You know, when we're talking about Iranian deterrence, we're talking about long-range strike capabilities, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones. We're talking about a combination of nuclear hedging and nuclear latency. And this critical third leg is perhaps out of those two, the most ideational, the most touching the soul craft part of the Islamic Republic's statecraft. And that's this transnational terror and proxy network that after the Arab Spring, the regime itself began to call an axis and call it specifically the axis of resistance. This is the other thing. The Iranian Islamic Republic, when it emerged at the very beginning, similar to all revolutionary powers, it turned many countries in the region from the rival or even from friend to an enemy. It did it with Iraq. Iraq was a rival, but now it was an enemy. It did it with Israel. Israel was a close friend of Iran. After the revolution, it turns to be the enemy of Iran. So what they do, they decide that we are going to have third parties. We are going to have proxies in other countries fight this fight for us and prevent the threat or expand on advance our influence. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jeb, joined by my co-host Alex Chinchilla. On today's show, we step back from the day-to-day headlines and examine the deeper historical forces that shaped modern Iran. From the fall that shone the 1979 Islamic Revolution to the regime's use of proxy warfare and its evolving relationship with the United States and the wider Middle East. To help us unpack these questions, we're joined by Dr. Arman Mahmudian, a research fellow at the Global and National Security Institute whose work focuses on Middle Eastern and Russian affairs. And Ben Amben Tablo, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a leading expert on Iranian security policy. Together, we explore the political origins of the Islamic Republic, the strategic logic behind Iran's proxy networks, and what today's conflicts might mean for Iran's future and the broader regional balance of power. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our show with Dr. Arman Mahmudian and Mr. Ben Amben Tablo. Alright, Arman, Ben Am, thanks for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast today. It's great to host you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. So, here on the Irregular Warfare Podcast, we normally dissect a specific piece of literature that addresses a certain aspect of irregular warfare, right? Given the exigencies of the current war in Iran, we thought it was important to do a show that went beyond kind of the day-to-day headlines and examined how the last 80 years or so actually brought us to this moment in time. Ben Am, I'd like to start with you. Could you describe the political context in Iran that led to the 1979 revolution? Like in other words, what preceded the Islamic Revolution? So again, let me just reiterate, classic Persian style. It's a real pleasure and honor to be with you all virtually. I'm looking forward to a very fruitful discussion. And you may have gotten from that a little bit of largesse, which would also describe Iran's pre-1979 political system. Iran for roughly 2,500 years has had multiple dynasties, some domestic, some foreign, that have continuously had monarchy as being the main pillar of the state. Now, the relationship between the monarch, the court, state, and society drastically changed in the past 2.5 millennia. But leading up to the 1979 revolution was the last dynasty in Iran known as the Patalevi dynasty from 1925 to 1979. In essence, you could say that those were two of Iran's most modernizing monarchs for all the military audiences out there who love the acronyms and the things that begin with the same letter, alliteration. MMM is a good way to think about the Patalevi period. There's another alliteration for you, most modernizing monarchs. But suffice to say that the political system was monarchy. And you could say in political science speak, the more authoritarian they both got, the more you could say a sultanistic type of state. Okay, so if I'm hearing you correctly, Persian civilization is an ancient culture long shaped by dynastic monarchs, the last being Muhammad Reza Shah Pavlavi, whose rule ended with the Iranian revolution in 1979. But I feel like we can't talk about that revolution without mentioning the 1953 coup, right? I mean, from what little I know, at the time, the Shah was locked in a power struggle with Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mahabin Mossadegh, who had nationalized the country's oil and the crisis escalated so far that the Shah actually fled the country, right? And then a covert operation, backed by the CIA, by the way, overthrew Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power. And after that, the Shah ruled, I guess, to put it politely, far more authoritatively and relied heavily on Western support. So with all that background in mind, how central was the 1953 coup to what eventually happened in 1979 and did that moment fundamentally reshape Iran's political trajectory and its relationship with the West? Well, that's a good question. And I think specifically speaking the Mossadegh part. It's very debatable. You know, when we look at the downfall of the Mossadegh, some people make a debate that it changed Iran's path. Iran was going toward the democracy and then the coup regressed it. Some other argument is that it's not necessarily changed Iran's path to the