Iranians, in return, are asking the U.S. for reparations. They may ask for recognition of the right to enrichment, and they want not a ceasefire but an end to the war—not just against themselves but also against Hezbollah in Lebanon. They want an arrangement for the control of the Strait of Hormuz that would allow them to charge transit fees. And they also want guarantees that the U.S. and Israel would not attack them again. So you put these two sets of conditions from both sides together, and we’re nowhere close to any kind of understanding, which means that the parties have only two options. Those are either to continue apace or to escalate. Continuation of this conflict—I don’t think it’s realistically possible without escalation because, at a certain point, in order to inflict more pain on each other, the two sides would have to cross new red lines, and that means escalation. And escalation is going to increase the risks of this conflict.
For the United States, there are only two possibilities in terms of escalation. One is a ground invasion of a Persian Gulf island or the southern shore of Iran, which could result in a very high number of American casualties, and obviously would deepen the conflict and make it even more complicated to solve. And the other option is to target Iranian energy infrastructure, which could result in Iran retaliating against the Gulf states and torching the entire regional infrastructure.
Which is perhaps why Trump backed down a little bit from his recent threat of targeting Iranian power plants, because he came to the conclusion that that would be the type of escalation he might not want right now, right?
Yeah, correct.
When you laid out what the Americans want, listing things like limits on Iranian uranium enrichment and an end to support for proxies in the region, and so on and so forth, that struck me as what someone at an American think tank would want. I don’t mean that as a criticism exactly. It’s not clear to me that that’s what Donald Trump cares about. I don’t think he is staying up late at night because Iran is funding Hezbollah in Lebanon. So I do wonder if there’s a way to make a deal here that does not fulfill the American demands but does fulfill Trump’s demands. I assume his demands right now are, one, to not look foolish and, two, to get the strait open so that the world economy can get back on its axis.
No, you’re absolutely right. If it were up to Trump, I think he would accept a less-than-ideal agreement, but he has repeatedly demonstrated, and this is not a new phenomenon, that he lets negotiations be conducted by people who believe in those maximum estimates. What Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have reportedly put on the table is almost a mirror image of Mike Pompeo’s twelve demands in Trump’s first term in office. And these are basically Israeli demands. So I don’t think Trump is acting independently here. These are a set of demands that have been in the circles that are close to him for many years, and they have become a kind of orthodoxy that I don’t think he can abandon, even if he doesn’t personally believe in them. So he’s stuck with them.
And now the problem, even if Trump wants to step aside from the maximalism of the current demands—the Iranians have demands that will be very difficult for him to meet. So I have a hard time really seeing how we can get to a diplomatic agreement anytime soon.
What role are America’s allies in the region, other than Israel, playing here? There’s been reporting in the past few days that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been encouraging Trump to continue the war.
I don’t think there is a single view among U.S. allies in the Gulf. There are a range of perspectives. There are those, like Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, who would be happy with this war stopping immediately and some sort of mutually beneficial solution being presented. But for Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia I think the situation is different. They do not want this war to end with an Iran that can still project power beyond its borders and threaten their interests again by controlling the strait. The problem is that they don’t have a clear concept of what defanging Iran really means because Iran is threatening these countries by basically firing drones and missiles toward them. And, as we have seen in the war in Ukraine, in order to completely destroy Iran’s ability to produce these cheap drones, which can be made easily in any basement, the U.S. would basically have to invade the entire country, which is just not on the cards. And, as we have seen in the case of Yemen, you can completely destroy a country’s infrastructure, its economy, and you still can’t stem its ability to produce projectiles that could disrupt the Gulf’s economy.
So this is why I think that all the Gulf countries want Iran weakened, but I don’t think the ones who want Iran vanquished have a clear definition of what vanquished really means. And if the U.S. is to go all the way, go for broke, and dismantle the Iranian state or turn it into a failed state, the Gulf countries would be the ones who would then be paying for the consequences. They would have a giant failed state of some ninety-three million people right next door to them, which would cast a shadow over all the prosperity plans that they have been planning for the next generation.
I think the Gulf states are just angry because they didn’t expect Iran to target them. They thought that the degree of détente that they had engaged in over the past few years was sufficient to deter Iran from attacking them. And now that it has happened they don’t have a clear strategy for how to bring this to some sort of soft landing. Other countries have experienced similar situations, like Germany in Europe and Japan in East Asia after 1945. But in those cases there was the total defeat of a state that had hegemonic ambitions, and then there was reintegration. In this case, it’s very hard to imagine either of those scenarios. As I said, totally defeating the Islamic Republic would require the kind of investment in blood and treasure that America is unlikely to have the appetite for. And reintegration is also something that there is no plan for in the region. So this is why I’m saying that the way this is going it is just going to create a more dangerous region, not a region in which the Gulf countries can go back to business as usual.
