Lawfare Daily: Beyond the Headlines: A History of U.S.-Iran Relations

[Intro]

John Ghazvinian: So from the very beginning, the U.S. developer's reputation in Iran as being hands off, non-imperialist. And, for those people who actually bothered to study American history, they saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire.

So you could see why on multiple levels the United States was really appealing to Iranians.

Ariane Tabatabai: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Ariane Tabatabai, public service fellow here at Lawfare and with John Ghazvinian. He is the author of “America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present.”

John Ghazvinian: To me, what's always very important is to recognize that for the vast majority of the history of these two countries, they have actually been very, not just friendly, but I have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, you know, a really warm, if sometimes idealized idea of each other, and that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly.

Ariane Tabatabai: Today, we're going to zoom out of the ongoing war with Iran and U.S.-Iran policy to talk about U.S.-Iran relations and their history.

[Main Episode]

John, I wanna start by talking about your vantage point as a historian of the relationship and what the sort of origin story of this relationship is because when you ask most Americans where this history begins, it often starts with 1979 and the hostage crisis. For many Iranians, I think you would probably hear 1953 and the coup, which we will talk about.

But for you, how does it all start? Your book starts in the 1700s. So what should folks know about this history? Zooming out a little bit from the ongoing tensions.

John Ghazvinian: I came to this topic as an Iranian-American who was curious about the history between these two countries, basically.

As someone who was a trained historian and a former journalist, I felt that I had some kinds of skills to bring to this, but I think fundamentally I came to this with curiosity. You know, as I think everyone, or many people, I guess many of us who are Iranian and American at the same time and have some curiosity about the extremely fraught and extremely tense relationship between these two countries.

You know, we ask ourselves questions about, well, why, how did this begin? You know, what, you know, and as a historian, I'm course particularly curious about the origin stories. The beginning, you know, everything has a history. How did this start? So, you know, I will be completely honest and say that was kind of where I came from on this.

But, and I think that's the kind of question that I get a lot from people as I was working on the book as well as since the book has come out, which is, okay, help us understand why these two countries hate each other so much. What's gonna happen? Where's it all going? Who started it? You know, what's the problem?

You know, which is, which are all very reasonable questions to ask. Anytime there is a conflict, it is natural to ask, well, who started it? Whose fault is it? But the problem is history doesn't really work that way, and I don't think it's a really useful way to approach history. You know, so what I was trying to do was to ask what I thought were maybe deeper questions.

So, for example, when you ask yourself, well, who started it? Whose fault is it? Where did it all go so wrong? There are a lot of other questions that are embedded in that, which is, for example, first of all, there's the assumption that history is some sort of courtroom drama where somebody needs to adjudicate, where Judge Judy needs to come along and say, it's your fault.

You need to pay so and so this much for the damages that you caused. You know, history is not that simple. I think also embedded in these questions is this idea that if everything went so wrong, that perhaps things were great. At one point, maybe things weren't so bad, and so then I'd become curious about, well, if things, you know, if we're asking ourselves, you know, where did it go wrong? Maybe we should ask ourselves where did it go right? Or did it ever go right? Was there ever a golden age of U.S.-Iran relations? And these were all the kinds of questions I was trying to grapple with this in this book.

And of course, there's something quirky perhaps about going all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century. You know, we don't typically think about this as a 300-year relationship, and there are reasons why I went back that far.

You know, I found as a historian, my first question was, well, where do I begin this story? And you mentioned 1979 to 1953. These are two huge dates in the history of U.S.-Iran relations.

And I think I would, I think at this point we can say that 2026 is the third big date in U.S.-Iran related in the history of U.S.-Iran relations—willalmost certainly go down in history that way, but the historian I wanna get to outta myself looking back those are the two big dates. Right.

But I think I had a bit of an issue with this because you're right for a lot of, not just Americans, but I think for people who fundamentally have a favorable view of the United States and foreign policy, I think is a better way of saying it, and a fundamentally critical and negative view of Iran or the Islamic Republic, it is natural to wanna begin the history in 1979.

'cause that's when the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian revolution took place, when fanatical students got a little out of hand and took the American Embassy hostage and held its employees hostage for a well over a year and brought about eventually the rupture in diplomatic relations between these two countries.

So it's easy to say that's where it all went wrong. Everything before that was great. And everything since then has been terrible. And Iran has become this evil terrorist state at the heart of the Middle East that has done nothing but cause havoc and destruction of the U.S.-Iran relationship in addition to other things as well—fine, perfectly reasonable narrative to have.

There is an equally reasonable narrative that a lot of Iranians have, or shall we say, people who are less sympathetic to American foreign policy and more sympathetic perhaps to the Iranian nationalist narrative which is 1953, which is the year in which a CIA backed coup brought down the very popular elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran who had committed the great sin in the eyes of the west of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, and saying that Iran's oil profits belonged to the Iranian people.

It's a very popular position for 1950s, sort of third world nationalist to take. But it was of course, extremely unpopular with the British oil company at the time, the Anglo-Iranian oil company, which later became British Petroleum, what BP as we know it today. So for a lot of Iranians or Iranian nationalists, the story begins there.

And there was this idea that everything was fine until the CIA came along and overthrew the government, and then caused, you know, that then helped the Shah at the time, the king, to solidify his rule, which became increasingly dictatorial through the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly reliant on American support and of course resulted in the famous blowback or, you know, backlash of 1979.

And that is a perfectly reasonable narrative to take as well. But both of these narratives assume this kind of perfect idyllic past, right, this prelapsarian and kind of, you know, perfect kind of paradise—Again, we all know that U.S.-Iran relations before 1979 were not perfect. They relied on a state-to-state relationship between the United States and, you know, a deeply, oncreasingly unpopular and dictatorial and quite ruthless monarchy.

And we also know that before 1953, although this is often more vague to people, but we know that, you know, U.S.-Iran relations weren’t perfect. It was a perhaps more innocent time, but a lot of people forget that the U.S. and Iran actually first broke off relations in 1935 because of a dispute that grew out of a speeding ticket that was given to the Iranian ambassador in rural Maryland in a town called Elkton, Maryland.

So they were, you know, things were far from perfect. So I wanted to go back a bit further and say, well, where should we begin this history? Should we begin it with diplomatic relations in the 1880s, the first exchange of ambassadors? Sure. But then you're writing a purely diplomatic history, a purely political history and relationships between countries are not always just political and diploma ballot.

