School of War - Ep 255: Roya Hakakian on the Islamic Revolution

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Roya Hakakian, author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace and Journey from the Land of No, joins the show to discuss the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, and how these events have shaped the world. ▪️ Times 02:56 Life Before the Revolution 11:02 Antisemitism in Revolutionary Iran 21:56 Khomeini’s Rise to Power 22:32 The Global Left and the Soviet Union 29:49 A Catastrophe of the 20th Century 37:21 The State of the Iranian Regime 42:19 The Revolution is Alive and Well 52:01 The Future of Iran and Its Leadership Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 was one of the signal catastrophes of the 20th century, the cause of generations of disorder and suffering in the Middle East. Today, we speak with an eyewitness to that revolution, about what it did to her family, her country, the region, and to the United States, and about its ongoing consequences to this day. Let's get into it. A date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in Grand.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Long time listeners might remember me mentioning a summer fellowship I teach for on Grand Strategy and Statecraft, the Hurtag Security Studies Program. Applications are open again for the summer of 2026, and I'd like to invite you or maybe

somebody you know to apply. The Security Studies Program is a five-week residential fellowship in Washington, D.C., for advanced undergraduates, recent graduates, and young professionals. It's an intensive deep dive into geopolitics and national security, with courses led by some of the best in the field, many of whom have been guests right here on School of War. I'll open the program with a seminar on geopolitics, followed by Vance Surchuk on U.S.-Russia relations. Then Mike Duran of the Hudson Institute will take on the Middle East,

and Dan Blumenthal of AEI will cover Chinese grand strategy. We'll close with West Point's Hugh Liebert to teach Thucydides. Our fellows also hear from a world-class roster of speakers. Last summer we hosted Senator Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, retired General Frank McKenzie, Palantiers Mike Gallagher, others. So if you're passionate about history, geopolitics, or statecraft, this is a really

extraordinary opportunity to sharpen your understanding and meet leaders shaping American strategy today. Applications are now open on a rolling basis at hertogfoundation.org. That's h-e-tog foundation.org. I hope you'll join me next summer for the Hurtog Security Studies program. Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the today. Roya Hakakian. She's an author, a journalist, has written several books including a memoir, Journey from the Land of No, a Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, another book called Assassins of the Turquoise Palace about Iran's extraterritorial terror operations in Europe. She's a contributor to the Atlantic, amongst other publications. Roya, thank you so much for coming on School of War.

Thank you so much for having me on. Let's start with, well, with you. Tell us where an intuitive, into, To what world you were born? And what was it like growing up as Roya Hakakian? I was born in Iran and came of age right during the most important tumult of Iran's 20th century, which was the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Revolution. And so the book that you just mentioned in the introduction is a memoir that recounts the story of a few years before the revolution and a few years after the revolution so that it

tells the story of Iran's transformation from 1979 to 1984, which is when my mother and I left Iran and then went to Europe, we're refugees for about a year in Europe until our asylum applications were approved and we came to the United States as refugees. But prior to that, It's really this story of little girl watching the world fall apart in Iran. And this runs the risk of being rude, but I think it's important for context. But how old were you in the Revolution? How old were you? How old were you? How old were you? No one had to do the math.

I was 12 when the Revolution happened. Take us through. Let's start with those 12 years then. What was, you were in Tehran? I was in Tehran, and my father ran one of the few Hebrew schools that existed. in Iran at a time. And my mother was a Hebrew teacher for many years before she ended up with four kids and had to quit teaching. My father was a leading Jewish educator, a Jewish educator in Iran. And, you know, it was very fun when I traveled to, say, Los Angeles, where there's a giant community of Iranians and especially Iranian Jews, you know, in Westwood areas of Los Angeles

and elsewhere, because people would come out of their stores and their restaurants and greet my father because they were all students of my dads. And, you know, I was too little to really register the political nuances that were surrounding me at the time. But life seemed quite good, especially when I knew what my father or what my mother had lived through. My father had been, part of a very small Jewish community in a very rural part of Iran, which was adjacent to Qom, and Ghom is sort of the Shia capital of the world. It's where all the seminaries are. So it was a very odd and unusual place for Jews to live. And so he grew up with, you know, 90 years ago with a lot of anti-Semitism. My father couldn't go to school on rainy days because

