Iran, Israel, and the Failing Global Order

What follows below is the (edited) transcript of an interview with geopolitical analyst Trita Parsi. As you can tell from his name, Parsi comes from a Zoroastrian family. His father was a political dissident under both the Shah and Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic, and the family ultimately moved to the Persian diaspora in the West. Parsi is regarded as a top explainer of Iran to the West. This interview is of particular importance because Parsi—like many Western analysts—sees a second Jewish Nationalist onslaught against Iran coming before the end of 2025. In that light he analyzes the current situation, but also within the broader context of the Anglo-Zionist drive to dismantle the entire post-WW2 international order of international law before BRICS gains the leverage to insist that the Anglo-Zioist Empire should also conform to law—rather than its own “rules-based” order. Along the way, Parsi has a lot of insights to offer regarding not only geopolitics but also regarding the internal politics of the Islamic Republic.

What’s especially concerning at this juncture is that Trump has surrounded himself with radical Jewish Nationalists and third rate goy “advisers” like Kellogg and others. As a result, Trump has allowed the US to be drawn, time after time, into reckless actions driven by Jewish Nationalist fantasies. The resulting chaos in the Middle East cannot, in the long run, serve American interests. In the meantime BRICS prepares.

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Iran, Israel, and the Failing Global Order w/ Trita Parsi

Q: I'd like to start with a question that we begin all our conversations with, and that is to ask you, Are we experiencing a transformation or disintegration of the international order, or is this order experiencing yet one more challenge from which it will recover and perhaps emerge even stronger than before? Specifically, many people have described Israel's genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip as a final nail in the coffin of the international order established after the Second World War and of the institutions that have underpinned it. Do you agree with this assessment or are we experiencing one more challenge like we have seen on multiple occasions previously and from which the system can be expected to recover?

TP: Let me first start off by saying that all transformations start off with some level of disintegration. And I do think that what we're seeing here is not a scenario in which the system actually recovers. I've not seen much recovery in the last two decades or so. But I think we should be focusing on the overall trend. And the trend I think is crystal clear. This is a disintegration which I hope will lead to a transformation. There's no guarantee, of course, but we have seen the hollowing out of international law and institutions for more than two decades. Let me go back to an op-ed that Richard Perle published on the day that the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. In it he said that this will not only be good riddance to Saddam but also to the UN as a whole. And he argued that, in the future, security is not going to be upheld by international institutions but rather by a coalition of willing states. From the Neoconservative perspective, the UN was seen as an unacceptable constraint on American power and therefore the Neocons were pushing to undo it. And as you may recall, back then there was a debate whether Bush should even go to the UN and make the case for the invasion of Iraq because, in the view of some of the Neoconservatives, that would legitimize the United Nations. In their view it was better to just do it and not even bother pretending that the UN mattered.

Now, there is a perception that other administrations, Democratic administrations, have had a much more friendly perspective on the UN and multilateral systems. And, at times, that was true. I don't think the Biden or the Obama administration shared the perspective of Richard Perle and the Neoconservatives. But I think it's important to understand that towards the end of the Obama administration--and certainly by the time Biden came in--something had shifted. You suddenly saw much more use of the term "rules-based international order." That really took off in 2015 when it was included in the last NSS [National Security Strategy] of the Obama administration. There is a belief that "rules-based order" and the "international order" or "the UN system" is one and the same thing. But that clearly was not the perception. If you take a look at the 2022 NSS of the Biden administration, they talk about how it's important for countries to subscribe to the rules-based order because, if they do so, the United States would help them with their military defenses. It is talking about the rules-based order not as a universal order but as a club, as a NATO plus. You subscribe to it, you become a member of it, and then you get military benefits.

