How Weak Is Iran?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrew, Suzanne, Eric, thanks to all three of you for joining me after what I know has been a taxing couple of weeks for anyone who works on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Given how tumultuous those past weeks have been, it’s hard for me to think of an episode in American foreign policy in the last few decades, at least, that has induced quite this much whiplash over a short period. But I do want to say at the outset, that we’re having this conversation on the morning of Wednesday, June 25, east coast time, just in case something changes in the next few hours before we release it.

Suzanne, let me start with you. On camera yesterday, [U.S. President Donald Trump] said, about Iran and Israel, roughly, you have two countries that are fighting for so long they “don’t know what the F they’re doing.” So if we look back over the last couple of days, what are they doing? How do you interpret what’s happened since, really, Sunday morning in Iran, when the United States dropped those several dozen explosives on three nuclear sites? How do you see both the Iranian and Israeli reactions? What got them to a cease-fire, and how stable is it from the perspectives of those two primary antagonists in the war?

SUZANNE MALONEY

Well, thanks so much, Dan, and obviously the president used very colorful language, but I think that what he characterized was a sense of frustration from Washington about his desire to wind this conflict down very quickly. Obviously, the Israelis had been very successful in the opening days of their strikes on Iran, in terms of their ability to gain air superiority, to take out key targets and to decapitate the leadership of Iran’s military and a number of very important nuclear scientists. And they helped to create the conditions in which the United States’ role was almost inevitable, because to have done the damage that they did without actually trying, at least, to finish the job, I think would’ve left real questions about the utility of the original military intervention to begin with—and it would’ve left Iran in a much stronger position to try to reconstitute its program. But I think that there were, clearly, those who felt that the job was not finished on the Israeli side.

I think that the Iranians obviously wanted to be able to get their last licks in—to at least demonstrate that they were still standing, and that they could still fire back, even if we know that about 95 percent of the missiles and drones that they lobbed over Israeli territory were either intercepted or down or went astray. So they had fairly limited impact, but it was important for the Iranians to get some last shots off.

And I think the sense that the Israelis were prepared to keep going, and that the Iranians wanted to have, at least, a kind of defiant last stand, really conflicted with what the president wanted, which was to say, “one and done, we did the strikes, we did them flawlessly.” We don’t know, of course, entirely what the impact was or will be, but Trump clearly wanted to ensure that the United States both signaled and moved in a way that ensured that there was no sort of even perception that we were prepared to get bogged down in a long and potentially costly military conflict in the Middle East, which, of course, is something that the president himself has campaigned against throughout most of his political career in a way that I think has been key to his electoral success, and key to his connection with ordinary Americans. And so he had a domestic political interest, as well as the foreign policy interests.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We will pick up a bunch of those questions about the effects of the strikes, but I’m curious first to get your read of Iran’s response to the U.S. strikes. It was a fairly limited set of attacks, or a fairly limited attack, on an American military base in Qatar earlier this week. Iranians, of course, telegraphed that pretty clearly and messaged it to Qatar trying to prevent real damage that might lead to further escalation. How do you read that, in terms of what it says about the Iranian view of their own position? Is that a sign of desperation, a sign of a kind of tactical retreat, and waiting to fight the next day? How should we read that response?

SUZANNE MALONEY

I think it tells us just how empty Iran’s slogans are. he fact that not only was it an entirely performative strike, that they telegraphed in advance to ensure that it had no possibility of doing any serious damage, and that it would not even disrupt their relationships with various countries in the Persian Gulf, I think it really just underscores that for the Iranians, this was almost a video game. They had no real military strategy, they had no real options for escalating, for striking back. They needed this for their own domestic purposes, to be able to broadcast to their own public that this had been a tremendous success, that they had this historic attack on the most important U.S. military base in the region, and it was tremendously successful. It just shows you how empty this regime is, because nobody in Iran will believe that, not even their own supporters.

And so this is almost like a Kabuki theater. They needed this conflict to end as quickly as it has, and I think we will not know for a very long time what the reverberations of both the damage to the military leadership, as well as the damage to all of their nuclear installations will really mean for the long term for Iran. The political implications and the security implications are going to be playing out over a very long time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrew, let me go to you on the Israeli side of this. If we go back a couple of weeks before Israel started its offensives—at that point, the United States. was still in talks with Iran, and it does seem, despite what the administration has suggested retroactively, that Israel was trying to subvert American diplomacy at that stage. If you look at their objectives and how they expected the coming days would play out, are they happy with how this has gone? Does this leave them in the kind of place where they want it to be, or is this still a kind of partial achievement on their part?

ANDREW MILLER

Well, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is certainly representing it as a definitive victory and is trying to elevate it to the level of some of the great military victories in modern history, and he has a strong reason to do so, given his political standing. And from recent polling, it does appear that his prosecution of the war in Iran has done more to restore his popularity than any other discrete event since October 7. He’s not yet in a position where he is in the driver’s seat in terms of winning another election—but you can actually see a pathway for that now, whereas before it was nearly inconceivable. In reality, I think it’s a mixed bag from the Israeli political leadership’s perspective. On the one hand, they were able to do substantial damage as Suzanne described, and they also were able to get the United States involved, which was Netanyahu’s aim since returning to power in 2009. He had asked every administration since [U.S. President George W. Bush] to join Israel in attacks on Iran, and he finally was able to get President Trump to do so.

On the other hand, I mean, I do think Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to be very interested in the actual battle damage assessments, the BDAs: how much was caused to Fordow, what happened to the stockpile of [highly enriched uranium], and I think, the fact that we did see that exchange after the cease-fire went into effect indicated a degree of Israeli dissatisfaction with where things stood—that they would’ve preferred to continue the campaign.

