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0:01:25 Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prop G pod.
0:01:26 What’s happening?
0:01:31 A ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump is now in place after a 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
0:01:38 The region remains on edge as both sides claim victory and questions grow around how long the calm will last.
0:01:41 And also, what actually happened here and was it effective, ineffective?
0:01:50 In today’s episode, we speak with Kareem Sajipour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in Iran and U.S. foreign policy.
0:01:57 We discuss with Kareem what triggered the latest conflict, how it might shape the future of U.S. diplomacy in the region, and what comes next for Iran.
0:02:00 So with that, here’s our conversation with Kareem Sajipour.
0:02:05 Kareem, where does this podcast find you?
0:02:09 I’m in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
0:02:09 Nice.
0:02:11 And how long have you lived in D.C.?
0:02:15 I’ve been in D.C. for basically the last two decades.
0:02:18 I’d previously been based in the Middle East.
0:02:23 I’d lived in Tehran and Beirut, and I grew up mostly in Michigan.
0:02:24 Interesting.
0:02:28 So did your parents leave during the revolution, or did you live in Tehran after that?
0:02:33 My family was one of the few families that came to the U.S. before the revolution.
0:02:39 My father was a medical doctor, and he emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1950s.
0:02:45 My mom grew up both in Iran and in Italy, and they came together.
0:02:51 They settled in the U.S. in the late 60s, and I think they probably always thought they would one day go back to Iran.
0:02:56 But then when the revolution happened, they stood put, and I grew up mostly in the U.S.
0:03:02 I spent years living in Latin America and in Europe and in the Middle East, but the last two decades in D.C.
0:03:04 Surely a global citizen.
0:03:06 So let’s bust right into it.
0:03:11 For now, it appears the ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues to hold.
0:03:14 Trump says the war is done.
0:03:31 Give us your sense of the state of play, because I think one of the frustrating things about this conflict war is that I went back and I looked at headlines the first few days after a war began or a conflict.
0:03:35 And what they were reporting then was oftentimes just not accurate.
0:03:38 And it feels even less.
0:03:40 It feels like there’s even less veracity.
0:03:44 Like, have we set their nuclear program back seven days or seven years?
0:03:47 I literally don’t know who to turn to.
0:03:57 So I’d be curious to just get your kind of appraisal, no mercy, no malice overview of the state of play right now as it relates to this war.
0:03:58 Sure, Scott.
0:04:09 So first, let me give like one minute of historic context, which is that, you know, these two countries, Iran and Israel, in my view, are actually more natural partners than they are natural adversaries.
0:04:13 There’s an ancient history of affinity between the Persians and the Jews.
0:04:20 You know, Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king, is revered in the Old Testament for liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity.
0:04:25 Prior to the 1979 revolution, the two countries had good partnership.
0:04:39 And even now, if you look at them, you know, in contrast to most modern geopolitical conflicts like China and Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, there’s no direct land or border disputes between Iran and Israel.
0:04:41 The two countries, in my view, have complementary interests.
0:04:43 Israel is a tech power.
0:04:44 Iran is an energy power.
0:04:47 And there’s natural basis for cooperation.
0:05:01 What happened in 1979 was that Iran went virtually overnight from a U.S. allied monarchy led by the Shah to a viscerally anti-American, anti-Israeli theocracy ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
0:05:07 And since then, there’s basically been three ideological pillars of Iran’s 1979 revolution.
0:05:17 It’s death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, the veiling of women, which Khomeini called the flag of the Islamic revolution.
0:05:25 So going now to the present, the latest battle between Iran and Israel may be over for now.
0:05:34 But the war will continue so long as you have a regime in Iran whose entire identity is premised on replacing Israel with Palestine.
0:05:37 I bring a bias here.
0:05:50 And my bias is that I feel like one of the biggest unlocks that Americans don’t consider, it’s not in their lexicon or their dialogue, is the potential for the Iran and America to be allies again.
0:05:52 Because, and this is pure anecdotal evidence.
0:05:59 I grew up in Los Angeles, I went to UCLA, largest concentration of Iranians, I think outside of Tehran.
0:06:06 And several of my closest friends at UCLA were Iranian.
0:06:11 And it always struck me, my comment about Iranians was they were more American than Americans.
0:06:13 A love of education.
0:06:14 A love of money.
0:06:16 And I say that in a positive way.
0:06:17 Total capitalists, entrepreneurs.
0:06:19 A love of graduate education.
0:06:23 An appreciation for ambition and competitiveness.
0:06:27 I just always thought the most American kids we have here are Iranians.
0:06:47 And when I see the, when I see the lack of popularity of the Islamic regime or the Islamic Republic, what is your sense for whether or not when we took this military action, there’s always a fear that you have a rallying around the flag when you’re attacked.
0:06:54 What’s your sense of the Iranian, that kind of man or woman on the streets reaction to this military action?
0:06:56 It’s an important question.
0:07:16 And, you know, my view about this is that what tends to happen in these dramatic instances of, you know, military attack or military conflagration with an external power is that it tends to accentuate Iranians’ existing political views.
0:07:37 So, if last week or two weeks ago you were a supporter of the government, and I suspect government supporters represent about 15 to 20 percent of society, it’s not a popular regime, then you have even more fodder, obviously, to hate America and Israel for the military invasion of Iran.
0:07:54 If you were a critic or an opponent of the Iranian regime and you said, you know, this is a regime which always puts its ideological objectives over the national interests of us and the well-being of the Iranian people, then you have even more reason to dislike the regime.
0:08:01 I think in the near term, what happens is that the regime has gotten a kind of a, what I would describe as a temporary sugar high.
0:08:22 But when the dust settles, three months, six months, nine months from now, I think people will go back to living under this politically repressive, socially repressive police state, which is profoundly mismanaged, an economy which, you know, Iran could be, in my view, it should be a G20 nation.
0:08:30 Under proper management, this is a country which has enormous human capital, as you were referring to, has enormous natural resources.
0:08:34 It is not a country which just came to be in the 20th century.
0:08:38 It has a 2,500-year-old civilization and identity.
0:08:44 And, you know, I think Iranians will eventually revert back to that profound sense of discontent.
0:08:46 And I’ll give you a concrete example of that, Scott.
0:08:56 You may remember in January of 2020, Iran’s top Revolutionary Guard commander, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated by President Trump.
0:09:05 And many people then said, well, this is, you know, the country is rallying around the flag and there were mass protests in Iran.
0:09:06 What happened two years later?
0:09:15 Two years later, there was a young woman called Masa Amini that was detained and killed in custody for allegedly showing too much of her hair.
0:09:24 And that set off massive nationwide protests in Iran, which persisted over six months and had the regime on its heels.
0:09:32 So, you know, I don’t doubt that, you know, many people took umbrage to the U.S. dropping 30,000-pound bunker bombs.
0:09:38 But ultimately, you know, vast majority of Iranians, as I say, they want to be South Korea.
0:09:40 They don’t want to be living under North Korea.
0:09:42 Let’s talk about the next generation.
0:09:46 So, Khomeini, 85-year-old theocrat.
0:09:56 And the next level down, I got to be thinking, when the Mossad is able to penetrate—I mean, people talk about how Israel rules the skies over Iran.
0:10:00 I think what’s probably more frightening for the leadership in Iran is it appears they ruled the ground.
0:10:14 And what I mean by that is that the signal I think they’ve sent is that on a moment’s notice, an email to a secure device, to an asset spy on the ground in Iran, we can kill any of you.
0:10:18 And so—and I think Americans even have trouble relating to that.
0:10:28 Imagine if all of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of the Navy, every five-star general we have in the Air Force, within 30 minutes were all murdered.
0:10:31 And it’s clear, okay, they can take out anybody.
0:10:39 My question—I was—when I’ve been on corporate boards, my question is, the strength of a company is not based on the CEO.
0:10:44 It’s based on, do you have zero or eight people who could step into the CEO’s shoes?
0:10:47 That’s a sign of a strong corporate governance and a strong organization.
0:10:53 What do you think the next generation looks like in terms of the regime?
0:10:56 And is this a house of cards with an 85-year-old?
0:11:00 What happens when he dies, assuming he’s not overthrown?
0:11:01 He’s an old man.
0:11:04 What does the next generation look like?
0:11:08 And is there a chill of, what have I signed up for here?
0:11:10 It’s an important question.
0:11:14 And, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei is actually now 86.
0:11:17 He’s the longest-serving autocrat in the world.
0:11:18 He’s been ruling since 1989.
0:11:20 He hasn’t left Iran since 1989.
0:11:24 And, you know, you put yourself in his shoes right now.
0:11:25 He’s living in a bunker.
0:11:28 We all have known, you know, 85, 86 years old.
0:11:31 You have limited physical, mental stamina.
0:11:43 And he’s expected to lead this three-part war against the greatest superpower in the world, the United States, the greatest military power in the Middle East, Israel, and against his own population.
0:11:51 And he’s doing that at a time when you mentioned his top military commanders have been assassinated in their own bedrooms or in their own bunkers.
0:12:04 And so, as you mentioned, this really slows down the wheels of state when it’s a state which potentially needs to act quickly to address an external or internal security threat.
0:12:11 And when people get the notifications on their phones, they don’t know if that’s coming from their higher-up command or is coming from the Mossad.
0:12:15 So, in my view, what I would describe as a Swiss cheese regime.
0:12:19 It has so many holes in it penetrated by Israeli intelligence.
0:12:23 Now, what happens after the supreme leader’s passing?
0:12:33 You know, Ibn Khaldun, the great North African philosopher, sometimes called the father of sociology,
0:12:41 He came out with a theory centuries ago, in the 13th century, which he called asabia.
0:12:45 And it’s now known in kind of modern business literature.
0:12:47 You may be familiar with it as the power cycle theory.
0:12:52 And essentially what he said is that empires are built and destroyed over three generations.
0:12:55 The first generation, they have fire in the belly.
0:12:56 They come, they build it.
0:13:01 Second generation watched what the first generation did, so they managed to preserve it.
