Headline Geopolitics: Israel, Iran, and the New Global Order w/ Dr. Arta Moeini

Good evening everyone and welcome to the inaugural episode of Headline Geopolitics. I'm your host, Jose Nino, and this evening I have the pleasure of being joined by Arta Moeini PhD, the Managing Director of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. How are you this evening, Arta?

Good, thank you. Glad to be here, Jose.

So I thought I would bring you on, uh, for this episode because you have a very unique expertise on Iranian affairs and more broadly speaking, like international affairs. And what I like about your work is that it kind of goes against all forms of conventional wisdom in international relations, from like neoconservative to neoliberal interventionist views. You offer a more realist perspective. But before we start talking about the latest conflict between Iran and Israel, Could you give a brief background of what work you've done and just your overall body of work?

Sure. I have a PhD in politics and government from Georgetown University. I run a think tank here in Washington, DC, working on the questions of peace and diplomacy. It's called the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and we do it from a realist perspective. I work on the questions on the philosophical foundations of the current order, as well as, you know, the current order meaning the liberal international order, the post-war order, the rules-based order, whatever term you like, and the sort of the transition towards the new post-unipolar era, the new system that's then forcing changes on this order. I call it the Great Transition. And so we can look at various developments within the context of these systemic changes.

Yeah, just to start off right here, what, what do you mean by the post-liberal order, the rules-based order, and all these other synonymous terms there?

Uh, sure. Um, so after World War II, there was a new kind of, uh, order that was established that was supposed to be based on— it was a normative order. Orders come on top of systems. So post-World War II, we had, we had a bipolar system, meaning there were two poles, that would be the USSR and the United States. And that order, that system, they got a normative order that was imposed on top of it. That was known as the liberal international order that was premised, for example, on the UN, the charter, the idea of sovereignty, but also all the borders are going to stay the same, and a whole bunch of other things including human rights. And various international institutions. That order was supposed to be, again, sort of based on certain views of justice, all of those things. But really, my argument is that all orders are based on the distribution of power and how power actually disperses within the system. So that order really reflected the preferences of the United States and the USSR, and it was a very modern Western order, if you will. And that then sort of collapse onto the unipolar era of US power, and it sort of made the whole thing more aggressive and extreme. That's when you have sort of things such as Responsibility to Protect, where the United States would use the Charter, use the international norms and laws to then actually do regime change, military action, such as in Europe or across the world, in Serbia, Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia and across the world. And that kind of took us to the, again, I'm being very brief and giving a very quick summary here, but that sort of took us to 9/11 wars and more actions that then got us to endless wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. And that has opened the door to a decline of US power because of all these interventions, because of all these problems that we have faced. Now we are basically, relatively speaking, we are seeing a world in which multiple regions and poles and what I call civilizational powers are back. We're getting basically a multinodal state, a multinodal system where you have multiple regions all significant and no global hegemon can actually do what it wants everywhere in the world at the same time. So the fantasy or the dream or the aspiration of global hegemony, which was the basis of first the Soviet Union, view of the world, and then the United States' view of the world has been effectively expunged by realities of systemic change and the fact that there are more powers that are near-peer to the United States, namely rise of China and the return of regions. And so now we are in a great transition to figure out what that new order, basically the rules of the game of how these new players will interact with each other, how does that look And what does that look like? And how can the United States, from a US perspective, I speak as an American grand strategist, how does US grand strategy adapt to this new world so that we can actually protect as much as possible our great power status? Because America has declined as a superpower, but it's still a great power. And so it's a great power among other powers instead of just being the sole power. Which, which is the term for unipolarity.

You brought up the point about, uh, the unipolar order and unipolarity, and we're clearly in like a transition phase. What event or series of events would you say facilitated this transition from unipolarity to a more competitive multipolar order?

So it's two things, right? You have the rise of certain countries relative to the United States that was happening because of globalization, rise of China, again, more regional focus on politics, the rise and return of sovereignty as a concept, as something that has been very important to the so-called non-Western world, India, you know, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, we're gonna talk about it later, but that was part of this trend as well. It was one of the first sovereignist movements that actually showed itself in terms of Islamism, but it was a sovereignist movement. And you move forward to all of these sort of countries trying to rise and challenge the hegemony of the sort of specifically, not the West as such, the West is a political concept, but really is the American supremacy in that order in the aftermath of 1991. That's one side of the story. The other side is we basically have shot ourselves in the foot. In the unipolar moment, usually what happens is you get a lot of pride, and pride is the first, I guess, the most important sin when it comes to grand strategy, because it sort of meant that we overextended ourselves. We did a lot of spending, a lot of overreach, that imperial overreach of being everywhere at the same time, wanting to remake and We shape the world in our own image. That is not a realist posture, that kind of premises posture. It might sound very tough and very rough and good and American, but it's actually not. It's against the teachings of George Washington. It's also against the interests of the United States. The sovereign interest of the United States is not for us to go and do regime change around the world or do random wars of no consequence for us. Even when we do wars that are, let's say, surgical, in and out, attacking the Houthis or now attacking Iran, even if we can keep it from escalating, what we are still doing is spending billions of dollars in military action and equipment and all the infrastructure that goes into this. And we are in trillions of dollars of debt. And that's what I mean. So the one side is the rise of the rest relative to us. The other side is the relative decline of us as a superpower, which means it creates more of a power equilibrium.

