Iran’s strategy, according to experts, is to keep widening the war with the U.S. and Israel and make it last as long as possible. Why?

Guests

Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Author of the book “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.”

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I         

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This past Saturday, March 7th, Ali Larijani appeared on Iranian State TV. He is Iran’s top national security official.

Larijani said Mr. Trump got a taste of what happened in Venezuela and liked it, thinking he could do quickly the same in Iran. Now he’s stuck. ‘We will not leave him alone. He must pay the price for what he did.’ End quote. And Larijani continued.

‘These are the final breaths. When a government and enemy fails to reach its goals, it begins to flail. I believe Mr. Trump should admit he made a mistake and was deceived by Israel. Fix it. Admit you were wrong. Why are you flailing?’ He then adds: ‘There were heavy economic blows and bombardments, but they didn’t achieve their results, and we will not let them go.

The Americans must know we won’t leave them alone. You have left a scar on our hearts. We will not let you be. You must accept that you no longer have the right to aggregate against Iran.’ End quote.

Okay, bellicose language like that is to be expected in any conflict, any war. Harder to discern is what’s actually happening inside Iran and what Iran hopes to achieve with its strategy of attacking regional neighbors.

Choking off the Strait of Hormuz, decentralizing its military command and control. Iran has thus far stymied the U.S. and Israel’s hope for a quick and clean regime change, but making the war regional is also having severe global impacts. Does the Iranian regime worry at all that the international community will lose its willingness to bear those risks for long.

Does it worry at all about what prolonged war, about the effect that will have on the Iranian people themselves. Vali Nasr joins us now. He is a professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He’s also the author of many books on Iran, including Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.

Professor Nasr, welcome to On Point.

VALI NASR: Thank you. Good to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, professor, as I said the kind of bellicose language that we’re hearing in public statements from Iranian officials, in a sense matches the hyperbole that we’re hearing from U.S. officials as well. That kind of posturing is not a surprise, but what do we know about what the conditions are of the regime actually inside Iran right now?

NASR: I think Mr. Larijani’s statements were less bellicose than an outline of exactly what their strategy and intent is, which is they’re going to continue to resist, and they are confident that they have coherence in their government and coherence in their military forces to continue this fight.

So it’s a warning sign that despite the decapitation of the leadership of the state, the killing of the supreme leader, commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, that the Iranian regime both has the will and the ability to continue to wage a long war and that the pressure is on the United States, not on them.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s understand that a little bit more clearly. We have heard, of course, over the past several days that a new Supreme Leader in the form of the late Ayatollah’s son has been named. Has he actually been seen in public in Iran?

NASR: No, he hasn’t. In fact, he has rarely been seen in public in Iran.

He’s perhaps the most powerful man in Iran that people have not seen over the past number of decades. And there’s a reason perhaps for him not being seen. First of all, there are rumors that he may have been injured in the bombing of the compound. His father, his mother, his wife, his daughter and his sister were all killed in that attack and that he may have been injured.

There’s also reasons of security because Israel and the United States have said that they intend to take him out. Israel has made it explicit, and this happened in Lebanon as well when they killed the leader of the Hezbollah. So Iranians are being very cautious not to have to deal with another leadership succession right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I’ll come back to that a little bit later in the program because I want to understand a little bit more about how we should understand the operational capacity of the regime right now. Actually, in fact, you used the word coherence, that the regime believes it has the coherence to continue fighting back against the U.S. and Israel.

What do you mean by that? How would you describe what that coherence is?

NASR: The expectation is that when you kill the leader of a country, or a number of its senior military commanders, that there would be immediately a leadership vacuum, that they wouldn’t be able to give orders or make decisions.

But the Islamic Republic for a long time has been organized around many nodes of authority with autonomous decision making and operational capability. That means that you eliminate one person, the system doesn’t collapse. And after the June war the 12-day war with Israel and the United States in June of 2025.

When Israel started the war by killing about 30 commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and forced everybody else in Iran to go underground, in the ensuing six, seven months, Iran spent a lot more time to make the system even more decentralized. That if the supreme leader gets killed, the system doesn’t go paralyzed.