It's very important to understand the difference between a rules order and a law order. At the end of the day, there is an objective transparent process in which international law is formulated. It is by and large consensual. Countries sign onto treaties and, as a result, are bound by those treaties. The United States never signed the Rome statute and as a result does not have to arrest Benyamin Netanyahu when he arrives in Washington. Whereas Germany has to, even though it now says that it won't. When it comes to rules, what is the process of formulating rules? Do you have a say in what those rules are? It's really clear that rules are something that Western powers--particularly the United States--put together, with the expectation that other countries are now bound by them. I think that is essentially a 'coalition of the willing' approach towards the international order. You're actually taking away from the legitimacy and the inclusiveness--with all of its faults--of the UN system and moving it towards a coalition of the willing approach, a rules-based order that you subscribe to and by which you try to uphold not only order but, more importantly, Western dominance.

The danger in all of this, beyond the fact that of course it's hollowing out international law--and many international law experts are increasingly saying that the rules-based order is a threat to international law--is that if the Chinese and the Russians then also start doing similar things and they create their own rules-based order, then you would not only have a multi-polar world emerging, but also a multi-order world, which in many ways would be much more dangerous than what you had during the Cold War. During the Cold War, there were clearly two different orders, but there was a super order above it--with the UN, with international law, with the authority of the security council--that both sides accepted. Both sides quarreled about how to interpret things and at times they ignored the rules. But, nevertheless, there was a mutual acceptance of its nominal authority. In a multi-order world, we will not be competing or arguing about the interpretation of law. We will have different sets of law. And I think that will be tremendously destabilizing and will make it very difficult to be able to address common threats such as pandemics and climate and things of that nature going forward.

Now, again, taking it to Gaza and what the Trump administration is doing, I think right now we're seeing a very aggressive assault on the multilateral system as a whole. But I think it's a mistake to believe that that is the whim of the Trump administration or Trump as a person. With Trump it is manifested in a much more overt and aggressive way. But even prior to that under Biden, there was an assault on [the multilateral system]. It was just much much more subtle. It was much more clever, perhaps, because it was under the guise of trying to protect the system. It was under the guise of status quo protecting it from revisionism from China or Russia or whoever. Whereas in reality, the rules-based order itself actually was fundamentally revisionist.

Q: … Where does the transformation lead to and is it going to be a very violent and rocky transformation as we're already witnessing?

TP: Historically I think we have to be honest. Almost all transitions tend to be pretty violent and bloody and problematic. Transitions are the most destabilizing moments in international history, and I don't think this one is going to be any different. It's probably going to be much much worse at the end of the day. ... given what just happened with the bombing of Qatar, there's much to be worried about where the direction of the international system as a whole is going. But I think there are also small things that perhaps can help lead us in a better direction. No guarantee whatsoever. The fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio very early in the Trump administration said the world is multi-polar and that uni-polarity was an historical aberration and an abnormal state is actually very interesting. ... Now, if you recognize--and this is the part that I think the Trump administration doesn't recognize--that the world is multi-polar, that US no longer has the uni-polar privilege that it did 20 or so years ago, then that also means that your ability through your own hard power to constrain the behavior of rival states such as China or Russia is going to be much limited than it was before. So naturally that would lead you to think, 'Well, in that case I will need some alternative instruments to be able to protect myself, but also to constrain those rivals,' and that's where international law and the multilateral system actually comes in.

That's the bargain that every other state makes. They agree on constraints on themselves because it gets them constraints on others. And whereas that may not have been an attractive bargain when you were a uni-polar power, if you admit and you internalize that you are now in a multi-polar world, you may still be the most powerful country in the multi-polar system, but it is a multi-polar world and you're no longer uni-polar power. Then I assume that at some point, if you think long and hard enough about it, there should be an attraction to international law. Perhaps in the revised version, I'm sure everyone would have to want to see some changes to, but nevertheless, that's very different from the position of the Neoconservatives who, in the uni-polar moment, viewed international law as nothing but an unnecessary and illegitimate constraint on the United States with no benefits. ... So again, I don't want to overstate this, but it is interesting and potentially hopeful that that first recognition has been achieved or has been reached. Whether that will lead to these other recognitions that I personally think logically comes from that remains to be seen. But at least theoretically there's a path to it. Whereas if the president's name or if the secretary of state name was John Bolton or Richard Perle, then I don't think that theoretical possibility even would have existed.

