There's a massacre, as far as we can tell, even with an Internet
blackout being perpetrated against kids who were at
university, who were, you know, on TikTok until a few weeks ago,
you know, who were dreaming of a better future.
I think Donald Trump, who was quite impulsive, you know, and,
and can be moved by these reports of of outrageous
massacre on the streets, might feel that something, anything
has to come from the skies. Hello and welcome to Trump
World. I'm Matt Fry in London.
And I'm Anushka Rastana in Washington, DC Over the past
week, Trump has been reminding us he wants the whole of the
world or a piece of the whole of the world, hasn't he, Matt?
I found it kind of amazing when he posted on True Social an
image of his Wikipedia page, which someone had edited to say
president of Venezuela. And he actually put that out on
social media. But obviously the issue we're
talking about today is Iran. It is indeed.
A lot later, we're going to talk to Joe Biden's Iran envoy to try
and understand more about those conversations happening in the
White House. So we don't really know what's
going on inside Iran, but the little snippets that have
appeared and I, I have a lot of Iranian friends in London and
outside in the US who are in contact very sporadically with
their relatives and friends. The picture inside Iran is
utterly horrific. It is a massacre perpetrated by
the regime against mainly unarmed civilians, some of whom
have been fighting back, some of whom have killed policemen and
members of the militia, some of whom have burnt mosques and
police cars. Yes, yes, yes.
But essentially this is this is a regime fighting for its own
survival by unleashing hell on its own citizens.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely horrific.
The world is looking on in horror.
And here in the US, Donald Trump is making quite clear the there
may be some sort of intervention.
He has written on Truth Social. Help is on its way, although
when he was asked what help might be, he told someone to
figure it out themselves. We know that his national
security team has been meeting. We don't know quite what's going
on in his head, we never do. But he did in an interview with
CBS, talk a little bit about his motivations, a strong action.
You're talking about what's the end game.
The end game is to win. I like winning.
How do you define that in Iran? Well, let's define it in
Venezuela. Let's define it with Al
Baghdadi. He was wiped out.
Let's define it with Salamani. So, so we know he wants to look
like he's winning. But Matt, this could be really
consequential, right? And what America is about to do
is something that a lot of people are presumably discussing
inside Iran. And a lot of the Iranian people
you've been speaking to, what are they telling you?
What do they want to see from America?
Well, one thing that's really struck me in Oska is that, you
know, for the first time ever, really, you have a plurality of
the Iranians that I've been speaking to.
And of course, these are almost by by their very nature,
oppositional figures who are saying to Donald Trump, bring it
on, you know, unleash those missiles.
And the first time I heard that actually was many years ago
after 911. I was, I was in Iran because we
were expecting Iran to be hit by the US and it ended up being
Iraq and, and, and our government Minder appointed by
the Ministry of Information whispered into my ear during
Friday prayers in Tehran. When the bombers come from the
United States to Iraq, could they please unleash their load
over Tehran? First?
I thought that was an extraordinary thing to say.
And it was a sort of little glimmer of fearlessness from
someone who worked for the government.
Now you're getting that on a massive scale across the
country, translated into the coinage of of sheer rage and
outrage by the fact that the regime, which has proven to be
not just incompetent and brutal, but also corrupt over time, is
saying to an to a population that is really quite well
educated. And Iranians have a high level
of education. They pride themselves on that.
You know, there were all these images from Tehran on social
media just a few weeks ago where, you know, there were kind
of bands playing in the streets. And, you know, women in Tehran
have taken off the hijab, not because they've been officially
allowed to do so, but just because they've taken things
into their own hands. And then along comes this very
dramatic devaluation of the currency.
And for the first time in years, and this is important to
understand, the bizarre class. So the it's by bizarre, you're
not doing it justice. This is the economic kind of
beating heart of Tehran and other big cities.
These are the people who, when they sided with the ayatollahs
in 1979, made the revolution happen.
This time round, they're so fed up with this incompetent and
corrupt regime and essentially have said to the regime, this
doesn't work. Now, what does the government
do? They fire the head of the
central bank. They then give something like
$7.00 a month to each household as a kind of pay off, which will
buy you, you know, a bottle of oil if you're lucky.
And remember, the inflation is so rampant that if you go into
the bazaar, into the market in Tehran, which is huge, and you
end up, you know, you buy a loaf of bread.
