"The Ayatollah Has No Clothes" - With Rich Goldberg and Richard Fontaine
As we continue to assess the threat FROM Iran and the threat TO Iran, we sat down today with two analysts and former national security officials with different perspectives on what we’ve learned so far and next steps.
Richard Fontaine is CEO of the Center for American Security. He was formerly the top foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and an official of the U.S. State Department and National Security Council. He currently serves as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.
Rich Goldberg is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. From 2019-2020, he served as a Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council. He previously served as a national security staffer in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. Rich is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve with military experience on the Joint Staff and in Afghanistan.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
RG: With no air defense, Tehran, the regime, is naked. The Ayatollah has no clothes. You now have a situation where if you're the Israeli Air Force, you can take these jets, you can take drones, potentially launch missiles, at almost any target in Iran, And face no threat of being taken out of the sky, intercepted. That is a game changing situation, not just for the Israelis, but also for the United States and our coalition partners as we contemplate our own contingencies in the future.
DS: It's 4:00 PM on Monday, October 28th, here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Where I am with my friend Dave McCormick, who's running for the US Senate, for an event we're doing tonight in Pittsburgh. It's 11:00 PM in Israel. Before diving into today's conversation, which will focus on Iran, just want to take a moment to acknowledge how difficult this past week has been for many of our listeners, especially in Israel, but not only in Israel, with the war fighting on Israel's northern front with Hezbollah. In the last few days, 23 IDF soldiers have been killed in action, mostly in the North, on the northern front, but also some have been killed in Gaza. And that means that 56 children of those 23 have lost their father this past week. Many of these soldiers were miluim soldiers, reservists, who have been in reserve service, for many of them, for more than 270 days. Those are 270 days away from their families, their businesses, their co-workers, their fellow students, their communities. And they are the ones who are bearing most of the brunt of this war, right now at least. And we will be focusing some of our next episode, not today's, on this recent wave of casualties and the mood in Israel these days, which weighs heavily on Israeli society. Today we're going to be talking about Iran and where that war front is heading in light of recent events in Iran, that military operation Israel conducted over the weekend. For that I'm joined by Rich Goldberg from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former official in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill working on a whole range of policies dealing with Iran. And Richard Fontaine, who worked for Senator John McCain, Senate Armed Services Committee, also worked in past administrations and leads today the Center for New American Security and is on the Biden administration's Defense Policy Board. I thank you both for being here. We're learning more about Israel's operation in Iran. And we knew a lot in the first 24 hours, but I think we know a lot more now. If I had to ask you, do we have a clearer picture of what Israel managed to accomplish with this attack relative to what we were learning in the first couple of days, what is that clearer picture you would describe? I'll start with you, Rich Goldberg.
RG: Yeah, I think we do have a pretty clear picture here. Obviously it's clouded by Iranian disinformation, denial, downplaying. You have basically every stakeholder involved here for various reasons that does not want to see immediate escalation. On the Iranian side, they don't want to have to admit that they were rather helpless with what Israel just did and that they are now even more helpless and vulnerable after what Israel did, which we'll talk about. In Washington, we're just a week out of an election. And so if there's a way to just stave off whatever might come next for eight more days, that's great with Washington at this point. And so, you know, downplay that. Israel was constrained. They didn't go to the top targets, you know, whatever, fine. And for the Israelis, they don't want to have to have 200 ballistic missiles once again coming at their territory and expending the interceptors that we talked about last time I was here. So everyone has a little bit of a reason to try to downplay what happened, but it's fairly significant what happened and transformational in some ways. Israel as it appears eliminated, destroyed completely, Iran’s strategic air defense. So their Russian acquired S-300 air defense batteries are long range air defense. The Iranian knockoff of that S-300 appears to be largely destroyed. We don't know exactly how many and what was in storage.
DS: So the S-300, for those not steeped in it, does what?
RG: So when you want to protect your territory from incoming aircraft, from incoming missiles, for incoming drones, you have air defense. And you have different kinds of capabilities within that air defense. We talked about Israel's air defense and in a past episode, and its layered air defense when you talk about Iron Dome for the short range rockets, the homemade rocket threat, all the way up to the Arrow 3 system for these larger ballistic missiles. When you think about Iran, they have some of the shorter range, more traditional type air defense capabilities, whether required for abroad or homemade to try to take out shorter range threats. They also have a capability to deter aircraft coming from afar. And that is something that they purchased from the Russians many years ago. And that system is known to us as the S-300. And it is, you know, supposed to be, from a Russian perspective, a more robust capability to deter foreign threats from coming into your airspace. If something were to come in, the Israelis were to send jets, the Israelis were to send missiles in, the radar system should pick it up, and they have interceptors to try to take out those systems. There is a more advanced version that the Russians have come out with called the S-400. That has always been sort of looming, threatened to, will it be transferred to the Iranians? The Iranians really wanted that upgraded version. But, you know, as what we sort of saw was with the S-300, the Israeli military, Israeli Air Force, didn't seem to have any issues, not just evading, but taking out the batteries entirely. And then as far as Iranian sort of reverse engineering attempts of that S-300 system, so they don't have to keep buying from the Russians, they want to make their own indigenous products, that, from what my sources tell me, performed ineffectively as compared to the S-300, to the extent the S-300 performed effectively that night. And so Iran, at this point, again, when you think about jets coming across F-16s, F-15s, F-35s, which obviously already are designed to evade systems like the S-300, but the F-16s might not be, you now have a situation where if you're the Israeli Air Force, you can take these jets, you can take drones, potentially launch missiles, at almost any target in Iran, and face no threat of being taken out of the sky, intercepted. That is a game changing situation, not just for the Israelis, but also for the United States and our coalition partners as we contemplate our own contingencies in the future.