That there is a web of leaders and decision makers in Iran, in IRGC, in government, in the bureaucracy, that are collectively making decisions to run the government and wage war. And so we see that Iran hasn’t missed a beat in retaliating against the U.S. and Israel, and in also managing a very difficult situation domestically.

So the one thing we’re not seeing in Iran is a collapse of government. And … paralysis in decision making, and there’s no evidence of any fissures in the kind of consensus that Mr. Larijani expressed in that interview.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Is this the mosaic defense that has been talked about more recently, or, actually, I guess it’s been talked about more publicly in the West recently.

As in terms of Iran’s approach.

NASR: It’s not just mosaic defense. It’s mosaic governance. In other words, Israel this time took out the primary civilian decision maker in Iran, and has been also after killing other civilian leaders. Who are part of the war effort, but also part of the civilian war effort and manage the economy, manage the bureaucracy, manage response to the bombings.

And that side of the government is also functioning. So this is a system now that doesn’t depend on decision making at every single point. At the apex, it’s a system in which everybody knows what the aims are and operates independently based on those aims. And then there have been already decided that if one layer is eliminated in the bombing or decapitation, who immediately takes over and what is their duties.

And that person in turn immediately appoints the person that would succeed him in case he’s killed. So the system is able to replicate itself very quickly without having to pause in order to respond to a decapitation. And is this almost automatic self-replication and self-preservation, is it primarily through provincial IRGC commands or is it also through other forms of governance in Iran?

NASR: It was always implemented in IRGC. That’s why when Israel killed about 30 Revolutionary Guard commanders, the top commanders in June, in one night, IRGC immediately regrouped and started retaliating against Israel and then the United States.

But now that model has also been extended to the civilian government as well. In other words, the Supreme Leader, in many ways knew that he might be taken out. In fact, perhaps he welcomed it or made it much easier by going back to his compound and being above the ground when the attack came.

But with fully knowing that very quickly a new Supreme leader would be appointed and in the interim that people like Mr. Larijani, Commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, other civilian leaders would continue the governance of the country and the management of war in his absence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. On March 1st, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, he actually put a post up on X/Twitter and it said this. Quote: We have had two decades to study defeats of the U.S. military to our immediate East and West. We’ve incorporated lessons accordingly. Bombings in our capitol have no impact on our ability to conduct war.

Decentralized mosaic defense enables us to decide when and how war will end.

What’s fascinating to me about this Professor Nasr, is that there’s ample criticism to be made of both the Trump administration and Israeli leadership, and the presumptions that they made in launching these attacks against Iran, but to be entirely fair.

A month ago it might have seemed reasonable to have these presumptions, because of what you said a few minutes ago. That Iran’s proxies in the region had essentially been knocked out by Israel. So was this just a catastrophic miscalculation about the resilience of the Iranian regime, or is there some room for understanding that Israel and the United States would not have seen or presumed this mosaic defense and mosaic governance strategy to be as strong as it is.

NASR: I think the misunderstanding is more on America’s part than Israel’s part. I think Israel was prepared to have a very long war with Iran and it needs the United States to also remain in that war, to continue to bomb Iran until you reach a tipping point that the mosaic defense and the decentralized government also collapses.

I think there is a confusion perhaps more in America than in Israel between weakness and weakening and resilience. So Iran definitely is not what it was before October 7th, 2023. It no longer has Hezbollah. It no longer has its perch in Syria. Its air defense has been battered, its nuclear program, which was its main leverage in terms of engaging the U.S.

Has been damaged enormously. But that does not mean that it could be shredded very quickly. Iranians going back to the 1980s when they fought the war with Iraq know exactly how to hunker down and do an extensive resistance and survive against a greater odds.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: It seems by now clear that one of the strategies of the Iranian regime is basically battling asymmetry through attrition. Is that a fair analysis?

NASR: Yes, it is. It is a strategy that Iran adopted after the United States invaded Iraq, and they watched how the Iraqi Army could not withstand the United States military trying to fight in terms of a classic warfare.