democracy, but it deepened a resentment toward America. I'm not really a member or the fund of the first group. I don't believe that despite the coup, the 1953 coup or the downfall of the Mossadegh, Mossadegh's government itself was sustainable. Because when we look at the coalition and political coalition he had in the Magyar, in the Magyar, in parliament, it was kind of the oddest coalition that you could ever get. It was a coalition of the communists, the Islamists and the nationalists. A three political bloc in Iran, each genuinely hated the other party. The communists never got along with the Islamists. They never got along with the internationalists or the autistic view they had. The Islamists obviously saw the communists in the way infidels and also they didn't respect nationalists because they didn't put much of a value in national identity altogether. So Mossadegh in a way builds a fort, a fortress on the sand at the edge of the ocean with a very fragile foundation. One way or another, I think his government would have collapsed. But in an event of the collapse, the next alternative to him would have been the communist party or two-depart. And that is the assessment of the CIA at the time. This would have not led to a democracy. I think this would have led the continuous of Mossadegh to the further destabilization or instability in the country. But the coup and the blame that the United States got for it, in one way or another, depended on resentment among some of the Iranian toward America. The Islamic Republic's problem with the United States, I think, unlike the contemporary belief, doesn't have much to do with the 1953 or Mossadegh altogether. The problem they have with the United States has nothing to do with Iran's national interests or national history. It's much had to do with the ideology that they were advanced. Primarily one was the dislike or hatred of Israel. And if you look at the books that the pioneer leader of the Islamic Republic wrote, like for instance, Khomein or Muttahari, you would notice that when they criticized the United States, they largely criticized the United States for its backing of the Israel or what they call the occupation of George Zalemogorov's votes and backing of the Shah itself. You won't see much of a trace of the coup and the 1953 event. Great. You know, Revelation is something we're pretty interested here on the Regular Warfare Podcast. And I was wondering for Benham, can you kind of talk us through what made the Iranian revolution successful and what are some important takeaways from this chapter in Iran's history? I think answering that question against the backdrop of 2026 is critical because one of the undistributed middles into how did 1979 happen and how did it come about was actually the role of the state itself. Traditionally, with the revolution, we tend to look at the social forces, the political forces, the grievances, the coalition building, the opportunities that tend to get you there. Occasionally, that has a foreign element and we tend to look at the foreign element. You know, Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic, was in exile for large parts of his life, particularly in Iraq and then later in France. We tend to look at all these variables. One undistributed middle is the role of the state itself, the role of the state under siege when the role of the state changes, when they fear something versus when they don't fear something. One of the fundamental differences that really shaped and made the success of the Islamic Republic that replaced that monarchy was the fact that the monarch was willing to be. Now, in the early days, it was that the monarch was willing to concede. There was this really famous speech by the late Shah where he says, I've heard the voice of your revolution. It's some of the most famous, I don't know, 11, 12 words in contemporary Persian history that is designed to buy off and co-opt the street, at least in terms of surface level intention. But in reality, signals state weakness and is the thing that allows this vast coalition of leftist Islamist Marxists, which increasingly, if we're looking at a series of then diagram of divergent ideologies, divergent social realities of protesting and dissident Iranians, that Venn diagram, the shared part is anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism, all framed through the prism of downplay your difference, upplay the similarity, and the first and most local target would be the king itself, the Shah himself. So one of the things that made this revolution successful was in so many ways the mistakes of the ruling elite, and in particular the late king, and ultimately the willingness not to use force, which is the thing that has kept so many Middle Eastern autocracies in power have allowed so many Middle Eastern autocracies to either evolve or devolve. And a revolution that is first and foremost a social phenomenon can only become a political phenomenon when it overtakes the state. The willingness of a monarch to flee rather than to crack down, and the willingness of the state forces to step aside, or at least to move into a more neutral position, was the most proximate reasons why these forces succeeded. And that simply means that whatever one's political disposition, and certainly there were mistakes pre-79, and certainly a lack of political freedom, but compared to everything else we've seen, and U.S. foreign and security policy has had to deal with in the late Cold War and post-Cold