America and Iran and The Risk of War - With Iranian-American Scholar, Vali Nasr

I think we're at a very critical point for Iran, for the Middle East, and for the United States, each in its own way. You know, there's the future of the Middle East now, you know, depends on the Gaza War, depends on Lebanon, Syria, normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But all of this in some ways depends on what happens with Iran next.

Vali Nasr is an Iranian-American scholar who has bridged the world of diplomacy, scholarship, and teaching. He knows well the country of his birth, Iran, and the country he adopted and lives and works in, the United States. The son of an Islamic scholar, He was born in Tehran, came to the U.S. with his family after the revolution in 1979, and received his PhD from MIT in 1991. He is now professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of International Studies and continues to write about the Middle East. His books include The Shia Revival, Forces of Fortune, and The Indispensable Nation. His most recent, in 2025, is Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History. We're in a moment where the possibility of war exists. We'll talk about war and what it means for the United States and Iran and the world. I'm pleased to have Vali Nasr here. Vali, thank you for doing this. It's a pleasure to see you again.

Thank you. It's very good to be with you, Charlie.

Tell me what the moment is that we're in with respect to Iran and with respect to Iran and the United States.

I think we're at a very critical point for Iran, for the Middle East, and for the United States, each in its own way. In other words, the future of the Middle East now depends on the Gaza War, depends on Lebanon, Syria normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But all of this in some ways depends on what happens with Iran next. 'Cause it's a big country, it's been at the heart of the Middle East, it's been at the heart of a lot of the issues in the Middle East, and its fate could either calm the Middle East or it could actually explode the Middle East. It's a critical time for Iran because the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic is now at an inflection point. Both at war with Israel and the United States, super military powers with nuclear weapons, which are far stronger than Iran. And also, it's also suffering or confronting a massive rebellion by its own population, which is tired of the revolution and wants to move on. And it's also a critical point for the United States because the US is at the edge of potentially entering into another major war in the Middle East, this time a country that is far larger, potentially more lethal, that could not only define Trump's presidency but also greatly impact the United States' agenda for confronting China, dealing with Europe, varieties of global issues. And so all of these strands are coming together at this point in time with the US Armada, in the words of President Trump, having been arrayed in the Persian Gulf, ready to strike Iran. And we're holding our breath to see what comes next.

And what will determine what comes next?

I think largely it is the president of the United States, because he escalated this situation into a near war. There was massive protests in Iran, but previously the United States had not weighed in to domestic issues in Iran militarily. It had condemned the regime. The United States has, with other countries, sanctioned authoritarian regimes that suppress their people. But the United States has not threatened to intervene, whether it's been in Eastern Europe, in Belarus, in Russia, in China, wherever else you've had this kind of a attempt by a population to change their government. But this time, the president said the United States military is locked and loaded, ready to rescue the Iranian protesters. And so he put the military issue on the table, and then he began to build forces in the Persian Gulf and said that the United States was looking for a change of leadership, potentially regime change and was considering different options about how to impede the Islamic Republic's ability to suppress the protests in Iran. Then most recently, he's backed away from that reason for entangling the United States in a war with Iran.

He did not mention the protesters in terms of social media that he wrote.

Right. His latest social media basically said that now the military, it was there to coerce Iran into diplomacy, to sign a deal on its nuclear program, potentially missiles, proxies, but he made no mention of the protests. And so it looks like the president rushed into a very, very delicate situation by putting the issue of war on the table. He raised expectations that the United States was going to go to war with Iran over the protests. Then he backed away from that and now says he might go to war with Iran if Iran does not sign a deal with the United States. But so in other words, he's the one who is defining objectives on the go and is changing them. And he's the one who created an expectation of war with Iran over the past 2 weeks. And then now is considering whether he should do it or not do it. And the reasons why he would do it or not do it is also changing. There is no process I can discern in the American institutions, State Department, CIA, Pentagon, that has been building around a military campaign that serves a very clear foreign policy objective, like was the case in 1991, First Gulf War or the Second Gulf War, whether you agreed with those objectives or not, there were objectives, very clearly spelled objectives. Whereas now it's largely the whim of the president. So he's now, I think, painted himself in a corner by raising the expectation of war, threatening Iran with war for differing reasons. And now if Iran does not sign a deal or if he doesn't get his way, then, you know, we either— he either has to follow through and go to war with Iran, or he has to back off, which has its own political costs for U.S. foreign policy.