And Iran was afraid that the United States was going to invade Iran after it settled down in Iraq. So Iran started asymmetric warfare against the United States in Iraq, and it produced positive results. The U.S. got stuck in a quagmire and never set its eyes on invading Iran. It is a strategy of a weaker partner to engage a military that is reliant on Air Force artillery tanks, and it also wants quick victories.

Does not have stamina or patience for a long war, and definitely does not want to deal with the cost of war.

Body bags, high oil prices, and so Iran understands that the way to fight America is not to fight America on its terms, but to fight America on terms that benefit Iran and is not to United States liking.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s listen to another clip of Iran’s top National Security official, Ali Larijani. Again, this is from just this past weekend on Iranian State television.

Larijani says quote: He does not understand. Iranians may have disagreements among themselves, but they are Iranians. They stand with Iran and will not cooperate with you for the partition of Iran. Moreover, the people of Iran have seen the experience of the U.S. intervention in the region. You intervened in Iraq.

What happened to the people of Iraq? You intervened in Afghanistan. These are before the eyes of the people of Iran. You are not concerned about the people of Iran. End quote.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Nasr, is someone like Ali Larijani concerned himself about the people of Iran?

NASR: They were definitely concerned about the people of Iran in January not more than two months ago when they rose up in large numbers demanding regime change in Iran and Islamic Republic had to resort to enormous brutality and bloodletting. In order to suppress that uprising. So perhaps the word that Iranians have disagreements with one another is not saying the full scale of the worry that the Islamic Republic had when it went to this war, but it also is very clear that the one thing the Islamic Republic right now is not worried about is a popular uprising in Iran, which actually was a cornerstone of President Trump and Israel’s strategy of invading Iran at this point in time.

So they hugely miscalculated and particularly President Trump’s menacing rhetoric about the fact that Iran’s borders will perhaps not be the same at the end of this war or that the United States might be arming the Kurds in a separatist enterprise. Have landed in Iran among the people with the force of a giant meteorite coming from out of space, it has jolted them into a nationalist moment.

That doesn’t mean that the pro regime or have forgotten the brutality of January, but the priority for most Iranian is preserving their country and protecting their country.

CHAKRABARTI: Are you surprised that this fact is seemingly catching Washington off guard?

NASR: Yes, I am. I’m very surprised that they are so blind to the power of nationalism.

That particularly publicly threatening a country’s territorial integrity is not to get the people of that country on your side or to justify your war in their eyes. And if anything, if the United States or Israel thought that the Iran’s population was the Achilles’ heel of the Islamic Republic that they have done everything to actually make, to ameliorate the fissure that had opened between the regime and its people. That fissure may return at some point in time.

But at this moment of war, where the United States and Israel are trying to knock Iran out, Iranian people are not their ally. The Iranian people have rallied behind the flag, and we don’t see any evidence of a … effect to the country. If I may say, we’re seeing daily evening anti-war protests across Iran and very large crowds even showed up in Tehran a few days ago in order to celebrate the appoint of a new Supreme leader who most of them don’t like and fear.

CHAKRABARTI: Should we be skeptical of those crowds though, professor Nasr? Because on this show we’ve had various Iranian analysts say that opposition to the regime is what it could be north of 70%, 80%. And are the crowds that, even though rallying around the flag right now is an existential impulse, which is totally understandable.

Are those crowds that are currently showing up in public in Tehran, are those mostly made up of already extant regime supporters? What information are you looking at to get this sense that public support for the nation of Iran is stronger than ever?

NASR: From varieties of things.

I’m talking to Iranian professors who are reflecting the opinion of their students, who usually would’ve been in the streets demonstrating against the government. I agree with those estimates. There is no broad love for the Islamic Republican in Iran. In fact, as we saw in January, it is the opposite, right?

But in the middle of this war. The United States has done everything to make sure that the Iranian anger against their government, it would not be a factor against the government. Whereas when they started the war, they basically said, this is a war of liberation. This is Iranian people’s moment to take over their government in the hope that the anger that we saw, the rage that we saw against the Islamic Republic in January would actually be a factor in denying Iran the ability to resist the war that Israel and the United States was waging against it.