That's a very interesting point because when you look at it from a broader perspective, unipolarity is actually an aberration in like the broader scheme of things when you look at international relations. But it is true that US did squander its so-called peace dividend I want to go back to a point you brought up that raised my eyebrow about the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, because I always saw that too, as well as kind of like a third way, because it came against the backdrop of the US's security competition with the Soviet Union. But the Islamic Revolution did kind of provide a kind of alternative model to the bipolar capitalist versus communist dichotomy. And would you say that revolution was an event that really set the stage for the inevitable clash between Iran and Israel and to a lesser degree, the United States that we recently saw kick off two weeks ago?

Well, I mean, the obvious answer is yes, but a couple of things. First of all, you mentioned the unipolar moment being an aberration. That's completely correct. It's very, very rare, almost impossible. I think in terms of the scale, we can never have a unipolar moment like this, I think, ever again. We haven't had in the past in such scale. I mean, you can think about like the rise of the Mongols and stuff, but it's not really this kind of a world. It's not global as much as it is today. But also the bipolar eras are also not, are more likely, but also anomalies, also aberrations. Because again, for a bipolar order or moment to happen, for a bipolar system to come to existence, you need certain things. You need 2 empires or 2 powers to rise and a whole bunch of other powers and regions to be subjugated to their rise. And that's not something that happens regularly and usually. And I think what we are seeing in terms of this grand transition, the great transition is a move back to the normalized understanding of geopolitics that's tied to localities and regions. Having said that, then we can think about what that looked like in terms of the Iranian Revolution. The Iranian Revolution, you're absolutely right. It did have in the back of its mind this kind of competition between the United States and Soviet Union. In fact, one of the first slogans for the revolution was, "No to the East, no to the West, only independence," something along those lines. And that kind of strategic autonomy, but also cultural autonomy, cultural sovereignty expressed itself very quickly in Islamist terms because of Khomeini's power and charisma. At the time, and the fact that the Islamic tradition was put as something to be protected against the Western aggression. But really, my argument has always been that for all of its faults, and I have to be very clear that I have a lot of disagreements and criticisms of the Islamic Republic, but for all of its problems, especially domestically and internally and against its own people and the lack of popularity, Its geopolitical posture mostly has been, and as well as its general power base, their general logic has been very nationalist, sovereignist, and patriotic. It came out of that idea of trying to focus on Iranian self-reliance, of building things on its own, of being completely independent, of not being a pawn to the West at the time, but also not being a pawn to the Soviet Union. So that element has always existed. Now, one of the main reasons for the Islamic Republic's antagonistic position towards Israel was the view that was expressed by many anti-imperialist movements at the time, which was basically absorbed by Iran. So it wasn't antisemitism. This is a misconception. It wasn't because there are many Iranian Jews, and in fact antisemitism in Iran is very low. So what you actually had was an anti-imperialism in the Iranian left, because the revolution actually had a huge leftist sentiment, and the anti-imperialists were against Israel specifically because they saw it as a colonialist project in the Middle East. So they saw it as the pawn of the United States and the imperial hegemony of the United States, and that's how and why they rejected it and they committed themselves to the destruction of Israel. Now, but a lot of that was ideology and fervor of the height of the revolution. 46 years has passed and the Islamic Republic today is not the Islamic Republic of 1979. It has gone through multiple conflicts, an 8-year war with Iraq, a change of leadership, and now very significant, I believe, in the Iranian psyche, 12-day war with Israel and the United States. So it's a very different circumstance. That we find ourselves in today and what we have to look at in 1979.

Indeed, things have definitely changed because from what I've gathered studying this conflict from afar, Iran has been in a strange shadow war with the US and Israel for several decades, but it never really escalated to like a conventional conflict until the 12-Day War. And that's where I saw like the— that this, this security competition actually went kinetic, uh, directly. And what would you say were some of the contributing factors to this conflict finally turning into a a heated conventional military struggle between Israel and Iran?

