What happens next inside Iran?

As in Venezuela, you have somebody who works at the bidding of a foreign power, but does what 80% of the population want. That thing can work.

There is no real national interest of the United States, and I will say that clearly and without any hesitation, in trying to change or collapse or do anything in Iran. I think the ultimate goal of the Israelis is a kind of a civil war in Iran.

Hello, and welcome back to UnHerd. Now that we are in the throes of what rapidly looks like a general Middle Eastern war, there are so many different aspects that the Western media is getting excited about and focusing on. There's the internal politics in European countries, in places like the UK, different factions winning out. There's the effect on the economy. People are looking at, quite rightly, the Straits of Hormuz and what that is going to do to global oil markets. There is the question of how many other countries will be dragged in, how wide could it escalate. The question that we think is more important than all of those is also the hardest one to answer, which is what is going to happen next inside Iran? Because this is a country where we have very little information in the West as to what is going on at the highest levels of the regime, or even frankly, on the ground. We're going to try to tackle that hard question today by putting in front of you two very different perspectives. The first is, if you like, the American perspective. It is what voices inside the Pentagon, inside the American administration, believe and hope will happen next inside Iran, the outcome they are looking for. We're then going to present the opposite view, what people who are closer to the Iranian side think might happen next. So we're really going to give you two sides of this question. And by the end, of course, as ever, you can make your own mind up. First up, in order to talk about really the Pentagon and the administration's predictions and hopes for what happens inside Iran, we have Professor Edward N. Luttwak. He is perhaps one of the foremost experts on grand strategy, coup d'état, the geo-economic and geopolitical fallout of these kinds of actions. But he's also someone who deeply understands the Pentagon. He has been inside many different administrations. He's been in and out of that building for decades, ever since the '70s, and really has a deep understanding of their way of thinking. So it's hard to think of anyone who can better give us that perspective. Professor, welcome back to UnHerd.

Thank you.

What is your sense of what the Trump administration wants to happen inside Iran?

They want regime change without troops on the ground, any troops on the ground. The moment you bring boots on the ground, as the phrase goes, you bring the American Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps machinery there. All of them want to participate. Their logistic requirements are luxurious and vast. The whole thing becomes very heavy. And then along the way, you try achieve your aim. And you have accumulated all kinds of costs. People have died. Because people have died, you can't walk away. You intervene in a country, your troops are killed, and you can't go home and say, sorry, I made a mistake. You have to say, no, victory's around the corner, et cetera. To avoid all of that, the funding, the principle, the operating principle is no soldiers in Iran. No ground forces enter Iran, period. You have to achieve a kind of levitation or effect from a distance. Now, this was pulled off in Venezuela. In Venezuela, the simple device was, no, we don't destroy the government. We simply remove Maduro and Mrs. Maduro, and we put in the number 2. Now, strangely enough, this could be done in Iran, because as you know, among the peculiarities of Iran, there are many, They actually had a presidential election. The president has nothing to do with foreign policy, Revolutionary Guards, or missiles. He just administers the Iranian state at home. That president, Masoud Pashinyan, is actually an ethnic Azeri, which is very important in this case, brought up in a Kurdish area. So he's a sort of multiethnic type. He's also a technocrat and is not at all a religious fanatic or anything of the sort. So Pajizian is a candidate in the presidential election along the guy that is closer to the regime, who is a classic extremist, Islamist, Shia imperialist, et cetera. He wins the election. The election is a real election. And he actually wins it.

This is in 2024, right? So this is around 2 years ago. Yeah, that's right.