And that and then both by targeting civilian targets inside Iran, including the school bombing that happened very early in the war. And then the rhetoric of President Trump about dividing Iran, in a self-defeating way, the United States and Israel have made sure that the Iranian public in the middle of this war would not be a factor in their favor. Yes, down the road when there is ceasefire, when there is peace, that anger that we saw in January may very well return, but it’s not a factor at the moment against the regime.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, it is, I echo your surprise in terms of Washington’s total miscalculation on this, because I cannot point to a single example in the past 60 years where relentless bombing by the U.S. military of some other nation has not produced a surge of nationalism in that country. Because it makes sense, when you have bombs reigning down on you.

The first thing you want is for that to stop and you want to defend your nation, it does surprise me, especially because obviously Israel has been fighting wars for a long time for its own national preservation, and Donald Trump rode back to the presidency here on a wave of nationalism as well.

Boggles my mind. But what I actually would like to ask you is you mentioned earlier about Iran calculating that it can survive a long period of time, even with all this bombing going on, because it’s going to extract a cost from not just the United States, but the region and therefore also the world.

Let me flip that on its head a little bit. If I may, professor. What is Iran’s capacity to tolerate costs as well? Because I’m thinking back to the Iran-Iraq war, something like a quarter million, maybe more Iranians were killed in that war. How do we look at previous conflicts Iran has been in to measure the nation’s capacity to absorb the cost of war?

NASR: The number was actually higher. It was probably closer to half a million, and it depleted about two thirds of the country’s national reserve’s wealth. It was an extremely costly war, although that was a different time. It was in the heady days of the revolution and there was much more support for the Islamic Republic at the time.

But now the government, Islamic Republic can bank on the fact that the Iranians will sacrifice not for the Islamic Republic or Islamic ideology, but for the preservation of Iran. And he thinks that Iranians, it is not as I said, support for them that is going to make suffering acceptable.

But it’s the threat that is to Iran itself that would make him accept suffering. But also, their study of the United States and even Israel in the past two decades has shown that these countries are not willing or prepared for long wars in which suffering is included. That Israel given its size, despite the fears it has for its security and the determination it has to address those security, needs to win wars quickly.

That’s why it comes in with a massive punch upfront trying to knock out its enemy. But if that strategy doesn’t work, that Israel does not have the capacity ultimately to fight a long war with a much larger country, a war of attrition with Iran. And similarly, the United States has shown that it’s averse to costly wars.

In fact, we’ve had three presidents in a row, including the first term of President Trump, where the United States very clearly said that it does not want another major war in the Middle East. That even what it did in Iraq and Afghanistan was expensive and bruising enough that he didn’t want to repeat that.

So Iran understands that’s the weak point of both Israel and the United States and Iran should not fight its wars with them on terms and turf that benefits them. So you need, Iran needs to absorb the punches that it gets from Israel and the U.S., organize itself that it can survive those punches and then drag out the war.

And this time it has surprised them both by actually deciding not to fight on the battlefield that the U.S. and Israel favor, means the air corridors and missiles and air power going back and forth between Israel and Iran and U.S. ships and Iran, but rather to use the global energy markets and the global economy.

As the battlefield that Iran should fight the United States and then prepare to make that a long fight. So it’s very interesting. Iran has already shipped over 10 million barrels of oil to China in preparation for closing the Strait of Hormuz, and others has given China worth months of oil that it would’ve been giving China in a much more rapid pace in order to prepare for shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, potentially for a long period of time. So it’s not missiles and that Iran is necessarily fighting the U.S. with, it is rather the Strait of Hormuz, which is the battlefield that Iran wants to fight on.

CHAKRABARTI: This is another one of those sort of baffling moments for me in trying to understand this conflict because my impression was for years that the potential for the major disruption of global energy markets was exactly one of the reasons why previous American leaders were very hesitant to launch direct military action against Iran.

We knew that this would happen, and yet when it’s happened now, again the administration is acting with surprise. It baffles me. I’m not trying to, I’m not going to ask you unless you want to answer, to explain that. But what I am more curious about is, okay, so Iran is shipping oil to China, meaning Iranian ships, I’ve been reading now, their tankers are getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Yes?

