A Model of Clarity

In the present situation, UnHerd is incredibly lucky to have both Aaron Bastani and Sohrab Ahmari:

“A ceasefire is not on the Iranians’ agenda right now. A ceasefire may come after we’ve imposed costs high enough that the Americans don’t willy-nilly attack us again.” So declares Hassan Ahmadian, an Iranian strategist and defense theorist seen as close to the Islamic Republic’s security establishment.

I spoke by phone to Ahmadian on Thursday evening as the United States and Israel carried out some of the war’s most intense aerial bombing yet. Ahmadian — who teaches at the University of Tehran and, before that, served as an analyst at the regime-linked Center for Strategic Studies — sounded remarkably calm, all things considered.

“Mostly, I hear sounds,” he tells me. (We spoke in Persian; all translations are mine.) “I watch the news and speak to friends, [and] there’s talk of hits. I saw two to three places near me that were hit. But you have to remember, Tehran is incredibly vast, and in order to cover the span of the place [with bombs], you have to work really hard.” Still, “they’re hitting everything: clinics and such in addition to military, paramilitary, and police targets.”

Even so, he insists, the operation isn’t remotely close to its original aim of allowing the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” as President Trump put it in his initial statement announcing the war. In other words: regime change.

“This Islamic system is deeply institutionalized, and with parallel institutions,” Ahmadian tells me. “From the day they assassinated Mr. Khamenei until now, I haven’t felt any vacuum. Each governmental unit fulfilled its respective function. The military does its work, the civil servants do their work. If anything, overall control has increased because it’s wartime conditions.”

That message is echoed by analysts in the West’s realist or foreign-policy-restraint camp: that despite its unpopularity among important segments of Iranian society — the urban and the educated — the regime represents a systemic, as opposed to personal, state. It also benefits from Iran’s status as a coherent, ancient polity, notwithstanding the ethnic and sectarian fault lines that crisscross it.

“This is a sharply polarized society,” Ahmadian grants. “Just last month, there were protests that eventually were violently confronted. And members of the security forces were also killed. People aren’t satisfied economically at all. But to translate that into the idea that ‘these people want to overthrow the regime’ — sure, some people have this opinion, but they are a minority.”

“The majority of the country,” he adds, “is in the middle. They’re not necessarily supporters [of the regime], or they have serious grievances. But they absolutely aren’t prepared to accept foreign invasion.”

Since the invasion, some have taken to the streets or their balconies to voice celebration, scenes highlighted in Western media and on social networks. But there have also been pro-regime and nationalist demonstrations whose sheer size is a reminder that the Islamic Republic has a social base, conservatively estimated at about 15% of the population. That base includes people who genuinely believe in the regime’s project for religious reasons, and who additionally enjoy a kind of regency, with access to perks not available to seculars (like my family). They aren’t close to giving up.

Fantasies of a huge majority that could serve as the West’s foot soldiers, Ahmadian insists, were just that. “I saw a BBC report that showed celebrations in three locations in response to the bombing. But of course, there are many, many others who’ve had the opposite reaction. It’s propagandistic to show only the activities of a minority. And the bigger problem is that if you keep engaging in propaganda, after a while it traps you inside it. You come to really believe it. Or you keep digging in because you feel your credibility depends upon it being true.”

Unmentioned by Ahmadian, of course, is that the Islamic Republic was similarly ensnared in some of its own propaganda, not least assertions about the strength of the so-called Axis of Resistance that proved illusory after Israel set about dismantling it in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks.

Still, it was possible to overestimate Tehran’s relative weakness — and that’s just what happened as a result of missteps by Iran during last summer’s 12-Day War.

“Accepting the ceasefire then,” Ahmadian says, “nurtured the notion that Iran is weak. But that wasn’t so. Both sides were firing. Even at the last minute, Iran fired a dozen missiles that did extensive damage in Beersheba…. It was a caricature of Iran, to imagine that an attack would cause its rapid collapse. It was the Israelis [who] promoted this account.”

But nations, especially nations at war, don’t remain static. Since the humiliations of the 12-Day War, Iran has striven to counter the impression of weakness operationally. “Before the [new] war, the commanders and Mr. Khamenei himself warned that ‘if you attack Iran, we will hit regional targets.’ They described everything that has transpired.” Since then, “Iran concluded that if the other side is going to attack every six months, we will impose such a high cost that they can’t keep coming back — even if it means we also bear a serious cost.”

Dragged around by Israeli initiative, Ahmadian argues, the Americans didn’t consider the obvious steps Iran was bound to take. “One huge problem with American decision-making is that it really takes place in a bubble,” he says. “That is, the Americans imagine they’re the only ones who think. They forget that there is another actor who is equally capable of initiative, foresight, and planning.”

