Everything You’re Told About Iran Is Wrong | Aaron Bastani Meets Vali Nasr

There are those in Iran who say we have to continue to resist. The United States, even in this 12-day war, proved that it's an enemy, that it wants to, you know, undo us. It wants— it means us harm. And then there are those in Iran who say enough. The strategy that you followed has brought both war and economic misery at the same time. So, so I think Iran, in my opinion, is already in a post-revolution debate. I would say You know, Iran is not yet at the moment when Mao died or Brezhnev died, but it's already in that tunnel.

Iran has been in the news a hell of a lot in 2025. Of course, it's been in the background in terms of the Middle East for decades when it comes to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine. Iran has been a factor. But in the 12-day conflict it had with Israel just a few months ago, it very much took global center stage, and people started asking all kinds of questions like, what does Tehran really want? Why does a country with no real military or economic base find itself enmeshed in so many conflicts overseas? Does it really support the cause of Palestinian liberation? And why would they want nukes? With me to discuss all of that is the author of this fantastic book, Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History. That's by Vali Nasr. He's a professor at Johns Hopkins University. I think this is the single best volume if you want to understand what animates Iran, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. Vali Nasr, welcome to Downstream.

Thank you for inviting me. Good to be with you.

We're talking today about Iran. People can probably guess from your name that you're Iranian. Um, just offer a little bit of a CV about who you are, what books you've written, why you are an authority on Iran, all things Iranian.

So, uh, I was trained as a political scientist in the United States. I, I worked a lot on Middle East, on issue of Islam and politics, also worked on Pakistan under Islam and politics. But I've also always been very focused on Iran, largely because the revolution was first of all transformative to my life. It's very difficult to not have your intellectual life be pivoted around that, but also because it has been so central to the history of the Middle East and in fact to the history of Islam and the Muslim world for the past 5 decades. And more recently, I've worked much more on, on politics within the Islamic Republic its evolution, its thinking, and particularly its interaction with the outside world, which to me seems to be accelerating at a very rapid pace towards some kind of a denouement, as we're— as we've been watching from events.

What do you mean by that?

Well, because there is a sense that the, the way in which the Islamic Republic set itself up, both ideologically— and I argue in my book more so in terms of a national security thinking that Iran has to protect itself from the United States and the West and resist, this idea of grand idea of resistance as a mantra for its foreign policy, has now reached certain dead ends within Iran. Economically, it has impoverished the country because of the weight of sanctions. It has isolated the country. Its infrastructure is creaking under the weight of these sanctions. The population's quite unhappy. It's being impoverished. The size of the middle class is shrinking. And also, as we saw in the confrontations with the United States recently, the 12-day war that brought war into Iran itself finally led to a major bombing of Iran by the United States. It also looks like that even on a security front, that approach that Iran has had towards the United States and the West has reached its limit. So Iran has to figure out as a country, given its size, given its location, given its capabilities, given the realities of its economy and its people, can it actually continue on this path as it had done before?

I suppose for lots of people who aren't that familiar with Iran and post-revolutionary Iran, they would say, yeah, there's a real incongruence between its aspirations regionally and the limitations of its economy. And there is clearly a tension between economic development and the foreign policy choices that the country has made since 1979. Is that debate going on inside Iran, and to what extent is it a live debate? I mean, it seems very obvious to anyone in the UK, but obviously, you know, as much as our media and political class in this country try and present Iranians or Muslims or Middle Easterners as stupid, they aren't. They're often very bright people. So where is that debate at?

This is the core debate in Iran, and it has been for some time, and it has accelerated and become bolder since Iran's war with Israel and the US bombing of Iran. And the reason for this is, my view is that Iran is not today best explained in terms of theocracy or Islam or these kinds of shibboleths that we have in the West. It's rather the Islamic Republic came to power with the belief that it was liberating Iran from imperialism. It had a view that Iran had always been under the thumb of the West since the 19th century. They almost divided Iran, occupied Iran at various times, and that Iran basically survived imperialism by the skin of its teeth. And the revolutionaries that toppled the monarchy in 1979, be they democratic liberal democrats secular Marxist or Islamic fundamentalist, they all believe that Iran lost its independence in 1953 with the coup that they allege Britain and, and the United States supported. Now, we could quibble about whether the coup was genuinely micromanaged from London or Washington. We could quibble about is it right to say that the Shah's monarchy between 1954 and 1979 was basically a puppet of the United States. But in the telling of the revolution, Iran was not an independent country. And I argue in my book that in fact, Ayatollah Khomeini believed that the greatest achievement of the Islamic Republic was that it's the first government in Iran over a number of centuries to give Iran genuine independence. Like, a few weeks ago, former Iranian foreign minister, in an interview with an American outlet, said that this government is the first to give Iran genuine independence in over 225 years. Now, I don't believe that to be true on a factual basis, but that's their truth. And so the entirety of the Islamic Republic's behavior since 1979 towards the United States, towards Israel, towards Arab governments that are allies of the United States, towards Britain, France, Germany, Europe, is that you want to take back that independence that we gave Iran, and we're going to fight you tooth and nail. So the narrative of the Islamic Republic, really at the core of it, once you brush away death to America, death to Israel, the theocracy, etc., is that we are defending Iran's independence. We are resisting the reimposition of imperialism on Iran. Now, increasingly The Iranian public is not convinced of this, and as you mentioned, this is not convincing. And it's also— it is increasingly clear that there's a really, really high cost to this maintenance, maintaining independence in the telling of the Islamic Republic. And the more these tensions are growing, the more this debate in Iran is intensifying. So you now— you have— whereas the leadership of Iran were all people who carried out the revolution in 1979. So they, their mindset is still the one that brought the revolution to power. Majority of Iranians were born after the revolution, so they don't necessarily share the idea that somehow 1979 was a moment of liberation. In fact, they may look at the pre-1979 era with certain degree of nostalgia for varieties of things. And so they're not buying into this idea that we need to resist the United States to be independent. Number one. Number two, they're saying that if a foreign policy is so costly, there might be other ways of doing it, right? So, you know, you— the cost is not just billions of dollars that you might pour into Iraq or Lebanon or Syria. It is Iran's isolation, Iran's— the opportunity cost of not being integrated into the global economy. And, and so Iranians are intensely debating that it is very obvious to them that development and resistance cannot be complementary, are in fact zero-sum choices. The Islamic Republic is of the view, and the Supreme Leader often says, there is such a thing called resistance economy. We can develop despite the United States. We can develop without being integrated into the world economy. But majority of Iranians don't believe that's possible. And so There are those in Iran who say we have to continue to resist. The United States, even in this 12-day war, proved that it's an enemy, that it wants to, you know, undo us. It wants— it means us harm. And then there are those in Iran who say enough. This strategy of resistance that you followed has really reached its dead end. Not only has it reached its dead end because it's economically damaging and no longer sustainable, But because it has failed, you haven't actually defended Iran. The strategy that you followed has brought both war and economic misery at the same time. So I think Iran, in my opinion, is already in a post-revolution debate. I would say, you know, Iran is not yet at the moment when Mao died or Brezhnev died, but it's already in that tunnel. In that 7 years that separated Mao from Deng Xiaoping, or the number of years that separated Brezhnev from Gorbachev. So already the debate is, you know, how do we address our economic development needs around where our foreign policy has left us? And I would even say that the hope that the Iranians had in negotiating with President Trump or negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015 was an attempt to get out of this quandary. That's why the Supreme Leader in Iran, which is the— who is the architect of resistance, allowed those negotiations, because it was a compromise to say, we'll give up certain things and you give up economic pressure. And so even nuclear negotiations should be understood in the context of this grand debate that you mentioned.

Your book is fantastic, your most recent book. And for me, and it's something I've recommended to a very wide range of people.

Thank you.