DS: Okay, Richard Fontaine, based on what you know, was this attack that Israel conducted more about deterrence, reestablishing some kind of deterrence for Israel, not only in the region, but specifically with Iran? Or did it have a more longer term strategic objective that this first operation was in service of something much bigger and potentially a much greater threat either to Iran's nuclear program or to the regime itself?
RF: Well, the operation as they carried it out accomplishes potentially both of those objectives. The near term one was to stop the tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran. And though Iran has said that it will respond, it's been a little half hearted in its denunciation of the attack and domestically sort of minimized the damage that Israel had done in its attack, suggesting that it may not feel the need to do what it did in April, and then again three and a half weeks ago in terms of major barrages. And if that's the case, then Israel has succeeded in backing Iran off from another significant attack on Israel. More longer term, it sounds like the way that this proceeded was the first wave of aircraft took out air defense sites in Syria and Iraq. The next couple of waves went and took out the air defense sites, among other targets, in Iran. As Rich was saying, the S-300s is their most capable air defense system. It was reported that they had bought four from the Russians. One looks like it was eliminated in the Israeli attack in April, three eliminated in this attack. By my count, that leaves zero and the Russians don't have a bunch of spare air defense systems they’re willing to export to other countries while they're in full scale war with Ukraine. And so the Iranians are left. Not quite defenseless, but almost defenseless from air attack from Israel, even when they had these things around them before, it didn't seem to do much to the F-35s flying in the vicinity and so forth. You put all this together, the message, I think, to the Iranians is, your nuclear and energy and command and control sites are effectively undefended against Israeli air attack. You might want to think about that pretty hard when you're thinking about how to respond to this.
DS: Rich Goldberg, there's been a lot of conversations going on offline, a bunch of different people you and I know trying to assess Iran's next move. And, you know, Richard just said that there's something that the regime is signaling, but it's not that clear to me that there's one thing the regime is signaling that we're hearing different things from different players. There's ultimately what the Supreme Leader Khamenei decides. There are people around the supreme leader, there are hardliners, there are officials who are less hardline. And I know no one on this conversation, it's hard to find anyone really in the US, who has deep, deep, deep penetration into the thinking inside and around the supreme leader's head. That said, based on the statements you are seeing, what's going on, or I guess, what should we be looking for?
RG: Well, Khamenei’s in a box right now. He is really in a squeeze. And understand what the dynamic is right now. By taking out the air defense, by taking out a lot of the key elements of production of Iran's most advanced ballistic missiles, its solid fuel missiles, and some key elements that you need to continue to produce those, he has whatever stockpile is left of missiles in storage, he has, obviously, the capability to produce more liquid fueled ballistic missiles. Though the disadvantage of those is the time lapse of being able to detect actual fueling of a missile typically at a fixed site location, not mobile. And therefore if you're watching Iran like the Israelis might be or the Americans might be and you might have some time to take out something on the launch pad, the no notice type launches of mobile, longer range, medium range, ballistic missiles is not something that will be available at some point once he depletes his stockpile, until he's able to restore that production capability. So in the meantime, in the interim, with no air defense, Tehran, the regime is naked. The Ayatollah has no clothes, and he knows it, and now we know it, and everybody sees it, and every leak that comes out is more painful to that reality, and harder to conceal. Now at the same time, the way this regime works, as most closed regimes work, is you have to conceal this, you have to deny this, it could not have been a complete catastrophic failure. You can't actually be that vulnerable at the moment to anybody's air attack. So you see media that downplays this, officials that downplay this. You know, the Zionists, they say, were defeated. Our air defenses worked. You know, there's some people who died, and there's some casualties we're reporting, and they're true martyrs of the Islamic Republic, and we honor them and memorialize them, but they died in defeating the Zionists, not in losing to the Zionists, they tell us. And so you look at the supreme leader himself, you have hard line, let's call them, media inside of Iran, sources in the news media close to the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard, Some of them close to the supreme leader that as a lot of this news has trickled out of the success of the Israeli attack have been growing a little bolder in their calls for Iran to retaliate. But at the same time the supreme leader hasn't vowed to retaliate the way you saw him do after the death of Ismail Haniyeh over the summer, which eventually, by the way, he didn't end up responding to and I think he views that as a big mistake. So he doesn't want to make that same mistake twice. He doesn't want to commit himself to a plan of action here. He is in a full hedge of what to do. He knows everybody sees he's vulnerable. He can't admit that he's vulnerable. He knows he kind of needs to respond. He's afraid if he responds he invites what comes next from the Israelis because he's so vulnerable. Therefore, I don't think that he's made that decision yet. And everybody's sort of sitting there waiting to see what he does. Now, we obviously have options here in the United States. Israel has options. We're a week here or more away from an election. Anything could happen after that. Maybe the Iranians wait to see what happens with the election before they make a decision. Maybe they move quicker than that. We don't really know yet. But if past is prologue, the supreme leader, and you see this in his comments sort of saying it's up to the officials quote unquote in Iran to decide how to respond. He doesn't want to take responsibility quite yet. He doesn't want to put himself in the seat of arbiter of whether this was something they need to respond to or not. And so he's convening his Supreme National Security Council. Most likely he's asking for options. He's asking for a decision. Maybe they say, let's wait and see the election outcome in the United States. And that could dictate what they do next.
