506. Trump Attacks Iran: What Happens Now?

As Tehran launches retaliatory strikes against Israel and US military bases, how dangerous is this moment for the Middle East and the wider world? Are the attacks an attempt by Trump to shift attention away from the Epstein files? Will any of this lead to regime change in Iran? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Emma Jackson, Charlie Johnson Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to Arrested Politics, special on US Israeli attacks on Iran. Operation Epic Fury is underway. Sounds like a very much something written by Donald Trump or Hexeth. And to think that just two days ago in Geneva, there were talks going on and the Amani mediator was heading to Washington to report on progress. And now we are with some pretty major bombing underway. Rory, where do you want to start?

• 0:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think let's start with, for people who are interested in a kind of granular US view, maybe look back at the recent leading interview that we did with Rob Malley. And just to remind people who are listening, Rob Malley was the lead negotiator on the JCPOA, which was the old Iran nuclear deal, and was Obama's point man and then Biden's point man on Iran. And we obviously got him on because the US fleet has been gathering around Iran for months now, much in the way that it did in Venezuela. So people remember there was a lot of false ARAMs around Venezuela, people very concerned

• 1:15Rory Stewart?

  that this enormous American military naval and air presence, marine presence had ended up around Venezuela. But for weeks, nothing really happened. And then the strike occurred. And the same pattern roughly has been followed in Iran. So over the last weeks and months, more and more American assets have been moved into the region. And there was a real sense, actually, even when the strike happened in Venezuela, of people saying, oh, I'm surprised it's Venezuela, I thought they would be doing Iran first. And when we did a recording, I think, a month ago, we were talking about why it might not have happened yet. So there was a speculation that Israel felt it wasn't quite ready.

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  I'm not getting into the rights or wrongs of this yet, we're getting the rights and wrongs, I'm just talking about the logistics, the tactics. So one argument was that Israel wasn't quite ready, its defenses weren't quite ready. Another argument was that the Gulf countries were holding off and that they didn't really want a war breaking out and that they'd put pressure on Trump to hold off. And by the time we interviewed Rob Malley, there was a rather sort of striking moment, which was rather sort of good, good quote, which we've just been reminded of by our team, which is, Rob said, "I would not be at all surprised if by the end of this podcast, you tell me, oh, we've just had a news bulletin that a deal has been struck, a nuclear deal has been struck, and President Trump has announced that it's the best deal that's

• 2:40Rory Stewart?

  ever been negotiated with anyone anywhere for the last 4,000 years. Or if you told me at the end of this, oh, we've just got a news bulletin that President Trump has ordered strikes on Iran and strikes against military political targets. Over to you.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and he also, he also said that there was some method in this madness, because of course unpredictability was a useful weapon. But I think there's, there's something, I, I think we have seen this coming recently. I read something just a few days ago when I was in Ukraine, and it was that some of the kit that has been sent as this build up, two thirds of the US's E3 command and control aircraft, somebody said this would totally not be required just for PR in the way that some of the Armada might be. I think another thing important to make, Rory, is that, you know, one of the things I kept hearing in Ukraine was that these negotiations with Whitkoff and Kushner are just fake, they're for show. And you sort of feel it's been the same with this. The

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  Iranians turn up, the Americans tell them to capitulate, the Iranians say no, and they go away. And there was a very interesting, there's this guy, I don't know if you follow this guy, Treta Parsi from the, Parsi from the Quincy Institute, who seems to be like Rob Malley, something of an expert on Iran. He, he is adamant that most of the information flow that goes to Trump about Iran comes from Netanyahu. And he's convinced Trump that, one, that Iran is a lot weaker than it was, which is true, it is weaker than it was on the nuclear front, it's weaker economically, and it's just had the biggest demonstrations, probably the biggest demonstrations that we've, that we've seen in, in recent

• 4:19Alastair Campbell?

  memory. And so has persuaded him that a few big hits and a few big threats and Iran will crumble. And Parsi tweeted recently, he said this, "Trump's fundamental misread of Iran is that he believed that the theocratic leadership..." Would fear all the US aircraft carriers and their firepower and as a result opt to surrender. It's the opposite. They fear surrender far more than they fear war. And, and I think that's a, that's an important insight because we, the way that Trump operates, I mean, don't forget, when he did do the launch of the nuclear program recently, he came out immediately and said, it's been obliterated.

• 5:00Alastair Campbell?

  I saw J D Vance last week being asked, if it's been obliterated, why do you have to attack it again? And he, he really struggled with the answer. But these attacks are far bigger. These attacks are far bigger. We've already seen attacks on the intelligence headquarters, National Security Council, the pasta compound where it's thought that both the president and the Supreme Leader Haman A are thought to live. We've seen an attack on the place where the former president is believed to live. And we've also seen the response as well. You know, Qatar says it's thwarted a number of attacks on the American airbase there. We've got bases in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, all being subject to attack.

• 5:40Alastair Campbell?

  So this, this could go in any sort of really quite dangerous directions.

• 5:48Alastair Campbell?

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• 6:43Rory Stewart?

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• 6:45Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 6:58Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

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• 7:28Rory Stewart?

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• 8:14Rory Stewart?

  We'll get on to the really big question, I think, hanging at the back of this, which is how we judge Trump and Israel's actions. And we'll get on to the very different responses that are now coming. Some leaders who aren't really saying anything yet. Comments from the EU, comments from Australia.