Hopefully they'll listen to me because it's worth reading. It really does underscore the connection between Iranian foreign policy and its near abroad and this desire for sovereignty and self-rule. And that was the quote, the quote that you had from Khomeini, which just stuck in my mind. What was the fundamental achievement of the revolution? Iran is governed from Tehran for the first time, as you say, maybe over 2 centuries. That's the assertion anyway. I suppose a few counterpoints, a few counterarguments to everything you just said, because what a supporter of the Islamic Republic would say, and I'm gonna use the word regime, and often people in the comments get really upset because they think regime means regime change, It's a word that's used in political science for all kinds of countries. I can refer to the government in this country as a regime. In fact, I often do. Somebody who supports the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Republic, would say, well, hold on, there was regime change in our country, or there was the ousting of a democratically elected figurehead in the 1950s. The Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War basically tried to tear off a little bit of Iran by by creating these two quasi-protectorates, you know, socialist republics, didn't work. There's a deal in the early 20th century between the Russians and the British to basically split the country with regards to spheres of influence. So time after time, Iran's sovereignty is curtailed. And what's key here is that the supporters of the regime would say that sovereignty is a necessary prerequisite to development. You can't develop without sovereignty. And since 1979, nobody's nibbled at us. We've been at a war, we didn't lose any territory. We haven't become Afghanistan, we haven't become Iraq, we haven't become Libya. And, and for people in Tehran, that's a, that's a major accomplishment of statescraft and geopolitics. What would you say in response to that? I don't know about you, but recently I'm on Instagram, I'm scrolling through my feed and all I see are adverts and generative AI and stuff I never wanted to see in the first place. It's not remotely like the experience I had on Instagram years ago where I was following people I chose to follow, or people at least that were vaguely similar to the people that I chose to follow. We're in a very different world now. My timeline has changed, and I suspect yours has as well. And of course, it's not just Instagram. Well, guess what? Cory Doctorow One of my favorite sci-fi writers, big brain smart guy, the person behind boingboing.net all those years ago, has written a new book called Inshittification. Pardon the title, I hope no children are watching. And that is looking at chronicling what big tech has done to the internet and to our feeds at a very fundamental level. I can't wait for this event, it's going to be so much fun. It's our last event of the year. If you want to join us for that great event. See Cory, maybe get the book, have a chat afterwards. The link is in the description below. November 17th at Earth Theatre in Hackney with Cory Doctoromi and some special guests who are on the way. I'd love you to join us.

Well, I think it's a real position that a lot of Iranians have. As, as an observer, uh, uh, you know, in my own way, I, I, I could take sides in this debate, but actually, as an observer, I'm, I'm very keen to know what is the nature of this debate in Iran. And I do think, yes, you're correct, And in fact, after the 12-day war with Israel and the United States, what you said has now become even more prominent in the debate. So the ones who you mentioned who would say, "We defended Iran, we haven't lost territory," are gonna say, "Israel gave its best shot and we're still standing. They assassinated some 30 military leaders. We didn't collapse. We started a barrage of missiles on them." and it was the United States that actually asked for ceasefire. We didn't ask for ceasefire, right? So yes, people may mock them and say they're trying to characterize defeat as victory, but again, to them it's real. That it's like a boxer that everybody expected would be knocked out in the first round. Yes, it fell down, but it's still punching, and we're in round 3. And so they They take pride in that, but at the same time, they cannot deny the fact that their back is to the wall now, that economically they don't have a way out, that now even militarily, with the loss of Hezbollah and inability to deter Israel right on Israel's borders, they have to come up with another way of doing this. But more generally, you know, what you put your finger on is that all of this history that you mentioned from 19th century, that Iran was imperialist, almost divided, World War I, World War II, 1953, suggests that there is certain continuity in Iranian history. I mean, beyond the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic, beyond its ideology, that, that there is a sense of vulnerability in Iranian political psyche. Iranians see themselves as in imperial light, as a great power, as a civilization in the Middle East. But at the same time, as I mentioned in the book, they're the only Shia Persian country. They're not Arabs, and they're not welcome in the family of Arabs. And they're Shia, which means they're outside of the mainstream of Islam in the Middle East. And this loneliness has kept them alive over the centuries, but it also means that they are alone. Even in this 12-day war, they were alone. No China, no Russia, no Arabs, nobody, nobody protected them or supported them. The key issue in this debate that you mentioned is not the debate in Iran is not whether or not we're vulnerable or this history is wrong. I think all Iranians believe this history is correct. The key is what is your, what is your strategy of dealing with this, with this vulnerability? And I try to bring out in the book that the Shah, far from a puppet of the United States and Britain, also was driven by the same anxieties that drives the Islamic Republic, except he had a different theory, which is the way to protect Iran is to make Iran economically strong. The way to protect Iran is to hug the United States and monopolize the United States as your, basically as your stalwart, exactly what Israel and Saudi Arabia are doing today. Right.

They—

it's not that they don't have gripes against the United States, but they believe that the United States is the greatest power in the world. If you own the United States, if you can influence the United States, you are all the more powerful. The Shah's lesson from the Soviet occupation of Iran is that Iran is not going to survive without the United States. The Shah's objection to Mossadegh in 1953 was that you're picking a fight with Britain over oil, which is right in terms of principle, But our main issue is not Britain and oil. Our main issue is this aggressive bear to the north. The Shah's fears of the Soviet Union was like Zelensky's fears of Russia, right? And, and, but the Shah's solution was Iran needs to be, needs to be a powerful economic actor closely allied with the United States. Now, the ghosts of the Shah's arguments are very alive in Iran. Not just among the opposition. I would say the people who are echoing the Shah in a very nebulous way is like President Rouhani and his foreign minister Zarif, or President Rafsanjani in Iran, people who believed that the revolutionary rhetoric resistance has to give way to normalization with the West. So for President Rouhani, for instance, the nuclear deal was a way of opening to the West. Right? And once you open to the West, then, you know, you're going down that path. You can develop your economy, you can bring foreign investment, you can do business, and you could achieve economic development. In fact, before he became president, uh, he wrote a book, uh, as a prelude to becoming president. It is called Economic Development and National Security, which is exactly the Shah's argument. That economic development is vital for national security. And then on this side, you have those who basically say, we're willing to accept a lower grade of economic development, economic isolation, economic pressure, as a price for maintaining our independence. So I think this is the grand debate in Iran.

But it's almost more than that, isn't it? Because, there's an inversion. It's not saying actually we're going to sacrifice development in order for self-government and sovereignty. They say that the self-government and sovereignty is the necessary precursor for the development. So I think you highlighting the continuity is really key. The Shah says that development first means sovereignty later. These guys say no, sovereignty first means development later. Of course, there are— there's a range of opinions regarding what development means. There's that famous quote from Khomeini saying we didn't have a revolution so people could eat watermelon. Yeah, which is a very Iranian thing to say. But, you know, there's a spectrum of opinion on that stuff. And I find it really fascinating, this idea that Pahlavi, you know, the present president, is kind of like an androgyne figure, you know, this interregnum between the collapse of something previously and whatever is ahead for Iran. On the development, though, I mean, this is really interesting for me. So you talked about, for instance, the collapse of what's called for defence and the axis of resistance. You said Hezbollah has been defanged. I want to return to that. And of course, Palestine and Gaza is going to be central in the conversation we have over the next hour. But in terms of development, again, somebody in Tehran, a supporter of the Islamic Republic, would say, sure, you know what, we don't have, you know, imported American SUVs like the Saudis do. We might not even have a developed consumer economy like, say, Turkey. But actually, when it comes to the key critical technologies we need to defend our country, ballistic missile technology, you know, the diggers that build all these tunnels where the IRGC put their kit and whatnot, we have everything, we have everything we need. And I mean, this is really key. Israel has been, has been, is the regional hegemon in West Asia, has nuclear weapons, it has arguably the world's most outstanding security service spy agency, especially per capita. And the reality is that they were running out of interceptor missiles because Iran was hitting them so hard. That's why that war stopped. Now, I'm not suggesting that Iran could beat Israel necessarily. It can certainly take a lot more damage because it's a lot larger. You know, in terms of the surface area of the country, it's immeasurably larger. And that does feel like a major accomplishment for a country, as you say, which is so economically constrained, has no natural allies. And yet Tel Aviv had to basically go crying to Washington because they didn't have the interceptor missiles to carry that conflict on, say, for another month, 2 months. Now, the cost to Iran could have been immeasurable. Ultimately, you know, Israel has nuclear weapons. Let's not be, you know, unrealistic here. But equally, that does again feel to me like a real triumph of the Iranian military-industrial complex.