part of what the school administrators believed was that, you know, Jews would get wet. And if they move their body sort of, you know, in a big way, they would splash water onto other people. And because Jews were considered dirty, then because they didn't participate in Islamic ablution of, you know, cleansing themselves prior to prayer, then that dirty water would fall onto a Muslim, and the Muslim would get dirty too. So, you know, there are sections in my memoir about my father's recollection of staying home or being kept at home for days on end because the rain wouldn't cease. So when you kind of grow up thinking or hearing how your father grew up,

and then you compare it to your own life, which I did at the time, you know, 10, 11 years old, living in the capital of Tehran, and, you know, my Jewish father was now a principal. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood. We had Zoroastrians and Baha'is and Shias and all sorts of people in our neighborhood, and we lived peacefully side by side each other. So that seemed to me not just peace, but, you know, life as at its most ideal. And, you know, until, of course, in December of 1978, when a swastika appeared across the way on the wall where we lived, on the alley where we lived, and I had never seen a swastika. So I went inside, I brought my father out.

I, you know, I showed him. Because underneath the swastika, you know, there was a writing that had said, Jews get lost. So I knew that that symbol had something to do with Jews. So I brought my father out, I showed him the writing and the symbol. And he said nothing. He just said, you know, let's shut the door. And we shut the door. We went back inside.

And that was my first introduction to, you know, to Nazi symbolism. It's striking that the anti-Semitism you describe your father growing up with is this sort of, I don't know exactly how to characterize, maybe traditional bigotry, sort of religiously infused, traditional kind of silly, not silly to dismiss it, but the dunderheaded bigotry. And then the anti-Semitism that you first encounter at the start of the revolution is this sort of politicized, western, making reference to the West version of it. I don't know exactly what to.

No, no, I love that. It's a wonderful observation. And I've recounted this story many times. You're the first one to make this comparison. But it could also be that we're living in very strange times in the United States. And so we're far more mindful and sensitive towards the issues of antisemitism. But you're right in that the anti-Semitism that my father experienced was bigotry. And it was idiotic bigotry, you know, the kind that, you know,

Every society has either known or continues to know. But yes, with the advent of the Iranian Revolution, it suddenly became politicized, and so I'm going to set us up for the rest of our conversation. It was because it was when Islamism and Marxism had met. And it was in that meeting that the usual anti-Semitism that was ongoing in Iran. Prior to that, took on a different meaning and took on a much larger significance. And that was because, you know, the Marxist dogmas had met with the Islamist

conservative dogmas. And so they became far more explosive and dangerous. When do you remember, or what do you remember about first discussing with your parents or knowing that your parents were aware that the revolution was a problem for you, for the family? This is quite incredible because when my father first started talking about the dangers of the revolution, she was only making observations based on aesthetics. In other words, my father was looking at Khomeini, and he was saying that based on what he knew of Iranian history, that a turban and a rope never brought good news. And so it wasn't that, you know, my father had delved into all of Khomeini's writings

and was coming away with, you know, with a deep analysis. It wasn't that. It was a very intuitive, almost visceral, reaction to what he knew from growing up where he grew up that, that, you know, Mullahs or religious clergy in Iran had always meant. And so that was his initial reaction. Mine, on the other hand, you know, being sort of part of the youth division at the time, I thought, you know, what do my parents know? They belong to this past. They, you know, they think that they still need stay home on rainy days, that those are their, you know, they mistake their sufferings or the

legacy of their sufferings for this, you know, enormous change that's coming. For me, it was all sort of this literary campaign that I had experienced because at the time, all elite Iranian secular intellectuals were using poetry and prose. It was not unlike what Chamberlain, Chamberlain, had said about, you know, about the way that Churchill had used the English language. You know, the Iranian literati had really brought or weaponized Persian language in favor of the revolution, in favor of anti-Shaw activism. And so that, that was the stuff that had really excited me and, you know, set my imagination on fire. I'm no expert in the revolution, but my general impression is, like other revolutions successful or not, that have occurred in the Islamic world broadly.