War and post-911 Middle East, what was happening before was like St. Francis of Assisi, compared to Assad or Qaddafi or Saddam or even the Islamic Republic. So thanks very much for that helpful context. What I'm really curious about is, Benam, you've described this state that is in some ways quite fragile but willing to fight for its interests and push back with the security apparatus. How does that translate into foreign policy? How is Iran thinking about the world and how has this evolved over time since 1979? Well, this in and of itself could be an amazing dissertation, but the Islamic Republic has a security hangover, much like American national security thinking has a security hangover. For us, it's the Iraq War, for the Iranians, it's their Iraq War, which incidentally is the first Iraq War, the Iran-Iraq War. It's really downplayed in Western academia and policymaking, but it's the longest conventional war of the 20th century, a full eight years, and kind of indicates the bleed over from these popular ideological revolutions that can cause a foreign conflict. The lessons that the regime's security and political elite learned, the veterans of that war had promoted into society up until recently, and the security policy doctrine of that state are sheer products of the war. The nuclear program was resurrected then. Iran's ballistic missile program was built then. Iran's first drone use happened then. Iran's erection of a transnational terrorist architecture was built then. Iranian threats in the maritime domain, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz happened then. So many of the security challenges that we deal with from that state have their origins in that conflict. And up until the cycles of violence in Gulf in the Middle East post October 7, that strategy on balance paid off and had Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, passed away on October 6, 2023. You could have said that he would have been one of the most successful anti-American anti-Israeli autocrats in the contemporary Middle East, being able to enable for his regime a limited war option indirectly while deterring a limited war option for the adversary on his territory. Amman, I'd like to hear from you as well. How have you seen Iran's relationship to the world changing since 1979? Well, it goes through two stages. The first stage, which is mostly the first decade of the revolution, is the stage that the Islamic Republic followed through with the whole strategy of neither in the West nor the East, only the Islamic Republic. Basically, the idea or the dream was to introduce a third poll in the power competition. Iran didn't want it to be neither the VARSO pact or the NATO pact. They were hoping to establish a coalition with the countries that they considered as oppressed ones, those who been in their view the victim of either the Americans or the Russians expansionists. That was the first stage. Iran found itself in a position that faced hostility as a response from both powers. And we have seen it during the Iran-Iraq war, the United States on and off supported Saddam, but also Iranian. But the Soviet Union was a strong backer of the Saddam regime during the war. The collapse of Soviet Union changes this equation strongly. Because once the Soviet Union collapses and there are so many new nations in Kostakos, in Central Asia, the Iranian and Russians are for the first time their history facing a circumstances they never experienced. And that was not sharing a border, a grand border. Throughout the history, if you go back to the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century to end of the Soviet Empire, Iranian and Russian shared border. And that usually triggered conflicts between two nations or made them to feel threatened by one another. This changes the equation. So Iranian now feel less threatened by the Russians, which brings us to the new policy. And then in Iran, they used to call it the policy or a strategy of people to the east. So basically the grand idea was that Iran needs to expand its ties with the eastern power such as India, Russia and China in order to counter the western pressure. What I'm really curious about hearing from both of you is we've heard much about Iran's strategy of relying on a regular warfare as part of its foreign policy. So they do a lot of work with proxies, non-state actors to accomplish its interests in the region. How do you see this strategy? Has it actually succeeded? It succeeded until it didn't. It's a strategy born as much of ideological imperative for the 1979 revolution to export that revolution. Most of the press ones, this was part of the ideational elements of the Iranian foreign insecurity policy post 1979 to be able to tap into grassroots networks with local grievances using local actors kind of by within through those local actors to contest a state that at the structural level had a 180 degree or at least a 90 degree different foreign policy disposition. And this is what really made and cemented the Islamic Republic as an anti-status co-actor because it was willing to work again, try to co-opt a grassroots elements of another state society and get that to flip. And over time, the ability of the Islamic Republic to either attract or repel based on ideational overlap or financial and material support is what created this constellation of forces that here's another military alliteration for you. CCC allowed them to create in some places proxy groups, terror groups, militia