And the two objectives that, in addition to the nuclear program, have not been met: one is regime change, and while Israel won’t officially endorse it, they did everything but publicly call for regime change in Iran. Netanyahu has been consistent since the 1990s that the solution to the threat posed by Iran is the elimination of the Islamic Republic and the installation of a new government in Iran. So even neutering them of their military capacity is not enough because they could reconstitute. The other objective that’s potentially unmet is a diplomatic agreement, a new [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] or something along those lines. And Netanyahu has tried to suggest he would be willing to accept an agreement where Iran had no enrichment capacity domestically, but it’s more than just the nuclear program. He doesn’t want the Iranians to receive economic relief—or he doesn't want the Iranian regime; it's not necessarily the people—and he understands that under any conceivable diplomatic outcome, even if it’s one that’s much more favorable to the United States and Israel than what could have been achieved before, there will be substantial economic relief. And with that funding, there is the fear that Iran will put it up to nefarious purposes. So I think that’s going to be a concern on his part, and the strong preference would be continuing this campaign, as the war between wars, or the gray zone where Israel will continue conducting strikes, and hopefully the United States will join where necessary. But this is not mission accomplished for Netanyahu yet, I think, privately, and certainly not from the security establishment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Eric, let’s go to the battle damage assessment that Andrew just referred to. You’ve worked at senior levels of the Defense Department. As you assess U.S. military action, how do you judge its effectiveness, especially when it comes to the effect of both the American strikes and the Israeli strikes that preceded it, in terms of setting back Iran’s nuclear program? We saw a report from, I believe, the Defense Intelligence Agency saying that it had only delayed it a few months. That would put Iran at about six months or so away from having enough highly enriched uranium to build a weapon, though weaponization itself is another question. The Israelis have said other things. As you assess American military action, especially, how do you judge the effects?

ERIC EDELMAN

Yeah, Dan. First, it’s great to be with you and great to be with this great group. As Suzanne said, and I think it’s really important to kind of foot-stomp this: it’s going to be a while before we actually know. I mean, one of the things I learned in my two tours in the Pentagon is—in fact, I learned it before that in the State Department—early reports are almost always wrong. When it comes to bomb damage assessment, or battle damage assessment, pilots always believe that they hit the target and destroyed it, and that’s a natural human instinct. But it really requires a kind of all-source BDA using various elements of intelligence, including things like MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence), communications intelligence, signals intelligence, and some passage of time before you can actually have a reasonable judgment about this. Partly because we live in a world where Twitter or X dominates how people think about this, there’s this urge to rush to judgment, and a lot of it is motivated reasoning. People who hate Donald Trump don’t want this to be seen as a success of any kind. Arms controllers who have argued that the JCPOA is better than military action want to make sure this is seen as failing—I mean everybody. Those of us who’ve advocated it obviously have a motive here as well. So I think it’s really important for everybody to take a breath and wait to see this.

If you look at some of the photos of Fordow, what you see is that, in more recent days, since Saturday night, Sunday morning, there’ve been some subsidence. There’ve been some collapsing of the mountain, which suggests that there was structural damage inside. Now, I don’t know at what time the DIA analysis was completed, but I would say that I’m leery of people rushing to judgment about one leaked assessment from one out of a number of intelligence agencies—that was low confidence, by the way—and based only on early overhead satellite photography and some [signals intelligence]. So, I think people really just should wait.

Rafael Grossi, the [Director General] of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has inspectors in country, although not at the sites yet, has said they believe that significant damage was done. And David Albright and Andrea Stricker at the Institute for Science and International Security, who watched this very carefully, have done a very lengthy analysis they posted yesterday, which again suggests lots of damage, difficult to reconstitute. I wouldn’t venture a guess at this point of whether it’s been set back by six months or a year or two years. I would only note that if you go back, historically, the Israelis thought that they were going to set back the Iraqi program in 1981 by six months with the Osirak raid, and they ended up setting it back by a decade. So, to Suzanne’s point, it’s going to be a while before we really are able to answer the question.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And Eric, you as someone who has been a supporter of this kind of military action—though not a supporter of the Trump administration, I should add—how would you define success? If a year from now, as we’re trying to judge whether this was a good use of American military force and smart U.S. policy or not, what makes it successful and what would make it a failure to your mind?

ERIC EDELMAN

Well, so I agree with Suzanne, which is that given what the Israelis had already done in their campaign, I think it would’ve been irresponsible to allow Fordow to continue to exist and have an angry, pissed off Iran with still a lot of enrichment capability and a lot of centrifuges at its disposal. So I think in some sense, once this Israeli campaign got going, the die was almost cast. It was almost impossible to imagine any other scenario, at least for me.

What will be measured by success? Again, I think we’re going to have to see how a few things play out. I would make a couple of points there. One, Suzanne made a really powerful point, which is: Iran’s response options were really all terrible, if you sort of think about them and go through them systematically. So, hitting U.S. bases in the region, which is what most people were understandably justifiably concerned about; Tucker Carlson was talking about thousands of Americans being killed and coming back in body bags: not really a great option for them. I mean, first of all, we had flushed the fleet out of Bahrain, we had taken most of the aircraft out of [the Al Udeid air base], everybody was buttoned down and on high alert. We’ve got very good defensive systems to protect our forces and our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who are out there in harm’s way. Because the bases reside in countries that are important to Iran—I mean, Qatar and Oman, where we have forces, both have been intermediaries for the Iranians with the West. They’ve invested a lot in improving their relations with the Saudis and the Emiratis in the last couple of years. Did they want to isolate themselves further by doing that? It turns out the answer to that, as Suzanne points out, is no. Because what they did was—and I agree with her characterization completely: this was totally performative. It was a box-checking exercise, similar to what they did in January 2020 with the [Iranian general Soleimani] strike, which tells you that they are afraid of further escalation with the United States.