Q: …. This June, …, we witnessed the first ever attack by a nuclear state--the United States--against the nuclear facilities of a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, whose facilities operate under the supervision of the IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency. Should we view this as part of a broader effort to remake the global order or was this war the product of unrelated dynamics that are specific to Iran? ...

TP: I do think that this is highly related because I think [Israel's foreign policy is] the tip of the spear of the effort to undo as many norms surrounding the use of force--as many institutions of the international system, as much of international law as possible--in order to create more of a law of the jungle type of a situation. I don't think it is a coincidence that there seems to be this systematic effort to constantly challenge boundaries and norms such as the attack on Qatar today, such as the assassination of leaders in other countries, such as breaking all kinds of previous rules about limitations of collateral damage, etc. that the US itself had imposed on itself and on those using its weapons. These norms now appear to have completely lifted when it comes to Israel. So, I think it has been a long-standing position of the Israelis to try to undo these things because they see an advantage for them as a very sophisticated military power that has the ability to get the most powerful military power in the in the world to do much of its bidding, to create a world in which those constraints do not exist any longer. So when you see the ambassador of Israel go to the UN General Assembly and tear apart the UN charter, then I don't think there is much room for speculation. They're doing it as openly as possible, tearing apart every rule of the charter that is the very foundation of international law and the international system.

So attacking Iran and Iran's nuclear facilities--which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions Article 36 if I'm not mistaken--does something very interesting for them. They're breaking another norm and then they're looking at the Europeans and what did the Europeans do? They did not condemn it! Remember how much they condemned Russia when Russia attacked Ukrainian nuclear facilities? Now, not only was there dead silence from Europe, but you even had the German chancellor go out and say that Israel is doing Europe's dirty work for it. So, far from any condemnation, there was an embrace. ... Europe had been a driving force for a lot of these different international agreements. ... And now it is the Europeans who are more or less at the forefront following the Israelis and undermining these very institutions and laws and norms that they themselves played a critical role in establishing.

Q: Regarding the Twelve Day War itself in June. The Iranian leadership made no significant effort, to my knowledge, to present the war in a regional context. They made conspicuously few references to Palestine. I would watch the speeches by Iranian leaders and it was as though this was a separate event from what's happening in Gaza. Even in normal times Palestine usually gets brought in. Did Iran, too, perceive this war as the product of a separate series of dynamics or were there other motivations at play in its posture? Did they just want to deliberately separate things?

TP: They wanted to deliberately separate things for reasons that have very little to do with Palestine and much more to do with the uncertainty on their end concerning how the Iranian public would react to this. It was important for them to be able to fuel and utilize nationalism, which I think occurred in a manner that was way beyond their expectations and, frankly, had very little to do with them. But the more they would have talked about Palestine, the more they would have undermined the manner in which nationalistic fervor spread throughout Iran as a wave, because of the tremendous anger at what the Israelis had done. This was seen as an Israeli attack on Iran. If you threw Palestine into it too overtly, it would have probably--and I'm speculating what their calculation was--they probably thought that that would have fueled other voices who have been in Iran for quite some time, people who have argued that Iran has unnecessarily dragged itself into a conflict with Israel by supporting Hezbollah and Lebanon, by supporting many other groups in Iraq and Syria, etc., and that it would have been better if Iran had just minded its own business--in their view--and stayed away from those type of conflicts and that type of a foreign embroglio. So, under those circumstances, too much talk about Palestine would have undermined the nationalistic fervor that was spreading.