Let me mention a couple of things. One, you mentioned this, but according to the New York Times and according to what he has said and his associates have said, there are three demands. One is no enrichment. Two, reduction of ballistic missiles, and 3, the idea of failing to support, reducing the support of the satellite countries in Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah. What do our allies in the region want us to do?

They actually want us to arrive at an agreement with Iran. I mean, look, let me put it this way to you, Charlie. The president has outlined what he But that doesn't mean he's willing to negotiate. I mean, there is a difference between negotiation and demanding surrender. So you could call it diplomacy. I mean, if you call, you know, forcing another country to come to the table and sign a surrender diplomacy, then yes, he wants to meet with the Iranians and get their surrender. But the region actually doesn't think this will work, and it's very dangerous. and it could plunge the region into war and things that are unseen. They want a deal. And a deal means that you have to put your demands on the table. You have to be willing to negotiate language and extent on them. And then you have to actually offer something. What we are not seeing here at all is what is he offering for what is he demanding? So if you just looked at it, he's offering nothing. What he's saying is that—

He's basically offering that we will not attack unless you do what we say.

Exactly. So that's not negotiations. That is a dictate. That is demanding the other side surrender or you're going to go to an open conflict with them. So that's not diplomatic negotiation. What the region wants is not this. The region, the back channels that are happening right now, at least we know from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, maybe others who are talking to Tehran and are talking to Washington, and are encouraging the two sides to come together directly, indirectly, arrive at an agreement, are talking about a give and take. In other words, the US has to offer something to get something from Iran. You know, in a diplomatic negotiation, every side tries to get most of what it wants and give the least that it can, but still is a give and take. And that the president is not offering. And that's why the threat of war is actually quite serious.

And so what do friends of the United States suggest we offer?

Well, it's not what the friends suggest. You have to see what is compelling to the other side. And I would say, I haven't seen any text, but I would say the Iranians want real sanctions relief, a real promise that the United States will not just willy-nilly attack them. So a kind of cessation of hostilities and sanctions relief. And they want assurances from the United States that it actually will not renege on any deal, because in Iranian view, they had a deal with the United States. They did their part in the deal. That's the previous nuclear deal.

This is the deal that Obama negotiated. Right.

And inside the US, we can debate, is Obama's deal, Trump's deal? Was it a good deal? Was it a bad deal? But to another country, they signed a deal with the United States. And the United States and Iran, in its own view, did what it was supposed to do under that deal. And the United States didn't and walked away from that deal. And so any deal-making, I think in Iran's view, has a trust factor because Iran is the weaker party here. What it gives up is much more meaningful to it. It's only leverage. And it wants to know that it will not be quote-unquote double-crossed again. And so that's also part of, I think, what they want is certain ways in which they can be assured that the deal will stick.

What's the status of the protest movement that was taking place that led to this crisis?

The protests for now have died down. I mean, there was a massive outburst of public anger in the form of, you know, probably hundreds of thousands of people going in.

Primarily about the economic condition of the country?

Well, the economic conditions, which is actually partly because of mismanagement, corruption, partly it is a consequence of sanctions, maximum pressure sanctions. I mean, the United States imposed maximum pressure sanctions to squeeze Iran's economy, you know, to nothing. Secretary Pompeo in the first term of Trump said Iran has to choose between its policies and whether it wants to feed its people. And so it was very clear, the sanctions have worked, Iran has become poor, the people are destitute. That creates an underlying anger in the public, which is pervasive. Aside from whether you like the Islamic Republic, don't like it, work for it, don't work for it, everybody in Iran is really, really unhappy. Now, that is the underlying factor, but in In December, there was a precipitous collapse of the Iranian currency, and that spiked inflation more. And the first sort of wave of the protests were by merchants who decried the situation—ongoing inflation damaging their businesses, absence of dollars, declining value of dollar. But very quickly, the protests became something much bigger. It became about regime change. It became where larger numbers came out, egged on by the exiled son of the Shah, and Trump saying, "We're locked and loaded to intervene." So now economic protests became regime threat protests. They spread to over 190 cities in Iran. The high point of it was January 8th and 9th, Then the Iranian regime decided that it was under attack by its own population, it was under attack by the United States and potentially Israel, and it saw these two things as connected together. It decided to at least shut down one of these fronts of the war, which is the domestic one over which it had control, and it did so brutally and with a great deal of bloodletting. But it worked in the sense that, first of all, President Trump did not intervene. There was no cavalry that came to rescue them. Even though he had said that one condition was that they not kill the protesters. Well, that ended up being his saving grace to back off. I mean, there was announced that one protester would be killed. That was what was in the public domain. The president claimed that there had been 800 protesters that were supposed to be killed. Even if that was an intelligence number, nobody knows where it came from. But the Iranians decided through intermediaries not to execute anybody, which provided the president an off-ramp to back away from carrying his threat. But for the protesters, it meant that he did back off. For whatever reason he backed off, he backed off. So they went in the streets, they died in large numbers, expecting an American intervention that didn't come. And the crackdown broke the back of the protests. And I have to add, Charlie, the protests were in a way a sudden burst of anger, but they were not really organized. There's no leadership. There's no sort of grassroots movement that was managing them. There's no political party that was leading them. And amorphous protests like this, either have to evolve and grow and then develop organizational capabilities, or they ultimately fizzle out, particularly when they're under, you know, massive military threat by the state.