You know, whereas you go into the bazaar and then an hour
later as you're shopping, you buy the same loaf of bread
again. It's going to be more expensive.
And I think there's combinations of things, you know,
incompetence, brutality, you know, and, you know, and lack of
freedom and hardship and hardship.
I think it made people's cup boil over.
And essentially when you add to that, you know, gunning them
down on the streets has created a a pretty fearless population.
So even if they don't bring the regime now, now, even if Trump
doesn't intervene in any meaningful way, no regime can
survive purely by coercion. There has to be a degree of
consent. And you're only getting that
from people who are still paid by the government or, you know,
small pockets of loyal support in bits of the countryside.
Although we've seen protests before that haven't brought down
the regime and that's what people are scared about.
This is different. I think this is this is bigger.
It's on a bigger scale. And, and I think maybe in
getting back to Donald Trump, you know, he is, look, there are
many things that motivate him. And, you know, whether it's oil
or power projection or whatever, I think for them, they must be
cautious that having had a very smooth operation in Venezuela,
where there was really very little loss of life.
And although you could argue that, you know, there wasn't
regime change, it was regime rebooting of a sort.
And they were talking to the vice president for months before
this happened. And she may have been
instrumental in throwing Maduro under the bus.
There is no such process as far as we know in Iran.
And there's a real danger that, you know, if they try something
similar in Iran and it fails, they'll have, you know, they'll
be accused of, of botching it, basically.
But at the same time, I think Donald Trump, who is quite
impulsive, you know, and, and can be moved by these reports
of, of outrage and massacre on the streets, might feel that
something, anything has to come from the skies.
Yeah. And what is interesting about
this, Donald Trump's second presidency is for all the talk
of American isolationism, all the promise of no forever wars,
it has been incredibly interventionist.
You and I have talked about this so much on the, you know,
Channel 4 News bulletins and on this podcast.
But, you know, there have been strikes on Syria, on Nigeria, on
Somalia, on Yemen, on Iraq, on Iran last year when there was
the war with Israel, when he actually this week described his
strike on a nuclear facility there as flawed.
And then, of course, we've seen what we've seen in Venezuela.
You talk about Venezuela. The people of Venezuela wanted
regime change. And many will feel frustrated
that what they actually got was, yes, Maduro going out, but the
vice president who was frankly up to her eyeballs in the same,
you know, administration carrying on and America probably
having more influence over Venezuela than Iran.
So there will be some nervousness about it.
Now we know that Donald Trump has met with his national
security team. They then met again on Tuesday
this week themselves. The options they are said to be
discussing, and I'd just like to ask you about these, Matt, are
economic sanctions. We've already heard him talk
about tariffs for those doing business with Iran, but economic
sanctions on individuals within the regime, cyber attacks that
could quite try and disrupt some of the issues that you've been
talking about in terms of communications.
A kind of symbolic strike, one which is there to show American
support, but perhaps not with much follow up.
Perhaps hitting particular buildings that are seen as quite
symbolic. A strike that actually tries to
take out the supreme Leader himself, which is being talked
about more at the moment, or a kind of bigger intervention, I
would say. I don't get the impression that
they want to do a bigger intervention.
Everything we've seen before, this has been more like a
surgical strike. There is a lot of resistance
here in including from JD Vance, the Vice President, to that.
Talk me through some of those options, Matt, and what you
think might be likely to come and the impact it would have.
There's something to be said in favour and against all of them.
So if you take things like sanctions, there are of course,
already sanctions in place against Iran.
They were triggered after Trump pulled out of the, you know, the
nuclear accords, which he did almost immediately when he came
back into into power. There are sanctions also imposed
by, you know, many European nations against Iran.
But despite those sanctions, Iran has been doing, you know,
economically on one level, not so badly because they're selling
a lot of their oil to China. You know, they have, you know,
very close links with Russia. As we know.
You know, a lot of the military hardware from Iran was bought by
the Russians to be used in Ukraine.
So they are part of the kind of wider axis of authoritarian
governments, which also includes Pyongyang and so on.
So economically they can probably they could have
survived quite well if it weren't for the absolute cock
up, you know, that led to the, you know, hyperinflation and
then the collapse of the currency which was then felt
immediately on the markets. Now part of that was a result of
what happened last June in the circle 12 day war, but part of
it is just down to the sheer incompetence of the Ayatollas.