groups, armed groups or co-opt. In other places, ultimately with the express purpose is a very distant, long leaf style control to control political pressure against the state from the street to get a cycle of violence going into conflict that will allow the Islamic Republic to have more influence on that capital or in the bilateral relationship such that you have groups that the regime has created like in Iraq, like Badr, much more recently, all the constellation of forces that broke away from the Makhni army in the middle part of the Iraq war that later became Qatayb Hezbollah, Sayyed Bafal Haq and the Alphabet Shroud of Shia militias there. Lebanon, again, created Hezbollah. But in other places, co-opted using an existing conflict and pressing on the fault lines of that existing conflict for the ultimate regime interest there to further strategic competition or to further ideational contestation. And there it's Hamas and Gaza, co-option, and there it's the Houthis in Yemen, co-option. So again, in some places it creates and on strains equips and gives cohesion or in other places it co-opts. And that's where the material support and the sustained long leash approach gives it that magnifying foreign policy power that for so long was part of the regime's conventional deterrent triad. You know, when we're talking about Iranian deterrence, we're talking about long-range strike capabilities, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones. We're talking about a combination of nuclear hedging and nuclear latency. And this critical third leg is perhaps out of those two, the most ideational, the most touching the soul craft part of the Islamic Republic's state craft. And that's this transnational terror and proxy network that after the Arab Spring, the regime itself began to call an axis and call it specifically the axis of resistance. It had such a constellation that it was trying to develop political order in some of these states based on the axis. And again, you fast forward to the cycles of violence post October 7 in the Middle East. It's likely that had that terror attack not happened and had Israel not responded in that way, this axis would have continued to rise. In 2026 today, we're sitting and speaking, this axis is down, but it's not out. But it has been a critical element of the regime's foreign security policy. Something I'm curious on just reiterating or revisiting is why Iran pursued this strategy in the first place because it seems like there's a lot of downside here, right? I mean, you don't see a lot of countries relying on terrorist groups, non-state actors, proxies to try and accomplish their national security interests. So Arman, why did Iran come to rely on proxies in the first place? So is it just opportunistic? It's a very good question. It's hard to answer because most of the time when people look at this, Iran's so-called axis of resistance, they come to the understanding that this axis of resistance is an outcome of coherent and progressive and step by step policy, a gradual one. This is not necessarily the case. If we go through each flank of the axis of resistance books, the Lebanese one, the Hezbollah, the Syrian one, the Iraqi, they come out of different circumstances. For instance, the Iraqis, the bad corpse and other networks over there. It kind of routed back in the time that Khomeini was in Iraq as an exile, and that's how the bad corporation corpse was formed. They formed the bad corpse basically from the Iraqi prison of wars, the Shias, and also sat down Shian opponents. In Lebanon, this is a different scenario. In Lebanon, the 1980s was the civil war. The Iranians sent a group of about 5,000 troops of the IRGC under the name of the Mohammed the Prophet of the Gods Brigade. They formed the Hezbollah. So it's not out of the connection. It is out of the chaos in Lebanon. Sometimes Iran forms these proxy networks out of the connection that it has, sometimes through the agency of the chaos. There's a civil war in Lebanon. We go there, we form a Shia militia. There's a civil war in Syria. We go there, we change the balance of relationship. We are no longer with the Assad-Equal partner. They are a semi-client. We are protecting them. We are going to have a proxy militia. The same thing was the case in Yemen. And what why they decided to give a chance to the proxy networks is because of it was one of the few toolbox they had. Look after the Islamic revolution, Iran and the foreign policy, Iran inflicted upon itself through the hostility with the West lost access to the great chunk of the conventional weaponaries on the face of that. Iranian couldn't no longer purchase aircrafts or ships or tanks or whatever you liked. So that was one of the reasons that was one of the toolbox they had in the military doctrine. This is the other thing. The Iranian Islamic Republic when it emerged at the very beginning, similar to all revolutionary powers, it turned many countries in the region from the rival or even from friend to an enemy. It did it with Iraq. Iraq was a rival, but now it was an enemy. It did it with Israel. Israel was a close friend of Iran after the revolution turns to be the enemy of Iran. So what they do, they decide that we are going to have third parties. We are going to have proxies in other countries fight this fight for us and prevent the threat or expand and advance our influence. And I very much on board with the behnams point that this worked until the October 6th of 2000s, 2002 and 2003. And it