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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum urges an end to wishful thinking about Iran, and a focus instead on the regime’s threatening words and murderous actions.
Then David is joined by the Carnegie Endowment scholar Karim Sadjadpour for an urgent conversation about the internal decay of Iran’s theocracy. They discuss the survival instincts of Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, the regime’s obsession with martyrdom and repression, the true cost of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, and the disconnect between the revolutionary slogans of the state and the aspirations of Iranian society.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I had a slightly different plan for the podcast this week, but the startling news of the Israeli airstrike on Iran beginning on the night of Friday, the 13th, upended plans. And so I’ve had to improvise something. And I want to thank our friends here at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario, for making their boardroom space available to me.
I will be speaking today to Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the closest study we have on the thought of the supreme leader of Iran. But before I speak to him, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts of my own about the situation unfolding. These are not thoughts on the military situation; I am no kind of military expert in any way. We’re recording 36 hours in advance, so the situation may well be changed.
We know a lot about the internal politics of Israel because it’s such an open society. We know a little bit less about the politics of the society on the receiving end of the Israeli exchange, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that’s what I’m going to talk about with Karim: How is all this affecting the Iranians? What can we expect? What can we hope for? And before we get to that dialogue, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts.
Now, I am in no way any kind of Iran expert or even amateur. I don’t speak the language. I’ve never been to the country. I once had an opportunity to go; I was invited by an international businessman who was closely connected to one of the leading families in the clerical regime, and he wanted to invite me to come in and meet some of the figures. This was at a time in my life when I had a kind of outsized notoriety as a figure in Iran politics because I ghostwrote a speech for President George W. Bush that became important. And I got credited or blamed or demonized as that figure. And I said, I would love to go. I’d be really interested to come in. How confident are you that I’ll be able to leave on time, and not 10 years later? And he assured me he was really, on the whole, quite confident. And that was not good enough, and so I declined to make the trip. I didn’t want to end up chained to a radiator for the next decade.
But here are the preliminary thoughts I want to offer. American policy to Iran, as long as I’ve been paying attention to it, has veered back and forth between two competing ideas or hopes about what Iran might be. One of them has been the hope that cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran is at hand. We heard a lot of that hope just after the 9/11 attacks, where some diplomats like Ryan Crocker, who was then, I think, ambassador—to I forget where; he was a special diplomat—said he had worked out a deal with the Iranians to help in Afghanistan. The Obama administration had vast hopes of cooperation with the Islamic Republic.
And those hopes always come to grief because, it turns out, the people who have staged regular marches chanting “Death to America” are not actually all that interested in cooperating with the United States. And the hopes that repeatedly appear—we saw them in 2009, when President Obama declined to help the Green Revolution in Iran, and in 2015, when he tried to reach a diplomatic agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear-weapons force—those hopes come a cropper.
But there’s another hope that also has been disappointed again and again, and that is the hope that we’re on the verge of some kind of transformational breakthrough—regime change in Iran. Repressive regimes can be very powerful, and especially those that come to power not by a coup but by a kind of mass revolution that brought the Islamic regime to Iran in 1979. They have staying power. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be here forever. Every one of those regimes sooner or later collapses, and perhaps collapse will come this week or next month or next year. Who knows? But it is a dangerous thing to put too much stock in.
I think there’s a real chance that when the Islamic regime in Iran changes, it may not change to something much nicer than what’s there now. It may change into a more traditional authoritarian regime that gives up some of its more ambitious hopes in order to consolidate power. That’s what happened to Cuba after Fidel Castro. The Castro regime is still there; it’s just not a revolutionary regime anymore. It’s a criminal regime, but it keeps power by being less aggressive toward the world around it.
It could also be a terrible bloodbath. We have, I think, a distorted idea of revolution from the happy experience of the revolutions in the northern part of Central Europe in 1989. The crowds come out. The leaders run away. The flags are waved. The people cheer. And a transition that is more or less peaceful begins. Revolutions against terrible regimes can often be terribly bloody. Terrible regimes inflict a terrible blood price on their society. And there’s a lot of payback that may be coming. The regime change in Iran may turn out to be a very, very bloody business, and a very protracted business that doesn’t end soon.
