The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work
"The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work" connects past to present, using historical analysis and context to help guide us through modern issues and policy decisions. Then & Now is brought to you by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. This podcast is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell, and features original music by Daniel Raijman.
The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work
Why Does US-Iran Hostility Persist?
In this episode of The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work, host David Myers speaks with Dalia Dassa Kaye on why U.S.–Iran relations constitute the longest-running hostility in American foreign policy. Dalia argues that while Iranian actions and the regime’s post-1979 anti-American ideology are central to the conflict, U.S. policy narratives have also played a decisive role. Repeatedly framing Iran as a permanent rogue state has narrowed the American policy imagination, raised the domestic political costs of engagement, and foreclosed opportunities to test alternative approaches. Across administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, there has often been strategic interest in easing hostility, yet entrenched discourse, fear of appearing “soft,” and political risk have consistently blocked change.
Dr. Kaye emphasizes that trauma from the 1979 hostage crisis alone cannot explain policy rigidity, noting moments such as Iran-Contra and post-9/11 cooperation that reveal recurring, if fragile, openings shaped by strategic necessity. Turning to recent developments, she traces today’s accelerated escalation to the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the regional consequences of October 7th, and the June 2025 Israel–Iran confrontation, arguing that these events fundamentally altered deterrence attempts without producing clear paths to stability.
Dr. Dalia Dassa Kaye is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and director of its Initiative on Regional Security Architectures. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dalia is an internationally recognized expert on geopolitics and Middle East policy. She has received numerous awards and held previous positions at an array of research and public policy institutions, including as a Fulbright Schuman visiting scholar at Lund University. She is the author of dozens of articles and policy reports, as well as three books, including most recently Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy (Stanford University Press, 2026).
Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, I'm David Myers, host of the History Politics Podcast. On this episode, we speak to Dahlia Dassa Key, who is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and Director of its Initiative on Regional Security Architectures. Dahlia is the author of the new book, Enduring Hostility: The Making of America's Iran Policy. Iran continues to be an enigma to most Americans, policymakers no less than average citizens. We speak to Dahlia Dasekay to gain clarity on the ongoing instability in Iran emanating from the powerful protests that broke out in January, and against the backdrop of more than 40 years of hostility between the United States and Iran since the 1979 revolution. This enduring hostility, Dahlia argues, is not a one-way street, but the result of both parties' own interests. Our conversation discusses the history, psychology, and present-day manifestations of the hostility, where it came from, where it has led, and what it might portend for the world in the future. Hi Dahlia, welcome to the podcast. So you make the point in your book, Enduring Hostility, that uh Iran, the United States is the longest standing hostility that our country has had with any state. Um, certainly longer than the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. So the question is why this enduring hostility? You've written the book on it. So maybe you can edify for us why this is.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Well, thanks again for having me. You know, it the main thrust of the book is suggesting that when there's a conflict this long-standing, there's usually two sides to it. So, yeah, a big reason why we have this conflict for now nearly half a century is all of the bad stuff the Iranians do, and at its root, the very fundamental anti-American stance of the Iranian leadership since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Uh, but what I do in the book is I also say that the US and the way we think about foreign policy, the way we think about the world, the way we have thought about Iran has also been an impediment. And essentially, when you frame a country as the ultimate rogue, as a pariah, as, you know, evil and so forth, malign, whatever word choice of the day you're going to use, and you frame an entire nation with these labels, and you do this for decade after decade, uh, it gets very, very difficult to change the discourse and to think of different policy options. And frankly, if you think the other side isn't going to change, uh, the political cost of trying to adapt a different approach is very high. So there's very little political incentive to think differently about dealing with this very, very troublesome country. So the book is really about, you know, both sides playing a role, but trying to do a deep dive into the American side and our policy process and opportunities we may have missed over the years.
