Podcast: Tensions with Tehran with Karim Sadjadpour

Transcript

Listen: America nearly launched into a major military confrontation with Iran. Then Trump backed off. So what happened? Ian Bremmer looks into it with one of the world's foremost Iran experts, Karim Sadjadpour.

TRANSCRIPT: Tensions with Tehran with Karim Sadjadpour

Karim Sadjadpour:

In 1979 Iranians experienced a revolution without democracy, and today they aspire for democracy without a revolution.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. It's an audio version of what you can find on public television, where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of little puppets. This week I sit down with Karim Sadjadpour an Iranian American economist and policy analyst who regularly advises American, European, and Asian governments about the Middle East. He's a particularly good person to talk to about Iran right now, and I'll talk to him about what to expect from rising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

And I'm here with Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow for the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, one of the top experts in the world on all things Iran, and getting a little grayer, I see.

Karim Sadjadpour:

That's true.

Ian Bremmer:

How did that happen?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, I guess it's better than the alternative to not getting older.

Ian Bremmer:

You look good. Great to see you. And we're going to talk about what the hell is happening in the Iranian conflict. So, President Trump now saying he would be happy to meet with the Iranians with no preconditions, doesn't seem like where all the rest of the administration is. How surprised are you by this?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think there's three polls within the Trump administration vis-à-vis Iran, Ian. You have President Trump who very clearly wants a deal with Iran. At a minimum he wants a summit, like he's had with the North Koreans. Certainly doesn't want war. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has three decades of advocating military strikes and regime change in Iran. And in between them you have Secretary of State Pompeo who's trying to reconcile these contradictory impulses by really focusing on the means, which is sanctions and pressure, rather than the ends, which no one can agree on. But I think if it were up to President Trump himself, it's very clear that what he wants in Iran is some type of a summit where he can sit down with Iran's leadership, but he has no interest in conflict or even greater US footprint in the Middle East.

Ian Bremmer:

On the ground inside Iran, have the people gotten noticeably angrier at the United States because of the economic depredation that has been forced upon them? Or are they increasingly angry at their own regime for mishandling the deal, the Americans, corruption, everything else? Where would you put that balance?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, overwhelmingly the people of Iran were supportive of the nuclear deal. I will say the Iranian people want to be South Korea, not North Korea. And so they welcome the idea of being reintegrated with the international community. My sense as to how the Iranian public responds to outside pressure and outside sanctions is that these sanctions oftentimes accentuate people's existing political disposition, meaning if you're sympathetic to the Iranian government, you see economic sanctions as one more reason why America can't be trusted. And America is a malign and imperialist power. And if you're an opponent of the Iranian government, you say, this is just another example of the regime doing what it wants and the people pay the consequences. So I don't think sanctions and outside pressure gets people to really change teams in Iran. I think it really further polarizes the Iranian public and accentuates people's existing views.

Ian Bremmer:

Now we all know that the Green Revolution happened in Iran. It was brutally repressed, and the regime came out of that, a lot of state stability. If you look at the country today, vis-à-vis grassroots who everyone says that the Iranian people are much more interested in being friends with the Americans than certainly the Iranian regime. What does that balance look like today? How do you think about the strength and the expanse of the regime in Iran?

Karim Sadjadpour:

It's a great question, and what I'd argue is that the regime in Iran doesn't have widespread support, but the support that it does have within the revolutionary guards and the Basij militia and very conservative elements of society, is pretty deep. And so what that means is that you have a regime which is really willing to kill en masse to keep their power, and you have a society or an opposition which is unorganized and unarmed and leaderless, and very importantly not willing to die en mass to take power. And so my argument about Iran is that in 1979, Iranians experienced a revolution without democracy. And today they aspire for democracy without a revolution, meaning people in Iran, I would argue, have revolutionary, they aspire for revolutionary ends, but they're not willing to pursue revolutionary means. And-

Ian Bremmer:

So you think they're basically Americans.