All of this is speculative—guesswork, really. I think the thing we ought to be thinking about, and this is the thing I think that the Israelis have in mind, is not the future of Iran—not what will happen inside Iran, not guesswork about the transformation—but attention careful to the capabilities of that regime joined to its expressed intentions. We know that Iran had capabilities that were almost on the verge of nuclear breakout. And, of course, it expresses its intentions in every way we can see and hear, not just by its chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” but by its backing for terrorist regimes, terrorist groupings all over the planet. And not just in the region—Iran still has the blood on its hands from attacks in Argentina on the Jewish community center there; they killed dozens and dozens of people in two separate attacks in the early 1990s. Iran has attempted terror operations in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world.
We know their intentions. We know their capabilities. That’s the thing we have to focus on, and not our hopes or our fears, or our imaginings, or our beliefs, or our opinions, or our guesses about the way of the future. I’ll be talking more about that in this dialogue.
I want to say one last thing, which is: Conflict is a reality of human existence. It’s a terrible reality. It’s a reality. And we have to be prepared and meet for it, and we have to sometimes anticipate it and try to avert the worst by acting more decisively in the present. But those necessary actions are not any kind of enthusiasm for conflict. No one wants to see conflict. No one wants to see human suffering. But it doesn’t go away because you choose not to believe it or postpone it later for other people to deal with after you.
This problem of the Iranian nuclear weapon has been postponed for a long time. I think we’ve now reached the point where it can be postponed no longer. And I think we all have to hope for a decisive resolution, as rapid a resolution as possible. It’s past the point of a peaceful resolution. But it can still be a stable and successful resolution—stable and successful not just for the people who are threatened by the Iranian nuclear weapon, but by the millions of Iranians who are oppressed and taxed and stolen from in order to fund the weapon that they don’t want and that will do them no good.
Iran is the center of a great and historic civilization. Persia has been the great cultural exporter of the whole central Asian region, from Istanbul to Delhi. For hundreds of years, if you had a new poem, a new recipe, a new way of dressing, probably it originated in Persian; it came out to you. The game of chess is Persia’s gift to the world—one of its many—along with a great poetic tradition. This is a society that has been cut off from its birthright and that has been cut off from its future, from its capability to contribute to humanity. Perhaps we will live to see that potential realized and that great connection to its great past revived. In any case, we can hope.
I turn now to my conversation with my friend Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you all for watching.
[Music]
Frum: I’m joined today by Karim Sadjadpour, who is one of the most sought-after experts in all of Washington on the topic of the internal development of Iran, the author of a 2009 book about Iran’s supreme leader that is a classic that is much consulted in the field, son of the Iranian diaspora, a native of the great state of Michigan. I’m delighted to welcome Karim to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Karim Sadjadpour: It’s wonderful to be with you, David. Thanks for inviting me.
Frum: Let’s first state that we are recording this on the morning of Monday after the opening of the air war by Israel inside Iran. There will be a little bit of a lag between the time we record and time that this posts. So there may be some events that we’re unaware of. Forgive us for that. I don’t think we’re going to talk much about the strictly military events. Those are amply covered by people closer to the scene. I want to talk more about the situation inside Iran.
Let’s begin first by recalling your book about the supreme leader. What kind of man do you take him for? He was more vigorous, obviously, when you wrote about him. What’s the mentality of the leadership in Iran?
Sadjadpour: Well, I’m sure you remember that wonderful book by Eric Hoffer that came out in the ’50s called The True Believer, and Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei is a true believer. He’s someone who is now the “last of the Mohicans.” He is the last of the first-generation revolutionaries, the revolutionaries from 1979, and he’s someone who is committed to the principles of the revolution. In fact, we call them hardliners. They call themselves principleists, and that means, as I said, they’re loyal to the principles of the revolution.
And what are those principles? I think at this point, you can distill it to three big ideas: “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and the mandatory hijab—the veiling of women, which Ayatollah Khamenei called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. And so Khamenei is committed to those principles, and he has internalized some of the thoughts of the great philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli, which is that the greatest danger for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. He took the lessons of Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the Soviet Union to heart, and said that didn’t prolong the shelf life of the Soviet Union; it hastened its collapse. And for that reason, he’s, on one hand, a very earnest believer in these revolutionary principles, but he also believes that if he were to change those principles, it would actually hasten the Islamic Republic’s collapse.