When Raisi, the president who was a far and prosecutor condemned 38,000 people to death and so on. He died in a helicopter accident. They had to have a new president. They had an election and the Khamenei, the boss, wanted people to show up at the election. So if they only had candidates who were mass murdering extremists and mass murdering extremists with a beard or something, Nobody would have showed up for the election. The big threat was no show up. So they put in Khatami and he wins. How does he win? By saying two things. One, I'm going to save the Iranian economy by removing all these embargoes. How I'm going to do it? By talking to the Americans. And what I'm going to say to the Americans, whatever it is, will remove the embargo. That's how he got elected. The moment he became president, He had only the state administration in his hands, a rather limited role in Iran. He didn't have Revolutionary Guards, he didn't have the Islamic foundations that have most of the nation's capital in their hands. He had very limited powers, but one power he did have was to occasionally speak. And what he said was, he didn't talk about Israel, he didn't talk about Yemen, he talked about one thing. If we do not stop what we are doing and turn around and invest billions and billions and billions, Tehran will have to be evacuated because we have neglected the water supply for 30 years while pursuing adventures. He didn't say the other part, said we've neglected the water in Tehran, we'll have to evacuate the city of 12 million inhabitants. And he starts talking about things that redirect the attention to Iran's needs. Now, as you know, and most people in the world know, the Iranians have diverted their foreign currency earnings from exporting oil, from their national structural needs, to arming Hezbollah and Hamas and Houthis and everybody else, plus building this gigantic missile construction industry, which produced an enormous number of ballistic missiles, more than, by the way, Russia or America ever produced. Produced, in numbers anyway. And what did they do? They did not invest in gas pipelines. So Iran with unlimited gas has limited gas supplies, which only reach some localities, most of them they don't reach.

Professor, how will the current president, who is already the president, deliver a new outcome for Iran now that the country's been attacked?

The way you deliver it is that you kill off his enemies. He is a president with this very limited role because the power goes from the, uh, it went to the Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards were running the country. They were receiving the hard currency earning from oil supply and using them for the nuclear projects and their missile projects. Both of them, by the way, hugely overbuilt. Iran has a huge installation in Natanz. You've heard about it for years. They had the other one in Fordow, another huge installation underground. Then you had the third one in Isfahan. I mean, compared to this, you know, 40 years ago, the Israelis acquired their nuclear weapon in a building that looks like a large garage, okay? And they didn't spend measurable percentages of their GDP at all to do it. You want the nuclear weapon, what the Revolutionary Guards— this became their project to put their hands on the whole economy, because everything is grossly overbuilt.

The Supreme Leader has obviously been taken out, Khamenei, but he will be replaced. It doesn't seem likely there's going to be a whole new constitutional settlement that empowers the President to deliver economic reforms and the role of the Supreme Leader will just stay vacant. How does this play out?

If they appoint his Mojtaba, his son, if they appoint his son, then the regime starts collapsing because the Supreme Leader is supposed— this is the system that Ayatollah Khomeini invented. Shia clerics through history were quietest, quietest. The official doctrine is, let's wait without excessive impatience for the return of the missing 12th Imam. Who is alive and well, but occult. He's hiding. We have to wait patiently for him. So the tradition is that the Shia clerics were quietest. They were scholars, actually scholars and not people who did things. Arta Moeini PhD totally diverged in 1970, not 2,000 years ago. In 1970, came out with his doctrine called Velayat-e-Faqih. Now, Faqih, F-A-Q-I-H, I'm not trying to be rude, is supposed to be a jurist, an expert, in Shia law and jurisprudence. Now, Khomeini made himself into a huge hero and he filled this role of the Grand Ayatollah that he was authority as this jurist. In other words, he designed this role and then filled this role through this process of exile and everything else. Now, he cannot be replaced by just anybody. When Khomeini replaced him, having been his longtime disciple, there were questions raised in Iran about the level of his scholarship. But now they put his undistinguished son there. It doesn't work at all. Shi'ism rules out dynastic succession. The whole idea of Shi'ism is that it's not dynastic succession.

So your hope or prediction is that somehow the whole constitutional arrangement of revolutionary Iran will change because the function of the Supreme Leader will somehow be disintegrated because the candidate isn't strong enough?

