Iran's New Grand Strategy | Vali Nasr

In Episode 487 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/irans-new-grand-strategy-vali-nasr of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Vali Nasr — professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and author of Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History — about the argument that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by national insecurity and historical grievance, how that reframing bears on US and Western policy and the nuclear negotiations, the forces that forged the Islamic Republic into what it is today, and the range of likely outcomes for Iran, the region, and the global economy. The first hour examines the central argument of Vali's work—drawn from his book and a recent Foreign Affairs article co-authored with Narges Bajoghli—that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by a deeply entrenched sense of national insecurity and historical grievance rooted in Iran's long experience of foreign domination. They trace that experience through Iran's centuries of isolation and weakness, the imperial penetration of the nineteenth century, and the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, before turning to why the distinction between ideology and rational national interest is so consequential for how the United States, Tel Aviv, and the West approach Iran—nowhere more so than in the nuclear negotiations. The second hour turns to the forces that made the Islamic Republic what it is today, beginning with the eight-year Iran-Iraq War—the crucible in which its current leadership, its institutions, and the Revolutionary Guards were formed, and from which Iran drew its doctrine of forward defense and proxy warfare. From there they examine Iran's nuclear program as an instrument of negotiation and deterrence rather than an end in itself, the effects of the maximum pressure campaign and sanctions, and how the latest war has accelerated cultural change inside the country. The conversation closes by drawing a parallel between the collapse of the Safavid state in 1722 and China's century of humiliation before considering the range of likely outcomes—including whether a grand bargain is possible and what the default scenario looks like for Iran, the region, and the global economy if the status quo persists. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 07/06/2026

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

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Vali Nassar, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University and a non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also the author of numerous books on Iran and the Islamic world, the most recent of which, Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History, forms the basis for much of today's conversation.

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Vali and I spend the first hour of the episode examining one of his central arguments, namely that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by a deeply entrenched sense of national insecurity and historical grievance rooted in Iran's long experience of foreign domination. We trace that experience through Iran's centuries of isolation and weakness, its loss of territory to Imperial Russia, and the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. We then turn to why the distinction between ideology and national interest is so consequential for how the United States, Tel Aviv, and the West should approach Iran, nowhere more so than in the nuclear negotiations. In the second hour, we examine the forces that have helped shape the Islamic Republic

• 1:27Demetri Kofinas?

  into what it is today, beginning with the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the crucible in which its current leadership, its institutions, and the IRGC were formed, and from which Iran drew its doctrine of forward defense and proxy warfare. From there, we examine Iran's nuclear program, the effect that sanctions have had on the country's economy and political system, and how the latest war has accelerated cultural and political changes inside the country. Finally, we close by considering a range of possible outcomes of the current state of affairs in the Greater Middle East, including whether a grand bargain is possible, what Iran would need in order to satisfy it, and what it would mean for Iran, Israel, the US, and the broader region if the status quo persists, and whether that is in fact

• 2:12Demetri Kofinas?

  the more likely scenario. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

• 2:56Demetri Kofinas?

  And with that, please enjoy this incredibly timely and deeply educational conversation with my guest, Vali Nasr. Vali Nasr, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Very good to be with you. Thanks for inviting me to the show.

• 3:13Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm excited to have you on. I've been following you for a long time. Those who may not be familiar with you, you're a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University and a non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at CSIS. You're also the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History, which I've read in preparation for this conversation and which, along with your foreign affairs article, your recent foreign affairs article co-authored with Nargis Majogli, will form the basis for much of today's conversation.

• 3:48Demetri Kofinas?

  Before we begin, I have a few biographical questions. From what I understand, you were born in Iran in 1960, is that right?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  That's correct, yes.

• 3:58Demetri Kofinas?

  And you left the country in 1979 during the Islamic Revolution.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Right at the time when the revolution was happening, my family left Iran.

• 4:06Demetri Kofinas?