What is fascinating with that nationalism, however, is that it actually to a large extent seems to have pushed back on this previous point that I just raised. Not to say that everyone fell in line, but that a lot of people started to agree with the logic that the regime itself had put forward earlier, which is that ultimately the support for Hezbollah, the support for groups in Iraq, is something that was needed in order to prevent war from coming to Iran's own territory. That, yes, there is an ideological dimension to it, but there is also a self-interested national interest perspective to this, which is that if it wasn't for these different groups, ISIS would have run over Baghdad and it would have tried to enter Iranian territory. If it wasn't for the strength of Hezbollah in 2006, Israel would have attacked Iran in 2006. So that argument--which was rejected by a large portion of the population because of anger at the regime for a whole set of other issues, and the belief that they were unnecessarily dragging Iran into a conflict with a much more powerful military that had the support of the superpower--I think changed to a large extent. Whether that will remain the case or not, I cannot speculate about. But it changed, to a large extent, because the Israeli attack came at a moment where the Iranian government was sending clearer messages than ever before that it wanted to have a negotiation with the United States to reach a nuclear compromise. It was signaling willingness for compromises that it had never signaled before, including welcoming American businesses into the Iranian economy. They were doing all of those things.

And then, in the middle of the negotiations, the Israelis struck and then Trump took credit for it, which then kind of blows up the idea that all of these things are coming just because the Iranian government is unnecessarily provoking. Here you have them being very seriously involved in trying to find a compromise. And it's at that moment that the Israelis decide to strike. And it is also a case where people have observed that Iran was attacked precisely after its allies had been significantly weakened. Much of the argument or criticism was no longer, 'Why did you support Hezbollah?' but 'Why didn't your investment in Hezbollah pay off? Why wasn't the Axis able to protect Iran?' And part of the picture for that is that Iran was not able to protect the Axis. Iran was not involved when Israel was bombing Hezbollah, and I'm sure that there are plenty of people amongst the Shia in Lebanon who are disappointed with the Iranians. Similarly, the Iranians were putting pressure on the Iraqi militias not to attack the United States because of the risk of a larger confrontation. But many of these Iraqi militias have their own interests and their own reasons for opposing the US that have very little to do with Iran's reasons to oppose the United States.

So I think we saw that the Axis was really not much of an Axis at all, because neither of these different states or movements managed to really help the other. And perhaps part of the reason for that was because of some of the intelligence successes that Israel had, particularly in taking out the leadership of Hezbollah. The one thing that ended up becoming much more popular in Iran--which prior to that had also been dismissed by many as some sort of an unnecessary, costly useless investment--was Iran's ballistic missiles, which turned out to be the only element of their deterrence that actually worked. And very quickly in a very overt and, I have to say, to some extent surprising way the government took advantage of this and fused Islamic and pre-Islamic nationalism in Iran, often times centered on the efficiency of the missiles. ...

So the symbolic fusion between pre-Islamic and Islamic nationalism was crucial for them, because at the end of the day it's precisely because of the unpopularity of the Iranian government that Mossad had been successful in penetrating not only society and having all of these Mossad cells inside of Iran, but also very high up inside the Iranian government itself. To counter that they needed to bring the country together. And in many ways it was the population that brought the country together, not the government.

Q: Trita, I want to raise a couple of quick points regarding the Axis. Is it that there is no Axis, or is it more that Hezbollah's own attacks and responses vis a vis Israel were meant, deliberately, to occur without Iranian intervention early on, because that would change the dynamic sooner than Iran would have wanted or unnecessarily would change the dynamic in a way that does not benefit Iran? And then later on when Iran was attacked, the Syrian regime had already collapsed and Hezbollah was severely weakened, even if only temporarily. ... Isn't this also analytically speaking a very powerful debunking of this really problematic take in the United States and many Western countries that Hezbollah is simply a proxy of Iran and there are no independent thought processes or policies. Same thing with the Houthis, of course, and with the Quwwāt al-Ḥashd ash-Shaʿbī [Popular Mobilization Forces] and the popular Shia forces in Iraq. ...