So, I mean, there are many causes, and I think we will need many hours to divulge all of that. But I think very quickly, I think Iran did not believe, and in fact, it was shocked and surprised to find out, to find itself in a war. It did not want an actual war. The Iranian leadership has always looked at the Israeli question through a domestic lens, through a political lens. It was never strategic because again, Iran has no actual interest in Israel. It doesn't want to take over its territory or it's far away, and that's why we're having an aerial warfare. So from the Iranian perspective, this was just highly ideological and it kept as a way to keep on a certain sort of symbol of the revolution. But from an Israeli perspective, things have changed a lot since the Iran Revolution. You might remember that in the '80s when Iran was actually in a war with Iraq, a lot of Iranian missiles were provided to it both by the Reagan administration and the Israeli government. So Iran has already had a revolution and it's fighting Iraq that's actually armed to the hilt by the West to weaken Iran. But the Israeli government is giving Iran missiles to fight Iraq. It's making sure that the Iranian army, the Iranian armed forces is strong enough to survive. So that doesn't make sense from that Iran is an existential threat, because as I'm arguing to you, if anything, Iran was more of an existential threat to Israel in 1979, 1980 than it would be today. Because Iran has gone over 46 years of tempering its ideological posture. But what has changed is the new kind of Israeli political posture. Israel today is not the Israel of the past. It's not the Israel of Ben-Gurion, it's not the Israel of the '80s and early '90s. It is the Israel of Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, which is a much more ideological, an offensive state that wants to become and has ambitions to become a regional power. This is no longer about the security of the state of Israel from attacks from the Arabs or even the Iranians. It's now about establishing Israel as a powerful state in the Middle East that actually rivals the historical great powers, regional powers, but great powers in the Middle East, which would be Turkey and Iran. That's structural. And Israel is trying to shift that strategic paradigm. Now, I believe as a realist that that is impossible. You cannot, as a tiny state, become a regional power. You cannot become a regional power when your own population is around 9 million. And you're basically reliant on American power and largesse to advance that Greater Israel project. So, my position is that since the mid-1990s, Israel has been looking for pretext to attack Iran. And Iran has made many mistakes that has allowed that impression that it is a threat to Israel. And it has, for example, Iranian doctrine of deterrence towards Israel for a long time was what we can call a forward defense posture through proxies, what the Israelis call the ring of fire. Through Hezbollah and other proxies, and what the Iranians called the Axis of Resistance. This was supposed to be, this is what most pundits would miss. This was never about, we are going to go and conquer Jerusalem. It was a forward defense line to be a deterrent against Israel attacking Iran, fearing the fact that as soon as an attack happens, there'll be hundreds and thousands of rockets fired upon Israel from short range, and so it will overwhelm Israeli defenses. That was the doctrine, that was the thinking, and it was a colossal failure. And that ring has also been pushed back significantly since October 7th anyway. So I think the question of deterrence is a big question that Iran has to answer for itself moving forward. But from an Israeli perspective, with the weakening of that, ring, and the fact that, again, Benjamin Netanyahu has been craving and wanting a war with Iran for 20-some years. And this does not go back, this does not go to yesterday or last month or this round of nuclear talks or anything like that. The plans for a new Middle East that the Israel Netanyahu-backed thinkers or politicians had, Netanyahu himself had, dates back to the '90s. The Iranian nuclear program wasn't even revealed yet. So this was not even about the nuclear issue at the time, but it was about changing the dynamics of the Middle East to create a new Israel as a regional power. And if you look at, for example, the— Is that clean break? Yes, that's one of them, but there are multiple parts of this. But for example, when General Clark, Leslie Clark, said that the plan was for us to attack Iraq, Syria and all these countries, Somalia, and the ultimate prize goal was Iran. It was to completely, all those countries around the Israel vicinity, they were to weaken these places to allow for Israeli action, freedom of action and maneuvering those places. And then finally, the final blow was supposed to be to Iran to completely weaken the sort of dynamics, regional dynamics, so that Israel can have freedom of movement and operation from the East Mediterranean all the way to Central Asia. That is the dream or the aspiration. I do not believe this will succeed, no matter what Israel can do in the next round of fighting that might be coming. I believe in the power of history and the fact that history is always here and it has never died. There's no end to it. Geography, history, culture, and geopolitics are alive. And so Israel has won a lot of tactical victories recently, but I don't see how it will translate into strategic or even political victories. And so I think that is the kind of lens to look at this conflict. The American involvement is a fundamentally different question.

Interesting. So with respect to the 12-day war, what is your initial takeaway of the result And what does it, how does it impact Israel's strategy going forward? And does it affect the United States much as well?

So I think there were a few questions. Let's go one at a time. So the first one is how has the war sort of turned out so far, right?

Yes.

And what was the second question?

And how will it impact the foreign policy decision-making of Israel, Iran, and even United States going forward?