NASR: First of all, to your first point, it is actually more baffling because Iran had been telling all the Gulf countries that this is exactly what’s going to happen. This is exactly what they’re gonna do. So it’s not like they were hiding what’s going to happen.

Iran has for a long time been holding very large reserves of oil, maybe up to 80 million barrels of oil in tankers on not only inside in Persian Gulf, but also on high season the Indian Ocean, et cetera. Because even though it couldn’t export a lot of oil, in order to keep its wells going, it had to keep pumping oil.

So it keeps pumping oil and keeping in reserves. And so it has tankers that are on high seas, not even in the Persian Gulf, and can be very quickly deployed and delivered elsewhere in the world. So perhaps it’s using those tankers and as well as the ones that it has in Persian Gulf.

And so it doesn’t need to increase its capacity to pump, it has a lot of oil that’s outside the ground already and it’s using that in order to satisfy its own financial needs, as well as its primary customer, which is China.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But in the long run, choking off the Strait of Hormuz has obvious global implications.

It’s already causing oil shock panic, but this is also something that could potentially choke off Iran’s own ability in the longer run to get its oil out of the region to China. Is that not a concern for the Iranian regime?

NASR: You have to survive the short run before you can talk about the long run.

This is a war of existential war, not just for the Islamic Republic, but now increasingly for Iran itself. It is a war that is being waged by the world’s primary superpower. In alliance with the region’s primary military power with the support of European countries and without any pushback from either the rest of the region in a meaningful way or the rest of the world.

So Iran is alone in this fight. It has to survive this fight. And ultimately, it’s calculating that before Iran really faces a serious backlash as a consequence of this decision, that the United States will be forced to abandon its war on Iran. I believe that for people like Mr. Larijani and Iran’s leadership, that this has to be the last war with the U.S. That either they go down completely in this war or that they convince the United States that it can’t keep going to war with Iran, and it needs to arrive at the lasting or longer lasting ceasefire or peace with Iran.

The situation in which United States and Israel would bomb Iran every six months, destroy its capacities, kill its leaders every six months, is not acceptable to them. It’s not a good outcome of this war. So they have to aim for a more larger goal, a more maximal goal here, which is this war has to be so costly to the United States, so costly to Saudi Arabia, to Europe, to the rest of the region, that collectively they resolve that every six months mowing the lawn is not an option, and they need to think very differently about a settlement with Iran.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I’d like to play a little bit of tape from Abbas Araghchi again, Iran’s foreign minister. He was on PBS’s NewsHour on Monday of this week, and asked about Iran’s attacks on oil facilities in neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and he was asked whether limiting oil supply is part of Iran’s overall strategy.

Here’s what he said.

This is a war imposed on us, and what we are doing is only defending ourselves. We have already warned everybody in the region that if the U.S. attack us since we cannot reach the American soil. We have to attack their bases in the region, their facilities, their installations, their assets, and as a result, the war would be spread into the whole region.

So this is the consequences, the consequence of the U.S. aggression against us. We are not responsible for that.

CHAKRABARTI: But Iran is responsible for its continued escalation of those regional attacks. Just today being March 11th, Wednesday, there’s news that Iran has attacked commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

A Thai cargo ship has supposedly been attacked by Iran. Two Iranian drones at least hit near Dubai’s International airport as well. And also the Saudis are reporting that Iranian drones were shot down near their oil field. So Professor Nasr, talk to me a little bit about, or talk to me a lot about these regional attacks that Iran has been doing.

As you said before the break, that they were saying, they were telling the region they were going to do this if the United States or Israel attacked Iran. But there was a careful calculation that had to be made here that it wouldn’t, regionalizing the war would not provoke an even more overwhelming response both from those regional neighbors and the U.S. and Israel. No?

NASR: Yes. Iran is, could very well be miscalculating but this is its calculation before we jump to what the result is. We should think about what, how they’re thinking. They had communicated to the region from before that if the war comes to them and U.S. bases in the region are used against them, that they would attack those bases.