Yes, it is. I mean, you see this debate among the public, among intellectuals, among opposition, as well as among people in the security forces, each, the same set of facts and realities has slightly different permutation, right? For those who are outside, they would not say that, you know, it's a Faustian choice between development and sovereignty. Of course, you have to be sovereign, but you have to also be able to develop in order to protect that sovereignty. And maybe 20 years ago, it was more difficult to make this argument. Iran was still developing. I mean, in a way, I've been to a lot of developing countries, and what Iran has done on its own is actually quite surprising. Like, the sixth largest city in Iran has a metro system, right? Or they built everything internally. But now Iran is arriving at a point where it's more difficult to say that under the current foreign policy setup, you can have both economic development and security. So it's now becoming very clear to the Iranian public that they're much more at a juncture. In other words, from here on forward, they're not looking at economic development plus security or sovereignty. They're looking at the fact that this kind of pursuit of security and sovereignty is actually going to look, going to create negative development.

It's zero, it's become zero-sum.

Zero, it's becoming zero-sum. And that's exactly why this debate is intensifying. I mean, you only debate things as a nation if you're at that kind of a juncture, right? Now, what you mentioned is actually pretty interesting. I mean, we can get into sort of Iran's military doctrine and how they sustain themselves. And I think your read of the way they think about the end of the 12-day war is correct. They don't think that they were defeated, that they were punched pretty badly, but Israel failed to deliver a knockout punch. And the longer it was going, the more like a smaller boxer facing a bigger boxer, Israel was getting exhausted. And in fact, there were those in Iran who criticized in a veiled way the Supreme Leader for accepting a ceasefire, that they should have gone longer. There was no logic to stop. They may be wrong, but, given where it stopped, they can afford to say that. But there's something else that's happened here, which is very interesting, and it's not about the regime. It's, if you want to call it, it's the unintended consequences of what's happened to Iran, which is Iranians as a whole, I mean, private sector businesses, Revolutionary Guard scientists, et cetera, have an attitude that is very different from other Arab countries or other developing countries, which is they have a can-do mentality. There is no foreign aid, there is no foreign investment, there is no hiring foreign companies to do things for you. And ever since the Iraq War, when they had to figure out how to kick the Iraqis out of Iranian territory between 1980 and '82, with— whereas the rest of the world was all supporting Iraq, and nobody was giving him anything, has imbued him with this sense that we can manage, we'll figure it out, we don't need outside help to do that. Which is fascinating because I think when Iran opens up, it will become an economic juggernaut, not because it has so many scientists and talented people, but it's in the attitude. I mean, we're looking at Iran today, uh, as a, as a theocracy. We don't realize that's one of the very few countries in the Middle East, perhaps the only country that is pretty much all of its financial network is digital. It's basically non-cash economy in that sense. Or that, you know, for everything that the West has, there is an Iranian equivalent. There is an Iranian version of Amazon. There's an Iranian version of Uber. There's an Iranian version of, you know, Netflix. And all of it is homemade. And in fact, this is exactly what the Russians wanted to learn from Iran after sanctions was imposed from them. I mean, how do you create a functioning modern economy that is not an offshoot of Silicon Valley and London, right? And in that, they actually have accomplished things. Like they make drones with chips coming from refrigerators and washing machines that have wreaked havoc in Ukraine. Or the missiles they use, this all homemade. Nothing that they bought from China or Russia saved them in the war. But that is a— that is not— that was not by design. You could say that the Shah left Iran with the best universities that there were, with an industrial infrastructure that was pretty good, that Iranians then had a very high number of engineers per capita, had some of the best universities in the Middle East. I mean, he endowed those things to Iran, and those things basically flourished not because the Islamic Republic wanted to flourish, but they have flourished in Iran. So Iran has excellent technical universities that produce world-class engineers and scientists, right? That it has, in Iran, it's not a problem to sort of attract women to STEM topics, that you have a highly educated you know, population of women that, yes, of course, are prejudiced against by law and in public sector, but are very prominent in private sector. And in many ways, they are running large corporations, large businesses, extremely competent, and they've been the backbone of the change that is happening. But so there is a different kind of a conversation to be had about how Iranian society has changed. Over the past 40 years. And to me, this conversation is not about religion versus secularism, democracy versus authoritarianism. Not that that's not there, but that's too simplistic a way of always phrasing things. That Iranians have grown up as a society over the past 40 years into a very sophisticated, self-confident, competent population. And that's why Iran has survived the, the sanctions. But that same competence and that same population is also asking very serious questions about what is the next chapter, that we shouldn't automatically assume that we should just keep digging to sustain the same isolation, that, that, you know, this may no longer be viable, or, or or doable. And so, in some ways, I would say, you know, not everything in Iran in the past 40 years is negative, but some of this is not by design. I think the sophistication of Iranian economy, of Iranian private sector, of the sophistication of Iranian society, you could look at movies, you know, culture, artists, etc. These, these in some ways are the unintended consequences of, of this country's isolation and having to survive on its own laurels. So one thing's happened to Iran is that Iranians are no longer sort of puppets of the West, as individuals I mean, right? Yes, they follow fashion, everything in the West, but there is a self-confidence in, in, in the society that it can survive. It can survive without the West. It can do what it wants. And then in the military terms, that translates into, we can stand up to the US, we'll figure it out. We, we, you know, for 40 years we've combated the US, uh, we will do so going forward as well.

So there's 3 big concepts in the book which I think for a Western audience are just really useful to help understand Iran because you use that word shibboleth. I mean, I can't think of a better description in terms of the mistaken understanding of Iran as a country. I think most people still think this is Qom, you know, this is a theocracy, this is a place where women are oppressed. Of course they are in many ways, they can't wear what they want, but equally you've got more women graduating from universities than you do men and so on. A very misunderstood place, I think, for a number of reasons. So those three concepts are a resistance economy, forward defence, and sacred defence. Now, we've kind of touched on the idea of a resistance economy. Interesting how that rhetoric was adopted by Hamas in Gaza prior to 2023. They wanted to build a resistance economy. Much harder when you're the size of the Isle of Wight with no oil and 2.5 million people. But it was an ideology that was, you know, attempting— there was an attempt to export that ideology. On forward defence, And the Revolutionary Guard and their technical capabilities is something I find just remarkable. We've talked about the ballistic missiles, also the speedboats, the Seraj speedboat. The story behind that is just crazy. I think it was called the Challenger 2. It was the world's fastest speedboat, has the record for circumnavigating the British Isles, I think. And the Iranians get hold of this via a seller in Switzerland. They take it to Iran, they reverse engineer it, and now it's part of their asymmetric warfare rationale doctrine in the Persian Gulf. Just an amazing story of, like you say, necessity driving innovation. So you've got the resistance economy, which is also part of that military-industrial complex. You've got forward defence, and like I say, you've got sacred defence. Now, on forward defence, we've said that one of the pillars of Iranian thinking is sovereignty. Sovereignty is a, is a precursor to economic development. But alongside sovereignty is the removal of America from West Asia. And again, that sort of goes hand in hand with self-government. So self-government allows economic development, but also self-government is impossible as long as the United States views West Asia as its kind of backyard. So Khomeini wants Iran governed from Tehran, but he also wants America out of the region. Now, in recent years, Iran has tried to do that through what's been called the Axis of Resistance in Yemen and Syria, Iraq, and so on. Tell me a little bit about that strategy, where it came from, who devised it, and has it kind of hit the buffers with regards to an assertive foreign policy in any way?