• 8:37Rory Stewart?

  Comments from people like Jeremy Corbyn, we can get into all the different ways that you can talk about this, but let's just try to get as far as we can close to the facts at the moment. The first thing is it's extremely interesting how all the news agencies the world have to scrabble to try to put the information together in real time. So, you know, we're doing this live and some of these strikes are still taking place. Yep. We know that these strikes in Iran, and we can see this from mostly from social media footage, have hit the major governmental capitals, the major cultural centres of Iran and major religious centres. What do I mean by that? It's hit places like Tehran and Tabriz, which are these huge cities, Tabriz, big

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  city in northwest Iran, hit Esfahan, which is the great kind of ancient Islamic capital, great cultural capital, and they've hit Khomein, which is the seat of the religious authorities and religious leadership. Yeah. But they've also hit slightly more obscure places, Karmanshah, which is out towards, is the west, towards Kurdistan, they've hit bits of Luristan, and they've hit bits of the border, place called Elan in Luristan. And then, as you say, there's been these Iranian counterattacks. So Iran clearly has been expecting this to happen and has had a, presumably set the coordinates of the places it wanted to attack so that they could trigger them as soon as the attack happened.

• 10:04Rory Stewart?

  They have attacked Israel, but they have also attacked Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. Hmm. And in most of those cases, as far as we can tell from the information as of 11 minutes past 11 on a Saturday morning in Britain, the attack in Bahrain seems to have been aimed at the US naval base. The attacks in Qatar look as though they were probably aimed, although the Qataris may correct this, at the US airbase. Hmm. Jordan also, there are, there are US assets on the ground. So. It may be that what Iran is trying to do is draw a distinction between attacking US bases in those countries and attacking those countries, but it certainly provoked a massive hostile

• 10:48Rory Stewart?

  reaction from the Gulf. Saudi Arabia has put out, and Saudi Arabia, remember, had slightly stepped out of the Iran conflict. China had negotiated a diplomatic alliance between Saudi Arabia and Iran, most of these Gulf states who had been against the Iran nuclear deal, with the exception of the Emirates UAE Dubai, that remain very strongly anti-Iranian, went a bit softer on Iran, seemed to have concluded that Iran was no longer really a threat, it didn't really have a big nuclear arsenal, a weak regime in Iran was less of a threat than chaos. But those regimes are now very, very angry indeed that Iran, who they felt that they were taking a gentle attitude towards, has decided to strike their territory, whether or not they're going after US assets.

• 11:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now Rory, I'm doing this live podcast with you. If I was doing it with our American counterpart, Mr. Scaramucci, and I were to ask him the question, how much do you think Wag the Dog is being brought into the equation? What do you think he would say?

• 11:48Rory Stewart?

  He'd say 100%. This is all about the Epstein files. That's why Hegseth is going to war with Anthropic and OpenAI, and this is why they're attacking Iran. Go on, tell us about that then. Give us the Wag the Dog theory.

• 11:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Wag the Dog was a film starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, I think. And basically what happened was the American president was caught up in a big sex scandal. I think just getting up to the election and his kind of Alastair Campbell figure, a guy called Conrad, he somehow constructed a fake war, would you believe, against Albania. So America went to war with Albania to stop this. So Wag the Dog basically means where bad things are happening. You create something far bigger so that the world stops talking about the bad thing and they start talking about the thing you want to. Now, I don't in that, I don't minimise, by the way, how awful the Iranian regime is

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  and how Iran has been seen as a threat by all sorts of countries for a long, long time. But it does seem sort of the timing, you know, he's, we've had Trump just done his State of the Union address, longest in history and didn't go down terribly well. His ratings are really poor right now. And there's a couple of historic tweets, Rory. October the ninth, two hundred, two thousand and twelve, from Donald Trump. Now that President Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin, watch for him to launch a strike on Libya or Iran. He's desperate. Now, you can often work, I've said this before, you can often work someone at best by how they attack their opponents. And then this one, a year later, November twenty thirteen.

• 13:26Alastair Campbell?

  Remember, I predicted a long time ago, President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly. Not skilled. So, you know, I think that, given what we know about Trump, what we saw in Venezuela, what we've seen in some of the other operations is done, there will be a pretty powerful political motivation. And what that leads me to worry, in fact, it puts people like you in a tricky spot. We loathe the Iranian regime, we'd long for it to be gone. But when you are highly suspicious of the motives, unsure whether this is thought through, you do worry that this, this could go any which way. And it'd be hard to work out the truth because Trump's going to declare huge success whatever happens.

• 14:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, I think you, if you look at these statements coming out from those leaders that have already made statements, you can see that fundamental challenge. On the one hand, the Iranian regime is abhorrent.

• 14:26Rory Stewart?

  Uh. Lost profound credibility has been killing tens of thousands of its own citizens.

• 14:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Rory Stewart?

  Is weaker than it's ever been. It's in a situation in which, for the first time, really, you have the middle class and upper middle class Iranians now combining with the Bizarres and and more of the urban poor and even some of the rural poor to rise up against the regime. And a real sense that it's in the end states. We've talked about the fact that how many is 86 years old, the the Supreme Leader.

• 14:59Rory Stewart?

