Iran, Israel, and America’s Future in the Middle East

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

For months, Iran and Israel have seemed to be on the brink of outright war. Although tensions are lower than they were in April when the countries exchanged direct attacks, they remain dangerously high.

Vali Nasr has tracked these dynamics since long before October 7. He is a professor and former dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And during the Obama administration, he served as senior adviser to the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Vali warns that as long as war rages in Gaza, the region will remain on the verge of exploding. Yet it is not enough for Washington to focus just on ending that war; it must also put in place a regional order that can free the Middle East from these cycles of violence.

Vali, thank you so much for joining me and for the slew of really fantastic pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the last few months, since October 7, especially.

VALI NASR

Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be with you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, there are so many places we could start, any one of which would justify a full show’s worth of conversation on its own—whether it’s [Ebrahim] Raisi’s death and what that means for the Islamic Republic’s future, or the recent strikes on Israel and Israel’s response, or the state of the nuclear program.

But let’s begin somewhere in what I suppose is the middle of the story, with October 7. There was of course a lot of speculation in the wake of the attacks, and there’s been some very good reporting on what Iran knew and how exactly Hamas’s attack and the atrocities of that day advanced Iran’s regional strategy. What is your assessment with almost eight months of distance? How much responsibility for October 7 falls on Iran in some sense, and what especially is Israel’s perception of the role Iran played in Hamas’s October 7 attacks?

VALI NASR

I think Israel’s understanding is that Iran was not responsible for the actual operation, for the day, for the decision, the way it was done. That was largely planned and executed by Hamas. But Iran was responsible for upgrading Hamas’s capabilities—intelligence capabilities, operational capabilities—making it into a much more lethal force capable of carrying out October 7. This is much more akin to, say, a major power supporting the military of a smaller power.

And I have to say that I don’t think Iran expected that the October 7 would turn out the way it did, both in terms of the depravity of the attack as well as the number of Israelis that were killed, the amount of time and space that Hamas and all other Palestinian groups and freelancers that went in had in order to run amok within Israel, and also the number of hostages that were brought back. So I think there’s something that Iran might have expected in terms of inflicting pain on Israel. But then the outcome of October 7 had its own strategic writ for Iran, and then they had to grapple with that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think it was a surprise to some observers who haven’t closely focused on Iran’s regional strategy in recent years to see how Hamas specifically fit into it. We have, of course, focused quite a bit on the Sunni-Shia divide, and Hamas is not one of the Shia proxies of Iran. How does Hamas fit into what’s often called the “axis of resistance?” And, a bit more broadly, why is enmity toward Israel so central to the kind of ideology and identity of the Islamic Republic, leaving aside Hamas specifically?

VALI NASR

So, starting from the last point you raised, at the very beginning, it was much more ideological. But even at the time of the revolution, the founder of the revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, had spent many years in Iraq in exile, so he was very sensitive to Arab opinion about the Palestinians. He had a view of Israel as being a puppet or an agent of the United States in the region. And in fact, you read what he had written even before the revolution, he used terminology that was very close to the description of colonial settler state—that Israel was basically a foreign entity in the region, it reflected the colonialism that Islamism and Middle Eastern nationalism had fought against. So his views of Israel did not necessarily come out of theology, although theology gave it that necessary legitimacy and coloration. It was essentially a Third World anti-Israeli view that was very prevalent among secular Arab nationalists then, as well as, let’s say, the New Left in Europe in the 60s and 70s.

There are periods that Iran and Israel silently cooperated—or instance, when Iran was under attack by Iraq, the Israelis did provide Iran with a lot of war materiel because it was the only military in the region which had American-made war materiel, and Iran’s military was still dependent on American technology then. But, gradually, Iranians sort of dug into exploiting the Arab anger toward Israel as a strategic crutch for themselves in the Middle East. The more the Arabs pushed against Iran in supporting an American containment strategy, the more Iranians became interested in exploiting the Achilles heel of the Arab regimes, which was the Israel issue. And that was really the basis of their investment in Hezbollah, because they saw Hezbollah and the war in Lebanon as part of their own security issue.

And so by the contemporary period, the Iranians have come to view Israel as the only force in the region that matters. So as Iran is seeking great-power status in the region, what other power in the region is capable, willing, and determined to stand in Iran’s way? And that is Israel, because the Arab world as a whole is not a threat to Iran anymore. With the fall of Iraq after 2003, Iranians see them essentially as being maneuvered by the United States and Israel, but they themselves are not rivals to Iran’s great-power position. Iran has penetrated the Arab world very effectively since 2003.