Well, you know, one of the things as we're talking about this innovation that we're seeing in Iran, which is very fascinating, is that Iran has been innovative in terms of strategic thinking because it cannot have a classic, classic military, cannot have classic military doctrine, doesn't have an air force, and yet it has this kind of expansive view of how it's going to protect itself. So it has to improvise how it does that, and the roots of that goes to the Iran-Iraq War. And I think for the generation of leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and the security forces, which are still lot of them are there. The Iran-Iraq War was the military school where they got their training. I mean, take somebody like Qasem Soleimani. He didn't go to an officer training school or Sandhurst or, you know, study classical military training. He was a 17-year-old volunteer who joined the Iran-Iraq War in these sort of irregular hit-and-run groups that were set up, which later on would coalesce into into the Revolutionary Guards. So they, they, they, and in a way, the way they think about defending Iran, and that's the job of the Revolutionary Guards. I mean, I know people think that, you know, they're, they're some kind of a messianic force bent on conquering the world, but, but in reality, they see themselves essentially as, as the military of Iran, as the defensive force of Iran.

But it's important to say, sorry to interrupt, but There's the Artesh, which is the regular army, and the IRGC, which is the real army, because there is a separate army. It's just not really the army that defends the revolution and defends the country.

Right, and over time, there have been many debates about whether they should be merged, one should be, you know, sidelined in favor of the other. And ultimately, Khomeini early on decided that they both should remain. But the Revolutionary Guard has really become the elite, not just the elite force like the Marines or Special Forces, but it actually has become a military by itself. So, Iran, you're right, has two militaries, although now at the command level there's much more integration between them. But, you know, it's in the genes of IRGC that military— that the job of defending Iran is asymmetric, because Iran does not have, or did not have in the decades before, access to tanks, artillery, air force, air defense systems. So the way they, they, they, they forced Iraq to leave Iranian territory between 1980 and 1982 was by irregular warfare, and they were successful. And then they implemented it in Lebanon after 1982, and they were able to logjam Israel and also force the United States to leave Lebanon after the bombing of Marine barracks and the French baracks. The United States left Lebanon. And so to them, this was definition of success. You can force the United States to leave, but not with a head-to-head confrontation, but rather through asymmetric warfare. Now, in the Iran-Iraq War, when Iranians pushed the Iraqis out, I think they came to the conclusion that they have a fundamental vulnerability, which is that the border between Iran and Iraq, they decided, is not defensible. Because they don't have a standing army that could actually prevent Saddam from going, rearming, and coming back. And that they need to basically find a way to be inside Iraq, to create a buffer, to be able to better protect Iran. And when I read all of their debates with Khomeini, different commanders, et cetera, the foreign minister, as to whether we should just stop the war now or continue into Iraq, all the discussions were, were very military and strategic. There was nothing about export of revolution. All the arguments were that this guy is going to take the UN resolution, go rearm, and come back at us. And we have all of these volunteer forces. If we send them home, we cannot regroup them again. And we need to basically create a situation when it's not as easy for Iraq to invade Iran. So this idea that Iran needs to defend itself from inside the Arab world was really born in 1982. But then it became much more prominent when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The Iranians were, and the Syrians, and everybody was completely convinced that Iraq was the starting point, and after Iraq, it will be Iran's turn. And, you know, the United States rebuffed the peace initiative that Iranian President Khatami put on the table. And I narrate a story when Bashar Assad visits Iran on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq and tells Khamenei that, 'I'm convinced that after Iraq it will be Iran and Syria's turn.' And Khamenei says, 'Yes, I agree. This is an expansive project for the whole Middle East. We have to make sure that this crocodile does not digest its bite easily.' And so he charges General Soleimani, essentially, as well as, you know, then the Syrians also support the Sunni insurgency to basically make life difficult for the US in Iraq. And of course, US made life difficult for itself as well with a series of missteps. But they came— but in a way, Soleimani emerges out of Iraq as a hero within the Iranian security establishment because Iran's operations in Iraq, organizing forces, combating the United States, combating Sunnis, etc., protecting the Shia political order that was emerging, was seen as a success. What was this success? The United States actually left Iraq by 2011, which was a big goal of Iran. Iranians did not want the US on their border. I mean, what we discussed is Khomeini's big success was to kick the United States out of Iran. But if the United States was going to be sitting on Iran's borders, the problem was still there. So this idea that Iran wanted the United States to leave West Asia is not just a grand anti-imperialistic goal. It is, it is a sort of a domino theory of their strategy. You don't want the US inside Iran because this embassy will be up to no good. You don't want them on your borders because they may cause trouble. You want them to keep pushing him out, right? And the Iranians came to the conclusion that they were succeeding at this. They pushed the United States out of Lebanon in 1985. They pushed the United States out of Iraq between 2003 and 2011. And out of these efforts, the Quds Force was born, kind of like an imperial unit, huge unit of the Revolutionary Guards. And in militaries, when you develop a big unit, then that itself becomes a self-fulfilling issue. So then they kept going forward. And there's always a thin line between offense and defense. So in the eyes of Iran, it's always been defending itself. It's sitting on Israel's border because Israel would attack it if it wasn't there. Soleimani and his militias were important because they pushed the United States out of Iraq and prevented the United States from invading Iraq after 2003. They were instrumental in defeating ISIS. In the eyes of the Revolutionary Guards, it's not the international coalition that defeated ISIS. It was the Revolutionary Guard and its proxies that defeated ISIS, supported with Russian air power in Syria and American air power in Iraq.

Broadly true.

No, it is actually true. I mean, in reality, there was no ground troops in Iraq. The PMF was organized by Soleimani, and then the units that Soleimani was managing in Iraq, Fatimiyoun Brigade. You know, in a way, the United States and its allies never put troops on the ground to actually do battles with ISIS. But so, so in a way, it's— so they began to see this footprint in the Middle East as necessary and successful, and the Revolutionary Guard became the big defender of keeping this footprint. And even if you ask them today, they would say, well, you know, Yes, it collapsed, but it was successful for some 20 years between 2003 and let's say 2023. Why didn't Israel bomb us 3 years ago, 5 years ago? Right? It was because, because of our footprint. And in fact, the biggest development in this war that allowed Israel to attack Iran was the collapse of Hezbollah in Syria. Right, that was Iran's line of defense. So what was portrayed as offense by Israel and Arabs, because that's the way it looks to them, that Iran is sitting on their borders, is menacing them, to Iran was a line of what was its first line of defense. And you're correct, now it has collapsed. That forward defense, that idea that Iran can successfully protect itself by being in the Arab world, has now collapsed. Israel shattered it. In, in Lebanon and in Syria. And then the Iranians now find out that actually the only way they can coexist with Saudis, with UAE, with others, is that they, they need to back off of grand operations in, in, in the Arab world. So I, I wouldn't say forward defense is completely dead. What's forced is not being cashiered. It's still there. But it's no longer the prominent line of defense that Iran was thinking about. It has to come up with something else. And the most obvious right now is their missile program.

Yeah, this, this idea of forward defense rests on a bunch of things, like you say, proxies overseas, the Quds Force. And the Quds Force, I guess for a British audience, is kind of similar to our SAS. It's an extraterritorial force. It's a lot bigger. And just going back to the IRGC and the Artesh, Iran does have a navy, an army, and air force, and then the IRGC have a navy, an army, and air force. It genuinely is a parallel military structure, although of course there is more integration over time. And the Quds Force, like you say, is key to this notion of forward defence, despite the fact it's called Quds, as in, you know, we're going to one day get rid of Israel and take Jerusalem. I find this really interesting that you propose what's gone wrong as being more about bureaucratic drift. We've been so successful so far, let's just keep on doing it, keep on doing it, keep on doing it. Because forward defence didn't just stretch into the Arab world, it was going to the Eastern Mediterranean. And Iran has not had Eastern, Eastern Mediterranean as part of its sphere of influence for, well, since the Sasanians, you know, for a very long time. The Safavids didn't go that far. This extraordinary great power of West Asia. And so it does feel like overreach. And one of the really interesting parts of the book, which I really enjoyed, was about the, the ways this is legitimized within Iranian civil society. So why on earth is Iran in Syria? This is quite a reasonable question to ask. Well, of course, it's defending shrines. And there's the shrine of Zainab in Damascus, Tell me a little bit about how this works, because again, it's very foreign to a Western audience, this idea that you'll have proxies and paramilitaries, not just Iranian nationals, but actually other people from other places too, defending a shrine in Damascus, and this being part of a broader doctrine of national self-defense. We've covered the self-defense bit. I'm interested in how it's legitimized to a broader audience.