It begins as this broader-based rejection of the Shah's authoritarian rule with actually a lot of liberal elements and then ultimately is sort of subsumed by a religious element. Talk about the nature of that religious element. And I guess one way to ask the question is I'm so fascinated by your father's very unusual upbringing. I mean, what a way to grow up Jewish. It's like being, you know, Jewish in Mecca. It was. The fact, it was the Shia version of that, basically. So is the...

But can I just interrupt you to say that the reason my father's story was actually a story of triumph was because the kid that had grown up that way had been, had gone to receive a master's degree in education. and served in the Iranian army as a second lieutenant. Wow. You know, so that's, you know, that's sort of like an MLK-sized trail of transformation. And so rather than talk about that, you know, bitter past, my father's story was the story of triumph. That, you know, look what was done to me and look how I turned out, despite of it all. When was he in the Iranian army?

Oh, when he got out of graduate school, he went in. This would have been in the 40s, 50s? Yeah, he was born in the late 20s, so yes, in the 40s. Wow, wow, well, that's incredible. It's a little bit like here, you know, it's of course, you know, in the First World War, the German army, the imperial German army, is replete with Jewish soldiers, many many officers serving the Kaiser honorably. Fascinating. So my question about the revolution is this world that your father grows up,

very immersed in, in some ways, kind of on the outside looking in in other important ways, this religiosity, Shia religiosity of Qum, is there a straight line from that religiosity to the nature of the Islam that is dominant as the revolution proceeds? Or are there new and important flavors and twists in the 1978, 79 Islam? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's wonderful. Yes. there is a lot because the Iranian clergy for a long time was sort of a symbol of backwardness, right? That, you know, they had their own constituency and that constituency would never be appealing to the cosmopolitan, to the middle class, to the urbanite Iranians. So they were like, you know, the lines were very well delineated between the two groups.

But what Khomeini suddenly does, and I think the reason this is worth revisiting is that the world we live in in some ways began there. And by that I mean that the way in which Marxist or leftist radicalism came together with Islamist radicalism to solidify a bond together, in my view, began in the 1960s with Khomeini in Iran. And the way it started is that, you know, Khomeini was sitting in Gorm, you know, in his seminary, and he was making all these bigoted statements. He was constantly obsessively, talking about the corruption within the Pahlavi regime. And when you wanted him to elaborate on what the corruption meant, he could only, or primarily, refer to the length of women's skirts.

So, you know, he's mini skirts. Women are wearing mini skirts. Women are going into workplace. Women being in workplace causes men to be. be distracted and not be able to work. And so the entire workplace has been, you know, has turned into, you know, some kind of, you know, Dionysian georgie. And then, and then, you know, women have the right to get a divorce and have child custody rights. So his real beef with the Palabees wasn't about, you know, was the country advancing?

or was there censorship, or was there, you know, a freedom of expression or whatever? It was none of that. It was his objection to how women advanced and how much rights they had gained. And while he was saying all this in the early 60s, nobody was paying attention other than his own constituency. And at some point, some of his advisors came to him and said, dude, if you really want to go beyond and become a national figure, you have to start talking about other topics that appeal to a broader audience and bring in these other elements that can never identify with you. And that's when he started striking a very anti-imperialist

and anti-Zionist, an anti-Israel note. And it was at that point when, you know, very specifically, capitulation laws had passed in Iran in 1960, 3 or 4. What are those? Capitulation. So it was, it had been ratified in Iran's Majelist Parliament, and it allowed, it gave the right to American citizens, military, or other officials who were in Iran

on behalf of the U.S. government to be tried in the United States for whatever crimes or violations they committed in Iran. So it was sort of granting immunity to all Americans who were in Iran, who had been stationed in Iran. And so after this is ratified,