So Israel and Iran now are the two gorillas in the ring. Turkey periodically rears its head, but these are the two gorillas. And if you look at the current situation, as important as Saudi Arabia is, Saudi Arabia is really a prize for the two sides. Both sides are trying to woo Saudi Arabia into—in the case of Iran, into neutrality, and in the case of Israel, into an anti-Iran axis. But Saudi Arabia itself is no longer the main threat to Iran, is not a main threat to Israel. In fact, there is no Arab army that is a threat to Israel, including Egypt, because of all the alliances, peace treaties, etc. So for Israel, Iran is the last, and the largest, and the biggest, Middle East obstacle to what it wants in the region. And for Iran, Israel, either on its own or as a deputy of the United States, is blocking its way. So that’s the way we arrive at October 7, if you would.

Now, you’re right, Hamas is not a Shia organization. Of course, Shia forces are closer to Iran because of the commonality of faith. But we often forget that that sectarian alliance also had to do with some kind of a strategic consensus, because the Shias saw themselves as facing the same Sunni threat, whether it’s in Iraq, or in Lebanon, or in these pockets in the Gulf in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, or even in Pakistan. And, therefore, they saw a common front with Iran in confronting the Sunnis, right? So there always was this strategic logic that went beyond just affinity of faith.

Now, Hamas, when the Arab Spring happened, actually sympathized with the Sunni Arab world. It broke with Bashar al-Assad, it left Damascus, it broke with Iran. But then, under the pressure of Israelis—as particularly they became more aggressive on settlements; as it looked like the West Bank was gradually being completely squeezed into annexation; as there was no hope for Gaza, and then it looked like the world basically forgot about the Palestinians— they basically decided that they needed Iran and Hezbollah’s strategic depth. And what brought them together essentially is this idea of resistance. Resistance is now a more important idea than sectarian divide.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So in the eight or so months since the October 7 attacks, we’ve seen a range of different kinds of activities by other members of that axis of resistance—the Houthi strikes on ships in the Red Sea, we’ve seen strikes by Shia militias in Iraq and Syria on U.S. and other bases. Hezbollah has been exchanging fire over the northern border of Israel, though that’s been, I think, more restrained than many people feared in those first weeks after the attacks. As you look at those different activities, what is the kind of theory of the case behind them from an Iranian perspective? What’s the strategy, and how well has that worked? If you’re an IRGC commander looking at your performance in the region over the last eight months or so, are you happy with where things stand and how it’s playing to Iranian interests?

VALI NASR

I mean, the short answer is yes, I think they’re happy. Not only Iranians; Hezbollah, even Hamas, is happy. Because if you looked at Israel’s firepower, and its ability to inflict pain or hit a target inside Iran, or hit Lebanon—there’s one way you can look at this: that Israel is still extremely powerful, it has America’s backing, it still has the most advanced weaponry, is still a nuclear-powered state. All of those are true. But Hamas’s biggest victory was essentially to shatter, first of all, Israel’s notion of deterrence.

Secondly, it also shattered the sense of security that the Israeli citizens and public felt behind the Iron Dome, behind the fences, behind the way in which the Netanyahu government had portrayed Israel as ten feet tall, that it could deal with everybody in the region. And so that immediately was a massive victory for Iran and Hezbollah, because their main adversary was diminished, in a way. And in fact, the way Israel reacted underscored that. They saw this ferocity of Israeli reaction not just as anger and revenge but also as a desperation to very quickly restore both deterrence and sense of security to their population.

The third victory for both Hamas and the axis of resistance was the Palestinian issue immediately came back to center stage. The issue of normalization with the Arab world basically is here and there but nowhere, and now it’s becoming contingent on a Palestinian state. So these were all victories right on October 8.

And then the Iranians and Hezbollah calculated that the angry Israel that they saw was going to try to destroy Hamas, and then was going to go after Hezbollah, and then was going to go after Iran. I mean, this was very much even in the Israeli rhetoric then, that, “Look, the worst has happened, now gloves are off and we’re going to deal with this security issue around us once and for all.” And that’s why they began to sort of try to establish deterrence with Israel. Hezbollah tried to very early on indicate, “Don’t mess with us.” And then the Iranians basically began, a lot of their minions began attacking from Iraq, sending missiles toward Haifa, hitting American targets in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis got involved. And all of this was basically to sort of try to contain Israel’s enthusiasm for finishing the job once and for all.