So in past conflicts like this, nationalism is a factor. And so people will rally Even though they have problems with the administration, if there's a protest, but if there's an outside force, they will rally behind the country.

Right. And that's what happened in June when Israel attacked Iran. Israel expected that given that Iran had gone through a wave of protests over the hijab issue just a short while before the war, that the Iranian public would rise in rebellion. And at least from my own contacts with colleagues and family and friends, the very first night when Israel killed about 30 Revolutionary Guard commanders and about a dozen nuclear scientists, there was a sense of glee in Iran that these were the enemies many people thought they were, officials of the state they were fighting. And there was a sense of, you know, maybe something good comes of this. But the next morning when they saw the damage that had happened, the collateral damage, the number of apartment buildings damaged, how many additional people had been killed for every Revolutionary Guard commander that had been killed, the mood began to change. And it was not sympathy for the Islamic Republic, It was a sudden realization that there is no such thing as a clean war, that there's always collateral damage. And they didn't rally to the government in Iran so much as they rallied to protect their country. Not only nationalism, a sort of a sense of affront that the country has been attacked by the outsider, but a real fear that a war on Iran could turn Iran into Syria, into Libya, into other Middle East cases that the Iranians know very well. And so this fear that Iran may be destroyed, may be dismembered, may be broken up, and that Iran will be the collateral damage of Israel and America's war on the Islamic Republic is why the Iranian public decided not to aid and abet in this war. Now, if America attacks again, nobody knows how the Iranian public would react, given the brutality they just have suffered over the past 2 weeks. I think some of it will depend on what is the nature of the attack. Again, if President Trump kills a number of senior security officials and hits some military targets, it would be very different than if this becomes a sustained air campaign that to the Iranian public increasingly looks like it's going beyond the impairment of the Islamic Republic, and it's basically becoming the destruction of the country and its infrastructure and its institutions. I think then their attitude would be different. Again, it will not be sympathy or love for the Islamic Republic. It will be to try to protect their country.

As you know well, Iran is part of sort of an axis that includes Russia and includes China and includes North Korea. Where does China and where does Russia stand? Because we know they didn't do anything when Syria was undergoing kicking out Assad?

Well, you know, there's always an expectation that they can do a lot. And maybe a lot of Iranians also have an expectation that they can do a lot. But in reality, you know, no country can give Iran the kind of support, let's say, that America gives to Israel. I mean, no country would intervene in a war between Iran and America. I mean, China or Russia were not going to come in and provide Iran with some kind of a military support that could entangle them themselves in a war with America or war with Israel. Secondly, yes, they could have provided Iran with war material, but not right in the thick of the war. I mean, air defense systems or jet fighters, even if they decided to give these to Iran, would not have been able to be put in place in a way that they would be effective when Iran is in the middle of the war or already happening. The third issue is that Iran does not have the money to buy these things necessarily. And so, you know, advanced Chinese air defense systems or the kind of jet fighters that China has given Pakistan or advanced Russian air defense systems. You know, these are expensive systems, and Iran does not have the financial means to buy these, and Iran has not been willing to accept debt from these countries in a way that would allow it to buy these things. And finally, I think China and Russia are also reluctant to give Iran weaponry that it could use against the United States, Because then they would be implicated in this, just like the fact that Iran, by giving missiles to Russia that it would use in Ukraine, has brought upon Iran the wrath of the European Union. And so, uh, it's different giving advanced weapons to Pakistan to fight against India. It's a completely different proposition to give Iran advanced weapons that it could use against the United States. And even so, I think they are giving Iran some assistance, some perhaps financial assistance, some technology behind the scenes. There have been rumors that the Chinese very quickly supplied Iran with solid fuel for its missiles after the June war. But I think Iranians realize that in confronting the United States and Israel, they're alone. They're alone in the sense that there is no source of support for them comparable to what Israel enjoys in form of source of support from the United States, or there's no source of support that would allow them to sustain themselves in a war with the United States. And that's part of the dilemma of the Islamic Republic today.