Okay. So let's just think about what this war has accomplished. So for Israel, this was, again, a very tactical decision, a very bold decision to do this because it sort of upended what the conventional wisdom was. The conventional wisdom is, as much as the same thing about Iran, as much as Iran says these things about Israel, Iran will not attack Israel because it'll bring a war. So Iran doesn't want a war, so it doesn't do that. The miscalculation was to believe that Israel thinks the same way, that Israel doesn't want a war. Of course, Israel wants a war. Israel has been moving towards a perpetual war footing for political and internal reasons since October 7th. We are seeing that the Gaza War doesn't end. We are seeing the bombing of Lebanon. We are seeing various theaters in which the Israeli army and armed forces, the IDF, is engaged. So for Netanyahu, the war has certain political and internal domestic benefits for his own political survival, for its own legitimizing, I believe, the inflated threat of the fact that Iran is an existential threat to Israel, which is not the case. But why does that matter? When you create the war and Iran is launching missiles back at you in retaliation, and those missiles are actually bombing down in Israel and taking 20,000, 30,000 homes, as some reports had it, that actually proves to the Israeli public that, look, Iran is actually a threat. So wars obviously create that kind of psychological effect. But the short-term gain was to derail the nuclear talks, between Donald Trump and Iran. In fact, on Friday that the bombing happened, on June 13th, there was going to be an offer by Iran that met many of the criteria that Donald Trump and the Trump administration had for the Iranian nuclear issue. It was supposed to be given to Donald Trump on, or given to Witkopf to be told to Donald Trump on Sunday. But this attack happened 48 hours prior and completely sort of delay of the negotiations, suspended the negotiations, and created this kind of coldness and pause between Iran-US relations. So that's one reason they did that. The other is that, and the fact that you know, for example, that, I mean, again, tactically and operationally, Israel was very successful. Also informationally, Israel was successful, which means what? It means that Israel has been planning this attack for a long time. This was a huge Mossad operation. And that's how you know that Israel was preparing for this for a long time, because eliminating and decapitating the heads of the Iranian IRGC and a nuclear scientist and all of those steps was something that was worked for decades, at least 10 years. So this was an ace that Israel had held for some time to use at a time and an opportune moment And the goal was to do this, and the expectation was the complete destabilization of the Iranian political system, perhaps not regime change. I don't believe that Israel actually wants regime change, because regime change means like you have a government that comes in, the government might be favorable to the United States, right? I don't believe that Israel is actually in the Netanyahu government's interest to have a very friendly government to the United States in Iran, because again, Iran is the source of the threat inflation. The same way that Israel and Netanyahu have been paying Hamas for years to create this enemy as well. And this is the scandal that's not talked about. Hamas is championed and created in a way and supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party, because it was one of the only Palestinian players that believed only in the single-state solution, not the two-state solution. It wanted the elimination of the state of Israel. And that's why Hamas was discredited, or should be in my view. But that's why the more extremist groups in the Israeli government liked Hamas because it creates that us versus them attitude. Same thing goes with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The rhetoric of Iran, the elimination of Israel, we are going to outlast Israel, Israel is illegitimate. All these kinds of ideological and revolutionary postures going back to 1979 and standing up for the rights of Palestinians, all these kinds of positions is something that Netanyahu actually likes politically. And that's the irony, because that creates the us versus them Manichean posture that allows Israel to be in a wartime footing, perpetual war footing, that could then move towards accomplishing what it believes to be the strategic goals of the state of Israel, which is an expansionist goal for becoming a regional power. So, I don't believe that Israel was ever after the complete regime change in Iran, but it believed that the Iranian government will be severely weakened, there'll be people coming to the streets, it will be completely mayhem, and basically Iran as a piece on a chessboard, on the strategic chessboard, would be knocked off. And so that would have been the worst-case scenario for the other players in the region, so Turkey, China, Russia, external or internal. I believe that for all the people who warned about escalation risk for World War III, for involvement of others, They would have only actually gotten involved if the status quo, that means the existence of the Islamic Republic or the Iranian state as such, would have been under threat. I think at that moment you would have seen a very different kind of position. And by the way, the Trump administration knew this. Donald Trump knows this very well. He was told this by Erdogan. He was told this by Mohammed bin Salman. He was warned against actively engaging in this conflict, and that's why he was always sort of playing good cop, bad cop with it, but it is not in the U.S. interest and in Donald Trump's vision for the Iranian state to be a failed state or a much weakened state that cannot defend its own sovereignty. That is not in the interest of the United States. So, that's why the Trump administration has been trying to walk a very fine line based on the gut reactions of the president to what's happening. And so the first reaction was, okay, well, we have nothing to do with this. This is an Israeli operation. We have not tacitly approved it. We have just not went after them to stop it. Okay. But then the Israeli sort of information apparatus goes into effect, and with the help of the media, an image is created of complete Iranian capitulation and defeat in the first 24 to 48 hours. The idea of Iranian skies are completely under military and air supremacy of the Israeli forces, that basically Iran doesn't have anything to do, is about to collapse. Expectations that Israel had of people coming out. So, the first 24 to 48 hours allowed for that image to be created, and Donald Trump kind of wanted to be on the victorious side. Lean onto that for a little bit. But it became very clear by Sunday that Iran and the regime in Iran is not going to collapse. That in spite of all the actual decapitation of the Iranian IRGC generals and the very real intimidation campaign, you might have seen reports, it was also in the Washington Post, of Mossad agents calling the number twos, number threes, number fives of the IRGC and other Iranian military people to basically intimidate them as to saying, you saw what happened to these generals. We are also having you under surveillance. You have 8 to 12 hours to record a video and say that you are no longer with the regime, and basically creating an