  So horrible internal repression. Uh. And of course, Iran is a state which has had these proxies. So it's had in Syria and in Lebanon and in Yemen and Iraq militia groups, guerrilla groups, missiles, destabilizing the the region, attacking American bases, attacking Israel, et cetera, and it had a nuclear program. So that that's the Iran is an evil regime that kills its own people and it's a threat to the world. And then you've got the other side of it, which is.

• 15:35Rory Stewart?

  Firstly.

• 15:37Rory Stewart?

  Where is the international law in this? How do you think this through in terms of a to be pretentious, a rules-based international order, right? The the basic lessons we thought we drew from the Second World War. And even from the First World War and the holding positions, the United Nations, et cetera, was about having rules. Yeah.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  Or or even from the American Constitution, because the American Constitution says only Congress can declare war. And he, Trump actually called this war today. Uh. Now, before he's been a bit careful on that. He's not talked about war because that is the American Constitution. But what he's showing yet again is he believes he can do whatever he wants, regardless of the American system and regardless of the United Nations or indeed his allies. It's not clear to me how many others. I was reading Der Spiegel this morning. They said Mads had been informed and Mads is due to go to Washington this week. I don't know whether the Brits were informed. I don't know whether the I just don't know. Um. But I don't know. Have you seen anybody?

• 16:37Alastair Campbell?

  Outside the kind of really obvious ones like Israel, have you seen anybody openly endorse this so far? It's interesting.

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Al Albanese, Anthony Albanese.

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  So it's been really interesting. I mean, I was just noting down a little bit of this stuff. So you get the full range. On the one hand, you have Jeremy Corbyn coming out saying, as you can imagine, this is illegal, unprovoked, unjustifiable. These are rogue states breaking international law. Right. So that's the classic, classic position of the European left. And then on the other extreme, you've got Anthony Albanese. And Anthony Albanese says, Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression. And then it talks about the Iranian regime's ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support

• 17:31Rory Stewart?

  for armed proxies, brutal acts of violence and intimidation, attacks on Australian soil, human rights. And it then says, we support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. We're closely monitoring the situation. We're upgrading travel advice. But it's very, it's the closest, you know, no, but it's compared to the other world leaders.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  It's a pretty full-throated condemn Iran, we support the US, and there's no anxiety. Now, Kaya Kalas, who's the EU foreign leader, says, you know, this is an evil regime, missiles are a threat to us all, but calling for a cool head. Von der Leyen is closer towards the international law position. She says, maximum restraint, protect civilians, fully respect international law, which is much closer to coded language for, we're really worried that the US and Israel are again acting completely outside international law. And despite the fact. That she agrees the Iranian regime is evil and dangerous. She also thinks that we have to think about the presence of a whole international system. But at least when I went

• 18:39Rory Stewart?

  on, there is a deafening silence from Keir Starmer's Twitter account and Macron's account. Neither of them have been tweeting about this at all.

• 18:47Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing I've seen from the UK is a line from, I'm guessing, number 10, the UK did not, or this may be a report, the UK did not participate in the strikes. Keir Starmer will convene a Cobra meeting this morning, that's the Cabinet Office briefing room A, where they have these sort of national security meetings. UK government statement does not endorse the US operation, that's the reporter saying that. And the quote was this, Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. That is why we have continually supported efforts to reach a negotiated solution. Our immediate priority is the safety of UK nationals in the region. We will provide them with consular assistance available 24/7. As part of our longstanding commitments to the security of our allies in the Middle East, we have

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  a range of defensive capabilities in the region, which we have recently bolstered. We stand ready to protect our interests. So there's no mention there of support or otherwise of this specific action. And don't forget, recently, I mean, I don't know how true this was, but there was quite a sort of kerfuffle with your old leader Boris Johnson condemning Keir Starmer for reports that Britain had not allowed some of its bases to be used for some of the military options that Trump was trying to get off the ground. So that looks to me like-

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that sounds like, let's just on that, I think that's really important because that implies that the UK have been anxious about the legal implications, the US launching attacks on Iran in the negotiations, and therefore have been reluctant to allow the US to use UK bases. And if that's been going on for a few days now, not surprisingly, when the US launches those attacks, the UK will still have that position. Can we just step back for one second, just to remind people a little bit of the big picture? I'm here. And the big picture basically is that if you'd been talking about this under Obama or Biden, so let's say we went back four years, eight years, 10 years, 15

• 20:43Rory Stewart?

  years, there would have been three worries. Number one, international law, right? You're going to get Congress, or domestic law is Congress, you get Congress, but internationally you're going to get the UN to vote for this. And what are your grounds? So you can only do this stuff in international law if it's, if there's an imminent threat to you, right? I mean, much as, I guess, I suppose it's a stupid analogy, but I suppose you're only really allowed to punch someone in the face in a bar if they're actually picking up a bottle to swing it at you. You can't say, I think he might in the future pick up a bottle, so I'm going to smack him in the face.

• 21:17Alastair Campbell?

  But interestingly, in his State of the Union address the other day, Trump said Iran was about to develop missile, ballistic missiles that could hit the United States, whereas the Defense Intelligence Agency's own assessment, the last one, says that's not true. So I wonder whether he was actually trying to sort of generate the sense that we are about to get hit.

• 21:39Rory Stewart?