  So what was it like to grow up in Pahlavi's Iran?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Well, I was too young to be involved in politics directly. I was in middle school and early high school before I left Iran. But I was very aware that there was a lot of political activism among young people. There was a lot of dissent. There was a lot of suppression of dissent. My father was first a professor at Tehran University, and he was chancellor of another university. And I remember that there were continuous, ongoing student demonstrations. Students get shut down. And one thing reflecting back is very clear is that Iranians then were much more fearful of talking, of speaking out, of getting in trouble with the secret police

• 4:51Speaker 01

  in a way that these days I see happening, say, some Arab countries, that you could be picked up for the police if you were not sufficiently deferential to the Shah. But at the same time, it was a country that was booming, that was on the move, that was progressing in many ways, saw itself on a pathway to becoming one of the main industrial powers by the year 2000. At that time, I think most Iranians thought that the Shah had hubris, that these were goals that were way beyond the imagination of a Third World country, as it was called then. And nowadays, we see that, you know, the righties of Arab countries have vision 2030

• 5:33Speaker 01

  and want to be part of the AI superhighway. And their citizens or the cynical views in the West don't criticize that. But at that point in time, the Shah's ambitions for Iran to industrialize it, develop it, make it a successful case in the Third World was seen cynically as being out of Iran's league, as him being a megalomaniac. All of these things sort of contributed in a way to the revolution.

• 6:01Demetri Kofinas?

  What were some of their largest industries? And were any of them competitive at that point with international companies?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  No, none were. Iran then was very much like South Korea or many Latin American countries. They basically were trying to locally reproduce industrial products in the West with the help of multinational companies. The development was real, but none of those industries, as was also the case in Latin America or South Korea at the time, were yet competitive on the global stage on their own. Iran used oil wealth at that point in time to pump a lot of money into ambitious industrial development. And it's actually very interesting that today you look back at all of the industries in Iran that have supported the war or support the country. Many of them have their roots back in the Pahlavi period.

• 6:53Demetri Kofinas?

  Did your family and you have an opportunity to travel around the Greater Middle East at that time? And if so, what was, what was it like then?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yes, at that point in time, as a child, I remember we, in the 1970s, we traveled to Egypt. And it was shocking to me how poor and how destitute Egypt was. And that how much more developed Iran was in comparison at the time. But most Iranians did not compare themselves to India, Pakistan, Egypt, or Latin American countries. Iranians then and now compare themselves to Denmark and Sweden. And they somehow see themselves through that lens. And therefore, the Shah's regime was always falling short. Because it was not a liberal democracy, because it was a closed system.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And largely because even the beneficiaries of his development, which was the Iranian middle class, which had got modern education, was wealthy, was getting well to do. And of course, they wanted liberal values that weren't available. Never took the development that they were benefiting from, and they were actually a part of, serious. He never took pride of it at that point in time. And therefore, the Shah never got credit for what he did. He only got blamed for the shortcomings of his regime.

• 8:14Demetri Kofinas?

  So what led your family to leave in 1979?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Well, by 1979, my father had a very high government position. He, as I said, he had been a chancellor of a university and towards the end, he was the head of the Queen's Special Bureau. And this was a revolution. And revolutions are bloody. They're not just a change of political order. They completely upend the entire social political structure. And what Iran went through with the revolution is very similar to what Russia went through when the Tsar fell to Lenin and the Communist Party took over China. And there was a purge, not only removing people from all kinds of position of power, dispossessing them of their houses, of their wealth, of their belonging, and distributing it to society.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  But also as a mark of how definitive the change of order is, there was a lot of bloodletting, a lot of executions, mock trials, kangaroo trials. And it was in that kind of a circumstance that my family left Iran.

• 9:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So you've been gone for almost 50 years. The country has undergone, as you said, extraordinary changes since then. How closely have you stayed in touch with Iran during that time? And how well do you think you understand the country today?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely correct. When I left Iran, the country was 37 million people. Today, it's 91 million people. Something like 86% of Iranians are born after 1979. So it's a completely different country. Their people's historical experiences are different. Their social mores are different. Even the way they speak Persian is different from the way I speak Persian.

• 9:55Demetri Kofinas?

  How so?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Well, languages change. There's new lingo, there's the way that people speak it. Even the academic language is replete with words that are translations or parallels to Western terminology, which is not recognizable to me. Fifty years is a long time. And also, that country obviously has been closed, not only to the world, but also to its diaspora, who doesn't access it as easily. So it's kind of like branches of a tree, you know, growing and going in different directions. Iranians who live abroad speak not only an archaic Persian of 1970s, but it's peppered with English words, or French words, or German words.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Whereas those inside Iran speak it a bit differently. I mean, it's comprehensible, but it takes a little bit of getting used to. But I've kept close, and I've followed Iran's politics very closely. I've visited on one occasion over 20 years ago. But one has to admit that unless you live in a country on an ongoing basis, it's never the same, regardless of how you closely watch it, to be able to be completely cognizant of everything that's going on in it.

• 11:08Demetri Kofinas?