No, they have to find a Supreme Leader who is plausible. It's plausible. And the son is not plausible in that role. He will not be accepted by the people who count, which is the academies in Najaf, which is in Iraq, which is not so convenient for them. Najaf is number one, number two is Qom, right remote from Tehran, no way they're going to accept, in other words, the people who care about Shiism and the whole concept of that religion and its structures cannot accept this type of, because hereditary succession is exactly, is contrary to what they believe. What they believe is that this is a great scholar recognized by the other scholars, and now we put him in charge of the country. That was the theory.

I do see that. And obviously, it is an irony that revolutionary Iran rose up in opposition to a monarchy. And now it looks like they're going to have a hereditary succession, which is definitely—

But that will not be accepted. That's the very point.

So do you not think it's possible, though, that given the attack that has just happened, they might see the son taking over as just a kind of continuity? It's a sort of way of sticking two fingers up to the US because it says, okay, you can kill our Supreme Leader, but we have one 'Just like him in the wings, we are carrying on as before.' The people who support the entire concept were perhaps 20% before the war.

With the losses of the war and with the exposure of the total incapacity of this boastful Revolutionary Guard. Revolutionary Guard said, 'The moment there's a war, Israel disappears. Okay, like that, it's going to disappear.' They failed, obviously. They failed in everything they did. This regime had a certain narrow base of support, which has become narrower. 80% of the population are opposed. But the more practical thing is—

But can I just challenge that? Sorry, Professor, but I mean, how do we know really what percentage of the population is opposed? And it just sounds a little bit like Western hubris to presume that that population will will shrink if we attack them?

First of all, you may have noticed that there were huge demonstrations in Iran against the regime. You may have noted there were no counter-demonstrations. 80% is a very low, I mean, it's a really conservative estimate of the people who oppose the regime. 80%, conservative. Now, the regime has failed. The regime has failed twice. First, it diverted all the resources to these foreign adventures. The foreign adventures One after the other, the support of Assad, the Hezbollah, the whole thing, one after have failed. And now their base of support cannot be as high as 20%. But the more practical thing is that Pashinyan is an Azeri and a very declared Azeri. The culture is not Azeri nor Kurd. The culture of the political culture in Iran is the classic Persian culture. They all read the Shahnameh, the national epic, which is indeed worth reading, and the poetry and so on. They're all in the national culture, but he is emphatically Azeri. And there are 2 million or 3 million Azeris living right in Tehran who are proud of the fact that he is the president of Iran and who will be willing to protect him if he's attacked. The Azeris have a strong Azeri identity. There was a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The government of Iran supported Armenia, Christian Armenia against Azerbaijan for classic reasons. And the Azeris demonstrated in Tehran, strongly demonstrated because the government was going against Azerbaijan, which is a different, a foreign country, but inhabited by fellow Azeris. Now they have an Azeri president, If the Revolutionary Guards try to pick him up, arrest him and shoot him, because he wants to do what he said he would do, namely, give up the nuclear project and start restoring the country, the answer is he has 2 million people around him to protect him. He's not defenseless.

So sketch for us the ideal scenario as you see it. So they appoint Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, who is, as you see it, an implausible leader. Somehow that leads to some kind of collapse in the regime or constitutional change?

What I see simply happening is that Pashinyan, with the support of the Azuris in Tehran, to prevent his murder, his quick murder by the Revolutionary Guards, he starts asserting himself. Why he asserts himself? Because he ran for election, he got elected to do this very big thing of giving up the nuclear project and removing all the embargoes on Iran. And start rebuilding the country after 30 years of severe neglect, which has affected the water supply, the gas supply, the electrical supply. This winter in Tehran, people could not warm the houses with electricity. They had to burn stinking residual oil. In this environment, it's possible to do something like happened in Venezuela, namely that the regime is not destroyed. You don't have American troops running around, But within the regime, somebody emerges that does the things that the United States wants them to do, which I think a huge percentage of the Iranian people want them to do. As in Venezuela, you have somebody who works at the bidding of a foreign power, but does what 80% of the population want. That thing can work.