  Trying to set that stuff up, yeah. Well, so there was the legal argument, but I think probably the two stronger arguments why people didn't do it in the past were firstly that they were very worried about Iran's proxies, this very powerful Hezbollah force in Lebanon, which had about 100,000 missiles targeted at Iran and the Houthis and the Shia militia. And secondly, that they were very worried about the potential response from Iran itself, its own missiles, the way it would accelerate its own nuclear program, the way in which you would unleash war in the Middle East. And what's changed over the last two years is that Israel began to be much, much more aggressive and take much

• 22:21Rory Stewart?

  more risk. So they, we first started covering this when they attacked an Iranian consulate and killed Iranian diplomats in Syria.

• 22:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 22:32Rory Stewart?

  And which was a change because actually the Iran-Israel conflict really since 2019 was a sort of shadow war. There were cyber attacks, there were a few assassinations, there were attacks on ships, but there wasn't anything absolutely open. Then there was the Israeli attack, which wiped out the whole of the top of Hezbollah. This was, people remember, this was the pages and the radio attacks where 1,500 of the top people of these Iranian proxies in Lebanon were, were killed.

• 22:57Rory Stewart?

  Then there has been the change in Syria. So Ahmadal Sharah, who we interviewed,

• 23:04Rory Stewart?

  is very much part of the anti-Iranian force. Iran was backing Bashar al-Assad, the old ruler in Syria. And the whole infrastructure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Syria has collapsed as Ahmadal Sharah has taken it over.

• 23:22Rory Stewart?

  So

• 23:25Rory Stewart?

  Iran suddenly finds itself without its proxies. And then the next thing that's happened is that the Iranian strike, the Israeli strikes against Iran, of which this is the third major sequence, have revealed a real weakness at the heart of the Iranian system. It turns out that the anti-aircraft, the antimissile defenses that Iran has simply weren't good enough. A huge amount of the satellite and interception infrastructure, in other words, Iran's abilities to scan the skies, see these missiles coming in, has been taken out. The nuclear program has been set back a long way, and Iran did not actually react very powerfully the last two times. And the Iron Dome, which protects Israel, held.

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  So the big change, to finish this long speech, is that Iran, which was seen as a very dangerous power that could cause mayhem if it was attacked, as recently as two years ago, is now perceived, at least by US and Israeli policymakers, as being a sort of paper tiger, militarily very weak, a regime about to collapse. And therefore, they don't think that they're taking too much risk in attacking Iran.

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• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, what do you know about Channel 12 in Israel?

• 25:18Rory Stewart?

  No, tell me about Channel 12.

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't know anything about Channel 12 because what I'm saying is just that somebody has just sent me a social media post quoting Israel's Channel 12, reporting Israeli officials believe that Khamenei, his advisers and those responsible for the nuclear programme have been assassinated. I have no idea if that is true or not, but I...

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's stop on that for a second. I mean, this is worth doing, given we're doing this live and you've just heard this live. Okay, so let's take that seriously. We don't know whether it's true or not, because in the past we've heard people have been assassinated, it's turned out not to be, and sometimes it is true. But let's say it were true. That is an immense change. How many has essentially run Iran since, well, now for decades upon decades? The first phase that you remember of Khamenei really came to an end in 89. And everything we know of Iran, the second Islamic Republic, since 1989 has been under

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  the control of Khamenei. And this man, 86 years old, is a true believer. He's not somebody that was likely to flee to Russia or head off with his loot. He's somebody who, to the end, believed strongly in the nation-state of Iran, in the sacred resistance, the fight against the US and Israel. And he is the absolute linchpin of that part of the regime. Now, there are other things underneath him. There is a huge Revolutionary Guard infrastructure, there is a Basij militia, which is set up throughout all the villages and towns of Iran, and then there's the military. But removing the supreme leader right at the top is essentially

• 27:06Rory Stewart?

  like removing Putin, or removing Saddam Hussein, or removing Gaddafi. I mean, you're removing...

• 27:12Rory Stewart?

  The person who has been personally responsible for running this autocratic regime. Now, what does that then mean?

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, anything I'd say about that, I think that's right, but I think the comparison with Putin is not necessarily accurate. I think Putin is an absolute dictator. I think Kamala is the supreme leader, but I read somewhere recently, somebody said it's less a pyramid structure and more a series of pillars that's sort of going in different directions. And I think a lot will depend, let's assume for the moment that this is true. Now, and as I say, I hate talking like this because we're talking about sort of hugely consequential global event that we're getting from one person on a trade on his way to a football match, telling me has seen on Twitter.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  But that you've then got the revolutionary guard, that is, as we said the last time we talked about this, the RGSC, the last time we talked about them, we talked about they basically control the economy as well as the politics of this. So the question then would be, does, if he were to get to be wiped out, does that then lead to a power struggle to replace him, which cements those kind of pillars and their power structures? Or does it lead to real change? Now, and this is so, this is going to be so complicated. When we were in Munich at the Security Council, Roy, I was talking to this European diplomat. And we were actually talking about all sorts of different things.

• 28:43Alastair Campbell?

  And along came our friend Justin Forsyth, who later introduced my friend to Reza Pahlavi, the, the, the son of the Shah.

• 28:50Rory Stewart?

  Who, who I also suspect to.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's why I suspect directly to, to the son of the Shah.