TP: Let me start off with the last one. You're absolutely right. I mean it showed very much that these are independent actors. They're not proxies. Iran has an influence, but Iran's influence is not complete. The way that the whole thing has been organized has actually been to give these different groups as much internal legitimacy as possible. As to your question of what really happened, my take is this. The fundamental issue was not that the Axis didn't exist, nor that it didn't work. It's that one element [Hamas]--not a core element, but one element of the Axis--decided to take action against Israel without the approval of the others at a time that was not favored by the others. The Iranians were playing the long strategic game. Their strategy was called strategic patience. They were taking huge hits in Syria, for instance, but they were playing the long game because they knew that, in the short term, the Israelis would still have an advantage. So they were not eager to run into a conflict with the Israelis. The Israelis understood this, which is part of the reason why they became increasingly bold in their attacks--they knew that the Iranians would try to the utmost to avoid war. That is still the strategy the Iranians currently have vis a vis the United States. They know they're not going to win a direct military confrontation with the US. So they want to avoid it to the extent possible. There may be a point in which it's not possible and then I think they will fight back, and perhaps some in Washington will be surprised by the damage that the Iranians can inflict. But to the extent that they can, they want to avoid it.

I think to a certain extent Hezbollah had a similar calculation, and you're quite right. If Iran had acted much more overtly in favor of Hezbollah during that period, it would have provided the Israelis with an excuse to expand the war already back then. And the United States under Biden most likely would have caved [to Israel]. They would have issued a lot of press leaks about how unhappy Biden is about this and how much he screamed at Netanyahu. But at the end of the day, it would have still been a complete cave. So I think this idea that if they had done it earlier the whole thing would have been different, I'm not so certain about that. I think at the end of the day the fundamental reality is that there was a game played in which the Axis calculated that time was on their side and not on the side of Israel, and that a premature confrontation would have been to their detriment. And to a very large extent I think that is how it played out, even if it hadn't been for the taking out of much of Hezbollah's leadership. If the Iranians had just stuck to the strategic patience they [Israel] would have been eventually weakened to the point of a defeat. That is exactly why I think in this next war--because I do believe there will be another war; the Israelis will attack again ...

Q: Which is my next question. You've repeatedly expressed the view that renewed war against Iran is very likely and you've even suggested that we can expect it to erupt before the end of this year. We now also appear to be on the cusp of the European signatories to the Iran nuclear agreement--Britain, France, and Germany--invoking snapback sanctions against Iran. So given these factors and what you've just said, could you explain why you think we're in this dangerous moment and how you believe this crisis might play out?

TP: Yes. Let me answer that and, at the end of it, I'll connect it to what we talked about earlier on: why I think the Iranian strategy of strategic patience has now ended, at least vis a vis Israel.

So, Israel's objectives with its attack on June 13th were, in my assessment, three-fold. Only one of these three objectives was achieved, and that one was only achieved partially. That objective was to finally get the United States into a direct military confrontation with Iran. This is something Netanyahu in particular had tried to do for more than 20 years. He finally got it, but he didn't get it to the extent that he wanted. He wanted the United States to be a full participant in this war and take out not only Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but much of its conventional military, and for the US to take the lead. The United States under Trump went in, but only for essentially a day. So, while it was a success for the Israelis, it was only a partial success because it was not at all what the Israelis ultimately wanted.

The two other objectives were failures. First, to decapitate the regime as a whole. Even though they had intelligence successes with the killing of more than 20 or so scientists and senior military leaders, they never managed to really disrupt Iran's command and control. Within hours the senior military leadership was replaced and the Iranians started shooting missiles at Israel that were far more successful than many had expected, including the Israelis.

The third objective is the most important one. It's the overarching objective of Israel, and it's not just tied to Iran--it's tied to the region as a whole. They wanted to turn Iran into another Syria or Lebanon, a country that it can bomb at will, with impunity and without American involvement. And the last part is very important--without American involvement. The Israelis strike at Syria without US involvement today. It does so as well in Lebanon. It cannot do so with Iran, however, because it needs massive American defensive support to be able to shoot down the retaliatory missiles and it needs a lot of intelligence and other types of support to also strike at Iran.