So there are layers to this. I mean, it's always much more, much easier for the Islamic Republic to justify these things to those who are in its base, people who are in the ambit of the Islamic Republic, not just security force, but even average person who basically listens to the Islamic Republic, believes in it. And the arguments being that, exactly correct, that we are there to defend the shrines. And particularly after the fall of Saddam, so many millions of Iranians visited Iraq and the shrines, and it was very near and dear to their heart that they instinctively understood that, you know, if jihadis, Sunni jihadis, crossed a certain line, that these shrines would be at risk.

This is Najaf and Karbala.

Najaf and Karbala, and then Damascus, the shrine of one of the saints in, in Damascus. But what was very interesting about this is that the defense of shrines is a very Shia thing, is not a very Islamic thing. So it almost was like the Islamic Republic was, was trying to sort of create a notion of a Shia sphere, that there is a Shia sphere that we need to defend. And this was— this sounded extraterritorial to a lot of more secular Iranians. This was no longer just even about fighting America, etc. Now you basically are extending Iran's national security parameter to include spots in the Arab world that you identify as have to be defended by Iran. So it was very murky, and that's why a lot of Iranians didn't buy into it necessarily. Where the Islamic Republic was not very good at explaining to its population was that their presence in the Arab world has a deterrence value, is to deter Israel from attacking Iran by being in Lebanon.

This wasn't explained to the public.

Not in a way that they would understand or buy. And that's why a lot of Iranians, particularly secular Iranians, were highly, highly skeptical of this. And they would chant in the streets things like, you know, "To hell with Gaza," or "Lebanon, may my life," be sacrificed for Iran, or why are you paying Arabs, and what's— why is Palestine any of your business? I mean, these were really loud comments. You heard it during the Mahsa Amini protest, very loud and clear. Or that, you know, the reason we're in Syria or Iraq now is because we're afraid of the Sunnis coming back at us. And, you know, Iraq was a strategic win. Iraq becoming Shia was a strategic win for Iran. It's now a friendly country. When it was under Sunnis, it was an enemy country. But they weren't putting this in a very sort of a clear, crisp, strategic language to their population. And partly this was because their own language internally among themselves was so ridden with religion and religious justifications. Secondly is that they had a difficulty of saying these things very clearly when they also are trying to justify their presence to the Arabs who are, they are among them. So you can't basically tell the Lebanese Shia that, oh, we're just here to, I'm going to use you basically as a way of deterring Israel. It would create other kinds of problems for them. So they were trying to play this game and it never worked with the Iranians. And ironically, it's after the 12-day war that all Iranians now get it, that we had to fight them over there not to fight them here. That if you don't want to fight on your own borders, you have to fight over there. And then it's also Israelis are saying this now very openly. Israeli generals, Israeli strategists are saying that the reason that Israel could take the fight to Iran was because the shadow of Hezbollah's missiles was lifted from Israel. And in fact, Israel basically spent about a decade planning its sophisticated intelligence operation against Hezbollah in order to pave the way to take Iran on. And why it hadn't taken Iran on earlier, why didn't it carry the 12-day war 3 years ago, 4 years ago, is because it had not taken care of Hezbollah. So now it's much, much clearer what happened, that Iran was in Lebanon in order to keep Israel busy on its own borders. Now, there is a level that people ask, well, why don't you just make peace with everybody so you don't have to have deterrence? But short of that, I think, you know, the forward defense to Iranians increasingly looked like an expensive, ambitious, extraterritorial presence that they couldn't quite— all of them, at least all Iranians, couldn't quite explain. Why are we in the Arab world, right? Is this imperialism of the Sassanid period? We're going to conquer these places. Is it self-defense? Is it defense of the shrines? Is it just meddling in Arab affairs and trying to be a nuisance? Is it being more Arab than the Arabs when it comes to Palestine and Israel? You know, they were never able to articulate any of this. And I would say that I think within even the Iranian security establishment, there were rivalries. You know, there is such a thing you mentioned. Yes, there is a bureaucratic momentum with the rise of the Quds Force. I mean, it's kind of true of every military. When you create a massive force, then it wants its budget. Then the end becomes the means, if you would, a justification for the means. But there were other divisions of the Guards, like the missile unit, who all along was suspicious of, you know, relying on the Quds Force to get the job done. And in fact, you could say that the tipping point here is when Israel hits Iran's consulates. I think it was in 2024, a year ago, more than a year ago in Syria, as a way of sort of sending Iran a powerful message, kills a number of Iranian generals. Iran decides to retaliate with missiles from its own territory, not with Hezbollah, which basically told you that that was the that was a time when Iran decided that even for its deterrence defense strategy, it was not going to rely on the forward defense. I think that's when it begins to collapse. And then I think in the debate right now in Iran, what is clear is that the forward defense may have been very powerful, useful, effective for 20 years, but then it collapsed. Right? It had a vulnerability, which was Israel's intelligence operation against Hezbollah, and then the collapse of Assad, right? So it's gone. And then it's not an easy way back to that. Yes, Iran can support Hezbollah or can support Houthis, but the way in which these organizations served really as deterrence against Israel and the United States is not there anymore. So they have value of maintaining Iran's regional influence, but not the kind of defense parameter that they provided Iran before. So they have to think about something else, and it doesn't work to sort of keep investing in forward defense.

One of the things I love about Downstream, no, scrap that. The thing I love about Downstream is talking to some of the most interesting people about some of the most important things going on in our world today. That's a gap the media is leaving wide open for us, frankly. There's lots of blackpilling, lots of doomstaring, lots of slop, but fascinating people having fascinating conversations all of the time. Our intention here at Novara is platforming it here on Downstream, or at least some of it. But you know what? We want to be even bigger. We don't just want to have those conversations here on our YouTube channel or on social media clips or even our increasingly well-attended events. No, we're also launching a Downstream newsletter to provide further reading, recommended books, vignettes, and anecdotes. Some of the bits that maybe don't work in video but are definitely worth reading about. If you want to get on that train and subscribe to our, I think, unique and very important newsletter here at Downstream, go to novara.media/downstream-newsletter. And get with our downstream community. I can't wait to write them, and I can't wait for you to read them. A forward defense as far as Iraq, I think, makes perfect sense in so much as Iraq is a majority Shia country. It was literally invaded by the United States. There was a war between Iran and Iraq. But I think, like you say, there's that, that drift over time pushed by the Quds Force. Again, this is what I love about the book, uh, Vali, is that you're drilling down into very material incentives for why people are doing things. And when you're dealing with a country which has a religious Grand Ayatollah as a supreme leader, most observers don't do that. You do, and I think that's why it's such a valuable book. Forward defence makes sense with regards to Iraq, and I think you're right, there are diminishing returns as you go forward. But the doctrine does make sense to lots of Iranians, as you say, after the 12-day war. And you see these extraordinary videos, this profusion of videos of people, of women with no veil. I remember one woman with no veil saying, I kind of get it now. They were right. They said the choice was either we, we help Hamas or the country is under attack and we, we lose parts of the country. I get it. I agree. Now, I'm not suggesting she's right or wrong, but that was a, that was a sentiment in society. Maybe not the majority of society, but more people shifted towards it after Iran itself was attacked. There was another extraordinary video of a young woman wearing a headscarf, you know, and saying, I'm Aryan, I'm a member of the Aryan race, the Iranian people won't be bowed by Israel. And that's something I want to return to later on, this fusion of historic Iranian nationalism with the Islamic Republic, the Islamic Revolution, which they're quite distinctive things. In terms of Iranian sort of expansionism, this is what I find fascinating. You know, you've got Herat in modern-day Afghanistan, next to Iran. It is a Persian city. This is the city where Shah Abbas the Great is, um, is born. It's been a Persian city for thousands of years. Today it's in Afghanistan. Iran doesn't really have any designs on Herat, yet it had designs on, you know, Damascus in a certain way, a presence in Damascus, a cultural, political, and military presence in Damascus. And so I do think that gets to the heart of this being something which was driven by material incentives. If it was just about Tehran wanting to expand its reach and, you know, the greatness of Iran and military escapades and just wanting to add territory or whatever, there's a ton of bits there east, but they're not interested in that bit. They're interested in the west because that's where the perceived threat comes from, i.e., Israel and the United States.