So in your estimation, having had your conversations with people inside the Pentagon and perhaps in the administration, You think that the situation you've just described is what they are aiming for? If there is a strategy, if there is a good outcome, it's that, that you get a more assertive Pahlavi president and a diminished Supreme Leader, and that overall the trajectory of Iran veers more friendly to the US?

Yes, except that this is not a complicated scheme. It is simple reality. A, American troops are not in Iran, will not be in Iran. So Any of those options are out. Therefore, you need to evoke a solution. You cannot enforce it with bayonets because they're not going to send troops. The ready-made solution in place is the fact that they do have a president who was elected, who was elected on the promise of doing what the world would want Iran to do, but he was not allowed to do it by the Supreme Leader Khamenei. He was now dead. This thing is a doable proposition. The elements are there. Okay. The elements are there. And you don't, from the guy in the White House does not have to engineer it because as a matter of fact, that's the only thing that can happen because A, he cannot send troops. You cannot invade Iran, period. You cannot go to Tehran. So it must be evolved internally. And that is, so all they have to do is to ensure that if Revolutionary Guards try to get organised to physically, they do a coup d'état. If they try to do a coup d'état, then now you can bomb them. That's the only American intervention that can work is for them to attack the Revolutionary Guards if the Revolutionary Guards try to assert their control physically in Tehran.

I think a lot of people watching have strong memories of Iraq, Afghanistan, many other attempted interventions from afar, and some on the ground by the US that have not turned out to be going to plan. I guess my question is, how can you be confident that the cards will fall in the way that you say when there can be many other outcomes that could be far worse?

Those very memories are what drives this process. And those memories are far stronger in Washington than they are anywhere outside Washington. I myself testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Biden as it happens, against the Iraq War of 2003. I said, "The project to install a democracy in Iraq is a mad project. Iraq is not a nation, there's not a state, there's no unity. There are only rival groups, different Kurds, Talibanis, Barazanis fighting Turkmen and Kurds." The Kurds and Turkmen against the Sunnis, the Sunnis against the Shia, the Shia, the different, I said, you go, and my testimony was very clear, you go into Iraq and it's going to be a catastrophe, a disaster. Those memories, it wasn't listened to at the time. Now everybody knows. So in other words, the Americans have learned something from Afghanistan and Iraq. First, if you try to achieve political change, don't try and do it with bayonets. Deadpanness because the Americans are not like other people. They're not Genghis Khan. They're not willing to go and massacre everybody in the country who disobeys. They cannot have a North Korean solution. So they don't have to be clever. A, they cannot send troops. So rule that out without any consideration, any possibility. And indeed, the only merit, I mean, I would say the great merit of the Secretary of Defense, who was more of an NCO than an officer and so on, is that he actually served. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, therefore realized the futility of it, the absurdity of trying to install feminism in Afghanistan. You recall the madness that the Afghan parliament had a higher female quota than the number of females in the House of Commons or the United States Congress. In other words, once you send the Panjshir Drum Army, Navy, Air Force, multi-service with all the NGOs, the plague of NGOs that show up that to introduce feminism in Afghanistan and fishing in a desert and all kinds of rubbish, everything goes to hell. And the Trump intervention idea is you defang the enemy, you destroy the nuclear, destroy the missiles, and then you hope for the best and you try, you know, you might do something like Russian guards at besieged position, American airplanes show up and blow them up or something like that.

One last question for you, Professor. You've sketched a scenario for us, which would be a positive outcome for the US. Now tell us what you think the worst-case scenario is.

The bad scenario is that Pahlavijian is murdered tomorrow morning or tonight, or while this show is not over. The Revolutionary Guard, some revolutionary bearded Revolutionary Guard general says, 'I'm in charge,' or something like that. But the attempt to smoothly replace the Ayatollah Khamenei with his son in violation of every Shia concept, that cannot work. In other words, their scenario cannot work at all. The smooth succession and nothing happened and continue broadcasting on television, Iran has won great victories and the world is shaking in its boots and so on.

