- Iran doesn't care about the wellbeing of Palestinians.
It doesn't care about the wellbeing of Lebanese or Yemenis or Iraqis.
Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous.
[intriguing music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."
I'm Ian Bremmer.
Do you remember that famous line from Bill Clinton's campaign staffer, James Carville, back in 1992?
"It's the economy, stupid."
Well, when I look at Israel's escalating war with Hamas, there's a voice in the back of my head that keeps repeating in that nasally Louisiana accent, "It's Iran, stupid," because whether it's the dizzying arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in Southern Lebanon that are pointed at Israel, or the Houthi drones targeting Israel from Yemen, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities in Eastern Syria, one thing is clear: all roads lead back to the Ayatollah.
So how close is Iran to waging war on Israel and its Western allies?
Iran is, after all, a rogue nation which has been on its way to developing nuclear weapons capabilities, and that's an escalation that no one, including Iranian leadership, wants to see happen.
To unpack it all today, I'm joined by Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Karim Sadjadpour.
And later, with all eyes on Gaza, the Ukraine War rages on outside of the spotlight.
But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.
- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.
- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains, with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.
Learn more at prologis.com.
- [Announcer] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."
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- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [curious music] - Fun fact: Israel and Iran used to be friends, sort of.
It was 1947, Iran, along with Turkey and pretty much the rest of the Middle East, voted against the creation of an Israeli state by the United Nations.
Iran and Turkey also rejected Israel's membership request to the UN back in 1949.
Both countries quickly moved to recognize Israel on an informal defacto basis, establishing thinly veiled trade relationships.
Why would they do that?
"Because," the thinking went, "us non-Arab states need to stick together."
Remember, neither Iran nor Turkey are Arab countries.
From 1956 to '79, Israel's Mossad spy network shared a remarkable amount of intelligence with its Iranian and Turkish counterparts.
It was codenamed The Trident Alliance.
Jerusalem's ability to work so closely with Tehran and Ankara constituted one of Israel's biggest early foreign policy achievements, rivaling only its relationship with the United States.
Here's Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1950, greeting an Iranian representative at the YMCA building, of all places, in Jerusalem.
[crowd chanting] And then, in 1979, Islamists toppled Iran's Shah.
They adopted a staunchly anti-Zionist platform, and the Trident Alliance was no more.
And while the Israel-Turkey relationship has run hot and cold ever since, recent comments by its strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may have just brought it to an all time low.
[gun blasts] Fast-forward to 2023, and as Israel and Hamas engage in a bloody war, the country that is keeping Israeli and U.S. leadership up at night is clearly Iran.
In Southern Lebanon, Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters have a missile arsenal that dwarfs Hamas' rocket supply and that could easily overwhelm Israel's famed Iron Dome air defense.
The Iranian proxy threat goes well beyond Hezbollah.
The Pentagon recently redirected the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier and its strike group of destroyers to the Middle East instead of the Eastern Med.
One big reason: to intercept missile and drone strikes by Iran-backed Houthi militias in Yemen aimed at Israel.
Days later, American F-16 jets carried out airstrikes in Eastern Syria on facilities used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies.
Strikes in retaliation for a barrage of recent rocket and drone attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria.
So yeah, Iran gets around, but there is a big difference between skirmishes with Iranian proxy forces and an all-out U.S.-Israel-Iran war.
And given Iran's nuclear ambitions, that's something that absolutely no one, including the Ayatollah and Tehran, wants to see.
So how close is Israel and its Western allies to all-out war with Iran?
And how does an Israeli invasion of Gaza up that ante?
That's a question I'm posing to today's guest, Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour.
And here's our conversation.
Karim, welcome back to the show.
- Thank you so much, Ian.
- It's good to see you.
I have so much I want to ask you about Iran's role in this Israel, Gaza and extended conflict.
Tell me how you think Iran has been involved so far.
- Since the 1979 revolution, there have essentially been three pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Number one, Iran wants to defeat the U.S.-led world order.
Number two, they want to evict the United States from the Middle East.
And number three, they want to replace Israel with Palestine.
And there's perhaps been no government in the world which has had a more consistent and enduring grand strategy than the Islamic Republic of Iran.
