School of War - Ep 276: Charlie Laderman on Regime Change in Iran

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Charlie Laderman, associate professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, joins the show to discuss parallels between Reagan’s policy towards Cold War Poland and the crisis in Iran today. ▪️ Times 02:45 Comparing Iran and Poland 05:56 Reagan’s plan  10:15 Reheating the Cold War   12:26 ’81 coup 15:53 Sanctions and pressure 20:19 Constant agitation   27:38 End of the Cold War 34:45 The violence of the Iranian regime  37:55 Structural differences    44:32 Exiled opposition Read the article discussed in the episode - Freedom for Iran: Learning From U.S. Support for Polish Anti-Communists in the 1980s Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Iran is in the news right now and the world is wondering whether President Trump will or won't initiate military action as negotiations over Iran's nuclear program and other activities sputter along. One of the possible goals for such an operation could be regime change. What does that mean? How could that be brought about in a place like Iran? Today's guest Charlie Laterman uses history to help us understand this question. And we look at the end of the Cold War, the question of Poland and Ronald Reagan's policy towards solidarity in the Soviet Union. Let's get into it.

It is for safety for war. The Iraqi invasion of late December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in France. A fight on the beaches. It's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets, which you'll never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Charlie Laterman. Charlie, when you came on the last time, you were at King's College, London, and you had recently published a really excellent book called Hitler's American Gamble about Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States in 1941. Today, you're an associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida's Hamilton School. And we're going to talk about Iran and some work you've done about comparisons between Poland and the solidarity movement and the opposition in Iran. And it's going to be fun. And thank you so much for coming back.

Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to join you last time. I've become an avid listener in the meantime. Always fun to join you and to discuss what is an extremely important topic and a very important moment. If my only listeners were the guests I've had on the show, I actually would be okay with that on some level. That would be a good group. Charlie, well, let's just start a very big picture. So this is a, we're going to talk about a paper you wrote for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy is called Freedom for Iran, learning from U.S. support for Polish anti-communists in the 1980s. Just very big picture, why that analogy, why did your mind go to Poland and solidarity in the 80s

as a way of thinking through present-day concerns with the Iranian regime? First of all, the comparison between Iran. and the latter stages of the Soviet Union and its satellite states is a comparison that's been made by others, not least by Kareem Sadhapur, one of the most adept analysts of Iran today. And to a great extent, the Iran of the Islamic Republic does look like the latter stages of Soviet-style communism, bankrupt and ideology that is driving a great nation into economic,

disrepair. The reason why we came to that topic, and this is a paper that I wrote with my co-author Nazimoinian, who's a great expert on Iran, our sense really was the idea of regime change had to sort of establish a very reductive sense of itself in the American strategic imagination. We only tended to think of Iraq, of Libya, of Afghanistan, of these sort of kinetic regime changes, and this sense that all of those would lead to ruin and to overextension and that military interventions were the only way to fundamentally transform a disreputable regime. And really for us, our sense was that actually there's a long and very interesting history of the US looking to modify regimes and to do so partly through nonviolent means,

but also through aiding those within regimes and empowering them to overturn turn their regimes. And really, our sense was that by not necessarily studying the ways in which domestic opposition to regimes is actually a fundamental part of American statecraft, we're actually short-changing American foreign policy. Engaging in unilateral ideological disarmament is a disservice to the United States and doesn't advance its statecraft. So that was the approach and the Reagan administration's approach. with the Soviet Union and particularly with its support for solidarity, which they saw really as a wedge issue to confront the Soviet Union was an excellent case study and one which we thought was very

relevant to the situation today. Yeah, it's all a bit out of fashion, isn't it? On the left, you know, you made the point in the paper that it's really the Obama administration that originally decouples the nuclear question from all other questions of Iranian state behavior. And then on the right, obviously you have an enormous allergy to questions of regime. change precisely because of Iraq and the legacy of Iraq. We'll get into all that. We'll come back to Iran. Let's take a few minutes, though, and talk about Poland and Reagan and the Soviet Union more broadly and just sort of establish the historical record there before we come back to the present. Talk a bit about the context into which this crisis in Poland intrudes. So it's the 70s. What's happening in the Soviet

block? Tell us a little bit about detente and the broader strategic context in which Ronald Reagan really starts making a lot of trouble. Yeah, so you've got sort of Poland, in particular sinking into sort of this deep economic crisis in the 1970s, sort of widespread unrest, and this sort of further undermines the legitimacy of that regime and the broader communist system. But this had been occurring in a broader geopolitical perspective

in which the United States had tried to bring down tensions with the Soviet Union to focus, as Henry Kissinger saw it, on a sense that the Soviet Union needed to feel that the global order was legitimate, that they had a legitimate place within it. And macheting down's tensions involved spending less time focusing on the nature of the regime. And so things like detente downplayed support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. But what happened throughout the 1970s is a growing opposition to kind of Kissinger-style bail policy. and Ronald Reagan, as you say, is very much at the forefront of this.