And that is something that has been very much registered by the
so-called bizarre class. Now, the second thing is so
sanctions, OK, you can increase them, but that's not going to
have an immediate effect. Because I guess what they're
thinking of is how do we stop the killing on the streets?
How do we use this opportunity of fearlessness and rage to to
work against, you know, to tip over so that the regime actually
falters? So you're looking at cyber
warfare. Well, that can certainly, you
know, the Americans have used it before.
There was a famous Stuxnet virus, something it was called
where they basically stopped the centrifuges of a, of Iranian
enrichment facilities. I think that was not an, that
was a Democratic administration that did that, not, not the last
Trump administration. So they can do that, right?
They've got the ability to do that, but that doesn't that
doesn't necessarily make a difference, especially when the
nuclear program has been sort of kind of put on ice anyway by the
by the war from last year. And also, if the Internet is
shut down, and that's one of the reasons why they're shutting it
down, you then have much less ability to go in there and hack
stuff. OK.
So cyber warfare doesn't really work if the country's gone
offline. OK.
And not to the same extent. And then you have military
strikes. And I guess what they must be
thinking of, can we take out the Ayatollah, which would be an
obvious thing to do. They shield away from doing that
in June because they thought that would be a step too far.
But I'm sure they're thinking about that right now.
If we take him out, the guy's in his 80s.
He's, he sounds very frail or they're still, you know, very
ruthless. Does that actually make a
difference when you have an entire security structure, the,
you know, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij militia, you
know, the regular army, when they're kind of seem to be
unified in opposition to their own population.
So maybe that won't make much of a difference.
The key thing I would be looking at, and we just don't have
access to this, is when they say they're talking to the foreign
minister, who else are they talking to?
Are they talking to people in the regular army, you know,
generals in the army who don't like, you know, who answer to
the president who's supposed to be a bit of a reformer, who
don't like what's going on? The way these regimes fall is
when the institution split and one institution, especially in
uniform, sides with the people on the streets.
That's what I would be looking out for.
And I wonder, you know, to what extent that can be accelerated
by military strikes or hindered by them.
I'm not sure it could be accelerated.
You could could find that, You know, IGRC generals think, oh,
I'd rather live than die under an American bombardment.
And so maybe they're not talking through back channels to, I
don't know, Marco Rubio or Pete Hexor, Who knows?
I think there's been an interesting shift in tone from
Donald Trump this week. Earlier in the week, he was
talking about diplomacy. He was telling reporters, you
know, they call me, I've been talking to them.
Obviously, I'd prefer diplomacy to take action.
And then we had this kind of hardening of his tone where he
suddenly said on true social, I'm not talking to any officials
anymore, get out there, protest, take over your institutions.
And I was wondering what had led to that.
And one thing that was being reported on Fox News, which we
know he watches, was the Ayatollahs Russian language X
account in Russia. He had written in Russian that
America better be careful not to miscalculate here.
And it actually wasn't being that broadly reported on or
taken that seriously, but it was being reported on Fox News.
And I did wonder if Donald Trump had seen that and had felt some
sort of anger to it. And in fact, his press
secretary, Caroline Leavitt, then came out just outside the
White House and suddenly spoke to a load of journalists saying
they're saying one thing in public and they're saying
another thing behind the scenes. We know that he is quite
sensitive to all of that. I think one of the risks here is
that every single, you know, strike that we have seen from
the US has been a surgical strike.
Trump has wanted to say victory, as he did in Venezuela, without
actually getting the thing that a lot of the people on the
ground want, which is regime change.
And and so there is no sense that they want to follow up with
what might be required in Iran to try and stabilize the
country. I mean, I think the, I think the
difference in between Venezuela and Iran is very stark.
Venezuela was a, you know, a slow bleed and up a population
was deeply upset by levels of corruption and incompetence and
all that stuff, but they weren't gunning down their own people on
the streets. This is different.
I mean, there's a massacre, as far as we can tell, even with an
Internet blackout being perpetrated against, you know,
kids who were at university, who were, you know, on TikTok until
a few weeks ago, you know, who were dreaming of a better
future. And again, I come back to this
thing. This is a highly educated,
sophisticated and mostly secular population.