DS: I want to come to the US role in a moment, before we do, just Russia's role, Richard, as you both have alluded to, many of the, and described, many of the targets destroyed were the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft batteries. What does Russia do now? So there are all these actors in the kind of axis of resistance or axis of evil that could help reinforce Iran's defenses now that they've been so badly hit, as you guys are describing. What are you hearing? What do you expect? We also were hearing that Russia gave advance warning to Iran about Israel's operation. I don't know how reliable that is, but Russia clearly has some kind of stake in all of this.
RF: Yeah. Well, step back for one second because we've been talking a lot about, you know, technical details of air defense. And the first reason why that's important and much more important than it would have been previously is that there was a strong taboo against Israel or the United States attacking Iran in Iran. The thought at the time for many years was that was likely to ignite a regional war with potentially catastrophic consequences, and no one wanted that. And so, you know, the attacks, the tit-for-tat exercises were largely by Iranian proxies and on Iranian proxies in countries other than Iran. Well, that taboo has been broken. It was broken in April for the first time, and it's really broken now. Because there is no regional war of the kind that was feared and yet some fairly decisive military measures have been taken against Iran inside Iran.
DS: One would hear those concerns both in the US security establishment and in the Israeli security establishment.
RF: Right. Exactly. And so that doesn't mean there's no restraint, but it does mean that a new response option is available to Israel that, previously at least, most Israeli policymakers had thought Was not available to them but in extremis. So that's the first piece. The other is one the taboo against attacking Iran in Iran has been broken, two. Israeli or rather Iranian air defenses have been destroyed and others weakened but Iranian offense has been not neutered completely, but significantly degraded. I mean, the two prongs of their offensive capabilities have been their proxies and their ballistic missiles. Well, you see what happens when they shoot ballistic missiles. Yeah, some can get through, but they've caused very little damage in the whole region. It seems plus the United States, plus the UK, plus France rallies together to protect Israel against those. You don't see Russia and China, anything else trying to protect Iran from anything. So that's notable. So its ballistic missiles are not as effective and not so fearsome in the way that they previously were thought to be. And of course, and the other is, you know, Hamas is non-functional almost, at least outside of Gaza. Hezbollah has been degraded significantly, although still poses a threat. And so when you have the two offensive prongs really damaged and the defensive prongs sort of, you know, on their back, then that creates a very different strategic picture for this balance across the region. You asked about Russia. There's a lot that Russia could do. I don't think there's a lot that Russia will do. I mean, Russia could take S-400s off the battlefield, send them to Iran, put Russian crews there, and then dare anybody to attack them.
DS: Take the S-400s off the Russian battlefield?
RF: Exactly. They're not gonna do that. Because they've got much bigger stakes in their fight with Ukraine than they do in Iran. And a lot of their relationship with Iran is driven by the fact that they think they need Iranian capabilities for the war in Ukraine. So they've been using Iranian drones. There's effectively an Iranian drone factory in Russia producing Iranian designs, drones. So Russia's relationship with Iran is more about Ukraine than it is about Iran. So they may try to help here and there on things that don't matter quite immediately, but you're not going to see the Chinese and the Russians come to Iran's defense like you see Jordan and UAE and Saudi and France and the UK and the US come to Israel's defense.
DS: Question for you, Rich. What do we know of the US role in all of this as it relates to intelligence, rescue, preparedness, refueling of the Israeli Air Force operation? The US played down any direct involvement in the immediate 24 hours after, and then we started to hear that there may have been a little more involvement, maybe on the rescue operation planning, but I don't really know the answer to the question. What do you know?
RG: I think it's likely that we provided as much intelligence support as we could You Within the framework of whatever the Biden administration had deemed its parameters for what it thought was a proportional response. And obviously we can debate the logic of talking about a proportional response to 181 ballistic missiles at a country the size of New Jersey, but be that as it may, we saw the public comments saying no oil, no nuclear sites, which sort of left pretty much everything else in, except for potentially regime assets and leaders and command and control of the regime itself. And so, from that perspective, if there was intelligence that was somehow helpful to either persuade the Israelis of the advantage of going in a certain direction, the disadvantage of another, It is possible that was passed. I don't think we'll ever get confirmation of that because it would make our role a little bit more active for the Iranians. But beyond that, it certainly seems as though Israel cleared its own airspace, so to speak. As Richard talked about at the top, on its way to Iran It took out anything it thought could be a problem in Syria and Iraq along its way and as it had already shown the world, and Iran itself, twice, it in fact has the air to air refueling capability to launch a long range strike a thousand miles away. We saw that happen. Obviously, there was this great CNN ride along that Nick Robertson did on the last strike at Hodeidah port that the Israelis carried out in Yemen. He was, you should look it up on CNN. He just gets told to show up to some tanker and get on board and they lift off and they unfold his blindfold and they give him a video to watch. And suddenly he's like, you're over the Red Sea, Nick, and we're striking Yemen. And here's how we're doing it. And the fighters are coming back to this tanker to refuel. That was a message by the way, to Khamenei at the time of, hey, we can do this on our own. All the people who said we can't do this type of operation were wrong. We'd been practicing. We're carrying it out. We can do it to you too. He didn't apparently pay much attention to it, which was his mistake. And so I think we should really credit Israel militarily from the bulk of this operation with very little support operationally from the United States, if any.