So I thought, okay, maybe I'll start the history as some people do in the 1830s with the first arrival of Presbyterian missionaries in Iran from the United States, people who went there to build schools and clinics, and also to proselytize Christianity, proselytize the locals into Christianity. But I thought, you know what about sort of pre-history?

I mean, there's a pre-history sometimes even before people come into contact with each other, the kind of preconceived notions that they have of each other. And I discovered much to my surprise that colonial American newspapers as early as the 1720s were obsessed with Iran. And so I'll sort of stop there and say, that's why I took the history as far back,

Ariane Tabatabai: Okay, well now I wanna hear about this newspapers and you know, what were they saying about Iran or Persia at the time?

John Ghazvinian: Yeah. On a sort of whim, I put the word Persia and Persians into a search engine. You know, at the time looked, trying to look into these colonial newspapers. And I didn't expect to find anything. But what I found was that these newspapers were full of stories about Persia, as they called it at the time.

Sometimes a quarter or as much as a third of the newspaper was news about Iran. And I thought this makes no sense to me—Why in 1722, 1725, 1724 are newspapers published in Colonial Philadelphia and Boston that come out once a week and there are three pages or four pages. Why do you have a whole page of about Iran?

At the very beginning, you had you, I even came across one newspaper from 1724 that said, whose lead story said: we regret that we have no news from Persia this week. That was the headline story in colonial North America in 1724. The leading story in the newspaper was ‘we're sorry we have no news about Iran this week.’

Now that is a little strange and there are reasons for this. Some of it is just pure coincidence. The very, very first printing presses that started producing weekly newspapers in colonial North America in 1720, happened to be in the early 1720s. And the big international news story of the day in 1722 was the collapse of the Persian Empire, the one of many Persian empires throughout history, the last really big kind of glorious Persian empire, the Safavid empire.

And it was at the hands of these Afghan rebels who were rebelling it because the Persians were trying to force them to convert from Sunni to Shia Islam. And the Americans, the colonial Americans, American settlers at the time mistakenly believed that because of this was the sort of Sunni-Shia thing that therefore the great Sunni evil empire of its day, which was the Ottoman Empire, as they saw it, must be somehow putting the Afghans up to this.

Now they actually weren't, but this was a really, this is a really telling window into the psyche of colonial North Americans before they ever came into contact with Iran, which was that the great evil empire of its day was the Ottoman Empire. Now remember in 1722, it had only been about 40 years since the Ottoman Empire in, you know, 1683 had actually come to the gates of Vienna.

So for white settlers of North America in the 1720s, who saw themselves as Europeans, as British subjects. This was the great threat to christen them, to European Christianity, the Ottoman Empire. And so they saw the Persian Empire, which they knew had been fighting wars with the Ottomans for years.

And in some, in many cases, those wards had a sort of subtle Sunni-Shia kind of rivalry embedded in them as well, that they were somehow— the enemy of my enemy was my friend. The Persians were just to the east of the Ottoman Empire. They were seen as more exotic, more oriental, less Muslim.

You actually, I mean, had newspapers at the time saying, this is the Holy War between Muslims and Persians, which is a very interesting way of describing it, right? As if somehow Persians, or Shia Muslims were somehow not as Muslim or even not Muslim at all. It was a lot of wishful thinking. You know, they even tried to explain to readers the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Not very well, sort of said that the Shia worship Ali, which is not quite right, but, you know, they, they were trying, and this was really important to them for some reason. And the reason it had to do with biblical inheritance as well, because in the Bible, the Persians come out looking much better than the Babylonians.

And so there's a lot of, this kind of stuff was overlaid into all of this. I don't want to, you know, get into too much detail with this right, right now here. But fundamentally, this idea that the beyond the evil empire of the East, beyond the Arabs and the Turks and the Ottomans. Just to the east, there was a more idyllic, more beautiful, more oriental, more, you know, kingdom that was less hostile, less Muslim, somehow.

I would argue that mentality stayed with Americans right through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, because as late as the 19th seventies, you could see on American television, Iran being described in this way. You know, you had the Arab oil embargo and these evil Arabs, and they're socialists and they wanna destroy Israel and they wanna like keep oil out of the international markets and we're all having to queue up at gas lines and dah.

But just to the east, you have this nice idyllic Shah and he has this glamorous wife, this empress and so on, and they love America and they're anti-communist. And there are all these things that we want them to be. You can, and I won't do it here, but you can draw a straight line to connect those dots from the 18th century all the way to the 1970s.

Ariane Tabatabai: So we've talked a little bit about how Americans perceived Persians, Iranians, you know, throughout the, kind of, the several centuries that you study, what does it look like from the Iranian perspective? How are Iranians or before that Persians, I guess, seeing this nascent country, the, you know, revolution, the kind of like the Civil War, and all of the events that follow, bring us up to let's say 1945.

What, how are Iranians seeing things?

John Ghazvinian: It's funny 'cause there's an exact parallel they had. They also had this idyllic view of Americans. It's hard for Americans to understand this today, but until well throughout the 19th century and even into the early 20th century in some parts of the world, including in Iran, the United States was seen as basically a European country, a country that was to the far-flung, western fringes of Europe.

Even after the American Revolution, there was a lingering kind of psychological view of the United States that's fundamentally a very distant western European country, kinda like Iceland or Greenland, right? Sort of far flung way out to the west, but still basically part of European civilization.

In the 19th century, so the Iranians came to this a bit later than the Americans because in the 18th century, in the sort of 1700s when these news American newspapers were coming out, Iranians didn't really think very much about America. It was called the Yengeh Donya, the New World. It was seen as this land of cannibals and, you know, savages and so on.

I mean, you know, much as, you know, much as it was described in a lot of the European literature as well at the time. It wasn't until Iran began to really decline as a power in the sort of 1820s, 1830s, 40s, 1850s, 1860s, that Iranians started to become a bit more curious about the United States.

And there were several reasons for this. One is that Iranians felt themselves to be the inheritors of a kind of a great empire, but recognized that they were increasingly much weaker than the European great powers at the time, particularly Britain and Russia, which were both interfering a lot in Iranian affairs and putting a lot of pressure on—

And remember Iran was a sovereign country at this point. It was never colonized by Britain or by Russia formerly. But increasingly from, you know, throughout the 19th century in the south, the British exercised huge sphere of influence in Iran, even if they didn't call it that. And the Russians in did the same in the north.