Khomeini delivers a sermon and he says, look what the Shah has done. He has so profoundly humiliated us that now an American dog has more dignity than an Iranian. And so he is a servant to U.S. imperialism, and he has completely undermined and obliterated Persian identity and dignity and all that. And suddenly after this, the game changes. It's no longer about women. It's no longer about skirt sizes. It's suddenly about this grander notions of national dignity and U.S. imperialism and, you know, sort of giving in or surrendering to the world's greatest power. And you mentioned Marxism earlier. So this, you know, your account just now

sort of reminds us that when we talk about political Islam, not to overlook the political. You know, It's its own important additive element. But what is the intersection between Khomeini's evolving rhetoric, even worldview platform, and the Cold War politics of the day, the way in which obviously the Soviet Union is competing against the United States. Iran, the Shah's Iran is an American partner. How does that, how does the global left and the Soviet Union kind of play into all of this? Well, everybody forgets because there has been such heavy emphasis. since 1979 on Iran being part of the Middle East.

By the way, which it wasn't until 1970, eight or nine, Iran was considered part of Asia. And so suddenly, with the rise of religious fundamentalism in Iran, Iran's geographical category shifts to the Middle East. And the reason that that's significant is that everybody forgot that Iran shares a giant border with the,

former Soviet Union. And so much of the political consciousness that filtered through Iran to the intellectual classes was Soviet propaganda and Soviet literature. I mean, one of the first writers I was reading was quote Maxim Gorky, you know, Shomakov, you know, so flows the dawn, you know, and things like that. Those were the earliest books of literature that I was exposed to because of the huge influence of Soviet thinking and Soviet propaganda in Iran. And this is, sorry to interrupt, but this is Soviet literature translated into Farsi in the 1970s, essentially.

That's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the most powerful political movement in Iran, all through the 50s and the 60s and much of the 70s was. If the religious could have any challenge in Iran, it was by the Communist Party of Iran, the Tudah party. And the Tudé were basically an outpost of the Soviet Union inside Iran. And, you know, those stories are tragic on their own because some of them were such believers that they moved through the Soviet Union and were executed by Stalin.

And, you know, the Soviets there, it's not funny, but it serves them right. for all the things that, the misleading that they brought to Iran. But yes, so we forget how influential the Soviets were, because we keep thinking of Iran as exclusively Shiite and as exclusively being in the Middle East and far away from the Soviets and that culture. But the way they come together, which is not just the tragic bonding, but also, I think, hugely consequential, even for our times, is that prior to the revolution all through the 70s

and especially through 1977 and 1978, suddenly Khomeini begins to say all the things that the cosmopolitan elite, who were either mostly secular or mostly Marxists, find incredibly appealing. So, you know, he's sitting, so Khomeini is finally in exile, and by 1977 and 1978 he's in exile in Paris. And so he's now talking about the equality of genders.

So people interview him at a time, and they say, what about women's rights? He's all for women's rights. What about the workers' rights or freedom of speech? He's all for freedom of speech. What about the freedom of political parties? he's all for freedom of political parties. And in fact, he goes even one step further, and he says that he has no designs on power,

political power whatsoever, that he's only in it to lead a moral struggle against tyranny. And once that moral struggle is over, all he hopes to do for the rest of his life is to return to Qom and sit at his seminary and study. And so somehow the Iranian elite class begin to see Khomeini, not as the way my father was seeing Khomeini, you know, turban, rogue, bad news. They thought he is the Mahatma Gandhi of Iran. Nationalist, nationalist, anti-tirony, anti-tirony. And suddenly, they, it was as if they, they, they, they. thought that his religious garb were serving or was serving exactly the same purpose as

Gandhi's, you know, Indian rap was doing for him. It was a, it was an expression of national identity against, you know, the British. And now suddenly, you know, Khomeini's turban in Rube was no longer, you know, religious symbols, but rather a, a, a national symbol. And that's how they come around and they start to embrace him as this singular figure who can lead the movement against the Shah. It's not just the critics of the Shah in Iran, I think, who fall for this. The Americans, the Carter administration, we had Edward Luce, the Financial Times journalist on School of War a few weeks ago to talk about his biography of Brazil. It was really interesting conversation. And we talked about the revolution at some length, which, as you probably know,

Brzynski was engaged in a fight within the Carter administration about what to do about Khomeini and what to do about the whole situation as it began to unravel. This is before, of course, the hostages, the American hostages were taken at the embassy. And Brinski sort of took a hard line and was a bit of a hawk on Khomeini, but he lost out to others in the administration who essentially were arguing things not totally dissimilar to what you just described. Look, do we agree with everything here? Is this a uniformly positive development?