And if you look at his radio addresses in the 1970s, it's something that he returns to again and again. And there's a line that he says, he says, sort of if, but actually supporting those behind the Iron Curtain could be worth actually a huge amount to us militarily, far more so than de Tant. And so Reagan is critiquing this from the right. The Carter administration had obviously been critiquing it from the left, from some of the human rights perspective.

There's Zibinia Brzezinski from a more sort of hard, position, the National Security Advisor, within the Carter administration, who has his own links into Poland, as an emigre from Poland expert on what was going on in the Soviet Union. He has increasingly started to support Polish dissident movements in the 1970s during this sort of economic crisis. And what you have is that shipyard workers in Gurdanks go on strike towards the end of the Carnetra administration. They initially secure the right to establish an independent trade union, solidarity, and they get as many as 10 million members. And fearing for the stability of the regime, President General Jaroselsky, over the succeeding

months, increasingly looks to pressure the solidarity movement, the Polish citizens, and he, ultimately 18 months after the birth of solidarity, launches a military coup, replaces the civilian government with the military junta declares martial law. Union leaders are thrown in prison. there's this severe and brutal crackdown. And Reagan is appalled by this, but he also recognises an opportunity, that this is a chance to really put pressure on the whole Soviet system and that the rise of solidarity,

the situation in Poland, is really a watershed moment, as he says, in the Cold War. Yeah, you know, it's funny. On the right today, Reagan is sometimes attacked for, you know, essentially a kind of idealism that, you know, say what you will, that in the 1980s, the argument would run seems out of place and even dangerous today. I suppose he probably was exposed to similar complaints at the time from sort of the Kissinger

wing of things, but much more noticeable in the record is complaints from the left, which there must have been, it's kind of head spinning when you think about it, the move that he pulls, the whole pride, the whole argument for socialism, of course, is that it is the just an idealistic option. It is the, it is the just way to order society. you have Reagan looking at a situation in Poland where there has to be significant social unrest, even for people to be able to be permitted to start a union. Yeah, yeah.

Not a notably right-wing kind of organization. No, exactly. But it's civil society, isn't it? And civil society, of course, is a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere. And so Reagan looking at this and saying, this is crazy, we're the good guys. They're the bad guys, despite the broader rhetoric of the global left. And I'm going to lean into that. I'm going to make that a major focus of American policy, for which the general response

on the left was horror at hypocrisy and recklessness and warmongering. I mean, these were all epithets leveled at him, yeah? Yeah, very much. And there's a sense when we talk about Cold War 2.0 today. I mean, this was a time of sort of like the second Cold War within the original Cold War that we'd had this sort of heat, the centuries that Reagan is sort of reheating up the Cold War that had sort of been sort of brought down to sort of manageable proportions by the Dayton operations of the 1970s.

So Reagan is, as you say, critiqued as a warmanger. that he's sort of focusing in on these sort of ideological forces and that that is not going to be the basis for coexistence. And also, as you say, there's a sense to which Reagan is seen to be fundamentally just reactionary, sort of almost like bringing back sort of John Foster Dulles-style rollback rhetoric of the 1950s and really sort of putting nuclear brinkmanship back on the table. And this sense is that his focus, on what's going on domestically

within the Soviet bloc is, it's just irrelevant that it's a distraction. And as I say, that's a critique from the left, but it's also a critique from the right. It's a critique also from like international relations scholars of this sort of neolist bent who would say that what's going on within regimes

is utterly irrelevant. They're black boxes, they interact in different ways, but actually the internal makeup of them is not so important. the nature of their regime is not fundamentally important here. But Reagan's argument constantly had been that to understand the root of Soviet aggression in the world, you had to understand its internal system. And the only route to changing external aggression was internal change.