Then, too, he thinks Washington has insufficiently thought through its ultimate objective. “Rubio said we had an imminent threat [from Israel], and we knew that if Iran was attacked, we, too, would get attacked, so we decided to go for it first. Then there’s JD Vance, who says this was intended to stop the nuclear program, but that’s nonsense, because Iran has had no chance to restart its nuclear program. And Mr. Trump himself said this was to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear program and navy (never mind that Iran has no real navy to speak of, except some speed boats and such). And at the beginning, Trump said the goal was regime change. Now Hegseth says the goal is to degrade Iran’s capabilities so it doesn’t threaten the region.”

This collection of justifications and objectives, Ahmadian says, amount to a “circus.” He thinks what really happened was that the Israelis managed to persuade the Trump administration that Iran is weak — a little push and the regime would fall — and the moment was golden. But since the rapid collapse hasn’t come to pass, the Americans are straining to come up with new aims and justifications for a costly step.

Another such justification is that the operation was a bold Trumpian move in 4-D chess, intended to block China from an important source of oil and gas. “This notion that the Americans are trying to beat China is another after-the-fact justification. China getting hurt? Right now, America’s regional allies are taking a beating. What was supposed to have been a source of security” — the presence of US bases — “has turned into a source of menace. The cost on America is much higher than any borne by China over the course of a three- or four-week war. Because China buys energy from everyone, and its Mideast energy sources aren’t going to dry up permanently.” 

In the event, he says, “both sides are now hitting. Iran had the experience of the last war. We thought through certain preparations and are now using them, and I doubt Iran’s plan is for the war to end soon. “We want to deplete Israel’s defensive weapons: David’s Sling and the THAAD batteries. I’ve heard from informed people that Israel has about 10 days’ worth of defensive capability. Iran’s biggest missile attacks haven’t even started; they will only start after about 10 days.”

But haven’t the US military and the Israel Defense Forces struck many of Iran’s missile launchers and the underground “missile cities” that supply them? “Again,” Ahmadian replies, “informed people here say that the US and Israel have hit a lot of decoys: paintings, fake launchers.” Then, too, he says, it’s telling that the Iranians are going out of their way to telegraph a no-ceasefire approach. It suggests that they don’t feel the level of weakness ascribed to them by more sanguine Western analysts.

What about the prospects of ethnic separatists getting involved, perhaps with covert ground support from the CIA, the Mossad, or even Army special operators? “This Kurdish question is obviously a serious national-security issue for Iran,” Ahmadian counters, “so of course we have all sorts of contingency plans of which violence is only the last resort.”

Tehran, he says, boasts strong relations with most of the Kurdish parties inside Iraq, “and we also have the Baghdad government and the [Shiite] popular mobilization forces. These are conditions on the ground that Iran has created. So if you enter Iran, you run into problems in Iraq, too.”

Could it be, though, that by targeting so many actors across the region, not all of which are overtly hostile toward the Islamic Republic, Tehran is turning itself into a 21st-century Napoleon, raising the enmity of a regional or even global coalition?

Ahmadian disagrees. If anything, he contends, it’s America that has forced its regional allies to rethink their dependence upon Washington. “I have lots of friends in these countries,” he says. “They understand that this isn’t their war — that it’s America and Israel. Yes, they’re unhappy with Iran’s attacks, but they don’t view Tehran as the ultimate reason for this turmoil.”

The Arabs, he goes on, “complain that civilian infrastructure is being hit, but we insist these are legitimate targets because they are being used by America in its attacks on Iran. If they didn’t agree for their countries to be used as platforms for assaulting the Islamic Republic, then that shows they need to reassess their relationship with Washington. And if they did consent, well, then that answers their objection as to why they’re under attack.”

“Be that as it may, the fact that the Arabs keep saying this isn’t our war shows these countries know that they shouldn’t enter this war, and that they have a sharper understanding of the Iranian regime — that it’s not a regime that you can easily change.”

Meanwhile, the American and Israeli bombs keep dropping, to ends that Washington itself struggles to articulate, much less persuade American majorities to accept. And while the Trumpians now speak of a long war, while refusing to rule out a ground operation, the Iranian security establishment appears serene for now.

“If we get to 10 days,” Ahmadian says, “my belief is that Iran will launch really crushing attacks and that will raise costs…. The notion that [the Americans and Israelis] want to extend the war, the implication is that regional security and the global economy are put on pause. What I’ve heard is that life in Persian Gulf states is disabled. And so it is in Israel. And so it is in Iran.” Therefore, “I think this talk of an extended war is wartime posturing.” In other words, the Americans — beholden to the stock market and prices at the pump — won’t endure much more.

Maybe that’s true. Or maybe it’s a Persian bluff. In the end, only one man knows Donald Trump’s mind, and that’s Donald Trump. Iranian strategy — once a black box whose decoding employed a whole industry of analysts — is by contrast a model of clarity.