No, obviously not. But, you know, the Shah's not great. There's some legitimate grievances here. And we can, if we reach out our hand, we can work with this guy. We can work with this guy who has sort of legitimate complaints and seems in some ways to have it. Like, he has a nationalist streak that we can lean into because we can understand that and we can work with that. And this other stuff is probably, you know, less significant. So it's the Americans who contribute to this as well.

And we end up with, I mean, it affects you personally, of course, in your family and your whole world. But, you know, for the region and for the United States, too, this is not, you know, the great catastrophe of the 20th century. I don't think it edges out either the Russian or the Chinese revolutions in terms of death toll and total impact. But it's somewhere up there. I mean, top 10, I mean, it is one of the great catastrophes of the 20th century. Exactly. I mean, I think about the Iranian Revolution as this never-ending, as this process that has yet to end. And if I ever had any doubt about my own hypothesis, let's say, the events on university campuses here after October 7th just confirmed. Say more about that. Well, you know, the idea that, you know, kids in the United States, 18, 19-year-old, young people who have gone to the best schools in this country can suddenly wave his will of flags was Khomeini's dream come true?

That, you know, immediately after he came to power, he, one of his greatest, if he had a foreign policy, his number one, number two and number three, foreign policy was to export the revolution, exporting their revolution. So, you know, Kueni was never a real, never really celebrated the Iranian or Persian identity. In fact, he believed in everything but the Persian identity, and he was constantly at war for the first few years of the revolution against all the distinctly Persian traditions of Iran, including the Persian New Year, which was a pre-Islamic, has been a pre-Islamic tradition. Because he believed in exporting the revolution and Islamizing the entire world through that export.

And so to watch after October 7th that, you know, transgender youth in America or, you know, LGBT, all these ultra-19. lefty, ultra, I suppose, liberal or whatever they might have been. Now, suddenly celebrating what Hamas had done or weaving the flags of these radical groups that had brought such torment on Israel, you know, even before Israel had gone to war in Gaza, was an affirmation that what Khomeini began in 1979 had really become reality. And his revolution had been exported, which is, you know, if you were following Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's current supreme leaders, Twitter feed, he was just egging on everything that was happening on university campuses.

So in their view, this has been an enormous success. You know, it was not about land. It was about manipulating and winning over the hearts and minds of the Western public. which are many ways they have done. When was it that you and your mother decided to leave and how did you leave? And what happened with your father in that period? That's a good story because it actually goes back to some of what the Iranian regime has never really decided since 1979 about Jews, about Israel. So initially when they came to power, they didn't know whether they wanted to.

to turn the Iranian Jewish community into a hostage community, hold them in Iran and swap them for other international favors, or whether they were going to simply let them be as they had been there before Islam came to Iran. People forget that the presence of Jews in Iran predates the advent of Islam. so they are far more indigenous to their own than Muslims are. But what happened was that there was a tug of war between the various factions within the regime about what to do with the Jews and that manifested itself in the way that Jews were being

granted exit visas. So my mother and I and my father, because my brothers had already come to the United States to study prior to the United States to the... to 1979. And so when we applied for exit visas, our passports were confiscated because they had added the question of religion on passport applications after the revolution. And we, you know, just blithely put down Jewish, you know, never thought that this could pose a problem.

And of course, they confiscated our passports. And we would go to the password office and say, you know, why, when can I get my password back? and they would say, you know, come back in three months. So nobody would say officially we have banned Jews from leaving Iran because there was no such policy in place. Very much like, ironically, how so much else goes on in Iran at the moment, that, you know, there is no policy, but you know, what's happening

is against certain beliefs or certain actions of various government administrators. So finally, we found a mole inside passport office, somebody that my father bribed, who swapped my application and my mother's application with Christian Armenian applicants. And the IAN at the end of my last name helped. So my mother and I received our passwords and flew out of Iran into Switzerland. My father, however, couldn't bribe the same guy. He had been fired or arrested, I don't remember. So his passport remained confiscated, and he was smuggled out of Iran on the back of mules four years later into Pakistan. And then you ultimately all reunite in the United States.

