Breaking History - The Reluctant Prince: Can Reza Pahlavi Lead Iran’s Future? Q&A with Eli Lake

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

As Iran’s regime faces mounting internal pressure, one name keeps resurfacing: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah. But is he a viable future leader, or simply the most recognizable symbol of a free Iran? In this conversation, host Eli Lake and producer Poppy Damon unpack the strange political moment Pahlavi finds himself in—popular with many Iranians, yet viewed skeptically by parts of the opposition and treated cautiously by Washington. Can he unite the stakeholders to bring about democracy? Or is he likely to get in the way of a future without monarchs? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, listeners. Welcome back. This is Eli Lake. This is kind of a bonus episode. We're going to be dropping a few of these every now and again. And right now we're going to be talking about Iran. It's been in the news. I've been writing a lot about it for the free press.

And it's just a conversation with my producer Poppy Demon. And I think you'll enjoy and keep your ears glued because sometime in May we will be dropping a well-crafted and long series about a topic we can't tell you about just yet. but I think you'll really love it in this new format for Breaking History. Podcast family, we regretfully are taking a bit of a break. That's because we need best quality in every expect the best when we river or the chatter. Like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at Breaking History,

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check them out. Go to VARW watches. That's V-A-E-R-Waches.com and support American craftsmanship. Eli Lake. Hello. Hi, Poppy. We're trying something new in kind of to do these interim episodes before we launch the first season of Breaking History 2026, and that is to just sort of update on events and try to draw lessons and, you know, use some of my print journalism as a launching pad. I wanted to ask you when you started covering Iran and why you have such a special interest in it, because everything's coming to the fall right now, but this is something you've been covering for about 20 years. Yeah, more than 20 years. I started really getting into Iran because I covered the aftermath of the 1999 Tehran University uprising. A lot of people, my

self-included would say that that's the beginning of what we would see as the sort of chain of unrest, the popular discontent with the Islamic Republic that came from the 1979 revolution. And we should really talk a little bit about that period, because in 1997, Iranians elect Muhammad Khatami, who was a reformer president, who had promised more freedoms to allow, you know, to stop closing opposition newspapers, for example, who had, you know, promised basically kind of more freedoms. And he was supported by a lot of the student movement, which is what ultimately came to the Tehran University part of it. And then during Hatami's presidency, the West began really engaging. Christiana Aminpoor famously at CNN goes back to Iran. She's Iranian.

And she reports on the Hatami election, as well as this sort of, it's a new dawn for Iran. And it was a story that we were very much kind of wanted to hear. This is after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A number of former authoritarian and totalitarian states had been going democratic. It did feel like the end of history to borrow that phrase from Francis Fukuyama. And Hatami was part of that story. The problem was he was never able to get his reforms out of Iran's parliament and as the Majlis. Effectively, all of his... reforms were vetoed because he had the votes in the parliament and as the Majlis, but then the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader at this point Ayatollah Ali Hamine would not allow it.

Add to this, there is something known as the chain murders, which are a series of these awful kind of killings by maybe we call it the equivalent of the Iranian plumbers from the Watergate era, which are former high-level security people. Some of them are still in the intelligence service and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, but they don't really have an official, they're not acting officially, or at least that's the cover story. But a number of prominent intellectuals, newspaper editors, are showing up dead. And this is the era of Hatami. So you have the promise of reform, you have the external facing promises of what he would call a dialogue. of civilizations and trying to kind of knit Iran into the international community.

This is the height of neoliberalism, again, only a few years away from the collapse of the Soviet Union. But at the same time, you have this reality. And the Iranian students at Tehran University and other universities who got involved, they understood this. The crackdown was absolutely vicious. And so I was covering that because there was still a lot of people who could get the word out. A few years later, I started covering the fate of someone named Akbar Ganji, who was originally very zeal. as supporter of the revolution, and he had come to see it

its flaws. And from prison, he wrote these dramatic, open letters, to the Supreme Leader Homonez saying, if you're so confident that you represent the will of the people, why don't you stand for election? I thought this was extraordinarily brave. I was, I think, I was writing for the New York Sun. I think I was one of the only

Western journalists who was really covering that story. Wow. And I got to know a number of people in the Iranian opposition at the time. And these were people who impressed me, I felt I had an opportunity, I should say, at the end of 2002 on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003,

my original plan was to travel. I had developed relationships with some of the Kurdish parties in Iraq, was to travel through Tehran and go into Iraq. It turned out to be too dangerous at the time. There was a group of kind of Kurdish Islamists who were on that border

who were kidnapping Westerners So I ended up staying in Tehran for two weeks, but it was an absolute education. I did hook up with some of the freedom movement at the time and some of the students. And just having been there, what I came away with is that something that I think everybody now realizes, which is that this regime has zero legitimacy.