Where would the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia be if there is a war between the United States and Iran?

I think their strategy right now is to try to make sure that Iran doesn't target them directly. And they have started this process actually first by normalizing relations with Iran, by changing the attitudes they had towards Iran in 2018 when they lobbied very aggressively in the first Trump administration that Trump should leave the deal, he should impose maximum pressure sanctions. But that attitude began to change, especially when Iran targeted Saudi oil fields in 2020 and the United States did not do anything to protect Saudi Arabia. The Saudis realized that there is no scenario in which the United States would go to war with Iran that they don't get bloodied. The best they can hope is that they don't, that Iran does not view them as an enemy and target them deliberately. And so they normalize relations with Iran, they build relations with Iran. And also just a few days ago, they announced, both of them announced that they would not permit the United States to use their airspace or bases, or bases it has on their territories, to go to war with Iran. In other words, they basically told Iran, we're not going to aid the United States in this war.

Speaking of getting bloodied, what is the vulnerability of the United States militarily in the region in terms of troops and bases?

Well, Iran definitely has the capability to inflict damage on the United States. I mean, we saw during the June war that about 20% of Iran's missiles went through multiple layers of air defense systems and hit Tel Aviv and Haifa and other military sites. Now, the United States is sitting in much closer proximity to Iranian missiles than Israel is, because about 35,000 US personnel are just around Iran. There's a lot of American bases in Qatar, in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, in UAE, in Oman, in Bahrain. But 35,000 troops. 35,000 troops, personnel across the board in the region, right? And you don't need too many Iranian missiles to hit targets that matter, that would basically draw blood from the United States. Now, the US definitely has the capability to punish Iran and punish Iran severely if that comes to point. But the question that is, it is an open question that perhaps the Iranians are thinking about, is that yes, you can destroy us, but what is your threshold of accepting certain pain? Right? You know, the United States could kill Iran, but how many—

Do you think Donald Trump has an answer to that?

Well, that's the $64,000 question, because I think the Iranians may come to the conclusion that Trump's tolerance for a serious war is near zero. If that's near zero, then the Iranians do have a lot of leverage because they could hit certain targets, kill Americans. And is that an acceptable level of cost for Donald Trump? He can always punish Iran massively. But if his tolerance for getting bloodied, in other words, for American troops dying, American bases being hit, being drawn into a larger war that doesn't look like Venezuela, looks a lot more like a much larger, longer campaign that might ultimately end up with US boots on the ground. Because, you know, once you start a war, you don't know where it's going to take you. Then, yes, the Iranians do have leverage. I mean, the Gulf, the southern shore of the Persian Gulf is only about some, in some places, 90 kilometers from Iranian border. And then even aside from hitting American troops, Iranians can hit oil facilities across the region. They can spike the price of oil around the world to much higher, which is again a pain point for President Trump. In other words, you know, he's been pushing for lower oil prices. He's dealing with an issue of inflation. So rattling the energy markets or damaging them in a serious way will have consequences for American economy.

Not only that, as you well know, clearly the loss of life inflicts the greatest and understandable pain on a nation. But for Donald Trump, in addition to that, there is the political division within his own support group. MAGA is not of one mind on US opportunism abroad.