They feel completely out of sync with the ayatollahs, you know,
with the theocracy that's been running around quite badly for
all these decades. And practically, do you think
that a strike then leads to a change in regime or what are the
risks in between? Well, you know, anything could
happen, right? You could have a strike that
could embolden, you know, the really hardcore of the, you
know, the, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and, and one
of their kind of, you know, hard generals, the ones that weren't
killed in the in the June war of last year, takes over and, and
becomes even more brutal. Or it could be that, you know,
there are conversations that suddenly happened quite quickly
between Zapalavi, you know, the the man who would have been
Crown Prince, the son of the late Shah, and various
oppositional forces inside Iran, of which there are there are
plenty. But as we've said before, you
know, they're all kind of quite bitterly divided against each
other. But there's nothing like this
sort of degree of brutality to bring even adversaries together
and make them contemplate things that were, you know,
unthinkable, you know, just a few weeks ago.
I just, I just want to tell you this one little story.
I interviewed the Iranian foreign minister, the last
Iranian foreign minister, but I interviewed him literally 10
days before he died in a helicopter crash, which also
killed the Iranian president. And the final question, I said
to him, what are you more afraid of Donald Trump getting re
elected or your own people? And at that stage, I noticed
that his legs started to shake. You know, it was shaking.
I mean, his knee was getting up and down like this and he was
looking at me daggers. And he was really upset by the
question answered in Farsi and said something along the lines
of how, how dare you suggest that we're afraid of anyone.
We have the greatest democracy on the planet.
Da, da, da, da, da interviewed, end of interview, right.
It was interesting that this man who was the the embodiment of
unruffled diplomacy suddenly looked quite ruffled.
So I do think there's a degree of fear from from the regime
towards what's going on on the streets.
And I think you know, and Trump knows that.
And I again, what haunts him is I don't do anything at all.
These people get hung and strung up, you know, and forget about
the Peace Prize. But I mean, it's just sort of it
will keep him up at night and it should do or I do something and
it goes wrong. And then of course, there's
always respect him. We mustn't forget this.
Jimmy Carter's presidency was, was, you know, to some extent
brought down or rather he became a one term president because of
the botched rescue operation of the American diplomats who had
been kidnapped in Tehran for, you know, over a year.
They tried to rescue them. No one was rescued.
It was a huge humiliation for Jimmy Carter and it was one of
the reasons why he lost the election.
There is the other thing as well.
Just looking at this from an American point of view, which is
the reason people are quite surprised by all the
interventions, is that, you know, make America great again.
The MAGA movement is hardly supportive of the idea of
foreign interventions and certainly not in the Middle
East. They, you know, really hate the
idea of the forever wars that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and
the impact that that had on American soldiers.
And also there is an economic issue here at the moment.
People are really feeling the squeeze.
They want Donald Trump to focus on domestic issues.
I find it interesting that all of this comes after, you know,
the administration has been talking so forcefully about the
so-called Donroe Doctrine, the, you know, renamed Monroe
Doctrine, the idea that they're going to focus on the Western
Hemisphere. And now suddenly they are
weighing up the idea of military action in Iran.
You know, I don't think we need to go to massive detail because
neither of us are in Donald Trump's head.
We're always in his head in USA. We live in that head for
goodness sake. We live.
We live in his head. I'd be somewhat more skeptical
about his motivations than you on this one.
But nevertheless, he is weighing it up.
I think it could be quite difficult for him here in the
US, not only in terms of his base and what they might think
about it. You know, ultimately they may
support him anyway. But I was in the capital
yesterday. And there is also, you know,
fury across Congress about the fact that all these strikes are
happening without congressional approval.
There is precedent for that. Barack Obama did it.
But we've now started to see Republicans vote with Democrats,
enough of them, much to Donald Trump's fury, to try to limit
his ability when it comes to war.
I think there is, however, a key distinction here, which I think,
you know, he will be taking into account.
There's a difference between forever wars that involve
American boots on the ground. So occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq incredibly costly and ultimately botched air strikes,
you know, from 30,000 feet is a different matter.
Venezuela, a surgical operation that doesn't involve the
American troops staying in Venezuela more than two hours is
a different matter. The only the big risk with Iran
is that you do something that ends up either having no
discernible, making no difference at all, in which case
America looks toothless despite baring its teeth.