Iranians felt increasingly resentful, Iran grow—a new generation of Iranian nationalists began to feel very, and reformists began to feel very resentful of this kind of European sort of soft imperialism. At the same time, they recognized, listen, these guys are onto some things that we're not. They have better weapons. They have more dynamic economies, they have more dynamic politics. We are basically a decaying eastern civilization—This was the way they saw it. We need to learn some things from the Europeans, otherwise we're gonna lose this battle, we're just gonna get taken advantage of.

But they didn't like learning things at the losing end of a gun barrel. Right. Nobody likes that. So what they, when they looked at the United States, they saw basically as they saw a European country that had all of the nice things that they liked about, or that they felt they should be learning from Europe, better technology, more dynamic economies, et cetera, et cetera.

But without the imperialism and the greed what they saw when they looked at Americans in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the only experience they had with Americans was Presbyterian missionaries who were building schools and clinics. And yes, kind of talking about Jesus as well, but at this point, they were pretty low-key. The missionaries didn't try to proselytize the majority Muslim population, mostly because that there would be a penalty of death for trying to do that.

So instead they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian and Jewish communities. Or excuse me, Christian communities my apologies they left the, they largely left the Jews alone as well, but they tried to proselytize Iran's very small Christian community, which they felt followed a kind of deformed, decaying version of Christianity that had been inherited, you know, from kind of eastern Christianity, centuries earlier.

So we're talking about the Armenians, the Assyrians, Chaldeans, who they referred to kind of disparagingly as historians, followers of Nester from the fourth century. Basically, they looked at the pres—American Presbyterians from New England, looked at these guys and thought they aren't real Christians. They need to be exposed to a better form of Christianity.

So they showed up in Iran, but they would, they were very indirect about it. Instead of trying to go out there and Bible thumping what they would do instead build schools, clinics, promote literacy and modern hygiene and things like that, and hope that they would, by doing this, they would uplift the condition of local Christian communities.

And that then eventually the Muslims and the Jews would also look at these and say, oh, these guys are doing way better than we are. Maybe we should think about Christianity as well. I mean, it was a very convoluted road and a very low-key kind of approach to missionary work. And the reason I say this is because ultimately what that meant is that they didn't really convert anyone. I mean, they converted a couple hundred people. The missionaries were there for a century, from 1835 to 1935, and in that 100 years, they converted a grand total of about 200 people to American-style Presbyterian Christianity.

What they did that had way more impact was the schools and the clinics and the, you know, and the uplifting of people's lives and the kind of positive impact that they actually ended up having in a lot of ways.

So when Iranian reformists and nationalists looked at Americans in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, they didn't see—the U.S. still had no embassy in Iran, right. Which was unusual 'cause there were Anglo-missionaries from England as well. And there were, you know, there were orthodox missionaries from Russia, but they had embassies, governments that were backing up what they were doing.

And so the Russian and British missionaries and the French missionaries as well, came across to Iranians as sort of fifth columnists, sort of tools of their government. Whereas the Americans were just, you know, these kind of innocent, kind of scrawny, you know, school teachers from, you know, Amherst, Massachusetts that were like, you know, trying to help tell, teach people about vaccines or, you know, give them literacy or translate the Bible into, you know, into Assyrian. And the American government had no interest in Iran.

So from the very beginning, the U.S. developed its reputation in Iran as being hands-off, non-imperialist. And so those people who actually bothered to study American history. They saw this was a country that had come into existence less than a century earlier with a big revolution against the British Empire.

So you could see why on multiple levels the United States was really appealing to Iranians. You know, they saw it as this anti-imperialist country, this kind of hands-off, low-key kind of harmless, western European country that had all the things they liked about Europe and none of the things they didn't like.

And the reason I'm going on so much about this is because this also mentality remained with Iranians throughout the 19—educated Iranians—especially throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. And that's what was lost in 1953. Mohammad Mosaddegh himself, the prime minister, the this great nationalist prime minister who was a hero to Iranians, who was overthrown by the CIA.

In the 1920s, you should see the wonderful things he had to say about the United States. He was a great nationalist who hated the idea of any kind of foreign interference, but, when Morgan Shuster, the financial advisor was sent in 1911 by the American government, by the Taft Administration to help reorganize Iran's finances.

He was, he became a sort of hero to Iranian nationalists because he stood up to the Russians and so on. 10 years later, when Iran's constitutional government wanted to actually bring another financial advisor, a lot of people said, we need to bring back Shuster, we need Americans, et cetera.

Mosaddegh was a great nationalist, and he said, we don't need, we need, we can need to get our own finances in order. We don't need foreigners coming and doing this, but if anyone, you know, if we have any kind of warm feelings towards any country, it's the United States. You know, even as late as 1953, when Eisenhower was giving his approval to the coup that was gonna overthrow Mosaddegh three weeks later, you know, he wrote a letter to Eisenhower, he had no idea any of this was being planned.

The British were sanctioning Iranian oil and they were starving the Iranian economy. And it was the, it was Eisenhower that Mosaddegh chose to write to, because even at that late moment, three weeks before he was overthrown by the CIA he believed that if there was one country that would understand Iran's plight, it would be the United States.

And that says a lot about the lingering attitude that Iranian nationalists had over the 100 years or so from the 1840s through the 1940s.

Ariane Tabatabai: So I, I do wanna pause briefly on the Shuster comment because I do think that it is really fascinating, actually. It's a really nice vignette to maybe flesh out just very briefly a little bit.

You know, he wrote this book called “The Strangling of Persia,” which is very much kind of from an American perspective, talking about how Persia at the time is stuck between these great powers that you've been describing.

In your research, is this something that other Americans were seeing, or was this kind of like a personal perspective from one guy who just happened to be there? Or is this something that you see come up a lot in kind of the writings that you've read from the missionaries and others who were who spent time in, in Persia and then in Iran?

John Ghazvinian: Yes, to some extent. The Presbyterian missionaries, you know, did a lot of you know, they would come back home to fundraise and they would talk, they would sort of give little presentations about Iran and, you know, why you should give us more money because look at all the good work we're doing that—

And in the process, they were kind of educating Americans about Iran. But I would actually argue that Shuster played a fundamental role in transforming the American ideas about Iran.

Before Morgan Shuster, Americans had almost no idea about Iran. I mean, they had these very kind of outdated, orientalist ideas or biblical ideas about Iran or classical ideas about the Persian, classical Persian empire.

But in 1911 when after Shuster was kicked out of Iran by the Russians, because he, you know, so he was sent by, you know, 'cause I said by President Taft, you know, as part of a kind of goodwill mission to help reorganize Iran's finances and so on. He became very popular among Iranian nationalists because he said the fundamental problem is British and Russian imperialism.