So he’s now 86 years old. He’s not going to change his worldview. But the final thing I’d say here, David, is that Khamenei is arguably the longest-serving autocrat in the world, right? He came to power as president in the early ’80s He has been supreme leader since 1989. So if my math is correct, that’s about 36 years he’s been supreme leader. He hasn’t left the country since 1989.
And I’ll just say, you know, in conclusion, you don’t get to be the longest-serving autocrat in the world if you’re a gambler. So he has very good survival instincts. And, you know, as Hannah Arendt once said many years ago, even “the most radical revolutionary [will become] a conservative the day after the revolution,” because you suddenly have something you want to preserve. So he’s, up until now, had good survival instincts, and we’ll see, you know, how he gets himself out of what’s probably been the greatest bind in his political career.
Frum: Well, one of the great gambles that this regime has taken is the gamble on a nuclear program. Becoming a nuclear state is a very hazardous undertaking. A lot can go wrong on the way there. Once you’re there, like Pakistan, you get the ability to commit terrorism without fear of consequence or, like Russia, the ability to commit aggression without fear of consequence. But on the way there, you can end up like—remember the Argentine dictators had a nuclear program in the ’90s, and that led to the collapse of their regime? The South African apartheid regime had a nuclear-weapons program. Collapse of regime.
A lot of people become much more interested in collapsing your regime if you are on the way to a nuclear program. So you have this terrible zone of danger, and the Iranians seem now to be in that zone of danger. In your assessment, which do they care about more as preservationists: preserving the nuclear program or preserving the regime? Can those be separated?
Sadjadpour: I think they can, in that what’s obviously paramount for them is their own survival. And we should emphasize that if you contrast this regime to the previous government in Iran—the monarchy, the shah—that was a government which had a very close relationship with the United States, with the West. Many of its political and military elite had studied overseas. And so when things got bad for that government, many of them could remake their lives in Los Angeles or London or Bethesda. Whereas this Iranian regime is deeply isolated, one of the only friends they had was the Syrian government, which collapsed last fall. So for that reason, they have these survival instincts, and they’ve shown themselves able to make tactical compromises, including in the nuclear domain, when their survival is at stake.
Now, the challenge that he has, Ayatollah Khamenei, is he’s now in this situation in which the parameters are: If he feels that if he doesn’t retaliate—if he doesn’t show any strength—he loses his face. And he loses face not only externally, but also internally. And every dictator wants to be feared by its own population. So if he doesn’t respond strongly, he loses face. If he responds too strongly, he could lose his head. And so he’s in these very tight parameters at the moment, and he’s long believed that if you compromise under threat and you compromise under pressure, that doesn’t alleviate the pressure—it actually signals that the pressure is working and invites even more of it. And so that’s why I say he’s in a very difficult bind these days.
Frum: Is this how they see it? I mean, they look like they’ve been completely—they look like fools. They look penetrated. They look helpless. They look defensive. They look as unintimidating as possible. That’s a dangerous way for a dictatorship to look. And their enemies look effortlessly superior over them. And the regime also seems to be projecting a lot of fear, because there’s this question of: Can the Israelis do anything about the nuclear installation under that big mountain?
But everyone seems to take for granted that the United States could, if it would. And all the Iranians can do is hope that the Americans choose not to. They have no levers of power against the United States. Their retaliatory terror weapon, Hezbollah, has been taken from their hands, and although we’re told there are hunter-killer teams prepositioned all over the Western world, after the last few days, those kinds of claims of Iranian fearsomeness look a lot less credible than they used to do.
How does that redound on a dictatorship like this, where you just look like—you look defeated?
Sadjadpour: So you’re right that if we look in virtually every realm—militarily, intelligence, financially, technologically, diplomatically—Iran is outmatched in every sense by Israel. There was a very good piece in [Monday’s] Wall Street Journal about how Israel has established total air dominance over Iran. And so there’s no doubt that in this head-to-head conflict, Iran is going to lose.