You know, or you do something and and it gets it's horribly
botched. You know you, I don't know you
hit the wrong target. And we may never know because of
the Internet blackout, but that is so there are risks there.
But I would, I would think, and I may be wrong here, I would
think that those risks outweigh what they think of the benefits
of some kind of action. And I would not, I mean, I would
put money on something happening in the next few days or weeks
from the American side. And of course, everything, every
issue has to be seen in a different light.
So there are Republican senators or congressmen who are perfectly
happy to see military strikes against Iran, although they are
holding their breath, you know, and, and crossing their fingers.
Those same senators, you know, and we heard one last week who
said, you know, using force to take Greenland is, and I quote,
weapons grade stupid. So that's another issue that
you'll be reporting on where, you know, the, the, the people
aren't quite so unified. You know, they don't see the
logic of it. You don't break up NATO for the
sake of green and for goodness sake, you know, there are other
ways of securing American interests than that.
So, you know, again, everything is case by case.
Iran is, is very much so generous.
It's tricky, it's complicated. There are lots of risk factors
there. But there's a sort of
overwhelming, I think, desire driven by the rage that is felt
at the at the, the images we're hearing about to do something.
And if you've got that toy box, you know, ballistic missiles and
other things at your disposal is the most powerful man in the
world, you're going to use it. So we're joined by Rob Malley,
who is a senior lecturer at the Jackson School at El University,
but also served as Biden's special envoy to Iran.
And you've also been a former Middle East advisor in 3
presidential administrations. So you've been in the room, Rob.
What do you expect that Donald Trump and key advisors are
discussing in terms of Iran right now?
Well, I think President Trump has made it as clear as as it
could be in his for clarity in his case is not always the the
most evident attribute. But in this case, I think he's
signaled that there will be a military strike.
He, we know he likes dramatic spectacular strikes.
They don't. He doesn't like long wars, but
he likes short, dramatic confrontations in which the US
has the upper hand. So I think we should expect
sometime in the coming days some strike on regime targets,
security services. But who knows?
He could always surprise us. But everything he's telegraphed
so far suggests that, you know, on the on the back of what he
considers A spectacular success in Venezuela, having warned the
Iranian regime, wanting to be on the side as he puts it up, the
protesters and believing that at this point Iran doesn't have
that many options to respond forcefully against an American
attack. My assumption is that we will
see something. And, Rob, the success of the
Venezuela operation, especially the extraction of Madura, you
know, putting him on trial in New York was so extraordinary.
And, of course, much trumpeted, forgive the term by the Trump
administration. It kind of sets the standards,
doesn't it? You know, do you think they've
been planning something, you know, similar with the Ayatollah
Khamenei in recent months as they were planning with Maduro?
Do you think they've got a clear idea of targets in all this?
Or are we dealing with a kind of more instinctive reaction from
the president, who is as upset as many people are about the
reports of violence on the streets of places like Tehran?
Yes. I'm not sure that what's truly
motivating him is level of upset at the levels of violence.
I think he has other considerations in mind.
Again, I think he is fond of these dramatic, spectacular
military raids when he killed Qasem Soleimani, bombed Fordow
in Iran, the nuclear site, and now what he did in in Venezuela.
So I think he's a bit intoxicated with his own self
perception of success. And he may also have been told
by a number of people around him, certainly by the Israeli
Prime Minister, that the Iranian regime is very, you know, it's
very weak at this point. And it might take just a little
push from the US to see dramatic changes in Tehran.
I personally doubt that, but he may well be convinced of it.
And at this point, he doesn't need a big success coming out of
this to be able to claim success.
He has defined success in a way that guarantees he won't fail
because for him, success is showing that he has done what no
other president has done, that he's intervened militarily on
the side of protesters in Iran and that by striking something,
he'll he'll achieve some target. I don't think he could kidnap
the supreme leader, but he could do, he could kill regime
officials. He could target security
installations. He could do something that says
to him and to his his constituency, I said I would
act. I acted.
I said I would punish the regime.