And he kept trying to help—hefelt that Iran needed to stand on its own feet and so on. And he became very popular, but he became very unpopular with the Russians, who basically invaded Iran and booted Shuster out the country. And as he left the country, his motorcar that was leaving Tehran, you know, was the route was lined with people waving American flags.

I mean, but when Shuster returned to the us this is the part of the story that doesn't always get appreciated. He became a kind of national celebrity. He became the first celebrity pundit on Iran in the United States. You know, there was a stampede in Philadelphia to hear him speak. The police had to get called out with barricades. And he was at the Carnegie Hall the day before. I mean, it sold out, you know—

I mean it was, everyone wanted to hear what Morgan Shuster had to say. He was a young kind of good-looking guy, you know, who kind of, who was in all the magazines at the time talking about Iran and how it was being strangled by these British and Russian imperialists and so on. And so when he came out, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

And, you know, after that, you know, there was a, I think it's possible to see a kind of a little spike in sort of, American—to some extent orientalist yes, but kind of American kind of fantastical ideas about Iran and what a beautiful country it is.

And you know how it's, people wanted people wanting to learn more about it and the National Geographic started doing more stories about Iran and so on in its early days. So I think Shuster played a pretty fundamental role in that.

Ariane Tabatabai: Okay, so we've talked about a couple of centuries going back a couple of centuries, I'm gonna come back to post-1945.

So, you know, in the aftermath of World War II and in both wars, we should just kind of briefly say that, you know, Persia and then Iran were, was dragged into the conflict because of the kind of, you know, the influence of the various countries that we've talked about, the Brits, the Russians, et cetera.

So what happens in 1945, you have a new king who ends up being the last king, right? Reza—Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who takes over. He tries to continue the modernization work of his father. Part of that is kind of building that relationship with the United States. What does that relationship start to look like from 1945 until 1953?

And, you know, often I think part of what you've mentioned this, people talk about this alliance that Iran and the U.S. had not really an alliance, but that's a separate story. But what, yeah, what are the tension points that exist there? What is the relationship look like?

John Ghazvinian: So, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran, came to power in 1941, the beginning, in the middle of the Second World War.

He—He more than any other king, more than any other leader in Iranian history, by far, no comparison, had a very close relationship with the United States to understand why you have to, I think, understand his father's reign a little bit.

His father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was king from 1926 to 1941, came to power as this kind of great nationalist king who wanted to reduce the role of, you know, the British in Iran in particular, this, these Russians had already kind of taken themselves outta the game a little bit after the Soviet Revolution, they had said that they were gonna stop interfering Iranian affairs.

So the British were really much more influential in Iran, the 1920s. Reza Shah ended a lot of the British concessions by 1927, built this kind of militaristic Iranian state, you know, but he was a ruthless dictator. This is the Shah's father, in the 1920s and 1930s, was very unpopular by the end of his reign.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Reza Shah declared Iranian neutrality. Iran had always been a neutral power and it was technically neutral in the First World War as well, although no one actually respected that neutrality. For the first two years of the Second World War, the Allied Powers, the U.S., the Soviet Union and UK kind of tolerated Iranian neutrality. They didn't really care enough.

But as they needed Iran's oil more and as the German presence became much more noticeable in Iran informally, but there were a lot of German spies running around in Iran in 1939, 40. And then as the Western Front got closed off to the Soviet spy Hitler in in 1941, suddenly Iran became strategically much more important because Reza Shah had built a railway connecting the Persian Gulf in the south to the Caspian Sea in the north, which, for the Americans who were trying to get lend lease supplies from British positions in the Persian Gulf up to their Soviet allies in the Soviet Union in the Russia, the only way to do that now, the only other way to do that was either through the northern route around Archangel, you know, this sort of extremely cold, northern route, or through Iran using the trans-Iranian railway.

So for all of these reasons, the allies demanded that Reza Shah declare or end his neutrality and join the allies, or else. He said no, Iran was invaded by the Soviets from the north and by the British from the south. And Reza Shah was overthrown and sent into exile in 1941. His son, Mohammad Reza comes to power in the shadow of all of this in September of 1941 as a 21, he is about to turn 22. He has seen what's happened to his father.

His father, who 15 years earlier had said, oh, we're gonna, you know, boot the British out and we're gonna declare our own, you know, we're gonna be much more stand on our own feet much more and build this great military. And he did, he built one of the largest armies in the Middle East. And so none of it actually made any difference. When push came to shove, the British and the Russians just removed in him within three weeks, occupied Iran, and removed his father from power. So the Shah never, the younger Shah, I never forgot that lesson.

He said, look, he looked around and he said, look you can't anger the British and the Russians and the British and the Soviets, like, you know, these are the, is the great powers of their day, but what we need is a third ally, one that we can sort of wave in their faces.

And this was not new. This was actually a kind of an unofficial part of Iranian foreign policy dating back to the 1860s, 1840s, really. And Amir Kabir and you know, you know, Shah from the 1840s and fifties. This is part of their policy as well. It's why the Iranians first started to get interested in the United States, but the culmination of this in 1941 was the new young Shah saying, we need a strategic alliance or relationship, I guess with the United States.

The United States is the great up and coming power of its day. It's clear that the British Empire is spent after this war. And they were bankrupt after the war. The Soviets, you know, have their own issues. But if we have a, if we are close friends with the United States, the British and the Soviets won't mess with us as much.

And he was right about that to some extent because, you know, they, the, when the Americans entered the war they, they forced the British and the Soviets to sign a tripartite agreement that promised that they would vacate Iranian soil within six months of the war, which ended up becoming really important because the Soviets turned out not to want to vacate Iran within six months of the war, in fact. And so the Americans had to really pressure them to do that.

So from the very end of the war in 1945, the Shah sees the U.S. relationship as strategically very important to the United States. He's young, he's untested, and the Americans are also very grateful to have him as a kind of anti-communist leader, because as soon as the war ends, of course, the U.S. suddenly perceives itself to be a sort of soft war or Cold War, famously, with the Soviet Union.

And it really values regional allies like the Shahs, Iran, and it becomes more and more important throughout the fifties and sixties and seventies.

Ariane Tabatabai: So now let's talk about 1953. So, you know, the young Shah has a little over a decade to kind of get settled, and then you have the famous events or infamous events, we should say, of 1953.