  So I know that your most recent book, and presumably all your books have been translated into Farsi. Do you see those changes, those linguistic changes, when you read your own text?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Less so in the text, other than when it comes to technical words. Like, you know, when I was young, there was a people for the word "strategy," which is a word that's even in the title of my book. There was just a Persian pronunciation of the word "strategy." It was called "estrategi." Now, there's a Persian word for it. There's a Persian word for activism, for plan of action, for varieties of professional sets of words that you use in social sciences or in professional fields, there are now parallels for it. But the grammar, the constructive sentences, et cetera, is very simple. It's in conversation on the street.

• 11:53Demetri Kofinas?

  I see.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Where you notice the biggest set of changes.

• 11:56Demetri Kofinas?

  So, as I mentioned, your most recent book, Iran's Grand Strategy, has been translated into Farsi. From what I understand, your recent foreign affairs article has been translated into Farsi as well. What has been the reaction to both of these texts among different facets of Iranian society?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Well, these kinds of books and articles are not read widely by everybody in society. So it's read by, I would say, the political class is the best way of putting academics, politicians, et cetera.

• 12:25Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, before you give your answer, can I ask, though? I find that different societies exhibit a different level of civic participation in foreign policy questions. And in my experience, many foreign countries are more interested in these topics, their citizens are more interested in these topics than Americans seem to be as a percentage of the country's population. Is that true in Iran's case or less true?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  No, it is true in Iran's case, particularly because so much of the everyday life of people is entangled with its foreign policy. Right? I mean, Americans are completely insociate about foreign policy because for long periods of time it hasn't mattered in a way that matters to other countries. We don't have any troops that sit on our borders threatening us. We can choose to go to war somewhere else in the world or not. And a lot of what happens around the world does not impact us. But a country like Iran, you know, it's under economic sanctions, it's under threat of war, the revolution has basically been on a heightened state of confrontation with the US. And so these sorts of things are debated in Iran very, very intensely, both among

• 13:31Speaker 01

  the young people, high school, university, as well as the elite. And the percentage of Iranians that pay attention to these things or read or literate is quite high. I mean, this, my book was translated into Persian maybe three months ago, and it's already in its third printing. And for a period, it was among the bestsellers, which wouldn't happen in the United States for a foreign policy book.

• 13:56Demetri Kofinas?

  So what was the reaction? I interrupted you, but I don't think you had a chance to tell us.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Well, I've read articles written about it. There have been a number of podcasts about it. By and large, it has generated a lot of debate, largely because a lot of the political discussion inside Iran has been about dictatorship versus democracy.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Or ideology versus secularism. And at the same time, the Iranians know that they have this set of foreign policy issues with the United States. But they haven't really thought about how the Islamic Republic that they live in, in some ways, is a product of the of the security environment in which the Islamic Republic has come of age. In other words, the main theme of my book is, yes, how does Iran see the world and why does it do what it does? But at the same time, I've argued that if you set aside everything else that we believe accounts for the behavior of the Islamic Republic, we also have to accept the fundamental axiom that foreign policy problems, national security threats, shape states.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And a country that has been at war with the United States in one form or the other, under massive sanctions, feels threatened by the outside, cannot but have been organized internally around that fear. And that actually, for a lot of Iranians, has been quite interesting to debate that. And particularly because the book has come out at a time when Iran has gone to war, where that national security threat has become very, very real. And so the debate about why is Iran in the situation that it is? And what has been the meaning of being in this situation for 47 years? So that, I think, has been very poignant. That's the theme that has ran through most of the analysis of the book.

• 15:48Demetri Kofinas?

  So in the book, you write that if the West is to contend with Iran, then it must move past its shibboleths about the country in order to understand what Iran is after and why.

• 16:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What are the answers to these questions? And what informs them?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  I mean, for a very long time, it's been very easy to dismiss the Islamic Republic by saying, well, it's all about Islamic ideology. They read the Quran and they want to attack the West. Or that, you know, these are mullahs, they belong to the 7th century, they don't understand anything about the modern world. Or that they just want to destroy the West, you know, the kinds of things that we hear. But in reality, for the better or for the worse, the Islamic Republic has a very deeply entrenched sense of national security. What is national security? What is national interest? It's rooted in the reading of Iranian history. It taps into the way in which Iranians themselves understand their history.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  But also it's very much based on the fear that they have of the United States or Israel essentially undoing them. Now, they are partly responsible for the very anxieties that they face, because they have been in confrontation with the US. But nevertheless, it's the dynamics of this confrontation that accounts for their behavior, rather than some ideological dogma that they are reading in the religious texts that drives into that. So my argument is that it is self-defeating for the West or the United States to reduce your adversary into a comfortable two-dimensional chivalry.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Rather than try to understand, as a chess player, how does Iran see the board? And therefore, why does it move the way it does? If we actually thought like this, we wouldn't have been caught by surprise the way Iran behaved in this war with the United States.