Karim Sadjadpour:

In some ways. I mean, I think that in a way it's kind of a reflection of a political maturation in Iran.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think that National Security Advisor John Bolton, doesn't understand this or doesn't care?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think John Bolton's generation of American foreign policy and national security thinkers were very much traumatized by the experience of the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. And from that point on, many of them have held incredibly jaded views about the nature of the Iranian regime. And I think they're entitled to their views about the malign nature of the Iranian regime. The question is what's the most effective way to deal with Iran and to again ensure that Iran not only is prevented from becoming North Korea, but you help a society try to become South Korea. And I think the policies which Bolton has advocated over the years, whether that's military strikes or a regime change isolation, they've really never borne fruit when we've tried to apply them elsewhere in the world. And when Bolton was last in government during the George W. Bush era, we had at one point over 200,000 US troops on Iran's borders in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a daily basis, President George W. Bush was saying, all options are on the table, threatening potential strikes against Iran. That was during the time when Iran was killing hundreds of American troops in Iraq using Iranian IEDs. So I think it's one thing to diagnose the problem correctly, but this is an Iranian regime which wants to be our adversary. You can't make friends with a regime which needs you as an adversary for their own internal legitimacy. Okay, that's okay. But then how do you go about dealing with that problem? And I think the perennial challenge in the United States is that people on the far left, like Bernie Sanders, think that we're the problem. And people on the far right like John Bolton think that we're the solution. And in reality, I think it takes a mix of both pressure and engagement to effectively deal with Iran.

Ian Bremmer:

So that implies that a big part of Obama's strategy, which was not just about doing a limited nuclear deal to try to contain that specific threat, but that would then be the opening for a more constructive, broader US Iranian relationship, with this regime was actually misguided, that you don't believe that that's possible with this Iranian regime.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, I remember having this debate with folks within the Obama administration, and there were a variety of views within the Obama administration about this. But on one hand, I think that the nuclear deal, in my opinion, it was a good deal with a bad regime. And it was successful in that it significantly curtailed Iran's nuclear program, subjected it to more transparency. But I do think it was illusory to think that this nuclear deal was going to change the Iranian regime's perception of its own interests. And the reality is that Iran's supreme leader has long believed that it's easier for him to preserve his own authority in a closed isolated environment, which is hostile to the United States. And I think we're naive if the United States believe that we can get autocratic regimes to do things that would be inimical to their own survival interests

Ian Bremmer:

In 10-years time, does the United States have more in common, more aligned with the Iranians in the region or say with the Saudis?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think an increasing number of people in the US foreign policy establishment see the United States and Saudi Arabia as friends, but not allies and Iran and the United States as allies, but not friends, meaning that we have more in common with Iran than we do with Saudi Arabia. And the threat of radical Sunni jihadism like ISIS and Al-Qaeda is worse than the threat of radical Shia jihadism like Hezbollah. But I think the reality is that you have a government in Saudi Arabia with all of its flaws and shortcomings, at the end of the day, Mohammad bin Salman wants to be allied with the United States. And at the end of the day, Iran's current leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei wants the United States as an adversary.

So if you're sitting in their White House, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you're not going to gratuitously break an alliance with a country that wants you as an ally and you can't force a country which wants you as an adversary to be your friend. And so I think ultimately as Henry Kissinger best put it, Iran really is going to have to decide whether it wants to be a nation or a cause. If Iran continues to see itself as a revolutionary cause in opposition to America, in opposition to the United States, then we're going to continue to butt heads. But I think the day when Iran starts to prioritize its own national interests and economic interests, there's actually going to be a lot of overlapping interest between America and Iran.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, this does relate to the Iranian people, it relates to the Iranian economy. So far we've been talking mostly about Iranian politics at the high level, and yet we know Iran is a large population. It's a diverse economy, and if it's going to grow and provide anything for its people and anything for its middle class and its working class, they're going to have to be a part of the global economy. You said Iran wants to be more like South Korea than North Korea. Well, that if that's true, if they want to be more like South Korea than North Korea, they have a hard time picking the United States as their top enemy as a regime. Those two things don't really work together. So what is the driver for that piece? Is it some moderates in the government that just don't have a lot of power? Is it completely separate from the regime? It's some local business interests, but they don't really have the ability to shape anything? What is it that's driving the internationalizing component of what Iran is all about?

Karim Sadjadpour:

So if you look back at the 1979 Revolution, all of the disparate groups that opposed the Shah of Iran from Marxists to Khomeini, they had very little in common when it came to the end game. But what united them was anti-imperialism. This belief that America was somehow keeping Iran backward and poor. I think now, if there's an organizing principle among Iran's younger generations and more moderate classes, it's really, it's not anti-imperialism, it's globalization. That we are very proud country. Iranians are very proud. They want to remain sovereign, but they also want to be integrated with the world. They want to be part of the international community rather than always fighting against the international community and being the odd people out.