And that all of the things that we are projected back to the West, death to America, death to Israel, The students that I spoke to thought it was a joke. And they were at the point where as if we were being told by the regime that this was the case, then we believe the opposite. I mean, I'm oversimplifying a bit. You also saw, I also saw all these ways in which Iranians were kind of violating the rules of the strict Islamic theocracy. So I was able to, I was able to hook up with some people who showed me how to buy liquor in Iran illegally. It's this fascinating way.

You kind of go into a store, you say you want something else, and someone sort of knows. It was a code. I wrote a call about that. I met filmmakers and artists and people who really just wanted to live a kind of

in a Western freedom, and that still had critiques of the West, I should say, but it was, I got a long discussion with kind of an aspiring filmmaker about the movie American Beauty. Do you remember that movie?

I do. Kevin Spacey. And the argument was, I mean, what he would say is sort of, I remember this very vividly, what he'd say is, he would say, yes, of course, everything you say about our system is correct, it's corrupt, it's stifling, but this movie reflects a deep kind of corrosion of the American soul. Look at what happens to this guy. This is unthinkable that he would have this affair with his daughter's friend and ruin his life and everything like that. And that stayed with me. But this was still a period, especially because of some of the little bit of the little bit of the loosening under Hotsamie, a lot of people who were middle class had satellite dishes. So there was the beginning of this opening. And then, of course, it was stifled. And that was the kernel of it. So I've stayed with that story, and I've really had an interest in sort of seeing this transition to democracy,

because I think it's the one population in the Middle East where if there was a vote, you would get a fairly kind of pro-Western free vote. You'd get a pro-Western government. Well, let me ask you, I want to talk about the opposition. I want to talk to you about Reza Pallavi, but I just want to pick up on one thing there. You talked then about the 90s as a kind of origin to revolution, to disruption. Do you see things that you saw then happening now? What do you think is the link to everything that's taking place in Iran? Well, what I see now is, I mean, what happened was that the regime crushed dissent,

and they have exiled, jailed, or murdered anybody who wanted to reform the system at this point. I mean, we just saw another round of arrest of so-called reformers, but there really were none left. I saw the beginning of that. When I was in Iran, these were literally show trials of Hatami advisors that were charged with treason. This is the end of 2002. And when I say they were charged with treason, the crime was that they had participated in a poll with the Gallup organization, which is Western organization, as part of the, what's sometimes called Track 2 or Track 3 diplomacy, where what you have are civil society leaders meeting,

as opposed to diplomats. And this was approved by the Khatami government, and then it was, they turned it into sort of an example of treachery. Now, they never arrested Hattomi, and Hattomi is loath to them. by most Iranians because he didn't stand up for his principles. But many of his closest aides were, you know, there was a trial, and they were sent to the Avon prison, which is a dungeon. And that was also, that also left an impression on me.

Even though I didn't speak Farsi, I was able to watch it with somebody who could translate and show me what was going on. And it was the message was very clear to everybody. So that was the beginning of the end. And then it's just gotten worse. And every single time, if you look at the 2009 election in Obama's first year, the people are supporting, again, reformer candidates, Musavi and Karabi, who are still under house arrest, I might add, although they've come out in favor of the revolution. And then they stole the election.

They gave it to this guy, Ahmadinejad. Now, the irony is that Ahmadinejad, the sort of hardliner handpicked, you know, in that that was the second term. Ahmadinejad, you know, who isn't a central figure, he has come out for pretty radical reform at this point. That just shows the revolution's kind of ether young, and they consume themselves. So we're at a point now in Iranian history where there is, I think, I wouldn't call it a consensus,

but I don't, I think that there's, I think it would be safe to say 70 to 80% of the country would like to get rid of this awful corrupt system. And they don't have the guns, and they don't have the guns. They don't have the power of the violence. And so anything we can do at this point to try to balance that. I don't mean sending arms to average Iranians.