atmosphere of distrust and defections. But this didn't work. Actually. And so the Iranian army came back, the Iranian military came back together and started launching attacks on Israel, missile strikes on Israel. And those missile attacks continued and became increasingly successful and accurate with time. Now, the criticism from a realist perspective, the problem I would say is that the Iranian side looks at this conflict First of all, through two problems, I mean, two mistakes. One is that it kind of always thinks that it is in a war with Israel alone. That's never the case. When you're in a war with Israel, you have to calculate the fact that America is in the war. But that kind of perspective made Iranians hesitant about what they need to do to make this war last long. So They thought that an attritional war is the way that they will get, they will find superiority over Israel. So instead of going all out to do sort of immediate blows to the complete, in a way, humiliation that they suffered 24 hours or 48 hours earlier at the hands of Israeli operations, they kind of did much more measured, much more modulated and restrained approach to sending 50, 75 missiles. That's not because all the Iranian missiles were destroyed or the launchers were completely incapacitated. That's not the reason, because Iran did its most attacks towards the last 24 hours of the war. So that was an internal calculation for two reasons. One, because Iran at the same time has a strategic doctrine of attritional warfare with Israel. So if the war goes to, if a war happens with Israel, the Iranian armed forces had this calculation that Israel can sustain a war effectively for 10 to 12 days or 10 to 14 days, 2 weeks at most, and then it will have to be replenished. So we need to be geared for an attritional war so actually we can go after them after the 12 to 14 day time period. On the other hand, certain Iranian strategists didn't want America to join and thought that if they do an aggressive stance, it might actually bring America into the war. But both of those calculations, I believe, are mistaken because a lot of the ways that Donald Trump thinks about the war and America thinks about the war is about the costs that the war actually creates. So when you are measured, when you're modulated, it doesn't look like you're really fighting back, or it projects not strength but weakness, and Donald Trump likes strength. So what ended up happening is that that image of weakness made Donald Trump reconsider certain things and think of something that was, in retrospect, might have been a very important, even ingenious move in the Trump orbit, which is we are going to do this huge attack, what looks like a huge attack. It will be surgical. We will claim to have eliminated the Iranian nuclear capacity and capability, and basically take the nuclear file off the table as the recipe for peace. But this would not have maybe happened if Iran had actually— because I do believe that Donald Trump wants a general deal that stabilizes the Middle East. That's my belief of what Donald Trump wants in the Middle East. But I do also believe that Donald Trump could not help himself. When he saw that Iran is weak, he couldn't go back and say to Israelis, or even to the hawks in his own administration, that, look, Iran is strong and we might actually get more than what we bargained for here, so let's go back to a negotiating table. Because of that strategic misstep by the Iranian military to try to think of this as a long war, it made Donald Trump more accepting or more tolerant of the military option. And then he was brought onwards to the military option, but then he did the military option in such a way to think as how can this military action end the conflict? And so he did it in the best way that he thought possible. Now, that move could be a way for de-escalation, but I do not believe that the Israeli side will be satisfied. I think the Israeli side, because my position is that the Israeli actions are geared by something completely different, not by the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranian nuclear program is, we can talk about it, but it was never weaponized. And that is in fact another one of the mistakes of the Iranian regime, that over 20 years they did not understand what many realists like John Mearsheimer or myself said, that any country This is not about Iran. Any country, especially a middle power, a regional power, in order to protect itself as an actual deterrent, needs to have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are actually a defensive tool for deterrence, not an offensive tool. If you use it, you're going to be destroyed as a country, as a nation, as a state. So it's never something to use. General calculation of the Israeli state is, is that it does not want any country, including Iran, to challenge its nuclear monopoly because Israel is the only country that has nuclear weapons. And number two, it wants to use whatever it can, including a nuclear issue, as a pretext for an offensive campaign to change the dynamics, the status quo in the region, and become a regional power. That it wants to do with complete US backing, support, military wise and economic. And I do not believe that it's sustainable in the long term. We are already seeing reactions domestically in America to that kind of messaging. So I think we might be in for round 2 or 3 of this conflict. I think the Iranians now are under no illusions that this might happen, and they're trying to make certain moves to change their posture. But it's going to be very hard for Iran to all of a sudden make these changes that it hasn't made because it sort of naively thought that if it has America on its side and if it negotiates with America, America can control the demons of Israel, the aggressive posture of Israel, and Israel will never attack Iran. This was a fallacy. And obviously, to Netanyahu's credit, what he does the best is that he's a kind of a madman. When everything looks like there's some sort of a conventional wisdom, he does the opposite and upends the game. So I think that's what he did. And I think that is a reason for Israel's tactical and operational achievements in the early days and hours of the war. And the nuclear program in Iran has obviously been set back because of not necessarily Israeli strike, but because of the US strike. Also, no question about that. But all these are tactical achievements. Strategically, the result of these tactical achievements are completely against American interest. Because if there was any doubts that Iran should have a nuclear weapon, because there were certain— what people don't realize is that there is a certain liberal Western-minded faction in the Islamic Republic who really want to be part of, have some sort of relations with the West. They still have this kind of view of the West as a benefactor. And they thought that the West is not going to do this. The West is not going to go against the UN Charter and attack us. These kinds of fantasies about the international order that we talked about in the beginning, many people in the Islamic Republic believe in the fantasy of the UN, for example. That's why their first reaction to the attack of Israel and then the United States was to condemn it in the UN Security Council. What is the UN Security Council? It's a joke. Or what is the NPT? It was something to control certain states at a certain time.