Professor Edward Luttwak, thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you. Thank you.

Our next guest is Dr. Arta Moeini PhD. He is going to provide a very different perspective. He is Managing Director of of the Institute of Peace and Diplomacy in the US, knows Iran and its culture very well. He is a heritage Persian, but also has lived there for quite a long time, and probably is more up to date with what's actually going on in that country than most people in the West. Welcome back to UnHerd, Arta.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

What's your best guess, let's get straight into it, of what happens next? The Supreme Leader has been taken out, We hear rumours that his son, Mojtaba, is being kind of selected as a potential replacement. What do you know, and what should we know about what is likely to happen next inside Iran?

I don't know if Mojtaba Khamenei is going to be the next Supreme Leader of Iran. I think there are many people who use that to create sort of a sense of hereditary transfer of power. But so far as we know, Khamenei, he was very clear that he doesn't want that sense of hereditary change. He is a very powerful person. He's very connected with the IRGC, and I think that's the key line. Iran is a very entrenched, has a very entrenched social order and very entrenched political system. It is highly decentralised, it is very layered, it is horizontally organised.

What does that mean, just for our viewers and listeners? What does it mean to say something is horizontally organised?

There are a lot of redundancies. There are many different people that sort of work within their networks, and the networks are all sort of parallel to one another. So you can't just decapitate a head and expect the regime to fall. The closest systems to the Iranian system we have to think about are the USSR or China, perhaps even North Korea. Definitely not the sort of the sultanates and the dictatorships that were person-centered in the Middle East. A lot of the critics of the regime think that the regime just doesn't care about human life, as if it doesn't care about the people. It doesn't care about human life in general in the sense that it thinks that life is in the service of the system. So it also didn't care about the life of the Supreme Leader and its military leaders and others. Everybody is expendable for the system.

So what you're saying there, which is point one for Western strategists to try to absorb, is that just because you've taken out the number one guy, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and a number of his lieutenants, it doesn't mean that the system is decapitated in the sense that it would be if it was like a pyramid system, and suddenly, it all falls over. You think there's a kind of resilience there because it's networked, and there are all these different parts of the state, it's more resilient to that kind of action than other countries might be.

You could not have gotten the Soviet Union to fall with a war. You could not have gotten China to do anything or change. Fundamentally, this China today is a different China than it was under Mao, for example. But it didn't come through war.

So you think the revolutionary Iran, the state as it is right now, a few days after these attacks, is still robust and intact, even despite the protests we've seen over the recent year? Your feeling is that Western commentators are overestimating the amount of damage they've done?

That is correct. I think again, the way that the West thinks about Iran was always as sort of a fragile paper tiger, couldn't do much, but it is It is a regional state, it is a regional power, and there is a reason for that. The ideological character of the regime has to be understood in the context of the geopolitics and the kind of unique characteristics of the Iranian state itself. And the Iranian state, as we're seeing today, was not just created in 1979.

We've just had Professor Edward Luttwak on the show. So he is someone who has been around a long time. He's seen many American administrations. He's very familiar with the way the Pentagon thinks about these kinds of things. And his analysis is that what the administration and inside the Pentagon, what they are thinking is that the current President, Président Macron, is their hopeful candidate for someone who is going to get more influence than he used to. His analogy is Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela, there, supposedly, they have been successful. It's early days yet, it's worth saying, but they have been successful, and they took out the top guy. And there was someone there who can gently pivot the country to be more friendly to America. The analogy is that the elected President Pesechian had spoken in ways that were more reforming, he was being held back by the Ayatollah, and now he's going to be able to be more dominant in this new world. Is that right?

I think this is an absolute mistake. I kind of see where Ed is coming from. I just think that the entire analysis on Iran has been mistaken over and over again. They don't understand the unique structure and characteristics of the Iranian state, not just because it is the cultural and religious and political nuances of a different culture and society, but also the unique structure of a modern state. It doesn't work on personality. No one person can tame the beast, the Leviathan, the Minotaur, as Bernard de Jouvel would call it. Once you birth these kinds of states, the state rides you. You don't ride the state.