I'm sure the Israelis did not expect that the first war would reduce Iran to a new Syria, but I think they thought that it would achieve much more than it did and that the cost of it would be much lower than it was--given the penetration of Iran's missiles of all layers of America's and Israel's air defense systems. But precisely because it is intolerable for the Israelis, from their standpoint, to allow any country in the region to to have a deterrence against Israel, now that they've started this they cannot stop. They have to double down. I'm not agreeing with them. I'm just saying this is how they calculate. If they give Iran too much time, Iran will be able to rebuild its air defense systems. It will be able to potentially buy new ones, better ones, from China. It will be able to find ways to root out the Mossad infiltration inside of Iran. And the Iranians build ballistic missiles faster than Israel and the United States can build interceptors. So time is in that sense not on Israel's side, once it has started the clock.

Now, the question: When will they strike? I have no insight into their military readiness, but I can tell you that the political window for this, in my estimation, becomes very messy once the United States enters the midterm elections. It's not to say that it's prohibited, but this was costly for Trump. The only reason it didn't end up becoming much costlier is because the US's own involvement in this was very brief, and Trump presented it as if he had actually stopped the war by getting a ceasefire after 12 days. If this had ended up becoming a longer war with American body bags coming home, no end in sight, no exit ramps, etc., then I think this would have been a devastating blow to him, because this was not popular within the MAGA movement. And once you're in the midterm elections, it's much more difficult to foresee exactly how it will play out. So, in my estimation, I think this will happen before December. It can happen already as soon as now.

There are many different factors at play here, but I would be very surprised if the Israelis don't do this, because from their standpoint, having started it with an opening that they thought existed, they cannot abandon it at this point. And precisely because of this, the Iranians have now more or less abandoned strategic patience. They know that their only way of dispelling Israel's fantasy of turning Iran into the type of a country they can "mow the grass" with--to use their own expression--is to make it as costly as possible for Israel in this next round. Instead of hoarding missiles and playing the long game, I think the Iranians are likely to go very hard at Israel right away, unlike what they did this time in the Twelve Day War. They thought it was going to be a long war. So, they actually paced themselves. I don't think they will do that this time. They will go at it very hard, which will then potentially lead to mass casualty events in Israel, which would put tremendous pressure on Trump to get back into that war.

Q: That suggests that it could very quickly escalate--whether by design or otherwise--into a confrontation that once again directly involves the US. ...

TP: Yes, absolutely. My hope is that Trump tells the Israelis, 'No!' that the United States is not going to be involved in these things. I mean, look, if the United States had told Israel 'no' months ago, so much of this devastation in the region would not have happened in the first place. Israel cannot do any of these things without active American support. I mean, CRS just came out with their numbers. About a third of Israel's military budget was covered by the United States in 2024. In 2025, it's likely to be much higher because of the tremendous cost of the Twelve Day War. Just one day of those attacks in October 2024 cost about 1.5 to 2 billion for the United States, and that was a much much smaller thing compared to the Twelve Day War. So this idea that some people are spreading in Washington that Israel is now the new military hegemon of the region, that may very well be how the Netanyahu government sees itself. But what kind of hegemon has someone else pay for its war? What kind of hegemon cannot actually conduct any real war without getting massive support from a global superpower? That's not a hegemon. That is a country in my view that is consuming American power rather than amplifying it.

Q: I would like to go back, Trita, to the Iran alliances question of Iran Iran's alliances in the region. How have the past couple of years affected Iran's regional relationships, particularly the repeated Israeli offensives against the Axis of Resistance and, of course, the collapse of the Syrian regime, which is a very important topic. How has this affected Iran's perception and place in the region, taking into consideration how it has significantly improved its relations with many GCC states? What do you think is the current state of the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah? ... And then finally, what is Iran's position regarding the demands for Hezbollah to disarm, given it is likely to be a precursor to the return of US and Saudi patronage or hegemony or domination.