They've spent many billions of dollars on militant groups, whether that's Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, trying to defeat Israel.
And so in some ways this is nothing new.
It's just a continuation of Iran's longtime strategy to try to end the State of Israel.
- Now, the statements that I've heard from the Supreme Leader and from other Iranian government officials, very much in the vein of, "End of Zionism.
Destroy Israel.
The region will be in flames."
But it's always in the passive voice, "Region will be," not, "Iran will do."
How plausible is it that Iran actually wants to stay out of the conflict directly?
- Well, Iran doesn't want peace with the United States, nor does it want peace with Israel.
Now, do they want direct war with the United States or Israel?
In the past, that hasn't been the case.
They've tried to operate via proxy.
And really, if you look at the Middle East today, Iran is the dominant power in the region.
And the places, the countries where it has enormous influence are essentially five failing states.
You have Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza, the Palestinian Territories.
So Iran tends to thrive where there is chaos, where there are power vacuums.
And so, for them, an Israeli invasion of Gaza, they've experienced this before.
They've experienced Israel going into Gaza before, and their proxy groups, whether it's Hamas or Islamic Jihad, have come out stronger.
Iran's most powerful proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, was in some ways a byproduct of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and that really helped them turbocharge Lebanese Hezbollah.
So, over the course of the last four decades, they've really thrived in these indirect conflicts.
Now, the question is whether they're prepared to enter into more direct conflict with either Israel or the United States.
And one advantage you could argue that Iran has is the fact that they've had, in their Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, arguably the longest-serving dictator in the world.
He's been in power, Supreme Leader since 1989, and he has a lot of experience and a lot of institutional memory.
And I think one of the chief lessons he's learned over the decades is that, if you hit America in the United States, you go after the World Trade Center, they're gonna follow you to wherever you are and hunt you down.
But if you go after U.S. forces in the Middle East, well, that sours American public opinion, because people will ask, "What are we even doing there in the first place?"
And so, I think the danger we face at the moment is that it's the Islamic Republic of Iran's view that, after two decades of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's no appetite in the American public, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, to fight more conflicts in the region.
And Iran feels particularly emboldened at the moment, whether it's going after Israel via proxy, going after the U.S. via their proxies.
And they may be difficult to deter, because they may either correctly read the situation that we're not interested in a conflict, or they may misread it, and it could lead us to a more direct conflict with Iran.
- Now, the Israeli response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas has been an enormous amount of military firepower, first an air campaign which continues, and now a ground campaign.
And the stated purpose of those operations, not just from the Prime Minister, but by the entire unity war cabinet is to destroy Hamas, which is Iran's principle proxy in Gaza and among the Palestinians.
So, I mean, are the Iranians prepared to stand back and watch that happen?
And if the answer is no, what are they going to do about it?
- Well, again, and if you look at the history of the last two decades, what Iran tends to do is, at the beginning of these conflicts, and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq is perhaps an example, where you initially bide your time, but then you prepare your forces for basically the post-war.
And so, that's what Iran has done with its proxies in Lebanon after various Israeli invasions of Lebanese Hezbollah, again, past Israeli wars in Gaza.
They may lose the war, but they tend to emerge stronger after there's a cessation of hostilities.
So I expect this time to be no different.
Certainly, Iran is not going to change in any way it's policies, it's longtime policy of trying to essentially replace Israel with Palestine and support proxy groups to that end, and they're prepared to spend a lot of money to do that.
And technologically, they're much more equipped to do that as compared to let's say 10, 15, 20 years ago.
They've become much more effective at manufacturing these precision missiles, rockets, and drones.
Now, the question is whether at some point Iran will want to unleash Lebanese Hezbollah and get them involved.
Hezbollah has well over 100,000, perhaps 150,000 rockets they could employ against Israel.
That remains a question.
But as long as Iran feels that there's not going to be any direct consequences on the Iranian homeland, I think they're happy to continue to fight Israel down to the last Palestinian, Yemeni, Lebanese, and Iraqi.
- I'm wondering about the level of Iranian influence, and I understand that this is a bit of an impossible question to answer, but just to provide some context.