The other options, closing the [Persian Gulf], that obviously led to a kind of momentary spike and oil prices, also not terribly attractive for Iran because the government of Iran has to actually finance itself. It’s got to get its own oil to market. It only has one—I believe there’s only one—export terminal outside the Strait of Hormuz for Iran. The Saudis and the Emiratis have both built pipelines with a lot of spare capacity, so they both are prepared to pump oil outside, going through the Gulf. So that wasn’t very attractive.

Another response that people have been, again, justly worried about, is a cyber response. The problem with cyber, of course, is, unless you take credit for it, it’s not necessarily apparent what you’ve done or who’s responsible. If you do take credit for it, you’re then opening yourself up to a pretty devastating U.S. cyber response and escalation. So that’s not terribly attractive.

And then there’s, of course, the terrorism option, which would be hard to distinguish from business as usual with Iran, since we’ve recently had an indictment of agents paid by Iran who were trying to assassinate Donald Trump, plots against other senior U.S. officials, and this goes back to 1979, really. I mean, how would you even notice that it’s really changed?

So their options were all really terrible, and I think that’s sort of important to note the notion that the use of military power was going to lead to Armageddon, I think, was always grossly overstated.

The other thing I think to watch now is what happens—this is to Andrew’s point, I think—about further negotiations. So Grossi has said, "We’re ready to sit down, meet with the Iranians, we want to get our inspectors back in, let’s get a discussion going, let’s get a negotiation going." The parliament, and Suzanne may have more on this than I do, but the Majles, I believe, has voted unanimously—or maybe one person voted against it—to cut ties with IAEA. It will be very interesting to see what they decide to do. If they decide to stay outside the IAEA and to leave the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Proliferation Treaty], which is, of course, an option for them. I think what they’re staring down the barrel of is continued punitive raids by Israel and perhaps the United States over a long period of time as they try to reconstitute this. And that’s got to be daunting for them too, because one thing that’s emerged from this Israeli campaign is how thoroughly penetrated the regime is by Israeli intelligence, and how good Israeli intelligence is on their program.

And Suzanne mentioned the killing of the scientists. You frequently hear people say, “You can’t kill the knowledge.” Well, that’s true at a very high level of abstraction. It’s not true that any kind of physics graduate student can build a bomb. It is a pretty significant engineering task, thank God. And in killing all those nuclear engineers, the Israelis have destroyed a lot of the historical knowledge and memory, including, as I understand it, and Suzanne may know more about this, the backup material to the Fakhrizadeh archive that the Israelis had exfiltrated out of Iran in 2018. So you can’t kill the knowledge, but boy, you can really set the program back, and I do think they’ve done that in terms of reconstitution.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Suzanne, I’m interested in your assessment of how the Iranians are thinking through their options on the nuclear front now. Eric mentioned the messaging so far about the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nonproliferation Treaty, but it does seem like they don’t face great options, and you can see the kind of logic for further negotiation with the United States. You wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs late last year called “The Middle East’s Dangerous New Normal.” I would note that in that piece you predicted that there was likely to be a war between Iran and Israel several months before it happened, but you also noted the tactical agility that you often see from the Iranian leadership and their ability to be aggressive at points and withdraw when they need to. As you see them starting to think through these options and signal now, what do you think they’re likely to do?

SUZANNE MALONEY

Well, I think they’re really just in a regrouping moment. We have not yet seen, as far as I can tell, [ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] emerge from his bunker and try to rally the leadership at a time of really historic crisis for this regime. And so that, I think, is going to be the important moment. I assume it will happen at a Friday prayer soon to come, but the fact that we haven’t even seen a televised message from him, I think is an interesting indicator. And there I just do want to reinforce that I think the Iranians are always prepared for a variety of eventualities, and they understood, I am sure, how vulnerable they were in the aftermath of the strikes in October that took out key air defense systems, and as Eric said, other important nuclear knowledge and installations. But I think they have always banked on the restraint of American presidents when it comes to working with the Israelis around what their options were, and I don’t think that they saw this coming. As the campaign went on, they just had very few options to strike back.

And there has always been this debate about, is Iran likely to escalate when hit hard or is Iran likely to lick its wounds and to try to regroup and to try to live to fight another day? And I think this set of strikes was severe enough that the regime is not going to act precipitously at this point. Their clear focus is going to be on ensuring the stability of the system itself, on trying to identify to what extent they can reconstitute the program. And then I’m sure that there will be some wider repercussions that come from this. The parliament is an important body in Iran, and it is very much a signal sender, at the moment, with what I think are primarily symbolic resolutions about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—obviously nothing came of that. We’ll see with the IAEA, what this in fact brings. Obviously this is going to be a key moment because to the extent that the program has been set back but not entirely eradicated, the IAEA has the absolutely essential role to play now in ensuring that whatever nuclear program exists in Iran can, in fact, be bounded to be entirely civil-focused and that we have full knowledge of all of its component parts. The fact that that had eroded, really since 2018, and let’s be clear—that was a decision by Donald Trump to pull the United States out of the 2015 JCPOA that brought us to this moment. In many ways, the American involvement in the strikes was the culmination of the decision that President Trump made in 2018, that, I would argue, left us in this dangerous escalatory moment with very few good options at the negotiating table. But I have real questions about what can be achieved at the negotiating table at this point.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to pick that up, but Eric, quickly, do you have a different view of that?