Where do you spend your teenage years? New York, no, Tehran and New York. Yeah. So I want to, I mean, I want to fast forward us up to the present day, but maybe to bridge the Gulf a bit. We've mentioned Khomeini a couple of times. You know, it's striking. The revolution is, where are we now? In 1979, so we're like 46 years or so into this deal. And it's striking that we've only had two Iranian leaders, Supreme leaders in this time. What, if anything, is different, I mean, about Khomeini besides, I mean, there's the obvious, you know, Khomeini is this

revolutionary figure. Khomeini is a, you know, a steward of sorts. of something that he inherits. And by the way, seems to be driving it into the ground, especially in the last couple years. I mean, this is something we should talk about, is a lot of the dreams of revolutionary dominance. While the revolution remains in charge for now in Iran,

it's dreams of regional dominance, despite which you just said about American campuses. Maybe it's going better on American campuses than it is in Iran's immediate neighborhood. Yes, yes, yes. And for a time being, that's a huge victory for them. Because it's sort of twisting the knife in the heart of Uncle Sam that, okay, you know, we didn't dethrone you, but look what we did to your university

campus. It is a major triumph for them. And yes, you know, the popularity of the Supreme leader is least visible within Iran. You know, I think Chomenei is such a steward of Hohmeni's legacy that in many ways he is a lot less pragmatic than the original supreme leader was. You know, Khomeini was very savvy, and by 1988, which is, you know, eighth year into the war between Iran and Iraq, which had begun in 1980 when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. By 1988, Khomeini recognizes that there is no winning this. And this is the guy who in 1980, when Sathlama attacked Iran, said, great, the most wonderful thing that could happen is this. Because what we can now do is take over Baghdad and from Baghdad make a B-line for Jerusalem and liberate Jerusalem. So he, that was his vision of how that war.

was going to end, you know, Tehran, Baghdad, Baghdad, Jerusalem. And so by 1988, when, you know, there had been no, not an intrav gain of land on either side, he recognized that he needed to sign a peace deal. And so he famously said, I am going to drink the chalice of poison, hemlock, and agree to this peace deal because it's what's best for the country. But Khomeini can't do the same thing. He can't be pragmatic enough to drink the chalice of poison and say to President Trump or, you know, I agree to whatever terms you're proposing

in order to get Iran out of the current. hugely stagnant and incredibly fragile state. Yeah. Well, we've seen, you know, numerous overtures. I mean, the Obama administration was kind of the peak of this. But, you know, there are moments that you see this in other administrations where there's the same, it's like the same hope from 1979 in the Carter administration, though the details are all different. But we can figure out a way to work with these guys.

They can be persuaded to be reasonable. They could meet us halfway, and if they could just meet us halfway, we can come to terms that are mutually acceptable. I mean, in the Obama vision, I mean, I think the great analyst of this is frequent school of orgeste and Mike Duran. We wrote a brilliant series of pieces back during the Obama administration about the real goals of Obama's state craft towards Iran, which Obama was not entirely publicly forthcoming about, which is to create this new balance of power in the region where Iran would be more properly, where the United States' attitude towards Iran would be less prejudicial against it. And we would sort of work with them just like we worked with the Israelis and traditional powers hostile to Iran. But that vision depended upon, I mean, setting aside whether it makes sense anyway, that vision critically depended upon the premise that the Iranians could be a kind of normal power

without revolutionary goals. And yet the revolution, I mean, it seems to be alive and well. Thank you for leading me to the place that I was hoping. we could go to, which is that the reason we have, or, you know, the Obama administration forge such a policy is because certain narratives that the regime has been trying to sell us for the past 46, 47 years, we have bought. And part of that narrative is that we're not really bad. It's just that you've done bad to us. You've done us wrong that we have acted, you know, with belligerence, with violence, with, you know, all these unacceptable terms.