• 28:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So we both, we were both, we're both chatting to him and he was saying that, you know, he was feeling more confident. They've had these massive rallies around Europe and he's been out on social media today, saying that the time to return to the streets may be approaching. Military there to defend the people, not the regime, pleading with Trump to avoid civilian death and pleading with people to stay safe, but be ready. He's essentially saying that the regime is crumbling, may or may not be true. But interestingly, the diplomat, who was just, you know, I think quite pleased to suddenly be meeting the Shah's son. As we were just having a chat about this, that and the other, he sent me a message this morning. I'd love to know your reaction to this. He said. And so it begins, you recall my concern that starting a war is easy,

• 29:40Alastair Campbell?

  controlling it, ending it much harder if at all possible. The Iranian regime is evil, yet I'm taken aback about the hubris and ease of the decision to attack. The world is becoming unshackled and our most atavistic instincts unleashed, all the while backed by unprecedented technological ability. I fear we're entering an age of impunity and suffering with no one in control. How long will it take to temper the human condition once again and who is going to do it? And I kind of feel there's a lot in that, that, that, you know, when, when this happens, Trump, he stands up there with his USA baseball cap and he kind of, you know, just talks as though he literally owns the world and he's carrying it on his own shoulders.

• 30:23Alastair Campbell?

  And he doesn't really know what's going to happen. Bizarrely, when this, when the news broke this morning, this was happening. I'd been in bed wallowing in self pity with, with a, with man flu. And as, as you do in bed, Rory, I was reading, reading the latest edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. And I was actually reading a piece by this guy about Iran. He was called Ben Ham, Ben Taleb, Taleb Lu. And he's the senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which I think opposed the JCPOA. So he's probably, you know, very, very anti Iranian. But he set out, it was a really interesting, thoughtful piece, and it was setting out how America, with the support of the Iranian people, could bring down the regime. Okay.

• 31:07Alastair Campbell?

  But as I read through it, I thought, God, this is bloody complicated. This could go any which way on the route from A to B.

• 31:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so, so let's, let's, I think you, I think this is the key. You are essentially, when you're doing this, you are stepping into a completely black room with no idea whether there's a step underneath you or whether you're going to plummet 100 feet down. You, you may get away with it, you may not, right? So what's the most optimistic scenario which Israeli and US planners will have? Their most optimistic scenario will be.

• 31:47Rory Stewart?

  The Iranian people are completely fed up with this regime. That when Hameni in the top leadership falls, the Revolutionary Guard and Basij will be unable to hang on to power. The army will maybe be a more neutral force, more sympathetic to the calls from Reza Palabi. I mean, he himself might even want to feel that the military has some residual loyalty to the old Shah. But in any case, that Iran, this is the optimistic story. Iran has a very strange, strong and long tradition of parliamentary engagement, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. And that there are this highly educated progressive population, particularly in cities.

• 32:31Rory Stewart?

  And that what will happen is that it will be like 1989. The old leaders will be kicked out. And this is the very optimistic scenario. Elections follow and sanity returns. Yeah. On the other end, is... Well, let's lay out some different scenarios. Number one, a top leadership maybe is taken out. But a new form of top leadership takes over, which could either be a new strong, strong man taking over, head of the Revolutionary Guard, or could be just a military coup, a military general taking over. And then the Iranian people are going to be very, very angry because tens of thousands of people have been killed by those figures.

• 33:16Rory Stewart?

  And they're not going to be content with a Venezuela situation where you just remove the top person and leave the rest of the regime in place, in which case you have continual killing in the streets. Or you have, let's craft another possibility. You have a anti-regime government takeover. So maybe a technocratic, US-backed government takeover, in which case you might have the former regime elements, right, the people who were lined up with the old regime, starting their own insurgency. That's the Iraq problem, right? The Baathists are kicked out. And then you have all the former Saddam loyalists mounting a 10-year insurgency against the government. Yep. As with many of these countries, you could also imagine a scenario of big divisions, which are ethnic and sectarian. So the Kurds...

• 34:02Rory Stewart?

  Western Iran, very, very badly disposed towards the regime, completely different political views, heavily prosecuted now for forty years and very, very interested in separatism. The Baluch down in the southeast on the Pakistani border again could kick off. No. Somebody listening to this is going to say, oh, well, that's just typical. And certainly Boris Johnson listening to people would be like, oh, this is the normal rubbish that you get from these kind of foreign office Arabists. You just, when are you going to just call out the fact the regime is evil? Fine. Um, I honestly do think that anybody who thinks they can predict which path this is going to go is confusing themselves.

• 34:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Rory Stewart?

  We know so little about Iran. We've got so many of these countries wrong. We got Afghanistan wrong, we got Iraq wrong, we got Libya wrong, we've got Yemen wrong repeatedly. So they may be lucky, but even if somehow by some miracle Trump and Israel triumph and Boris Johnson writes the article he wants to write, saying yet again, that doomsayer, liberal bedwetter was wrong and it all worked out beautifully. It will be in a sense because they were lucky. Anyone who thinks they can predict the directions, they're taking risk, huge risk.

• 35:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, on prediction, while we've been talking, Rory, our hardworking, dragging them out of bed at thirty in the morning to set up a live podcast team, have been doing a bit of polling of our listeners and viewers. Will Trump be successful in establishing regime change in Iran? Our viewers and listeners think no, eighty percent, yes, twenty percent. Will there be a full blown war? Yes, fifty five, no, forty five. Will Keir Starmer join the US in Iran? No, eighty four, yes, sixteen. Will the Iranian people rise up against the regime in the week of these strikes? Yes, forty one, no, fifty nine. On the coup point, Rory, when you were speaking there, I was sort of trying to think what would a Venezuelan equivalent be?