• 17:43Demetri Kofinas?

  So I think most Americans don't know anything about Iranian history, but whatever they do know is likely confined to the last 50 years. How important is it to understand Iran's pre-revolutionary history if we want to understand the lessons and beliefs about the world that have shaped it? And that have shaped its leadership and government?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So the last 50 years obviously loom very large. But Iran's anxieties, I believe, go farther back. I mean, first of all, since 1500, when Iranian scurrage came about, it is alone in the region. In a region that others are not alone. It's one thing to be alone in a region where everybody's alone, as opposed to a region in which you are alone. So Iran's language is Persian. Their cultural identity is Persian. And they are surrounded by either Arabs, which are a family of 22 countries, which band together. And at the same time, as they see themselves as nation-states, they see themselves as a block. They have an Arab League.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  They have Arab soccer tournaments. They have, you know, common language, et cetera, right? To which the others are not equally welcome. And then there are Turks all around Iran, who also have an identity that is different from Persian. So Iranians are unique in the region. They also are followers of Shia Islam, which is one branch of Islam. Whereas the majority or the prevalent Muslims in the Middle East are Sunni Muslims. That's both Arabs and Turks. So both by virtue of their faith and their language, the Iranians have been alone. And this basically has loomed large over Iran's strategic thinking.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And then, for the past 200, 250 years, Iran has been weak and has barely survived by the skin of its teeth. During the era of imperialism in the 19th century, Iran, along with Thailand, was perhaps the only Asians that was not actually directly colonized by Europeans. But at the same time, it was deeply penetrated by them. They abused power, they took national resources, they subjected Iran to unfair treaties. And Iran came out of the 19th century barely surviving, but with acute sense of humiliation and weakness.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And the Palavi period, from 1921 onwards, after World War I, put its shoulder to restoring the Iranian state and giving the country integrity. But that sort of shadow of the 19th century was never lifted. And then in the 1950s, the big event that concerns the US is that there was a military coup in Iran that removed a popular prime minister who had nationalized Iran's oil industry. Historically, many believe that, you know, this coup was somehow engineered directly in London or Washington. I think it's a lot more complicated that there were also many Iranians, for their own reasons, who wanted to remove the prime minister.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  But the coup did get the backing of Americans and the British. Though those who carried the Iranian revolution are particularly of the view that the coup was an American project. And so, in their eyes, Iran, after 1953, was not an independent country. That imperialism had once again intervened in Iran to shape its destiny. And so, the revolution in 1979 happens against this background. And one argument I make in the book is that one of the things the revolution is most proud of and sees as its greatest accomplishment is to give Iran, for the first time,

• 21:37Speaker 01

  independence and strength after several decades, after over two centuries, you know. About six months ago, I think, Iran's former foreign minister told the Foreign Policy Magazine in an interview that the Islamic Republic is the first government in Iran in over 250 years to give Iran genuine independence. And even this war is happening, as, you know, we're witnessing in Iran, millions of people go to the funeral of their former Iranian supreme leader. The current leadership of Iran is saying that the war with the United States and its outcome, and forcing President Trump into a memorandum of understanding,

• 22:21Speaker 01

  and backing off a superpower along with its main ally, which is the biggest military in the Middle East, is a feat that Iran has not accomplished since the medieval period. So, the meaning of even this war against that history is that we have a 250-year history of abuse of imperial powers, superpowers, beating Iran down, taking its territory, imposing unfair treaties on it. And here is the Islamic Republic, standing tall and pushing back against this. Now, when you look at this, you see, this is not about Islam. This is not about the Quran.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  This is actually about a deeply entrenched sense of historical grievance that has been animating the Islamic Republic. And the Islamic Republic now actually is trying to seek legitimacy, not in religion.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  But actually in reversing a verdict that has been dominant in Iran's history. Now, I'm not saying that the language of Islamic Republic is not Islamic, that the leaders are not clerics. But to read this too narrowly, that this is all about Islam, the holy book, and seventh century thinking about theology misses the point. Iran is a highly nationalistic country with a very bruised ego and a sense of both vulnerability and historical grievance. And the Islamic Republic from the get-go in 1979, even the way they took hostages, American diplomats hostage,

• 24:01Speaker 01

  has been trying to assert that under its leadership, Iran is no longer weak, is no longer subservient. It's standing up to imperial powers and is not going to be subjugated by the United States.