What I mean is to say that there's a lot of things I think the United States can do short of bombing them that would be extremely helpful the next time they come to the streets. And I think it's only a matter of time. Because what we saw the end of December and early January was not the first time the Iranian people had said enough. it was the seventh or eighth time we'd seen it in sort of a national level and I think that it's just it's only a matter of time

the structural problems in Iran right now are so awful. It's not just the currency which everybody talks about, the Rial is worth nothing there's not enough potable drinking water. There is a huge problem right now with the pensions of just average workers because they've been looted by the people who really run the economy

which is the Revolutionary Guard Corps. there's a series of bank failures. All these things are kind of independent of sanctions, you know, which is what I think some of the people who make excuses for it. So in that respect, I think it's a matter of time, the worst thing that can happen, and it's, even though I still think that Trump

is probably going to end up bombing Iran, I think that negotiations are very bad because it is a lifeline to the regime. And it sends the message back to the people that, you know, we can cut a deal that will allow us to keep slaughtering you. So I would hope, I think it was a very bad idea to start those talks like they had.

I think you've got to let them sort of stew. The thing is, I think crucially with that, is because of the way that President Trump has been acting in the foreign stage, for the first time, at least it would be a real threat that there's going to be some kind of intervention. We've obviously seen him act in Venezuela and other places. So, assuming, I mean, this all tease up

where we're going to take this discussion, which is that the hands. hesitancy from a lot of Americans of any form of intervention is what are we going to leave structurally as an opposition? You know, too many times have we intervened and there's not been a kind of plan for afterwards. That's kind of how the critique goes. So tell me, for a beginner start here, who is Reza Palavi? And what do you think of him as a potential future leader of Iran? Well, Rezapalavi is the kind of crown prince of the Pahlavi dynasty that was replaced at the end of in the 1979 revolution.

So his father left, in part because he was unwilling to do the kind of, to use the violence that, to do the kind of things that this regime is willing to do in the face of popular unrest. And, you know, his 18-year-old son at the time, Rezapolovie, who was next in line, the crown prince, left with him.

I mean, he was already in the States, who's training in Texas to, to be a cadet in the Imperial Air Force. He attended a semester of Williams College, very prestigious school. I might add, it's the same school where a famous CIA director named Richard Helms attended. And then he joined his family

who had to go from like sort of country to country because no one would take him in this weird interregnum period of 1979. So he was in Cairo and Morocco and all these places. and he earned his college degree at the university, the rest of his college degree, the University of Southern California through kind of correspondence classes.

Can I ask this a question? Why study in the U.S.? And what is the effect of that? Well, a lot of elites from all over the world studying the U.S. because we have great universities. Yeah. So that's the first reason. But is it sort of a signifier of aligning

with Western values on some level? I mean, I think certainly politics. Mohammad Reza Shah, his father was a very strong American ally. He was an autocrat. But the autocracy or the authoritarianism in Iran is sometimes overstated. In our two-parter, I have many critiques of the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and many in the poor. And as is kind of the Persian custom, Polovi was a flaunter. he liked to, he was ostentatious displays of his wealth, which didn't play well if you were,

if you were living at or below the poverty line. But on the other hand, he was responsible for great reforms in Iran that kind of took Iran out of, you know, their own sort of dark ages. And he was able to get women's suffrage, he got much, much more universal education, improved the literacy rate of Iranians, and did something known as a land reform, which actually really was a structural challenge to the power of the clerics in Iranian society, which is what Ayatollah Khomeini comes from, the Shia kind of theologians of Kome, which is right near Tehran. So they were the, many of them were the absentee landowners for much of the country. And you had a kind of peasant class as a result, almost like the serfs of Russia. And finally, it was Muhammad Razz Shah that

changed that, he did it through decree, meaning it wasn't, by that point it was really hard to, you couldn't say it was a truly elected modulus or parliament. But these were at least the reforms themselves were very much in keeping with the democratic tradition in Iran that goes back to the 1905 constitutional revolution. We can get into this, but there's a, there's a bit of a mythology around the U.S. intervention in 1953 when the CIA through Kermit Roosevelt, persuades Muhammad Reza Shah, who's that a young man,

a very unready, young kind of monarch, to assert his constitutional authority and fire the prime minister, Mohamed Mousadah. Now, Mousadah is this kind of, heroic figure for the anti-imperial left, but Moseda was very much of a kind of, like, would have agreed,

he had, with much of the reforms of Muhammad Resel Shah later on. Yeah. And I would say that it This is called a coup. I don't think it was a coup. I think it was Muhammad Mosadeh was himself trying to basically, you know, drive the Shah out of the country. It's a power struggle.