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  So Venezuela, he goes in and takes out Maduro. And we all think this is going to be the unleashing of sort of, you know, great democracy uprising in Venezuela, because he's got no interest in democracy, he actually wants to be a dictator himself. So Delcy Rodriguez does a deal, stays there, carries on. I guess the closest example, parallel to that, is this too harsh on Delcy Rodriguez? Might be if actually they take out Khamenei and some of the top dudes and then actually a version of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Just takes over.

• 36:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I I think there would be a, I mean, the one Trump narrative we've seen before, which could definitely play well here, is a military general takes over, who says, we made a mistake having a nuclear program, we're going to get rid of our ballistic missiles, but I'm going to run a military dictatorship, I'm going to open up oil for American oil exploration companies, and Trump will say, tick, tick. What does Trump care about? He doesn't want, he wants to be able to say, no nuclear weapons, no threat to Israel, and great commercial opportunities for the US. And as you say, he seems to think that it's easier to deal with old fashioned dictatorships than with democracies that might in an annoying way, vote in governments that might be opposed to the United States. So I would have thought

• 37:16Rory Stewart?

  there would be a strong temptation from the kind of hard realist edge of the Trump administration to say, we don't have any views on whether or not Iran has a democracy, all we care about is that it's not threatening our ally Israel, and that it gives us commercial opportunities. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that that is not remotely acceptable for the Iranian people who've just seen tens of thousands of their citizens machine gunned in the streets over the last few weeks. They are not signing up for a world in which a new military dictator takes over. And so I think the level of rage and antagonism in Iran towards the United States, towards Israel, and of course, towards their new government, is something we're massively underestimating. So I don't think that's an easy thing to pull off.

• 38:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there we are, Rory. We're both looking for a quiet weekend. I was looking to get rid of this post-Ukraine, whatever it is, and you, you, you've seemed to have a skiing injury. Raise your hand again. You've got, you've got, what have you done?

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  Not a very interesting, I was, I was, I was ski touring, and as people know, what you have to do is you have to click round the back of your bindings, and I managed to cover the snow in blood trying to flip it round. And now let's just quickly, let's just quickly just go through some of these comments.

• 38:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, real comments, I didn't know that.

• 38:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, so we've got, I like this, leftist idiot switching off Keir Starmer voters. Stop supporting Ukrainian Nazis. All you two care about is finding a way to smear the motives. Of Trump. All our friends are out then. So that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah. There's a lot of comments, thousands of comments, my god. Okay, um, so I, I think, let's just take that on for a second.

• 39:05Rory Stewart?

  How would you, if you were, I don't know, Keir Starmer, for example, make a speech to the people there who say we're just a bunch of useless lefties who aren't condemning the Iranian regime enough and we just want to smear Trump? I think what you have to say is, listen, the Iranian regime is a horrifying, horrendous regime that's machine gunned tens of thousands of people in the streets. I, I would say to this person challenging me, have spent, I guess, much more time in Iran than they have. And my experience being detained by the Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guard was extremely unpleasant. I got a sense of a totalitarian regime, people living under fear, massive underdevelopment, a very, very angry population. And this is going back even twenty, twenty-five years.

• 39:49Rory Stewart?

  And it's a regime that's been in place nearly fifty.

• 39:53Rory Stewart?

  And it's also true that this is a regime that has destabilized the region, fired missiles around. So I would be incredibly happy if this regime was toppled and a liberal democratic government emerged in Iran and all the incredible potential of this educated, vibrant, huge civilization was released and stabilized the world. But Trump does not have a good track record on doing these things carefully and responsibly. There is no sense at all that he's answering the question of what happens the day after? You know, what is the nation building? How do you get the government going? How do you get the economy going? And secondly, the risk is here is not being properly analyzed. Let's talk through the risk. What would it mean if there was a civil war?

• 40:37Rory Stewart?

  What would it mean if there was a military coup? What would it mean if another Iranian Revolutionary Guard takes over? What does it mean if Iran starts not just firing ballistic missiles at the Gulf? But starts doing much nastier terrorist attacks around the world in revenge? So somehow we have to find a way of saying, I totally condemn the Iranian regime, but what Trump is doing is reckless, stupid, ill-planned, and has a very, very high probability of going wrong. And even if he gets away with it, it'll be through fluke, not judgment.

• 41:11Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think Keir Starmer can say the last bit of that. Uh, I think he can say a lot of the first bit about Iran and what we think about that. But I think maybe the way to phrase it is that, look, Iran is an issue and a country that has bedeviled presidents and other world leaders for decades now. And it is probably only if we do have some kind of joint cooperative approach to this that we can make real progress. I mean, the truth is that the deal that was done was a very, it was a pretty good deal. Trump hated it because it was done by Obama. Um, but you know, I, I, I just think that that is part of the problem. We're dealing with somebody who feels that everything has to be about him.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, I've been, we're getting hundreds of comments in here, but you read out some of the negative ones about the, from, you know, people who say, I suspect there's quite a lot of bots going on here. But here's one from Fam Giza, Australia. Netanyahu is only interested to stay out of jail, which means he has to continue in the state of the war conflict. Same for Trump. The Epstein scandal continues, distraction helps. Somebody else, Paul Ingram, Operation Nonsense Distraction. Um, self, you know, so there's a lot, it's all very, very mixed. But I, I think that, look, I think one of the, I was thinking about this when I was thinking about the bilection yesterday and all that sort of, all the kind of, the relentless commentary that flows from this. You get so many people saying so much stuff about anything that happens in the world.