SPEAKER_02:So would you say that the enmity serves the interests of both at this point? I mean, it's not only that it's ingrained, but in some sense, there's uh an interest in having that kind of villainous enemy against which to uh take aim and which kind of shapes your vision of yourself?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a good question. I wouldn't say that for necessarily the Iranian leadership, I mean for the US leadership. For the Iranians, that could very much be the case. This has been very important for the regime, part of its, you know, attempt to um maintain legitimacy over the years, which with what's going on now, it's looks like it's completely lost. Um, but there is, there was a use to having the other. And you could argue on the American side as well. But what's really interesting and what I do in the book is I go through administration after administration, Republican and Democrat. There was an interest from the highest levels, from the president to senior advisors, um, trying to figure out if we could have a different relationship with this country, because actually it did not serve our strategic interests. There was a sense that in every era it would be strategically useful to change course, whether it was, you know, because we were dealing with the Soviets in the 80s, uh, other priorities in the 90s, after the 2001 um uh September 11th attacks, and, you know, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was the notion that actually we have other enemies and we might need to deal with the Iranians to address these other enemies. Um, and it goes on and on. And so you see very much uh an interest um by successive administrations to figure out can we do something differently? And every time it doesn't pan out. And a lot of it has to do with the bad stuff the Iranians are doing that make it very difficult for us to engage and think about uh diplomatic routes. Um, but it also has to do with, well, who wants to look like you're appeasing the mullahs, right? Who wants to look like you're an apologist for the Iranians and who wants to make those debates internally and the political cost was always just too high. Um, and it could be the Iranians wouldn't have responded on this occasion or that occasion, but a lot of times it wasn't even tested. So I don't know if the othering, you know, is so is so dominant in that sense. I think there was strategically an understanding that there was a cost to maintaining this stance. Um, but domestically it was very difficult to change course.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So there was this internal American tension between a desire to overcome this hostility because it did not serve our interests, and entrenched political and ideological forces that uh made it very difficult to actually effectuate change. I mean, would be would the JCPOA be the one instance in which the former bested the latter, the impulse to sort of discard decades of policy and overcome uh domestic political uh crosswinds and actually do something differently? Or should that is uh is that not how we should understand uh President Obama's um uh efforts to uh reach an agreement with the Iranians about their nuclear program?
SPEAKER_01:Yes and no. So there's no question that compared to all previous types of engagement, and and you know, your listeners should should be aware that there were pretty extensive uh diplomatic um uh meetings at high level, senior levels, even before the JCPOA and the Obama administration, after um the Afghanistan uh, you know, um war as that was starting. Um Ambassador Ryan Crocker, for example, and Ambassador Jim Dobbins and other U.S. diplomats held very high-level meetings with Iranians. And Ambassador Crocker had meetings with like really bad, the bad guys in Iran, not just like the foreign ministry um folks, but also the really tough IRGC guys. And, you know, we were cooperating to the extent that they were giving the US, you know, targeting um, you know, maps of show sharing maps of where to target the Taliban because they were also an enemy of the Iranians. So, you know, and these weren't covert, but they were kept very quiet because of these domestic debates within the US system about dealing with these guys, which you know, the neocons and the administration were very much opposed to. So the JCPOA wasn't the first time the US dealt with the Iranians, but it was very rare and you know, for this kind of engagement. And that all, of course, in the 2000s broke down with this so-called access of evil speech that President Bush gave, and then the whole thing kind of deteriorated, and then the Iranians were, you know, killing our military. And, you know, the cycle just you see the same cycle repeating itself again and again, where both sides sabotage for different reasons. Um, the JCPOA probably got the furthest uh in any in any previous episode. Uh, it was the first time you had sustained open diplomatic engagement, granted, often through this multilateral setting. It was not just a US-Iran bilateral agreement. It was a multilateral arms control deal. Uh, it even involved the Russians and Chinese. Um, certainly the Europeans were at the forefront of it. But it was becoming kind of a regular pattern for our Secretary of State to call the foreign minister. We still didn't have the meeting of presidents. You know, President Obama never met President Rouhani, who's not necessarily the deal maker anyway, in the country, but it never got to that point. But it was pretty serious. However, at the end of the day, uh, it was not a transformational moment. It was a limited arms control agreement. It contained the nuclear issue for a period of time. Both its proponents and opponents probably overstated how important this ended up being. Um, this was not about resetting US-Iran relations overall. It wasn't about we're going to open embassies, we're going to normalize ties. It was an arms control deal. In fact, even after it was signed, the Iranians were quite disappointed. They didn't get as much economic relief as they expected. And there were a lot of people in the US system, especially Democrats, um, who, you know, were a little bit uncertain about the JCPOA because this again was like there was bipartisan concern about it. Um, and they were like, okay, we got this deal. So now let's get tough on Iran on other issues, militia, backing of militia forces in the region, missiles. You know, this isn't the time to use the nuclear agreement for a big opening with Iran. This is the time to uh, okay, we say we settled that issue for now, let's speed up on the Iranians on the other arenas, which, you know, in a lot of ways they deserve to be, those issues deserve to be focused on, but it just shows you the mentality was not exactly like, let's use this as an opening to test whether we can really have fundamentally different relations with Iran. It really never was designed to do that.