And he had alienated a number of other constituencies that he had in his own base. And the reason why Muhammad Mosadeh had to ultimately resign his position back in 1953, in my view, was not because of the CIA. its black propaganda or the British MI6, it was because the senior Ayatollah in Kome, Ayatollah Khashani, was also the speaker of the Majlis, had withdrawn his support, his earlier support, from Mosadd's coalition, and was now opposing him and had brought people on the street

demanding that he resign. Now, the irony here is that Khashani himself, who was a bit of an extremist, was a huge influence on Ayatollah Khomeini. So in this respect, I think it's fair to say that Homanie, even though he wasn't really a prominent figure at the time, was probably in the camp that wanted to get rid of Mosada, which is unlike the story that people tell about the 79 revolution, which is that, well, they nursed this grudge for a generation and they, this is for Mosada and the coup, the people who end up stealing the revolution. Romani and the clerics are the same people that were responsible ultimately for turning the tide against Mosadd. So I never bought the argument that the 79 revolution was somehow informed by anger over America and British role in this 53 affair. I don't like to call it a coup.

So back to now. But back to Reza Polavi. Yes. So he got up to his kind of Western education. Yeah, he's Resford education. And then in the early 80, I mean, so his father, Robert Reza Shah, has cancer.

It's at a pretty bad way by 1980. It had it for many years. He kept it from his own family. He dies in 1980 and all the responsibilities of maybe trying to take back the dynasty fall on the shoulders of this very young man

Rezapolavi. And Rezaphalovie, in the early 80s, he has meetings with the CIA at point. He gets some funding from the CIA. As I report in my piece, it's regime irritation, not regime change. But over time, what I would say is that what happens with Rezapolovie is that he assimilates. He's in America at a young enough age that he becomes very American. He he's looking around and he sees the sort of trends of history and lives through the end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, and believes in liberal democracy.

And as somebody who believes in liberal democracy, for years, he would say, I'm happy to lead the movement to transition Iran to a democracy, but I have no interest in becoming an absolute monarch. I do not want to become the Shah. So I say at the end of this piece that it's not the Moas that destroyed the Pahlavi line. It's America. because nearly 50 years later, you have people in the streets of Iran shouting,

Javid Shah, long live the king. They want to bring back the monarchy. But you have the crown prince who, in his bones, I think, doesn't believe that we should bring back. Maybe he would be a constitutional monarch, like King Charles in the UK. But he doesn't, I think, want to actually rule the way his father did

to be an absolute monarch. Yeah. So that's one of the kind of history's ironies. Now, can he be the leader of the revolution? I believe he could be. But in order to do that, he needs to unite all the different factions that oppose this regime and get them on the same page. And that covers, there's still a union movement in Iran that covers the human rights lawyers

like Nargis Mohamedy, who was just resentenced another seven years. That means the ethnic minorities, most of the human rights. notably the 15 million Kurds that live in Iran. And he has to do some coalition building. Does he have it in him? Is he that kind of person? I think in his best moments he can be that. The problem I think is that the people, there is a movement, there are like millions of Iranians, particularly in diaspora, but also inside the country, that are not interested in that. They want him to be the king. And to be the

king, kings don't make coalitions with people. They rule. So this is a natural tension. Because they think it's cleaner, someone needs to take the reins, or they believe in monarchy in general? I think it's, I don't want to know, I think there's a lot of different motivations going on. I think that part of the motivation is,

as all politics come down to compare to what? Yeah. So there are a lot of people who were not born, who don't have any living memory of life under the Shah. but they have a vision of life under the shah. It was much better than this. So that's the first thing. The misrule of Khomeini and his fellow Moas is such that I think we're at the stage now

where most of Maranians think, well, I want whatever you replaced because you've driven our country into the ground. So that's the first thing. Yeah. Then I think there's a, again, there are millions. of Iranians who fled Iran in 79 who did feel some fealty to the Shah. And they want Rezaphalovie to be a man

he's not. So there's that as well. And then there's Rezapolovie himself. And Rezapolavi is not just kind of committed, I believe, to liberal democracy as a superior way to organize society. He is a student of Gene Sharp who believed in nonviolent resistance. and is one of the foremost theoreticians of what's known as people power.