So I think the Iranians are now sitting there saying that they didn’t plan October 7 the way it unfolded. They expected an Israeli reaction, but not the level at which Israel reacted, which actually has surprised everybody. But everything that’s happened since October 7, now several months forward, has actually not changed the fundamental strategic outcome of October 7. And Israel, as we’re speaking, does not have a way in which to get back to where it is—and as it’s going into Rafah is in fact risking its relations with Egypt, relations with Jordan, relations with Saudis. And so as the Arab world gets angrier, it means that the Arab public is moving in the direction of the axis of resistance, which puts pressure on their own governments.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you talk to members of the Biden administration, they will defend their policy since October 7 by focusing on the risk of regional escalation and the ways in which, they argue, they’ve successfully averted at least some of the most worrisome scenarios that we would’ve come up with if we were having this conversation in the immediate wake of the attacks, in terms of what the region could look like. Do you think that U.S. policy has succeeded here—that that element of the strategy at least, leaving Gaza aside for the moment, has in fact been successful in the way members of the administration claim?

VALI NASR

Yes, I do think so. I think it’s not just with Iran. In fact, from very early on, the administration adopted the strategy of trying to get in between Israel and Hezbollah. When the inclination of Israel was to immediately extend the war into Lebanon, okay, the United States brought aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean to warn Hezbollah. But then they assigned the diplomat Amos Hochstein to essentially try to find ways to talk to the Israelis, talk to Hezbollah, arrive at an agreement that would get Hezbollah to back away from the Israeli border to allow the displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north, and essentially basically take Israel and Hezbollah back to the agreement that they had after the 2006 war. In other words, certain redlines that kept that border war-free for a period. And it has been largely successful, because we don’t have a war on the northern border of Israel with Hezbollah.

And then the United States applied the same strategy with Iran, which is to say that we don’t want war, Iran doesn’t want war, and technically Israel may have miscalculated in Syria by hitting Iran’s consulate: How do we back away from this? And if Iran feels like it has to attack, how do we calibrate this? How do we minimize this? And then how do we get the Israelis to accept an outcome that is less than heir knee-jerk reaction would’ve been?

So yes, the United States should take a victory lap for avoiding a much larger war, but the United States’ policy is still in danger largely because it has not been as successful in the Gaza war, because I think its reading of where Israel was going with this at the beginning was mistaken. And so they’ve been playing catch-up with Israel and what’s happening in Gaza ever since, and they’ve never got ahead of it. So until the guns fall silent in Gaza, the region can explode in varieties of ways at any moment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the piece that you wrote with Maria Fantappie shortly after the October 7 attacks, you wrote that, and I’m quoting you here, “Washington’s beliefs about the Middle East were completely incorrect.” So what was wrong in Washington’s view, and to what extent do you think it’s corrected that view in the months since?

VALI NASR

Where the United States got it wrong was largely that it over-read into the Abraham Accords, and over-read into how dangerous the Palestinian situation was, and also misunderstood where the new Israeli government was. I mean, we sort of forget why the October 7 operation was named after the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. And the reason is that in February of 2023, the controversial Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir went inside Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, and they beat up worshippers, old women, et cetera and the videos of these went viral. So it’s not just that the United States was discounting the fact that the Palestinians, after the Abraham Accords, with the now much more aggressive settlement policies in the West Bank, are getting more and more agitated, and this thing may blow up. But also they sort of didn’t take quite the stock of the Israeli government that they were dealing with. And at the same time, the Palestinians were getting more desperate. And so the idea that you could think that now Saudi Arabia can normalize with Israel in these circumstances, that’s I think where we got it wrong.

And I think it’s a moment where, again—and this is a story of American foreign policy in the Middle East—we became overdependent on decisions of single autocratic rulers, forgetting that there is a public, and that public at some point will speak. And we only notice Arab publics when they revolt; r they become terrorists; other times we basically think it’s irrelevant. There’s one man in Riyadh, one man in Cairo that can make all the decisions, and so we should base our policies on that one person without looking under the hood and seeing whether the ground is solid. And it wasn’t.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The administration still seems quite bullish on the prospect of some kind of deal with Saudi Arabia. I think there were reports last week about the U.S.-Saudi dimension of that deal being very, very close to finalization with agreements on security guarantees and civil nuclear programs and all the bilateral elements. Of course, the path to a Palestinian state that would need to be a part of that is a more challenging one when it comes to the Israeli government. But this focus on Saudi normalization as the key piece of this still seems to be a kind of center of American strategy looking beyond Gaza. Do you think that that’s a fantasy? Are they kind of out of their minds in expecting that to have any chance in the coming months?