TP: Yeah. So on the first question, I think Iran's regional position obviously has been weakened as a result of the weakening of Hezbollah and the fall of the Assad regime, and I think the Iranians are trying to come to terms with that. But it's important to understand that two other things have simultaneously also happened which, in some ways, point in the opposite direction--and they're related. One is that, even prior to this there was a significant warming of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as Iran and the United Arab Emirates [UAE]. This, in my view, is primarily driven by the fact that these two countries came to the conclusion--belatedly but correctly--that the United States was not going to come to their defense in any war with Iran, or most likely with anyone, because the attitude of the Trump administration under Trump 1.0 when Iran attacked Saudi oil fields in 2019, after the Saudis had played a pivotal role in squeezing out Iran's oil exports as part of the maximum pressure policy that Trump pursued at the time. The Saudis expected that the United States would come in and follow the Carter doctrine and protect Saudi Arabia. But Trump made it very clear to them that that was an attack on Saudi. It was not attack on the United States. This shocked the kingdom.

But then something else happened a couple years later. The Houthis attacked Abu Dhabi. And guess what? The president's name now was Joe Biden. and he did the same thing. The Emiratis expected protection, an attack on the Houthis. Instead, the Biden administration issued a press release. And even the use of the Patriots that were stationed in the Emirates, the United States sent an invoice for how much it would cost if they were to be used. So, this made it clear that this is not a Trump thing. This is an American thing. The United States, in my view correctly, is not going to willy-nilly get itself involved in every conflict in the region. As a result, it meant that these countries no longer could hide behind American military power. If you can't hide behind American military power and you have bad relations with a powerful neighbor, guess what? It makes diplomacy with that neighbor much more attractive, because now you have to find a way of resolving those tensions, because you cannot hide behind American military power.

So you saw a flurry of intensification of regional diplomacy taking place after 2017, after 2019 in particular, and that eventually led to the signing of this agreement of normalization between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The lion's share of that work was done by Iraq and by Oman, but the Chinese were needed to get it across the finish line. So now you had a situation in which those countries no longer were in the Israeli camp hoping the United States would go to war with Iran, because they recognized that that would be very bad for them. Then you have the weakening of Iran regionally. That makes the concerns about Iran not as acute as they may have been in the past in some GCC capitals. But then you have another thing that we just saw the manifestation of today--although it already started early on--which was the United States had taken off all constraints on Israel. If you're sitting in Doha, if you're sitting in Abu Dhabi, if you're sitting in Dubai or in Riyadh and you've been focused on Iran for so long, you realize that perhaps you had not paid attention to some other things. If the Israelis have no constraints from the American side and the United States is not going to stop Israel if it does something not just against Lebanon, not just against Syria, not just against the Palestinians, but also against others, then what is your protection against Israel? And today when Israel struck Doha, I think we saw the circle come complete because here you had a situation in which either the United States gave the Israelis a green light or it was informed at the last minute and it chose not to stop Israel--or it couldn't stop Israel and wasn't even informed about it in due time.

Either one of those scenarios point to the same thing. You put all of your eggs in the American basket in order to get protection against Iran, but you forgot that you may actually get attacked by Israel with the support of United States itself. So I think that this will likely lead to some very significant rethinking in the region about what the actual threats are. As a result, perhaps there's an opportunity for the region to find its own balance, a positive balance amongst themselves, rather than thinking that security can only come by one or the other side importing it from an extra regional power.

Q: …, US President Donald Trump, as you know, is typically presented as representing some kind of radical break with traditional US foreign policy. Do you agree with this assessment or is it perhaps more appropriate to see Trump's policies as really continuity on steroids? How how would you characterize the differences if there are any, indeed?

TP: I think we have to make a bit of a differentiation between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. I think in Trump 1.0 you did not see a break with traditional American foreign policy. You saw a caricature of American foreign policy. You saw an exaggerated version of what it always had been--or at least had been for decades, with a few exceptions. ... Let me give you one example. When the Saudis killed Jamaal Kashoggi and Trump was confronted about it by American journalists asking, 'What is the US going to do about this?' and he said, 'Well, nothing.' And then came the follow up: 'Why?' Every other president at that moment would have lied. They would have said 'strategic interest.' Perhaps they would have thrown in 'common value.' But Trump said, 'No, they buy a lot of weapons,' which was the most honest answer. So he wasn't a break. He was an exaggerated, perhaps naked, version of what it was.