I mean, for all of the support that Iran has provided, including training for Hamas, right up until the attacks, the belief of the American intelligence is that the Iranians were not aware of the October 7th attacks coming, they were surprised by it.
And the Israeli intelligence seems to accept that assessment.
Does that strike you as plausible?
And then more broadly, when you said the Iranians might set loose Hezbollah in Lebanon, is that the Iranian call?
Is that 100% Iran's call?
I mean, to what extent do they really have a level of operational control over these various proxy groups in these five failed to failing states and territories across the region, Karim?
- So, I would say that Iran tends to macromanage rather than micromanage their proxy groups.
So it's not usually the case where they call up, whether it's the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis, and say, "Okay, do X, Y, and Z today."
They tend to defer to those leaders themselves.
So they don't micromanage, but on a macro level, they do have enormous influence, just given the fact that they're oftentimes the chief financier and military supplier of these groups.
Now, I guess the main point I'd make, Ian, is that we really have to distinguish between being anti-Israel and pro-Palestine.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is deeply anti-Israel, and I wouldn't argue it's pro-Palestine, or pro-Lebanese Shia even.
And I say this in response to your question about whether or not Iran would ask Hassan Nasrallah to unleash Hezbollah rockets.
- [Ian] The ruler of Hezbollah.
- The ruler of Hezbollah, because at the end of the day, Iran doesn't care about the wellbeing of Palestinians, it doesn't care about the wellbeing of Lebanese or Yemenis or Iraqis.
I'm always reminded of a conversation I had over a decade ago in a Track II meeting with a senior Iranian official, and this was in 2008, and I asked him, I said, "Think of all the money that Iran has spent over the past decades on Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad."
It was then billions of dollars.
Now it's many billions of dollars.
And I said, "Think of how many Palestinians and Lebanese you guys could have educated, sent abroad to become doctors, lawyers, and engineers."
And I'll never forget his response.
He said, "What good would that have done for Iran?"
He said, "Do you think, had we educated these young men to become doctors, lawyers, and engineers, they're going to want to come back and fight for Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad?
No, they're going to remain professionals."
And the reason why I say this is that Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous.
And so, in some ways, the more these populations experience conflict, whether it's conflict amongst themselves or direct conflict with Israel, Iran has tended to benefit from this despair of these Arab populations.
- Now, the United States relationship, the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal, of course, is done.
That certainly predates this crisis.
There had been some efforts by the Americans to reengage.
Where do we think the U.S.-Iran relationship goes from here?
Does this lead the Iranians to dramatically step up their nuclear efforts?
I mean, the Saudis wouldn't be happy about that.
Does it also lead the Iranians to be much more willing to engage in strikes against American bases, troops in the region, given what you said about that before?
- It's an important question, Ian.
And at the moment, I think even people inside the Biden administration would probably concede that they don't really have an Iran strategy at the moment.
The hope was to revive the Iran nuclear deal.
That hasn't happened.
And now we're in an escalatory situation with Iran at a time when no one really wants an escalatory situation.
But that's not only for us to decide.
And I think that it is absolutely plausible that Iran may choose to both advance its nuclear program and up its attacks on U.S. forces and Israel, whether directly or via proxy, if they believe that the Biden administration is not interested in a fight.
This is kind of what's oftentimes... One of the challenges in dealing with Iran is that you're dealing with a country or the government which needs the United States, wants the U.S. as an adversary for its own internal legitimacy.
And so, when we have an administration which is trying to make concessions or conciliatory gestures toward the Islamic Republic, they don't reciprocate that.
They oftentimes say, "Oh, we can afford to be even bolder because America doesn't want fight with us."
And so that's the challenge that this Biden administration faces, that, on one hand, they want to avert conflict with Iran, but if you want to deter Iran, whether deter their nuclear advances or deter their regional aggression, you have to make clear to them there's gonna be costs for that kind of behavior.
- Yeah, that is certainly challenging in this environment.
Okay, final question.
None of this really affects the American economy so far.
Of course, oil does, and I don't think we can have a conversation about Iran without at least one question about oil.
They export some 1.4 million barrels a day.