You mentioned briefly that it had to do with Iranian oil being nationalized. Tell us a little bit more about the events that lead to the coup itself and the U.S. role in the coup, because it doesn't actually start with the United States, right? It starts with a U.S. ally. So how did we end up in this moment that essentially becomes to a defining moment in this relationship?

John Ghazvinian: Absolutely. I mean, the story of 1953, of course is pretty well known and lots of people have written about it much better than with much more authority than I have. But look, you know, the short version is that by the late 40s and early 50s Iran, there's a new generation of young, educated middle class Iranians who are really passionate about the idea that they should control their own oil resources and their own money.

And their hero is a guy named Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a parliamentarian and he is elected prime minister in 1951 on an explicit platform of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and kicking the British out 'cause they had a monopoly on Iranian oil since 1907. And Iran had seen almost no money from, you know, 50 years, of almost 50 years of British oil exploration in New World, despite having one of the largest reserves of oil in the world.

And Iranians were pretty fed up with this. Mosaddegh made this kind of cause. But he was also a great democrat and a great believer in self-determination. And that Iranians should not just control their own oil money, but they should also control their own destiny as a people, which meant that he was not a huge fan of absolute dictatorship. He was a monarchist.

He, you know, like any mainstream politician of his day, he was absolutely loyal to the monarchy. But he felt that the Shah, the king, should reign and not rule. In other words, he should become a sort of constitutional monarch in a European tradition. Mosaddegh himself was a trained constitutional lawyer who had been, you know, who had received his education in Switzerland, in France and he was a great admirer of the western constitutional legal tradition. This might be of some interest to your kind of legal listen—lawyer listeners. He was really the first Iranian to receive that kind of training in the early 1900s actually. And he was an old man by the time he became prime minister in 1951.

But he became a hero to these young Iranian liberals and nationalists who felt he wanted more democracy, more say, more popular participation, and who wanted, you know, the British out. And he wanted, you know, Iranian control over Iranian assets. He became prime minister in 1951. Immediately, the British felt, the government of Winston Churchill felt that the, this was not acceptable because within three weeks of Mosaddegh becoming prime minister, the Parliament passed a very popular nationalization bill.

And the British then fought an epic battle over the next two years with Mosaddegh with his government trying to, you know, imposing sanctions and military blockades and so on, trying to starve the Iranian economy and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They kept trying to convince the Americans to join in this because in 1952, Mosaddegh gets wind of the fact that the British are actually plotting to overthrow him, and he breaks off relations with the United Kingdom.

He says, you know, this is not what diplomacy should be about. And he closes the British Embassy, kicks out all the British diplomats and, you know, and so on. And so the British are now no longer in a position to be able to overthrow him, and they try to convince the Americans to do it instead. And in 1952, the United States is still led by Harry Truman and his government and his administration is dead set against the idea of a kind of imperialistic, kind of dirty tricks campaign to overthrow a foreign government.

State Department run by Dean Acheson at the time was famously full of kind of, you know, sort of New England liberals who, who didn't really, you know, who were strident, anti-communist, but believed that the way to fight communism was by, you know, giving, you know, giving people more you know, kind of more bread and you know, less, you know, kind of, you know, fewer weapons, right? This idea of, you know, we needed more social welfare programs and education and healthcare and things like that, and that would make people less willing to turn to communist.

The Republicans, famously, had a completely different approach, which is that the only way to defeat communism was to build up third-world governments militarily to avoid any kind of Soviet invasion, and then worry about kind of, you know, internal domestic development. It was just two very different ways of seeing things.

So when the Republicans finally came out of the wilderness in 1953, they remember they had not, you know, held the White House for more than 20 years. And when Eisenhower was elected on a kind of wave of red terror and, you know, kind of red baiting, and the idea, you know, and the sort of McCarthy-era overlapped with this, the Churchill's government saw that they had a fellow traveler.

They had someone who they could talk to in the United States. They immediately got to work on the incoming Eisenhower administration and tried to convince them that Mosaddegh was flirting with communism, which he absolutely was not. He was a strident anti-communist, but he was, he had a big tent kind of a big umbrella for his governing coalition.

And, you know, that included all manner of leftists as well as, you know, religious, you know, conservatives and so on. Long story short, they, the incoming, the Dulles brothers, the head of the CIA and the State Department, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, were very much open to this argument and they convinced President Eisenhower that Mosaddegh was not to be trusted and that a freewheeling very open, very liberal democratic government in a country like Iran was gonna be inherently unstable and could in, inherit and easily be manipulated by the Soviets. And that that Mosaddegh had to go.

And so they put into Operation Ajax, which had been basically a plot that had been fed to them by the British. And the CIA did the dirty work of the British for what that meant was that the, in the United States was never forgiven over the next 25 years, and the Shah was for the next quarter century of his rule was seen as a, basically as an American puppet, as a guy who owed, who owed his throne to the United States and to the CIA.

And that, that, that reputation never left, which might have been fine had he not also gradually drifted towards autocracy and dictatorship and human rights abuses by the mid to late 70s. So now you had a very unpopular dictatorial government that was seen as overly pro-American as well. And of course that had famous repercussions for the United States to Iran.

Ariane Tabatabai: Before we actually talk about that period and then the revolution, briefly, you know, one of the things that's been really interesting to me watching the war play out is the amount of kind of commentary around the 1953 coup that is being, you know, there it's almost become a meme, right? In many circles where people talk about, by the way, Iran had this democratic government, we overthrew it and you know, this is like basically the extent of what people tend to say about it.

On the other side, I think on the right you've seen kind of folks write about what we have gotten wrong historically about 1953 and perhaps we've overplayed the role of the United States and the kind of scholarship on the topic.

Can you briefly kind of, you know, opine on the different, you know, what do people get right and what do they get wrong about 1953? What are the myths that are sort of floating around this notion?

John Ghazvinian: Yeah. You know, like everything else in the history of U.S.-Iran relations, it quickly becomes very political, particularly everything after the mid 20th century. It's very difficult to talk about these things in neutral fact-based ways because the reality, which is that the CIA played a critical role in the overthrow of a popularly elected prime minister Iran in 1953 is inconvenient to a certain narrative.

I don't think it needs to be. I think if you look, if you are a diehard supporter of Reza Pahlavi view and you wanna bring the monarchy back to Iran and you want regime change and you're supporting the idea of Trump bombing Iran, do all this, you can do all those things and still acknowledge that the CIA played a critical role—in 1953. I mean, if I wanna put myself in the shoes of someone who feels that way, it's not difficult to simply say, yes, we did that. It wasn't a great idea. It brought back, you know, it actually delayed Iran's democratic development and it, you know, it helped to solidify this and consolidate kind of royal dictatorship and that led, unfortunately, to the Islam Republic.

