States is no longer the unipolar force in the world. And that is something that Donald Trump continues to ignore. You know, you can reestablish spheres of influence in your sort of near abroad, in your, you know, sphere of interest in the Americas, for example, but you cannot do so in the Middle East. You cannot do so in East Asia. And so we are moving towards a much more regionalized world and countries that have staying power in these areas, they have endurance in these areas, which are called middle powers. They have civilizational strengths and geographic reasons for those civilizational strengths. This is not a Huntingtonian model so far as it is the reality that there is something bigger than even the nation-state at play here. Iran, Russia, China, these are states that fundamentally will, are seeing, will see the world in a different light than the American strategists have seen it for the past century or so. So I think we are in a different world. The rupture is real. And I think the war in Ukraine, which you and I have talked a lot about, I think that war was the beginning of the rupture. We saw this great transition and this rebalancing of forces around the world. But I think the Iran war will completely reshape our perceptions of what international order is, what international Law is, it's sort of, you know, illusion of the international law, the mirage of international law, and a new order that's based on power taking place. But power is different than force. I think the Germans always had it right when they distinguished between Kraft as force and Macht as power. The United States has a lot of overwhelming force, but you cannot use force and bombing to get what you want strategically, which means that you lack power to shape events.

Yeah, and I guess the Chinese use economic statecraft, you know, more than hard military capability to try and leverage—

Which they learned from the United States, which they learned from the United States and experience of America actually in the '50s and '60s and '70s. That was what America used to do. We do— our differentiating factor with the Soviet Union is that we can trade with everyone. We are not the aggressor. That changed in the '70s and '80s, and the neoconservatism, the neoliberal politics became intimidating and coercive instead of, you know, and far more moralistic than it was before. So I think the Chinese are still sort of, they have internalized an older idea of the United States in the early years of the post-war period, and they're working according to that. But America itself has completely abandoned its original understanding of what it is that gives America power.

That's a really fascinating insight, actually, not least because in the '70s, the Soviet Union was obviously in its final throes of decay. China had yet to emerge as the great power that it is today. What do you think actually precipitated that change in the US?

I mean, there are many factors, one of which was this kind of internalization of the threat structure of the Soviet Union, the fact that increasingly we just have to subdue them, the rise of the neoconservative elements in the United States. You know, we moved away from Kennan and his idea of containment was not military containment, actually. A lot of people, I think, misread Kennan. He himself Kennan wrote later in life that he was misread. So Kennan had a very realist understanding that to stop the Soviet Union, you have to understand the political and economic reasons for Soviet Union or really communism's expansion around the world, that ideology is what matters here. And there are other considerations for ideological supremacy or ideological ascendancies, not militarism. And military power. But increasingly the Pentagon, the United States sort of military and strategic minds decided to, or began to think that the problem that we have with the Soviet Union is one of military competition and military competition alone. So everything moved towards trying to make more ICBMs and nuclear weapons than the other side. "They're going to blow us up 500 times, we're going to do it 700 times." It became very absurd, but it also made this kind of Manichean mentality ingrained into generations of American thinkers through the experience of the Cold War because of bipolarity, by the way. A lot of my work is about ontological security, about how perceptions of power actually shape power, as well as the element of cultural realism. Like there is more to realism than just how many tanks and weapons you have. It's actually how, what's your strategic power and what's your cultural resilience. And I think in time America lost a lot of its sort of more common sense understanding of the world, that sort of Washingtonian, George Washington's kind of approach that was ingrained, I think, in someone like Kennan. And you get some different version, which is far more hawkish, far more moralistic, far more Manichean because the Cold War was bipolar, right? And bipolarity of the Cold War meant that it was us versus them. These kinds of scenarios, this kind of international structure, I believe actually makes the conflicts feel zero-sum and all or nothing. And in process we did, I mean, the Soviet Union failed because of its internal dislocations, not because we destroyed them in a war. And the same will apply ultimately to Iran. But I think the problem that we have had is that we haven't noticed how much damage we did to ourselves, that the United States has degraded itself culturally, politically, economically since the defeat of the Soviet Union, because we went towards a direction that ended up sort of targeting our own sources of strength domestically.