In part that's because the Americans haven't done much to the Iranians in terms of the oil that's going to secondary non-sanctioned countries.
And also, about 10x that is going through the Straits of Hormuz every day, which the Iranians certainly could have something to say about it if they wanted to.
How worried are you about those flows in the near-to-medium term?
- Well, I think here is an example of America and China having a common interest in ensuring stability in the region in order to ensure the free flow of oil, because China imports much more oil these days from the Middle East than the United States.
That should be very much a Chinese interest as well, to try to... And U.S. has no positive leverage over Iran.
They can threaten Iran with conflict and sanctions, but China has enormous influence over Iran.
If there's a country which loses more from disrupted flow of energy from the Middle East, it's China.
And here, I think it's important to distinguish between China and Russia, because oftentimes these two countries are lumped together.
But as you know better than I do, China is very transactional when it comes to the Middle East.
They're not ideological.
They do a lot of trade with Iran, but they do much more trade with Iran's rivals in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whereas Russia is much more ideological: who is a U.S. ally and who is a U.S. adversary?
So, I think that's one issue, the free flow of oil, in which there is a common interest there between Beijing and Washington.
- Karim Sadjadpour, thanks for joining us on "GZERO World."
- Thank you so much, Ian.
[curious electronic music] - As the Israel-Hamas War captures the world's attention, the war in Ukraine still rages on, even if far fewer in the international community are paying any attention.
GZERO's Alex Kliment has more.
- Live from Israel, we've got breaking news.
- Israel has declared it is at war.
- They're firing directly into Gaza every few minutes or so.
- Palestinian deaths have exceeded 8,000.
- A ground invasion is underway.
- Over the past few weeks, the conflict in Gaza has drawn attention away from what used to be the most covered war in the world: Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
You know who's not mad at that?
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Even before the Hamas attacks, Western support for Ukraine was starting to waver.
Now, Putin is perfectly happy to see Western governments and media distracted by the Middle East.
What's more, a little unrest in the region always bumps up prices for Russian oil.
And how could Putin not relish the sight of the so-called U.S. world order falling into disarray?
[Putin speaking in foreign language] - [Interpreter] This is a clear example of the failure of the United States policy in the Middle East, which tried to monopolize any settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
- Here's Russian foreign policy expert Hanna Notte.
- The war in Gaza gives Russia an opportunity to paint the West as guilty of double standards, as hypocritical in the court of global public opinion.
- But there are a few reasons why this latest conflict in the Holy Land might not be a blessing for Putin.
For one thing, it forces him to choose sides in a way that it doesn't seem like he wants to.
It took Putin 10 entire days to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with condolences after the October 7th attacks.
And while Russia condemned the Hamas rampage, Putin has also welcomed Hamas officials in Moscow and called for a ceasefire, something both the U.S. and Israel oppose.
On the one hand, bending towards the Palestinians puts Putin firmly in line with mainstream opinion in the Arab world and the broader global south, where sympathy for the Palestinian cause is strong.
On the other hand, antagonizing Israel could lead the government there to change its mind about giving advanced weapons to Ukraine... [rockets firing] something that Prime Minister Netanyahu has so far chosen not to do.
And then there's the risk of this conflict spiraling out of control entirely.
A wider regional war between Israel and Iran could turn into a nightmare for Putin.
But don't forget, Russian forces are currently propping up the Assad regime in Syria, an ally of Iran that could easily be drawn into a wider war with Israel.
- As long as the war in Gaza remains regionally confined, remains confined to Israel, Gaza, the benefits for Russia outweigh the risks.
But the moment that this conflict escalates, the risks for Russia could be considerable.
- In short, Vladimir Putin is fine with Middle Eastern instability that puts the heat on his Western adversaries.
Unfortunately for him, he can't count on staying out of the fire himself.
For "GZERO World," I'm Alex Kliment.
[curious electronic music] - That's our show this week.
Come back next week.
And if you liked what you've seen, or even if you don't but you're just really freaked out by all this Middle East stuff, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.
[exciting music] [exciting music continues] [exciting music continues] [music fades] [light electronic music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis, - [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains, with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.
Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."
We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.
Learn more at Cox.career/news.
- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [dynamic music]