• 24:15Demetri Kofinas?

  That was extremely helpful. I might have a few more, one or two more questions about the Iranian psyche. But before I ask those, let's sit a bit longer here on the 1953 coup. Now, the prime minister at this time was Mohammad Muzadek and the CIA MI6 operation was Operation Ajax. This is one of those stories that is part of the progressive anti-war pacifist lore. And the way it was taught, the way that I learned it, was that Muzadek wanted to nationalize Iranian oil. He wanted to institute democracy and we weren't okay with that. So we sent Kermit Roosevelt, TDR's grandson, as part of this intelligence operation to overthrow Muzadek

• 24:58Demetri Kofinas?

  and institute the Shah so that we could control the oil. And in your book, you argue that it wasn't so much about whether Iran should seek to nationalize its oil industry or become more democratic, because certainly on the nationalization front, that was something that the Shah was also interested in doing. But rather that it was really about what constituted Iran's principal security threat. Was it the Soviet Union and Soviet communism? Or was it British imperialism? And what was a convincing, compelling way to address that threat? And to sort of thread the needle between... Contact and integration with the West and confrontation with the Soviet Union. Do I have that right?

• 25:42Demetri Kofinas?

  And why is that distinction so important for us to understand if we want to understand Iranian motivations?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  It's not only important for us to understand, it's also important for Iranians to understand. And let me put it this way, the picture that you drew is by and large the picture that has dominated understanding of 1953. It's definitely the picture that dominated Iran and the United States in 1979. I mean, when the hostages were taken at the American Embassy and all three American television channels were broadcasting every night from Iran, they nonstop were talking about this grievance about 1953. There is no doubt that the British wanted to defeat Mossad, just like later on they wanted to defeat Nasser and the Swiss crisis, or any other upstart Third World leader who

• 26:33Speaker 01

  dared to demand a fair compensation for their resources or wanted to nationalize their resource. They wouldn't negotiate with Mossad, and they wanted to persuade Washington to remove it. As soon as the Eisenhower administration replaced the Truman administration, the Republicans were much more amenable to removing Mossad. And yes, they sent Kermit Roosevelt, and they were British spies. But they wouldn't have succeeded if there was not actually a lot of Iranians who also had begun to develop their own sets of issues with Mossad. Nobody in Iran liked the British. Nobody in Iran thought that the oil deal with them was fair.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  In fact, the Shah's father had been removed in, at the beginning of World War II by the British and ignobly sent into exile in South Africa where he died, and the Shah had a dislike for him. But the Shah's formative experience as a young king was when the Soviet Union occupied northern Iran and would not leave northern Iran. And it took the Truman doctrine, and President Truman, to bully Stalin to leave northern Iran. And so for him, British imperialism was a lesser threat to Iran than this big voracious bear sitting on Iran's borders.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And the lesson the Shah took from 1946 was that the only thing that saved Iran from being broken up and absorbed by the Soviet Union, much like what Russia is doing to Ukraine today, was actually the United States of America and Western Europe. And Iran could not afford to pick a fight with them. Mossadegh, on the other hand, dismissed the Soviet threat. He thought that Great Britain was the worst thing ever created, that imperialism was a true bane and a threat to Iran, and that he can handle communism. Now, increasingly, as Mossadegh confronted Britain and the US, more and more Iranians

• 28:46Speaker 01

  became worried that he was being too naive, that he basically was going to be a handmaiden for a communist takeover of Iran. It's not that they disagreed with him on principle, that this oil deal is unfair, that oil belongs to Iran. They rather were extremely worried that he, in a don quixote way, is charging the windmill without a plan. And if the British put sanctions on Iran, which they did, if the British invaded southern Iran, if the United States and Britain became alienated from Iran, the Soviets would be back. So the Iranian military, and ironically, the senior, most clerics in Iran at the time,

• 29:31Speaker 01

  all gave fat was in support of the Shah, even though they had many issues with him. And also, another important thing is that the Shah then was not a dictator, he was a constitutional monarch. And when Mossadegh began to tangle with them, and the Shah left Iran in a huff into exile, that actually damaged Mossadegh, because the Shah was popular. The fact that he was unpopular in 1979 does not mean that he was unpopular in 1953. But these forces began to plan for removing Mossadegh. And in the end, it was not the CIA and MI6 creating the coup so much as they rode the