Trump 2.0--and of course we're just nine or so months into it--had the promise of being a break because you had a different constellation of elements inside it. Whereas in the previous administration it was just a hodgepodge of people who hated each other, with no ideological cohesion, no development of what some of these slogans of America First actually meant. In the second Trump administration, you had two clear camps. You had the restrainers, realists, some of them calling themselves prioritizers, who wanted a clean break. Who wanted a reduction of the military presence involvement in the Middle East. They wanted the Europeans to end the war in Ukraine with Russia, come to an agreement. They were skeptical about NATO. There was an intellectual architecture behind that thinking. And then you had more traditional Neoconservative Republicans on the other side. In the beginning, I think the balance was in favor of the restrainers. Since mid May, it has shifted quite dramatically in the opposite direction. Whether that's the end of the story or not, I don't know. Will he be a break? Perhaps he will not because if the neocons win out, then it's just going to be the same, but probably much much more aggressive than we ever have seen it.

Q: Can Israel come back from from everything it's been doing for the past two years on top of the prior 77 years? And if not, is this the reason it has ramped up its genocidal push with collective starvation and outright ethnic cleansing policies as though it has a limited window of opportunity? …

TP: Let me put it this way. First of all, I don't think Israel can come back. I think after this, well, let me put it this way. I think Israel has lost an entire generation of Americans and they're not coming back. This is a generation of Americans and every poll shows it, and it's as strong on the Republican side as it is on the Democratic sides. In fact, in some ways, it's even stronger on the Republican side among some of the America First folks there. … I think it very much depends also what will happen at the ICJ. If the ICJ rules that Israel is committing genocide then in some ways it is not a test of Israel any longer. It's a test for the West. Is the West going to set aside that ICJ ruling of the mother of all crimes that is genocide? And if so, that means that it will sacrifice ... so much of the entire world order. And for what? To protect Israel as it commits genocide. Is that worth it? Is that worth sacrificing Institutions that, with all of their imperfections, nevertheless are crucial for upholding international peace and stability? ... We're going to sacrifice all of that to protect Israel because it's committing genocide as if that is something worthy of protecting? That in my view is not just a test of the international order. That is the test of the West as a whole.

Q: ... Is there anything that could happen inside Iran that would change much of the analysis we're addressing today? … Give us a sense of what's happening inside Iran, because a lot of people don't know much at all about what's happening inside except the cliches, of course.

TP: The current regime like any type of regime has an expiration date, and I think this is a regime that currently is very, very unpopular. I don't think the attack has made it more popular, but I think the attack has made people more nationalistic and, as a result, there is a unifying front against an external threat that is then taking precedence over a lot of other issues. Now there is some hope that, because the fact that the government needs to recognize that its unpopularity was a critical reason as to why Mossad was successful in penetrating the country and its security apparatus, it needs to listen to the population and be more accommodating. In some ways perhaps it has. I mean there's no forceful implementation of the hijab rule any longer. The laws are still on the books but it doesn't address the deeper injustices and problems and incompetence, mismanagement, that is unfortunately very common in that system. So there's a profound level of reforms that are needed.

Perhaps the government now is recognizing that more. I have to say that as much as I would like to see that happen, I cannot help but also look at history and, unfortunately, what you see there is that when countries come under military attack, even if there are moments in which you know there is a greater openness, in the longer run it tends to make the governments more radical and more repressive. And that may very well also happen in the Iranian case. Now, it may also go in the other direction. Again, I'm trying to be careful not to make any predictions, but there is a degree of hope right now that perhaps this can actually not just create a superficial unity, but actually one in which the distance between society and government is bridged in a much more systematic way. And of course there's others that believe that ultimately this is not possible because there's some fundamental disagreements with large parts of the population that simply are not bridgeable, not even in the long run. ...