Absolutely. Until now, US opportunism has been cost-free because the president said in June that I bombed Iran and nothing happened. Not a single American was killed. They didn't do anything. He invaded Venezuela to abduct its ruler. As it turned out, not a single American was injured or killed. And so he can tell the MAGA movement right now that, what are you worried about? This is not the neocon kinds of wars. These are really nice and clean kinds of wars. But that, I think, gives Iran every incentive this time to not make it easy for Donald Trump domestically. I mean, they very well understand the MAGA dynamics. I mean, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene and these sort of anti-war MAGA leaders are very well known to the Iranians and are quite popular for that reason. And I think if they Iranians in their own mind, obviously I don't know how well they know America, but sitting in Tehran, they basically would calculate that Donald Trump's Achilles heel is domestic, oil prices, and body bags. And that's what they're threatening him with. That's what they're telling the Arabs, that's what their foreign minister said. Our finger is on the trigger. Our military will defend itself. This is not going to be like when you killed General Soleimani or when you bombed Fardow, the Iranian nuclear site.

You were in and out and that was it.

We were in and out, but Iran's answer was symbolic, right? Iran did not actually try to kill Americans. I mean, they might have died anyways, But they didn't try to do that. And so they are trying to get this message out that this time will be different.

Reality with respect to Iran, many say, and I think the Secretary of State said in his testimony before Congress, it's the weakest that country has been since the revolution of '79.

Yes, I mean, it's the weakest largely because the ground under it inside Iran is now soft and giving way. Although, you know, if you go back to the '80s and after the Iran-Iraq War, etc., the Islamic Republic was militarily and regionally weaker than it is today. But in 2003, when George Bush went into Iraq. He thought that Iraq would take 2 weeks and then Tehran, Iran would take another month and they would get rid of the Islamic Republic as well. Iran didn't have the missiles it has. It didn't have a nuclear program. But what it had was a lot more support of its people. So it's weakest not because it's not able to launch missiles or drones at the United States. It's weak because of the tumult inside Iran, but it's always very, very dangerous. I think at this moment it's important to point that out, Charlie. It's very dangerous to overread the weakness of your adversary. And also, weak governments with their backs against the wall are more dangerous and unpredictable. Than actors that don't feel that sense of vulnerability. So this makes this, I mean, I fear that the US may be overestimating how easy this might be, how weak the regime is, and it might be underestimating how unpredictable and dangerous a regime that feels its back is to the wall might be in responding to a military attack.

The Shah's son, is he a factor?

Well, he was definitely a factor. He's a factor on two fronts. One is he's been a factor in galvanizing Iranians outside of the country and galvanizing public opinion through media outside around the fact that the Islamic Republic is weak, is about to fall, and he's ready to take over. He was also a factor in calling out to Iranians to come out on January 8th and 9th. In other words, the surge in the protests and the turn of the protests away from just economic protests to being much more regime change protests. But I think it's difficult to see him as the leader who's going to carry Iran through this period. Because he doesn't have a ground game in Iran. He hasn't been in the country for 50 years. He doesn't have a political organization. He has no connection to political or civil society groups inside Iran. In fact, his attitude towards them is quite hostile, towards political prisoners, civil society groups, because he wants to assert himself as a singular leader. He has made no inroads into attracting bureaucrats, the salaried middle class, or people in the security forces. So I think his symbolic importance is more than its actual leadership position is. In order to get there, he would have to do a lot more hard work of building political organization. That may matter down the road, but right now in this particular moment we are, he's not playing, he played his hand, which is to bring the protesters out and now to lead protests outside of Iran in London, Los Angeles, Washington, etc. But he's not a decisive factor in whether Iran goes to war or not. Or in how politics inside Iran is moving on post the protests.

Is there someone within the present administration that could succeed the Ayatollah and provide some stability? I mean, the speaker of the parliament, or you see various names mentioned.

It might be, and it might be some names we know and some names we don't know. I mean, when, when Deng Xiaoping Xi Jinping or Boris Yeltsin were emerging, they were not household names in the US. And they came out of the belly of the beast, if you would. So one best-case scenario for Iran is that a faction of the Islamic Republic will basically say, enough is enough, we need to go in a different direction and would take control. It's difficult to know.

Take control meaning they would say to the Ayatollah, You're no longer in power.