I punish them. And if they continue, I could
punish them again. So he sets the bar wherever he
wants it to be set, and he will claim success regardless of what
happens. But it is interesting to watch
Donald Trump talk about success in Venezuela when at the moment
the same regime is in place. Venezuela and Iran are very
different, right? In Venezuela, America can exert
quite a lot of influence at the moment, it says, because of the
leverage of the oil. But but just looking at it as an
analyst, not thinking about Trump's motivations, if you have
these options on the table, economic sanctions, cyber
attacks, a limited targeted strike or something bigger,
looking at the situation now from your point of view, what do
you think of the merits of those different options?
I mean, we're not even talking now about the legality of some
of these options. So let's let's put those as that
issue aside. I think the question comes down
to what's the objective and it's not clear what the objective is.
Is it just a signal American resolve?
And again, the fact that when the US president threatens
something, he acts on his threat and that people pay a price for
ignoring his threats? If that's the objective, that's
one thing. Is the objective to deter and
stop the Iranian authorities from massacring their people?
Very hard to see why how a military strike achieves that.
Is it to topple the regime? Again, it's hard to see how
strikes, however extensive they are, would lead to the downfall
of the of the regime and certainly hard to see how it
transitions at that point towards the kind of of
government that the US says it wants to see in Tehran.
So the the objectives have not been defined other than living
up to the president's threat. Now, I don't want one big
caveat, which is that the president can, as you said
earlier, he acts by instinct. He could change his mind.
So maybe everything I'm saying now will turn out not to be
true, you know, 24 hours from today.
But at this point, everything signals that he is in that mode
of wanting something, and again, he will define whether it's
successful based on his own criteria.
You're asking me? But what do you think should
happen if you were there? What if the objective right now
is to stop what Iran is doing to its people?
I don't think that administrative strike would
achieve that. I think there are other ideas
that are out there about, you know, cyber forms of cyber
warfare that would prevent the regime from communicating with
itself so that you disrupt their operations.
You could also have efforts to try to help the Iranian people
be in a better position to escape the complete blackout
that's been imposed by the authorities.
But frankly, the, the, the sad truth is they're very limited
options If the goal it when, when a government or regime
feels itself existentially at stake to try to stop it from
going after people who they believe are threatening their
rule. There are very few options that
are out there. And that's just, that's just the
reality. But there's steps that can be
taken to try to limit the ability of the government to
repress its own people. I wouldn't.
I wouldn't claim that those are going to be wildly successful.
Rob speaking to a lot of Iranians, this week's mostly
outside Iran because of the Internet problems and the phone
lines being cut. But I've really noticed two
things compared to last year or any previous time, even those
people who don't particularly like the Trump administration
are so enraged by what the regime has been doing to
protesters on the streets that they are almost begging him to
intervene. I mean, you know, even if it
doesn't result in, you know, regime change or even if it
doesn't, you know, it's not the domino that topples the OR the
other dominoes. They just want someone to
suffer, you know, and they think that only Trump can impose that
degree of suffering on the regime because the street is
helpless. The second thing that I've
really noticed is that Reza Pahlavi, you know, the the son
of the late Shah who's been living in exile in Maryland for
decades, you know, and I've met him a few times.
I interviewed him once for the BBC and who seemed to be utterly
irrelevant for many, many years. The State Department, you know,
under, you know, Bush and Obama wouldn't go anywhere near him,
right? His name is now being shouted
more and more on the streets of Iranian cities.
Maybe because there's no obvious alternative.
And I just wonder whether you had any dealings with him when
you were working for President Biden and for his predecessors,
and whether you think he is at all a viable option, either as a
transitional figure or maybe he's part of some kind of future
government. So first, I mean, you know, I
think we're both hearing many of the of the similar things.
I really don't want to be in a position here where I claim that
I know how the Iranian people feel.
I don't know. I've not been there for decades.
I was there on three days decades ago.
I, I don't know that how the majority of Iranians feel, but I
could it's very understandable that a number of them who either
have been victim or their families have been victim or
friends have been a victim of, of the, the crackdown that they
won't help from anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
And if right now, as you say, the one country that seems
prepared to do something for good or I'll is the United
States and it is President Trump.
So I'm not. I wouldn't be surprised if there
is that feeling among many Iranians looking for salvation.
And they look to the one place where they think it may come
from, whether that's a majority of you, a plurality of you.