But you know, a lot of time has now gone by since then. It's no longer 1953. You know, those lessons, while they're important are, should not immediately inform our policy and we should still bomb Iran and, you know, bring Reza Pahlavi back. That's not, to me, that's a perfectly coherent intellectual argument.

I don't know why someone who is a diehard supporter of the former monarchy should feel threatened by the simple reality of 1953. But again, unfortunately, as you know, all too well. You know, debates around Iran and U.S.-Iran relations just very quickly become strident and irrational. And that means that even to this day, there are people out there, I won't name names, but who go around masquerading as legitimate serious historians who try to portray the 1953 coup as an event in which the United States had no meaningful role whatsoever, which is simply absurd.

I think you can debate the degree and the decisiveness of the CIA's actions, perhaps you could argue that, you know, Mosaddegh might have fallen under his own way anyway, or this, that, or the other thing. I, you know, I would disagree with that, but I think that's a reasonable, you know, position to take. And you can have reasonable discussions about this.

But I, I mean, I think the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence, and again, there are people who've looked at this stuff way more closely than I have, but the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence, including documents that continue to get declassified year after year, points to the fact that the CIA played a critical, if not the decisive role of Mosaddegh in 1953.

Ariane Tabatabai: So now let's talk to the revolution itself. You started to kind of paint a picture a little bit, right? That the Shah resumes power in 1953 and he becomes more and more kind of, autocratic and builds this whole kind of internal security apparatus to crush descent and also invest a lot in the military.

And then 1979 begins to happen, you have a revolution that kind of brings together these different factions that were essentially only unified in their, initially in their opposition to the Shah. And then ultimately you get the revo—the Islamic Revolution out of it. Can you talk briefly about the drivers of the revolution and then what was the U.S. approach to the revolution—as the United States is watching these events unfold, what is the thinking in Washington?

John Ghazvinian: The drivers very simply are, I mean, there are many, there are cultural ones, there are economic ones, there are social ones, there are religious factors, there are all kinds of factors. But fundamentally, I think to grossly oversimplify this, the Shahs and his father, I mean, the Pahlavis the last two kings of Iran from 1926 to 1979 fundamentally prioritized the modernization, quote unquote, of Iran in along very western lines by which they meant factories and, you know, railways and air and military strength and you know, air force and things like that.

And yes, things like literacy and, you know, healthcare campaigns as well, and even to, you know, with varying degrees of success. But you know, in kind of redistribution land, redistribution campaigns and things like that. But the one thing they didn't do was, but they didn't believe in modernizing Iran's politics.

They didn't think that if they believed that you can have modernization in every way and uplift the material condition of the Iranian people while still telling them they couldn't really participate in political decision making. The feeling, even in the 1970s, you can see it in all the interviews that the Shah gave to, you know, 60 Minutes and so on, in 1970s, he simply didn't believe as people were ready for democracy. He didn't think that's something that they wanted or needed, that they love their king, that they love their government because he was making their lives better, and he was dragging them into the 20th century and was giving them a increasingly European way of life and so on.

It turned out to be a catastrophic mistake that you ended up with an increasingly educated, knowledgeable, informed public that was increasingly frustrated by the fact that it was living under a dictatorship, and that it had no mechanism for addressing that because it couldn't, you know, create political parties in any meaningful sense, you know, or newspapers or what have you, because they saw what had happened every time they tried to do that. So you had three nodes of opposition to the Shah by the end of the 1970s.

There were kind of hardcore leftists and Marxists communists who were becoming increasingly radicalized. I mean, Iran had a huge communist party, you know, dating back to the 1920s and 30s. But it was largely a pro-Soviet party, the Tudeh. By the 1970s, they had been largely discredited among young people in Iran who were much more likely to follow kind of Maoist guerrilla groups. You know, similar to like, you know, the Red Brigades or the, you know, Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, you know, very classic 1970s kind of, you know, guerrilla groups.

You had increasingly a religious conservative opposition, which was very new in the 1970s. I mean, religious radicalism was unheard of, completely unheard of in Iran before the 1970s. You had small, I, when I say unheard of, they were small, you know, kind of, you know, these kinds of like, you know, sort of, largely obscure kind of, you know, radicals who would blow things up and so on, but—

Ariane Tabatabai: Not as a movement, is what you're saying. There were, they existed, but not as a movement.

John Ghazvinian: Yes. And they were very small. Even the Ayatollah, Khomeini was not particularly well known in 1960s and 1970s. He was increasingly well known to his followers. Right. But they were outside the, they were sort of in the fringe of Iranian society, but by the 1970s, they were getting more and more radicalized, smuggling, cassette tapes from of his sermons while he was in exile in Iraq and so on.

So now you have these leftists radical Maoists. You have these like religious radical, all these young people running around on university campuses, getting into fist fights with one another. And then in the middle, somewhere in the middle, you have these kind of liberal nationalists, the kind of heirs of Mosaddegh, the kind of people who believed in democracy and political parties and petitions and things and having poetry readings and things like that. And they were democrats and they were, you know, these were the people that should have been pro-Western, right?

But these were the people who, you know, they were largely an aging generation of activists from the 1950s who felt, you know what? We tried to do things by the rules. We tried to like play by the, we tried to create, you know, this kind of liberal democracy and the world's greatest democracy, the United States came in and overthrew our government.

So they were largely so for young people, this idea of like liberal western democracy just didn't have a lot of purchase in the 1970s. It was all about religious radicalism or leftist, you know, kind of, Marxist radicalism. And the irony is that all three of those groups for different reasons, hated the United States by the 1970s.

Leftists just naturally did because that's what leftists do. You know, the religious radicals did as well because they saw the United States as the beacon of, kind of decadent western sinfulness and American movies and so on. And the Shah was like the epitome of that problem. The government and his, everybody around it, you know, all the kind of sants that were surrounding the Shahs who were very pro-Shah kind of elements in the 1970s.

These were, you know, the wealthy elites of Tehran, you know, society who were largely pro-Shah and so on. And they hated these guys because they were basically, you know, wealthy western cosmopolitans. And then the liberals, the liberal democrats in the middle, who should have naturally been pro-Western and pro-American, were still kind of angry about 1953.