DS: Okay. In terms of the US all these constraints that you described that they put on Israel. I guess I'll put this to you, Richard. Do you think there was a major concession by the administration to go along with this a week before or nine days before a presidential election? I'm not saying I think it's a major concession, but do you think it was. I guess is my first question. My second question is, Nadav Eyal, who we have on frequently, has made the point that the administration strongly discouraged Israel from taking action in mid-April, or after the April 13th attack, where they basically said, you know, Biden said, take the win. There was this incredible multilayered, multilateral, multinational defense that protected Israel, as you guys have described, that was very successful. Take the win. You don't need to respond. Don't escalate. And Israel insists on responding. And according to Nadav, the Biden administration officials he spoke to after that said, you know, we did discourage Israel from responding, but what Israel did was pretty darn impressive. And they, in retrospect, they actually handled this near perfectly in terms of their response and that we were wrong, we, the US government, wrong in discouraging them. So both those, big deal that the administration went along with this so close to the presidential election? And do you think the US government is impressed with what Israel has pulled off?
RF: I think on the first question, it's a big deal insofar as we're going to have a presidential election, a new president next year. And if you look at the candidates and their positions, who knows what either would have done in the same situation. I think of a piece of where the current administration has been, I mean, they dispatched the THAAD, this is another, yet another air defense system, but they dispatched a THAAD battery to Israel. They've made clear that they would defend Israel, have defended Israel from missile attack. And I think part of the coordination on this operation. Which, you know, looks like Israel carried it out on its own, more or less, was also to prepare for an Iranian response, if such a response was or will be in the offing. So that seems to be a pattern of cooperation. I mean, if anything, the striking thing, the big deal to my mind, is the fact that not only the United States this year has rallied to actively defend Israel militarily, but other countries have as well. I mean if you had predicted this even last year that in some way shape or form you'd have Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, France, the UK and the United States all acting to militarily defend Israel against another country in the Middle East,I think that would have been surprising to a lot of people. So that I think is the big deal. The way you put the reaction of the US policymakers to the April operation, I think is right. I mean, had they known that this was what Israel was going to do and that it would have the effect that it had, I think they would not have had qualms. But as I was describing before, pre-April, there was a strong taboo against striking Iran in Iran with unforeseen consequences, potentially dire ones to be had. As it turned out, that was a pretty near perfect operation, both militarily, of course, because they got in, they took their strikes and got out, but politically as well, because it sent a message, a message that ultimately was not heeded by the Iranians, but a message. Nevertheless, this is what we can do. This is relatively small scale now, but it could get bigger. And so you would be ill advised to attack us again because our next response could be bigger still and then of course they calibrated this response. And so the escalation dominance, as they say in the biz, has been mostly on the Israeli side here, and I think it was a good operation, and I think policymakers acknowledge that now.
DS: Do you think they'll have the same reaction now?
RF: I do. I think there were a couple of different concerns about, you know, there was at least reportedly all this give and take and back and forth over whether Israel should or should not strike nuclear and oil installations. There were other potential targets. You could hit the Quds Force headquarters. You could strike the Iranian Navy. There’s all kinds of potential targets. The question on the table is what’s going to be most effective in achieving the objective? It's not clear that Israel has the capability to destroy deeply buried nuclear sites and so you have an effectiveness question there. On the oil sites, it's arguable about what effect you would have. But we've been talking at length about the longer term effectiveness of taking out air defenses that are around sensitive sites and retaining for yourself the ability to escalate if the Iranians make it necessary to do so. So I think the reaction, once again, will be that this was a tailored, well crafted and well executed military operation.
DS: Rich, anything to add to that?
RG: Well, a couple of things. One, I think we'd be remiss not to note that there was a massive intelligence leak from the United States in preparation for the operation, which we still don't have almost any information about. And while the nature of the substance of the reported intelligence document was not of detail to impede the operation, we did see some of it come to light, come to fruition as far as certain jets that they used, and certain munitions that they put on those jets. But I think those were sort of built in assumptions that at least among the ways that Israel would attack Iran would be through its fighter jets with air-launched ballistic missiles, which we understand was exactly what they did. But we don't know other capabilities that were used. We didn't know at the time how they were going to get there, when they were going to attack, what they were going to attack. So the specifics of an attack plan weren't there. But this was top secret, you know, special compartment intelligence of the US government. Somebody leaked this. It was out on Iranian social media channels and telegram. This is very serious. And the longer we go without having somebody in custody, I'm going to get more concerned. Because in the end, there should be a digital footprint for everybody who accesses this intelligence. It might take a while because this was probably pretty widely accessed intelligence, but at some point you should find this person. And if they somehow can't come up with a person, that's when my antenna will go up, so hopefully we do because you can't keep having people leaking top secret intelligence out of the United States. The other piece is, and by the way I totally agree with what Richard said, by the way, even if you were thinking about going after nuclear sites, and you wanted to think about this as a sequence campaign, you would still do what Israel did first, right? Priority would be suppression of enemy air defense, take out their strategic air defense capabilities. Then it's, you know, how do we suppress as much as possible what they're launching back at us over time, their retaliatory capabilities. So, they're going after critical parts of their most dangerous ballistic missile program. And then you have an environment where you can take time and think, okay, what comes next, what's stage two now let's regroup and think creatively how are we going to go after potentially an underground nuclear site? The way that Richard talks about might be difficult. You'd probably have to have a lot of creativity compared to the United States capabilities if you're Israel to do that, remembering though, that of course Israel has a range of capabilities, not just in this domain that we saw on Friday night. They have clandestine capabilities. They have cyber capabilities. They have drone capabilities. Some of which likely were used on Friday night. We just don't know much about it. And so you put all those pieces together they could come up now with phase two. This is my segue to a very important flag and that is a lot of celebrating going on, a lot of high fiving going on. We're entering a period now where we've described very well, and Richard did a very good job of describing how this entire strategic dynamic has shifted. The whole paradigm for Iran has shifted on them, with their proxies being degraded, their missiles potentially ineffective, and part of their program degraded, having no air defense. What's the one trump card in escalation dominance? What's the one thing that you know as an insurance policy might keep this regime going and not be so vulnerable? Well, I would say it's a nuclear weapon.