0:13:05 But by the third generation, by no fault of their own, you know, they’re soft.
0:13:06 They’re princelings.
0:13:07 They’re born in the palace.
0:13:09 They weren’t born with that fire in the belly.
0:13:14 You know, the example I commonly use in the American business context is Walmart, right?
0:13:19 Sam Walton, through his thrift and grit, built this amazing company.
0:13:22 You know, second generation has preserved it.
0:13:28 Now, you know, his grandchildren were born multibillionaires, so it’s clear, you know, they weren’t born with that same grit.
0:13:34 But now going back to the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini is the last of the Mohicans.
0:13:38 He’s the last of the first generation leaders in the Islamic Republic.
0:13:48 And they don’t have any great options for succession, in part because this is a society which is thoroughly secularized over the last 46 years.
0:14:00 You know, the best way to secularize a population is to rule them with a repressive, corrupt theocracy, which is ruling from a moral pedestal.
0:14:07 You know, that’s insulting to people in a way that living under your run-of-the-mill dictatorship is in some ways less insulting.
0:14:18 You know, Vladimir Putin doesn’t have any pretensions of being, you know, God’s representative on earth, whereas, you know, Islamic Republic’s leadership, they have these pretensions of moral superiority.
0:14:28 So the question is, you know, does, you know, does, if the regime manages to keep it together and they don’t implode like the Soviet Union did, which is, you know, a big question.
0:14:36 Is the next strong man in Iran going to be wearing a turban and being another ayatollah?
0:14:43 Or is it more likely to be someone from the security forces with a military or intelligence background?
0:14:54 My sense is that even if they try to anoint a cleric as the next supreme leader, that person is likely going to be a transitional figure, much like Boris Yeltsin was in the post-Soviet Union.
0:15:04 And that if the system manages to keep it together, more likely we’re going to see someone with a military and intelligence background, not someone wearing a turban.
0:15:07 We’ll be right back.
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0:16:21 I’m Julia Longoria, and this week on Unexplainable, things get a little personal.
0:16:25 With morning sickness.
0:16:31 What I saw in television shows and movies, people saying, ha, ha, ha, she’s pregnant.
0:16:33 She’s been barfing for an hour.
0:16:43 When I woke up, I ran to the bathroom, and I sort of laughed after, thinking, this is morning sickness, uh-huh.
0:16:49 But within a week, I realized that it was not very funny.
0:16:53 And it got bad really fast.
0:17:00 I just was like, okay, I have to work on this, because there’s nothing out there, and I need the answers.
0:17:05 Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Monday and Wednesday.
0:17:18 I want to outline a thesis to you from someone who’s just, uh, obviously observing this from abroad, and has a limited view into it.
0:17:23 But my, generally, for someone said, all right, summarize what’s going on here.
0:17:26 Where you have someone who’s literally running to stay out of prison.
0:17:33 And the best way to stay in office is to get people to rally around the flag and the current administration.
0:17:37 And the easiest way to accomplish that is to go on a constant war footing.
0:17:47 Which results in whether or not you think it was the right idea to respond in Gaza, which I do believe it absolutely was the right decision.
0:17:55 And now, most people, including, I think, a very large segment of the Israeli populace and former prime ministers, are saying, it has just gone too far.
0:18:13 And then, after diminishing or neutering the proxies of Iran, which is understandable, going in and convincing your ally to come in behind you, who comes in behind you, with what I would describe as what looks to me like, increasingly, a performative attack.
0:18:20 Now, now there’s reports that the majority of the enriched uranium was transported out of these facilities.
0:18:35 And it was a little bit of a president, very focused on his image, jealous of the macho light that Netanyahu was basking under, so came in with a performative attack, which then inspired a performative response.
0:18:54 Where Khomeini ordered an attack on bases in Qatar and Iraq, and my understanding is, gave Qatar and U.S. forces a heads up that this was about to happen, such that he could flex and say, see, I responded, but not risk any real collateral damage that would inspire an escalation.
0:19:01 So, this whole thing, this whole thing, this whole chapter, the word I would use to describe the last two weeks, performative.
0:19:02 Your thoughts.
0:19:05 So, a couple things.
0:19:21 Number one, I’ve been teaching a class at Georgetown University for years in the Master’s School of Foreign Service, and I always joke on the first day with my students that if you really want to understand the Middle East, you’re better off studying psychology than political science.
0:19:32 Because so much of this region is shaped not by the national interests of states, but by kind of the manias and political ambitions of strong men.
0:19:53 And in the case of this current war, America, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, much of what’s transpired over the last few weeks is, I think, driven by the person of Donald Trump and his political imperatives, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the person of Ayatollah Khamenei.
0:19:57 Not necessarily, as I said from the outset, the national interests of these places.
0:20:12 Now, one framework I used to think about, certainly the relationship between President Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei, there’s a wonderful essay which the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953, which is called The Hedgehog and the Fox.
0:20:15 And he essentially puts human beings into two buckets.
0:20:23 He said, you know, hedgehogs really have one big idea, one great passion, and foxes know many things.
0:20:24 They do many things.
0:20:28 And his example of the quintessential hedgehog was Karl Marx.
0:20:32 His example of the prototypical fox was William Shakespeare.
0:20:35 Now, how does that apply to Trump and to Khamenei?
0:20:38 Ayatollah Khamenei is the prototypical hedgehog.
0:20:46 He has basically one great passion, one big idea, resistance, resistance against America, resistance against Israel.
0:20:47 Death to America, death to Israel.
0:20:53 Trump, on the other hand, is someone who, I don’t think he knows many things, but he says many things.
0:20:59 And he’s had a profound, you know, I don’t know what you would describe it.
0:21:02 I call him the Jackson Pollock of foreign policy.
0:21:13 You know, he goes from one month ago, he was in Riyadh denouncing those previous administrations who engaged in military interventions in the Middle East.
0:21:23 He ridiculed them and he said, you know, there were regime changers who destroyed far more, I’m sorry, there were nation builders who destroyed far more nations than they built,
0:21:27 and interventionists who had no idea about the reality of their own society.
0:21:39 One month later, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had taken military action, as you said, Trump saw that it was perceived to be very successful.
0:21:45 Netanyahu is getting, you know, great reviews on Fox News, and, you know, he wanted to be associated with that.
0:21:48 And so, I think we will look back years from now.
0:21:57 And Scott, you know, when you’re watching these things in real time in the Middle East, as we’ve seen, you know, if we were having this conversation in spring of 2003,
0:22:00 we would say the Iraq war is, you know, a great success, right?
0:22:03 We took out Saddam’s army in three weeks.
0:22:05 Five years later, things look very differently.
0:22:07 So, years from now, things could look very differently.
0:22:17 But I do think when the history of this war is written, much of it will be about the psychology and political calculations
0:22:26 and domestic political expediences of these three men, Netanyahu, Trump, and Khamenei, rather than the interests of nation states.
0:22:38 So, another thesis I’d like to put forward and get your reaction to, I feel as if the unsung hero in this or the unsung force here is the Ukrainian army.
0:22:39 What do I mean by that?
0:22:54 If Russia had barreled into Kiev as Putin’s generals were guaranteeing, and immediately Ukraine fell, and Russia held this perception and reputation as this fierce fighting force,
0:22:56 not to be trifled with, to be very scared of,
0:23:04 that Syria would not have fell, and we would have thought twice, as would have Netanyahu,
0:23:12 and perhaps would have received more military, logistical, and perceptual support around its surface-to-air capabilities.
0:23:20 And neither Israel nor the U.S. would have had the confidence or the ability to do what they had done,
0:23:26 had Russia still been intact in terms of its actual and perceived power.
0:23:27 Your thoughts?
0:23:32 Well, I think that’s one important data point among others.
0:23:36 I mean, the other important data point is what happened on October 7th, 2023,
0:23:41 when Yahya Sinwar and Hamas invaded Israel,
0:23:47 which, you know, turned out to be one of the most profound miscalculations in modern history,
0:23:54 because, you know, they thought that that was going to delegitimize Israel and lead to its eventual demise.
0:23:58 And what we’ve seen in the last year and a half is exactly the opposite.
0:24:03 And, you know, Iran’s leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei was the only leader in the world
0:24:07 that praised the Hamas attack of October 7th.
0:24:10 And that led Israel.
0:24:14 And then, you know, Iran kind of unleashed its other proxies,
0:24:19 like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Yemen, to commence this multi-front war with Israel.
0:24:25 And those proxies have been decimated the last year and a half.
0:24:29 So that was also an important factor.
0:24:32 But back to Ukraine and Zelensky.
0:24:41 One of the most important observations that stayed with me over the years about geopolitics
0:24:46 is an observation which Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs that he said, you know,
0:24:52 before he went into government, when he became Secretary of State and National Security Advisor,
0:24:53 he was a professor at Harvard.
0:24:57 And he thought that history was driven by impersonal forces.
0:25:01 You know, nations basically follow their own interests, regardless of who’s in power.
0:25:05 And he said after he served in government, he reached the opposite conclusion,
0:25:09 which is that the individual profoundly shapes history.
0:25:13 Academics oftentimes don’t like this because they call it, you know, the great man theory of history.
0:25:21 But I’ve also come around Kissinger’s worldview, that the individual has a profound impact on history.
0:25:23 Leadership has a profound impact on history.
0:25:32 And so your point about Ukraine for me, you know, obviously the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian people is critical.
0:25:43 But the person of President Zelensky is someone for me who has played an incredibly important role in the history of his nation.
0:25:49 And we saw, you know, just a year prior to that, and perhaps it was one reason why Vladimir Putin invaded,
0:25:59 was that in Afghanistan, you know, it was a country, a president who, he fled the country within, you know, 24, 48 hours, and the entire system collapsed.
0:26:06 So it just goes to, you know, both in business and in politics and geopolitics, the importance of leadership.
0:26:12 So I’ll go even further afield.
0:26:19 We had what was sort of a political earthquake with Zoran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary.