• 30:14Speaker 01

  tide that was being created by these forces inside Iran.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, history is ultimately, sometimes at a popular level, is understood the way it's taught, which is the opposition in Iran over the years increasingly began to say that this was a CIA coup. Iranians all were pro-Musaddegh. Nobody disliked it. There was kind of like a historical amnesia. And on the other hand, CIA took a great benefit from claiming this coup because it would win much bigger budget battles in Washington. Remember, the author Scott Lee Anderson, in a book about the history of CIA, says when

• 30:58Speaker 01

  the coup happened, they asked Kermit Roosevelt to come to the Oval Office and tell President Eisenhower what happened. Now, from historical documents that have now been released, we know that when the coup was happening, Kermit Roosevelt had no idea. He was having strawberry daiquiris next to the pool at the American Embassy because the coup that he thought he was generating had failed three days earlier. But he comes into the Oval Office and he starts telling these James Bond-like tall tales to President Eisenhower, who's mesmerized. And Anderson says, as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles are listening to this, wheels begin to turn in their head that, hey, wait a minute.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Using the CIA for dealing with Soviet threat, it's so much cheaper and more effective than putting billions of dollars into the Pentagon. Especially Allen Dulles in the CIA saw an opportunity that by claiming the 1953 coup as being an entirety a successful mission by the United States, that you basically could increase the budget of CIA and make it the forefront force in the fight against communism. It's almost like the Venezuela issue with Trump, right? This happens so easily in Iran. And CIA never came and said it happened so easily because Musaddegh was facing real

• 32:25Speaker 01

  problems at home, because the senior ayatollahs had turned on him, because the military had turned on him, because there was a political class that he had alienated, because a chunk of his own party actually had left him. None of these were told by the CIA. CIA basically claimed that it carried out Operation Ajax.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  But I mean, there's two ways of looking at this. One is, as historians, where does things lie? The other is that historical memory that led to the revolution in Iran had a particular reading of that event. Now, my point in the book is that this fight did not start between the Shah and Musaddegh over democracy and dictatorship. It was not a domestic issue. It was a fight over who constituted this most significant strategic risk to Iran. And the Shah, at a fundamental level, believed that Musaddegh did not understand the Soviet threat, and the path that he was going down was actually putting Iran's existence at risk.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Musaddegh, on the other hand, thought that the Shah was exaggerating the communist threat, and Iran should be engaged in this anti-imperialist fight.

• 33:41Demetri Kofinas?

  By the way, echoes of the politics of any country that was enmeshed in the Cold War. Obviously, what it led to eventually a coup in Iran and the repercussions were more significant for the domestic population. But we've had similar discussions across both party lines in the United States, going back to the very beginning of the Cold War. Of course, this was like central to the Kennedy election, right? Whether there was a missile gap or not.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 34:05Demetri Kofinas?

  So, as you've already stated, this narrative served the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution. How central is the broader war, this broader war between Iran and the West, to the self-conception of the Islamic Republic and to the national narrative today?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Well, the people who carried out the revolution of 1979, all of whom were not religious, they were also Marxist-Leninists and liberal democrats. They may have had very different conceptions at that point in time about what the shape of the government of Iran would be in the future. And each of them thought that the other ones would be basically thrown by the wayside once the Shah's gone. But one issue they all agreed on was this reading of the 1953 coup.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  That the Shah's government was fundamentally illegitimate because it was installed in power by a foreign government. Right? Now, Ayatollah Khomeini firmly believed in this. He thought that in 1953, this American imperialism came to Iran and put him in place. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to subjugate Iran. So they saw the Shah essentially as a puppet, as an agent of imperialism. And in the environment of post-Vietnam era, where these kinds of ideas about American imperialism was popular on the universities and among intellectuals in the West.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  You could go to Berkeley. And Iranian students, the younger generation, were also exposed to these dark views of American imperialism in universities in Europe and the United States. And so you had a sort of consensus among those who carried the revolution that the US had been a force for evil in Iran. It had not only changed the regime, but it was then responsible for all the excesses of that regime. And that Iran had not been an independent country between 1953 and 1979. Now, this is a highly exaggerated view of history,

• 36:18Speaker 01

  but it's the one that won Iran in 1979.