Yeah, but I'd like you to be a bit more specific if possible. Like, why is that theory wrong? So the president is still there. He is still the president and has whatever powers he has, not as many as the president of a Western republic, perhaps, but he has some influence. The language he's used has been about trying to get rid of sanctions and improving the economic situation. Why is it wrong to hope that he might have more influence now?

He represents what we have seen over and over again, a kind of a reformist faction in Iran. But the reformists, especially after this war, but over time, have been increasingly marginalised. What happens is the IRGC has increasingly And not just IRGC, security establishment in Iran, other networks, the regime base of support, let's say. So this is also a social phenomenon. I think they have become more hardline as the sort of secular Iranian segment of society has become more anti-regime and fundamentally broken with the regime. You have the IRGC actually saying, you know, we cannot deal with the West. Any longer. Because this is what I think the audience needs to understand. Khamenei developed this culture of resistance about everything. He was trying to show that his mythos was all about resistance, that he captured this religious symbolism of the previous Imams of Shiism, whether Ali or Hussein. And he was trying to show that to his audience, to his people. A lot of the programming, a lot of the media, it's directed at the base of the regime, not at the society at large. And that has been one of the major aspects of of the problem.

Your thesis then is actually that by taking out the Ayatollah, you enhance the hardline element, because he will now have the aura of a martyr about him. And that kind of groundswell of support for the more hardline approach will be expanded. Is that what you think will now happen?

Yes, I think a lot of the Iranian establishment are Western-oriented. So Hassan Rouhani, Javad Zarif, Pezeshkian, There is this sort of fascination with the West that even exists within the regime, and it also exists within the diaspora and within liberals in Iran. There's this kind of schizophrenia between loving the West and hating the West constantly for generations. And this has also permeated the regime. But that faction, which was basically the original, it came out of the original leftist inclinations of the Iranian Revolution, the socialist Islamists basically ended up being the ones that pushed for more Western openness and more democracy or more representation for the people. People. And they got shut out because the politics didn't allow for that. And I think to this day, it doesn't allow for that, even after all this.

So why is there not a chance that that kind of politics will have more power or more sway in this, whatever comes next?

They were kept at bay because their orientation, their worldview, was viewed as threatening to the cause of the Islamic revolution doctrine. But the original basis of the revolution was a sovereignist revolution, and Islam was then used, and Khomeini was able to bring everyone together under this sort of like Shia doctrine. But the original impetus was anti-imperialism, Iranian sovereignty, and that's why it had a lot of secular leftists, nationalists, students, labourers, it had all of these people, not just a traditional clerical establishment, not just the bazaar, but it was a national revolution.

In which case, what happens next? What is the most likely next step or two after Iran has now received this massive attack, which has taken out the Supreme Leader of the past 36 years? It's a major event, obviously, for that country at the very least. And who knows how long or how deep those attacks and that conflict will go on. But what's your best guess as to the next steps inside the governing elites?

Khamenei was wavering as to what to actually do. So he had one foot in resistance, but then the entire Iranian economy ran on the dollar. He was developing missiles, but then those missiles functioned on the American GPS. But since the 12-day war, increasingly they understood that any kind of openness with the West, I'm talking about the security establishment and the more realist and hardline voices, the pragmatists even, they understood that any kind of opening with the West in that sense may actually create more existential threats for the regime down the line, that they don't want Iran to be, let's say, viable as a state. And so, In a sense, they are going to come out of this thinking further east rather than west, thinking China rather than the United States.