Well, they would say to the— that's going to be difficult. You know, the coup in Iran of that sort is difficult. That's why I'm saying that, you know, that's the best case scenario, but it doesn't mean that it's going to easily happen. Partly is because the Ayatollah is a very towering figure and the power structure in Iran is pretty diffuse. In other words, there are multiple power centers among the clerics, multiple power centers within the IRGC. Within the economic leadership and business class, within the political leadership. And so somebody who's capable of bringing all of this together, create a coalition in a direction forward, would have to probably be once the Supreme Leader is not there. And even then, it's not going to be an easy task. And so, you know, this is not a top-down system, right? It's not like Saudi Arabia, let's say, when King Salman decided that he's going to anoint Mohammed bin Salman and empower him to reform and change the country. It's not even Shah Zahiran, where he controlled everything. And this is already a system where the Supreme Leader has the last word. But the exercise of power is quite diffuse. And then on top of it, Iran is being forced to change under tremendous amount of pressure and a question of war. Now, you could say that the threat of war actually empowers those who want to avert it and want change. But at the same time, it also empowers the security forces who are in charge of the defense of the country. And so for that reason, it's not a given that when a country is in war, that a sort of a moderate pragmatic figure who wants to take the country in a new direction would right now be in a position of asserting authority.

This is the pregnant moment, though. The Armada is there.

That's right. This is the pregnant moment. The Armada is there. I'm sure there is a lot of debates going on in Iran.

Debate among the Ayatollah and the military or debate among whom?

Yeah, I mean, Iran's Power structure has clerics in Qom and Tehran from the religious sector.

The religious center. It has lay political leadership.

It has a political class from top bureaucrats to former presidents to political activists. They sit on varieties of committees. There is security forces, and these are not unified under the command of one general like militaries we've seen around the world. Each division of IRGC has its own budget, is separate. They compete with one another. They support different political factions. But they have their own economy as well. Well, that is again, not unified centrally among them. That economy is also, you know, there are different former IRGC commanders who have different kinds of relationships with business people. Sometimes rival one another. And also the intrusion of IRGC into Iran's economy is not always easily, you know, it's not directed necessarily centrally. You cannot point to a single IRGC economic command here. And so Iran is a sort of a very diffuse political structure. So in a way, the Supreme Leader keeps all of this together, but at the same time, he acts more like setting the grand goals for the country and then building consensus. But a lot of operational running of things is not done by him per se. It is managed through a very chaotic, interlaced situation.

Do you think a year from now there will be an Islamic Republic?

It all depends on this war. Islamic Republic. No, I think it all depends on this war. You know, given the ferocity of the crackdown, without outside intervention changing the balance of power, The balance of power right now rests with the state, not with the people. They were not able to sustain a protest in order to overwhelm the system. And who knows when the protesters would return and in what form, and what their anger and sorrow and despondency, what direction it takes.

But it should say, let me interrupt you, you should say that this protest was different from the previous protests or not?

Yes, it was. It was different in the sense of the anger that it showed, how quickly it spread, how far it spread across Iran was very key. But also the outcome is very different because the level of bloodletting, not only in the number of people who were killed, the number of people who were actually injured, and injured severely in this protest. The willingness of the state to use the kind of violence and open warfare on the population—

It is said that there were somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 were killed.

Well, I mean, the numbers vary all over the place. I can only go by numbers that have been verified, which is in the 6,000 range. But even if you just took that number, That is worse than anything Iran has experienced in a very, very long time. But the problem is, the point is that as time goes on, even if people begin to believe in the larger numbers, that itself becomes political fact. In other words, if people begin to believe inside Iran, outside Iran, that 20,000 people were killed, 30,000 people were killed, even if that's not the number, those numbers themselves become political fact. Because if Iranian population believes that that's the number, that would shape their attitudes towards the regime for a very long time. And then, as I said, Charlie, it's not just how many were killed, it's how many were maimed or injured. So the number of Iranian families who are entangled in this protest, including those have not been injured but have been arrested, is quite, quite large. It's more than the families who are grieving for family members who were killed. It's very large. So that's one side of it. So I think the protest also changed, it's changed both Iranian society and the state. So both of them went through this transformed, one by the violence that it showed and the other one by the violence itself.

Okay, that's an important point. Let me underline it. It changed both the society and the state.

Yes, because a state that goes through this process of this kind of a killing, its perception of itself, its perception of power, and its perception of its public changes. You cannot get over this moment easily.

And it changed the state in the same way, in a sense?