VALI NASR

I don’t think so. I mean, after the Rafah attack, it’s even less likely than it was before. The problem is this: normalization is really close if the administration can deliver Israel. And the administration is not anywhere close to getting Israel to agree to a two-state solution, let alone committing to an irreversible, firm path to it. So yes, the Saudis do want to normalize. It fits into their whole strategic outlook about their geoeconomic agenda, et cetera. But they do have a public, there is an Arab public, there is a Muslim public; there’s a lot of pressure there.

I think one of the problems is that both the United States and Saudi Arabia need the bilateral part of this. Saudis were willing to agree to normalization because they wanted civilian nuclear infrastructure, because they want the security guarantees, they want the defense pact with the United States, they want all of that. And then they said, “Okay, we’re willing to recognize Israel if we get all of this as a price.”

And the administration needs this deal with Saudi Arabia not because of Iran per se, although that’s part of it, but really because of China. Because the United States needs to find a way to keep the wealthiest countries of the Arab world from just gliding into a gray area of no-man’s-land between China and the United States. Or, that they essentially go down [the] path of China. So if the United States doesn’t sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis could go to the Chinese and get it from China. If the United States does not give the Saudis security guarantees, then they’re going to seek to use China and Russia to a greater extent to sort of balance their relations with Iran, as they did when they normalized with Iran in Beijing. But because from the beginning the administration tied its security pact with Saudi Arabia to recognition of Israel, now it has a difficult time decoupling them.

And it hasn’t come to basically say that beyond recognition of Israel, why does the United States want this deal? Why is the United States willing to give a level of security guarantees to a country in a very volatile area of the world? The last time we gave these security guarantees was to Japan and Korea. So why are we willing to do that? It’s never explained it to the American people, aside from that this is a gift to Israel. Why do we want to do this? And there is legitimate national security reasons for the United States to do so—and until they explain that to the American public or to the Congress, it might be difficult for them to move ahead with the very important bilateral part of this when Israel is actually not playing ball in getting recognition.

So, very shortly, I would say that—and I’m coming from the region actually as we speak—the mood in the region is that Israel is not willing to sacrifice anything for Arab recognition, is willing to sacrifice normalization for Rafah, is willing to put Camp David in danger in order to realize its goals in Gaza, i’s willing to put its peace treaty with Jordan at risk to realize its aims in the West Bank. And unless Israel changes that tune and changes strategy, which doesn’t look like it under this current government, I just don’t see how you could go forward with normalization. The worst thing we can expect in the next months is not that more Arab countries are going to recognize Israel; it’s that the ones that have already recognized Israel may back away from their relations with Israel, which would be a disaster for the region.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This concern over Chinese and Russian influence in the region, especially when it comes to the big Gulf Arab states, also comes at a time when Iran seems to have really solidified its relationships, its cooperation with Russia, with China especially. It’s a time when there’s talk of this kind of axis—“axis of upheaval” was the term that Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine used in a recent piece for us. How does that fit into Iran’s strategy, and how does that change regional dynamics, this sense of a kind of tighter partnership with these big outside powers?

VALI NASR

I mean, that’s the bigger axis of resistance. I mean, one Iranian observer said that everybody’s future is Iran. Sooner or later, all of them are going to find themselves in the same spot. So those countries are finding common cause with Iran. Russians need Iran for trade with the world, the Iranian landmass. And actually, the way these countries are situated actually allows them to create a massive Eurasian landmass that the United States could be excluded from, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and then eastward to the Pacific. And so the Iranians basically see this as a gift that the Ukraine war and the Trump-Biden policy toward China has given. They don’t see eye to eye on everything; they have disagreements with Russia and Syria, they have disagreements with China over other issues. Iran also has relations with India. These are all there. But at a larger level, U.S. policy has created a strategic common ground. And our policy unfortunately is not nimble enough to exploit differences between them, but rather is pushing them all in each other’s direction.