ERIC EDELMAN

No, it’s not a difference. I think Suzanne is, of course, exactly right that this is an arc that goes back to the decision to pull out of the JCPOA. I would say, however, that it’s important to remember that we’re now in 2025. The JCPOA had a whole set of time limits—eight, ten, 15-year time limits—built into the agreement, constraining various parts of the Iranian nuclear program, and not just their nuclear program, but their ballistic missile program, as well. And those had already started to expire and were expiring, and the rest of them soon would be expiring.

And as [U.S. President Barack Obama] said at the time, at the point of expiration of those limits, because of the fact that the JCPOA allowed Iran to continue to develop but not employ more advanced centrifuges, they would’ve been “days away”—and that’s Obama’s words—from having enough fissile material to have a weapon in 2030, when all of this expired. So in some sense, I think it’s true that this exact moment, I think, goes back to the Trump decision to get out of the JCPOA, but in some sense, this is a reckoning that’s been building for a long time, even with the JCPOA.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Suzanne, just go back to those decisions. Do we have any ability to understand how the Iranians will make this decision, and what the balance of authority, at this moment, between [Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian], and hardliners, and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] elsewhere, and the supreme leader ? What are those decision-making dynamics? It’s so hard to understand that from a distance.

SUZANNE MALONEY

I want to speak to that, but I do want to just note that, of course, yes, Iran would’ve been days away from having enough fissile material to fashion a nuclear device in 2030. Instead, by leaving the deal, Iran was weeks away from having enough fissile material to develop nine nuclear devices in 2025. And so we accelerated this moment, and I think that the theory of the case of the JCPOA was, I think, predicated on the concept that Iran’s wider integration into the world and the global economy would help to modulate and moderate its politics. We have not seen that. And I’m not sure that we would’ve seen it, but it’s an untested proposition largely at this stage.

And that gets to your point about the balance of power between the supreme leader, the military, and theological leadership, as well as the elected institutions of the Iranian regime.

We are in a kind of odd moment in which the question of succession already looms large for the supreme leader. He’s 86, and even if he hadn’t been through this ordeal of the past 14 days, I think that there were real questions about his longevity and to what extent the regime was already preparing for some kind of a transition. There had also been an unexpected transition on the elected side of the Iranian leadership with the death in a helicopter crash of [Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi] who had been the president, close to Khamenei, seen as a potential and, I think, viable successor to Khamenei as someone who was loyal to the theological infrastructure, that has been integrated into the political system since 1979. And there aren’t great candidates from a younger generation at this point in time who I think are well understood to be real contenders for that role.

Obviously during the course of this crisis, the Iranian government announced that Khamenei had in fact appointed or had named three other clerics who he would see as potential successors for the body that is established under the Iranian constitution to select his successor. I imagine those names were to no surprise to any of the other elderly clerics who are part of that body, and there will be an orderly transition whenever it comes. But at this point in time, the elected government is probably as weak as it has ever been. I don’t think Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, has any real input into nuclear decision-making in particular. And he’s never been in a moment like this. He’s been in various positions in the Iranian government, but he has a background as a doctor in the health ministry, and he would never have been in the room where the decisions about war and peace are made, or about the nuclear program, up until the point at which he became the president. And I think he has had a very weak hand, and played it in a very weak way since then.

So at this point in time, the power lies in the hands in which it has lain for many years, and that is the kind of symbiotic and, I think, mutually beneficial relationship that exists between the political clergy, Khamenei and his commissars, who he has implanted throughout the bureaucracy of the Islamic Republic, and the security and military bureaucracy, with whom Khamenei forged a critical relationship during the Iran-Iraq War and whom he has relied upon as he has gradually built up his own dominance of the post-revolutionary system. And I think that’s a very solid relationship. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about power shifting away from the clerics and over to the military. There really isn’t a divide between these groups. They rely on one another. The clergy relies on the military to keep them in power. The military relies on the clergy to retain the revolutionary legitimacy of the regime, and their interests are very much shared. So, I think that the decision about how to proceed remains in the hands of that close circle of Khamenei, those around him, and what is left of the senior military leadership.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrew, let me go to you on how you judge the effectiveness of the strikes when it comes to changing or countering Iran’s nuclear ambitions. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs a couple days before, warning that the likelihood of real effectiveness was pretty low and that the possibility of rushing toward breakout, even secretly, should not be underestimated, and that the record of air power and really changing these dynamics is not that good. We’ve seen reports along with the DIA report that Eric mentioned, reports about the HEU, the highly enriched uranium, being moved before the strikes. How do you see both the state of the nuclear program now and the risks of Iranian actors going forward?

ANDREW MILLER

I think it’s certainly possible that the strikes on Fordow were as successful as President Trump initially claimed, and others have claimed. But the ability to reconstitute the program in some shape or form can be done more quickly—not at the same scale, not in terms of the ability to be one to two weeks away from having enough fissile material for a weapon, and certainly not at the scale to be able to mass produce nuclear weapons. The real fear was that they had enough for nine or ten weapons at the very least. But all Iran needs is a single weapon, and that changes the calculus.

An important moment during the Biden administration was when we recognized that the pre-existing assumptions regarding Iran’s timeline for potentially developing a nuclear weapon were predicated on building a weapon of the sophistication the United States fields, which means a miniaturized nuclear device that could fit on a ballistic missile, and that would take years. That is not something that many rocket scientists or nuclear physicists are capable of doing. But when we started to consider the possibility they could build a cruder device, more akin to what we used in the 1940s, that’s when we revised down the timeline and we got to the three- or four-month period for not only having enough material for a weapon, but being able to build that.

And I do think Iran almost certainly retains enough knowledge to do that.