0:26:28 And I wonder how much of that is a new generation of American voters, quite frankly, very fed up with Israel.
0:26:35 And that this was not only an outstanding campaign run by someone who really understood new media,
0:26:41 representing youth, a pushback on the established Democratic machine.
0:26:50 What is your sense as you reverse engineer activities in the Middle East in terms of its impact on the U.S. political landscape,
0:26:54 what’s happening both in Iran and Israel and the dynamics there?
0:26:54 Do you think it will?
0:26:59 How do you see it reverse engineering to what happens here in the United States?
0:27:01 So that’s an important question.
0:27:03 Let me react in a couple of ways.
0:27:11 Number one, we’ve seen the impact that America’s failures in the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan
0:27:15 and the failure of the Arab Spring in 2011 to bring about democratic change.
0:27:24 The impact that’s had on American politics, whereby, you know, it used to be that Republicans were national security hawks
0:27:29 and more supportive of U.S. military interventions.
0:27:37 Now, you know, a strong wing of Trump’s base are, you know, they wouldn’t like the term isolationist.
0:27:39 They would call themselves restrainers or non-interventionists.
0:27:45 But that’s an important part of his political base now, including, I would probably put in that category, Vice President Vance,
0:27:48 and people like Tucker Carlson.
0:27:57 And so that is probably a majority view because it’s also, it’s a widely held view on the left as well,
0:28:05 that, you know, America should just kind of stay out of military interventions, especially in the Middle East.
0:28:13 Now, second, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you know, when I first started doing this work,
0:28:16 Israel was a bipartisan issue in Washington.
0:28:20 You know, whenever there was a bill in Congress about Israel’s security,
0:28:28 it was oftentimes like, you know, 99 to one or 99 zero with one abstention in support of it.
0:28:30 And that’s starting to change a little bit.
0:28:34 And as I said, it’s not only on the left, it’s more predominantly on the left.
0:28:40 But even there are folks on the right, as I said, that wing of the party like Tucker Carlson,
0:28:45 who say, listen, Israel is a strong country.
0:28:51 We’ve been giving it many billions of aid over the years, and it can take care of itself.
0:28:53 We don’t need to be fighting wars for it.
0:28:59 The other important factor is how people consume media and news nowadays.
0:29:07 And the reality, Scott, is you have, what, 15 million, is it what, 1-5, 15 million Jews living in the world
0:29:13 between, you know, Israel and United States and diaspora communities and Europe and Australia.
0:29:16 And yeah, probably, what, 1.2 billion Muslims.
0:29:28 And so the disparity in terms of what is produced on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter about the news of the Middle East,
0:29:34 especially when the images and videos are so dramatic and they appear, you know, very one-sided.
0:29:43 And David versus Goliath, a Palestinian population which has suffered, you know, perhaps over 50,000, 60,000 casualties now.
0:29:52 And an Israeli prime minister who, you know, is widely disliked even within his own society, let alone globally.
0:30:05 And so I do agree with you that the Democratic primary, mayoral primary in New York is an important signpost for any supporter of Israel in the United States.
0:30:14 Because if you’re losing New York City and so much of the debate, political debate in that election was not about New York City, it was about Israel-Palestine.
0:30:21 You know, that is, in my view, if you’re a strong supporter of Israel, that’s a five-alarm fire.
0:30:25 You obviously, you teach, you’re in D.C.
0:30:30 You see kind of the human capital that goes into our foreign policy apparatus.
0:30:36 I’m always consistently impressed by the human capital that decides to go into U.S. foreign policy
0:30:42 and decides to not go into what would probably be much more financially lucrative careers.
0:30:50 At the same time, our security apparatus right now, I would argue, seems sclerotic and just, they can’t even get their own story straight.
0:31:04 What is your sense of the current state of our security apparatus and our foreign policy engine, if you will, as you see the human capital going into it, whether it’s, I would imagine it’s less attractive right now, but I bring a bias to the table.
0:31:11 But give us a sense for the strength or lack thereof of our foreign policy and to the extent you’re comfortable talking about it, our security apparatus.
0:31:21 So one place where, you know, I’ve always been very impressed by the human capital of our leadership is our military, you know, especially our military institutions.
0:31:29 The great, you know, in my view, these are great American institutions, West Point, you know, Annapolis, the Naval Academy and our top generals.
0:31:41 I’m always impressed by, you know, the fact that presidents and politicians change, but there’s a consistent level of excellence from those top military commanders.
0:31:50 And not only, you know, excellence in terms of their discipline and preparedness, but, you know, oftentimes their character.
0:31:51 So I would rate them highly.
0:31:55 I’ve also, you know, over the years when you, I’ve been in D.C. for many years.
0:32:02 So you interact with many different institutions, Pentagon, the intelligence community, State Department.
0:32:16 You know, I think one of the challenges we have, and it’s natural because the U.S. government is an enormous bureaucracy, but it’s, you know, getting talented people in is a challenge.
0:32:18 When, for example, I’ll give you some concrete examples.
0:32:22 I have very talented friends who are of Iranian origin.
0:32:29 You know, one in particular was born and raised in New York City, would be a huge asset to the U.S. government, wanted to serve in the U.S. government.
0:32:35 And for four years, he was waiting for security clearance, which never happened, never got that security clearance.
0:32:46 And the way they conduct these security clearances are totally antiquated, where, you know, you have one person going and interviewing 500 different people and asking them questions.
0:32:57 You know, my view, this is ripe for disruption from a company like Palantir, that, you know, to hand over all of your, you know, computer, your social media, and we can do this much quicker.
0:33:00 So that’s one example.
0:33:17 The other example is that the U.S. Foreign Service, for example, you know, it’s, you start off and you may go stamp passports and Bangladesh for a couple years, and then you’re, you know, off to another assignment.
0:33:31 And the pace of professional advancement can be quite slow, and it’s not the same excitement as, you know, going and joining a startup, AI startup or Silicon Valley startup.
0:33:41 So I think that people should feel that, you know, there is, you know, very high caliber people we have in government.
0:33:47 But, you know, a lot of the best minds these days, government is less attracted.
0:33:51 The final thing I’ll say on this, Scott, is that, you know, I’ll give you an example.
0:34:00 We have probably, in the U.S. government, there’s, you know, probably upwards of a billion dollars dedicated to strategic communications.
0:34:14 That is almost irrelevant now when you have a president who is essentially tweeting or, you know, putting on truth social his foreign policy positions and ambitions.
0:34:18 It’s, you know, it’s rendered virtually irrelevant.
0:34:30 So that, I think there’s a great sense of demoralization among many folks in government that the system isn’t functioning like it used to be and like it should.
0:34:33 We’ll be right back after a quick break.
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0:36:18 We’re back with more from Karim.
0:36:34 If you were going to make any bets around what’s going to happen in the Middle East, recognizing this is a almost an impossible region to predict, but do you have any general themes or outcomes that you think are more likely than not?
0:36:37 Let me venture a couple of broad thoughts.
0:36:51 Number one is that, in my view, this is a region which is never going to experience real stability and security so long as you have a government in Iran whose organizing principle is death to America and death to Israel.
0:36:59 As long as you have a government in Iran that, as Kissinger once put it, behaves as a cause rather than a nation state.
0:37:01 Because it’s a huge country, Iran.
0:37:03 It has enormous resources.
0:37:14 And if it wants to spend all of its capital and talent dedicated to the business of destruction and destabilization, it can continue to do that.
0:37:17 So, that’s one big prediction.
0:37:22 Second is that, in my view, there at some point will be a reckoning in Iran.
0:37:29 And there’s a wonderful book on revolutions, which a professor called Jack Goldstone wrote.
0:37:32 And Goldstone likens revolutions to earthquakes.
0:37:35 He said, you know, we know where fault lines lie.
0:37:43 We know which countries are highly seismic, but we can never say with certainty, you know, when an earthquake is going to happen.
0:37:46 And that’s true about Iran as well.
0:37:50 This is a regime which, in my view, it’s like the late-stage Soviet Union.
0:37:51 It’s a zombie regime.
0:37:53 It has a dead ideology.
0:37:55 It survives with the repression.
0:37:56 It’s on borrowed time.
0:38:00 At some point, there is going to be a reckoning inside Iran.
0:38:08 But, you know, I can’t tell you when exactly that’s going to happen, nor can you say for certainty what is going to be the outcome.
0:38:14 You know, we know from history that authoritarian transitions oftentimes don’t end in democracy.
0:38:17 Only about one in four cases end in democracy.
0:38:20 More often, it ends in another form of authoritarianism.
0:38:33 But even if that’s the case in Iran, you could have a system which, you know, evolves into a regime which is, or a government which is a nationalist government, much like, you know, the choice that Deng Xiaoping made in China in the 1970s.
0:38:39 Put the national interest and economic interest before cultural revolution.
0:38:45 And, you know, that is, in my view, the kind of the key to understanding the region.
0:38:52 The final thing I would say here is that a big question is Saudi Vision 2030.
0:39:02 And, you know, to the extent to which Saudi Arabia succeeds and Mohammed bin Salman succeeds in transforming his nation.
0:39:07 And I’ll tell you, you know, I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs about this last fall.
0:39:19 That is a tall order for, you know, young man, modern leader, to try to take what was, you know, up until recently, very traditional society and rapidly modernize it.
0:39:23 And I think it’s in our interest and U.S. interest that he succeed.
0:39:31 But, you know, we have the example of the Shahi of Iran in 1979, also a modern leader trying to rapidly transform a society.
0:39:38 And what we know from history is that popular tumult doesn’t tend to happen when people feel most destitute.
0:39:45 Popular tumult tends to happen when people’s expectations have risen, but then those expectations are unfulfilled.
0:39:49 It’s called, you know, the J-curve theory, or revolutions of rising expectations.
0:39:56 So an ideal outcome, Scott, in the Middle East would be in Iran, which transforms into something modern,
0:40:01 and in Saudi Arabia, which succeeds in transforming and realizing Vision 2030.