We should do a breaking history on the success of, but that's what we associate with, say, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi. And so he wanted something like this for Iranis, wanted that for a long time. It is an irony that we have this moment in history where Trump promised at one point to, you know, basically use American arms to help this movement, which is kind of against the spirit of Gene Sharp, although I certainly understand why Rezapolovie won some military intervention, as do so many Iranians that I talked to at this point, including Shereen Abadi, and other Nobel Peace Prize-winning Iranian human rights lawyer, who would never have said that before,

but it's become so desperate after the slaughter of January 8th and 9th that I think the argument is basically, listen, the people don't have any, they don't have guns, the regime has guns. Can you start picking these guys off? And willing to kill so many. I mean, these crackdown numbers disputed, but, you know, tens of thousands of people. It's like at that scale, you know, you feel like your hand is forced. Right. It's like Bobby R.

Yeah. It's absolutely grotesque. They're now purging anybody who was slightly reformist. So you've got, you know, this is a really ugly moment. And the question is, what can arms, what can military intervention do? And if we're being honest, we're in uncharted territory. Yeah. Because I don't think a full-scale invasion of Iran is on the table at all.

That's not going to happen. Well, that pivots nicely to where I want to take listeners next, which is into the halls of D.C. So we've got Reza Palavi, we've got the protests going on. What's stopping President Trump just saying, we back Reza. we're going to do anything we can to put him in power. Why the hesitancy from them? Well, he hasn't been in the country since 1978. So, I mean, that's almost 50 years.

I mean, like, you don't know. I mean, yes, people call his name. There is a serious poll from people who are reliable that say he has 31% support in the country, which is far more than any other figure that they polled for, including homine or regime figures. But that, he hasn't won an election.

It's, you know, it's unclear that he would, you know, like the transition documents that Polarvi's office has put out talk about this idea that he would be the, kind of the leader of the uprising. So he would be the final say in that he would be the transitional leader, but how long is that period of transition until, I mean, all of those are, his questions. And I think that

the Trump administration would like to keep their options open to see if they can cut a deal. Now, there's a great way of under, it's kind of a frame from someone who I'll try to get an interview with. Karin Sajapur, who is a terrific he's the council, I think he said the council

on farm relations or Carnegie or one of these great think tanks, but he's a great writer and writes a lot for the Atlantic. And what he says is that in the beginning of the revolution, it was 20% charlatan, and 80% true believers, and now it's 80% charlatans and 20% true believers. So the idea would be that you kill a couple charlatans, you kill a few more true believers, and then the charlatans look around and they say, I don't want to be on the kill list.

Maybe I should join. And then maybe you get one of them and they're more reasonable and they really well cut a deal. That's the idea. But that still leaves the Iranian people potentially in the lurch. and it's not the kind of full, I don't think it's what the Iranian people are demanding, which is a constitutional referendum that eliminates the powers of the Supreme Leader

and the Guardian Council returns Iran to something like the 1905 Constitution or maybe the 1925 Constitution. And that's what I think they want. And that's what they've been saying. So I don't know how that'll be reconciled, but I think that a lot of this is Trump trying to keep his flexibility and his options

open. Similar to what we're seeing in Venezuela, although I remind some of my pessimistic friends on that, that there is still a plan to transition to elections. So for now, you're going to have the vice president and the rest of

the regime sort of making these decisions, but making decisions and answering to Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and not, you know, they're the people who, you know, Venezuela is an enormous debt right now to China and Russia. mainly China. So to have that is an interesting, we'll see, is that an interregnum?

But that's very different than what Paolavi won. So I think that's part of it too. Let's just play out a couple of those scenarios that you've touched on in a little bit more detail. So if the regime did fall, Palavi steps up as some kind of interim leader or rallying together the opposition. What the people want is a referendum which would vote on certain specifics of a way in which the system would operate, i.e. a presidential. or how the elections would work, is that kind of one pathway? Well, they want to eliminate the supreme leader.

As Akbar Ganji, as we talked about earlier, it said, if you're so confident you represent the will of the Iranian people, why don't you stand for election? Yeah. So they want to eliminate this office, which is, you know, kind of kept its thumb on the Iranian society now since 1979. So that's the first and foremost thing.