The question is: What comes next once the dust starts to settle? I think for the Israelis, they want two outcomes from this war. They want to significantly degrade and set back Iran’s nuclear program. As you alluded to, the big question mark will be: What happens to that deep underground facility in Fordo, and do the Israelis have the wherewithal to damage it badly, or would that require Donald Trump’s intervention? That’s one big question. But the other big question as the Israelis have also defined it is that: How does this impact the stability of the Iranian regime? And how does this impact the future of the supreme leader?
We’ve had so much discussion in the United States about President Biden’s cognitive and physical abilities during his presidency. I mean, in Iran, you have an 86-year-old supreme leader, as we talked about, Khamenei, whose only education was in the seminaries of Qom seven decades ago now. He doesn’t have the wherewithal to be leading this very high-tech, military, financial, technological war. But what happens to his leadership, and what is likely to happen to the system?
There’s a possibility that it could transition into a system, a government whose organizing principle is no longer the revolutionary ideology of 1979, but the national interests of Iran. That certainly is a possibility, but there’s also a danger, David, as you alluded to earlier, that you could have some more aggressive military commanders come to power who also take the same lesson you did, which is that the regimes which didn’t have nuclear weapons—[Muammar] Qaddafi’s Libya, [Saddam Hussein’s] Iraq, Ukraine when it gave up its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union—they all were vulnerable to external intervention. Whereas regimes like North Korea, which had the nuclear weapons, provided themselves a cloak of immunity.
So Israel, no doubt they’ve tactically—this war, they will prevail. The question is, strategically, six months to a year from now, what is this due to the nature of the regime and the nuclear program?
Frum: So we hear the phrase regime change a lot. I think to those of us of a certain age, that conjures up memories of 1989, where at least in the northern part of Central Europe—East Germany, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics—the process was bloodless. The crowds came into the streets, the leaders resigned or went away, and there was a rapid transition to a Western-oriented system, and everybody 20 years later is much more prosperous. And you have some nostalgic extremists, but really, these are successful societies.
So that’s the model of regime change that I think we all want to imagine. But of course, revolutions tend to be, usually, much bloodier affairs. And even in Eastern Europe, there was the case of Romania, where hundreds died. So Iran must be riddled. When you think about the number of people who have been prisoners, the number of women who have been abused, the number of families that have lost loved ones to the Revolutionary Forces—when that regime’s power breaks, you could be looking at a very, very bloody confrontation, where maybe there isn’t a transition of power. Maybe there’s just bloodshed for a long time, until some Napoleon Bonaparte figure emerges at the top.
Sadjadpour: So there’s a piece that I’m preparing for Foreign Affairs for later in the year about Iran’s potential—five potential futures for Iran. And they do vary dramatically, right?
There’s the bloodless-coup option. There’s something that could be more violent. The challenge we have at the moment is: You have a regime which has very limited popular support. I would put it at, at most, perhaps 20 percent, most likely lower than that. Let’s say 15 percent of society. Just to take a step back for a second, this is a regime which is not only politically authoritarian, but it’s also an economic basket case and socially authoritarian. So they not only—you know, a lot of places they’re just dictatorships, but you’re allowed to pursue economic advancement or you’re allowed to at least watch what you want, or drink what you want, or eat what you want. This is a regime which—it polices your private activities, as well. So it has very few redeeming qualities. But the challenge is that they may not have much in terms of the breadth of their support. But they do, up until now—their support does have some depth, meaning that the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia have shown themselves willing to go out and continue to kill and die for the cause.
And there was a book which came out about a decade ago, which was based off of an article in the Journal of Democracy, which I believe it was called “The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes,” and essentially made the argument that revolutionary governments—meaning those authoritarian regimes that are borne out of a revolution, whether it was the Soviet Union, Cuba—tend to be more durable than just your run-of-the-mill dictatorship because there is an organizing principle that helps the security forces cohere. You’re not just killing and staying in power to enrich one man and his family.
And so that’s a big question. You know, because you have a society—as I said, perhaps 80, 85 percent of society—that is opposed to the regime, but at the moment, they’re unarmed. They’re unorganized. They’re leaderless, and I say this to their credit, not to the detriment: It’s a regime which believes in martyrdom, but a society which doesn’t believe in martyrdom. We’re trying to separate mosque and state, not join it, which is distinct from a lot of the Arab opposition movements.