DS: Right, so do they race to it right now? We’re about to watch a mad dash to a nuclear program.
RG: And you have to be very confident that you can detect that mad dash. And if the Israelis are that confident, I would say you're overconfident. And I think that they are humble enough, hopefully they're humble enough, not to have that hubris as we look at history. And obviously they have incredible intelligence inside of Iran. They've demonstrated a penetration of Iranian security services to a very high extent, when we go back to the Haniyeh assassination. But do they have that level of penetration in the nuclear side, and all the nuclear scientists, and what they might be doing and there's some crash program somewhere, there's some facility where they're working on weaponization? That's what should be keeping everybody up at night. And that's what has to be solved for inevitably here to ensure that we don't see that threshold crossed.
DS: Okay, so then a question to either of you, whoever wants to take it. That is what concerns me, it's the one insurance policy that Iran has,s is getting to a nuclear weapons breakout. Regardless of which way the US election goes next week, could you imagine a world in which the Biden administration, outgoing President Biden, regardless of who his successor is, is presented with this reality that Iran could or actually is making the mad dash and the mad dash will be made before he leaves office in January, and his legacy will be he either stopped it, or under his watch, Iran got a nuclear bomb? And there are some in the Israeli system who are arguing that there is a world in which President Biden will decide to stop it, whatever that means, whether it's the US acting alone, whether it's the US operating with Israel, whether it's the US giving Israel tools to do it. I throw that open to either of you. Does that sound plausible?
RF: No.
DS: All right, Richard. Tell us why.
RF: Well, I first start with giving Israel the tools. A lot of this turns out what would be militarily effective, and there's some big question marks around that. But if you're going to try to destroy deeply buried bunkers, the biggest bomb Israel has is 2,000 pounds. The biggest bomb the United States has is 30,000. It can only be delivered. So Israel has none of those. We could give them to them, but they couldn't deliver them without a B-2 from the United States. So they'd have to fly a B-2 from Missouri or something or, you know, so there's a lot of ifs there, but my understanding is that the US and Israel still assess that Iran has not, is not in the weaponization phase. And if that's the case, then Biden striking Iran when both Israel and the United States believe that it is not weaponizing seems highly unlikely to me, especially because even if you did so, you would only buy time. So the question would be how much time? First you'd have to be effective militarily doing it. And then, how much time would you buy? And, presumably, across, I think, three presidencies now, the message to Iran has been, we will prevent you from getting a nuclear weapon. So, if you begin weaponizing, then we will stop that process. So, you put all that together, to me, that seems extremely unlikely.
DS: Rich?
RG: I think it's unlikely that the Biden administration will do this. I don't know what a Trump administration would do, but I will say my concern is Iran living in the gray zone right now of nuclear threshold status and walking us into a nuclear weapon instead of breaking out to a nuclear weapon. That'd be a walkout is what I would call it instead of a breakout. By that, I mean we've been very highly focused on their production of enriched uranium at the two key facilities where they're doing this, at Natanz, which I think the Israelis probably could degrade pretty well, and at Fordow, the underground facility where I think most of us have questions over what Israel could or could not do, though I don't think we actually know. If you were to neutralize, you know, a lot of their nuclear stockpiles, the material, the centrifuges, most importantly, and the centrifuge production facility in Karaj, you would probably do a lot of damage in setting back their progress. It's not to say that they haven't diverted centrifuges already in the last couple of years since they started limiting UN inspectors from watching their centrifuge manufacturing plants, which is something that happened starting back in 2021 when we changed our policies on Iran and didn't really hold them accountable for some of this. And if you fast forward and they have some program somewhere and they've been mining secretly their own uranium, and a lot of this should be verifiable, but let's say it's not, and there's some scientists who worked on nuclear weapons 20 years ago, who have gotten the band back together and they're doing computer modeling, which we do understand is happening now. That's the one piece of weaponization that we understand is taking place from various leaks or reports. And what are we supposed to do with that two pieces of information? It seems to me they're sort of playing a little bit of a word game where The bomb's not being built, but they're working on a computer about testing and modeling the actual design, which is a lot of the weaponization piece nowadays. Think about the United States. We don't test our nuclear weapons. We do that on a computer right now. We computer model nuclear testing. Computer modeling is actually a core part. In fact, it's so core to weaponization that even in the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, the IAEA advised including it in the definition of weaponization, which is prohibited under the JCPOA. So they're already potentially doing weaponization as the UN would define it, as the JCPOA would define it, not even me. So if you're in this space, how do you crack down on the weaponization piece? Now, Iran, this is where I'm talking about the gray zone, Iran has already proven it can produce the enriched uranium. It can probably produce 90 percent weapons grade uranium. They've proven low enriched uranium years ago. They moved up to 20 percent enriched uranium, which is the threshold, what we call high enriched uranium. That happened right during the transition, early 2021, right before president Biden came in, they jumped up to 60 percent high enriched uranium, which from a technical perspective is just a stone's throw away from that weapons-grade uranium threshold of 90 percent purity of the uranium. And they were caught red handed by the IAEA inspectors, the UN inspectors at one facility making 84 percent enriched uranium as they were retooling their centrifuges to be able, presumably, to make 90 percent and say, oh, whoops, it was a total technical error. We have no idea how our centrifuge just spat out 84 percent level purity of uranium. So let's assume they could already make 90 percent. We in Washington, in large parts of the world, when you talk about their dashing to a nuclear bomb, they're in a breakout, we have always had a conception that that's going to 90 percent weapons grade uranium, that that's our military red line for taking action. What if they never actually go to 90 percent before it's too late? What if they've already proven that they can go to 90 percent? They're effectively there. They've crossed the red line from a technical perspective. Now they're working in secret somewhere on the weaponization side, cause it's the hardest part, but it's also the part you can conceal the best. That means we're on the clock already. What do you do? How do you solve for that? That's a difficult question, but an important one everybody has to ask themselves.