Yeah. And I guess ultimately the Russians and the Chinese just don't see the US as a civilization rather than as a nation of immigrants, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's also part of it, but I think America will increasingly see itself and has as sort of a, you know, because of its power, will have to transform itself into sort of a civilizational actor, or at least in the new world a different kind of civilization obviously than the Eurasian old civilizations. But I think the language and the sort of rhetoric and the staying power applies. America will continue to be a great power in the Western Hemisphere, but it has to come to terms with its limitations in the rest of the world and on the Eurasian plane. But our refusal to do so has made all of the sort of the fantasy of the Eurasian Axis, Iran, China, you know, Iran, China, Turkey even, but Iran, China, Russia, all of those people are coming together because of the actions that we're taking. And, you know, we're all doing all this not out of some sort of wisdom, not out of national interest. There is no real interest that we're advancing in a war with Iran. Iran is no threat to the United States, to the United States mainland. It doesn't have ICBMs. So it's not a security threat. And also, I think the last realist president that we had was Nixon, and Nixon understood that, respective of the ideological character of regimes, bigger regimes, more powerful regimes, middle powers effectively, who have had a staying power in regions, could do and provide for stability in those regions. That's why he did and worked with Anwar Sadat, who had invaded Israel in '73, but he worked with Saddat to create a peace deal because he saw Egypt as one of those linchpins. He also had a very close relationship with the Shah. Now, granted, the Shah of Iran was a US ally, but the sort of the understanding of Iran as a hegemon in the region to sort of manage stability and keep the Soviets out, and also by its presence, make sure that America doesn't have to fight the Soviets in the Middle East, that had nothing to do with the ideological nature and the pro-Western sort of alliance of the Shah, except for the fact that he wasn't communist. But, you know, if it was any other form within the context of the Cold War, would have been fine. So that was Nixon's doctrine with China, which it was with Iran, it was with Egypt. These are very different kinds of states, very different alliances and allegiances. But Nixon was able to work with all of them because he understood that these are the nodes that you to strengthen because for their own self-interest, they will resist Soviet expansion. This is what America still needs to do 50 years later, but it kind of has failed to understand sort of the strategic picture.

Yeah, and I guess ideology, at least as it relates to kind of Russia, is no longer really part of that calculus, right? I mean, the Soviet Union and the US competition was ideologically driven on both sides, but it would be hard to claim that sort of briefly kind of going to Russia more than more than Iran, that Russia is ideologically driven, is kind of civilizationally driven, arguably, in terms of the existential threat that it sees from NATO expansion. So, and I think it would be a leap as well to claim that China is an ideological competitor, you know, to the US, or do you see that differently?

No, I think I largely agree. I think we are, before Donald Trump, America was the last ideological actor in that sort of trying to have the power and trying to reshape the world through various means, through whether it's USAID or National Endowment for Democracy, which is by the way, it's still operational, to try to reshape governments, to try to do democracy promotion. And democracy is really democratism, is a form of ideology. Is to get these societies to become more westernized, to not be as authentic, to just accept us and also open themselves up to neoliberalism. That was the American model. Donald Trump came out and said, you know what, we're not going to focus on the ideology, we're just going to do, again, sheer force and just force them to open up if they can't defend themselves. The rhetoric has shifted, the approach has shifted. But the ultimate goal remains the same, submission to American power. And American ideology was a means of getting American power over these countries. But American ideology, that sort of neoliberal democratism, has failed. And so let's just resort to force alone. It's what I call the Boltonian view of the world. It's called machtpolitik. We just do it because we are powerful enough and we can. We will do it unilaterally. We don't need international law to do it. We don't need any covers. We don't need ideology. We're just going to go there and Take the oil, for example, and that's reducing it for the Trump sort of MAGA base. But ultimately, it's not just about that. It's about this idea of, you know, we will make these countries sort of like succumb to us and become semi-vassals to American, in the American sort of world order. But again, all of this misunderstands the the kind of world in which we live today, which is a post-unipolar era. And I've argued it's a world in which civilizations, not as an ideology, but civilizations as the old structures, as the old units of world politics are returning and they will increasingly have staying power. And they will, because of the more closer balance and relative decline of US power, they're able to reassert themselves. And I think we need to understand as Americans, I mean, I'm speaking as an American, but even this might apply to Britain as well. But, you know, in terms of the change in world politics, in terms of change in international relations, we have got to understand that these states, not the regimes, but the states are there to stay. So we got to work with them and we got to understand them and treat them as, you know, equal in their own regions and accept their sovereignty. This is different than accepting, let's say, the sovereignty of Kosovo. These are, you know, originally this kind of national sovereignty was used against these old civilizational and imperial states, but those civilizational imperial states are returning and we need to go back to them and recreate a new concert of powers. But we can't do a concert of powers in which we are the only power in town. Countries would reject it and we are going to create sort of a global alliance against the American global power or American globalism. So I think that's where we are.