• 42:37Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that when something like this happens, it really is important that world leaders kind of do step back a bit and actually, I think, say what they really think. Uh, I'd love to hear, you mentioned Albanese, when you first mentioned Albanese, oh God, no. Surely he's not going to come out and say, yeah, we totally support this and blank check. And I don't think that's what you're saying he's done. But I'd really like some kind of honest calling out of this by all of the world leaders really. Because what we're entering a world at the moment, we are, we talk, you know, that friend of mine from the diplomat talked about impunity. We are entering a world where, you know, leaders can do what they want. And then if they have the base and they have the media control that they have, they then just create a new narrative if it goes wrong.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, so, so, I mean, I, I, I, I think this is, um.

• 43:29Rory Stewart?

  One of the most worrying things for the whole thing, which is the way in which the engines of the way that populism works, the way that a social media works, the way that this kind of post-truth works, all increases the chance of conflict. Because if you are Trump or you're Netanyahu and you're effectively running a sort of reality TV show where what you're trying to do is unsettle your opponents, throw everybody off balance by creating a new headline every day. Bombing another country is almost the best headline you could ever get. I mean, you've pointed this out when you've said, you know, this ends with people dropping nuclear bombs around. Because the mechanism of politics isn't anymore. It's not Cameron

• 44:14Rory Stewart?

  against Blair or Gordon Brown, right? This is not people talking about, you know, whether we're going with sure start programs for early education, or whether we're going to be reducing spending on policing, or invest more in devolution. This is a type of politics which is all about the big radical play. You know, we're sending ice into Minnesota, we're dropping bombs on Iran, we're challenging the constitution. And so I think that you and the people who are responding, who are talking about the fact that you've got to look at Wag the Dog, you've got to look at distraction, you've got to look at court cases. And the reason why that's problematic is the

• 44:58Rory Stewart?

  Iranian people are the victims here, right? That it's not really about Iran. It's not even really about the threat that Iran poses, because in fact, actually, paradoxically, the reason this is happening is because it turns out Iraq is much weaker and less threatening than people claimed two years ago. In fact, the only way in which you're Iran, sorry, Iran is much weaker, less threatening than it was two years ago. In fact, the only way in which Iran is going to damage anybody is going to be in response to these attacks, right? It's not that Iran was on the verge of launching these attacks unilaterally. But there's another point, I just to give you another thing to chew on. Krista Hechtshund.

• 45:39Rory Stewart?

  Says millions of refugees coming to Europe because of Trump. So remember when the civil war broke out in Syria, smaller, much smaller place than Iran, I guess, probably about a quarter of the size in terms of population. You end up with three million refugees going to Turkey, a million to Lebanon, a million to Jordan. Ukraine, I can't remember what the statistic you gave us when you were in Kiev this week, but

• 46:02Alastair Campbell?

  4.7 million in Europe.

• 46:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Alastair Campbell?

  4.7 million in Europe, yeah.

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  Okay, now Iran is a gigantic population, right? It's a bigger population than Britain. You really could end up, if this thing goes wrong, with tens of millions of refugees on the move.

• 46:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And this despite the fact, this is in the comments from D. Mulcahy. This was Trump in June 2025. I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. So we'll get a version of that tomorrow, today or sometime tomorrow. Anyway, we'll doubtless be talking about this again on Tuesday, when we do, when we record the main podcast. We'll probably talk about the by-election as well. But there we are. Bloody hell, what a world, what a day, what a world.

• 46:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think we just keep coming back to your point about politics. I mean, there's a guy called Time Lord Jenkins, who sort of echoes your anxiety. He's on the other side to you, but this is what you're dealing with. He says, I'm not a fan of Trump, but at least he's someone who's actually doing something rather than sitting in constant conferences, saying a lot and doing nothing. It's this very odd world that you want to say rationally, yeah, but what's he doing? I mean, the mere fact that you're doing something rather than sitting in a conference is not great if what you're doing is causing chaos. I used to hear this a lot with Boris Johnson. At least he's not sitting around, at least he's, you know, taking risk, doing something. But if the risks are reckless and the actions are profoundly damaging.

• 47:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Rory Stewart?

  You know, someone else has just said, what does it matter if there's a civil war? Well, it matters if there's a civil war if you turn up with tens of millions of refugees, apart from the incredible suffering the Iranian people themselves.

• 47:50Alastair Campbell?

  There's a, there's another thread in the comments, Ray.

• 47:54Alastair Campbell?