Now, it’s limited in terms of its usage. It’s very unlikely Iran would be able to use such a weapon against Israel, because it would be a bomb, it would not be a missile, and they’d have to find some way to get it. That’s good, but it still would serve as a deterrent to the Israelis, to the United States, to other countries, and put the Iranians in a stronger hand to employ conventional force. That was the essence of the argument behind the JCPOA: that yes, Iran is nefarious in any number of ways, but we’d much rather deal with an Iran that doesn’t have a nuclear weapon in those areas than to deal with them with a nuclear weapon.

And we’re just going to have to see the BDA and where this comes out. There are now Israeli sources—and who knows how credible they are—saying that they agreed that Fordow wasn’t completely destroyed, and that the facility remains intact. The centrifuges in all likelihood were destroyed because they’re so sensitive and just the shock waves alone probably would’ve been enough to destroy them, but it illustrates the difficulty. Having spoken with a number of U.S. military personnel, both current and former, they said they thought it would take multiple air raids on Fordow to take it out. And the Trump administration did adjust. The original calculation was six [Guided Bomb Unit-57s]—they ended up dropping 12. I think that was a wise decision. It still may not have been enough to completely destroy the facility.

And we have to remember this is a dynamic game where we respond and they will respond. And they may find ways of devising around our ability to intercept them and to interdict what they’re doing. Now, we will be able to respond to that as well but it’s this cat-and-mouse game that plays out over time. And I think that’s what makes the JCPOA so important. It wasn’t so much, at least from President Obama’s perspective, that he thought it would lead to the transformation of Iranian society; he’s very much a realist. There were some within the administration who had hopes for that, and clearly we would’ve welcomed it, had it taken place, but it really was a much more pragmatic consideration. Would we rather deal with Iran’s nuclear program exclusively with a military force option or with both a political agreement and military force as a last resort, if necessary? And that, from the Obama administration’s perspective, was the better position to be in. It didn’t rule out or preclude the use of military force, but it provided other ways of dealing with the threat short of military force. And the value of that was not only that it could be more effective and comprehensive, but, given U.S. interests globally, it could potentially reduce the need for a persistent presence in the region that would detract from our ability to address other threats.

This isn’t withdrawal from the Middle East, which is a fantasy, and certainly not something I would recommend, but would allow for a different force posture. And I think that gets to a broader point of this, which is:there’s no question that Iran is weaker than most folks assume, including me, and we were wrong in that, and we need to admit it, and we need to acknowledge that our assessments were incorrect. And that’s important. It’s consequential.

We also need to acknowledge that there are limits on Israel and the United States. They’re different, but they do exist. With the Israelis, we saw the best of the Israeli security establishment. The Israeli Air Force and Mossad are world-class. The Israel Defense Forces is much more uneven. There are specific units that are world-class, but as a whole, there are some weaknesses and they don’t have an expeditionary military capacity for the entire force. So what that means is, if it becomes necessary to put a force on the ground in Iran, it would either have to be the United States or it would be the United States working with the Israelis to deploy their forces. I’m skeptical that even Israeli forces delivered by the United States could do the job. I think the United States would have to deploy. And that gets into a U.S. limitation: President Trump has been prepared to use air power, both in his first term and now in his second term, in the region, because he believes he can keep it relatively limited. He has largely succeeded in that regard. Whether he’s willing to deploy American forces on the ground in Iran, I’m not going to rule out that possibility. I think it’s a much more difficult proposition for him and a much more difficult proposition for the public as a whole.

So it could very plausibly play out in the way that Eric suggested, in terms of the limitations on Iran—and Suzanne suggested—limitations on Iran preventing this from spiraling. It could also play out in a way where a weak Iran is actually more likely to rush to having a weapon. And if that happens, I think that’s a failure of the policy, and it would have regional implications that would be extraordinarily destructive, with the Saudis following suit, the Egyptians, and the Turks. That’s not a region the United States wants to deal with.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrew, let me take a brief detour, picking up on the first part of your answer, when it comes to broader regional implications. When you look at what this means for the war in Gaza and Israeli policy in the West Bank, do you see this as reinforcing maximalist Israeli objectives and the risk of reoccupation and expulsion in Gaza or permanent war in Gaza, or do you see this as an opening to end the war?

ANDREW MILLER

On balance, I think it actually increases the likelihood that the war can end in Gaza. I don’t believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu personally believes that permanent, endless war in Gaza is in Israeli interest. He certainly has grander ambitions in terms of what can be achieved in Gaza than what the Biden administration thought was possible. But he doesn’t want an indefinite military commitment. His inability to end the war is a function of his coalition, and the fact that it could almost certainly lead [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir] to leave the coalition, and potentially lead [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich] to leave the coalition, which would collapse Netanyahu’s government.

And since Netanyahu’s been in such a weak position, he has wanted to avoid the prospect of elections. There may be a way to keep Smotrich on side through some side payment, and I think Netanyahu is probably considering that. But now that Netanyahu is in a stronger position than he was before, he has more room, if he wants to use it, to consider not just an agreement with Hamas on a temporary cease-fire for the release of half of the hostages, but to consider “maybe I go for the whole thing, and maybe this is the time for elections, because my fortunes aren’t going to be higher moving forward. If I can bring the hostages home; end the war; I’ve decimated Hezbollah; in Syria, Assad is gone; in Iran, we’ve clearly set back the Iranian nuclear program somewhat, and it’s less capable of harassing Israel than before.” That’s probably the ideal situation for Netanyahu amidst what’s possible post–October 7. So I’m actually, I wouldn’t say optimistic, but maybe a little more encouraged that there may be more room for diplomacy in Gaza now than there was before the Iran campaign began.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Eric, I want to get your sense of the way forward, but also to pick up on an argument that you’ve made in Foreign Affairs both in 2020 and last week, which is about the possibility of regime change in Iran, which you see as at least one of the objectives for U.S. policy right now. I should clarify, that’s not about an American invasion, but about using other tools of American power to weaken the regime and encourage the Iranian people to change those governing them. Pick up on that argument, but also how you see the nuclear dimension of this going forward.