And I think that process is already kind of quite a way down the track. You certainly look at the, the evolution of the BRICS grouping and how that— the growth of BRICS has accelerated since the Ukraine, you know, war started. And it's also completely unrealistic on the part, you know, of the US. I mean, I was talking to Jeff Sachs yesterday, and I referenced the National Security Strategy that was just published in, in, uh, you know, November, and that talks about sort of the US, you know, staying within the Western Hemisphere and having that as its kind of, uh, sphere of influence, you know, if you like. Uh, events have proven that it doesn't have the capability to move beyond that, even though it is obviously trying right now, you know, in the Middle East. And that's just, you know, the— I mean, Iran is just a long way from, from the US, and You know, China is now the great power, you know, in Asia and so on. The Americans seem to have drifted away from— whether you agree or not with the kind of Western Hemisphere sort of idea, you know, some, some sort of clarity about sort of how they would use, you know, their leverage within their kind of sphere of influence. They've thrown that in the bin and now they're trying to dominate the world completely in circumstances where manifestly, and as events are proving, they do not have the military capability to do so. I mean, I see that as— go ahead.

Yeah, I think we need to really understand. I think the NSS, the National Security Strategy document, shows and has tried to create this blueprint for America in the multipolar or multinodal world. It is a world in which, yes, spheres of interest, spheres of influence matter a lot. And America has, you know, Trump himself has touted the Monroe Doctrine. But so this is not, you know, I don't think that this is reversible with the next administration. I think we are increasingly going to focus to make sure that we can, secure supply chains and make ourselves strong in our own region. So I think there is strategy in that. I think what we are seeing also is the residual neoconservatism that continues to affect US politics. The fact that US Congress, especially the GOP, is so out of touch with the voters, with its own interests, that it will lose the '26 midterm elections, I think quite assuredly. Based on its disastrous politics in the world, you know, the kind of global politics that it continues to aspire to. So there is this regional element that, again, there are US strategists like Michael Anton and others who are trying to, and even JD Vance himself and his team like Andy Baker contributed to this NSS document. This is based on their understanding of realism and change and the need for adaptability. So I think that is true. And also it's true the United States has basically violated its own NSS by going to war with Iran, right? So the question is why? And I think that cannot be answered other than challenging and questioning the relationship between the United States and Israel, not based on any sort of ideology, like, you know, not based on how even the left sees it as, you know, Israel is a genocidal state or stuff like that. I think in general, Israel has a different interest when it comes to the Middle East than the United States. The United States needs a couple regional nodes, regional hegemon, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, ultimately to manage that region. Israel wants out of a lot of maximalism, a lot of ideology. Netanyahu wants to create Israel into that one sole regional hegemon. And the way that they're doing it is through their nuclear monopoly and the fact that they use that nuclear monopoly to secure conventional supremacy through the United States, and then they use the US weaponry and their own sort of nuclear escalation dominance to be able to reshape events in the Middle East. Now, Donald Trump has long wanted to make peace with Iran and leave, but he doesn't understand how to do so. He doesn't understand the character of the Iranian state, the character of the Iranian regime, those are different things. The resilience of Iran as a middle power. So he doesn't understand these facts, but he has that ultimate goal. And yet Israel is manipulating events for its own benefits, and the United States continues to do Israel's bidding in the region. So I feel like that is going to be one output, one one impact, one implication of this war. We are increasingly going to see the special relationship between the United States and Israel break down.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know whether it will or it won't, but I certainly share your assessment in every other kind of regard. Let's see. But I mean, what I see are incredible parallels between what's happening in Iran and what's happening in the Russia-Ukraine war. One smaller state wanting to have an antagonistic relationship with a much larger near neighbor or direct neighbor and having that security backstop through NATO, through the US, through now the EU, because the US is largely leaving the Europeans to it as it relates to Ukraine at least. And actually coming up against the hard brick wall of that state saying, well, no, We won't stand for this. We may be smaller than the collective NATO, you know, West, but we are here and you're not, and we won't budge. And I think that the Iranians are doing exactly the same because they've noted the success of Russia in standing up against a 32-nation alliance that, you know, accounts for over 53% of global defense spending and is still winning.