That's right. And even it goes much farther in history. In other words, there are only two two gateways through which you can invade, uh, the Iranian— you know, because of the high mountains that surround, uh, Iran and the way it sits on a plateau, there are only two historic gateways for it to be invaded. One is on the northeast where the Mongols invaded Iran. That's the borders of Iran and Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, that area. And the other is the border between Iran and Iraq. So Alexander the Great, the Arab armies in the 7th century, all the way to Saddam's army in 1980, they all came through that tunnel. And so Iran has to, in terms of defense, these are the two places that you are most vulnerable. But historically, Iran has, and particularly under the Pahlavis and under the Islamic Republic, The threats are not to the east of Iran. Iran really does not have a fear of Pakistan, even though it's a nuclear-armed country. It really doesn't have a fear of Afghanistan other than through drugs and terrorism, etc. It had a fear of the Soviet Union, but it doesn't really have a fear of the republics that have replaced the Soviet Union—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, etc. But the Arab world really poses the greatest challenge, if you would to Iran. And this perception, and it also has to do with the fact that the United States has not really cared about Afghanistan, or Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, etc., are not sort of the basis from which America is operating against Iran. In Iran, so, you know, the United States, first thing it did after 1979 was to rally the Arab countries in creating a cordon around Iran. So the Arab world was immediately weaponized against Iran in that sense. And even to this day, when they look at the Gulf, they see, you know, 20, 30 military bases over there. There's no, other than Bagram Air Base, there's nothing in Afghanistan that would point at Iran. It's not, yes, there's something in Central Asia, but that's not really it. So for Iran, Iran's sort of, and there's a continuity between the Shah and the Islamic Republic, is that Iran views the Arab world as a potential source of threat. And this is both government threat, American threat, and things like ISIS coming at you from that direction. And so the trap that Iran fell into is trying to manage the Arab world in a way to pacify it. That threat with the idea that we have to be in there to pacify that threat. And that ended up being unworkable for varieties of reasons. It worked for a period, but it's no longer, I think, a viable strategy for Iran to survive. So then the question becomes, if you really don't have ramparts in the Arab world to protect you, maybe you need to change your overall conception, because resistance without being present in the Arab world may no longer be viable, right? So it's a moment, it's a moment of truth. And I think we're seeing it gradually. We're seeing it with this rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. We're seeing it in the warming of relations between Iran and the rest of the Arab world. I mean, Iran and Egypt don't have diplomatic relations, But Iran's foreign minister has been to Egypt twice and met with President Sisi. Egypt helped facilitate negotiations between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency just before snapback sanctions were imposed. And President Sisi invited Iran's president or foreign minister to the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting. Right? So there's love in the air, let's say, between Iran and the Arabs. And that suggests to you that, you know, there is a sense in Iran that, look, we can no longer operate in the Arab world the way that we did. And so we have to change our strategy. We have to befriend them and potentially, we have to find a way to manage this demand for sovereignty differently than we have so far.

I mean, it's a miracle that forward defense worked for as long as it did. When you look at Iran's technological base, its demographics, its economic, you know, base, it's, it's quite—

but at the same time, you might say it was a poor man's defense. I mean, like everything else Iran improvises. First of all, large parts of it actually employs Arab youth where, you know, the demography of Iran, and this is important to note, everybody keeps thinking Iranians are very young 'cause they protest, et cetera. And one reason maybe that the youth protest didn't work was because the youth are actually a minority in Iran. Average age in Iran right now is like 33. In 5 years' time, it'd be 37. Its demography is very much West European because it's carried out the most successful family planning program anywhere in the world.

I mean, it's probably worse, right?

It's getting worse. First of all, you have—

'Cause you have that drop-off of birth, it's the quickest decline of birth rates in human history. That's right.

And so as a result, it is an aging population. Its workforce is now Afghan refugees or Afghan workers, much as the workforce in Europe is North African, African, et cetera, for the lower-end jobs. The same kind of racism, anti-immigration feelings that you have in Europe are surfacing in Iran against the Afghans, even though they're Persian-speaking, et cetera.

They look the same and sound the same. They sound the same.

That's bigotry for you. Exactly, and for the same reasons, exactly similar reasons that you might have in Western Europe. But then in military terms, it means that Iran is not gonna be able to launch wars like it did in 1980. It just doesn't have that number of young people. And so, you know, the reality is that it worked. Forward Defense worked because it is manned by Lebanese Shia, Iraqi Shia, Afghan Shia, and Yemenis, right? And it doesn't take much to arm them, right? It's not like you're buying sophisticated weaponry. So as I said, Iran's strategy is fascinating, not because it's good or just, or it's just a degree of improvisation for a country that was determined to resist the West but did not have access to regular means of military defense. So it came up with this idea of defending not on its own border, but outside of its own border, using non-Iranians. Right. And that's why the idea of shrines was so important to the Shia.

I mean, leveraging, leveraging the demographic bulge of other countries. Again, it's kind of in retrospect, you think, wow, this is really, really smart. A few questions. So we're talking about Iraqi Shias and how those guys were leveraged for Iranian foreign policy preferences. There's this thing called Arba'in. Have I said it correctly? Yes, Arba'in. Arba'in. I'm not a Shia, I'm a Catholic. Arba'in is the biggest pilgrimage in the world, regular pilgrimage. I think you've got the one in India, which is every 10 years, but Arba'in is, I think, annually and biannually. It's very regular. I think this year 20 million plus people went on it. Tell us a little bit about Arba'in, because again, you know, we're talking about this constantly today. There are so many of these social phenomenon which are so integral now to the politics and culture of West Asia, most people in Britain will never have heard of Arba'in, which is the largest regular pilgrimage in the world.

But it happens in London.

It happens in London, but I mean, it happens everywhere, doesn't it? It, it happens— I saw one in Japan even, you know. But 20 million people coursing through, um, Iraq, and it wasn't happening prior to 2003, as I understand it, on that scale. So correct, where does that feature in Iran's kind of worldview and its politics and its cultural sphere?

So it's a very Shia thing. It's not an Islamic thing. And, you know, Shias have a set of rituals and a set of events that are particular to them. And it's not totally alien to Catholics. I mean, it's almost like certain Catholic practices, like in France, you know, there's an annual sacred march from the Cathedral of Notre Dame to the Cathedral of Chartres. That parts of it people even go on their knees or on their chest. That's very sort of Shia. So for the Shias, the most important day is the death of the third Shia Imam, who's buried in Karbala, Iraq, which is known as Ashura, and it's commemorated every day. Now, the 40th anniversary of the death of Hussein, who's that saint buried in Karbala, is known as Arba'in, which in Arabic means 40th. Now interestingly, it was not a big event in Iran, you know, when I grew up there was not commemoration of Arba'in in this manner. It was a very Arab Shia thing. And under Saddam, he would not allow Arba'in to be commemorated. But when the regime fell in Iraq, I think the very first Arba'in was sort of monumental because the first time that the that the Shia of Iraq were actually allowed to commemorate Arba'in. And Arba'in involves essentially a walking, religious, dedicated walking from one shrine city of Najaf to Karbala, which people do it over a 2-week period. The very dedicated walk the entire way. They feed each other. There's food for them. People give us charity food, they sleep, people open the houses along the way to allow the pilgrims to sleep in it, and it's a massive social phenomenon. Now, ever since 2003, it just has grown, grown, grown, and grown. And there's points at which the Revolutionary Guards actually patronize this because they saw it as a way of basically bolstering the idea that there is a Shia world out there. That they are the defender of, that idea of a Shia sphere from South Lebanon to Damascus to Iraq, and then into the Gulf, and encompassing Pakistan, India. And gradually, we have essentially now a Shia world, not in a political sense that governments or organizations, but that Arbaeen has become for Shias a huge event, and particularly doing it in Iraq, of going to Iraq and walking that, that path has become a, a very big, uh, very big event. Um, uh, and, and so, um, you know, there it is one of those things that within Iraq that is a— that it does have political strategic significance because it binds Iranians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Shias in London, Shias in New York, everybody together in the way we used to talk about going to Mecca may bind all Muslims together. But at the same level is also a massive cultural phenomenon in the region, right, that is larger than the politics that surrounded 2003.