ERIC EDELMAN

Yeah, just to respond a little bit to Andrew’s very powerful, I think, case for the JCPOA, both under President Obama and President Biden: I mean, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been a skeptic of negotiating on the nuclear program with Iran for a variety of reasons. But one of them is that, although I know that the Obama administration and the Biden administration both said that military strikes were on the table, the reality, as Suzanne mentioned earlier, is I don’t think that had a lot of credibility in Tehran with the leadership. I don’t think they believed that really was an option.

And one reason why I have today a little more hope, and it’s not a whole lot that we might get a negotiation, is because, to Suzanne’s point, the Iranians now know that the president of the United States is actually willing to do this, and that it can inflict a lot of damage that what he did do was relatively limited and that there could be more coming. And I think that does create at least a potential for some people, the argument, in the regime, that, “Look, we’ve just seen almost half a trillion dollars go up in smoke. Maybe what we need to do is actually negotiate this thing.”

So we’ll see. It’ll depend a lot on how they respond to Grossi, and his request to meet and to start negotiations again. But I think there’s at least a potential that this could happen. And to Andrew’s point, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said now he’s willing to contemplate this as the outcome if we can get there. A lot of ifs there. I mean, I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about it, but it’s a possibility.

On regime change, I think I might have a slight difference with Andrew, which is I don’t believe that when the Israelis launched this campaign, regime change was actually an objective. I think the objective—and some people I think have conflated two things—the targeting that the Israelis did, to go after the leadership, as Suzanne was talking about earlier, of the aerospace forces, the IRGC, and some of the Artesh, the regular military, was really twofold. One was to degrade, even further, the defenses of Iran, so it would facilitate the use of the Israeli air power to go after the nuclear targets. But they did the same thing we would do, essentially, which is suppress the enemy’s integrated air and missile defenses, but also slow down their decision-making by decapitating the leadership. And the other element of it was damage limitation to make it harder for them to retaliate and hit Israel and cause damage to the Israeli population.

I think a lot of people looked at all that decapitation and said, “Oh my God, it’s regime change.” I think the way the Israelis thought about it was, “Well, that might turn out to be a collateral benefit of what we have to do anyway.” And so Bibi’s comments about the Iranian people rising up and regime change, those came a couple of days into this. I don’t think they were the major impetus for this. The reality is, I don’t think that while Iran is being bombed by both Israel and the United States, you’re going to see people rising up. Although what Ray Takeyh and Reuel Gerecht and I argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs—I don’t know whether the Israelis read the article or not—but we did see in subsequent days that some of the targeting that we recommended: going after the Basij, going after the internal security elements of the IRGC and the [Ministry of Intelligence and Security]. Those did turn out to be on the target list for the Israelis, including the front gates of Evin Prison, which I thought was a very nice sort of symbolic kind of regime change target.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Evin Prison being where dissidents and political prisoners are held.

ERIC EDELMAN

It’s the Iranian equivalent, I guess, of the Lubyanka. This is not going to happen while military operations are ongoing, in my view. But, and this is a point that I think Suzanne made earlier, as this now winds down, and if it stays wound down for a period of time, and if we get into a process of negotiations, I do think that there’s going to be a lot of perturbations in the force, if you will, inside Iran. There’ll be public, I think, outrage over what I mentioned earlier. “What? We spent a half a trillion dollars, we’re still poor, and you put it into this, which is now gone? What good did that do us?” And we’ve seen over the last five or six years, four or five different efflorescences of popular outrage at the regime. You could see it start to happen again, particularly if there are internal shortages of gas and other necessities of life that are consequences of this.

They’ve got a major internal security problem, which they know. They know they’re extremely penetrated, and the degree of paranoia is going to be extremely high. I mean, as Suzanne mentioned, we still have not seen or heard, pretty much, from—I think people may have read a statement on behalf of the supreme leader, maybe they played a video of one of the statements he made in the bunker—but I mean, it’s striking that there’s been so little evidence of the supreme leader.

You’re going to have recriminations inside the regime. People are going to have to answer for what has happened in the sense that this was not unpredictable. I mean, Suzanne was predicting it, and the Iranians had the opportunity to see what the Israelis had done when they eviscerated Hezbollah. “And why didn’t people think they might try to do this to us too?” There are going to be people asking that question, and they’re going to have to be people answerable for it. So you’re going to start to see splits, I think, in the regime, in the best case. And, at that point, down the road, I mean, who knows what will happen? I mean, Iranians have, in the past, historically had popular uprisings. Some of them ended up in military dictatorships. Some of them ended up in an Islamic dictatorship. One of them ended up in a constitutional government. So it could be any one of those as an outcome.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Suzanne, do you detect any wobbliness or vulnerability in the regime at this point? Any chance for the kind of change Eric is calling for, on some level?

SUZANNE MALONEY

I think it’s really just too soon to tell. This has been a moment as catastrophic, really, as the 1980 invasion of Iran by [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.] And we know that played out internally in really dramatic ways throughout the course of the eight-year war and thereafter. And so I think who is held to account, what it entails in terms of purges within the security bureaucracy and the military, who actually manages to rise to this moment and seize more authority—there’s almost no way to predict, other than we know the people who’ve been assassinated, and we know that they’re out of the game. We know that Khamenei is 86, that he has scaled back his public role, and that there has been a long, slow-moving preparation for his succession process. We also know that the regime has relied on an upper echelon, especially on the clerical side, that is very elderly, but that there is a pretty deep bench when it comes to replacing those who have left. And so I think it’s going to be a time of intense competition. I think it’s also going to be a time of intense repression at home. That is what we saw in the early aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, and then in the aftermath of the decision to end that war, because of the humiliation and because of the political risk, the regime went after dissidents in an almost unprecedented way at that moment.