RF: We've talked about the military difficulty, not only from an operational point of view in the US, or Israel for that matter, and some of the unknowns and what the trigger would be for a given president. But then you look at the other tools in the toolkit. I mean, the JCPOA kept things at 3 percent enrichment, but had other flaws. The Trump administration did maximum pressure, but Iran was enriching a lot more uranium at the end of the Trump administration than the beginning. The Biden administration couldn't get back into the JCPOA or a stronger version of the JCPOA. I've heard Trump administration officials say, well, we were like six months away from bringing down the Iranian regime because maximum pressure was just on the threshold of working and if Trump had been reelected, then, you know, it all would have worked. Well. I mean, that's complete conjecture.
DS: We have a former Trump administration official who worked on these issues right here. We don't have to talk about him in the third person.
RF: No, no, I don't know if this is Rich's view, but it's complete conjecture if it is. And of course, who knows, there's at least a 50-50 chance that six months into a Trump presidency in 2025, you'll have brought down the Iranian regime to renewed maximum pressure. But if not, then you have to figure something else out, I suppose.
DS: Yeah, I would rather say, Rich. Rich, I want to give you the last word on this.
RG: In defense of maximum pressure and the conjecture, and by the way, it is a counter narrative, you can't prove this.
DS: And it's when you say maximum pressure, just for listeners to what you're referring to, it's a whole suite of tools that were deployed.
RG: Maximum pressure means turning on every light switch possible in terms of economic, financial, political pressure on the regime in Tehran that we could possibly find.
DS: And some military, meaning the taking out Soleimani.
RG: Absolutely. Military deterrence along with sort of a Reagan style Cold War approach of political pressure, economic pressure, military deterrence, maybe covert operations, no idea. And so together is the recipe potentially to bring down a regime like this without actually getting into a war that nobody really wants to see. And so if you start grading maximum pressure and think about, well, how long was maximum pressure actually applied for? Well, people say, well, he had four years of maximum pressure. Well, that's not true. He was in the JCPOA in 2017. This is he, President Trump. He was in the JCPOA for the first half of 2018. He made the decision to get out in May of 2018. They then granted a six month sort of time lapse for people to wind down their business in Iran. So partial sanctions, re-imposition in November of 2018. The State Department then issued waivers for countries to keep importing Iranian oil,wWhich was just like life preservers to the regime because they just had to go back to sort of a pre-JCPOA level sanctions level and they sort of knew how to deal with that at this point. It wasn't until May of 2019, the president decided to end those sanctions waivers. We still had nuclear waivers and other things going on the State Department was holding onto for months after that. So you go into 2020, you've had not even a year of maximum pressure, economic pressure being applied. Soleimani gets taken out. As the year goes on, the pressure financially keeps building. The IMF says that they're down to 4 billion dollars of accessible foreign exchange reserves by the end of 2020 and right when the boot's really on the throat, we kind of take the boot off the throat. Well, you enter 2021 and the policy of the biden administration is to return to JCPOA and start easing back on maximum pressure They don't remove sanctions So they can't be blasted for removing sanctions the policy is we're not going to remove formally the sanctions Until iran agrees to come back into compliance with the JCPOA. It's sort of a half in half out type approach. We're not going to come into compliance with the JCPOA until you do Iran. So Iran stares us down and they start escalating their nuclear program in a way that never happened before. They go to that 20 percent threshold. They go to the 60 percent threshold. They start reducing IAEA inspections. They start producing certain key components of nuclear weapons that the IAEA sees and reports on. And there is a lack of enforcement because you have Rob Malley, at the time the special envoy for Iran, who is blocking out any sort of pressure because the theory is if you're saying hey, we want a deal, we want to get back to JCPOA, tell us how we get there. Well, if you're being heavy handed and you're provocative and you're putting on, you know, major new sanctions, you're enforcing big sanction items, then the regime's going to get angry and they're not going to talk to you. And how are you going to do diplomacy if you're doing maximum pressure? So you start seeing their foreign exchange reserves start. Start increasing. The oil exports start increasing in 2021. There is some kind of arrangement reached between the Biden administration and Iran. You see a skyrocketing of Iranian oil exports in 2023 to China. They reached like two million barrels per day. Like, unbelievable. They were down to 300 thousand, 500 thousand under the Trump administration. And money starts getting opened up, bank accounts in Iraq, bank accounts, obviously in South Korea, part of the hostage deal. And then October 7th happens. And so your podcast writes the rest of history. But to me, that wasn't a maximum pressure campaign and it wasn't, you know, anything other than a maximum, let's call it maximum deference campaign to be kind. And it failed. And Iran is where it is right now.
DS: When you say hostage deal, I just want to be careful because we talked a lot about hostage deals on this podcast. This had nothing to do with Hamas.
RG: No, this was the five Americans, dual nationals, who were held in Iran for six billion dollars shortly before October 7th. Yeah.
DS: Okay, Richard.