SPEAKER_02:So I want to understand this better. I mean, a psychologist would say you have two sides that are completely stuck, stuck in something. And sort of the originary act, it would seem, is the takeover of the embassy for the Americans in 1979. Um, and I mean, I'm just wondering were shame and rage and anger um such powerful forces that they have basically controlled American policy for more than four decades, uh, coming up on five decades? Is it really that uh sense of shame and and and and anger over what happened in 1979 that has kept us locked in?
SPEAKER_01:It was absolutely a traumatic event, you know, holding uh over 50 US diplomats for 440 days um in the chaos of the Islamic Revolution. Um, it was it was a trauma. I mean, you were probably remember this. I'm old enough to remember this. Um, yellow ribbons everywhere. This wasn't just an issue for you know elite policymakers to be fretting over. This was, you know, this was a national drama. This was something it was the origins of Nightline. I spoke to Gary Sick for Ken Koppel every night. And you know, I spoke to Gary Sick, who was a NSC advisor at the time, to President Carter for the book. And he does talk about the trauma and how he does think that that's had a lasting legacy on the way we we as Americans look at the Iranians. And, you know, every day it was 24-7. Mad Mull is on the radio. And so it's very hard to overcome that image because, and they did do these horrible things, right? So it's not just psychology, it's real. But I actually push back against that is um one, we've had generational changes. So to suggest something at, you know, policymakers today that's not something they even remember. I'm, you know, they're they they they're not even as old as me. Um and um, but also, you know, more to the point, even in the 80s, when this trauma was, you know, very couldn't be fresher in the minds of top senior policymakers. This was the era when we had Iran Contra. The Reagan administration was tempted, and this was the plan cooked up with the Israelis. They were, at the time, the Israelis were more focused on Iraq than they were Iran. Iraq was their big enemy, not Iran. Even after the Islamic Revolution, the the Israelis were not as focused on Iran. And they did they basically thought, well, let's see if we can find so-called moderates in Iran and deal with them again because of the strategic importance, right? The strategic rationale that having this adversary relationship with such a strategically located country sitting on these oil reserves, this choke point of global oil supplies, um, you know, that in those days they were worried about Soviet influence. And so there was this idea that let's figure out if we can work a different relationship. And so Reagan, you know, sends his NSC advisor on a secret mission, actually goes to Tehran with a key-shaped cake and, you know, Reagan's Bible and all of this. And it and instead of an opening, it turns into this scandal, obviously, uh, where the US is illegally selling arms to the Iranians, um, and it becomes kind of an arms for hostage deal, um, is how it's foreseen. Lots of resignations. It was, it was a very, very big moment. And there is an argument. And so my point is if if Iran Contor was such, I mean, if the hostage trauma was so traumatic, you know, why would you have senior officials, you know, writing NSC member memos, actually acting on these memos, going to Tehran, seeing what they could cook up? You know, no, there were still strategic interests that were driving, you know, uh some efforts to see what they could they could manage. In the end, it became this scandal. And in the end, and it what it did is it just exacerbated the narrative of Iran, our Iranian leaders, Iranian, they're not people we can deal with. They're going to, um, it's gonna have blowback, and it becomes this very politically toxic issue. You know, Robert Gates in in oral history years later, you know, talked about, you know, why after Ayatollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader, died, that we didn't think about new relations, and he has to, he said, you know, you have to understand Iran was the third rail, and James Baker said similar things of US foreign policy. You know, this is the country that led to Iran-Contra. This is the, you know, this is the place where you have this failed mission to release hostages. I mean, this is a place that just, you know, dealing with them is never going to end well for Americans. So this is not worth the attempt, basically.