And then beyond that, I just think they want, again, I'm going to rely on Karim Sadrapore because I think he says it so well, they want their government to be organized around the principle of make Iran great again as opposed to death to America. So so many of the resources that Iran got after signing the nuclear deal when all the sanctions were lifted and the United States paid in pallets of cash for the release of various hostages, that money was not reinvested in Iran. That money went to like Hezbollah. and Iran's kind of regional ambitions. And one of the ironies here is that I have noticed that the self-styled, so-called, alleged, anti-imperialist left has taken up the cause of Iranian sovereignty without grappling or reconciling the fact that Iran is a regional imperial power. That's what it means when it, you know,

basically kind of, you know, funds, arms, trains, directs, proxy, you know, terror groups and militias and little statelets like the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah and Lebanon, which was more powerful than the Lebanese army, no longer because of Israel, or Hamas, or the Iraqi militias that, you know, were maybe necessary at various points to go after ISIS and al-Qaeda, but no longer and have not absorbed into the Iraqi, I should say, national army. So Iran is an imperial power. Yeah. And I do think that this is, I think this is a moment that will be remembered with great shame for the left,

or at least those who want to sort of maintain their kind of commitment to anti-imperialism. Because they've picked the side of ultimately kind of regional imperialists. Now you could say America's more powerful. imperial power, at least according to that analysis, I would quibble. But that doesn't really make much sense. I mean, because especially now that you have such overwhelming evidence, the Iranian people, do not want this. Yeah.

And that is, so that's a big part of it, too. And I think they also want, you know, I mean, what you see every time you've got failed states driven into the ground by fanatics and authoritarians, which, you know, they drive away their best and brightest. So there are plenty of Iranian engineers who probably could do something to figure out how to deal with Iran's water crisis, for example, or to deal with Iran's failing banks.

Iran is a vast nation of 90 million people. There's a lot of talent. But if you had any kind of talent, why would you want to stay in Iran? Why wouldn't you just try to leave? Absolutely. And what about Donald Trump as a president? Is he uniquely positioned to achieve peace in Iran?

Or, you know, how do we compare this to the rest of his record in foreign policy? Well, Trump has an opportunity to be an historically great president on foreign policy, but he's not there yet. And there's still a lot of open files. So I think he was vindicated on U.S. intervention and allowing Israel. to do the 12-day war. I think it exposed Iran as a paper tiger. I left them incredibly vulnerable, which is what we're dealing with now.

But the job isn't finished until, I mean, there is a transition to something better. And if he ends up making a deal, as we speak right now, Steve Whitkoff is envoy to the world and Jared Krishna are meeting with high-level Iranian officials in Oman. I mean, if he cuts a deal that allows this regime to survive,

then I think he will go down as kind of like George H.W. Bush, when he urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein only to allow the dictator to use his attack helicopters to go after and slaughter, you know, tens of thousands of his own people. Or Obama, when he drew the red line against, Bashar al-Assad in Syria using chemical weapons. He does, and then Obama kind of backs away from it, punts it to Congress, who doesn't do anything.

These, in my view, are kind of legacies that if I was Trump, I would want to avoid, and I have reason to think that he doesn't want to be known that way. And then Venezuela is another example in his foreign policy, where if all we get is, you know, kind of the Maduro regime limping along, then that to me is a failure when they had an election. We know that the party of Maria Machado prevailed,

and that should be the model to have another election and to try to get the rest of the thugs out of there. Yeah. But then he's trying to go for a model that avoids the pitfalls of the regime change, full-on wars of Georgia. George W. Bush. So he doesn't want to deal with an insurgency comprised of the remnants of the regime loyalists in either Venezuela or Iran. I understand that. So I'm open to that. But if you don't

get the transition to something better and you don't get the end state of Iran, it doesn't have to be a perfect democracy. It doesn't have to be Denmark. But if it was something better where you gave the people a chance. And you'll know, by the way, people will vote with their feet. I think a lot of Iranians would return to their home country, you know, if they felt it was safe. So he's got to do that. And there are other questions, which is, let's leave aside the bombing.

Why didn't the United States figure out a way to try to either turn the Internet back on, have a plan in place to try to give Iranians a chance to defeat or figure out ways through Starlink or other satellites? to get around that internet blackout, and then in turn, take away the internet and take away the command and control for the regime as they were doing the crackdown.

The United States has those capabilities. Why were they not deployed at that time is something that I'm certainly trying to find out journalistically, but I think that that's a huge question. And there should be a kind of plan in place assuming there will be a next time and that we should have a kind of protocol. The next time Iranians are kind of in the street en masse,

here's what we're going to do to try to advantage them. And right now, that is a, it's not only on, it's not just Trump because we didn't have that for other uprisings under Biden and other, in Obama, et cetera, but there really needs to be something like that in place because I think the Iranian people are just not going to let this go. And finally, Like, you know, back to kind of, you know, Trump sometimes creates his own problems.