Now, the interesting thing is in the region, Saudis and the United Arab Emirates now are finding, increasingly, that China and Russia, because of the influence they have in Tehran, are more useful in managing Tehran than the United States is. Because the United States can only threaten. So Saudis think that the more relations they have with China, the more they can turn to China and say, “Can you please talk to Tehran?” Or if the UAE has good relations with Russia, they can basically tell the Russians, “You need to talk to Tehran.” But it works the other way around, too. The Iranians also talk to the Chinese and to the Russians saying, “We want Saudis and the UAE to remain friendly with us. We want them to normalize. We want them to be neutral in these kinds of situations.”

So in a way, we are having a debate in Washington about sort of scenarios in the region that actually don’t account for the reality that’s unfolding in the region. And because we cannot even get a hostage cease-fire deal, let alone a new security architecture for the region, that is what’s creating a greater room for Russia and China to come in, because those countries are beginning to hedge more and more on Russia and China to manage the security relationship in the region.

And the value of this deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia is that it allows the United States to interject itself in the middle of this picture. But again, the United States is unable to decouple this from a piece that it’s proven itself incapable of solving. If you can’t solve Gaza, if you can’t get the Israelis to promise a Palestinian state, then for heaven’s sake just go out and say, “I’m just going to follow a path of bilateral security deal with Saudi Arabia because of these national security reasons.” And that’s where the administration basically has not done its job—and therefore that makes it, even the bilateral part right now, a little uncertain.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What might that new security architecture look like and do you see any prospect of moving in that direction given where we are now?

VALI NASR

I think [the] United States has to put on the table what is its goal in the region, right? We all understand that the United States simply doesn’t want to go to war in the Middle East. Now, if you don’t want to get militarily involved in the region, you have to basically find ways to deescalate the most significant tensions. The Saudis managed to do that on their own, although with U.S. encouragement; and you have to give the Biden administration credit that it allowed the Saudis to pursue the path of normalization with Iran. So you can say, “Okay, there’s no conflict right now that pits the northern side of the Gulf versus the southern part of the Gulf.”

But then the Iran-Israel and the Lebanon-Israel piece of this, and the Gaza war, are the ones that the United States has to be able to put some kind of “guardrails,” to use its favorite terminology around it. You have to find a way to end the Gaza war. And it’s not about our domestic politics, that you’re going to get attacked—of course you’re going to get attacked. But the reality is that it’s in America’s national interest to end this war now, because it’s very difficult to come to a sort of a stable situation in the Middle East if this war continues to bleed trouble in the Arab world. I mean, the scenarios we can look at down the road on stable governments in Cairo and Jordan, mass exodus of millions of Palestinians—things can get only worse from here on.

And then the issue is that this agreement that the United States has been trying to negotiate between Israel and Hezbollah—it’s very close, but we have to get to some redlines between Hezbollah and Israel. Although that also needs an end to Gaza, right? In other words, that’s the condition for Hezbollah. And then, I think there is the absolute necessity for this region—and all the Arabs in the Gulf also believe this—is that the United States indirectly, or whatever way, needs to arrive at some kind of rules of the game between Iran and Israel. They don’t have to love each other. I mean, I always give the example of after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel: when it stopped, they both agreed to certain redlines that allowed relative peace on that border between 2006 and 2023 for 17 years. Something like that is necessary with Iran. And I think that those are the sort of building blocks. So I think the United States has to build this one step at a time, and it has to look at this like a roadmap.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One dimension of this that has gotten strikingly little attention in the last several months, despite advancing to a point that would’ve made it a top tier issue a couple of years ago, is Iran’s nuclear weapons program. There have been IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) reports about just how much highly enriched uranium Iran has at this point—very close to weapons-grade. It could break out to having enough within a matter of days or a couple of weeks—we’re not exactly sure where the weapons development part of that is. 

But certainly that nuclear capability is closer than at any time in the last couple of decades. And that would have been, I think, cause for serious alarm if there weren’t so much else that American policymakers were focused on. Do you see the last several months as having changed Iran’s nuclear calculus in any way? Do you foresee a kind of crisis on this front, or is everyone kind of comfortable with where things are; Iran is close enough that it has a virtual deterrent and not so close that it’s going to warrant U.S. military action or further escalation from Israel?