0:40:09 A disaster outcome would be Vision 2030 failing and having an outcome similar to what happened in Iran in 1979,
0:40:16 and this current regime in Iran managing to kind of retrench itself and ruling for years to come.
0:40:22 I mean, be more direct. Isn’t there a much greater likelihood of peace and stability without Netanyahu or Khomeini?
0:40:26 Aren’t these two obstacles to a sustainable peace in the Middle East?
0:40:32 So I would add one more person there, which is the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas,
0:40:38 because what a lot of the Gulf leadership will tell you, especially, you know, even in Saudi Arabia,
0:40:48 you know, Saudis will tell you that prior to October 7, 2023, they were very close to doing a normalization deal with Israel,
0:40:54 and that was in part why Hamas invaded Israel when they did to sabotage those prospects.
0:41:03 And they succeeded because it became almost impossible for MBS to sell a normalization deal to his own people while Israel was, you know, bombing Gaza.
0:41:12 But I think that Khomeini has to go for Gulf countries to feel confident that, you know,
0:41:20 the Palestinians are capable of presenting themselves in a cohesive way and having strong leadership.
0:41:22 Mahmoud Abbas will have to go.
0:41:30 And I think many would also argue that so long as Prime Minister Netanyahu is in power,
0:41:35 that that normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is unlikely to happen.
0:41:42 So, sort of a lightning round here, which is dangerous in geopolitics.
0:41:48 Increased U.S. intervention or additional U.S. intervention, more likely to happen or not happen?
0:41:59 I think it’s more likely to happen if we don’t get a clear account of where Iran’s highly enriched uranium is,
0:42:04 and we don’t have access to their nuclear facilities, because they may actually say,
0:42:07 now that you bombed us, we’re going to cut off access to the inspectors.
0:42:15 In six months, do you think the attack on these nuclear facilities will be seen as having been successful,
0:42:17 or that its success was inflated?
0:42:23 You know, Scott, I think applied history is useful here.
0:42:30 And unfortunately, over the last two decades, we look back at most military interventions in the Middle East
0:42:34 as having done more harm than good.
0:42:39 And, you know, I think there’s a real danger that that could be the case with this one as well.
0:42:44 So, we always like to end with, we have a lot of young people listening to the podcast.
0:42:47 It strikes me you have a really cool job.
0:42:53 That you found something, that you have this unique skill set for,
0:42:56 having been, lived all over the world, understanding these cultures,
0:42:57 obviously very intelligent,
0:43:03 and work at this interesting, you know, this interesting institution,
0:43:07 likely make a very good living, do really interesting things.
0:43:11 Like, how did you get from an 18-year-old,
0:43:14 you know, man,
0:43:18 what were sort of the pivot points?
0:43:19 How did you, how did you find,
0:43:22 how did you get in the seat you’re in now?
0:43:28 What were the seminal forces decisions that gave you the opportunity to kind of land where you are right now?
0:43:29 Because I look at,
0:43:32 I bet there’s a lot of young men and young women who look at what you’re doing and think,
0:43:33 you know what, that’s just,
0:43:37 that’s just a really interesting, rewarding way to make a living.
0:43:40 How did you get from there to here?
0:43:43 So, had you asked me at age,
0:43:45 you know, 13,
0:43:48 what I envisioned for my work,
0:43:54 I, genuinely, this would have not been in the top thousand things I thought I would do,
0:43:58 because I had zero interest in the Middle East and zero interest in Iran.
0:44:02 You know, despite the fact that my, my parents are Iranian,
0:44:04 it was, it was not easy to,
0:44:06 you know, you were not being,
0:44:11 you’re not proud of growing up Iranian in the 1980s in the United States, right?
0:44:13 In the aftermath of the hostage.
0:44:14 Pause there.
0:44:21 The amount of outright bigotry against Iranians in the U.S. after the hostage crisis was staggering.
0:44:26 I remember being in Westwood when I was at UCLA and walking down and there was this,
0:44:28 I think it was a disco called Dillon’s.
0:44:29 We had a disco.
0:44:31 And they put up a sign that said,
0:44:32 Iranians not welcome.
0:44:37 And fortunately, our institutions held and they were forced to take that sign down.
0:44:41 But that’s how comfortable a retail establishment was of being that bigoted back then.
0:44:42 I’m sorry.
0:44:42 Go ahead, Karim.
0:44:47 No, no, you know, and Scott, that wasn’t my experience as a young kid,
0:44:50 because I grew up in a community, very friendly community.
0:44:54 And, you know, my father used to tell us from the time we were small,
0:44:59 my father emigrated to U.S. in the late 1950s and he loved Iranian culture.
0:45:05 He was a great patriot, Persian patriot, but he also loved the United States.
0:45:08 And from the time we were small, he would tell us, you know,
0:45:10 you live in the greatest country in the world.
0:45:13 And the reason why I think he said that is, you know,
0:45:17 the reason why a lot of immigrants have, because they have something else to compare it to, right?
0:45:19 It wasn’t that they took it for granted.
0:45:22 He had lived in a different context.
0:45:26 But, you know, I grew up with no interest in the Middle East and Iran because, you know,
0:45:27 what did it represent?
0:45:33 It was Ayatollah Khomeini and burning American flags, death to America.
0:45:35 I was, you know, interested in basketball.
0:45:37 I went to University of Michigan.
0:45:38 I played soccer there.
0:45:44 And for me, what happened was, you know, I started to get experiences living abroad.
0:45:48 I lived in Mexico as an exchange student when I was in high school.
0:45:52 I spent my junior year in college in Italy, where, as I mentioned, my mom grew up.
0:46:00 Then when I was 22, I received, I won an essay competition from an organization which I believe
0:46:01 is still around.
0:46:03 I would recommend young people to Google it.
0:46:05 It’s called the Circumnavigators Club.
0:46:07 This was 1999.
0:46:13 And I won a scholarship, a grant, to travel around the world, to actually circumnavigate
0:46:13 the globe.
0:46:19 And my research project in 1999 was called the Internet’s Impact on Global Communication.
0:46:24 One of the places that they wanted me to go, I had actually no interest in visiting the Middle
0:46:24 East.
0:46:29 And up until then, I had not been to Iran because the war with Iraq had happened.
0:46:33 And, you know, I would have been recruited into the Iranian army.
0:46:36 So I never had gone to Iran, but I went to Egypt and I loved Egypt.
0:46:38 That was an eye-opening experience for me.
0:46:42 And I became really enthralled in the Middle East after that.
0:46:46 And then I worked at National Geographic.
0:46:47 That was my first job out of college.
0:46:55 And, you know, that, you know, it kind of continued to fuel my love of adventure and the world.
0:47:00 And then I spent the summer of 2001 in Iran, my first summer there.
0:47:02 And I lived with my 99-year-old grandmother.
0:47:05 I traveled all over the country.
0:47:06 It was a wonderful experience.
0:47:13 And then fast forward about a month later, September 2001 was my first semester in graduate
0:47:15 school, studying Middle East affairs.
0:47:16 9-11 happens.
0:47:23 And it then became kind of very clear to me that this is something I wanted to dedicate my
0:47:30 career and my life to, in part because, as you said from the outset, Scott, Iran is a nation
0:47:32 with enormous potential.
0:47:34 It should be a G20 nation.
0:47:37 And America and Iran should be natural partners.
0:47:39 They are not natural adversaries.
0:47:44 So, for me, that is what has fueled my passion.
0:47:50 And I remember when I was at Michigan, I was a classmate of Tom Brady, an undergrad.
0:47:52 He was the first guy I met in freshman orientation.
0:47:59 And we had a biology professor who said to us on the very last day, I was meant to be pre-med,
0:48:01 but I failed my pre-med classes.
0:48:03 So, I went into political science.
0:48:05 And we had this biology lecture.
0:48:10 I don’t remember much about the class, but I just remember the thing he said on the last
0:48:11 day of class.
0:48:15 He said, you know, he said, don’t cliche that if you find something you’re really passionate
0:48:18 about, then you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
0:48:23 And he said, you know, sometimes I’m waiting for calls from the lab, you know, for pending
0:48:25 experiments, and I’ll leave my lawnmower going.
0:48:27 You know, I just forget about it.
0:48:28 I’m so passionate about it.
0:48:33 And, you know, this career, it can be very emotional.
0:48:43 You’re constantly talking about repression and war and, you know, very hard, hard topics.
0:48:48 But, you know, it’s something which at the end of the day, also, it provides real meaning.
0:48:54 So, what I’d say to people is, you know, going abroad is, if you’re interested in a career in
0:48:57 international affairs, that’s one way to distinguish yourself.
0:48:59 You know, get ground experience.
0:49:03 It’s important to learn other languages and master those languages.
0:49:07 And then, final thing I’d say, Scott, is that I think it’s critical for young people to
0:49:09 read books, read history.
0:49:16 Those are the kind of the macro nutrients of kind of a great scholar or analyst.
0:49:21 If you’re constantly just reading tweets or watching TikTok videos, that’s, you know, nourishing
0:49:22 yourself with candy.
0:49:27 And it’s not going to sustain you or distinguish you from your peers.
0:49:29 Read books.
0:49:33 Kareem Sajjapur is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
0:49:34 specializing in Iran and U.S.
0:49:35 foreign policy.
0:49:42 Kareem, right away, we were getting so many muddled messages about what to believe or not
0:49:44 believe around this conflict.
0:49:49 And your name came up independently from different sources two or three times.
0:49:54 So, whatever you’re doing, you’ve established a reputation as a real honest broker.
0:49:56 So, well done.
0:49:59 Very much appreciate you coming on and hope that you’ll join us again.
0:50:00 Absolutely.
0:50:02 Thank you for having me, Scott.
0:50:02 Love being with you.
0:50:07 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
0:50:09 Drew Burrows is our technical director.
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0:01:25 Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prop G pod.
0:01:26 What’s happening?
0:01:31 A ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump is now in place after a 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
0:01:38 The region remains on edge as both sides claim victory and questions grow around how long the calm will last.