And that was a terrible combination for the Shah and for the United States because it meant, you know, you had this ruler who was increasingly hated and dictatorial, who was associated with the U.S. and all of the different types of opposition to his rule, all kind of associated him with the U.S. and kind of hated the U.S. for different reasons.

So when the revolution came about, it was a revolution against the Shah and his dictatorship. It wasn't a revolution against the United States, but it was very easy for the Ayatollah Khomeini who nursed—the religious leader who it was an exile who nursed a longstanding hatred of the United States to become this kind of unifying figure who was seen as the only person who could unify the opposition and overthrow the Shah.

And in fact, that's exactly what happened. But after the revolution—Surprise, surprise, all of these different strands fell out with one another. And there's a long, complex history of the f of the early 1980s of how they were all crushed basically by Khomeini and his closest supporters and solid—that helped to cement the Islamic and the Islamist nature of the Iranian Revolution.

Ariane Tabatabai: So revolution happens, and then we have the hostage crisis, right? That is 444 days of the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran being held hostage by this group of students, militants, activists. And, you know, it's also, as we said at the outset, one of the kind of big events that shapes the way Americans see Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, in part because the hostage crisis gets, you know, it's at the beginning essentially of the 24-hour news cycle. And so a lot of people are watching the news unfold every day. They're checking in to see what's going on with the hostage crisis.

As the hostage crisis is going on, you also have the start of the Iran Iraq War, which goes on for eight years. It is a very complicated policy decision for the United States on what to do with this war. And I'm quickly walking through these because I wanna kind of reset us in 1988. It's the end of the revolution, the hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq War.

What is the status of this relationship at the end of this, with this kind of new generation of Iranian leaders? I guess they're not that new anymore at that point. They're a decade essentially in, but where do things stand at the end of the 1980s?

John Ghazvinian: Yeah, I mean, 1980s and the Iran-Iraq War was a massive collective trauma for the Iranian people in a way that I think we'd, we in the West don't often appreciate because, you know, we don't see that war as being particularly about us.

But Iranians and Iraqis, I mean, went through eight years of absolute hell. It lost hundreds of thousands of people deep, savage trench warfare, First World War style, you know, trench warfare, chemical weapons, all of that. And they came out the other end steeped in blood and trauma and suffering.

But also the revolution had been consolidated fully in the course of the Iran-Iraq War. Because in 1979, ‘80, ‘81, you know, not everyone in Iran supported the idea of an Islamic revolution. The revolution itself was pretty popular, but not the Islamist direction it ended up taking. But very quickly, all of that was, all of those internal disagreements were overshadowed by the fact that Iran had been invaded in September of 1980 by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

And perception in Iran was that the U.S. had sort of given a green light. I mean, this is all debatable, but to Saddam Hussein to invade whatever the case, fast forward eight years later and Iranians have been through absolute hell, and the kind of Islamic Republic is fully entrenched. A year later, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader dies. And the constitution is amended and some additional changes are made to kind of consolidate the Islamic Republic.

And there is a new supreme leader, someone who's seen as much more pragmatic and much more politically savvy in some ways than Khomeini. And that's, I told Ayatollah Khamenei and that is the supreme leader, he would be, he was supreme leader from 1989 until a couple of weeks ago when he was killed in the U.S. military operation. So in the 1990s, there's a whole new generation of Iranian leaders—and the Cold War has come to an end as well which, which has effects in every country's politics.

A lot of the old leftists kind of reinvented themselves. And Iran went in a more kind of capitalistic, neoliberal kind of direction of trying to, you know, attract foreign direct investment from, you know, from the west and so on. And began to open up a little bit financially, economically, financially, as well as politically and culturally to the West, famously in the 1990s.

And there was some real opportunities there for from détente with the West. I mean, there was a new, very popular Iranian president elected in 1997 Mohammad Khatami, who really tried to liberalize Iran's culture and his its politics to some degree. He was ultimately not successful in doing that, but he really, he, he did a lot of outreach to the West.

He famously proposed a dialogue among civilizations and travel to Europe and all of that. And there was some early contacts with the Clinton administration as well. Didn't quite work out. So then you, George Bush, W. Bush gets elected and becomes president in 2001, September 11th happens. Iran under Khatami sees this as an opportunity to kind of make the case to the Iran, to the American public and to the world that Iran is not actually your problem. Your real problem are the Sunni radicals, you know, in Jihadist and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and so on.

The U.S. doesn't buy that argument. The U.S. is still very fixated on the idea of Iran as the bad guy. George Bush in his State of the Union address in January of 2002 famously lumps Iran in with Saddam Hussein's, Iraq and with Kim Jong, forgive me, North Korea at the time. And calls them all an axis of evil which plays very badly in Iran—

'cause at the time Iran is secretly cooperating actually with the United States to defeat the Taliban and Afghanistan, which nobody really knows about. Nobody wants anyone to know about. Neither the Iranians nor the Americans want anyone to know that they're cooperating secretly in this.

Ariane Tabatabai: So that actually, that brings us to the 2000s and 2010s, which is essentially kind of like a series of mismatched, you know, Iran is ready for dialogue at some point. The U.S. is not, then the U.S. is ready, then Iran is not. And you could of have this back and forth. And then you have this moment of opportunity with the joint comprehensive plan of action, the JCPOA that is reached in 2015 under President Obama.

And then from there things kind of go back to let's say a mismatch. But you know, we have the election of President Trump who pulls out of the JCPOA in 2018. And then you have a series of tit for tat kind of actions and escalation throughout the first Trump administration. There's an attempt at diplomacy again in the Biden administration, and then we kind of come to present day.

So I guess having kind of gone through this whole history, what are I wanna ask you to kind of, you know, start to wrap up here by talking to us about what are the through lines that you see in this very complex history? And, you know, we've tried to hit all of the kind of big events, but there is so much more—we could have spent that entire podcast series talking about some of these events, right. So what are the through lines here that you see as a historian?

John Ghazvinian: Yeah, I mean, of course it's, there are some great ruptures which we've already talked about, like 1979 especially. It's the biggest one probably. So it's difficult to you describe, I mean, obviously the history of U.S.-Iran relations, you know, over the course of 300 years as some sort of, you know, static, you know, sort of generalizable entity.

But, you know, I think that if we're talking about through lines, I think it's, you know, to me what's always very important is to recognize that for the vast majority of the history of these two countries, they have actually been very, not just friendly, but have had a great deal of mutual admiration, mutual fascination, you know, a really warm if sometimes idealized idea of each other.