I again, I'm not even going to to try to, to speculate, but
there must be a level of desperation and despair on the
part of many Iranians who are prepared to, to look at anything
and who may think nothing can be worse than what we are
experiencing today. On the question of, of, of the
former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, There was no formal
interaction with him when I was in the body administration.
I think I had one chance encounter at a, at a conference
at one point. I think you're right that his
name is being clamored more than any other name at this point,
partly because there are no other names.
I'm not sure, again, that that's an indication of his level of
support among the masses of Iranians or what it would mean
if at any point there's a transition in Iran.
Would he be somebody or would it be people who've lived in Iran,
who struggled in Iran and what some level know their country
better than he does? Again, I think it's very hard
for anyone on the outside to speculate because we are in
uncharted territory when there's no name but one name.
That's the one name people are going to to chat.
There's no other name right now. He's one person who's visible.
He obviously is well funded and so I think he has that name
recognition that others lack. I don't would think that that
necessarily translates into political organizational support
on the ground. Can I ask you about the risks of
military action? What do you fear would happen if
Donald Trump goes ahead and strikes Iran?
And just, I'm sorry to say, it sounds a little hopeless from
what you're saying. You know, whatever the rights or
wrongs of military action may be, this regime is doing really
terrible things on the ground. Can you see a way out?
Can you see a place where we get to where the regime does fall?
Oh, listen, when I say that, you know, whatever pessimism you may
have detected in in my tone, it's that I don't think that
externally inspired coups, revolutions, uprisings have a
great track record of success, particularly when it comes to
the United States. And we could go down the list.
So it's very hard to imagine that as a result of military
strikes, you're going to see either the regime deciding
they're not going to, you know, fight back against the
protesters or a change in the regime.
Now, I do think the dynamics within Iran itself are the ones
that are going to be the most important to watch.
And it is clear that the regime is has losing, has lost
legitimacy, has lost resources, assets, the ability to sort of
reproduce the conditions of its rule.
So at some point, I believe there will be a fundamental
transition, transformation. I don't know when, and I'm not
sure what role the outside players will will play.
But the dynamics in Iran, I think the intensity of the
protest, the fact that we now have protests every few years.
So it's not as if you have a protest, then you wait a decade
and you have another mass protest.
They they're happening more frequently with greater
intensity and with people feeling they have less to lose.
So I do think that they will be a change in Iran.
I'm not going to try to put a date on it, a timeline on it.
So but I think your, your question has to do with what the
impact of an American strike would be.
Again, part of part of it depends on how intensive broad
and what the targets of the strikes will be.
But I think the range of responses and, and I'm really
sorry to sound as speculative as I as, as I will, but I do think
there's so many unknowns. It goes from the Iranian simply
saying we're going to absorb the shock.
We're still standing on the day after.
And so, yes, the, the, the, the American president thought that
by striking us, we're going to, we're going to collapse.
We're not collapsing. We're still standing.
And that's our victory. Depending on how severe the
strikes are and how threatened the regime may be, they may
decide to lash out with nothing to lose and go after oral
installations. American head personnel in the
region, Israel, all of those are possible.
I wouldn't put them as the most likely responses because then
Iran is really inviting a much more massive retaliation by the
US or by or by Israel. So I think they will calibrate
their response depending on the severity of the attack.
I mean, as you said, you know, these regimes are rarely toppled
from the streets, even if ordinary protesters have have
lost their fear. And there seems to be quite a
lot of that going on. They're just, you know, this is
a last chance saloon both for them and indeed for the people
running the country or miss running the country.
I just wonder when, when you were, you know, on the Middle
East desk of the previous administrations, did you reach
out? And did you get any traction at
all with, you know, people in the, you know, in the
Revolutionary Guard or in the government, in the elected, you
know, civilian government who might be ready to, you know, who
might now be, you know, talking to the United States behind
closed doors? Because the way these things
collapse often is from within. So before I answer that, I just
want to come back to your last point, which I think is
important about how internal dynamics can evolve.
Let's just look at a comparison, which is a very inexact
comparison, But the Syria, we had an uprising which was, and
it's the state that was much weaker than the Iranian state,
an uprising that was well funded, armed by the outside
that seemed to be threatening the regime.
And yet the regime held on between 2011 to 2024.
And so that's one lesson that regimes could survive.