Yeah, rules-based.

Yes, but that was something that states partook in because they wanted certain benefits from that old order. The NPT regime is under huge challenge because of what happened over the 12-day war. And Iran is now going to move under this regime, the next regime, whoever comes in power, secular, liberal, nationalist, does not matter. Strategically, Iran now knows that it needs nuclear weapons. That's a strategic shift in the Iranian doctrine. You cannot stop that. That's something, that's what I mean, grand strategic implications of this has been huge. Another change is that Iran will increasingly have to move towards China to protect itself. If Russia wasn't a good, reliable ally because it wasn't able to give, basically replenish Iranian Air Force that was outdated and under severe problems and shortages. And it was supposed to be replenished and updated and renovated since 2016, but it's 2025 and almost nothing about from the Russian fleet has come to Iran. Then Iran has made decisions now, it will make decisions to become part of the military and security network of China because China has proved itself such as in case of Pakistan, to be a reliable, cost-effective partner that can actually give you the things that you need to defend yourself in a timely manner, and its systems are reliable. So from a grand strategic perspective of the United States government, what is our interest in general? Do we have a problem, an existential problem with Iran? Of course not. Was an Iranian nuclear program ever threatening America? Of course not. Because Iran doesn't even have ICBMs to reach continental United States. But this threat was inflated because of the political dynamics in America and because of Israel. But what is the actual interest of the United States? Two things. Pull back from the Middle East, not have so many bases because the age of protecting the oil is over. We have our own, your energy independence. And most of that oil goes to China anyway. So we don't need to protect the shipments for Europe or China. No one wants us to be the policeman of the world, and we shouldn't do that in the first place. That's number one. So we should just want a stable peace so we can pull back from the Middle East. And number two, we want the regional anchors of each region to be strong enough to be able to provide a check to other countries that might come in externally. So you want an Iran that's strong enough to say no to Russia and China. You don't want an Iran that feels threatened enough that goes and bandwagons with China when you say that you're in a great power competition with China. So this whole thing is a complete strategic disaster for the United States, and the only beneficiary of it is Israel. And that's why more and more people are waking up to the fact that this is not a special relationship or an alliance. This is a one-sided relationship. America does not gain anything from this alliance other than getting its reputation damaged by Israeli aggressions in various regions and being involved and goaded into conflicts that it has nothing to do with strategically. I'll stop there.

That's a lot of ground you covered. And one point that I also found interesting is about how you mentioned that in light of recent events, you could see Iran become part of more of the Chinese axis. And I was also intrigued by your mentioning of Pakistan as well, because I heard rumors that during this conflict, Pakistan and Iran, which I wouldn't say are like enemies, but they've been kind of more, um, competitive in recent decades. They actually had somewhat of a rapprochement in terms of certain defense affairs. And is there a likelihood that if Iran gravitates more towards the Chinese-Pakistani axis, that that could accelerate Iran's nuclear program towards like a weaponized program?