But that's only because you made us do it. You know, if you hadn't done 1953, if you hadn't done, you know, X, Y, and Z, we wouldn't do these things. But, see, you did it, and therefore we had to retaliate. Because we have bought this notion wholesale is that we think, that we can meet them halfway. So, you know, I think the best manifestation of this are two stories that I tell about the hostage crisis.

One is that, you know, I was working on a production of, you know, 30th anniversary of the hostage crisis or 40th anniversary I don't remember. And part of the team was trying to fit in this argument into the narrative of the documentary that the only reason that they went and took over the American Embassy on November 4, 1979, was because the United States had admitted to Shaw into America for treatment, and therefore, you know, they were so upset and afraid they took over the American Embassy in November. And so I said to the team, but they had already taken over the American Embassy on February 14,

1979, which is 10 months before November. So how do you justify that? I mean, they didn't keep it at the time, because February 14 was two days after the revolution, and, you know, things were in such a state of flux that they couldn't really hang on. But by November, they had solidified their hold on power far more that they could actually hang on to the hostages and carry on their melodramatic staging of the event. events. But people couldn't answer why, you know, if the Shah was to blame for the takeover of

the American embassy, why they had already taken over the American embassy on February 14. And the other, and the other is that at some point, I think it was in 1999, when Khatami, the reform president of Iran came, had come to office in 1997, two years earlier. And, and, and, So, you know, I think we had Bill Clinton here as our president. And so part of what the Clinton administration was trying to do was sort of bring reconciliation and second-track diplomacy. So we sent our Barry Rosen, you know, former American diplomat who had been held hostage in Iran for 444 days to a European location, I think it was Geneva, to meet with the former hostages, with the former hostages. with the former hostage takers. So a couple of the former hostage takers

come to Geneva, Barry Rosen, and a couple of other, I think, American hostages go to Geneva. And so because the American administration had bought the notion

that, you know, the U.S., the CIA conducted a coup in Iran in 1973, and that's why they, you know, Iranians have such a beef against the United States, Barry Rosen, who had been taken hostage, went to Neva, met with the hostage taker, and he apologized to his hostage taker for 1953.

And the hostage taker never apologized in return, right? Because they sat there and said, well, you know, you stage 1953, and so we righteously had to had to take over of the American embassy and, you know, and lock you up for 444 days. The reason I think this is significant is only because, I think, whatever it is that they have failed at the Iranian regime, and they failed at a lot. You know, there is an A to Z list that we can discuss for days to come.

But there is something that they have really succeeded at and have done really well, and that is selling their own, you know, Com produced, Tehran invented narratives about the wrongs they have suffered, you know, their relationship with the United States to the world community, even to the American public, that we still believe in. And I think that those are the things we need to really address. This is the international relations version of West Side Stories, Officer Kruppke.

I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived. You know, it's about street youths and gang members in New York City adopting this sort of narrative of victimology to justify, you know, their petty, thievery and violence. And the funny, I mean, among the things that makes it funny is they know exactly what they're doing. I mean, it's very cynical. It makes them great musical. You're right. I need to do an episode on 1953. I regret that I haven't done one yet. I was, you know, to your point about the influence of these ideas on American campuses, I was giving a talk.

recently at the University of Virginia that dealt with U.S.-Iran relations. It was mostly focused on more present-day stuff. But I mentioned 1953 and said, you know, I said, look, I'm not a historian of 1953. I have friends who are, though, and I sort of, people like Ray DeK, and I sort of trust their assessment that while, of course, there's plenty of American involvement, like the Iranians had a say in this, and there was a lot of Iranian politics involved, And to say that the whole thing was somehow the fruition of CIA plotting is a bit a bit superficial and not entirely accurate, which was essentially my point, that this had an Iranian element. And the young woman who asked me the question that prompted this, had been very offended by my not really emphasizing the role of 1953 in U.S.-Iran relations today, basically stalked out, stalked out of the talk in response to that.