But then at the time when least was least expected, the regime
crumbled. And I think there are two
lessons there. It could take a long time
because regimes that are fighting for their survival,
have the fire and that have the firepower to do so will do so.
But second, that we should never be surprised by being surprised.
Things could happen all of a sudden.
It could take a long time and then all of a sudden the House
of Cards just collapse, collapses.
On your second issue, Listen, I, I don't, I don't want to talk
about what the intelligence community might have done, some
of which I'm not even be Privy to.
I would say that the level of the political, the State
Department, the, the White House, no, there was not
attempts to try to get members of the regime to defect.
It would be too dangerous for them.
It would be too dangerous for us.
And probably we wouldn't be particularly good at picking and
then probably exposing the people that we were reaching out
to. So no, that was not part of my
experience. Again, what the intelligence
community might be doing. I leave that to intelligence
officials to talk to you about. Matt suggested that you know
Trump's motives might be about trying to help the people who
were protesting, and you suggested that might not be the
case. Can I just say just really
quickly in defence of Donald Trump, which which is something
I don't do every day, the I, I have no doubts about the fact
that he's looking at oil and strategy and projection of
power. But I do think it is not beyond,
you know, his wit or our wit, that you can be both strategic
and tactical while at the same time feeling, you know, very
human outrage about, you know, reports of massacres of innocent
civilians on the streets. You know, and when he talks
about people getting killed in Ukraine, it's kind of similar.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't follow from that that he's got a
coherent strategy for how to change the regime.
But I'm pretty sure that he's pretty angry at the moment at
the kind of reports that are making us angry as well.
Of course, and also I think, I think angry a bit about anti
American rhetoric coming from some of the members of the
regime as well, because I noticed that his language
shifted suddenly. But on Venezuela, for example,
he spoke a lot about human rights before.
He never spoke about democracy after.
And I just really wanted to ask, in terms of Iran, it's a bit
different. The oil industry is much more
separate from the US than the Venezuelan oil industry was.
Are there energy commercial interests in Iran that Trump may
well have his eyes on that America could actually
realistically get to 1 day? So first, you make a fairpoint.
Donald Trump is a human being. Sometimes one could forget that.
And he is. He seems to be become emotional
when he sees some pictures of children being killed.
I would say that his outrage is selective and his outrage is
often dictated by other considerations, as you just
said. And so he may, you know, what's
happening in Sudan may for some reason bother him less than
what's happening in Iran for other reasons.
But anyway, I'm not going to try to decipher his motivations too
much. Yes, I think in his mind he sees
Iran as a as a huge market and as a huge producer of oil.
And whenever he sees that, he believes there may be financial
opportunities. I think the Iranian regime tried
to play on that when they said we could reach a deal and then
we you could have billions of dollars of investment.
And who knows what he may be imagining that there's an
outcome in which just as he did, as he's doing with Venezuela,
the US will or he will will derive some financial benefit
from Iranian oil. Again, it's hard to see exactly
what he may have in mind for him.
It may be more abstract, amorphous.
But if you have a friendlier regime in in Tehran, one that
depends on the US, one that's going to want sanctions relief
and is prepared to trade some some financial benefit in
exchange for getting financial sanctions relief, I'm sure
that's in his head. And I think that's one of the
reasons why he finds Iran a particularly interesting country
to deal with. And he said that many times.
He never leaves the I mean, when, when, when Trump speaks,
you have to listen carefully because he often speaks the
truth, even inadvertently. And he often speaks about Iran's
economic potential. I think that is one of the
motivations as to why he thinks that either at some point a deal
with maybe a slightly different regime or with a completely
different regime, or some kind of a bargain can be done in
which financial benefits would accrue to the United States.
Rob. Really fascinating, really
appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us.
So look, obviously talking about foreign policy again, Matt and
Trump world obviously will often do that.
There's been a lot of domestic stuff going on here.
I've obviously not long come back from Minneapolis where an
ICE agent shot and killed Renee. Good.
I think that story is going to run and run because of the
reactions to it. And it is such a tragedy.
I'm sure we'll be talking about that soon.
And maybe maybe Donald Trump is even thinking that he might
distract from, you know, trouble on the streets of America by
launching air strikes, you know, onto the military installations
of Iran. And I think without Anushka,
we're going to wrap it up. Yeah, that's it.
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