Well, I mean, whether or not Pakistan is involved, what people need to understand is that the reason why I say that Iran, this is a strategic disaster and Iran will be able to move towards nuclear weapon is not because the surgical strikes didn't work or that the Iranian program is not significantly damaged. It's because imagine Iran has no program whatsoever today. Iran is a big country, is a large country. It has already made the nuclear technology indigenous. It has already learned how to make equipment and know how to do nuclear fuel cycle and do nuclear reactors. So Iran is already making nuclear equipment, including very advanced centrifuges. So it has a domestic industrial capacity. It has a manufacturing ability. Iran is a, again, is a regional state and a regional power. It's able to do these things and it has the know-how and the capability. So if you're able to do this domestically because you have the knowledge and you have the capability, you can make the parts for it. The only thing you need is the will. And the problem from the Iranian perspective was that for the longest time, Iran only looked at the nuclear program, the enrichment around 60% and all that, as a posture, as a political posture to get concessions from the West and America in exchange for lessening the sanctions. So Iran didn't actually try to get a nuclear bomb for strategic reasons. It was doing this to be kind of like a bad boy in the classroom that then acts in a little bit of a good way and then gets certain benefits from the teacher. That's not going to fly anymore. That was a political, and I think a very bad diplomatic bargaining chip. And because Iran didn't want to say openly that it is going to sort of normalize relations with America or de facto recognize Israel, so it played this kind of game of politically kind of showing that it can go towards nuclear weapons, but actually not having the guts to go there. So that's actually the kind of problem with the Islamic Republic grand strategy, because it kind of always puts symbolism and politics above big strategic goals. And this is the kind of problem that I'm also highlighting in the Netanyahu government, right? I'm saying that Israel moved from a much more pragmatic, strategic, realist footing in the '80s and early '90s to a much more ideological, political, and symbolic state. And that, I think, is a problem for Israel in the long term, the same way that Iran has not benefited as much as it could and has had a lot of wasted opportunities over the past decades or few decades because of this kind of highly symbolic posture. Yes, Iranians are proud people. It's a big, important event for them to be able to domesticate or endogenize the nuclear technology to be able to make your own nuclear fuel cycle that you can use in your own nuclear reactors to generate electricity, to do for medicine that requires 20%. These are achievements, but that, and Iran was always insisting on its rights because if you understand what I said in the beginning, the foundations of the Islamic Revolution was the rights-based egalitarian international order kind of posture. We need to have certain rights. Now, what the Iranian government, the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic does not recognize yet, and maybe from a realist perspective, they will have to moving forward, is that you don't live in a rules-based order that gives you rights. Rights are for the powerful. If you have the power, you can take it. If you don't have the power, you can't claim, oh, why the double standard between Israel and Iran? Why is it that Israel can have nuclear weapons and we can't? Why is it that we want to, in order for us to be able to make our energy resources more efficient and have electricity, we need to generate our own nuclear fuel and be able to maybe export nuclear fuel? Well, you cannot do that without enrichment. We need Do you have the right to enrichment? Well, that kind of question is not about, again, Iran insists on its rights and goes to the UN and all these really just theatrical bodies at this point and says these things and reads about the law, but actually it does not have the power to enforce its rights. That's the thing that Iran will need to change this partly because of this, as a result of this kind of 12-day war. So I think From my perspective as a realist, everything in the international system is about power. Everything else is nice casings for the power, nice packaging for the power to hide the fact that this is all power-based. Now, power-based does not mean zero-sum. I believe that a natural order actually allows, that reflects the power dynamics, allows for modus vivendi, peaceful coexistence, The fact that, because if you put ideology aside, there is no reason why America and Iran can't have normalized relations and actually not be hostile. There's no reason even Israel and Iran, for Israel and Iran not to be able to not be hostile. It is the question of ideology from the Iranian side initially, but increasingly from the Israeli side, that does not allow for peaceful relations between the two countries or de facto acknowledgement of the of the two countries. So I think acknowledgement of power and the reality of power in the international system does not mean just a world of conflict and war. That's a misconception. It means understanding geopolitics works with statecraft, and statecraft based on realism will give you a much more peaceable and peaceful world, because your genuine interests are kind of protected based on your power levels. And you have to basically only move as much as your power allows you. You cannot claim things and want things that you don't have the power to claim or want. And that is the move beyond this kind of, I guess, circles back to our first opening conversation, but we are the illusions of the post-war order, of the egalitarian order of the nation states, the international, the nation and the international. Every nation has the same equal rights and sovereignty. That was an illusion, and that has been proven by the Ukraine war and by this war. Both of which were showing that the power means a lot more than people give it credit for. And also, it also shows how much From a US perspective, holding on to these old alliance networks has been its strategic Achilles heel. And having a country like Israel go after Iran or having a Ukraine go after Russia, or using it as a way to put a dagger on Russia's throat, that doesn't work in the long run. We have to just spend a lot of resources. So I think putting aside the ideology and moving to power and politics of power, I think that is the way forward.

Just one final question here, because there was one point you raised that took me aback for a bit, that you think that there is a possibility for a round 2 or round 3 in terms of a dust-up between Iran and Israel. If such a hypothetical scenario were to emerge, do you think that the US would be more actively involved or dragged into this renewed conflict?