And so in some ways, the portrait I’m painting, David, is: I see light at the end of the tunnel in Iran, but there’s no tunnel at the moment, you know, for people to get from where they are to where they want to go.
Frum: Is there gonna be any, do you think—or do you expect any kind of rally around the flag effect, which is: We hated the regime, but now the Israelis are bombing us, so we rally to our leaders because at least they’re ours?
Sadjadpour: I don’t think so. I think what tends to happen in these situations is that people’s existing political disposition is simply accentuated. So if prior to this Israeli bombing, you were a supporter of the regime, a defender of the regime, and you blame everything on America and Israel, you obviously have much more ammunition to hold those views. And if prior to this, you were an opponent, a critic of the regime, and say that this is a regime which has never prioritized the security and well-being of the Iranian people, there’s far more evidence to continue to support that view.
But how that plays out in practical terms—up until now, what we’ve seen is that those supporters of the regime are willing to go out into the streets and show off that support, whereas the opponents of the regime, whenever they’ve done that, they’ve been brutalized. And so that dynamic hasn’t yet changed.
Frum: We see these clips circulating on social media of Iranian soccer fans booing any mention of Palestine, of people amending their paths so they do not step on the flag of the United States when it’s painted on the sidewalk. So those obviously have great currency in our world. It’s we want to believe is going on. Are we kidding ourselves, or is there some fondness or attachment or fantasy about the outside world?
Sadjadpour: No, I think that’s right that, after having lived under a repressive theocracy for 46 years, it’s a society which is desperate to be part of the outside world and to have—I think people recognize that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as long as its national slogan is “Death to America, and death to Israel.” That’s not a winning slogan. So I think that’s right. People are patriotic, they’re prideful, and I think they recognize that, prior to the revolution, when Iran did have a good relationship with the United States, the country’s status was so much better. So I don’t think we’re being delusional about the nature of Iranian society.
But this is, as I said, kind of a lesson I’ve repeatedly come to see, which is that leadership is so important. And there’s a huge popular demand for change in Iran, but we haven’t yet seen a supply of an opposition leadership, which can, as I said, lead people from where they are now to where they want to go.
Frum: Why did the regime want an atomic bomb or a nuclear bomb so, so badly? We tend to take it for granted. It’s an obvious thing. You’re trying to terrorize the neighbors—of course, you want a nuclear weapon. But it’s very risky to go from here to there. And it is the nuclear weapon that involved them with a conflict with Israel, whereas without a nuclear weapon, they could easily dominate all of their Arab neighbors, and Afghanistan to the east.
Why did they make this choice? It was made a long time ago, and it’s been persisted in, in the face of tremendous difficulties—sabotage in both the United States and Israel. Why bother? Why not concentrate on building up the strength of your Hezbollah arm, for example, and having a less-confrontational approach that would allow you to maximize your power in a more endearing way?
Sadjadpour: So their nuclear program has really been, now, a six-decade odyssey. Obviously, it was started during the time of the shah, and after the revolution, the revolutionaries shut down the program. They said pursuing a nuclear program is un-Islamic. And at that time, if you recall, Chernobyl had happened, Three Mile Island. And so nuclear power was out of vogue. It was after the—
Frum: But under the shah, it was a civilian nuclear program.
Sadjadpour: Well, even under the shah, it was a program in which I think they were hedging. It was obviously cloaked in a civilian guise. Even the shah himself, I think, wanted to keep his options open. But during the time of the shah, they had access to elite technology. It was American companies that were providing Iran that technology. Obviously, things shut down. The revolutionaries shut it down. And after the Iran-Iraq war, when they realized it was a country which was largely friendless, very few allies, they started to restart the program. Then in the late ’80s, the Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan provided them some of the intelligence to try to build it.
But I think the challenge they’ve always had is that, as you said, it’s such a deeply unpopular regime, and it actually has been for quite a long time that there’s been so many, not only Iranian civilians, but also regime insiders who have been willing to collaborate with, whether it’s U.S. intelligence, Israeli intelligence, to out elements of the program. And they’ve always—certainly in the last decade, since the program was exposed to the public in the early 2000s, just before the Iraq War—they’ve tried to maintain this facade that it’s a nuclear-energy program, right?