And so I think we’ve seen, already, reports of hundreds arrested as accused spies. I think we have to take all of those arrests with a grain of salt, because this may be just an opportunity to go after dissidents and others who are political opponents of the regime. But, as Eric said, the degree of penetration—what Israel did in the run-up to this campaign—is going to be studied, I assume, by military planners for years to come. And the Iranians don’t know what they don’t know, still. So they’re going to have to be thinking about how they ensure that this doesn’t continue, that they don’t have that same vulnerability. And it’s going to be very difficult, I think, for them to contend with that even as they’re trying to assess the damage, even as they’re trying to reassure the population and also to clamp down.

So I think it’s a precarious moment for the Islamic Republic. But I would say, as Eric said, it’s not typical for people, when they’re being bombed, to rise up against their own leadership. There is an inevitable sense of nationalism that’s going to be provoked by this. I don’t think anyone who invades Iran or bombs Iran would ever be seen as liberators. And so it didn’t really produce a moment for political entrepreneurialism by any opposition leader, such as they are. Even, I think, those outside of Iran, such as the son of the former Iranian shah, Reza Pahlavi, who is very vocal, I think, in many ways, has probably set his own cause back to some extent, although he does have a very rabid popular base among some within the diaspora and certainly within Iran, as well.

But there really isn’t an opposition movement per se. There certainly isn’t an opposition leader. We don’t know of any coordination among the various social groups that are discontented in Iran to try to mobilize in a way that could actually confront the regime. We’ve seen these bursts of political and economic and social unrest as a result of different precipitants, but they have never built into anything that can genuinely contest the power of this regime. And let’s be clear: the Islamic Republic has perfected the art of retaining power using all the levers of authority that it has, and repression that it has, to try to ensure that there is no one who can compete for power. And that includes even those within the system itself.

So I don’t detect any real opportunity in the aftermath of this crisis, but I would say, as we started, I think that we can’t fully appreciate the reverberations of the attack and of the destruction of key elements of the nuclear program. The clear message that came through to the Iranian people is that this government that has invested so much in threatening the world was not able to defend its own nation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Suzanne, for years, we talked about the Iranian proxy network as its great source of deterrence. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, Hamas—that has been largely eviscerated by Israeli military force over the past couple of years. Is there any chance that Iran will try to or be able to rebuild that in various ways? Or is that a weapon it’s permanently lost, or definitely lost, at this point?

SUZANNE MALONEY

Well, I think that we have a tendency—this kind of recency bias, that over the course of the past decade, Iran’s proxy network became, genuinely, an expeditionary military force that the Iranians were able to deploy in a tremendously vast arena. That historically wasn’t the case. And I think it’s important to remind people that the worst attacks by Hezbollah against American forces took place at a time when it was still very much a nascent organization, had no vast arsenal at its disposal, and was still able to kill hundreds of American servicemen and diplomats. So let’s be very clear that Iran can do a lot of damage even with minimal forces. I don’t think that there is a likely trajectory that can return Iran to where it was on October 7 or even early 2024.

I think the destruction of Hezbollah, the decapitation and the degradation of its arsenal, and then also critically importantly, the change in Syria, the loss of [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], who was never frankly a very good ally of the Iranians, but Syria was a critical territory for Iran to expand its reach. And I think those two factors, together with Hamas’ degradation as well, have left the Iranians without a serious proxy tool to use. There are the Houthis, there are Shia militias in Iraq. There are other forces that they have deployed from South Asia, as well. But let’s be very clear: there’s nothing that can rival Hezbollah. There’s nothing that can give Iran that expeditionary army in the short term. I would say the one risk I see is Syria, because obviously there has been a net positive in terms of the loss of Bashar al-Assad. But we’re seeing a resurgence of [the Islamic State], and this is exactly the kind of environment that the Iranians will look to exploit. Even if there is no ideological bond between those groups, anywhere where there’s conflict and violence, this regime will find some opportunity.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve all held important jobs working on Middle East policy in the U.S. government and the White House and State Department and Defense Department. I’m hoping I can ask you to inhabit those roles for a last round of questions. If you were in the situation room or the Secretary of State’s office or the office of the Secretary of Defense, making recommendations for U.S. strategy going forward in, let’s say, 90 seconds, what would you be stressing to decision makers in the U.S. government? Andrew, let’s start with you on that.

ANDREW MILLER

I think there are a few things that are critically necessary. One is trying to revive negotiations. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be guaranteed that they’ll either materialize or that they will conclude in a successful agreement. But the focus needs to be on that and on preventing actions by other actors, by other parties with different interests, who could seek to sidetrack it. And I think Eric’s point on the credibility of military force is an important one, and that’s a legitimate criticism of the Obama and Biden administrations. My concern is, frankly, the negotiating team that we are fielding. I just don’t have a great deal of confidence in them. I just saw yesterday [U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff] conflating nuclear reactors and centrifuges, which—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Steve Witkoff is Donald Trump’s negotiator for everything at this point.

ANDREW MILLER

Yeah, which I would forgive most Americans, but if you’re negotiating this agreement, you probably should know that. But the way in which negotiations were conducted earlier—and this is in no way to give Iran a pass—but they started off by saying, “Well, yeah, you can enrich,” and then they reversed their position. The optimal position is no enrichment, but the fact that he was negotiating, and he was putting forward a proposal without consulting with all of the relevant stakeholders does not inspire confidence. And my understanding is that he refused to specify what sanctions relief Iran would get in return.