Yeah. And also, again, I agree with that assessment a lot. I think we need to understand Israel as a Ukraine. American foreign policy has, since Nixon, and we discussed what was the Nixonian paradigm, since Nixon, we moved to say, you know what, we just don't really want any stability in these regions through the regional hegemon. So we are going to find and support smaller states. We are going to arm these smaller states to the teeth and use them as regional balancers against the regional hegemon with staying power in these regions. So we're going to use Ukraine against Russia. We're going to use Israel against Turkey and Iran. You know, that kind of a world. And we're going to use Taiwan against China. I mean, this is across the board. And so this has been a disaster. It has drawn billions, almost more than trillions actually, if you actually put them all together, of America's resources. And we have taken all this and transferred it to these countries. And ultimately these countries, because of structural reasons, because they're smaller, much, much, much smaller than their neighbors, because their population is smaller, because they can't sustain a long conflict, are deeply, deeply dependent on the United States. And so the dependence is such that it draws the United States into these conflicts. I wrote multiple times that the ultimate goal of Ukraine is to draw the United States into its conflict with Russia. It didn't happen for two reasons. One, the Ukrainians didn't have the same kind of lobby structure then that Israel has. And also number two is because Russia has nuclear weapons. And so the American leaders are very aware of a nuclear conflict with another nuclear power. Iran has neither of those considerations, the Iranian question. So Israel has a lot of power in US Congress, in US politics to draw the United States in and has multiple times. It uses the nuclear, its nuclear monopoly as the ultimate blackmail to do that as well. And Iran doesn't have nukes to actually counterbalance that picture. So I think the result of all this is that ultimately the middle powers will all move to have nuclear weapons to ensure that America can't create mischief in their regions and to protect themselves from aggression and invasions. And Iran is not as, you know, it's not as industrial as Russia in certain capacities, but it's still a country of 93 million people. It has an endogenous industrial capacity. It creates its own drones and missiles. It has multiple missile cities. The United States doesn't even know where all of them are. So that's why it allows Iran to continue to fight this asymmetric conflict with Israel and the United States. And all these other allies in the region, because a lot of these other systems are in regional countries that are other regional small countries, regional balancers that the United States has created to encircle Iran, whether UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. These are not, you know, these are artificial countries ultimately, if you think about it, in the sense that they were created after World War II. They don't have a historical backbone, back structure. They're very small and they basically operate as US bases. Forward basing in these regions. And the fact that the United States moved towards that understanding of using them as its forward presence has also put the lives of the people who live in these states in danger. And so I think the GCC, the Persian Gulf countries themselves, are going to reassess their relationship with the United States. Iran is going to push and continue to send in missiles. To destabilize their economies and make sure that the United States and its forward basing cannot come back. And also, I think even Israel as a regional hegemon wants to— there are elements in Israel that want the United States out to be able to have true freedom of action. So this kind of serves, this war serves in a larger strategic way, Iran, Israel, it changes the region. It just doesn't serve America's interest other than maybe coming to terms with reality and sort of recalibrating its own posture, which is very good for the United States if we're able to do this. In the short term, it just looks like absolute defeat.

Yeah, no, it certainly does. It certainly looks like defeat for the unit or the final kind of nail in the coffin of the unipolar sort of order really, which in any case—

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, exactly right.

And I think it's a culmination of the rupture. It's, it's, we are going to look back at these moments, we're going to see this thing, you know, slowly snowballing. And then we saw this beginning of, you know, something is not quite right with the Ukraine war. But we got the Ukraine war, and there is a shift, and there's great transition, and the world is reshaping itself. It's rebalancing, realigning, and then you also have this war at the end of it, which is going to complete and culminate in the final shift. That might happen in 6 months, it might happen in 3 months, it might happen in a year, but I think the writing is on the wall.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And one final question. I mean, do you see us settling into a world order in which the UN is largely irrelevant place, meeting point, but where the US and its peer competitors find a way to coexist without these kind of regional wars such as in Ukraine and in Iran? Or do you think conflict is just going to be the new normal even after the unipolar world has ended?