And these raves, tell me a bit about them. You refer to them, I think, as raves in the book.

Well, that's the best way of putting it. It is.

Tell us a little bit about them because They look absolutely extraordinary. Who organizes them? Are they an outgrowth of IRGC patronage?

What's the purpose of them? So IRGC again latched onto it at some point, particularly during the periods where they were in Syria fighting and in Iraq. There's a sort of a musical transformation. There always have been elegies in praise of the martyred saints. I know Shiism is imbued with this sense of, you know, sense of sorrow for the saints that were martyred, buried in Iraq, in Karbala, Najaf, in Damascus, etc. And on the— and you basically, during the commemoration of their death or on Arba'in, there's these sessions where people cry and there is an elegist who sings these really passionate sorrowful elegies. But there is a point at which there's a sort of a metamorphosis, and some say the origins of it actually goes to elegies during the Iran-Iraq War, that they are now much more rhythmic with modern music. I mean, it's not rock and roll, but the rhythm, the pace, etc., is, is much more, you know, relates to common view music, extremely passionate. And you had these gatherings of young men in particular that would come to a location and there would be enormous amount of passion and energy, let's say. And there are clips of him online, on YouTube, etc. And particularly for, although for many Iranians this is real, but the elegists are all kind of tied in with the establishment. Like this elegist is, and they're called maddah, or somebody who prays, sings in praise of the Imam. Associated with Khamenei's household. This one is, you know, they're all sort of right of center, right wing, you know, Shia supremacists, Shia nationalists. And then this idea was implemented in Iraq. Now you had big events in Basra, etc., and it became a way in which to sort of continue to mobilize support for operations in Iraq and Syria. And the fascinating thing is that when the Israeli attack on Iran coincided with Ashura, that's death of the third Imam, and some of the most interesting elegies now were not about the Imam, were about Iran. In fact, there is a very famous episode where Khamenei comes first time out of the bunkers for an Ashura commemoration, and he calls over the elegies, and he says to him that, "I want you to start your elegy session by putting to elegy rhythm a very famous nationalistic song called 'Ay Iran.'" "Oh, Iran." Which is mind-blowing.

It's a big pre-'79 song.

It's a big pre-'79 song. It's been the sort of the emblem of the opposition, but he basically, says that you do this. Now, it is not just cynical use of nationalism, but it's actually a way of thinking that today, you know, we talk about shrines that are under attack. Today, Iran is that shrine. Iran itself is the shrine, or Iran is the, is the sort of, um, the, the innocent martyr, right? Which is a very, um, You know, it's, it's not Iran or Shiism, it's Iran and Shiism. Now, for many secularists, this doesn't make sense, or they're opposed to it, but in reality, it is the direction that, that sort of things are going. But this amount of investment that was put into these raves, into Arbaeen, into cultivating this Shia mindset in Iran to justify forward defense in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq was important for mobilizing volunteers, for getting national support for it. Now it seems to have died down, largely because forward defense has died down, but its cultural elements are there. I mean, you can't erase, you know, the culture that came out of that. And so still, Arbaeen is huge in Iraq. I mean, even this year after the war, again, you know, IRGC was broadly present. Its elements were there. You know, you go through that march, and a lot of Shias don't like it. There are huge, you know, life-size posters of Qassem Soleimani and Mehdi Mohandes, the Iraqi militia commander who died along with him. And it's sort of combining them into the myth of Shiism as well. I don't think that's going to go away because I think somehow it's in the genes of the Quds Force. There's a lot too much investment in it has been made, but it still has utility for Iran. I mean, Iran, even if it's not going to be managing militias in the Arab world, still sees itself as a regional power that should have soft power influence in the Arab world. And his biggest soft power influence is relationship with the Shia communities, uh, and, and he wants to continue to keep that alive.

There's that extraordinary image that was made in the aftermath of Qassem Soleimani's assassination of him. I think it had his hand missing, and, you know, he's sort of just befallen. Obviously he's died, and he's being held up by Imam Hussein in the afterlife. Extraordinary. And I think, ah, by these raves, that kind of cultural production, as a leftist in the West, you know, Antonio Gramsci sets all this out, right? You're erecting a political military establishment doctrine way of doing things upon a much deeper set of cultural values, mores, relationships, ties, which are transnational. Really, really, really fascinating. Absolutely.

And also what I would say about the Islamic Republic is that this is not just cynical use of religion. There is a class issue in Iran. The leadership of Iran today, the leadership that took over the revolution, was not the secular upper middle class of the Shah's period. Those guys lost the battle for control of the revolution. So people like Soleimani, etc., come from bottom of the society. So this is very much imbued in their, in their sense of themselves and in the way in which they relate to the populations. And the Revolutionary Guard is very much imbued in these myths. The main university of the Revolutionary Guard is called the Imam Hussein University. All of the battles they fought in Iran-Iraq War had Shia names: Karbala 1, Karbala 2, Karbala 3. You know, they— it's very much integrated in the way they think about Iran. And there is something very Safavid about it because, you know, it was the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century which deliberately made Iran Shia as a way of, I think, protecting it from being absorbed into the Sunni Ottoman world. And it basically created the notion of a Persian Shia empire. Now, Under the Shah, this was maybe the balance was lost. It was more Iranian than it was Shia. But the Revolutionary Guards in particular sees itself as Shia Iranian. It's sort of, it's trying to sort of go back to that dual identity. Although for most of the population, they're seen as to be more Shia than they're Iranian. But you know, there's always this tension in Iranian history between Iranian nationalism and the Islamic Shia identity of the country. And there is a definition of secular Iranian nationalism which the Pahlavi monarchy foisted. There are many Iranians who subscribe to that. We're Aryan, the language is Persian, we have nothing to do with Arabs, we have nothing to do with Islam. Iranian nationalism is secular. And then there's the other strand which basically sees Iranian nationalism and Iran's Shia identity and Islamic identity is interwoven together, that, uh, that is a very different language of nationalism.

And I think that's what makes the opposition so weak. I don't mean internally, but I mean overseas with that diaspora in the United States, the UK, and whatnot, Canada, Germany, is that you'll meet— I don't want regime change in Iran. I'm not speaking on your behalf, I'm speaking on my behalf as somebody whose father is Iranian. I don't want regime change in Iran because I think that'll be a disaster for everyone, including people outside of Iran, including for Europe, by the way, because it would create so many refugees, in my view. Um, but what they propose is that Iran, a post-Islamic Republic Iran, would effectively be a secular, post-religious Iran. And I'm thinking, there are still people who are dissenters against the regime. They're not the biggest fans of Khamenei. They're the idea that you're going to have tens of millions of Iranians turn their back on Shiism to re-adopt Zoroastrianism is just so absurd to me. But that's, that's a, you know, you're making a rod for your own back by basically saying whatever the regime is, I will be the converse of, and I think that's a big weakness of the opposition. We'll park that. We've got 10 minutes left. I have two questions really. The first is about the Palestinian cause because we've talked about national interest and you even use the word cynical the Islamic Republic is not necessarily cynical. But how invested is Tehran in the Palestinian cause? Where does that come from? Because, you know, lots of Arabs say, oh, they're just doing it because they're trying to undermine Israel. Others say, no, they really mean it. They want an independent sovereign homeland for the people of Palestine. Which one is it?