And that the last 47 years is actually the anomaly. When you look at it that way, I, you know, I, maybe this is naive and overly idealistic and you know, I recognize that, and I started ending in my book in this way, but to me, there is no real reason why the United States and Iran need to be perpetual enemies.

Ronald Reagan, I mean, I use them quote from Ronald Reagan in the epigraph to my book at the very beginning, because in 1986, in the midst of the Iran contra affair, which we didn't talk about, I know, but you know, this big scandal, we forgot about that one. This big scandal in the Reagan presidency.

He comes on television to level the American people in a live TV address, and he says, you know, the Iranian Revolution is a fact of history. Between American and Iranian basic national interests, there need be no permanent conflict, which extraordinary thing for especially someone like Reagan, this kind of this great tough guy, Republican hero to say, just five years after the end of the Iranian hostage crisis when Iran is deeply hated in the United States, much more than it is today, when it is the ultimate embodiment of evil more, even if arguably as much, if not more than the Soviet Union at the time.

And he says there's, there doesn't need to be a permanent conflict between our two countries. That's more than a lot of democratic presidents have said since Reagan, frankly. And I think, and I actually think he was, you know, I think it's actually quite a moving quote and that's why I wanted to open the book with it, because we've come such a long way from that kind of approach.

I think, you know, I think that if someone at a Republican, tough guy president five years after the hostage crisis can say that about Iran, surely, in both countries today, we could be talking about a very different kind of future. Now, I'm not naive, I know that recent events especially have made that almost impo—

I mean, impossible, let's just say. I mean, I think that if I was giving, if I, when I gave some version of this conversation, I had some version of this conversation, you know, six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, I would always say, you know, it's almost impossible. And I'm idealistic, but I'm not very optimistic.

I mean, it's extremely unlikely, you know, where things are pretty bad. Like it would take something really fundamental to shift, you know? But, you know, never say never, but I don't see it happening. I mean, right now, I think you can say it absolutely is not gonna happen, unless there is some kind of, you know, regime change, successful regime change on the part of the Americans in Iran.

I mean, that's the only way it can happen. I mean, that's the choice that we have now taken. So in a way, the only positive, quote unquote, outcome for U.S.-Iran relations is in fact a successful military operation that, you know, removes the Iranian gov—you know, the Islamic Republic in power and installs some kind of pro-American government.

Now, do I see that happening? No, I really don't. I mean, the odds of that are actually pretty low. I mean, there for all kinds of reasons that I'm sure you and other guests have discussed in recent weeks. But that's where we are.

But again, the through line to me is that this is a wholly unnecessary conflict. And it's a deeply tragic one.

When we look at some of the adversaries the United States has had over in the 20th and 21st centuries from Nazi Germany to Vietnam, to the Soviet Union, all of them, all of those countries, with the exception of Russia. And even that, there's kind of an asterisk around that.

I mean, you know, we had reasonably good relations with Russia actually up until relatively recently. But all of those are hatchets that we managed to bury, and yet we cannot, for some reason get past this enmity and I don't blame the United States alone for this quote. Both countries are at fault for this, but for some reason we cannot bury the hatchet in either country, you know, with this country that is one of the weakest militarily in the world and is no real threat to us.

And it's unfortunate that we've chosen to tackle Iran in the way that we have in recent weeks.

Ariane Tabatabai: So, John, I wanna on this note, you know, you started with, you think that 2026 is gonna go down as one of the milestone events in the history of the two countries. So you've started talking a little bit about the present day.

Let me ask this final question, which is if I can ask you to think about what comes next? Where do you see this going? And what is your historian training help you kind of make sense of the present moment?

John Ghazvinian: I have absolutely no idea. I mean, you know, as a historian, I try to stay away from the present, much less the future, much more comfortable in the past.

But look, what I would say is if we in the United States have any sense I think that the, there is an off ramp that is available, you know, we can declare, I mean, there's nothing original or unique about what I'm about to say—plenty of other people have said it. We can declare victory. We assassinated the supreme leader of Iran.

I mean, no one's ever done that. We assassinated numerous, very high-ranking Iranian leaders from Ali Larijani to, I mean, you know, revolutionary IRGC commanders. The current supreme leader hasn't even been seen yet, supposedly because he's been so badly injured by the Americans. I mean, we have made our point, you know, we've, if not obliterated, quote unquote, at least significantly set back the Iranian nuclear program.

I know that it isn't satisfying to kind of step back now and say, well, you know, leave the Islamic Republic in place. I know all the problems that go along with that, but the alternative is a long, drawn-out order no one knows the end of, and when I say we can declare victory and move on, you know, I say that in full awareness of the fact that is a highly, highly, highly undesirable, you know, outcome.

It's not, you know, that I recognize all the flaws that has of, you know, leaving the Islam Republican place and leaving it, you know, kind of with its back against the wall and like a wounded snake, you know, even more reckless and more likely to kind of, you know, lash out at the United States and all these things.

But I do think that outcome though it's terrible in a lot of ways is the least bad outcome, 'cause it allows the United States to declare victory. The Iranians can kind of declare some victory. They can sort of say, look, we're still standing. The Israelis can declare their version of victory by saying, you know, we've set back, you know, we've kind of contained Iran even more and so on.

You know, I think that the war will probably move to Lebanon, sadly, for the Lebanese people and the kind of Arab states of the Persian Gulf will do their best to try to win back their sense of normality, because of course they have a lot at stake in preserving, you know, the kind of narrative that they've built over the past 20 years or so.

And so they won't be in a rush to kind of save the Lebanese people or, you know, or the—or the Palestinians, either any more than they usually are. And so I can, you know, I think there's a real exit strategy there that it's far from perfect, but leaves the Gulf Arab states reasonably satisfied, leaves the Islamic Republic feeling like, you know, they kind of got away with, you know, some things. United States feeling like, Trump administration declaring victory and going into the midterms, you know, kind of crowing with a certain kind of narrative about, you know, what they did to Iran, and leaves the Israelis reasonably satisfied as well.

I don't know why we don't take this, or maybe we are gonna take this option. I don't know. Maybe we just, you know, they're trying to give you all more of a bloody nose before they do. I don't, I have no idea. And you probably have way more insight into this 'cause you, I think, are much more involved in these kinds of, sort of, think-tanked discussions than I am.

But I don't know. That's my best guess as a, as an ignorant historian.

Ariane Tabatabai: All right, well that's a great place to leave it. Thanks so much, John for joining.

John Ghazvinian: Pleasure.

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