And the fact that those bases are located in countries of the region would not prevent Iran from launching those attacks. In other words, the U.S. could not hide its attack behind countries that have relationship with Iran, expecting that Iran would not retaliate.

But as I mentioned earlier, Iran in addition to attacking American base in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in Abu Dhabi, in Saudi Arabia, attacking radar systems in Qatar and Jordan across the region has also decided to wage war against the global economy. And the global economy is not just oil and natural gas, which is the most prominent ones we focus on.

Dubai and the Gulf countries are also very important to other aspects of global trade, to technology, to information systems, a great deal of commodities come and go out of the Gulf, countries like India, because of their port, limitations of port births that they have, they rely hugely on the massive ports in Dubai and the rest of the Gulf in order to conduct large amounts of trade with Asia, with Europe, with Africa, and attacking ships that carry containers or attacking port facilities or potentially doing so, also will impact all aspects of the global supply chain of trade.

In a manner that the Houthi attacks in 2023, 2024 did the same thing in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Iran is essentially, as I said, its calculation is that it’s the battlefield that it gives it advantage against the United States is the global economy. I’ll put it this way, to you Meghna, that when just before the start of this war, the president gave an extremely long State of the Union address.

He perhaps spent maybe less than two, three minutes talking about Iran in an hour and 48 minutes speech in which basically dismissed, or at least he thought that there’s nothing to explain to the American people because it’s going to be a fast war and he’s going to get a win afterwards, he spent a lot more time talking about oil prices, gas prices, the glory of the global economy, how well American economy is doing, how everything is working for it.

It was very clear that’s his vulnerability. He was not worried about explaining casualties to Americans or was really worried about what American military reaction to the United States might be. But the Iranians understood that his entire message to the American people was premised on economic numbers.

And there’s no point trying to hit America head on in a conventional military confrontation. This time Iran has taken asymmetric war onto the global economy. Now, it may blow back against them. It may very well be, it might be a miscalculation, but when you listen to Mr. Araghchi, when you listen to Mr. Larijani, it’s very clear that they think they’re calculating and it’s the U.S. that has miscalculated. And they may be wrong. I don’t want to say they’re correct, but at this juncture in the war, they seem to be more confident in that they have, they know what they’re doing.

And it’s the U.S. that has been blindsided by this strategy.

CHAKRABARTI: Your point is very well taken because U can see how there is a sense of, again, who has the higher pain tolerance, right? Whether it’s the U.S. and Israel, or if it’s Iran, but by using the global economy as a weapon in this war.

Iran is also forcing the question of who has the higher pain internationally? Let’s leave Russia and China aside for a moment. But India gets a huge amount of its natural gas from the region. Even things like fertilizer, which a lot of people only now are discovering comes out of the region.

And if fertilizer stocks are choked off during planting season, that’s going to have ripple effects around the world. The Gulf States themselves, I think are 90% of their foods are, food is imported into the Gulf States. So when you’re talking about essentials for survival, like energy, like food, but then also as you mentioned, finances, technology, AI infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera.

It does beg the question of whether the Iranian regime in its calculation has a line at which they say, now we will step back from this chokehold on the global economy. Because to your point, the thing that they could trigger is an overwhelming response when Europe, India, the United States, et cetera, says no more.

We will send boots on the ground in Iran, in order to just, if nothing else, free the global economy from this.

NASR: Yes, that’s one option they have. The other option is to basically say, what do you want not to do this?

CHAKRABARTI: That’s what the regime is hoping for.

NASR: That’s also been based on studying international affairs for a very long time. That ultimately the preference, the less costly way of dealing with this, the faster way of dealing with this, the more predictable way of settling this is to settle it through negotiations, what the U.S. has so far not being willing to do. And that the pressure that will come from India, Europe, the Arab countries on the U.S. is not that we want to send soldiers into Iran or that you should send soldiers onto Iran, is that you should settle this war, go to the negotiating table, and settle this war.