Well, I think it's both. I mean, there's a sense, like many others, that they care about the Palestinians, et cetera. But the degree to which they care, I think, had strategic roots to it. And then basically it became an albatross around their neck. And then it had a logic of its own. The more they began to become hostile to Israel and Israel hostile to them from 1980s onwards, the more the Palestinian issue became important to them because it was the enemy of their enemy. But I don't wanna say it's all like cynical choice of this. I mean, you have to sort of note that Khomeini himself lived in exile in the Arab world for a number of decades after, for two decades. So he absorbed the anger that the Arab world had over the Palestinian issue. He very well understood that Iran cannot be a part of the Middle East or a leader of the Middle East or a leader of the Islamic world unless it was a leader on the Palestinian issue. When you read Khomeini's book Islamic Government, which was finished in 1974, 5 years before the revolution, he already is using the terminology of colonial settler state, or he's using, you know, he's extremely anti-Israeli, not on a religious grounds, but on sort of the way in which PLO might have argued at that point in time. So he had absorbed that Arab sentiment towards Israel, that this is an output of the United States, it's an imperialist outpost, and it's always going to be opposed to us. And then a lot of the early leadership around him, including young firebrands, were trained in Palestinian camps or in other Amal— this is Shia organization— camps in South Lebanon, in South Yemen. A lot of even Iran's more secular revolutionaries were part of the new left movement in Europe. They were hanging out with Baader-Meinhof gang or IRA, et cetera, or they were hovering around in coffee shops in Berlin. And they all had sort of adopted and absorbed this Palestinian cause at that level. But Khomeini was very clear that we're not gonna follow the PLO. We're not going to follow somebody else's lead. The rest of the Arab world will follow our lead, right? And he basically said this mantra before Iran and before the Islamic Republic. As a very telling point, when Israel invades Lebanon in 1982, the first reaction of Shia villagers is to throw rice and flowers at Israeli soldiers because they were fed up with Palestinian bullying in their villages. And Khomeini steps in and says, no, we as Shia basically cannot survive in this region if we are not on the Palestinian side. Now, basically, I'm not saying you follow the Sunni secular PLO who treats you like dirt. You will lead the Palestinian cause. And then he did pay dividend with them, just like with the forward defense. There's a kind of a material bureaucratic benefit that comes. It did get Iran traction in the Arab world when no other issue does. The Arab rulers can easily say, these guys are Iranian, they're not Arab, they're not welcome. Or these guys are Shia, look at Khomeini's turban, look at Khomeini's turban, they're not Sunni, they're not the right kind of Islam. But on the Palestinian issue, the Iranians basically have taken a leadership position in the Arab world, which has got them certain degree of street credibility and credentials. When in 2006, Hezbollah forced Israel, frustrated Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006, Hassan Nasrallah became the most popular political figure in the Arab world. Iran's bombastic president, Ahmadinejad, for a period was hugely popular in the Arab world because of his harangue against Israel and the Holocaust.

Well, not just the Arab world, I mean the whole Muslim world. The whole Muslim world. My dad's a taxi driver and he will always say, "I met an Indonesian guy." I said, "I'm Iranian." They said, "I love Ahmadinejad." I mean, I still hear it in, you know, fruit sellers in Europe who would say that to you.

So they misread that, that, you know, that there is a huge amount of benefit for a country, again, that is isolated and outside, to support the Palestinian cause. Now, again, we're at this position where the questioning is, is this sustainable? And what has been the cost for you to do this? Right. And then it is also true that to the extent that Hezbollah becomes more and more influential in Iran and Hassan Nasrallah becomes more and more influential, for an Arab Shia community living in a country that has civil war with Sunnis and Christians, etc., that for Hassan Nasrallah, the Palestinian issue was extremely important for the legitimacy of Hezbollah as an Arab force. So it's not only Iran. I mean, Iran also locked itself into a set of relationships in the Arab world. Like, Iran could not have Hezbollah be the juggernaut that it was, if Hezbollah— and Hezbollah believed that to be the juggernaut that it, that it is, it had to be on the forefront of the Palestinian issue.

Last question, because we talked about the lapse of forward defense using asymmetric warfare, ballistic missiles, proxies. That's probably going to sustain in some sense, but not the expansive sense we've seen over the last 15 years. One argument now is that that will be replaced by nuclear weapons, because a lot of the desired outcomes, regardless of your politics, are actually shared. We don't want Balkanisation, we don't want our territorial integrity being undermined. We understand the ideas, the thinking behind forward defence. We just don't think it makes sense because of the costs, because it's now failed, etc. One replacement is potentially a nuclear deterrent. Do you think Iran will now pursue nuclear weapons? And is this fatwa that was issued all these years ago against the pursuit of nuclear weapons actually a deal breaker when it comes to Iran getting a bomb? So two things.

Let me start with the fatwa. First of all, in Shi'ism historically, it is illegal to follow the fatwa of a dead ayatollah. And that's why Shia law continuously evolves. So Khamenei dies, so does his fatwa with him. Secondly, just before Israel attacked, with a group of students, Khamenei met with a group of students, and one of them asks him, are you willing to change your fatwa? And he says, whatever is best for Iran's national defense, that is what will happen, which is extremely telling. In terms of the fatwa. So if the country's under attack, et cetera. And that's this year. This is this year. This is like within the past year. So that's, the fatwa is not the stoppage point, but, you know, let me put it this way. Yes, there is now a greater momentum in debates in Iran, at least, about a nuclear deterrence. And for the first time, actually, it has much more popular support among the population, including the secular population. Over national defense sets of kind of arguments. Or I've heard, you know, secular Iranians say that, yeah, we don't like the Islamic Republic, but this is the government we're in. But that doesn't mean that we would welcome living under the terror of potential bombing. So if it means having nuclear deterrence, so be it. But the larger debate in Iran is this, is that Iran followed a nuclear doctrine that said, you know, our program is above the ground, we're willing to negotiate over it, we're members of NPT, we're willing to sign a nuclear deal that subjects us to much more intrusive inspections, and we want a quote-unquote peaceful nuclear program. Now, this has failed. This doctrine has failed. I mean, Iran didn't go down the path of Pakistan, India, just building a bomb in secret. It was above the ground. I mean, even the sites that Israel and the United States bombed are all the sites that they knew and were protected by IAEA. They didn't find a site to hit that they could say wasn't there before. Now, this has all failed because they never convinced the West that the program is peaceful, right? They never were able to do that. So the doctrine hasn't worked. Being above the ground has not got them anything. They thought they would, if they had a nuclear program, it would be leverage for lifting sanctions. That didn't work with JCPOA. In fact, more sanctions followed signing a nuclear deal, and again, than before it. And their nuclear doctrine actually brought war on them. So the nuclear doctrine never convinced the West, brought more sanctions, and brought more war. So there are very rational people who are saying, isn't it time that you actually really set aside this nuclear doctrine, right? And so what would be Iran's nuclear doctrine? I mean, we give up the whole nuclear program. That's one way of saying, our nuclear doctrine is having no nuclear program. Or you basically say, we're gonna have a different nuclear doctrine. Now, what that might be, is it a bomb? Is it a hidden program? Is it no longer cooperating with IAEA and coming out of NPT? So I think this is an important debate. Iran has not made a decision about a bomb because that literally would invite another round of war. And also because the dilemma they have with the way they built the program is that to take it from where it is now to having 20, 30 nuclear warheads, which is what deterrence would look like is not a dash. It's going to take time, and it's the period in which they're going to be most vulnerable. So I don't think they can conceive of having nuclear deterrence unless they can conceive of how they're going to manage this period. And, you know, there are options on the table, like a serious nuclear deal with the United States or another Israeli attack on Iran. I mean, there's a lot of things that could happen in between, or the regime faltering domestically. I mean, these sorts of things could happen. But in reality, Iran was attacked because of its nuclear program. Iran is under massive snapback sanctions because of its nuclear program, right? So its nuclear program is now everything for Iran. It's its economy, it's its security, it's the viability of the Islamic Republic. They're all now tied to this thing. And it's very clear that the way that they progressed between 2003 and 2025, over 22 years, has now, A, reached a dead end, and some would say had been a mistake. You know, everything that the nuclear program was supposed to avoid and not bring upon Iran, it has brought upon Iran.

Vali Nasr, such an informative hour and a bit. Thanks for joining us here on Downstream.

Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great to be with you.