• 36:23Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, my parents were born and lived in Greece up until their early twenties. They were in university during the time of the military junta, the regime of Papadopoulos and the colonels, who had the support of the United States. And they came to America with many of the same narratives about the machinations of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration. And similarly, my in-laws, who grew up in Argentina, learned many of those same lessons. And while both of those countries endured military junta's with the support of the United States, and of course, Latin American countries endured many more intrusions onto their sovereignties, those national experiences were channeled into a much broader narrative that became popular within the international leftist movement that portrayed America as

• 37:07Demetri Kofinas?

  this cynical neo-colonial power that used the threat of Soviet communism to meddle in the domestic politics of other countries. And you cite numerous examples in your book where Iran's leadership, having internalized the same narrative of American clandestine preponderance and political meddling, consistently seems to draw the opposite conclusion from events that many of the Western observers do. For example, you cite the September 2022 protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, or the more recent October 7 attacks. Can you elaborate on how the Islamic Republic's leadership interprets these events, and why that's important to understand?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes, these are just purely rhetoric, and sometimes, there's actually a logic behind it. I mean, in the way in which the Islamic Republic has seen foreign hand behind every uprising and protest in Iran is not that different from, you know, Vladimir Putin thinking all velvet revolutions are the work of CIA, or Rajab Teb Eredag on blaming every protest in Turkey to be somehow a foreign attempt to overthrow or subjugate the country. Every protest in the Arab world, even in countries that are close allies of the United States, are interpreted as American interference in domestic politics. So in that sense, the Islamic Republic is not very different. But on the other hand,

• 38:33Speaker 01

  the Islamic Republic also, for a very long time, came to see that the new middle class that has begun to emerge in Iran, and wants change, to be both a natural ally of the West, kind of like wanting to go back to the pre-revolutionary relationship with the West, but at the same time, being encouraged by the West. So yes, they're paranoid, but there is some grounds in their paranoia. For instance, now that the war has happened, it's now become very evident, for instance, how much money has gone into exile television stations operating out of London beaming into Iran, mostly very negative about the Islamic Republic.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  But at some level, it's also a facet of a country which is in every sense is organized around a singular threat that it's facing from the outside, which is from the United States. So domestic protesters are either put up to it by the United States, or they are haplessly and unconsciously helping the American cause by weakening the Islamic Republic, particularly when the protesters are protesting policies that are directly associated with Iran's foreign policy, like supporting for Hezbollah or Hamas, etc. The attack of October 7th and what followed in the Gaza War is a bit more complex, because

• 40:03Speaker 01

  I think the debates among the actual decision-makers was much more sophisticated and nuanced. But the way that it was then communicated to broader constituencies was designed to say that Iran alone is the one who supports the organizations that are standing up to Israel and is standing up for Palestinian rights. And therefore, the fact that Israel is lashing out against Hamas, is going after Hezbollah, is going after Iran, is proof that Israel sees Iran and its proxies as genuine threats to Israel. So in the sense of Iran taking the fight to Israel, the rest of the Arab world has basically abdicated.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Iran alone is the one that is carrying this fight. What they don't say is that it also then increases certain risks to Iran, because then US and Israel actually went after Iran in a way that actually escalated in national security threat for Iran.

• 41:05Demetri Kofinas?

  So there's a working assumption in Washington that if we besiege our adversaries long enough through the rationing up of sanctions, targeted assassinations of their leaders, as has been the case in Iran, and occasional bombing of their infrastructure, that they will eventually exhaust themselves and seek some kind of peaceful accommodation. This remains the consensus view, the operating consensus view in Washington. But what you seem to imply in the book is that it is the United States that seems to be showing signs of imperial exhaustion. Do I have that right? And can you elaborate on that argument?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Right, so what you describe is actually absolutely correct. Even as you and I are speaking, there is a lot of pressure in Washington on President Trump that you need to escalate pressure on Iran to exactly exhaust it, force it to collapse. What we are seeing is a much more heightened version of the containment of the Soviet Union. You know, the US put in place after the famous Mr. X article in Foreign Affairs.

• 42:08Demetri Kofinas?

  George Kennan's sources of Soviet.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. So at that point in time, economic sanctions was not a part of it. Now economic sanctions are part of it. At that point in time, assassination was not part of it. Now it is. But the idea is that you don't invade a country. What you do is to put so much pressure on it that ultimately it collapses. Now with the case of Iran, this is running to a counter.

• 42:33Demetri Kofinas?

  By the way, it doesn't matter if that hardly ever works.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. It doesn't work for other reasons as well, because it actually brings a much harder, harsher, security-conscious leadership to the world. The US read into the weakening of the Saddam regime that it works. But I agree with you, it's become a lazy.

• 42:52Demetri Kofinas?