That's an insight in some ways that goes all the way back to noted idealist and liberal foreign policy thinker George Kennan, who in his own realist way makes much the same point. So, okay, so Ronald Reagan wins in 1980. This crisis is developing in, well, crisis for the Polish government is developing in Poland. And then things really come to a head. There's a coup late in 1981, right? Tell us how things develop into a, well, into a real crisis. Yes, and that's when General Jaroselski, he intervenes, as I say,

it's an internal coup. We now know from the record that Jaroselsovsky was extremely concerned about the right. of solidarity and was calling for Soviet intervention along the lines of what we had seen earlier in the Cold War, whether it was in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he wants Soviet troops to come pouring across the border to put down this potential uprising and this and to squash solidarity. And the Soviets actually partly influenced by pressure from the Reagan administration, the fact that they are already economically struggling. They're concerned about sanctions on their, on, on Moscow. They are, they are willing to, to intervene militarily. But what

Jarazowski does is he increasingly sort of builds up the apparatus of repression against the Polish people, against solidarity. And it's at that point that he sort of declares martial law, the, that the major leaders are thrown in prison, like Lech-Belsa, the leader of solidarity. And you get this severe and brutal crackdown with a number of people killed. But that, the major leaders are thrown in prison, like Lech Velas, the leader of people kill, but thousands and thousands who are imprisoned. And Poland really becomes far more repressive state as a result of this. And so Reagan is based with this choice. Do you, and it's as much a rhetorical choice as anything.

He's aware that in 56 and in 68, there have been an expectation raised that the US may intervene on behalf of protesters and also going back to the Yalta peace settlement at the end of the Second World War, the Poles felt that they'd been sold out by certain American promises that didn't come true. So he doesn't want to prove a promise in this situation, but at the same time, he recognizes that the solidarity is so important. It's the first time, as Richard Pipes, his Soviet advisor, says, that we've had anything of this type emerge within the Soviet system, and we can't allow solidarity to die in the darkness. We need to keep it going, both for the interests of the Polish people, but more importantly,

for American strategic interests as pressure on the Soviet Union. Well, tell us how Reagan calibrates that, then. That is to say, you don't want to give false hope. On the one hand, on the other hand, you do want to stand up for these people. On yet a third hand, you think there's a strategic value for the United States and the overall Cold War competition in standing up for solidarity. I mean, there are obvious echoes, even just as you answered that most recent question to the current situation, the president.

saying last month that, you know, the protesters essentially should, you know, remember the names of the people who are, you know, murdering them in the streets, that some sort of reckoning is coming. So the Trump administration is, you know, sort of attempting its own calibration right now. Though I guess the big difference, right, is, of course, because of the nuclear standoff and the, the military situation of the Cold War, the military option that exists for the Trump administration today with Iran is certainly not, not an option, or at least not an option in the same way with Poland. And so, but talk us through the deliberations, talk us through the National Security Council process and the actual balance that emerges from all of that. Yes, so there's discussions around sanctions that around economically, again, similar to today.

I mean, this idea of this soul searching within the administration as whether this would hurt people, it was designed to help by putting in pace economic pressure and trying to sort of weigh up the approach on this. and really what the decision is taken, and you see this in the fundamentals of Reagan's grand strategy, and quite a lot of the excellent new research done by people like William and Bowden or how Brands on sort of Reagan's grand strategy demonstrates this, is that there's almost an armed diplomacy approach that the Reagan administration is going to take. They're in the middle of new nuclear negotiations.

Reagan is fundamentally opposed to nuclear weapons. He has this deep horror of them, but at the same time combining this with this belief that you need to support those who are resisting tyranny in the Soviet Union. And so he takes this approach, which is that he wants to ultimately negotiate with the Soviet unions on a nuclear base, but you needed to essentially force them to the negotiating table where you have shown no illusions about the nature of their regime. And you see this within a whole range of Reagan national security documents of that era. So NSDD-75, I think, captures this really, really well. It's a national security doctrine that's put out by Bill Clark,

the National Security Advisor, Richard Pyatt's plays a major role in this, the advisor on Soviet affairs. And it basically says that the US needs to work within the narrow limits available to us to undermine rule and help advance towards more politicalistic systems behind the Iron Curtain. And so this is prudent, it's pragmatic, but there's a clear ideological thrust to this. And affirming the superiority of the system is fundamentalist, using the bully pulpit. So we've talked about the cautiousness about Reagan's rhetoric, but he's also very clear in the Westminster address that he gives in London in 1982 that the Soviet Union and Marxist communism

are on the ash heap of history. Again, we're talking about the sense of how much this alarmed people during the Cold War, this talk of an evil empire, this moral offensive, this ideological offence the Reagan initiates is a big part of this. But we can talk about the other tools of his state crop. Initially the question is, do the negotiations continue? And then also, how do you rally other nations to support your policy on this when there's a lot of resistance among the Europeans who Reagan calls the chicken littles because they're unwilling to be sort of hardline on what's going on in Poland?