So I think that this is a very important time for the Iranians to understand the kind of signals that's coming from the Trump administration and President Trump, such as, "God bless Iran, you guys both fought well," and all that stuff. And actually try to make the kind of region-shifting deal that Donald Trump wants to make. So that's from the Iranian side. They need to put aside some of their hostilities, some of the fact that they feel, I mean, you have to understand them as well. Strategic empathy means understanding that they feel betrayed. They feel like they were negotiating, but Trump threw them under the bus. But I think they need to understand what the dynamic of Washington is, the power of neoconservatives, and the fact that the Israelis were on the march, and it was very hard to stop them, and understand their own sort of culpability in not finding a ground to change the dynamics of their relationship with America. So, I think it's possible for Iran to move towards that direction and try to play at a level, at the ground that Donald Trump wants to play on, which is not about the nuclear issue. It's a more grand change of Iranian-American relations. And at the same time, I think America needs to understand that Iranians are a proud people. And if Donald Trump wants to deal with them, he has to make it a kind of a deal that's based on Washington's interests, his own general interests. Not have certain lines in the sand that are Israeli lines and have cascaded us into conflict, such as no enrichment on Iranian soil. Iran will fight to the death for enrichment rights, not because even before it wanted nuclear weapons, which it didn't, because it was, again, you have to understand the mindset of a sovereignist regime fighting for its rights in the rules-based order, even if that order is a fantasy. So that is something that's important. But if Iran and America can make that grand deal, then I think Donald Trump could be very adamant about holding the Israelis back. Yet if that deal is not made, and if on both sides they don't make compromises, and we kind of are still in the same place that we are today in 1 or 2 months, then Israelis will replenish their interceptors, recharge, regroup, and come back for round 2. Because again, their point is just to weaken Iran. They don't want anything more than weakening Iran consistently and over time. Because again, a strong Iran is against the aggressive posture of Israel today. So that's what I think will happen. And at the same time, the question is Iran either has to really make the deal with America, at the same time, he needs to replenish his own defense forces. He needs to understand why it had successes. Again, Iran had a kind of a victory of its own because it survived as a regime, it didn't collapse, and it was able to show that it can actually hurt Israel. And it changed psychologically the dynamic of the impenetrable notion of Israel. All of that is gone. So that's going to have a psychological effect. And I think Donald Trump, that's why he was so frustrated because the Israelis wanted the ceasefire because of the fact that they needed to replenish their own sources, and Donald Trump knew this. And yet they kept trying to escalate at some points to just show that they are the victors and they can do everything on their own terms. But I think ultimately Israel will come back unless it is stopped by two things, deterrent capacity in Iran, whatever that looks like, a new air force, and understanding what went wrong, But Iran is prepared for it much more than it was at the beginning of this month, even now, because it's expecting it. And number two, finding something with America that completely upends the post-1979 order and dichotomies in the region, a new kind of security understanding, a new kind of strategic understanding, And so, Iran therefore can do a military strategic posture to replenish and recreate deterrence while actually dealing with the Trump administration in good faith to change and alter the very basis of U.S.-Iranian relationship and moving towards normalization. The only thing that can change this, and it's the best solution for both Iran and America, is normalization. Now, we have to understand that the only country that does not want Iranian-United States normalization is Saudi Arabia. Sorry, it's Israel. Even Saudi Arabia has moved to understand that a positive relationship with Iran and entente with Iran is in its interests. So you mentioned Pakistan earlier. Pakistan has very close relations with Saudi Arabia as well. Saudi Arabia and many of the Persian Gulf countries, as well as Egypt, these countries which were historically in a clash or in a cold war of their own with Iran, have shifted their position, have shifted their position and pivoted towards finding some sort of a, first a détente, and now an entente, a kind of strategic understanding with Iran, because they understand that every plan that they have requires a stable Middle East. They don't want war. That's bad for the grand projects that Saudi Arabia has. And they also understand the problem of Israel and the problem of Turkey for that reason. So they need an Iran that's capable to stand on its own. And ultimately, this means there's ample opportunity right now to completely change the general public perceptions of what the Middle East has been since 1979. The idea that you have just some crazy Islamists in Iran is not really the reality of international politics anymore. And the idea that you have some very realist state in Israel, or a very Western-oriented Turkey in Turkey, or government in Turkey that wants to join the EU. All those things have changed. Turkey has now a different set of priorities. It wants to be much more aggressive and assertive in the region. Israel wants the same thing. And Iran has changed some of its posture, not entirely, but some of its posture. I think it's going to move more and more towards a more pragmatist and nationalist posture. Because it has to. And I think that's an opportunity for us as Americans to encourage that move and allow for the forces that are more moderate to come to power and deal with us and normalize relations, because that could definitely alter everything in the region and allow us to once and for all leave the Middle East. And a focus back at home.

Well, this was a captivating conversation, Arta, and I enjoyed every facet of it, and I'm sure that the audience will enjoy it as well. Um, before we leave, feel free to promote your work.

Sure. Um, well, first of all, again, our think tank where I, uh, I'm the, um, I run the US operations and I I serve as the director of research. It's called the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. Perhaps you can put that in the labels and in the heading. And the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy is a realist think tank. You can find it at peacediplomacy.org, as well as, you know, I'm active on Twitter, and that's @ArtaMoeini PhD. You can see my name on Twitter. So Give me a follow if you would like. And we also have a more philosophical magazine called Agon. That's agonmag.com, that you can— www.agonmag.com, where it looks at the world, including domestic politics, through the lens of radical realism and what that implies.

Awesome. Thank you again for coming onto the show.

Thank you, audience.

Thank you for listening. I'm Jose Nino, and this has been the first episode of Headline Geopolitics. Until next time.

Thank you. All right.