So first of all, you think it may be counter-effective, as it were, this attack, because the deceased Ayatollah will be martyred in a sense. Second of all, you think it might pivot Iran long-term to being even more isolationist, even less interested in a Western relationship, and if anything, more keen to join a kind of non-Western bloc. But all of that hinges on the idea that they are able to choose. I guess the counter argument must be if they are being pounded by American missiles, and the insistence of the US is that the nuclear programme has to stop and some more reasonable person needs to present themselves as the leader, they may not have a choice.

That's the US view of this. All the talk about negotiations, we were never interested in negotiating with the Iranians. We gave them terms, and we ask them to capitulate. And again, this is what I mean, the cultural mistranslation, the misreading. They don't understand that just because, even if you offer them favorable economic terms, removal of sanctions, investments, they even offered to pay for their nuclear fuel, but there's this lack of trust from the Iranian side. They think that they have staying power and they're resilient, and the Trump administration thinks that in terms of power balance, they can pound Iran and they're doing it. It would work in a sense if you're thinking about a much more centralised state. The Iranian state has all of these redundancies and is decentralised. So if you keep hitting them, there are going to be more people that are going to replace and they're willing to wait you out.

You've said that Iran is a surprisingly resilient and distributed network state and therefore 'Although it's a blow, it will survive this kind of attack.' But I've got to push back and ask, what are the limits? Because it looks quite like Iran has been exposed as really very weak in the past week. They have had an enormous attack on them from the US and Israel, it has killed their de facto head of state, the Supreme Leader, and all they have been able to do in return is shoot random missiles to 10 different regional countries without landing any major destruction anywhere, frankly, a few missiles have landed, but it's not a very almighty response, frankly, from such an almighty country. And a lot of people will be looking at this, they've been terrified of the idea of war with Iran, because they thought some great— all hell was going to break loose. And where is it?

The Iranian strategy is not about that. The Iranian strategy is an asymmetric strategy. And all you need is to have more resolve than your enemy. That's all you need to do. And you will survive.

So what does that look like practically? So is this to do with disrupting global trade via the Strait of Hormuz? What else can they do?

So for example, already what they have done, first of all, they have taken out out major radar stations, and they have gone after US bases in the region for the specifics of taking out surveillance and radars of the United States that's used for air defense, for the THAAD missiles and everything else. You basically bring that region and not just the energy, but the economies of those regions to a halt. You create a sense of insecurity. You have them call the White House and ask for a ceasefire. And Donald Trump has already asked the Iranians for ceasefires and they didn't want the ceasefire. So if it was just about like not being pounded by American bombs, they should have accepted the ceasefire or they should have capitulated earlier, but they didn't. So the question is why, right? So I think there's a major thing here that's being missed, which is they have more stocks of missiles that they can use. And the interceptors that the United States and Israel and its allies are using is being increasingly depleted. And if they probably will run out of that in a week or two. And so their strategy is to get them to that point, and then use it, use the missiles as a bargaining tool, not to give it up, but to basically, they can pound Israel once they can't intercept the Iranian missiles.

Do you think the Iranian regime, such as it is, wants to draw the US into a deeper conflict? Is that the strategy, that trying to hope, for example, that they will send more military to defend the Straits of Hormuz that Iranians can then attack. Do you think that's part of their longer-term plan?

The Islamic Republic didn't want this conflict with the United States. It's bizarre why we are in a war with Iran. No one can give a straight answer as to why. You saw what Rubio's imminent threat was, that Israel was about to attack Iran. Well, stop Israel from attacking Iran, but they didn't do that. There is no real national interest of the United States. And I will say that clearly and without any hesitation in trying to change or collapse or do anything in Iran. I think the ultimate goal of the Israelis is a kind of a civil war in Iran.

Is that possible, do you think? I mean, a civil war must be one of the outcomes. I mean, you mentioned how Khamenei was very good at sort of being ambiguous and bringing together all these different factions. You take that influence away and there are the Azeris and then there are the hardliners and then there are the reformers and all the rest of How likely is a civil war?

It's much deeper than a normal civil war even. I think the Iranians are, the Iranian people in general are deeply polarised. They live in fundamentally different moral and ontological universes. This is, I would call it the first ontological civil war if it happens, and is a disaster for Iran.