Now, I’m not taking a position on how extensive that should be, but in most negotiations, you’re not going to succeed if you simply specify what one party is going to have to get up, and you tell them, “The check is in the mail, you’ll see what you’re going to get.” So there are plenty of Republicans who have both the knowledge and the expertise and the skill to conduct these negotiations effectively. Unfortunately, I don’t see many of them in this administration. So that’s going to be key, and I think they’re going to have to rely on the faceless bureaucrats they’ve so maligned who do have the institutional knowledge, who do have the professionalism. They’re critical to making this happen.

Second, I’m a little bit more concerned about the risk of terrorism, both against soft targets in third countries by either Iran or Hezbollah or other actors. U.S. officials and former U.S. officials should be safe, but it’s worth noting that the Trump administration pulled the security details from its own former personnel, which the Biden administration never did, and I was involved in those discussions. No one ever advocated for that position; we had an obligation despite our disagreements with them, despite the ways in which they treated us quite unfairly, I think, at times. They are American citizens, they’re former American officials, and we need to protect them.

The third is there are some weaknesses that I think need to be corrected regarding Israel. One of them is their bomb shelters have proved inadequate. They were built during the 1970s and 1980s for Scuds. The larger Iranian warheads have been able to penetrate them. That’s not necessarily an American expense, but it’s something we need to work with the Israelis on so that there’s better protection for the civilian population.

And finally, while Iran was clearly depleting its medium range ballistic missiles, we were also depleting, and the Israelis were depleting, their interceptors. There’s a major problem in the U.S. defense industrial base that goes well beyond this that has to be rectified. We can’t be in a position where we are running through our arsenal of critical defensive equipment, not just with respect to Israel and the Middle East, but globally. That is a five-alarm fire and needs to be dealt with that urgency and seriousness.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Eric, as a former faceless bureaucrat, anything you’d add in terms of the way forward?

ERIC EDELMAN

Well, it’s hard to improve on what Andrew really just said. I mean, some specific things: I did not mean to either discount the danger of terrorism or the cyber threat when I was saying that they weren’t terribly attractive options for the Iranians. Those are both things we need to take seriously, that the administration has sort of eviscerated [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], which needs to be reversed.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This is the Homeland Security agency that defends against information attacks.

ERIC EDELMAN

Right. They’ve put an unqualified person in [the Department of Homeland Security] in charge of counterterrorism. They need to actually have qualified experts looking at this now. This is not the time for amateurism. I mean, we saw an amazing display of the professionalism of the U.S. military last weekend, but we need that as well in DHS and other elements of the government because this has got to be a whole-of-government effort. It can’t only rest on the DOD.

I would footstomp what Andrew said. I mean, I think there’s some people who think the president is strong-arming Israel into this cease-fire. I think the Israelis needed a pause, and they needed a pause because they’re running out of Tamir interceptors, as Andrew was suggesting. And he’s right that it’s not just a Middle East problem. This is a global problem.

The panel I co-chaired with former Representative Jane Harman last year, at the National Defense Strategy Commission, that Congress charter to review the Biden administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy was banging the klaxon on this last summer and fall. Right now, we have a capacity of building about 300 Patriot interceptors a year. That’s just unacceptable given the world we’re moving into of ballistic missile and cruise missile capabilities around the world.

Finally, I would probably say something that would immediately get me fired in this administration, which is when we’re using military force, I think our rhetoric needs not to be the kind of bombast and hyperbole that we’ve seen coming from the president, from the secretary of defense, notably not from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose professionalism, again, I would commend based on the briefing he gave on Sunday. It’s not helpful, frankly, to treat the American people like they’re idiots. I mean, I think the American people are capable of understanding ambiguity, uncertainty, the importance of waiting on evidence before everybody rushes to judgment. And I think unfortunately, the administration has heightened the already existing incentives in our system for people to rush to judgment and make categorical statements when the evidence is fragmentary and caution is in order.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Suzanne, anything you’d add in terms of priorities in the Middle East going forward?

SUZANNE MALONEY

I’ll add only a couple of small flourishes. One is just the reminder that we need the inspectors there. We need to have some independent assessment of where Iran’s program stands and where it might be able to go. And so that is the critical piece of this moment. I think one partner that we might be able to use in helping to affect that would be our European negotiating partners who were at the table before the United States was on this issue and who have now the capacity to at least threaten to snap back UN Security Council sanctions on Iran, something that Iranians surely would not welcome at this point in time.

And so I think we ought to be working with our European partners to try to come to a consensus about what the destination will be. And there, I would just say there is this question for me about: what is the negotiating framework? It’s not just the caliber of the lead negotiator and the depth of knowledge on this issue, but we are really at an entirely different point because we believe, at least, so much of Iran’s program has been damaged significantly, but there are still critical pieces that are quite dangerous, and Iran could rebuild over time.

So we have to, I think, think about what a different negotiating framework looks like. What are we prepared to give and what are we prepared to demand from the Iranians? It’s no longer a reduction of X number of centrifuges if so many have been destroyed. For me, the question is also what sanctions relief is anyone in the international community prepared to give? I think it’s a real risk for Iran. They may want to try to play out this scenario, but they are weaker now than they have ever been, and their leadership needs to understand that this is not an indefinite opportunity. So I think this is a critical time for diplomacy. We’ve seen the tremendous success of military action, but military action alone cannot address the threat that Iran poses.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Thanks to all three of you for the work you’ve done in Foreign Affairs in recent weeks and months and the work I’m sure you will do in Foreign Affairs in the weeks and months ahead. And thanks so much for trying to make sense of where things are at a moment where much, as you all pointed out, is still murky and unclear.