0:01:41 And also, what actually happened here and was it effective, ineffective?
0:01:50 In today’s episode, we speak with Kareem Sajipour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in Iran and U.S. foreign policy.
0:01:57 We discuss with Kareem what triggered the latest conflict, how it might shape the future of U.S. diplomacy in the region, and what comes next for Iran.
0:02:00 So with that, here’s our conversation with Kareem Sajipour.
0:02:05 Kareem, where does this podcast find you?
0:02:09 I’m in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
0:02:09 Nice.
0:02:11 And how long have you lived in D.C.?
0:02:15 I’ve been in D.C. for basically the last two decades.
0:02:18 I’d previously been based in the Middle East.
0:02:23 I’d lived in Tehran and Beirut, and I grew up mostly in Michigan.
0:02:24 Interesting.
0:02:28 So did your parents leave during the revolution, or did you live in Tehran after that?
0:02:33 My family was one of the few families that came to the U.S. before the revolution.
0:02:39 My father was a medical doctor, and he emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1950s.
0:02:45 My mom grew up both in Iran and in Italy, and they came together.
0:02:51 They settled in the U.S. in the late 60s, and I think they probably always thought they would one day go back to Iran.
0:02:56 But then when the revolution happened, they stood put, and I grew up mostly in the U.S.
0:03:02 I spent years living in Latin America and in Europe and in the Middle East, but the last two decades in D.C.
0:03:04 Surely a global citizen.
0:03:06 So let’s bust right into it.
0:03:11 For now, it appears the ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues to hold.
0:03:14 Trump says the war is done.
0:03:31 Give us your sense of the state of play, because I think one of the frustrating things about this conflict war is that I went back and I looked at headlines the first few days after a war began or a conflict.
0:03:35 And what they were reporting then was oftentimes just not accurate.
0:03:38 And it feels even less.
0:03:40 It feels like there’s even less veracity.
0:03:44 Like, have we set their nuclear program back seven days or seven years?
0:03:47 I literally don’t know who to turn to.
0:03:57 So I’d be curious to just get your kind of appraisal, no mercy, no malice overview of the state of play right now as it relates to this war.
0:03:58 Sure, Scott.
0:04:09 So first, let me give like one minute of historic context, which is that, you know, these two countries, Iran and Israel, in my view, are actually more natural partners than they are natural adversaries.
0:04:13 There’s an ancient history of affinity between the Persians and the Jews.
0:04:20 You know, Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king, is revered in the Old Testament for liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity.
0:04:25 Prior to the 1979 revolution, the two countries had good partnership.
0:04:39 And even now, if you look at them, you know, in contrast to most modern geopolitical conflicts like China and Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, there’s no direct land or border disputes between Iran and Israel.
0:04:41 The two countries, in my view, have complementary interests.
0:04:43 Israel is a tech power.
0:04:44 Iran is an energy power.
0:04:47 And there’s natural basis for cooperation.
0:05:01 What happened in 1979 was that Iran went virtually overnight from a U.S. allied monarchy led by the Shah to a viscerally anti-American, anti-Israeli theocracy ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
0:05:07 And since then, there’s basically been three ideological pillars of Iran’s 1979 revolution.
0:05:17 It’s death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, the veiling of women, which Khomeini called the flag of the Islamic revolution.
0:05:25 So going now to the present, the latest battle between Iran and Israel may be over for now.
0:05:34 But the war will continue so long as you have a regime in Iran whose entire identity is premised on replacing Israel with Palestine.
0:05:37 I bring a bias here.
0:05:50 And my bias is that I feel like one of the biggest unlocks that Americans don’t consider, it’s not in their lexicon or their dialogue, is the potential for the Iran and America to be allies again.
0:05:52 Because, and this is pure anecdotal evidence.
0:05:59 I grew up in Los Angeles, I went to UCLA, largest concentration of Iranians, I think outside of Tehran.
0:06:06 And several of my closest friends at UCLA were Iranian.
0:06:11 And it always struck me, my comment about Iranians was they were more American than Americans.
0:06:13 A love of education.
0:06:14 A love of money.
0:06:16 And I say that in a positive way.
0:06:17 Total capitalists, entrepreneurs.
0:06:19 A love of graduate education.
0:06:23 An appreciation for ambition and competitiveness.
0:06:27 I just always thought the most American kids we have here are Iranians.
0:06:47 And when I see the, when I see the lack of popularity of the Islamic regime or the Islamic Republic, what is your sense for whether or not when we took this military action, there’s always a fear that you have a rallying around the flag when you’re attacked.
0:06:54 What’s your sense of the Iranian, that kind of man or woman on the streets reaction to this military action?
0:06:56 It’s an important question.
0:07:16 And, you know, my view about this is that what tends to happen in these dramatic instances of, you know, military attack or military conflagration with an external power is that it tends to accentuate Iranians’ existing political views.
0:07:37 So, if last week or two weeks ago you were a supporter of the government, and I suspect government supporters represent about 15 to 20 percent of society, it’s not a popular regime, then you have even more fodder, obviously, to hate America and Israel for the military invasion of Iran.
0:07:54 If you were a critic or an opponent of the Iranian regime and you said, you know, this is a regime which always puts its ideological objectives over the national interests of us and the well-being of the Iranian people, then you have even more reason to dislike the regime.
0:08:01 I think in the near term, what happens is that the regime has gotten a kind of a, what I would describe as a temporary sugar high.
0:08:22 But when the dust settles, three months, six months, nine months from now, I think people will go back to living under this politically repressive, socially repressive police state, which is profoundly mismanaged, an economy which, you know, Iran could be, in my view, it should be a G20 nation.
0:08:30 Under proper management, this is a country which has enormous human capital, as you were referring to, has enormous natural resources.
0:08:34 It is not a country which just came to be in the 20th century.
0:08:38 It has a 2,500-year-old civilization and identity.
0:08:44 And, you know, I think Iranians will eventually revert back to that profound sense of discontent.
0:08:46 And I’ll give you a concrete example of that, Scott.
0:08:56 You may remember in January of 2020, Iran’s top Revolutionary Guard commander, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated by President Trump.
0:09:05 And many people then said, well, this is, you know, the country is rallying around the flag and there were mass protests in Iran.
0:09:06 What happened two years later?
0:09:15 Two years later, there was a young woman called Masa Amini that was detained and killed in custody for allegedly showing too much of her hair.
0:09:24 And that set off massive nationwide protests in Iran, which persisted over six months and had the regime on its heels.
0:09:32 So, you know, I don’t doubt that, you know, many people took umbrage to the U.S. dropping 30,000-pound bunker bombs.
0:09:38 But ultimately, you know, vast majority of Iranians, as I say, they want to be South Korea.
0:09:40 They don’t want to be living under North Korea.
0:09:42 Let’s talk about the next generation.
0:09:46 So, Khomeini, 85-year-old theocrat.
0:09:56 And the next level down, I got to be thinking, when the Mossad is able to penetrate—I mean, people talk about how Israel rules the skies over Iran.
0:10:00 I think what’s probably more frightening for the leadership in Iran is it appears they ruled the ground.
0:10:14 And what I mean by that is that the signal I think they’ve sent is that on a moment’s notice, an email to a secure device, to an asset spy on the ground in Iran, we can kill any of you.
0:10:18 And so—and I think Americans even have trouble relating to that.
0:10:28 Imagine if all of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of the Navy, every five-star general we have in the Air Force, within 30 minutes were all murdered.
0:10:31 And it’s clear, okay, they can take out anybody.
0:10:39 My question—I was—when I’ve been on corporate boards, my question is, the strength of a company is not based on the CEO.
0:10:44 It’s based on, do you have zero or eight people who could step into the CEO’s shoes?
0:10:47 That’s a sign of a strong corporate governance and a strong organization.
0:10:53 What do you think the next generation looks like in terms of the regime?
0:10:56 And is this a house of cards with an 85-year-old?
0:11:00 What happens when he dies, assuming he’s not overthrown?
0:11:01 He’s an old man.
0:11:04 What does the next generation look like?
0:11:08 And is there a chill of, what have I signed up for here?
0:11:10 It’s an important question.
0:11:14 And, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei is actually now 86.
0:11:17 He’s the longest-serving autocrat in the world.
0:11:18 He’s been ruling since 1989.
0:11:20 He hasn’t left Iran since 1989.
0:11:24 And, you know, you put yourself in his shoes right now.
0:11:25 He’s living in a bunker.
0:11:28 We all have known, you know, 85, 86 years old.
0:11:31 You have limited physical, mental stamina.
0:11:43 And he’s expected to lead this three-part war against the greatest superpower in the world, the United States, the greatest military power in the Middle East, Israel, and against his own population.
0:11:51 And he’s doing that at a time when you mentioned his top military commanders have been assassinated in their own bedrooms or in their own bunkers.
0:12:04 And so, as you mentioned, this really slows down the wheels of state when it’s a state which potentially needs to act quickly to address an external or internal security threat.
0:12:11 And when people get the notifications on their phones, they don’t know if that’s coming from their higher-up command or is coming from the Mossad.
0:12:15 So, in my view, what I would describe as a Swiss cheese regime.
0:12:19 It has so many holes in it penetrated by Israeli intelligence.
0:12:23 Now, what happens after the supreme leader’s passing?
0:12:33 You know, Ibn Khaldun, the great North African philosopher, sometimes called the father of sociology,
0:12:41 He came out with a theory centuries ago, in the 13th century, which he called asabia.
0:12:45 And it’s now known in kind of modern business literature.
0:12:47 You may be familiar with it as the power cycle theory.
0:12:52 And essentially what he said is that empires are built and destroyed over three generations.
0:12:55 The first generation, they have fire in the belly.
0:12:56 They come, they build it.
0:13:01 Second generation watched what the first generation did, so they managed to preserve it.
0:13:05 But by the third generation, by no fault of their own, you know, they’re soft.
0:13:06 They’re princelings.
0:13:07 They’re born in the palace.
0:13:09 They weren’t born with that fire in the belly.