my expression of that position. So this argument is alive and well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so let's have an episode. Yeah, yeah. So let me let me ask you this. You know, things look pretty grim, I think, if you're Hamene here in December of 2025, certainly regionally, that's the easiest, I think, place to make the case. He had for years in his regime and the IRGC and all the various elements of Iranian power had been pursuing a pretty coherent strategy to, well, I mean, to destroy the state of Israel as a, as a principal goal. And I think they were making real progress towards certainly making life uncomfortable for Israel and could bring real threats to bear through their proxies like Hezbollah, et cetera. But since October of 2023, somewhat amazingly, the tables

are quite frankly turned. Now you see pieces in the New York Times about the new era of Israeli imperialism, setting aside, I think, some bad faith in the way in which the Times was characterizing things. There's no denying that Israeli relative power is through the roof compared to where it was regionally a couple of years ago. You have Turkish power for better or for worse on the rise as Iranian power wanes. Just so many elements of Iranian power. have been decimated in the last two years in this broad strategy of terror proxies on the one hand and a missile force on the other as the two sort of principal elements of Iranian power projection are both just decimated. And then, of course, the nuclear program has another important pillar

decimated. So if I'm Khamene, I can't be that happy about the regional situation. How do you assess the strength of the regime and how do you assess the attitude of the Iranian people towards the regime? They are at the lowest they have been since 1979. One, because Chaminé has, had lost legitimacy already among the public long before October 7th or the 12th Day War, but now he has also lost legitimacy within his own followers and constituency. I mean, the fact that he was nowhere to be found for more than two weeks for the duration of the war, and even longer. I mean, he took a week after the war had ended to emerge from his bunker.

And that really didn't, you know, wasn't the picture that he had painted of himself of this sort of Islamic warrior who was ceaselessly ready to face imperialism and, you know, world Zionism, you know. So that's the loss of your life. legitimacy within his own constituency is one major issue. The other is that, you know, people underestimate the significance of water crisis in Iran. In fact, prior to 2020, women-life freedom protests within Iran, the last round of most serious protests that took over Iran were water protests, you know, in 2019. And now it's even worse to the degree that they're talking about

moving the capital. And yes, you know, they have lost all of their regional proxies or their relationship to their regional proxies have weakened. But on the other hand, they have never had closer ties with Russia or with any non-Arab partner. as they do now. And that's why that strengthens them, but also equally weakens them, because now Europe is far more serious about fighting against Iran than they ever were prior to the Russian attack on Ukraine. Because now Europe recognizes that without the Iranian Shahid drones, the Russians couldn't do the damage that they exacted upon Ukrainians in the last four or five years. So, you know, the calculus has changed, but what is really important to remember is perhaps

I can best explain this through a metaphor that a friend in Iran gave me once. They said, you know, the Iranian regime, or it's our relationship to the Iranian regime, it's much like, you know, the relationship between a player and a video game, because you, you are playing this video game and you have a small-sized green monster that you're trying to make sure wins over, you know, whatever category of fighting. And then if your little-sized monster survives the first level of fighting, then for the second level of fighting, your middle, your small-sized monster or avatar or character grows in size, right?

And then it becomes a medium-sized. And then once it survives, whatever it's cool. going through during that round, then for the third round, it's even bigger. And that, in some strange ways, it really applies to the Iranian regime. Every time they have survived, a major global or domestic crisis, they have eventually emerged at the other side. It's taken some time, but stronger. It doesn't mean that they've become better as a regime, but they have been a regime.

But they have figured out ways of assuring their own survival and guaranteeing their own survival in ways that they had not before. And so what I think is significant at this moment is that even though they are at the lowest that they have ever been throughout their 46-year history, the fact that they can bounce back should not be lost on anybody because they have come back from other crises similar to this. Roya Hakakian, author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, Journey from the Land of No. Another book, numerous articles. You have a forthcoming article on essentially the humanist tradition in Iran, which listeners should check out. Where is that piece appearing?

I'm not sure yet. But it will look out. It will run sometime next week. We'll look out for it. Thank you so much for coming on School of War. It's been a pleasure.