SPEAKER_02:It seems to be what the historian Barbara Tuckman calls the march of folly. I I mean, it seems to be a completely irrational sensibility that that that is informing U.S. that is controlling U.S. policy. I mean, is that a completely unfair assessment?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think that would be going too far, but I do think there is some psychology. I think more than psychology, my book is actually pointing to discourse and narratives. And so it's not a complete folly in the sense that, you know, yes, we have our blind spots, and part of that is driven by psychological impediments. Um, but it's also um, you know, the Iranians are doing things that make it very difficult to change course. So again, that's why there's two sides to this. It's not just like you're making this up. Um, that said, I think it's more about the way you frame issues in foreign policy, narratives that really matter when you frame a country a certain way. And that goes beyond, you know, an individual psychological approach to a country. It's also about what becomes politically acceptable, what language you can use that's acceptable. And then it kind of starts to limit the policy menu, you know, in terms of what options you'll even consider. I mean, there's one story. In fact, I talked to Dennis Ross a bunch for this book and different eras. And he has, you know, he gave an example of sitting in a principal's meeting, you know, the president and high-level cabinet members. And, you know, he, and Dennis Ross is not known to be, you know, a dub when it comes to Iran. You know, he's he's all he's into testing engagement, but he he's viewed um outside as uh more on the hawkish side. But, you know, he said it was, you know, interesting how the policymakers in the room were kind of competing, including Obama, against each other of who could look more skeptical about engaging Iranians. So it's more just like this is kind of like, okay, we're talking about Iran, which means I don't want to look naive, I don't want to look like I'm not tough, you know, that I understand what this country's about. And so they were going around kind of giving percentages, how much, you know, how how likely will it be that Iran will respond to some diplomatic opening? This was before the JCPOA. And you know, Hillary Clinton's like at the lowest because she's known to be the most hawkish. And but Obama wasn't that high either. So it's not exactly um, you know, so this just gives you, even at the highest levels, and it seeps all the way across the spectrum. Um, and of course, there are different views, and that's why there's debates in every administration, but it really matters how you talk about a country and how you talk about it so consistently. And obviously, congressional debates also reflect that.
SPEAKER_02:So let's flip the lens and look at how this looks through Iranian eyes, or uh to follow up your theme, what discourse the Iranians use. Um, I mean, the familiar phrase uh that we all recognize is the United States as the great Satan, um, which clearly emerges out of the theological political worldview of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution. I'm curious to know how far back we need to go to understand kind of the fixity of place of the United States in the Iranian imaginary. Do we go back to 1953 and the CA-sponsored coup of Prime Minister Mossadegh and the United States support for an oppressive uh uh ruler of the Shah of Iran? Where do you situate the current um discursive fixity uh uh of the United States in uh in Iranian language and imagination?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a really good question. I just want to note that you know, my book is not about the Iranian side. I mean, obviously it comes into play, but there are many good books and many good Iranian scholars who focus on this, and then there's no consensus about what the sorts of it is. Um, obviously, 1953, the coup against Mozadik, the you know, under under overthrowing an elected leader in Iran, um, did fuel grievances. There's lots of controversy about how that happened and so forth, and the Islamist position toward that as well. But but there's no question that fueled the narrative of the US intervened, right? The US supported the Shah, as you said, quite a repressive ruler. And so these guys came in, the revolutionaries, and that was a big coalition. They ended up squashing the others in the in the revolution, and they got the and Khomeini and the Islamic revolutionaries got the upper hand. Um, and their anti-American ideology was real, right? This this hostility to the US, to the West. So part of it is their own list of grievances, part of it is this ideology. Um, and over the years, I think some of it changed. I think there was, there was a sense that um uh, and this is an ongoing debate among Iranian scholars, you know, is I think Henry Kissinger once kind of said the phrase, is Iran a country or a cause, right? Is it just an ideology about resisting the West, or is it have national interest? And if you just look at the history, the way Iran has acted, they've acted through both lenses, I think. So there's not a definitive answer. At times they have been the symbol of the resistance, the one that fought Israel. At times that served them well to get wide regional support. They lost a lot of that when they supported Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They didn't exactly look like they were resisting Israel. They looked like they were killing Arabs. Um, and so uh, you know, they've lost a lot of legitimacy in the region, certainly at home, that's needless to say, over time. Um, but there were times when also they acted in very pragmatic ways, frankly, to survive, right? So the driving ideology, so I think you could say at this point is survival of this of this leadership. And, you know, they accepted the JCPOA. It was a compromise. You could argue it was in their favor, but some people argue the Iranians would never agree to any deal. They agreed to an arms control agreement that by all um, you know, uh indications, they adhered to um for that time. Uh so there was a time after the Iran-Iraq war, you know, drinking the poison chalice. There's a lot long history of the Iranian leadership, despite this ideology, you know, compromising. And I gave examples of when they're engaging US diplomats directly after, you know, again, after 9-11, uh, we had the common Sunni extremist threat. And so they aren't so hostile to the, you know, um great Satan that they weren't willing to give um targeting sites to the Americans and figure out how we can help the Afghan army and who will take over the leadership in Afghanistan. So you see different strains. And the last thing I'll say on the Iranian lens is that it's very, it's a very complicated system. And I don't think a lot of us, and even scholars who go back and forth to the country and and analysts who you know speak the language, read the Papers, try to, it is a very opaque place. It is very hard to figure it out. It's a very layered system with lots of different factions. And so I think it's very, very hard to decipher, frankly, what the lens is completely there, which is why I focus on our side because we understand it better.