0:13:14 You know, the example I commonly use in the American business context is Walmart, right?
0:13:19 Sam Walton, through his thrift and grit, built this amazing company.
0:13:22 You know, second generation has preserved it.
0:13:28 Now, you know, his grandchildren were born multibillionaires, so it’s clear, you know, they weren’t born with that same grit.
0:13:34 But now going back to the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini is the last of the Mohicans.
0:13:38 He’s the last of the first generation leaders in the Islamic Republic.
0:13:48 And they don’t have any great options for succession, in part because this is a society which is thoroughly secularized over the last 46 years.
0:14:00 You know, the best way to secularize a population is to rule them with a repressive, corrupt theocracy, which is ruling from a moral pedestal.
0:14:07 You know, that’s insulting to people in a way that living under your run-of-the-mill dictatorship is in some ways less insulting.
0:14:18 You know, Vladimir Putin doesn’t have any pretensions of being, you know, God’s representative on earth, whereas, you know, Islamic Republic’s leadership, they have these pretensions of moral superiority.
0:14:28 So the question is, you know, does, you know, does, if the regime manages to keep it together and they don’t implode like the Soviet Union did, which is, you know, a big question.
0:14:36 Is the next strong man in Iran going to be wearing a turban and being another ayatollah?
0:14:43 Or is it more likely to be someone from the security forces with a military or intelligence background?
0:14:54 My sense is that even if they try to anoint a cleric as the next supreme leader, that person is likely going to be a transitional figure, much like Boris Yeltsin was in the post-Soviet Union.
0:15:04 And that if the system manages to keep it together, more likely we’re going to see someone with a military and intelligence background, not someone wearing a turban.
0:15:07 We’ll be right back.
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0:16:21 I’m Julia Longoria, and this week on Unexplainable, things get a little personal.
0:16:25 With morning sickness.
0:16:31 What I saw in television shows and movies, people saying, ha, ha, ha, she’s pregnant.
0:16:33 She’s been barfing for an hour.
0:16:43 When I woke up, I ran to the bathroom, and I sort of laughed after, thinking, this is morning sickness, uh-huh.
0:16:49 But within a week, I realized that it was not very funny.
0:16:53 And it got bad really fast.
0:17:00 I just was like, okay, I have to work on this, because there’s nothing out there, and I need the answers.
0:17:05 Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Monday and Wednesday.
0:17:18 I want to outline a thesis to you from someone who’s just, uh, obviously observing this from abroad, and has a limited view into it.
0:17:23 But my, generally, for someone said, all right, summarize what’s going on here.
0:17:26 Where you have someone who’s literally running to stay out of prison.
0:17:33 And the best way to stay in office is to get people to rally around the flag and the current administration.
0:17:37 And the easiest way to accomplish that is to go on a constant war footing.
0:17:47 Which results in whether or not you think it was the right idea to respond in Gaza, which I do believe it absolutely was the right decision.
0:17:55 And now, most people, including, I think, a very large segment of the Israeli populace and former prime ministers, are saying, it has just gone too far.
0:18:13 And then, after diminishing or neutering the proxies of Iran, which is understandable, going in and convincing your ally to come in behind you, who comes in behind you, with what I would describe as what looks to me like, increasingly, a performative attack.
0:18:20 Now, now there’s reports that the majority of the enriched uranium was transported out of these facilities.
0:18:35 And it was a little bit of a president, very focused on his image, jealous of the macho light that Netanyahu was basking under, so came in with a performative attack, which then inspired a performative response.
0:18:54 Where Khomeini ordered an attack on bases in Qatar and Iraq, and my understanding is, gave Qatar and U.S. forces a heads up that this was about to happen, such that he could flex and say, see, I responded, but not risk any real collateral damage that would inspire an escalation.
0:19:01 So, this whole thing, this whole thing, this whole chapter, the word I would use to describe the last two weeks, performative.
0:19:02 Your thoughts.
0:19:05 So, a couple things.
0:19:21 Number one, I’ve been teaching a class at Georgetown University for years in the Master’s School of Foreign Service, and I always joke on the first day with my students that if you really want to understand the Middle East, you’re better off studying psychology than political science.
0:19:32 Because so much of this region is shaped not by the national interests of states, but by kind of the manias and political ambitions of strong men.
0:19:53 And in the case of this current war, America, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, much of what’s transpired over the last few weeks is, I think, driven by the person of Donald Trump and his political imperatives, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the person of Ayatollah Khamenei.
0:19:57 Not necessarily, as I said from the outset, the national interests of these places.
0:20:12 Now, one framework I used to think about, certainly the relationship between President Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei, there’s a wonderful essay which the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953, which is called The Hedgehog and the Fox.
0:20:15 And he essentially puts human beings into two buckets.
0:20:23 He said, you know, hedgehogs really have one big idea, one great passion, and foxes know many things.
0:20:24 They do many things.
0:20:28 And his example of the quintessential hedgehog was Karl Marx.
0:20:32 His example of the prototypical fox was William Shakespeare.
0:20:35 Now, how does that apply to Trump and to Khamenei?
0:20:38 Ayatollah Khamenei is the prototypical hedgehog.
0:20:46 He has basically one great passion, one big idea, resistance, resistance against America, resistance against Israel.
0:20:47 Death to America, death to Israel.
0:20:53 Trump, on the other hand, is someone who, I don’t think he knows many things, but he says many things.
0:20:59 And he’s had a profound, you know, I don’t know what you would describe it.
0:21:02 I call him the Jackson Pollock of foreign policy.
0:21:13 You know, he goes from one month ago, he was in Riyadh denouncing those previous administrations who engaged in military interventions in the Middle East.
0:21:23 He ridiculed them and he said, you know, there were regime changers who destroyed far more, I’m sorry, there were nation builders who destroyed far more nations than they built,
0:21:27 and interventionists who had no idea about the reality of their own society.
0:21:39 One month later, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had taken military action, as you said, Trump saw that it was perceived to be very successful.
0:21:45 Netanyahu is getting, you know, great reviews on Fox News, and, you know, he wanted to be associated with that.
0:21:48 And so, I think we will look back years from now.
0:21:57 And Scott, you know, when you’re watching these things in real time in the Middle East, as we’ve seen, you know, if we were having this conversation in spring of 2003,
0:22:00 we would say the Iraq war is, you know, a great success, right?
0:22:03 We took out Saddam’s army in three weeks.
0:22:05 Five years later, things look very differently.
0:22:07 So, years from now, things could look very differently.
0:22:17 But I do think when the history of this war is written, much of it will be about the psychology and political calculations
0:22:26 and domestic political expediences of these three men, Netanyahu, Trump, and Khamenei, rather than the interests of nation states.
0:22:38 So, another thesis I’d like to put forward and get your reaction to, I feel as if the unsung hero in this or the unsung force here is the Ukrainian army.
0:22:39 What do I mean by that?
0:22:54 If Russia had barreled into Kiev as Putin’s generals were guaranteeing, and immediately Ukraine fell, and Russia held this perception and reputation as this fierce fighting force,
0:22:56 not to be trifled with, to be very scared of,
0:23:04 that Syria would not have fell, and we would have thought twice, as would have Netanyahu,
0:23:12 and perhaps would have received more military, logistical, and perceptual support around its surface-to-air capabilities.
0:23:20 And neither Israel nor the U.S. would have had the confidence or the ability to do what they had done,
0:23:26 had Russia still been intact in terms of its actual and perceived power.
0:23:27 Your thoughts?
0:23:32 Well, I think that’s one important data point among others.
0:23:36 I mean, the other important data point is what happened on October 7th, 2023,
0:23:41 when Yahya Sinwar and Hamas invaded Israel,
0:23:47 which, you know, turned out to be one of the most profound miscalculations in modern history,
0:23:54 because, you know, they thought that that was going to delegitimize Israel and lead to its eventual demise.
0:23:58 And what we’ve seen in the last year and a half is exactly the opposite.
0:24:03 And, you know, Iran’s leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei was the only leader in the world
0:24:07 that praised the Hamas attack of October 7th.
0:24:10 And that led Israel.
0:24:14 And then, you know, Iran kind of unleashed its other proxies,
0:24:19 like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Yemen, to commence this multi-front war with Israel.
0:24:25 And those proxies have been decimated the last year and a half.
0:24:29 So that was also an important factor.
0:24:32 But back to Ukraine and Zelensky.
0:24:41 One of the most important observations that stayed with me over the years about geopolitics
0:24:46 is an observation which Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs that he said, you know,
0:24:52 before he went into government, when he became Secretary of State and National Security Advisor,
0:24:53 he was a professor at Harvard.
0:24:57 And he thought that history was driven by impersonal forces.
0:25:01 You know, nations basically follow their own interests, regardless of who’s in power.
0:25:05 And he said after he served in government, he reached the opposite conclusion,
0:25:09 which is that the individual profoundly shapes history.
0:25:13 Academics oftentimes don’t like this because they call it, you know, the great man theory of history.
0:25:21 But I’ve also come around Kissinger’s worldview, that the individual has a profound impact on history.
0:25:23 Leadership has a profound impact on history.
0:25:32 And so your point about Ukraine for me, you know, obviously the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian people is critical.
0:25:43 But the person of President Zelensky is someone for me who has played an incredibly important role in the history of his nation.
0:25:49 And we saw, you know, just a year prior to that, and perhaps it was one reason why Vladimir Putin invaded,
0:25:59 was that in Afghanistan, you know, it was a country, a president who, he fled the country within, you know, 24, 48 hours, and the entire system collapsed.
0:26:06 So it just goes to, you know, both in business and in politics and geopolitics, the importance of leadership.
0:26:12 So I’ll go even further afield.
0:26:19 We had what was sort of a political earthquake with Zoran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary.
0:26:28 And I wonder how much of that is a new generation of American voters, quite frankly, very fed up with Israel.
0:26:35 And that this was not only an outstanding campaign run by someone who really understood new media,
0:26:41 representing youth, a pushback on the established Democratic machine.