VALI NASR

So everything that’s happening in the Middle East has taken everybody’s eyes off of Iran’s nuclear program, and therefore Iran has found more time to build bigger, if you will. I still think that the Iranians would want to arrive at some kind of a nuclear cease-fire with the United States. It requires will and leadership in Washington to do that, right, and it does require addressing certain problems we had with sanctions lifting, with reversibility of sanctions. These are issues that we have to deal with, just like the Iranians have to make some new promises. It is also possible to try to include some of what I said in terms of security architecture for the region as part of those kinds of conversations with Iranians. Rather than saying, “We want a longer and stronger deal that is supposed to cage you,” to say that, “We want security guarantees of your behavior in the region, for which we’re willing to also reciprocate security guarantees against assassination, sabotage, et cetera, as part of a nuclear deal—and see the nuclear deal as a major brick in the future security architecture in the region.”

Now, the danger of this escalation between Iran and Israel, which I alluded to in my piece for Foreign Affairs, is that Iran got into a very dangerous escalatory cycle with a nuclear-armed state, which at this moment is very clearly capable of anything. Because that’s the lesson in the Middle East—Israel is not bound by anything, international law, et cetera; it’s in a very unpredictable situation. So the Iranians may come to the conclusion that Israel always will have a conventional military superiority. Iran can launch 300 missiles and have only few of them pass through Israel’s defenses; Israel can fly F35s over Iraq and hit an Iranian target at will. So ultimately you need to arrive at a cold war scenario with Israel, which means that you have to have nuclear deterrence against Israel, because that’s the only way you would balance them. And the Iranians have been talking about this.

But I think the reason they are openly talking about it—in other words, saying it on Twitter from the highest levels in Iran—is not that they intend to do it right away. It’s a message to the United States that, “We want some kind of redline. Because if Israel is not observing any redlines, if we’re in a situation that Israel can do what it did in Damascus this time somewhere else, inside Iran, et cetera, then we would need to change our nuclear doctrine. So, United States, if you want to contain this, you need to get in the middle, you need to help create, indirectly, guardrails in this rivalry, which then would make it unnecessary for us to revise our nuclear program.”

So I think they’re very cleverly, right now, both in terms of how much they’re enriching and what they’re saying about their nuclear doctrine, are trying to manage U.S. policy for the United States to sit on Israel more tightly in terms of Israel having an escalation trigger in its hand. But I think it also is a pressure on the United States to negotiate some kind of rules of the game in the region, which I think every country in the region wants.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just to add one more complicating dimension to this, you also have a relatively uncertain domestic situation in Iran right now. The president, Ebrahim Raisi, died in an accidental helicopter crash a couple of weeks ago, you have a likely succession of the Supreme Leader coming at some point soon. There were quite large protests in Iran in the last couple of years led by women angry over rules around head covering. This seems like, in some ways, a time of continuity—no one seems to think that Raisi’s death will fundamentally change the direction of anything—but also a time of potential uncertainty and instability for Iran domestically given the leadership changes and that level of popular unrest. What does that portend as you look at that mix of factors?

VALI NASR

So off the bat, Raisi was not a big voice on foreign policy. And even at the national security table in Iran, he was pretty mute. He was not like his predecessor, who had experience, and he could assert himself and maybe even influence policy, or could stand up to Revolutionary Guard commanders on the logic of their strategic assumptions. So his demise does not change Iran’s axis of resistance policy or nuclear policy.

The sense in Iran is that Raisi had failed at the domestic level. In other words, the anger that we saw in the streets over—with young girls coming into the streets over the hijab issue, first of all, is blamed on him for unleashing the morality police on the women. Secondly, his handling of the crisis left a lot to be desired. In a large part of the crisis, he was not assertive, he was nowhere to be seen; in other words, he didn’t play a leadership role. And then most importantly, he had not been able to address Iran’s economic problems. Yeah, we do blame it on sanctions—but within the establishment, it’s also blamed on mismanagement, on the people that he brought with him being—kind of the way we say, like, people coming with Trump can’t manage things. It’s that kind of an understanding, that these [people] were inexperienced and he was not performing well.

So the sense is that because there is succession coming, because of everything happening, that the establishment in Iran would want a more experienced president who’s capable of actually running things. I mean, Iran’s president is a lot like the French prime minister. Yes, [Emmanuel] Macron is the president and everything; nut the day-to-day affairs of the state, in varieties of ministries from education to health, et cetera, is run by the president. So the sense is that we may have a tilt a little bit more toward the center, and you might have a figure that is a more traditional figure, these people who have been sidelined to come back. And in fact, we had an indication: the former speaker of the parliament, who was much more moderate than the Raisi cabal, was reelected again as the speaker of the parliament yesterday.