didn't work from there because I think one of the mistakes that Iranian make in use of proxy troops, they change the purpose of it. For a long time, the purpose of the proxy militias was local, meaning I found as Islamic Republic Hezbollah to advance my influence in Lebanon and contain the threat in Lebanon. What happens on October 8th? Hezbollah by attacking Israel, which wasn't its own fight. It was Hamas's fight. It was this equation right away. It's no longer local. It tries to be unaggressive. So basically exceed the boundary of its resources and capacities. It makes sense. So just to recap, what we've heard so far is that after October 7th, Iran's proxy network is beginning to fall apart. The US is in negotiations with Iran about nuclear weapons and their pursuit of that. So why now? Why do this particular operation? Is it focused on something like regime change? And what specific risks and opportunities do we see involved with the particular US operation? So there's a whole debate in this country right now over the word imminent, how imminent a threat, some of the non-nuclear challenges that the Islamic Republic poses. I'll put my cards on the table here. I'm not a lawyer, but I am a fan of the Nixon administration. So naturally that means I find the war powers act to be illegal. The grenade being thrown out there. Let me move to the more approximate point, which is I think it was simply an intersection of strategy and opportunity. There's this great debate in Washington about Kremlinology around the president, who is influencing the president and on which policy. I think in term one, that game was played a lot by analysts, academics, experts, reporters, diplomats. And actually it denuded the president of agency. And I think the president has had a fairly clear view, particularly with his time out of office since the 80s, of what the Islamic Republic is. And he's had a fairly clear view of the way in which he's willing to wield American power. Some would say more forward leaning, even dare I say more crassly than ever before, would be willing to both bend it and break it in order to reshape it. And here the president has been immensely comfortable with the use of force against the Islamic Republic in a more limited way. And he's gambled on the use of force. I remember, you know, he cost him some of the money. Iran's chief terrorist, which later President Trump killed in a drone strike in 2020, called Trump a gambler. I mean, the regime has called Trump, unfortunately, many things, but they called him a gambler. And that's when President Trump was really changing the conventional wisdom on Iran. He was willing to leave the JCPOA that same year, May 2018. He was willing to massively scale up sanctions. He was willing for a part to play to the edge. He was willing to break the conventional wisdom that used to have a bipartisan stranglehold in Washington that if you support protesters in Iran, you denude them of agency. Tauern feathered them. I think Max Pressure, Term 1, and also how he leaned to this stuff in Term 2, totally debunk that thesis. We can get into that a little bit more on the social side if you want. But the president, kind of like what Arman was saying about the successes the Islamic Republic had with its proxies, got it to lean in. The successes the president has had with Iran policy also got him to lean in. You know, being able to do, you know, change the political game with supporting protesters more vociferously, more rhetorically than ever before. Being able to leave the nuclear deal, being able to restore economic sanctions, even gambles outside. You know, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Golan Heights of Yizravi, Israel, and Syria. Other things that people had said would be a World War III type of scenario. And every time he's kind of doubled down, it's actually paid off. Or on risk reward, it's actually paid off. Killing costs him some money, similarly paid off. I mean, make no mistake, that was the largest ever single ballistic missile barrage against U.S. forces in recorded history. But on balance, you know, I think the Trump administration would say that it paid off. And you take that logic and you transpose that into the willingness to, you know, back Israel's use of force in 2025 during the 12-day war. And the immense successes Israel had in that war, paving the pathway for the U.S. to enter in a limited way against Iran's nuclear facilities as part of a counter-proliferation operation. And then being able to achieve something that, since April 2006, no one was able to achieve with respect to Iran, which was turning off completely of Iran's enrichment output. That was the success of Operation Midnight Hammer. That paved the way to say, oh, perhaps there is a theory of limited war here that could be applied to Iran, that could be applied to a broader defanking effort. And I think when you contrast that on top of the protests and his rhetoric, his not one, his not two, his nine, eight or nine, depending on how you count multiple red nines drawn in the month of January, 2026, with respect to killing Iranian protesters, with respect to killing Iranian dissidents, with respect to jailing people, with respect to executing people, and the multiple promises, leaning in more than any other American president in the past 47 years to support the street against the state. Quite literally take over your institutions, quite literally make Iran great again, quite literally the words regime change. The