SPEAKER_02:Right. I mean, for the lay listener, can you just lay out some of the complexity? I mean, uh, you know, in the most basic way, um, about I guess around the question, where does power really lie? I mean, you have the the Revolutionary Guard, you have the Supreme Leader, you have government ministries. Give us your best sense in, you know, 60 seconds about where how how it works.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think you just laid it out. There's different elements of the system, right? So you have a parliament, you have some elected offices like the president, but then you have councils that very much limit who can run for the president, right? So it's a very controlled system. Um, and then you have the supreme leader who is the ultimate authority. Um, and that is, you know, calling the shots, but but there's tension often between the presidents of the country. Uh, sometimes they've been more reformist, more on the so-called moderate side. Sometimes they've been more hardlined. That can make a difference even in this very, very authoritarian and increasingly brutal system. So it is complex in that way. It's also a country of 90 million people with many different ethnicities and, you know, majority Persian, but you have many different ethnic groups. So it's, you know, the whole idea of trying to figure out, and especially when you are an authoritarian country without transparency, it's hard to figure out what popular opinion really thinks. Um, you know, what who has the upper hand in government at any which time? I mean, maybe that's hard in our country as well, but it's definitely country uh difficult to figure out in a country like Iran.
SPEAKER_02:So the unpredictability of Donald Trump um is an added element that complicates and confounds uh all sorts of expectations and prognostications. And there seems to have been a very considerable acceleration of developments since June 2025, when you had um the uh Israel-Iran 12-day war, and then uh the United States attack on the nuclear facility uh in Iran. Um What did that do to the existing equation? And would you agree that there's been an acceleration of developments? And of course, then we'll try and answer where is it headed? But let's begin with how you understand the events of June 2025.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it's really important to start before June 2025 because it the acceleration, which I agree is absolutely there, did not start last June. It I would say it really started with the US leaving, this is under Trump's first administration, leaving unilaterally the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, even against the advice of his own advisors at the time. There was about a year of the Iranians waiting to see if anybody could salvage it. Didn't happen. They started lashing out at oil facilities in the region. That's really where you get an uptick in escalation. That continues through Biden, and then you get to October 7th, the Hamas attack on Israel. And that's that was, I think, the game changer because it really changes Israeli strategic thinking. It lowers their risk tolerance and increases their incentives to deal with what they call often the head of the octopus, right? The tentacles or all these militia groups Iran is supporting, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, et cetera. Um, and the idea, uh I argued from the very beginning of after the October 7th attack, that this will become a regional war, and it did. Um, because ultimately the Israelis were not going to feel comfortable just leaving it at degrading their the immediate neighborhood. They they wanted to get to the Iranians themselves. So during the regional escalation of the October, you know, war, the Israel Hamas war after October 7th, um, you had really huge red lines crossed. So for all these years, the Israelis and Iranians had kind of a shadow war going and so forth. Um, what happened by 2024 is uh it no longer, and before that, neither country really wanted to fight each other directly and openly. But all bets were off after October 7th. And so you see in the escalation really starting in April of 24. Israel hits an embas a consulate, what they view as what the Iranians view as a consulate in Damascus. I talked to Israelis after that attack over the summer, and actually a lot of military planners in Israel did not expect an Iranian response. They thought the Israelis could just hit the Iranians. Um, if it was outside Iran, that was kind of just in the norms of rules of conduct. Yeah, rules of the game, like what they did with Hezbollah. Remember, they were killing a lot of Hezbollah guys even then and IRGC generals and so forth, but they did it outside of the country. Um the Iranians did not react that way, and they launched a very surprising major ballistic missile attack on Israel, the first kind of direct Iranian strike on Israeli territory. That's what started changing the whole game. And then you have the summer of 24 and the Israeli degradation and attacks on Hezbollah and the Pager attacks, and then the assassination of Nasrallah the Hezbollah head. That was momentous. And this was Iran's major, what they viewed as their major deterrent tool against the Israelis. The way they funded and supported Hezbollah, its most successful probably revolutionary export of any of the militias. Um, and this group was decimated. And so for the Iranians, they were they were exposed. And so it was a significant um hit to the Iranians. So that set this the stage for the October Iranian response, because now the Iranians start getting into like existential mode. Like we've got to restore our deterrence because the