So it’s possible that Iran may end up with a president who can manage the domestic situation better, but also be a character that might be a bigger voice, again, around the national security table. But my sense is that Iran’s policy is not going to change, but Iran is interested in stability. That’s why they negotiated the Oman deal with the United States, because succession needs stability. And so I think that is where the United States basically can leverage. Not focus on ideology, but focus on what would be the fundamental interest of the Supreme Leader, which at this point in time is arriving at some floor under the relationship with the United States, and guardrails around its regional sets of issues.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m going to close by shifting focus back to Gaza. What is Iran’s ideal scenario for postwar Gaza, and does it see events on the ground leading in that direction at this point?

VALI NASR

Everybody’s priority in the region is a cease-fire in Gaza, and Iranians want it for their own reasons. First of all, it would preserve Hamas, it would preserve the Al-Qassam Brigade, that’s Hamas’s military wing. But also, it would keep Israel bogged down in the Palestinian issue and not give it the time and space to focus on Lebanon or Iran. And I think they also want a cease-fire because the Palestinian issue can also blow up in directions that are unpredictable for them. That’s the danger of what’s happening in Gaza, right? The pressure on Iran may build [such] that you need to intervene directly. If scenes of carnage and burned babies come out, Hezbollah may feel greater pressure to escalate on Israel, and then the current scenario may change. And I don’t think Iran or Hezbollah necessarily want that.

So there’s an issue that they want a cease-fire, but also everybody in the region wants to know what happens the day after a cease-fire. And that is something that the United States has not put on the table. I mean, is this cease-fire temporary and then you resume the war? Or does the United States have a plan for making the cease-fire last longer, bring security to Gaza, allow humanitarian assistance, find a way to police the territory? As I said, I don’t think Iran right now either has a very forward policy on that or is averse to that. Because, as I said, stabilizing Gaza, stabilizing the West Bank, does not do away with the Palestinian issue. It actually forces the United States and Israel to deal with the Palestinian issue beyond a cease-fire, and that fits the strategic benefits that Iran has got since October 7.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You and I worked in the State Department at the same time—you were working with Richard Holbrooke, who was at that point working on Afghanistan and Pakistan but had been one of the most dogged diplomats of his time certainly going back to U.S.-Chinese normalization in the 1970s, and then the Dayton Accords around the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. You watched Holbrooke work as closely as anyone. If he were alive today and tasked with leading efforts on getting a cease-fire in Gaza, do you think he would do anything that the U.S. administration isn’t doing? Is there something about the Holbrooke approach that might yield results that we so far have not gotten?

VALI NASR

Well, I think first of all he would be basically filling the shoes of Bill Burns. I mean, he would not tolerate another member—if he was—of the administration basically performing any role in this other than he. But if you went to the closest case—and I think Israel is much more difficult; I mean, dealing with Bibi Netanyahu, dealing with the support that Israel has in the United States, is something completely sui generis to this particular conflict. But the way it worked out in the case of Bosnia was that he worked extremely hard to move the U.S. administration. So he wasn’t basically just following what Warren Christopher or Tony Lake or President Clinton told him. He actually kept forcing them to move their position in Washington.

So ultimately, Holbrooke was credited before the Dayton Agreement with actually getting the United States to get involved, right? So I’m not saying he would succeed there, but that’s perhaps [what] his approach would be: he would go to every Arab government rather than first of all telling them what to do, he would start by saying, “What do you think should happen?” Would do the same with Israel. And then would try to craft a middle situation that probably was outside of Biden administration’s comfort zone. And then he would try to move the administration.

I think he would have a much more difficult time with this president than he had with Bill Clinton, because I think Biden started by having very, very strong views of how he sees it, and maybe Holbrooke would not have had as much room with him. But that’s what he would do. He would want the president to support him, and then he would try to move Biden to where he thought that a cease-fire and an end game would work out.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a good note to end on. Vali, thank you for joining me and for the series of great pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs in recent months.

VALI NASR

Thank you for publishing them and thanks for inviting me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today’s show at foreignaffairs.com. The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Kate Brannen, Julia Fleming-Dresser, and Molly McAnany. Special thanks also to Grace Finlayson, Caitlin Joseph, Nora Revenaugh, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra and Marcus Zakaria. Our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every other Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.