forcing function for the strike in my view cannot be divorced from an attempt to also gamble and try to change the political equation. Now I am someone who in that sense says that the president may not yet be driving for regime change. I think his preferred model is a Venezuelan type situation. I think he sees the Islamic Republic as weak. But as we've been saying here for a while, the Islamic Republic can be weak, but it can also still be lethal at the same time. And there's a contest of wills right now as to whose side is time on. I'm not talking about the nuclear negotiations between the end of the protests and the start of the conflict, but I'm talking about how widening the war can affect someone's risk reward calculus going on and how time can be weaponized. So I think the president believed that a combination of a decapitation and an ongoing defanging mission could allow time to be on America's side. It remains to be seen if he's willing to entertain a much larger conflict. At least his rhetoric says that he's not. But operationally, he conceives of this as an operation rather than a campaign. My recommendation would be, you know, don't do it, but if you're going to do it, go bigger, go home and think of it as a campaign. That was literally the foreign affairs piece I had the day before the conflict. I mean, if it would have been OBE if it came out one day after the conflict. Your publishing timeline is impeccable there. I've got a question for Arman here. You know, Benem brought up the point about regime to current conflict in Iran and the greater Middle East. So I guess just big picture. What are the risks and opportunities associated with regime change in general? And then what are the risks and opportunities specific to Iran right now? Well, this is a wide range. It goes from the worst case scenario to the best case scenario. The worst case scenario for both Iranian and the American is that Iran turns to be a failed state. Basically, not only the regime collapses, but any, any, or any, unfortunately, of the restoring order and, you know, control over the country, imposed Islamic Republic era collapses with the two. This is a possibility. This is the worst case of the possibility. I wouldn't say that it's most probable, but it's among the possible. The failed state Iran would be obviously a disastrous Iranian population, but also for the United States itself. It is in the US interest that Iran remains unstable, friendly by the stable country. Because historically speaking, failed nations, they turn to be their place for a growth of terrorism, other source of criminal activity, and they describe trade, trade roads, energy, fellow, neither of those are in the US interest. We can make a debate that maybe the Israelis and the Americans are not sharing the same view on that front, because Israel is threshold for the failed state historically is much higher than the Americans. And there's reason behind of that. They're leaving. They are surrounded by the failed states in the Palestinian territory in Lebanon. They're the most stable state. The neighbors are Egyptians and Jordanian. They both are at the edge of the bankruptcy. And also, Israel has never been in charge of global order, but the Americans assumed that responsibility. So that's the worst scenario. What would be the best scenario is that Iran would have a smooth transition of power. Let's say that once the bombardment and the aerial campaign is over, which may lead to or result in the polarization of Iran's coercive apparatus, people of Iran would find it as a window of, unfortunately, they go on the streets, they seize the opportunity, straighten institution as the president Trump asked, or advocated it. The regime would be collapsed and there would be a smooth transition of the power. And then the new Iran would be a pro-euroreo, Iran, most likely, I think the most likely scenario is that democratic ground would be pro-America because most of the Iranian population have a very positive view on America. And that's not me saying that. Actually, that is Israel's prime minister, Ben Yami Netanyahu, said the prime minister in Netanyahu about two years ago in an interview. I mean, it comes from many reasons. One of them is that Iranian people reached the conclusion that they don't like the regime so much that they ended up by liking whoever is the enemy of the regime. And I'm not saying that that is the only reason that they're rooting for America, but that contributes to the two. But there are so many possibilities in the middle. And to be frank, where it lands, it largely also relies on the United States. For instance, today we are hearing that the United States, that this tour of the last week was entertaining the idea of sending armed groups into the Iran. It was primarily a discussion over arming the Kurdish militias or backing them to get into the Iran. I personally found it quite a dangerous approach. To me, that would have changed the entire equation. I think using any ethnic group in Iran at this point would change the equation from a national wide equation, national cause, the cause of people to change the regime and would marginalize it to a local matter. It is no longer national. It's no longer about Iranian versus the regime. It's about courts, it's about the Baluchas, the Persians, the lords. And the other thing that is that is going to do, it's going to scare away the large portion of the Iranian population. Look, the thing that secured the survival of the Islamic