And then make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Because for the Gulf countries, for India, for all the countries that rely on the Gulf for the global economy, the issue is not that this war stops now, but it’s that the shadow of risk on the Gulf be lifted. So it’s a mere ceasefire is not going to make Amazon rebuild its data centers in the region.

After having to scramble for two weeks to deal with the damage that was done to them or that the oil prices or premium insurance on ships would go down. All of these things would go down if the United States and also forces Israel in a way to basically arrive at a longer-term agreement with Iran.

Where the world can be sure that this war will not start again, all over again in six months.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So the risk premium that you talked about, I want to do an entire hour on insurance, global insurance markets and the very important role that they’re playing in terms of what we’re seeing happening right now.

… Professor Nasr, let’s talk about short and medium term duration, possible duration of this from the perspective of Iran’s own stockpiles.

If they’re going to keep the threat of instability in the region high, there’s been talk about mining the Strait of Hormuz, et cetera. How long could Iran keep this up?

NASR: Some of this is unknown because we really don’t know how much they have. Most of the estimates about Iran’s capacity have to do with its long range or medium range missiles.

In other words, for how long can it launch missiles at Israel, how many more supersonic missiles it has, and how much of their launchers and the places that they keep this missiles have been damaged by American and Israeli bombing, but the threat to the global economy is much easier and cheaper.

They could do that with these Shahed drones, which are very cheap and easy to manufacture, and they could be having in the orders of tens of thousands of these already, and they can launch ’em very easily. You cannot detect it, the distance between a ship going through the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian shores is very short.

And even getting across the Gulf to either oil or civilian facilities is very easy. And the Iranians don’t need to fire these nonstop in order to create costs for the global economy. Every once in a while, a ship getting hit or mining the Gulf periodically or parts of the Gulf or creating enough instability that it still creates chokehold. They could maintain that for some period of time.

CHAKRABARTI: Could they maintain this war of attrition if other critical things required for human survival start failing within Iran. And I’m pointing to water specifically, because even before this war, Iran had a major water problem and I wonder if, could that be one of the weaknesses internally to Iran, that perhaps isn’t being adequately addressed?

Iran does have a lot of vulnerabilities internally. If the United States and Israel decide to hit electricity grids, more fuel depots, as you say, water sources and the like, there is a point at which they think that the state could collapse or they’re going to create social mayhem in Iran and then Iran is no longer able to wage war.

But that actually is not a comforting scenario for the rest of the region because if Iran becomes like a giant version of Libya or Syria, that will still cast the shadow of risk over the Gulf. So I think for the Gulf economies, for those economies around the world that rely on the Gulf, I think Iran is calculating, and I think they are calculating that the cheapest, easiest way to deal with this crisis is to end this war and create a circumstance in which it will not happen again soon.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s so many more questions I could ask you. Professor Nasr, we haven’t even touched on the history of Shia-Sunni tension in the region, or Persian-Arab tension in the region. But with that as a backdrop, is there also a long-term impact that is going to play out regardless of what happens, regarding this immediate hot conflict?

And what I’m thinking of is the Gulf States regions’ relationships with the United States. Has what has already taken place in the last two weeks, could that have fundamentally changed that relationship?

NASR: I think you definitely are hearing that among the journalist, academics, former government officials across the Gulf.

They have invested huge amounts of money in thinking that the United States will provide them security. And this is now open to question. The United States is not going to defend them if Israel attacks them. That’s very clear to them. When Israel attacked Qatar, and the reason that the United States came to the region was to protect them against Iran.

Is also not happening. The United States has not been defending them in this war against Iran or is incapable of doing that. And the only thing the United States has actually done is actually invite Iranian war on them. So the very aggression that the United States was there to protect the Gulf countries from, it has been the cause of it.

And then it has failed to actually protect them. And so there’s going to be a lot of thinking in the Gulf going forward without a very clear solution. But I think there are questions as to what is the strategic value of these American bases, that they have been subsidizing, if they are not actually protecting the Gulf and even whether the United States will want to invest in rebuilding bases in the Gulf that could so easily be damaged again. So I think Iran has opened, this war has opened the Pandora’s box of questions about the sort of strategic culture that had dominated the Gulf for over four decades.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.