RF: if the goal of maximum pressure is leased as, as President Trump or Robert O’Brien generally said, to get a better deal than the JCPOA worthy and probably achievable objective. If it's to starve the Iranian government of resources so that it has less to give to its proxies to carry out terrorist attacks and regional mayhem, a worthy laudable objective, probably attainable. If it's the goal is to make the Iranian people so miserable, they overthrow their government, you have regime change, the US. track record is uniformly bad and trying to do that through non-forcible means. I mean, Dan knows we can invade Iraq and topple the government and force regime change, but we tried a hell of a long time and set out to do it non forcibly, it never worked. Libya, same thing, only when we began bombing the country relentlessly did we achieve regime change. Castro died in bed, Maduro's not going anywhere, Kim Jong Un likes his cognac. You know, you can go around the world. Burma. You know, all these places where we've said we have to put all this non military pressure. And if people will rise up because they're so disaffected with the government and give us a government that works better, if the Iranians have achieved one thing since 1979, it's ensconcing their tyrannical government over the heads of a people that by all accounts wouldn't mostly not like to have it and are very pro-Western and pro-American. So I think we have to have realistic objectives of our policies. And to avoid having Iran obtain a nuclear weapon and to starve it of resources going to proxies is realistic and I think potentially achievable. To produce regime change with no military action inside Iran merely through pressure would fly in the face of everything we know about Iran and all the other times we've tried it in other places. But you might get a chance to try again.
RG: By the way, and I disagree with some of what you said, not all of it. I mean, if you compare our sanctions regime on Iran to sanctions regime on Cuba, they're not the same sanctions regime. We almost were successful in Venezuela. We also had holes in that sanctions regime. We've obviously gone the other way and we've seen how successful appeasement of the Maduro regime has been. But what I will say is you've just articulated two primary goals and achievable goals and laudable national security objectives of either a maximum pressure campaign or whatever you want to call it. And that is, starve the regime of resources so it can't do all the bad things it does, from arming terrorists and proliferating missiles, and trying to assassinate presidential candidates on US soil and kidnap Americans, and deny it a nuclear weapon. And all that is encompassed in that including long range missile capabilities and any missile capability that can hit the continental United States. If you can achieve all those things both through economic pressure on the general sort of squeezing resources and potentially militarily to remove the nuclear threat, I think that's good policy for the United States.
RF: Yeah, but isn't there some mutual inconsistency between some of these objectives? I mean, the Trump administration, the president would talk about getting a treaty that he would negotiate personally with the president of Iran. John Bolton would generally talk about regime change. Other members would talk about starving the regime of resources. And still others would say, no, it's going to be, you know, sort of a JCPOA on steroids without the flaws. But if you're trying to bring down the regime, presumably you wouldn't negotiate a treaty or an agreement that would give a lifeline to the very government you're trying to destroy. So don't you have to choose?
RG: No, first of all, I think as Americans, we should stand with the Iranian people and should be for this regime collapsing at some point. And if there's things that we can do without entangling ourselves in any military conflict that does not advantage the United States, in fact, harms the United States interest, we should find those ways to do it because if this regime didn't exist, has a different government in Iran that was answering to its people, we'd be a lot better off. But along the way, there are specific things that we've told Iran it can do, the regime and Iran it can do, if it wants lifting of sanctions, if it wants maximum pressure to go away. And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listed those very specifically, and they included the full removal of their nuclear weapons program, their missiles, you know, their support for terrorism, their regional activities, etc. So there was a specific list. The regime would fundamentally have to change its behavior if it's capable of doing that. And if not, we know it's going to continue to try to be the exporter of the Islamic revolution. They're going to keep trying to kill Americans and kill Israel and kill all of our allies. And it's in our best interest to remove their greatest threat to us. That's their nuclear extortion weapon. And squeeze it of resources so it can't keep starting wars all over the Middle East. In the end, if you squeeze the regime and you remove its greatest threat, we don't actually have to be bogged down in the Middle East for very long. We can focus on China. We can focus on bigger threats and we can empower our allies to take care of the rest.
RF: I think one thing Rich and I seem to agree on here is that the next president is going to have to deal with this and Joe Biden is unlikely to resolve it between now and January 20th.
DS: Right, right. Yeah. Okay. So…
RF: Sorry for the debate we just got into.
DS: No, it was fantastic. Actually, these are conversations I often have with friends offline, so it's great to watch this debate play out right here. Last question. There's been a lot of speculation about warming of relations, or at least softening of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And there was news about some joint military training exercise a couple weeks ago, although I've been told that there wasn't much to it. Obviously, we know that the Iranian foreign minister and the Saudi foreign minister spoke in recent days following the Israeli attack. That's not so shocking. But that said, I keep getting these questions. Is there something going on? Is Saudi Arabia kind of moving away from the direction of the Sunni Gulf's normalization with Israel? Is it learning to live with Iran? Either of you want to react to that question?
RF: I mean, I'll just say, briefly, I think you see a change in Saudi foreign policy over the past few years. I mean, MBS would say publicly and privately that Iran was essentially the root of all evil in the Middle East and not quite that the Middle East wasn't big enough for both Saudi and Iran, but not that far from it. And, you know, the exchange, the normalization deal where they shake and read exchange ambassadors a couple of years ago, and, and, you know, some of the talks seem aimed at letting some of the tension out of the relationship. I don't know that their fundamental view of Iran's malign activities and intentions have changed. I mean, they shouldn't have, but the Saudis also have been pursuing, of course, an Israeli normalization deal derailed by what has happened since October 7th, but you know, there was a lot of hope that something could be reached and sealed this year. And it doesn't look like it's a 2024 thing. And of course, part of that deal would be a security guarantee from the United States. So a Saudi Arabia that is pursuing normalization with Israel, reduced tensions with Iran and a security guarantee from the United States is looking for security so that it can pursue its other national objectives. And that all seems to be of a peace. I don't think that there's sort of a deal beyond that to be had between Saudi and Iran because at root, so many of their interests are defined so differently.