The reality is that this is a program which has cost the nation—if you want to measure it, both in terms of sunk costs, but also ancillary costs and opportunity costs in terms of sanctions and lost oil revenue—the price tag is, I think a conservative estimate, at least $500 billion, considering how much oil revenue and oil production Iran has lost. And that’s for a program which barely provides just over 1 percent of Iran’s energy needs. And it hasn’t provided a deterrent either. So it’s really been a colossal failure to have spent this much time and money on a nuclear program which neither provides you energy nor deterrence.
But just on this point, David, it’s possible that a conclusion that some of the Revolutionary Guard commanders are reaching is not that Iran shouldn’t have pursued a nuclear program, but it may be possible the conclusion they may draw is that they shouldn’t have pursued the program so deliberately, that instead of this marathon approach of inching towards nuclear-weapons capability, they should have tried to sprint out and done what North Korea has done, which they have this cloak of immunity.
Frum: The sprint out? Is that going to be a feasible thing? You quote this program—it’s not exactly a positive program—“Death to America, death to Israel” it, it sounds pretty negative. But “Death to America” is just a slogan and a fantasy. “Death to Israel” is something that you can imagine, actually, a nuclear-armed Iran could achieve. And since the Israelis are not going to agree to be done to death, the slogan “Death to Israel” means: War with Israel before we become a nuclear power.
I mean, chess was invented in Iran. If you play the chess moves out three—Well, we tell them we want a nuclear weapon in order to murder all of them. We start developing a nuclear weapon. They’ve got one already. They’ve got a better air force. We don’t. What’s going to happen here? How did they not see that the logic of this was: They get hit very hard by a temporarily superior enemy before they can achieve the thing that can realize their fantasy of annihilation?
Sadjadpour: Well, I always remember something you told me over lunch, David. It was almost 20 years ago now. You probably don’t remember, but you said, You can enrich uranium, and you can call for Israel to be wiped off the map, but you can’t do both at the same time.
Frum: (Laughs.)
Sadjadpour: And that proved to be prophetic, your words there. And, you know, one thing I want to emphasize is that we really need to distinguish between the ideological objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the national interests of Iran, which in my view are two totally separate things that are at odds with one another, right?
Because from the perspective of the national interests of Iran, Israel and Iran actually have complimentary state interests, right? Israel is a technological power. Iran is an energy power. That was a source of great cooperation prior to the revolution. There’s a millennia, you know, thousands of years of history there of a Persian-Jewish affinity. Iran, to this day—although it’s dwindling—their Jewish community has one of the longest continuously inhabited Jewish communities in the world. So this ethos of “Death to Israel” does not reflect the national interests of Iran. And obviously, “Death to America”—any state which is trying to advance the national interest in security of its people, the last thing you want to do is gratuitously pick a fight with the world’s greatest economy and superpower. So you’re right to say that this was always going to be a losing game if you’re the Islamic Republic.
But as I said, going back to what was said earlier, starting with Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khamenei, their worldview has always been driven by revolutionary principles, not the national interests of Iran.
Frum: Well, the national interest—and this is maybe a point that Americans don’t appreciate enough—is Iran is the center of a great cultural zone and a long, continuous cultural tradition. It’s like the France of Asia. It’s the place where the food was invented. It’s the place where the poetry was invented. It was the place where the fashions were invented. If you were an important person anywhere from Istanbul to Delhi, your idea of a luxurious, elegant life was probably based on an idea that started in what is now Iran. And that zone stretches into what is now Afghanistan, stretches into what is now Uzbekistan, stretches into what is now Russian central Asia, stretches of course into what is now Iraq, stretches a little bit into what is now Syria. But only at very maximum moments had ever come to touch the Mediterranean.
It was always looking in the other way, and that’s the zone of the great Persian language and all its many affiliates. And you would think that a sort of a Persian Iran would be looking north and east, not westward. And this religious fervor that has gripped this regime also seems to be not, again, consistent with the long-standing religious traditions of Shiite Iran, which were never all that interested in going all the way to the Mediterranean.