Republic so far, next to the application of the violence, something that Shah didn't have the willingness to use it. And Ben-Nam rightfully pointed out. The second thing that really helped them is that the fear of serialization of the Iran. Since the beginning of the Syria civil war. The Iranian people reached the conclusion that we do not want the risk of Iran turning to Syria. So I'll just layer on one social element of what Arman said, which I want to reiterate. I wholeheartedly agree with the tragedy that turning a national into a ethno-sectarian issue would impose on US foreign policy, particularly given that Iranians are a highly nationalist population and highly nationalist populations when they make nationalism a part of their political discourse. It can be xenophobic. It can be irredentist. It could be predatory. It could be hegemonic. That is not at all the discourse of Iranian nationalism today. It's like a 180 at the discourse of Russian nationalism, which is revanchist, revenge, grievance-driven, historically rooted. You know, the Iranian national today, since 2009 in these protests, is Iran come home. It's Iran first. In fact, it was Iran first before there was the America first discourse, which allows for a fundamentally different kind of foreign policy discourse from Iran. That is more than the caricature you get in DC or the Academy of Empire, building in hegemony and everything else. So there is a way to transition this. If done artfully, if willing to invest, unfortunately, unfortunately, the time, the blood and the treasure to be able to push past and go from adversary to ally and to get the thing that the Trump administration wants, which is Paris national security strategy, stability, prosperity and peace in the Middle East. Because then you would disconnect the dots between patron and proxy from the axis of resistance with patron and you would return to hyper localizing and using both political and military means to deal with all of those other little transnational threats. And one reason why on the domestic front, that despite the Islamic Republic, unfortunately, being able to wield the Syria model successfully and unfortunately, the Libya and Afghanistan model as well, successfully in domestic discourse, one reason why you had such a turn in the streets. And again, one reason why as part of our conversation on security policy, we have to deal with what's going on in society is because the society hasn't willing to take more and more risks because all of the threats that would come with regime change, all of the fears that could come with the collapse of central authority were being made manifest anyway. So, you know, what I say, I think to the policy audience, I would again say here, which is in so many ways, Iranian society and US foreign policy has paid the cost of having a regime change policy without any of the dividends of the regime change policy, meaning if we were worried about loose, this all material, there's already 400 plus kilograms. TBD, if we were worried about refugee flows, keeping the regime in power has allowed more involvement in the region, which has led to more refugee flows, all Syria into Western and Central Europe and the changing political math there. If we were worried about the potential rise of ethno nationalism, well, the more the Islamic Republic is there, the more these fringe groups try to militarize their discourse against the state in its entirety. So, all of the fears that we have about regime change are already in so many ways being paid. It's kind of a shame that our discourse doesn't let us get around that and actually begin to connect ways, means and ends to do something about that. It's a risky strategy, but I think we have now 47 years of empirics to say that stasis also does not equal stability. So, it's not that this is a risky option versus not risky options. It's that we are dealing with at the basis a host of risky options. I mean, just take right now, we're in 2026. There is yet another Hamanay at the helm in Iran who's probably not as strong as his father. I'll end with this, but he's somebody who lost his mom, his dad, his child and his wife, who are US airstrikes. I don't think he's going to be able to do what the founding father of the Islamic Republic did, even if he had sheer political control, which is the quote unquote drink from the poison chalice here. So, despite the preference of a Venezuela option, there is no synergy. There is no marriage between the empirics of the Venezuelan state, the Venezuelan society and the Venezuelan military with the Iranian state, Iranian society and the Iranian military, which means that absent seeing this thing through, we're in for a whole host of instabilities. Well, gentlemen, this was refreshing to go just beyond the day to day headlines and do a deep dive into Iran throughout the 20th century and also some more contemporary events. I want to thank both of you for making time for us today. I know that you're in high demand about to Arman and Benam. Thanks for joining us on the regular warfare podcast today. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Alex. Thank you guys. Be sure to subscribe to the regular warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. If you enjoyed today's show, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the regular warfare podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point or for any agency in the US government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.