And so today, four decades after the 1979 revolution, something like three quarters of the country was born after the revolution was born, and death to America doesn't make sense to people as an organizing principle. It's not an inspiring organizing principle. And I think most people understand that Iran has enormous potential as a nation. It's got enormous resources, it's got enormous human capital. But that potential will never be realized as long as the official slogan of the government is "Death to America."

Ian Bremmer:

President Trump's closest relationships in the world today are with Iran's principle enemies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE. How does that play out for the Iranian regime and in the region?

Karim Sadjadpour:

So you're absolutely right that Trump's closest friends in the world dislike Iran and also in the context of domestic American politics, no American politician wins a lot of points by saying, let's be nice to Iran, given the fraught relationship with Iran over the years. But there's also a competing impulse Trump has, which is to get out of conflicts in the Middle East and reduce America's footprint in the Middle East. And I think he recognizes that it's very tough for the United States to do that if the status quo relationship with Iran remains. And so that's why, I mean, there's a famous essay from Isaiah Berlin called the Hedgehog and the Fox, and he separated individuals into two types of people in the world. There's foxes who know a lot of different things, and there are hedgehogs who know one big thing. And when I look at Iran and the United States, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei is a hedgehog. He only knows one thing, which is resistance, resistance, resistance. Donald Trump-

Ian Bremmer:

His beard also does have that hedgehog kind of thing.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Your words not mine.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, fair enough.

Karim Sadjadpour:

And Donald Trump is a fox, not in the sense that he knows a lot of things-

Ian Bremmer:

It is more orange.

Karim Sadjadpour:

It is more orange.

Ian Bremmer:

This works as an analogy. You're absolutely right. But he's also a fox because?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, he's a fox, not because he knows a lot of things, but because he says a lot of things. So this is a president to, within a one-week span, can tweet that he is prepared to end Iran, threatening genocide against Iran. And then a couple of days later, he can give a speech saying that Iran can be a great nation, even with the same leadership.

Ian Bremmer:

So what's the big thing that Trump knows? What's the one big thing?

Karim Sadjadpour:

Well, I think it is fundamentally confusing, not just for the Iranians, I'm guessing for Chinese and others, but in particular the Iranian regime, in that one day, the message they get from the United States is threat of war and escalation. And then the next day is President Trump saying, we're prepared to speak to you unconditionally. We just want a deal. We just don't want you to have nukes, which is what the JCPOA was providing, in any case.

Ian Bremmer:

The Obama deal. So, but if you are the Iranians, and you have watched this play out with North Korea, Trump has met Kim Jong Un on twice. No preconditions, likes the guy now, says nice things, talks about the suspension of the ICBM tests, the nuclear tests, getting back some hostages. And North Korea is now in a meaningfully better position. If Trump is telling you, never mind Bolton, never mind Pompeo, Trump's the president. If Trump is telling you, I'm prepared to meet with no preconditions, why don't the Iranians find that compelling? The Iranians that are facing a very severe recession right now, imposed by Trump?

Karim Sadjadpour:

I think there's an important distinction between Iran's leadership and Kim Jong Un in North Korea. So Kim Jong Un is a young man in his thirties. He's looking at a four, potentially four decade time horizon in which he could be ruling. Iran's Supreme Leader just turned 80 and his entire life, he's espoused this ethos of Death to America, America can't be trusted. And his goal is to die Supreme Leader. He doesn't have a four decade time horizon, and he fundamentally mistrusts Donald Trump. And his longtime modus operandi has been that whenever you're under pressure, never compromise, because that is not going to alleviate the pressure. It's going to project weakness and invite more pressure. And so I think as long as Khamenei sees these competing polls in the United States of Trump saying some things, John Bolton and Pompeo potentially saying other things, I think he's going to be very reluctant about entering negotiations with the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

Karim Sadjadpour, very good to have you on.

Karim Sadjadpour:

Thank you, Ian. Great to be here.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week, same place, same time unless you're watching on social media, in which case, wherever you happen to be, don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

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