In a sense that the security forces, the political elite, now that they made a decision and they went through killing and maiming and injuring so many people by using machine guns, open warfare, characterized them not as just being infiltrated by outside forces, but actually being on the service of outside forces or being Israeli-American agents. Its approach to governance changes, its approach to its public changes, its discourse with its public changes. And this is not unique in Iran. We've seen it in other countries as well. And similarly, and also then the institutional changes that will happen inside the system will be impacted by what happened. Who gets empowered? What institutions are created, how you handle, you know, exercise of power, who will be purged and who will stay in. These will all be decided by what the state did. And on the adverse side, the Iranian public has been massively traumatized. It's already had been traumatized by war in June, by economic strangulation by the sanctions, And now, for people to face machine guns, to see the number of people killed, the number of people who've been injured, that kind of a battering is also going to be transformative. I mean, right now, what I see talking to people in Iran, that Iranians are shocked, are sad. There's a sort of sense of despondency. And are at a loss, in other words, about where do they go, where their country goes. And then they're also facing potential for a war to come as well. And I think that gradually will also change their attitudes too about going forward. So the Islamic Republic is already changed in a massive way, not in the kind of way that we imagine, But it's already changed in a massive way. But is a state that was capable of using this kind of violence effectively, in other words, the protests were shut down with this kind of exercise of violence, is not going to readily hand over power. People are hoping that he would make concessions. There's no evidence of it. And at the foreseeable future, there is not enough political organization or muscle among the people, or even willingness to come out in the same numbers to say that in a year's time they will be just simply toppled, unless something else happens, right? Some other dynamic happens here.

So the ball is in whose court?

I think it's up in the air. I mean, right now, obviously, the regime in Iran is at a moment of facing a war with the United States. So that's deciding everything, right? Their survival, in their view, the survival of Iran, the future of Iran, everything hangs in the balance. So this is not a time when there's a lot of meetings going on about what do we do with the people, or how do we lick our wounds, or how do we heal the situation. I think everything is about the war. So either the war will happen, which will be the next very, very big thing after these protests, And it would be the war rather than the protest who's going to decide the step after, or the war will not come. And if the war does not come, I think we have to see how the Iranian state and the Iranian public basically internalize and move forward from this moment. Right. And, you know, we can look at the past. Examples. The 2009 protests eventually led to the coming to power of Rouhani as a concession and the nuclear deal. Or Iran suppressed the hijab issue as president of Iran. After hijab issue in 2022, then afterwards, Iran, they basically relaxed or gave up on enforcement of hijab altogether. We could look at that and say, well, they might make some concession, but that's not a given at all. This protest, as you said, was different. And therefore, I think the response of the state would be different. And then you have to see what the Iranian public does after this. How do they decide to show their anger at the state if public protest is not an option? If they're not willing to see brothers, fathers, sons, etc., killed by machine gunfire in the streets, then they would have to basically think of other ways of doing that. And there are discussions, I mean, like there are civil society activists in Iran who are saying that this Trump and the Shah's son call for people to just frontally attack The Citadel was a mistake because you put people in line of fire, and that actually political opposition requires the hard task of building institutions, true political movement, so that you can actually have staying power and be able to not be so easily withered with the kind of violence the state is willing to perpetuate. I'm not saying that works, but it suggests to you that there are these debates now happening. I mean, there are political prisoners who are speaking about this. There are civil society leaders who are speaking about this. Nobody is happy with the Islamic Republic. Nobody is saying that we should tolerate. The question is, what does political resistance look after these protests? And what's allowed? Well, what's allowed and what if the strategy of frontal confrontation did not work and it costs the society enormously, then what are the options? Right? This is not a new debate. This is not, sorry, Charlie, this is not a new debate in Iran. It's no different than the debates that the Russians are having. Right? It's no different than the debates that have happened in other societies in a sense of, yes, you're facing an authoritarian regime willing to survive at any cost. You're not going to throw in the towel, but the path forward is not clear, especially because one strategy was deployed and it didn't work. So you have to go back to the basics. And think through what comes next.

And because of that, that's the reason that there are many people who say Iran is weak and therefore we have to demand regime change.

You can demand it, but you're not going to get it. You see, demanding is one thing. I mean, other than there are regimes that, I mean, the United States put sanctions on Iraq for 10 10 years. The regime didn't fall. In the end, the United States had to go in and take the regime out. In Syria, it was an invasion again, masterminded by Turkey, using Syrian militia that he trained and groomed and prepared. But it was not public uprising that brought down either Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad. And even in Libya, again, it was foreign intervention at a critical moment that led to the collapse of the Gaddafi regime.

But that's exactly what I was talking about though. When I said regime change, I meant on the part of the United States viewing this as a moment for regime change. Right.