0:26:50 What is your sense as you reverse engineer activities in the Middle East in terms of its impact on the U.S. political landscape,
0:26:54 what’s happening both in Iran and Israel and the dynamics there?
0:26:54 Do you think it will?
0:26:59 How do you see it reverse engineering to what happens here in the United States?
0:27:01 So that’s an important question.
0:27:03 Let me react in a couple of ways.
0:27:11 Number one, we’ve seen the impact that America’s failures in the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan
0:27:15 and the failure of the Arab Spring in 2011 to bring about democratic change.
0:27:24 The impact that’s had on American politics, whereby, you know, it used to be that Republicans were national security hawks
0:27:29 and more supportive of U.S. military interventions.
0:27:37 Now, you know, a strong wing of Trump’s base are, you know, they wouldn’t like the term isolationist.
0:27:39 They would call themselves restrainers or non-interventionists.
0:27:45 But that’s an important part of his political base now, including, I would probably put in that category, Vice President Vance,
0:27:48 and people like Tucker Carlson.
0:27:57 And so that is probably a majority view because it’s also, it’s a widely held view on the left as well,
0:28:05 that, you know, America should just kind of stay out of military interventions, especially in the Middle East.
0:28:13 Now, second, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you know, when I first started doing this work,
0:28:16 Israel was a bipartisan issue in Washington.
0:28:20 You know, whenever there was a bill in Congress about Israel’s security,
0:28:28 it was oftentimes like, you know, 99 to one or 99 zero with one abstention in support of it.
0:28:30 And that’s starting to change a little bit.
0:28:34 And as I said, it’s not only on the left, it’s more predominantly on the left.
0:28:40 But even there are folks on the right, as I said, that wing of the party like Tucker Carlson,
0:28:45 who say, listen, Israel is a strong country.
0:28:51 We’ve been giving it many billions of aid over the years, and it can take care of itself.
0:28:53 We don’t need to be fighting wars for it.
0:28:59 The other important factor is how people consume media and news nowadays.
0:29:07 And the reality, Scott, is you have, what, 15 million, is it what, 1-5, 15 million Jews living in the world
0:29:13 between, you know, Israel and United States and diaspora communities and Europe and Australia.
0:29:16 And yeah, probably, what, 1.2 billion Muslims.
0:29:28 And so the disparity in terms of what is produced on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter about the news of the Middle East,
0:29:34 especially when the images and videos are so dramatic and they appear, you know, very one-sided.
0:29:43 And David versus Goliath, a Palestinian population which has suffered, you know, perhaps over 50,000, 60,000 casualties now.
0:29:52 And an Israeli prime minister who, you know, is widely disliked even within his own society, let alone globally.
0:30:05 And so I do agree with you that the Democratic primary, mayoral primary in New York is an important signpost for any supporter of Israel in the United States.
0:30:14 Because if you’re losing New York City and so much of the debate, political debate in that election was not about New York City, it was about Israel-Palestine.
0:30:21 You know, that is, in my view, if you’re a strong supporter of Israel, that’s a five-alarm fire.
0:30:25 You obviously, you teach, you’re in D.C.
0:30:30 You see kind of the human capital that goes into our foreign policy apparatus.
0:30:36 I’m always consistently impressed by the human capital that decides to go into U.S. foreign policy
0:30:42 and decides to not go into what would probably be much more financially lucrative careers.
0:30:50 At the same time, our security apparatus right now, I would argue, seems sclerotic and just, they can’t even get their own story straight.
0:31:04 What is your sense of the current state of our security apparatus and our foreign policy engine, if you will, as you see the human capital going into it, whether it’s, I would imagine it’s less attractive right now, but I bring a bias to the table.
0:31:11 But give us a sense for the strength or lack thereof of our foreign policy and to the extent you’re comfortable talking about it, our security apparatus.
0:31:21 So one place where, you know, I’ve always been very impressed by the human capital of our leadership is our military, you know, especially our military institutions.
0:31:29 The great, you know, in my view, these are great American institutions, West Point, you know, Annapolis, the Naval Academy and our top generals.
0:31:41 I’m always impressed by, you know, the fact that presidents and politicians change, but there’s a consistent level of excellence from those top military commanders.
0:31:50 And not only, you know, excellence in terms of their discipline and preparedness, but, you know, oftentimes their character.
0:31:51 So I would rate them highly.
0:31:55 I’ve also, you know, over the years when you, I’ve been in D.C. for many years.
0:32:02 So you interact with many different institutions, Pentagon, the intelligence community, State Department.
0:32:16 You know, I think one of the challenges we have, and it’s natural because the U.S. government is an enormous bureaucracy, but it’s, you know, getting talented people in is a challenge.
0:32:18 When, for example, I’ll give you some concrete examples.
0:32:22 I have very talented friends who are of Iranian origin.
0:32:29 You know, one in particular was born and raised in New York City, would be a huge asset to the U.S. government, wanted to serve in the U.S. government.
0:32:35 And for four years, he was waiting for security clearance, which never happened, never got that security clearance.
0:32:46 And the way they conduct these security clearances are totally antiquated, where, you know, you have one person going and interviewing 500 different people and asking them questions.
0:32:57 You know, my view, this is ripe for disruption from a company like Palantir, that, you know, to hand over all of your, you know, computer, your social media, and we can do this much quicker.
0:33:00 So that’s one example.
0:33:17 The other example is that the U.S. Foreign Service, for example, you know, it’s, you start off and you may go stamp passports and Bangladesh for a couple years, and then you’re, you know, off to another assignment.
0:33:31 And the pace of professional advancement can be quite slow, and it’s not the same excitement as, you know, going and joining a startup, AI startup or Silicon Valley startup.
0:33:41 So I think that people should feel that, you know, there is, you know, very high caliber people we have in government.
0:33:47 But, you know, a lot of the best minds these days, government is less attracted.
0:33:51 The final thing I’ll say on this, Scott, is that, you know, I’ll give you an example.
0:34:00 We have probably, in the U.S. government, there’s, you know, probably upwards of a billion dollars dedicated to strategic communications.
0:34:14 That is almost irrelevant now when you have a president who is essentially tweeting or, you know, putting on truth social his foreign policy positions and ambitions.
0:34:18 It’s, you know, it’s rendered virtually irrelevant.
0:34:30 So that, I think there’s a great sense of demoralization among many folks in government that the system isn’t functioning like it used to be and like it should.
0:34:33 We’ll be right back after a quick break.
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0:36:01 No sugar added?
0:36:06 Neutral.
0:36:08 Refreshingly simple.
0:36:18 We’re back with more from Karim.
0:36:34 If you were going to make any bets around what’s going to happen in the Middle East, recognizing this is a almost an impossible region to predict, but do you have any general themes or outcomes that you think are more likely than not?
0:36:37 Let me venture a couple of broad thoughts.
0:36:51 Number one is that, in my view, this is a region which is never going to experience real stability and security so long as you have a government in Iran whose organizing principle is death to America and death to Israel.
0:36:59 As long as you have a government in Iran that, as Kissinger once put it, behaves as a cause rather than a nation state.
0:37:01 Because it’s a huge country, Iran.
0:37:03 It has enormous resources.
0:37:14 And if it wants to spend all of its capital and talent dedicated to the business of destruction and destabilization, it can continue to do that.
0:37:17 So, that’s one big prediction.
0:37:22 Second is that, in my view, there at some point will be a reckoning in Iran.
0:37:29 And there’s a wonderful book on revolutions, which a professor called Jack Goldstone wrote.
0:37:32 And Goldstone likens revolutions to earthquakes.
0:37:35 He said, you know, we know where fault lines lie.
0:37:43 We know which countries are highly seismic, but we can never say with certainty, you know, when an earthquake is going to happen.
0:37:46 And that’s true about Iran as well.
0:37:50 This is a regime which, in my view, it’s like the late-stage Soviet Union.
0:37:51 It’s a zombie regime.
0:37:53 It has a dead ideology.
0:37:55 It survives with the repression.
0:37:56 It’s on borrowed time.
0:38:00 At some point, there is going to be a reckoning inside Iran.
0:38:08 But, you know, I can’t tell you when exactly that’s going to happen, nor can you say for certainty what is going to be the outcome.
0:38:14 You know, we know from history that authoritarian transitions oftentimes don’t end in democracy.
0:38:17 Only about one in four cases end in democracy.
0:38:20 More often, it ends in another form of authoritarianism.
0:38:33 But even if that’s the case in Iran, you could have a system which, you know, evolves into a regime which is, or a government which is a nationalist government, much like, you know, the choice that Deng Xiaoping made in China in the 1970s.
0:38:39 Put the national interest and economic interest before cultural revolution.
0:38:45 And, you know, that is, in my view, the kind of the key to understanding the region.
0:38:52 The final thing I would say here is that a big question is Saudi Vision 2030.
0:39:02 And, you know, to the extent to which Saudi Arabia succeeds and Mohammed bin Salman succeeds in transforming his nation.
0:39:07 And I’ll tell you, you know, I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs about this last fall.
0:39:19 That is a tall order for, you know, young man, modern leader, to try to take what was, you know, up until recently, very traditional society and rapidly modernize it.
0:39:23 And I think it’s in our interest and U.S. interest that he succeed.
0:39:31 But, you know, we have the example of the Shahi of Iran in 1979, also a modern leader trying to rapidly transform a society.
0:39:38 And what we know from history is that popular tumult doesn’t tend to happen when people feel most destitute.
0:39:45 Popular tumult tends to happen when people’s expectations have risen, but then those expectations are unfulfilled.
0:39:49 It’s called, you know, the J-curve theory, or revolutions of rising expectations.
0:39:56 So an ideal outcome, Scott, in the Middle East would be in Iran, which transforms into something modern,
0:40:01 and in Saudi Arabia, which succeeds in transforming and realizing Vision 2030.
0:40:09 A disaster outcome would be Vision 2030 failing and having an outcome similar to what happened in Iran in 1979,
0:40:16 and this current regime in Iran managing to kind of retrench itself and ruling for years to come.