I think in the short term, we're going to see a lot more conflict, basically these conflicts intensifying. The conflicts are already there. The fault lines are these regional civilizational fault lines. They're going to be pushed further. You're going to see much more conflict as we're seeing. I don't minimize that at all. I mean, I think we are going to— there's a chance that, you know, the United States and Israel might use nuclear weapons on Iran just to try to finish this conflict. And that would create a very different risk scenario. This is an absolute atrocious choice, but it is being considered by the White House. So this is something that is, you know, that has a lot of short-term risks to global peace, stability, human lives. So I'm speaking as a realist, but even if you were a moralist, you know, using nuclear weapons, even if they're tactical nuclear weapons, which is tactical ones are the ones that are being considered, It's not a humanitarian act, to say the least. And to use it first use, to use it unilaterally, to use it because you can't win conventionally would be a disaster, I think, for US credibility as well, for US standing in the world as well. I think America should do all it can to not only restrain itself, from using it, but also make it very clear to the Israeli side that nuclear power, nuclear use is off the table and that we will really reassess our relationship with Israel and our conventional support to Israel in case a tactical weapon is used. But putting that aside, I think ultimately, so these conflicts are real, but I think in the short, in the medium term, in the short term to medium term, these regional powers will move to have nuclear weapons first to secure themselves against these kinds of conflicts. And then, yes, I believe that we are going to move towards a concert of civilizational powers. So the old imperial civilizational states will have to find a way to deal with each other like the concert of Europe was in the 19th century. They are going to— it's not formalized, it's not legalized, it's not through the UN, but the Chinese, the Indians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Russians, even the French, the Indonesians. These are the nodes and they will have to talk to each other to manage the world. And they will all have to respect their sort of immediate spheres of influence. And the entire world politics will be about how the extent of those cultural domains and the civilizational expanses. And there will be a lot of move towards neutrality and buffering in areas that are between these civilizational powers. And that, by the way, is not something new. That has been the rule of the world, the structure of the world, the sort of the unwritten law of international relations in the classical times and in classical periods. You look at a country, we were going to Georgia, right? Georgia is a country that is Georgia, like Oman, like Hungary. These are kingdoms that basically became a kingdom in a buffer zone between two civilizational empires. And that's how they developed the very conception of a nation-state as a national kingdom rather than a civilizational kingdom prior to the sort of rise of nationalism and Wilsonianism and the ideological understanding of nationalism that happened on their modernity. So I mean, Georgia is an ancient state. Armenia is an ancient buffer state. Oman is an ancient buffer state. So these are very different than Kuwait and Bahrain. And I think we need to understand states as they really are rather than projecting our sort of sense of, you know, goodwill upon them or to see them all as the same because of sovereignty. I think sovereignty will increasingly be hierarchical. But it doesn't mean that we can just go ahead and abolish the sovereignty of our competitors. And I think that would actually be much more reinforced in this new order.

Yeah, thanks. Well, firstly, let's hope that there is no nuclear use because I think once that soda can is sprung, then the world's getting into very dangerous territory. But I completely agree with you on that final point about you know, the need to deal with, with nations as they are, not as we kind of, uh, in the West want them, want them to be. So, uh, you know, with that in mind, let's hope for that kind of future sort of concert of powers, you know, uh, over the longer term, uh, and that we can navigate this kind of febrile period of, of conflict as, as smoothly and as, as quickly as we possibly can. But, uh, but Dr. Arta Moeini PhD, thanks so much for joining today, and thanks everybody for watching, please like and subscribe as always. Uh, if you are finding these conversations stimulating and you want to kind of secure peace in this troubled world of ours, thank you for listening. Arta, I look forward to seeing you again in Tbilisi.

Thank you so much, Ian, and, uh, it's always a pleasure to speak with you, and I'm happy to do this. And we'll— we will see each other soon, I hope.

Yeah, soon. All the best. Bye for now. Thank you so much for watching my Peacemonger videos. If you'd like to support my work promoting peace around the world, then please consider clicking the subscribe button and liking any videos that you see, leaving any comments or questions in the chat. You can also support my work by buying a copy of my memoir, A Misfit in Moscow: How British Diplomacy Failed, about my 4 and a half years serving at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019. You can find that on Amazon or any major book retailer websites. Thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate every like, every comment that you provide. And don't forget to click the subscribe button. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your religion, whatever your nationality, I wish you very much peace. My name is Ian Proud and I'm the Peacemonger. Thank you so much.