But the dilemma that the US faces is that there is no alternative on the ground to the Islamic Republic. Protesters can weaken the regime, can overwhelm it, but protesters can't govern. And protesters that don't have a political organization with them cannot actually even sustain a situation. So if the regime collapses in Iran, what happens? What happens to the Revolutionary Guards? What happens to their missiles? What happens to the 500,000 Iranian military? Right? What happens? So in a way, when Secretary Rubio a few days ago said before the Senate, nobody has a clue what comes next, that's not really reassuring because that basically what the United States can achieve is regime collapse and perhaps even destroy a lot of the infrastructure and institutions of the country in the process. But it cannot dictate what replaces it without being in Tehran, as we were in Baghdad or we were in Kabul. So, and that's exactly, I think, the problem Donald Trump faces. And that's why he's vacillating because it's a problem that he faces in Venezuela. But Venezuela was a lot simpler. At least in Venezuela, the opposition leader that he's now Chantel Machado had a political party. She was a member of the parliament. She has an organization on the ground. But even there, the CIA told Trump that she cannot be president of Venezuela and run the country without US troops on the ground. In other words, we could have a Hamid Karzai takeover Afghanistan, but if you're willing to put 200,000 American troops there. Now, think of Iran, A country of 93 million, which is orders of magnitude larger than Iraq was in 2003, or Afghanistan was, or Venezuela is. And the capital city is mountain ranges away from the nearest port facility. And yes, there's a lot of Iranians who are eager for the Islamic Republic to go, but there is no clear what would replace it. So yes, Trump's best bet is to force some group within the Islamic Republic itself, essentially stage a coup against the Supreme Leader and the hardliners, come forward and say, you know, we're going to run the country and we're going to make a deal with you. But that right now is is more hope than possibility. I mean, I don't see the contours of that happening easily without the Supreme Leader not being there. So then Trump has come to the idea that maybe we should kill him, but it's not easy to do that. I mean, the Israelis tried during the 12-Day War. They didn't find him. He very well knows that they want to kill him. He's not accessible. They probably have come up with all ways in which would make either capturing him or finding him much, much more difficult. And so, you know, a decapitation strike will likely come if the United States was sure where he was. And they might take that risk and say, okay, let's kill him. And then hope that out of this killing, a faction would take over that that is willing to deal with us. But I think increasingly the administration has come to the conclusion that this is a rosy plan, the chances of which happening in a straightforward way are not there.

If you were a betting man, what would you think? What would you bet?

I mean, If I were to put a bet, and it's a long shot, but if I were to put a bet, is that Iran and the United States will come to some kind of an off-ramp that would avoid a war and would help defuse this moment. And then the ball is in both of their courts whether they take that and try to build a more sustained deal around the nuclear issue, missiles, proxies that actually mean fundamentally cessation of hostilities. I think that the reason I think that is put both sides' bravado and bombast aside, Iranians don't want war. That's the last thing they want is a war with the world's sole superpower. That if it breaks out in earnest, they cannot control, and it could devastate Iran and the regime. And the United States also does not want war. At least this president is pretty risk-averse. And I think he's calculated that, yes, the United States in the end can always get its way because it can destroy at will and it has the most powerful military in the world, but it cannot control the outcome. And the process of getting to regime change or regime collapse could be bloody for Donald Trump. And then he's going to own, it's the Pottery Barn rules, as Colin Powell said it, he's going to own the consequences. A collapsed regime, a chaos in Iran, civil war, the worst case scenarios may not be impactful for Israel because Israel does not have a border with Iran. It's far away from Iran. But it could devastate oil markets. It would devastate Saudi Arabia. It could undermine the region for a period of time. And those risks, I think, are weighing on the US as well. So I don't think Trump is eager to go to war. If I were to read one way of reading his tweet in Truth Social day before yesterday, when he said a massive armada is coming, you better come and sign a deal. It was almost like he was begging for diplomacy, like he was giving ultimatums, but the weight of that tweet was on trying to persuade the Iranians by threatening them to sign a deal to avert war. So this sense that both sides really don't want war is probably why I would think that they are both looking If they can find it, they are looking for a credible off-ramp that allows them to back away from this moment of confrontation.

Thank you so much.

It was good being with you.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to see you again. And you said a lot of things that I think a lot of people who are looking at this and don't quite understand exactly the moment we're in, and you've helped. Join me, become a subscriber to Charlie Rose Global Conversations and make it a better experience. Click this link to subscribe.