0:40:22 I mean, be more direct. Isn’t there a much greater likelihood of peace and stability without Netanyahu or Khomeini?
0:40:26 Aren’t these two obstacles to a sustainable peace in the Middle East?
0:40:32 So I would add one more person there, which is the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas,
0:40:38 because what a lot of the Gulf leadership will tell you, especially, you know, even in Saudi Arabia,
0:40:48 you know, Saudis will tell you that prior to October 7, 2023, they were very close to doing a normalization deal with Israel,
0:40:54 and that was in part why Hamas invaded Israel when they did to sabotage those prospects.
0:41:03 And they succeeded because it became almost impossible for MBS to sell a normalization deal to his own people while Israel was, you know, bombing Gaza.
0:41:12 But I think that Khomeini has to go for Gulf countries to feel confident that, you know,
0:41:20 the Palestinians are capable of presenting themselves in a cohesive way and having strong leadership.
0:41:22 Mahmoud Abbas will have to go.
0:41:30 And I think many would also argue that so long as Prime Minister Netanyahu is in power,
0:41:35 that that normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is unlikely to happen.
0:41:42 So, sort of a lightning round here, which is dangerous in geopolitics.
0:41:48 Increased U.S. intervention or additional U.S. intervention, more likely to happen or not happen?
0:41:59 I think it’s more likely to happen if we don’t get a clear account of where Iran’s highly enriched uranium is,
0:42:04 and we don’t have access to their nuclear facilities, because they may actually say,
0:42:07 now that you bombed us, we’re going to cut off access to the inspectors.
0:42:15 In six months, do you think the attack on these nuclear facilities will be seen as having been successful,
0:42:17 or that its success was inflated?
0:42:23 You know, Scott, I think applied history is useful here.
0:42:30 And unfortunately, over the last two decades, we look back at most military interventions in the Middle East
0:42:34 as having done more harm than good.
0:42:39 And, you know, I think there’s a real danger that that could be the case with this one as well.
0:42:44 So, we always like to end with, we have a lot of young people listening to the podcast.
0:42:47 It strikes me you have a really cool job.
0:42:53 That you found something, that you have this unique skill set for,
0:42:56 having been, lived all over the world, understanding these cultures,
0:42:57 obviously very intelligent,
0:43:03 and work at this interesting, you know, this interesting institution,
0:43:07 likely make a very good living, do really interesting things.
0:43:11 Like, how did you get from an 18-year-old,
0:43:14 you know, man,
0:43:18 what were sort of the pivot points?
0:43:19 How did you, how did you find,
0:43:22 how did you get in the seat you’re in now?
0:43:28 What were the seminal forces decisions that gave you the opportunity to kind of land where you are right now?
0:43:29 Because I look at,
0:43:32 I bet there’s a lot of young men and young women who look at what you’re doing and think,
0:43:33 you know what, that’s just,
0:43:37 that’s just a really interesting, rewarding way to make a living.
0:43:40 How did you get from there to here?
0:43:43 So, had you asked me at age,
0:43:45 you know, 13,
0:43:48 what I envisioned for my work,
0:43:54 I, genuinely, this would have not been in the top thousand things I thought I would do,
0:43:58 because I had zero interest in the Middle East and zero interest in Iran.
0:44:02 You know, despite the fact that my, my parents are Iranian,
0:44:04 it was, it was not easy to,
0:44:06 you know, you were not being,
0:44:11 you’re not proud of growing up Iranian in the 1980s in the United States, right?
0:44:13 In the aftermath of the hostage.
0:44:14 Pause there.
0:44:21 The amount of outright bigotry against Iranians in the U.S. after the hostage crisis was staggering.
0:44:26 I remember being in Westwood when I was at UCLA and walking down and there was this,
0:44:28 I think it was a disco called Dillon’s.
0:44:29 We had a disco.
0:44:31 And they put up a sign that said,
0:44:32 Iranians not welcome.
0:44:37 And fortunately, our institutions held and they were forced to take that sign down.
0:44:41 But that’s how comfortable a retail establishment was of being that bigoted back then.
0:44:42 I’m sorry.
0:44:42 Go ahead, Karim.
0:44:47 No, no, you know, and Scott, that wasn’t my experience as a young kid,
0:44:50 because I grew up in a community, very friendly community.
0:44:54 And, you know, my father used to tell us from the time we were small,
0:44:59 my father emigrated to U.S. in the late 1950s and he loved Iranian culture.
0:45:05 He was a great patriot, Persian patriot, but he also loved the United States.
0:45:08 And from the time we were small, he would tell us, you know,
0:45:10 you live in the greatest country in the world.
0:45:13 And the reason why I think he said that is, you know,
0:45:17 the reason why a lot of immigrants have, because they have something else to compare it to, right?
0:45:19 It wasn’t that they took it for granted.
0:45:22 He had lived in a different context.
0:45:26 But, you know, I grew up with no interest in the Middle East and Iran because, you know,
0:45:27 what did it represent?
0:45:33 It was Ayatollah Khomeini and burning American flags, death to America.
0:45:35 I was, you know, interested in basketball.
0:45:37 I went to University of Michigan.
0:45:38 I played soccer there.
0:45:44 And for me, what happened was, you know, I started to get experiences living abroad.
0:45:48 I lived in Mexico as an exchange student when I was in high school.
0:45:52 I spent my junior year in college in Italy, where, as I mentioned, my mom grew up.
0:46:00 Then when I was 22, I received, I won an essay competition from an organization which I believe
0:46:01 is still around.
0:46:03 I would recommend young people to Google it.
0:46:05 It’s called the Circumnavigators Club.
0:46:07 This was 1999.
0:46:13 And I won a scholarship, a grant, to travel around the world, to actually circumnavigate
0:46:13 the globe.
0:46:19 And my research project in 1999 was called the Internet’s Impact on Global Communication.
0:46:24 One of the places that they wanted me to go, I had actually no interest in visiting the Middle
0:46:24 East.
0:46:29 And up until then, I had not been to Iran because the war with Iraq had happened.
0:46:33 And, you know, I would have been recruited into the Iranian army.
0:46:36 So I never had gone to Iran, but I went to Egypt and I loved Egypt.
0:46:38 That was an eye-opening experience for me.
0:46:42 And I became really enthralled in the Middle East after that.
0:46:46 And then I worked at National Geographic.
0:46:47 That was my first job out of college.
0:46:55 And, you know, that, you know, it kind of continued to fuel my love of adventure and the world.
0:47:00 And then I spent the summer of 2001 in Iran, my first summer there.
0:47:02 And I lived with my 99-year-old grandmother.
0:47:05 I traveled all over the country.
0:47:06 It was a wonderful experience.
0:47:13 And then fast forward about a month later, September 2001 was my first semester in graduate
0:47:15 school, studying Middle East affairs.
0:47:16 9-11 happens.
0:47:23 And it then became kind of very clear to me that this is something I wanted to dedicate my
0:47:30 career and my life to, in part because, as you said from the outset, Scott, Iran is a nation
0:47:32 with enormous potential.
0:47:34 It should be a G20 nation.
0:47:37 And America and Iran should be natural partners.
0:47:39 They are not natural adversaries.
0:47:44 So, for me, that is what has fueled my passion.
0:47:50 And I remember when I was at Michigan, I was a classmate of Tom Brady, an undergrad.
0:47:52 He was the first guy I met in freshman orientation.
0:47:59 And we had a biology professor who said to us on the very last day, I was meant to be pre-med,
0:48:01 but I failed my pre-med classes.
0:48:03 So, I went into political science.
0:48:05 And we had this biology lecture.
0:48:10 I don’t remember much about the class, but I just remember the thing he said on the last
0:48:11 day of class.
0:48:15 He said, you know, he said, don’t cliche that if you find something you’re really passionate
0:48:18 about, then you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
0:48:23 And he said, you know, sometimes I’m waiting for calls from the lab, you know, for pending
0:48:25 experiments, and I’ll leave my lawnmower going.
0:48:27 You know, I just forget about it.
0:48:28 I’m so passionate about it.
0:48:33 And, you know, this career, it can be very emotional.
0:48:43 You’re constantly talking about repression and war and, you know, very hard, hard topics.
0:48:48 But, you know, it’s something which at the end of the day, also, it provides real meaning.
0:48:54 So, what I’d say to people is, you know, going abroad is, if you’re interested in a career in
0:48:57 international affairs, that’s one way to distinguish yourself.
0:48:59 You know, get ground experience.
0:49:03 It’s important to learn other languages and master those languages.
0:49:07 And then, final thing I’d say, Scott, is that I think it’s critical for young people to
0:49:09 read books, read history.
0:49:16 Those are the kind of the macro nutrients of kind of a great scholar or analyst.
0:49:21 If you’re constantly just reading tweets or watching TikTok videos, that’s, you know, nourishing
0:49:22 yourself with candy.
0:49:27 And it’s not going to sustain you or distinguish you from your peers.
0:49:29 Read books.
0:49:33 Kareem Sajjapur is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
0:49:34 specializing in Iran and U.S.
0:49:35 foreign policy.
0:49:42 Kareem, right away, we were getting so many muddled messages about what to believe or not
0:49:44 believe around this conflict.
0:49:49 And your name came up independently from different sources two or three times.
0:49:54 So, whatever you’re doing, you’ve established a reputation as a real honest broker.
0:49:56 So, well done.
0:49:59 Very much appreciate you coming on and hope that you’ll join us again.
0:50:00 Absolutely.
0:50:02 Thank you for having me, Scott.
0:50:02 Love being with you.
0:50:07 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
0:50:09 Drew Burrows is our technical director.
0:50:12 Thanks for listening to the Prof. G. Pot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Welcome to a bonus episode of The Prof G Pod.
Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in Iran and U.S. foreign policy. He joins Scott to discuss what triggered this latest conflict, how it might shape the future of U.S. diplomacy in the region, and what comes next for Iran.
Follow Karim, @ksadjadpour.
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