If that does happen, is that good or bad for the West?

It's horrible for the West.

Why?

Lack of stability in the region will have spillover effects. In Iran, will have spillover effects like the United States has never seen. Iran is, again, the world, the world geopolitics of the world has certain linchpin states, and if they are destabilized, you get regional and then global instability. One such state is Iran, and I call them middle powers. They're civilizational powers. The reason that they are staying in their regions is because of historical reasons, geographic reasons. Like, you can go back and you can see always there is there is a kind of a kingdom and an empire controlling that domain of land. And it's quite large. There is a reason for that.

Let me ask a question that I asked Professor Lüdbeck. What is your view of the best-case outcome for the West at this point? And what is your view of the worst-case outcome?

I mean, the least bad outcome is some sort of common sense coming back to the Trump administration, we stop this war, we stop the Israelis from doing this. We find an understanding that basically tries to bring Iran into the fold economically and otherwise, and basically do what Nixon did to Egypt after Nasser, but respecting Iran's sovereign rights.

What's the worst-case outcome, do you feel? What's the outcome that you think would be most frightening for the West?

I think the worst-case outcome is Trump doesn't put his foot down with Netanyahu. Rogue elements, whether they're Quds or the MEK, are somehow brought into Iran. They take a few cities. You end up starting a civil war. And I call this the sort of the Syrianization of the Iranian problem, but except that Iran is not Syria. It's not a sort of a post-colonial state. It's an ancient state that has structural staying power. And that civil war is going to devastate. It's going to bring America in in a way that you have not seen before. It's going to completely change the dynamics of the region. Persian Gulf countries can say bye to their economies because the entrenched elements that will be the IRGC, that will continue to be entrenched, will continue to send missiles and bombs into the Persian Gulf as the civil war is going to go on, and the dominant state is going to disappear. So you're going to get a lot of violence and a lot of migration flows. All these right-wing pundits who talk about immigration, you're going to see huge refugee crisis across the world that you haven't seen before. And the global economy, I mean, this is the world energy center. And so you're going to have that problem as well. And ultimately, also strategically, it's disastrous for the West because the winner is, I think, China for sure. The post-war order that was based on sort of American power, you are seeing the bombs and their tactical power and the awesomeness in that sense of their power. But I think when they don't achieve strategic ends and when countries don't do what the United States says, that actually discredits US power. The Ukraine war was the first phase of this change to a new order. And the Iran war today, it's going to be the culmination and result in a rupture. And that rupture, so that we will go look back at some point to this war as the moment that sort of this US era of invincibility has completely vanished. So I think the Trump administration is in for a big surprise, and I think they will also have political repercussions because of this war domestically. This is horrible for J.D. Vance, Rubio, whoever wants to run. They gave a huge benefit to the Democrats for no reason at all. And none of this is in US interest. Donald Trump promised to focus on domestic renewal in the United States, and he's just going from one war to another. The United States cannot make munitions and ammunitions fast enough to compete with all the wars and all the bombing campaigns that we are conducting. And so in that sense, all the other parts, regions of the world are going to benefit from this decentering of the United States. And I think that's a tragedy for US and doesn't have to happen. But we have to understand that we live in a post-unipolar world and we can't dictate terms to middle powers around the world. This is what I've been saying. This kind of sort of extra-regional, faraway war can no longer us do anything for the US interest. It actually backfires.

Arta Moeini PhD, thank you for your time today.

Thank you.

That was Dr. Arta Moeini PhD putting a very different spin on the events of the last week. His view is that it was a catastrophic mistake for the US to attack Iran directly. And that whatever the next outcomes, if they continue down this path, whether it is civil war, or whether it is an even more hardline spirit and regime in that country, that would be bad for the United States. A very different point of view than we heard from Edward Luttwak. As always, it's up to you to decide who you thought was more convincing. Thanks for tuning in. This was UnHerd.