His kind of insane talk about Greenland, and by the way, I would support buying Greenland, like, in a normal way, but then, you know, leaving, what are we going to invade Denmark? It's an insane proposition. Yeah. But that alienating of Europe in that way, we could really use, you know, effective diplomacy with Europe to kick out Iranian ambassadors. use the fact that a lot of Iranian elites live in Europe and America and Canada and try to use that as a leverage point to try to get defections at the elite levels of the regime. These are things that I hope we're doing, but I think it's made it much harder to do given the Trump theatrics on other things like tariffs and Greenland, etc.

Yeah. It sounds like, and I mean this is kind of the case covering foreign policy, that's why it's so great you've done it for so many decades, is that we won't know exactly how to evaluate Trump's record until some time has passed and to see the proof in the pudding. Right. And then so to that... Although I do think he did set back the Iranian nuclear program considerably. And that was an unalloyed kind of foreign policy victory. And for that, he deserves a lot of credit. He deserves a lot of credit for arranging a deal whereby Israeli hostages were returned, allowing for Israel to, you know, kind of end the war.

I don't think they could have ended it unless they got their hostages, the living hostages back. So that to me is, those are real accomplishments and we shouldn't diminish them. But I also think that, on the other hand, Trump does other things

that make his path to greatness, if you will, harder. And then we haven't even talked about the domestic stuff, but we've seen in this whole period, it looks like they've backed away from their policy of sending poorly, trained border patrol agents and ICE officers into cities where they were not wanted to try to round up illegal immigrants. Now, it looks like that's no longer going to be the policy after the

horrible tragedies of the shooting of Alex Priddy and Renee Good. But the way that his administration handled it was atrocious, and that they should be shamed for that, calling them domestic terrorist when there wasn't evidence of that kind of thing. Yeah. So it's a, it's a mix bag with Trump as always. And even though that's a domestic story, it is, it's hard to make the case that you're supporting a democratic transition in Iran when the president muses about nationalizing the midterm elections. Yeah. These things are in tension, if you will. Yes. And we should say that when you were talking about the hostages there, something that is maybe obvious, but I think about a lot is that Iran, we're not intervening just simply for the good of our heart that we think the people

want assistance in overthrowing the regime. Of course, Iran has funded so much terrorism globally that there are strategic interests in why America benefits if it's a more peaceful government. Yeah, now you're getting at a great point here, which is that there's something known as R2P, the responsibility to protect. I don't really think that that as a doctrine works, because there's going to be horrible tragedies in the world that America can't do anything about. But this is one where there was a terrible humanitarian catastrophe that happens to overlap with a regime that is the source of so much mayhem and mischief in the Middle East and has been an avowed American foe. So again, this is an example where this is overdetermined. I wouldn't want to say that in all cases when there are humanitarian disasters and, you know, America will intervene.

That, I think, is a... I don't think you can... I don't think that's a realistic thing. Yeah. Nice, but it's... But in this particular case, again, it's over-determined. And the real problem is that...

Just to sort of a final thing, and I wrote this last week, but the reason why we haven't... I think the real reason why we haven't done it is that we are kind of realizing now that Iran can... has more ballistic missiles than we have the interceptors to shoot them out of the sky.

So we developed an amazing technology of missile defense, which many people thought was impossible. But in fact, the reality is we did come up with this technology, but what we didn't think about was that it caused us far more to build the interceptors to shoot them down than for the bad guys to come up with the missiles. So that was another thing. After the 12-day war, we had a huge kind of backlog,

The cupboard was bare for the most part and the assistance that were provided into Ukraine. So we need to also figure out how to make more of these interceptors and to deal with our supply chain. That's a separate question, but it's one that I think has been avoided by Congress. Defense Secretaries and Presidents for the last 25 years. Everybody has said missile defense and missiles, this is the future of warfare. I've been reading that in National Defense Strategies now for 25 years. So that's where we're at.

Yeah. Well, I think we'll leave things there. But again, a final plug to listen to our Iran series. We'll be coming back with more episodes like this when appropriate. And look out for our new series. It's coming soon. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Diligence from sea to the river Expect the best Ignore the chatter Breaking history Means so much to me

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