Israelis are hitting us, we are embarrassed. And so then they launched this other big retaliation for the killing of Nasral and so forth in October. The Israelis then degrade a lot of Iranian air capabilities. And that is what leads to June, because it was a really big opera, I would say driven more by probably operational calculations than strategic from the Israeli perspective. They had this moment where the Iranian air defense capabilities were degraded. They had a moment they thought they a window. And then you have the Trump factor. You have a US president that is uh very um accommodating to the Israeli positions. There's no way the Israelis would have launched the June attack without full US support. And indeed, the US came in at the end and attacked the three major uh known nuclear sites in Iran. So it was June was transformative, but the transformation happened in the in the years running up to that. I think that's that's important.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, very helpful to hear. Um, I want to just uh stay for a minute on that third partner in this unhappy marriage, uh, the Israelis, um, and ask your sense uh of how accurate an impression they have of the Iranians, because um it's been, if we're talking about discourse, uh a f a fixed feature of Israeli political discourse to argue that Israel that Iran constitutes a grave existential threat to the existence of the country. And I'm wondering how you understand that. As someone who spent a lot of time studying not just Iran, but Israel. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And I spent a lot of time studying Israel-Iran, and it's a huge part of the equation, it's a big part of my book. Although at the end of the day, I argue that US policy on Iran is homegrown. Uh, but I think the Israelis, like the US, there's bipartisan agreement on Iran now, but that wasn't always the case, actually. There was a time when there was more debate about how to deal with Iran. There were Israeli policymakers at a certain point who didn't like the framing of Iran in these existential terms that Prime Minister Netanyahu is so famous for. Um, and he's the one who has elevated this threat. They they thought that actually by Israel posing Iran as such an existential threat, the Fed actually suggests Israel cannot deter Iran, like Israel can't defend itself. So they thought that wasn't useful for Israeli deterrence. They thought it was also that Israelis needed to be careful to be aligned with the United States. And so they didn't like the approach of Israel kind of being in the front seat when it came to confronting Iran because it's a global problem, not just an Israeli problem. So there were debates in the past in Israel about how to deal with Iran, but those debates have kind of narrowed and pretty much diminished with October 7th. There's uh even before, but uh increasingly now, really alignment across with all of the um frustration with Batanyahu among different political parties in Israel, um, and in fighting, there's not much fighting about Iran. The June war was was universally supported. So I think that's important.
SPEAKER_02:You think it's it's an accurate read to believe that Iran is indeed intent on destroying Israel?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, well, that's a different question. I mean, I you know, I don't I'm I'm more interested in how we're what how leaders look at threats. I'm not to try to describe motivations is very difficult. Um you could argue, and many have, and there's a good case to be made, that the Iranians and the Israelis, um, I wrote a book at Rand on this about the Israeli-Iranian rivalry. And you know, they are not natural enemies. They're, you know, they there's a lot of alignment. Um, the enmity didn't really get going until the 90s and really didn't take off until the early 2000s. Uh, the Iranians and Israelis have practically dealt with each other when need be. Uh, yes, I mean, I think the Israelis should and take these threats seriously, but the Iranian strategy was often keep war off our territory, right? Keep it, and so this, you know, these mechanisms, Hamas, Hezbollah, um, especially Hezbollah, uh, you know, were kind of let's make sure our enemy feels the pain, but we don't want the return address to be us. So, you know, it's not clear. Um, and most Israelis over the years did not think the Iranians were developing or attempting to develop nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons. They only have civilian, but the attempt at weapons, which was the concern, um, most thought they're not doing it to destroy Israel. Israel has a nuclear deterrent, right? It's to gain leverage to do more conventional stuff. So, what what I believe or not believe, I think it's more important to look at what the record has been and you know what possible motivations might be.
SPEAKER_02:Well, unlike you, I do like to think of motivation. And I've always assumed that these are two rational actors as states for whom the principle of mutual shore destruction is operative. And they understand very well the stakes, and hence you have this kind of constantly um escalating um proxy war that nonetheless reaches a limit, uh, and then they could dial it down until they couldn't. And that was the developments that you described from 10-7 onward.
SPEAKER_01:Um I subscribe to that analysis.
SPEAKER_02:The strategic balance has been altered.
SPEAKER_01:It has been altered. Although I want to caution, and and when I say I don't describe motivation, it's because I look at that, I just frame it differently. I don't look at, you know, it's more, it's I look at it as analysis of kind of what is the strategic.
