Iran expert says Trump’s ‘war of choice’ has morphed into a ‘war of necessity’ : NPR

A man stands in a damaged residence in Tehran on March 14.

Majid Saeedi/Getty Images Europe

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Majid Saeedi/Getty Images Europe

Three weeks after the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran, it remains unclear how or when the conflict might end. When asked by a reporter on Sunday if he was ready to declare victory, President Trump replied: “No, I don’t want to do that. There’s no reason to do that.”

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the president appears to have underestimated Iran’s response to the war. Sadjadpour notes that Iran telegraphed from the start that it planned to regionalize the conflict. But, he said, “President Trump said it surprised him when Iran started attacking Persian Gulf countries or closing the Strait of Hormuz.”

“I don’t think President Trump, in his own words, understood what he was getting into,” he adds.

Sadjadpour says the war with Iran began as what he calls a “war of choice” – meaning there was no imminent threat that Iran was about to acquire nuclear weapons or launch missile strikes on the United States or its partners. But the calculation has since changed. The Iranian government has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which about 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas typically passes.

Furthermore, it is unclear how much power Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, actually holds. Earlier today, Israel announced that it had killed Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Larijani was believed to be a close advisor to Khamenei.

“At a time when the regime’s survival is at stake, Larijani’s decades of experience in domestic and foreign policy make his loss a major blow,” Sadjadpour said. “For a revolutionary regime whose political ideology relies on martyrdom, the central question is whether these assassinations will ultimately extinguish the ideology or help revive it.”

Sadjadpour compares the internal workings of the Iranian regime to a black box: “It is inaccessible to us,” he says. “What started as a war choice, in my opinion, has actually turned into a war of necessity. I don’t think President Trump will be able to simply end the war and claim victory.”

Interview Highlights

On the priorities of the American government in this conflict

We are in a difficult situation. And I think there are really four main priorities when it comes to our possible negotiations with Iran. One of them is obviously nuclear, and highly enriched uranium, which is apparently under the rubble – after the bombings last June – must be taken into account. … Second point now… we need an agreement that also addresses the use of missiles and drones. A third problem concerns their proxies – support for groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shiite militias. Today, these proxies have been degraded, but they still pose a real threat to regional stability.

And then the fourth problem is why we are in this situation, which is Iran’s brutality towards its own people. If you remember, last January, Trump…warned the Iranian government that if it killed protesters, the United States would intervene. And that’s the red line he issued…and Iran tore that red line. And that’s what really motivated him to launch this military buildup in the Persian Gulf.

What we’ve seen is the president has been all over the place when asked what his goal is. Some days he says it’s just to reach a nuclear deal. Some days he says he wants an agreement with Venezuela. Some days he wants to implode the regime. And that lack of clarity, in my opinion, has been profoundly detrimental, because if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, then you put both the U.S. military and our partners in very difficult positions.

On the likelihood that the war in Iran will spread to nuclear weapons and other superpowers

Fortunately, I don’t think that’s a high probability, and I’ll tell you why. The countries that Iran has attacked the most in recent weeks are, as I said, these Persian Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates in particular. … When you look at these countries, they actually probably have stronger relationships with China and Russia than Iran, and so it’s not the case that Iran is this country with very strong allies supporting it and these Gulf countries are only allied with America and Israel.

In fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran is probably one or two of the most strategically alone countries in the world. She actually has very few reliable allies in the world. So I think that the Chinese will not come and fight alongside Iran against the Gulf countries with which they have even closer energy relations. And Vladimir Putin actually has close relations with Arab leaders…so I’m not worried about this deteriorating into a Third World War, but…this has just set a very dangerous precedent and I don’t think the world, and particularly the Middle East, will feel like a stable place for the foreseeable future.

On what he considers to be the best case scenario

The best-case scenario, of course, would be for us to have a different government come to power in Iran, in which it would either be an Iran in transition to a democracy, or a government whose organizing principle would be Iran’s national interest – “long live Iran” rather than “death to America.” I don’t think this is a short-term prospect.

And in the short term, I think the best outcome is that we free the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian interference and you restore the safe passage of commerce and ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And obviously, Iran has stopped all its attacks against its neighbors and against Israel. This would require the United States and Israel to also stop these attacks. But even then, there will be exceptional things that we cannot afford to ignore. What is happening to this highly enriched uranium in Iran? How will this be taken into account? What about Iranian ballistic missiles and drones? This has proven to pose a real threat to regional security. How are we going to solve this problem? What if Iran started rebuilding and refinancing its regional proxies? This is a challenge that we must meet.

And then finally… the reason this conflict started is the brutality of the Iranian regime towards its own people. …I fear that this regime is so deeply unpopular that the only way for it to continue to stay in power is to be even more brutal than before. Do we have a strategy to solve this problem? I think the president was hoping for something seemingly quick and easy, like Venezuela seemed to be for him, but it’s quite the opposite.

Why he considers Iran a tragedy

I think there is one conclusion that I feel — I know that most people in the American and European governments and tens of millions of Iranians feel this way — is that this country is not where it should be. It is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. It has enormous human capital, enormous natural resources, rich history, it should be a G20 nation. … This is why today’s Iran is truly a tragedy. And it is a tragedy especially for Iranians, both in Iran and in the diaspora. But it was also a tragedy for the United States, because in my opinion America and Iran should actually be natural partners and Iran is instead one of our worst adversaries. And unfortunately, I don’t see this dynamic changing in the near future.

Monique Nazareth and Théa Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and tk adapted it for the web.