  Except it didn't work because we had to invade Iraq. So it didn't actually work.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  No, you're correct. It goes to not objective analysis, but what you want to read. Right? The United States has now become enamored with sanctions and this kind of pressure because it doesn't want to go to war and it doesn't want to do nothing. So it basically claims that these strategies are working, when in fact they're actually not working. Right? But in the case of Iran, the Iranians basically have followed their own strategy, which comes out of a guerrilla war mentality, which is, you know, came out of Vietnam, came out of experiences of guerrilla movement, which is you keep harassing the US and you defeat it by a thousand cuts.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  That the United States ultimately will exhaust itself in sort of continuous guerrilla warfare, largely because the United States in the Middle East is not defending its own territory. The stakes are not really as high as it often claims it to be. Like even in this most recent war, it really, according to its own declaration, went to war at the behest of Israel, right? Not on his own, or it went to war thinking that it's going to be a three-day event. Whereas Iran basically is defending its territory, it's an existential fight for it. And the calculation is that you could get to a place, which is what Henry Kissinger said about the Vietcong, that the guerrilla wins by not losing,

• 44:22Speaker 01

  and the larger military loses by not winning. And ultimately defeating a guerrilla army is extremely difficult. And we saw the US give up in Afghanistan after 20 years, right? So Iran is basically waging a guerrilla war at a regional level against the United States with the goal of exhausting the US. And so the American strategy of containing Iran has ran head-on into Iranian strategy of waging guerrilla warfare against the United States.

• 44:53Demetri Kofinas?

  And it's a lot easier not to lose than it is to win, because winning looks very specific, whereas not losing can come in many, many different tastes and flavors.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 45:03Demetri Kofinas?

  So, one more question for you before we move into the second hour. I haven't really established or asked you to establish why it's important whether or not Iran's foreign policy is motivated by ideology or rational national interest. So can you lay that out for me? Why is that an important distinction for policymakers and the public to understand? And what does it? How does it inform the correct policy for the United States, for Israel, and for Western countries?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I mean, there's two ways. Sometimes you prefer to call someone else's policy as ideology, because it's an easier way to cast them as unreasonable. And the only way you can confront them is by aggression. But in reality, if a state or a movement is guided by ideology, it's kind of like, let's say, a movement that believes in messianism. Then it's not guided by rational calculation towards an objective. Right? You cannot change its mind about things. But if it's not guided by ideology, it's guided by decision, goals and decision-making, we can understand. Then we can actually confront it. It's like we look at Russia today and say,

• 46:14Speaker 01

  yes, its intentions towards Ukraine are evil, are bad, should not stand. But we don't attribute it to some kind of a millenarian ideology. It's a kind of behavior that we've seen in history before, that Putin wants land or is calculating this is how he's going to get it. Why it's important is because ultimately, the United States is always in a game of chess with its adversaries. And it's important that it recognizes that the person or the country that is sitting across the table is playing chess.

• 46:49Demetri Kofinas?

  And doesn't have a suicide vest strapped to its chest.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if you saw it that way, and even if it uses what you call it a suicide vest, nevertheless, there is a method to the madness if you want. Because the only way that you can defeat it is essentially by understanding that it is making a calculation. So you can change its calculation by changing the assumptions that are in front of it. For a very long time, we have not assumed that the Iranians are playing chess. That's not what American presidents tell them, American people. And that these are unreasonable ideologues, religious ideologues.

• 47:28Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, and the one obvious place where that is especially material is in the nuclear negotiations. Because if you think your counterpart is a suicide bomber, then of course, you're going to stop at nothing to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. Whereas if you view their desire to acquire a nuke, or their resistance to terminating their nuclear program as a bargaining chip within a larger negotiation, or something that they're doing to achieve deterrence because they're afraid of you, then you come to a very different set of conclusions about what you're willing to tolerate. And also, what the larger objective is to the negotiations and what you can get out of them in the first place. You know? So I'm going to move us to the second hour, Valli.

• 48:11Demetri Kofinas?

  There are a number of things that I'd like to ask you about in that part of our conversation. One thing that I would like to clarify from the start is how the Iran-Iraq war changed the country. And what lessons it imparted on today's leaders who came of age during the war, and for whom it was the formative experience of their political lives. Because these are the people that now wield power in today's Iran. I also want to revisit the nuclear negotiations. We mentioned them briefly just now, as well as Iran's policy of forward defense, and the maximum pressure campaign, and how it changed the country's economy, its power structure, and its politics. And lastly, I'd love to know what the most likely outcomes are here that you foresee. Whether a grand bargain of some sort is possible,

• 48:57Demetri Kofinas?

  the probabilities you'd assign to that happening, and what the default scenario looks like for Iran and the region if the status quo persists for the foreseeable future. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Valli, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join one of our three content tiers. All subscribers get access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Valli, stick around, we're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed.

• 49:44Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.