  CJ Kill, C G K I L, wonder if this is linked to the rumored executive order to bring in wartime powers on voting. Uh, Jim G six four five eight, Trump will use the war as a distraction and as an excuse to stall halt elections. And there is, there is something, there is something odd, given that he made such a big thing about the forever wars and his constant bleating to get the Nobel Peace Prize. He clearly loves standing up there and saying, I've launched a military

• 48:27Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird. It's very weird. I was looking at the notes that I was taking in October during, when he was running against Kamala Harris. And all the number of times he said, these were stupid wars. He was going to stay out of war. He wasn't going to launch the wars. And I actually took a note saying, question mark, I was just looking, I have these stupid books, I take the notes, and we should remember, you know, question mark, will this mean that he won't strike Iran? Because a lot of the language then was very much, I'm not the guy that does that kind of thing.

• 48:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Rory Stewart?

  We're now in a very different world where this guy's moving for, and you can see this breaking the mega coalition. You can see Tucker Carlson and people coming out saying, what on earth is going on? I thought you were meant to be this kind of isolationist who didn't want to get into wars. Why exactly are you picking these fights?

• 49:09Alastair Campbell?

  The last poll I saw on, uh, somebody sent it this morning, the last poll I saw was 20% support for military action against Iran. That's within amongst Americans. Uh, and there's another, here, they, I, I, somebody's pointed out that he called it, I should have clocked this, he called it a major combat operation. That's got a ring of the special military operation of Vladimir in Ukraine.

• 49:36Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, final, final thing, just before I let you get back to your sick bed. Um, the, uh, we've talked about how as the old rules and the old order collapses, conflict becomes more likely. But one of the things that's quite difficult to explain to people is that you can't necessarily predict region by region, exactly where that conflict's going to break out. What you can say is that the trend is clearly, for the last few years, every year you end up with more conflict, more refugees, more internally displaced people. But we are not yet talking about Ethiopian troops massing on the Eritrean border.

• 50:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Rory Stewart?

  We're not talking about what's happening between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, the point is that let's take the Pakistan-Afghan border or the Ethiopian-Eritrean border. These are borders like the Russian-Ukraine border. These are contested borders which were created with people drawing lines on maps at different times. And therefore, there are populations on either side of those borders that think they should be in a different country. It's true for all Iran's borders. I talked about the Kurds, the Baloch make the same comment about people up in Azerbaijan in relation to Iran, right?

• 50:46Rory Stewart?

  So what we're seeing in Pakistan-Afghanistan is a huge chunk of the Pakistani population in in Kaibar Pakhtunwalla, what used to be North West Frontier Province, are Pashto, who see them, call themselves Afghans. And I remember President Kazakh used to be kind of greeted by these tribal chiefs, people waving Afghan flags when he landed in Pakistan, right? So the Pakistanis are now bombing Kabul and Kandahar.

• 51:12Rory Stewart?

  What's this about? Well, this is about the collapse of a world order where people said, listen, these borders are borders. Doesn't matter how they were created. Doesn't matter who's on the other side of the border. The safest, the most peaceful thing for the world is to say, we're going to leave these borders in place. And that's why Trump allowing Putin to steal chunks of Ukraine, threatening Greenland, refusing to provide security guarantees for NATO, and now getting involved in these illegal strikes Venezuela, Iran, is so dangerous because we're just seeing the beginnings from Ethiopia to Pakistan of what could bubble into almost every continent in the world.

• 51:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there we are. It's sort of all fits with themes that we've been wanging on about for some time, but it's it's pretty alarming stuff. We'll see where it goes and I suspect it'll be in a very different place even by Tuesday.

• 52:10Rory Stewart?

  Okay, we'll speak on Tuesday and hope you get better. Yes, your voice sounds much better.

• 52:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I'm getting, I'm getting there. Yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine who who's in the military, who has been on that train a lot and he says he never gets ill, but he does the sleeper trade there and back. It's a problem. Anyway, there we are. I'll be fine, Roy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be very brave. I'm gonna be very, very brave about it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, see you later. You be brave with your, you be brave with your finger as well.

• 52:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, my lord. What's somebody called a posh injury? Oh, listen, somebody also asked, what's this picture in the background? The picture in the background is the mother of my father's Chinese teacher. My father studied Chinese in China before the revolution, nineteen forty five. And that's his Chinese teacher who was already eighteen in nineteen forty five. That's his mother. And she was a senior, the wife of senior Manchu official in the like sort of eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies.

• 53:03Alastair Campbell?

  Wow, I've, I've got nothing quite as dramatic as that unless you count. If I just dip down my shoulder this way, you'll be, you'll be able to see there the boots, the boots I wore when I played with Maradona.

• 53:18Rory Stewart?

  Oh, oh, my lord. Listen, Alistair, I didn't want to say this, but you just-

• 53:21Alastair Campbell?

  Signed by Maradona and Pele.

• 53:23Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's amazing. But you, you just provoked me there because I saw our mutual friend Damian Lewis two days ago.

• 53:30Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, did he tell you about that?

• 53:31Rory Stewart?

  He's, he's, he's said to me, he said to me, listen, you know, I, I love Alistair. But I've got to say, when he was selected as left back and I was right wing, I felt pretty lucky.

• 53:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he was lucky. There's, there's, there's a truly horrible picture of him gliding past me and really looking like I'm old and tired. And anyway, I don't care. I still mention Maradona every day of my life. You've got your dad's Chinese teacher. I've got my Maradona boots, you know. See you soon. Bye bye.

• 54:02Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye, bye bye.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  There we are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 54:35Speaker 07

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 54:37Speaker 08

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 54:40Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 54:53Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 55:04Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 55:09Speaker 09

  Yes.

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