Sadjadpour: Yeah, I’m a big believer—who said the quote that all history is biography? And Kissinger has observed that before he was in government, he didn’t think that the individual mattered that much in history. After he served in government, he reached the exact opposite conclusion, which is that the individual shaped history.
And in the case of Iran, we’re still living in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was the one that essentially invented this ideology. The Islamic Republic was an essay that he wrote in exile in Najaf in 1970. And when you go back to Khomeini’s writings, he was someone who—it’s not an exaggeration to say—he was deeply anti-Semitic. He was obsessed with Israel, and when he talked about Israel, it wasn’t just about Israelis. He would talk very—you know, at that time, I think now the modern Iranian officials have realized that they shouldn’t use that language, and they use Zionists—but he didn’t do that then. And so that’s obviously profoundly shaped the character of the Islamic Republic.
And you’re absolutely right that if you look at where Iran has invested its political and financial capital over the last four or five decades—Lebanese Hezbollah they’ve spent billions; Hamas; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Houthis in Yemen; Shia militias in Iraq; and Iran’s axis, what they call their axis of resistance. It was essentially five failing or failed states.
And now that we’re on the topic, David, I remember in around 2008, I was at one of these track-two diplomacy conferences in Europe, and I was seated next to a senior Iranian official, and I asked him after this dinner, I said, Think of all the money that Islamic Republic has spent over the decades on Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At that time, it was billions. Since then, it has spent tens of billions. Think of all the—how Iran could have spent that money on sending abroad and educating these Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites and how much better off those societies would be now. Even vis-a-vis Israel, you could say you’re educating these folks and advancing them economically.
And I’ll never forget his response. He looked at me and he said, Well, what good would that have done for Iran? And I said, What do you mean? He said, Do you think, had we sent these people abroad to become doctors and lawyers and engineers, that they’re going to want to come back and fight for Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? No. They’re going to remain professionals. And so it just kind of occurred to me what a cynical strategy Iran has had for the Middle East.
And I kind of think of the region as: There’s two kinds of actors in this region. There’s those who aspire to be falcons and those who are vultures, right? You have some countries that they’re in the business of trying to build things, you know? They want soaring societies, cities, economies. And then you have Iran and its proxies, and they’re not in the business of building. They’re in the business of destroying, and they prey on the misery of others. The problem, though, is that—this was my big takeaway from a Fulbright I did; I spent a year in Lebanon in the early 2000s, in Beirut—that it takes decades to build things, and it takes weeks to destroy them. And so that, unfortunately, that strategy, that resistance strategy, has proven effective up until now—I should say, it did until last November, last fall.
Frum: Last thought on this: It does seem like there’s a strange convergence between people in the region and people in the West. The people in the region say, We don’t care what happens to us so long as we can blame it on somebody else. And the people in the West will say, So long as we can find someone, some reason to blame things on ourselves, we don’t care what happens to the people in question, and that there’s this craving for blame and accusation that becomes a motor that just crushes the lives of potentially productive others. It is an interesting exercise to go to the World Bank or IMF site and look at the chart of Iranian growth through the 1970s, and say, If this had continued, where would Iran be today? And by my crude math, it’d be a country as wealthy as Portugal or Spain.
Sadjadpour: Yeah, what a lot of Iranians will tell you is that if you look at GDP in around 1978, ’77—just a year or so before the revolution—Iran, Turkey, and South Korea were at the same level. And what’s happened five decades after just shows you all the difference that vision and leadership makes. And so I say this is a regime which aspires to be like North Korea, and you have a society which aspires to be like South Korea.
Frum: Yeah. Well, one more of those comparisons of this: As people are marking the extraordinary achievements of Poland this year, the point is made that in 1990, Poland was as poor as Iran, and today Poland is as rich as Japan.
But another way to put that is: In 1990, Iran was as rich as Poland was then—why couldn’t Iran be as rich as Poland is now if they’d made other kinds of choices? But the implications of this are very unsettling for a lot of people because the answer is: Well, the correct answer to your economic-development strategy is to align with the United States, open your markets, have free markets, have capitalism, get out of the military-ambition business. And there are a lot of people, and not just the Iranian leadership, but a lot say that that’s not the path. We don’t want to admit that the neoliberals were right.