SPEAKER_02:You're a professional political scientist, I'm just gonna store it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we we're just using different words, but we're in agreement. It is, it's very calculated on both sides. It was calculated. The problem is things are calculated and totally not. And and as we know in political science, there's a lot of miscalculation. I mentioned the April one, but there's a lot. And so right now, there's a lot of worry we could be on the cusp of more miscalculation. Because um, yes, it changed the balance, and Iran is severely weakened, no question about that. And now with the protest, I mean, this this regime, this leadership has lost all legitimacy domestically. Uh and um they are really, you know, between the domestic pressure and the external pressure, they're, you know, really on the ropes, so to speak. However, um, you know, being weak does not mean you still can't be dangerous. And so there are Israeli analysts now who are cautioning that if you want to look at June and just say, okay, we won and they're weak and we can do whatever we want, you know, think again, because actually by the end of the June war, uh the Israelis were paying a pretty high price. The Iranian missiles, their interceptors were diminished, they were they were running very low, the Israelis. Some of the Iranian missiles were getting through much more accurately than previously believed they would. 30 some Israelis were killed, certainly not as many as Iranians. There are about a thousand Iranians killed, but I mean, these you can't compare Israeli and Iranian capabilities. But you don't need a lot of mass missiles to cause a lot of damage in Israel to the economy, billions of dollars and missile defense, damage to infrastructure. Um, so there was, you know, they're thinking now, post-12-day war, that, you know, this is not a cost-free uh exercise to just think you can just strike Iran militarily and there won't be a price. And this is probably one of the reasons why, if reports are accurate, the Israelis um and certainly the surrounding neighborhood uh Arab states, especially in the Gulf, were urging the Trump administration, president from directly to hold off on attacking Iran two weeks ago.
SPEAKER_02:And Netanyahu himself, apparently, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Netanyahu himself. Now it's hard to know getting motivations. Who knows what motivates that guy? But but you know, it is there is a case to be made that Israel would not have felt prepared two weeks ago. US did not have, we did not have a lot of assets in the region. As of this week, we now have an aircraft carrier group. We have a significant amount of missile defense capabilities that have been just pushed over to the region in the last week that did not exist two weeks ago. So it could have been an operational issue, but it also could be a strategic calculation because you know, before the June war, again, it was operational moment. They knew they degraded Iranian air defense, they they had a limited target set, we're gonna do missiles, we're gonna do and they didn't necessarily expect the reaction they got. Now that they saw the reaction, there's more worry in Israel. And if you're gonna pay a price and get, you know, have the risk of being attacked, you're gonna want to know that these attacks are gonna do something significant. And it's not clear what military attacks can do, you know, what the goal is, is is if generally speaking, military strikes do not topple regimes.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Okay, I want to I want to talk about um where we might be heading um as we move towards the conclusion. But um, could you tell us what you think the significance of these recent protests were and how they're different from, if they are, from the 2022 protests?
SPEAKER_01:They do seem to be different. Um again, speaking of crossing red lines, this is seems like a moment that has crossed all red lines. They're different in that they're they're widespread, they're not just issue specific. They really look like people are just um wanting the regime gone. And basically, there's a sense that this set of leaders can no longer govern, right? They are they're failing, we we are not able to live. We have the currency, you know, you should have the currency collapse that was the you know that that triggered this whole thing. But it it's so much more than economics. Previous protests, you know, focus more on economics or we want our vote in the 2009 Green movement and so forth. This is about this, we just we can't survive with this government. So it does seem to be more significant. And the other tragic reason it's significant is the uh leadership, probably because they do view this as existential for all the reasons we just spoke about, um, appear, and again, we're getting very fragmented information because of the internet blackout. Um, but uh they are responding with the most brutal force we have seen yet, um at least in decades, possibly since the 1979 revolution. So you're talking thousands, if not tens of thousands killed, tens of thousands imprisoned. Again, the three-week internet blackout. This has never happened before. So clearly the Iranian leadership is worried.
SPEAKER_02:Where do you think we're going?
SPEAKER_01:The onyx answer is I don't know. I think what worries a lot of us is it's hard to see good outcomes. And we absolutely should be thinking about ways to support the people in the country when they're facing this horrendous repression. But it is also at the same time worrying that we it's hard to see outcomes, especially if we get to military attacks, which could just make things worse and prolong things. Uh, but there does not seem to be a unified opposition within the country that can offer replacement. So this is why none of us know what's next. So there's talk about, you know, different scenarios. Maybe Republican guards take over and you get rid of the clerics, and you know, so you'll have a different kind of brutal regime, like Venezuela, right? Just get rid of the um that said, let's keep in mind you get rid of the leader in Iran. This is an Islamic Shia, major Shia leader. This is going to have regional implications. This is not just like country specific. So that's going to be a bigger deal, as much as people despise him within Iran. Still, it's a religious figure. So, you know, there's lots of scenarios. The scenario, and here I'm just drawing on analysts of revolutions and people who really follow domestic developments in the country. The scenario of democracy and rule of law replacing this horrible situation we have now does not look good. And of course, that's the outcome we all want. Um, and that's the outcome that seems least likely given that now we've moved to this use of force in unprecedented ways. Um, you know, there's likely to be a lot of violence, unfortunately, whatever outcome happens. I think the only way things really change is from the inside. And I think the likely way this will change is especially when you have security and leadership fracturing. And we haven't seen it to the extent that you would need to really have a like a significant change. That could change. And so this is why I mean, you're a historian, you probably don't like to predict when things change so quickly on the ground, things can take on, you know, their own dynamics. So it's very, very hard to say. But what's very worrying is it's hard to see a peaceful democratic um ending at least quickly. Uh, there's likely to be a lot more bloodshed before we get there.
