00:00I want to start with the disagreement that we see among administration officials here in the U.S.
00:03No clear, unified rationale for this war.
00:06And I'm curious, what history tells us about the potential problems or perils of going to war without a clearly
00:12identified goal or mission?
00:15Well, it tells us it's a bad idea.
00:18I think the problem is that there are things that the administration identified that it could do.
00:24And to some extent, these are its war aims and can be achieved.
00:28They can do things to the nuclear program that they thought they'd done last June but maybe need doing again.
00:35They can degrade the missile capabilities, production of Iran.
00:41They've taken out an awful lot of its navy.
00:43All of those things can be done.
00:45And if you wanted to say they were a success, you could do.
00:48But they said they were going to do more.
00:50They said they were going to achieve regime change, but they've got no obvious means of doing so.
00:56So that's getting a bit played down.
00:59What they didn't do is prepare their allies or the U.S. people for the things that the Iran might
01:07be able to do,
01:09which is basically make it very difficult to move shipping in and around the Gulf
01:14and to threaten installations within the main Gulf states, Emiratis, Saudis, Qatar, and so on.
01:24And that's where their problems really lie, is they don't quite know how to bring this to a conclusion at
01:30the moment.
01:30And on that note, when you talk about how to bring this to a conclusion,
01:33you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of achieving those objectives with or without boots on the
01:40ground.
01:40You know, the problem that you write is that not having boots on the ground is a good way to
01:44avoid getting caught up in a long and frustrating conflict,
01:47but it also makes it harder to guide the final outcome or achieve your goals and could last longer, I
01:53guess, right?
01:54I think, yeah, well, the difficulty you've got is that if you put boots on the ground, as it's normally
02:02put, put Alain forces in,
02:05first, it doesn't necessarily itself guarantee success, as the Russians have found in Ukraine.
02:11And remember, Iran is a country of 90 million people.
02:14But then you've got the country, then you're responsible for its occupation and administration.
02:21And Iran is in a mess, I mean, economically, never mind what the battering it's recently taken.
02:29So, understandably, the administration doesn't want to have any part of that.
02:34But that means that it's got no means of dealing with the regime.
02:38And the consequences of the regime falling on its own accord, which is possible, though I think less likely now
02:46immediately,
02:47but it's possible, is that you have chaos.
02:51You have chaos in this very large and important country.
02:55And you're not necessarily able to do very much about that either.
02:58So, the problem is in doing things solely from the air is that you set things in motion,
03:04but you can't control how they end up.
03:07And we get to the stage in practice where the main priority of the administration at the moment
03:13is really how to stop the Iranians doing harm to America's allies and friends in the region
03:20rather than making sure that the regime itself falls.
03:24When one looks for parallels to past conflicts, I think chiefly about the second war with Iraq,
03:29there was a robust public debate in the run-up to it.
03:33We saw the administration go to Congress and to the UN Security Council.
03:36That, of course, didn't happen this time around.
03:39And I'm curious what that says to you about the likely trajectory not trying to amass
03:43a coalition of allies internationally or, indeed, domestically.
03:48Well, I think, first, when things go wrong, you own it.
03:52I mean, this is President Trump's war.
03:56To some extent, B.B. Netanyahu's war.
03:58They own it.
03:59If things go wrong, they get the blame.
04:01Secondly, allies have got reason to be quite cross that economies have been put in jeopardy.
04:11People are getting killed.
04:14It's all very stressful.
04:16And they weren't really warned in advance.
04:18They weren't consulted on the wisdom of all of this.
04:21They may have put in their views.
04:23But as we know with this administration, the way the decisions get made can be quite abrupt,
04:32depending on the mood of the president.
04:34And so I think you've created a situation where allies are scrambling around themselves
04:41to deal with a problem not of their making and without confidence that the administration can sort it out.
04:48A good example of this is the promise to provide naval escorts to get ships through the Strait of Hormuz,
04:56which the president made, but which can't be fulfilled because the ships aren't there
05:00or it's too dangerous for them to travel themselves.
05:03So I think the aftermath of this is going to be a lot of rethinking about how, from the allies'
05:12perspective,
05:12they deal with the U.S., and hopefully a certain amount of rethinking in the U.S.
05:17about the advisability of consulting allies and taking their interest into account when you launch something like this.
05:24Quickly, before we let you go, you talked about the things that can go wrong.
05:27One of the things that seems to have gone wrong is that they, in these strikes,
05:31the U.S. seems to have knocked out a lot of the potentially more moderate leaders who could take over.
05:35Is there a possibility that the Trump administration ends up with a regime that doesn't fall
05:40and is more extreme than the one it replaced?
05:44Yes. I mean, to be honest, I think the likelihood that they would find some pragmatic guy
05:50who would do the same job that was done by the number two in Venezuela was always a bit fanciful.
05:56But certainly the Israeli strikes went further than the Trump administration seems to have expected.
06:06We're now in a position essentially where the IOGC, the Revolutionary Guard, is running the country.
06:13The hardliners are in charge at the moment.
06:15That's why they took risks with Hezbollah hitting Israel from Lebanon
06:22and are now seem pretty determined to push this as hard as they can.
06:26From their perspective, they've got quite a coalition ranged against them.
06:32So they've got to take advantage of their main leverage at the moment,
06:37which is the damage to the international economy, while they can,
06:40and see if they can get some guarantees from everybody else out of that.
06:45So this is a regime fighting for its survival and will fight hard.
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