DS: Rich, last word.
RG: Yeah. Two, one is at the strategic level and one is at the tactical level. Tactical level, there's going to be a lot to sort out in the relationship with the Saudis, especially if there's a Trump administration that comes in because we've had sort of this herky jerky. We were in maximum pressure on Iran. We moved to maximum deference towards Iran. Get back to JCPOA, remove the Houthis from the terrorist list, etc. Push the Saudis away. MBS is radioactive. You know, the president said, and President Biden not even wanting to shake his hand when you actually have to go to gravel for oil production. Not a great look there, and obviously creates a pivot in Saudi strategy, which is hedging on the United States. The United States isn't here for us. If they're getting back in bed with the Iranians, we're going to get in bed with a lot of different people, including the Chinese and increase our relationship there. And maybe the Chinese can be a power broker here because they’ve got such a great relationship with the Iranians. And we're going to sue for peace with the Houthis after many years of war in the U S pulling its intelligence and other operational support to our air campaign against the Houthis as the Biden administration did early on. So I understand why they've pivoted. MBS was very focused on vision 2030. He's got investors coming to Formula One races in Jeddah. You can't keep having Houthi ballistic missiles firing next to where the investors are and say, everything is great here. So he sues for peace. The Americans aren't there anymore. Okay. Well, we're going to have to solve the Houthis firing nonstop missiles into the Red Sea and shutting down international shipping. I mean, that can't be allowed to continue. Houthis may go back onto the foreign terrorist organization list if there's a Trump administration. There may be a more robust military response, you know, sort of a Chinese proverb of kill the chicken to scare the monkey. In this case, the Houthis are the chicken and everybody else in the world the monkey. It's sort of a low hanging fruit of restoring the semblance projection of US power, but also re-establishing a major maritime corridor. The Saudis are going to have to figure out what do they do with that because how are the Houthis going to respond? How's Iran going to respond if we're back into a maximum pressure posture? What's happening next militarily with Iran of what we just talked about this entire podcast? That's a lot for the Saudi system to have to take in and figure out what's the strategy now. Are they pivoting back to joining a maximum pressure campaign? Are they staying in a hedge? They're going to lobby a new president not to do certain things because they think they're at risk? So a lot of question marks there. On the strategic level, I will say this. Predating October 7th, I know a lot of people believe that post October 7th, right, the Iranians disrupted the cusp of Saudi-Israel normalization, and it shifted the entire region back to focusing on the Palestinians. And it's making it very difficult to get Israel-Saudi normalization. It's really what Iran wanted. And if we can just find a way to the two-state solution and pressure Israel into concessions it can make to the Saudis right now and get normalization going, we can finally defeat the raison d'etre of the Iranians and everybody else in the region and Hamas in waging October 7th and then the Hezbollah October 8th war and everything else that's ensued. I'm going to tell you right now. Before October 7th, because of the removal of the maximum pressure campaign, because of the change in posture in the region where we were deferential to the Iranians and therefore a heavier focus on Palestinian issues and two-state solution talk way before October 7th. And the Saudis therefore went into a truce with Iran, so they stopped bad mouthing the Iranians and they started focusing once again on the Palestinian issue well before October 7th. And because the US led negotiations which predated October 7th by a few months to try to jumpstart something with the Saudis In other words, they needed energy production. So they go to MBS saying, what's it going to take to have you, you know, help us out with this energy crisis going back to 2022, right? And not being able to get the king on the phone and being able to ratchet up oil production after Russia invades Ukraine. You flash forward in early 2023 and they're talking about, let's give a defense tree to the Saudis. We're going to give you what you want and what's it going to take to… but by the way, in Washington, we've got a left wing problem in the Senate where people don't like MBS and they don't like Saudi Arabia. And they've told us we're not voting for a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, unless it includes major commitments to the Palestinians and a Palestinian state, because they fundamentally don't like that the Abraham Accords went around decades of failed peacemaking between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Okay, what does it all mean? It means I was in Riyadh and I was hearing talking points like I was zoomed back to the past. Like the MBS era never happened, like maximum pressure never happened, Iran's no longer the central problem of the region. It's once again all about a two-state solution about the Palestinian problem. And this is what's driving all the threats of the region. And I'm thinking to myself, my god, we have completely collapsed all the progress we've made of shifting the narrative, of shifting our focus and strategic understanding away from the failed idea and paradigm that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drives all security threats in the Middle East and instead understanding that Iran, the Islamic Republic in Iran, is the root cause of all the security threats in the Middle East. How do we get back to that? How do we shift the Saudis back to that? Because if we're going to go into a lame duck and try to shove some security council resolutions down the Israelis’ throat. Tell the Saudis let's get on board for some two-state solution process the Israelis haven't even signed up for. We are doomed. That's not real peace. That's not a security framework. We got to figure out how we get back to where we were understanding and making people understand what is the cause of instability in the Middle East. And if you haven't been paying attention since October 7th, if you still haven't figured out who the invisible hand is behind seven fronts of warfare, I can't help you. But if you have been paying attention, if you have been listening to Call Me Back, you already know. We got to make sure our policy reflects that reality.
DS: Gentlemen, thank you both for this spirited conversation. We, I guess we're gonna have you both back on. Gentlemen, thank you.
RF:Thank you very much.
RG: Thanks, Dan.