SPEAKER_02:Notwithstanding the fact, by way of conclusion, that um, you know, perhaps one of the most recurrent discursive motifs in um our understanding of Iran is that people have nothing but contempt for the mullah class and for uh the leadership and for the way the Islamic Republic has unfolded. Um and never has there been a regime as anti-American with as pro-American a populace as Iran. Right. All of these things we've been hearing for years and years and years. And yet that uh that sentiment of the uh of the people has not yielded um a unified political alternative to uh the regime in place. Um and I just wonder why. Um is it uniquely effective in in disaggregating and and dividing and conquering? Uh is are is the populace in fact not as uh uh contemptuous of the regime as we think? How how do we how should we understand that conundrum?
SPEAKER_01:I think they are as contemptuous, contemptuous, I especially now. I think you know they again, we don't have poll, you know, accurate polling and so forth, but from the information we have, it's it's pretty widespread uh, you know, hatred of this current leadership. Um there are several reasons. I mean, one, this this leadership is this regime is very good at creating security forces to protect itself and its survival. The IRGC, these forces are designed for regime protection. That's why you have a separate military in Iran, separate from these guards that are a regime protection force. That could change. They could fracture, and that's where we may see um real change. But um, so that's that's part of the problem. You can also, so part of it is this internal organization itself, which um has been a barrier. But the other one is probably, you know, I think, and this is why we do need to look at ourselves, we need to look at the outside world. For nearly half a century, we're doing these containment isolation policies, pressure, and we keep expecting this to lead to a better result, and it doesn't. And, you know, and you got to like psychology, and this doesn't seem rational. That doesn't seem rational. And so we haven't dealt with when you suffocate a country, you're not giving a lot of breathing space for other uh centers of gravity to organize. The sanctions have punished people more than the leaders. It creates black markets that only and further enrich the the IRGC guards and the elite, um, punish average Iranians. So we haven't, you know, we we do these things so we can feel good and show we're getting tough, but we we don't really have a theory of change. You know, how are we helping the people? People. And then, you know, we haven't spent a lot of time on how do we promote democracy and civil society and build help build it has to come organically, but but facilitate and support um all of this, you know, real talent that's in the country. You saw it in the women life freedom movement in 2022. You have leaders in the country. Um, but we haven't thought through how we can support them better. And now with Trump, you're moving in the very opposite direction because anything we can use to help them, you know, democracy programs, international support, um, civil society building. You know, we cut all these programs. We were pulling out of organizations internationally that do these things. We've cut them in our own government. Um, for goodness sake, just today, the Trump administration just sent back another plane load of Iranians trying to gain asylum in this country who will be prosecuted if they go back. That is not supporting the Iranian people. So I think, you know, there are both internal and external reasons. I can say, you know, we're to blame for the sorry state of affairs, but our policies have not helped. And if we get a moment for the Iranians to change their country on their own, we need to figure out how to be supporting that in much smarter ways than we have.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a sober reminder how in conflicts that are often deemed intractable intractable, uh one would want to see the more powerful party make the first step to breaking out of the cycle of enmity and hostility and violence. And so rarely is that the case. And indeed, yeah exhibiting.
SPEAKER_01:We could have been testing it for many years and we didn't, and here we are, you know, when we're in 2026 thinking about war with Iran. It's it's tragic, and and the Iranian people are being persecuted in a way we've never seen. So let's hope it's a better story. I've said this a lot in talks, but I didn't call it permanent hostility. I called it enduring. So I there's always hope. There's always hope. And as you say, the people of Iran and the people of the United States are not enemies, and so you know, we have to keep working for that, you know, that better future, but it's gonna be tough.
SPEAKER_02:That's okay. Thank you for lending your expertise to us. It's been really fascinating.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Lutskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, LutzkinCenter.history.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Rosalind Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.