Sadjadpour: Well, I think the other thing, David, is that, on one hand, I say that this is a regime whose priority is not the national interests of Iran. So they’re not interested in advancing people’s economic well-being and security, but at the same time, they’re deeply interested in staying in power.
David, you were friends with Christopher Hitchens, as well, right?
Frum: Indeed, I was, and he was once a judge at an Iranian film festival. He was able to get into Iran, which is kind of amazing. They must have made some clerical error or something.
Sadjadpour: Yeah, he had a deep interest in Iran, and so he used to have these salon dinners at his home in Kalorama. And one night—I was living close to him at that time, and he kindly invited me and—one of the guests that evening was the actor Sean Penn. Sean Penn was, at that time, very interested in Iran and had just made a visit to Iran himself. And he asked me a pretty simple question, which is, Why does the United States have this problem with Iran? Why don’t we just normalize relations with Iran? And I said, That’s not a unilateral choice that we can make. I agree. It’s in the U.S. national interest to normalize relations, but you can’t force a regime which needs you as an adversary to normalize. And he said something which always stayed with me. He had just come from Havana. And he said, Fidel always jokes that if America were to remove the embargo, he would do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated, because he understood that his power is best preserved in this closed bubble.
And that very much is true about the current leaders of the Islamic Republic, which is that they fear normalization with the United States, in some ways more than they fear continued cold war with the United States, because they understand that if you crack open Iran to the forces of international capitalism and civil society, it’s much more difficult to preserve the rule of a theocracy, who’s led by a guy who thinks he is the Prophet Muhammad’s representative on Earth. That’s not a winning model. And so they thrive in isolation.
Frum: And isolation may be what they’re going to get. Last question, and then I will thank you for your time: How optimistic should Americans be about their ability to have any influence on the outcomes in Iran?
Sadjadpour: You know, it’s an important question, and invariably what we’ve seen in the Middle East over the last two decades is that our ability to shape outcomes in the region is somewhat limited.
I would say that there are more things that we could be doing right now which we’re not doing. I’ll give you one example. So one of the things that President Trump did in his first weeks in office is they shut down Voice of America. And you could argue, Voice of America is not that relevant in a lot of other contexts, but in the Iranian context, it still was able to reach many tens of millions of Iranians. And it’s true: The product needed to be updated and reformed to be made for a great television network. But that’s one way in which it is a huge tool we have in our toolkit. The regime was obsessed with Voice of America. And rather than at least getting some concessions from them for shutting it down, we did it for free. I think they’ve now realized that this was a mistake and we need this communication tool with the Iranians. And so we’ve somewhat backed some of those employees.
But I think the biggest impact we can have is in terms of media and communication, because one of the other things that the regime tends to do during times of crisis is to shut off the internet. They want to prevent people from communicating with the outside world. And so that’s actually a technology, frankly, which—you know, Starlink and Elon Musk, that would be a very important factor in inhibiting the regime’s ability to shut down communications between Iranians, and between Iranians and the outside world. So there are things we can do, but ultimately, the future of Iran is going to be decided inside Iran.
Frum: Well, as I often express, speaking on the internet, on Twitter, one of my great hopes in life is to someday embark on an art and archeology tour of the wonders of Persian civilization. I hope I’ll live to see that and that it will be possible in an open Iran to rediscover firsthand, with one’s own eyes, not just in a museum but in the place, the extraordinary achievements of this amazing civilization that has self-darkened itself so unnecessarily and with such loss, not just for the people of Iran-Persia, but for the world.
Thank you so much for joining us today. What a pleasure to have you. Bye-bye.
Sadjadpour: Thank you, David. It’s great to be with you.
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Frum: Thanks to Karim Sadjadpour for joining on such short notice. I appreciate his scholarly and his personal insights into these urgent questions that we’re discussing about Iran and peace in the region.
Thanks to our friends at the Royal Hotel here in Picton, Ontario, for making space available to us.
If you enjoy the program, I hope you’ll share it, subscribe, and like, but make others aware of it too. That really strengthens our ability to bring content to you. And the best support you can give this program is to subscribe to The Atlantic, where you will see my work and that of so many of my friends and colleagues who work so hard to achieve information that is, as the saying goes, “of no party or clique.”
Thank you for watching. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show.
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Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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