And then what do you do to call this out publicly that doesn't sort of get you over your skis where you're promising too much? You're very clear about the stakes that are there, the suppression of solidarity and the broad repression behind the iron curtain. Some elements of what you say, again, seem very familiar. The question of armed diplomacy, I mean, we're recording this. We should say the date on Friday, February the 13th. So obviously on Saturday, February the 14th, everything could look different. But today, at least, I mean, armed diplomacy certainly seems to be the moment we are in in terms of U.S. Iran policy. Other things that you say don't seem particularly familiar, maybe a little bit more with Iran, but certainly the general attitude today in the Trump administration, you know, you just had the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Bridge Colby out in Europe talking about.

We're not trying to strangle China. We're not, you know, that is not, we are trying to maintain a favorable balance in the region. But, you know, my words, not Colby's. you know, in other respects, we may wish China well. You know, it's, this is not fundamentally a question of the Chinese regime for us. For Reagan, obviously it is at core, at some fundamental level, a question of the Soviet regime. Assess, if you would, Charlie, the, I mean, the complaint about that that it's just reckless. It's reckless and destabilizing. Everyone's got a lot of nuclear weapons. Even the president, President Reagan accepts that that's a big problem, is trying to, trying to tackle that problem through

a diplomatic route, but this constant agitation at the core of Soviet power, you know, that kind of stuff can start wars. No, I think it's interesting. You're bringing out these differences and similarities because there's a lot that obviously feels familiar. There's a lot of the approach that's different and distinct. And yeah, and that's one of those sort of dichotomies that scholars have constantly tried to unpick when it comes to Reagan. How do you get this figure who had been so critical of the d'aeton policies of the Kissinger-Nixon approach of looking for these negotiations, of trying to engage in these negotiations. But then by the end of the 1980s, he's signing his own deals with the Soviets. And how does the rhetoric of Reagan match with the reality?

And I think there's a clear sense that this is sequencing, that actually you've got to be sense is that the Soviets really only get down to negotiations, as he puts it before his last minute with Gorbachev, when you've shown no illusions about their system and the nature of what you're up against. And I think that's what Reagan is able to do with regards to his approach to this. I mean, from his perspective, it's actually far more reckless to just treat this revolutionary revanchist regime as essentially just a normal actor, that you need to actually recognize it for what it is, to understand what its priorities are. And as a result, you can actually engage in better negotiations, but that certain pressure on.

on it comes from the pressure within. And that economics is a big part of this. So we're talking about the sort of similarities. There's certainly a sense that you are sort of strangling. There's a recognition. I mean, the Reagan administration talk about the sense that sort of that rat meat is being sold on the black market in the Soviet Union, that there's a real sense of economic crisis in place.

And this is also, with regard to Poland as well. The polls want to join the International Monetary Fund at this point. The Reagan administration prevents them from joining the international monetary fund. There's no sort of admission into the benefits of the international economic system without a change to what it's doing domestically and what the Soviet Union is doing externally. You deprive it of foreign lending. That's a big part of what Reagan does. So there's not necessarily a military ratcheting up.

For him, this sort of prudent approach is that there's a limit to what we can do. We can't actually fundamentally transform this regime. But we can be very clear about the tools that we have at our disposal while keeping open always the arm to negotiation. So that's the way in which I think the Reagan administration would see themselves as threading the needle on that critique that you mentioned. Well, let's talk about the administration as opposed to Reagan himself. I mean, there's some big personalities and famous figures involved in the formulation of these policies who are not Ronald Reagan. William Clark, the National Security Advisor, is one of them. Richard Pipes, the great academic.

scholar of the Soviet Union in Russia. Talk about these guys. Talk about the national security processes involved here because a lot of this is ultimately, you know, formally codified in a pretty deliberate process that produces, well, produces American grand strategy with regard to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of messiness to the Reagan administration's National Security Council strategy in those early days. We get a two or three national security advisors before we get sort of a clear process. And there's definitely competing constituencies within the administration. So there's very much sort of a clash between people like Casper Weinberg,

or in the sort of Defense Department and Hague in the Secretary of State position. And it's really not until about halfway through the Reagan administration with George Schultz coming in the Secretary of State. That makes a big shift in the administration's policy and a far more sort of coherence approach. But in these early days, I think there is a clear sense of translating into policy some of the Reagan and some of Reagan's own personal priorities. And Judge Bill Clark, who'd had this long personal relationship with Reagan, going back into his period as California

governor, is a really important factor within this. And the president himself is absolutely seminal to this. And he's a critical figure. And Clark will say that the, for him, what he would constantly do after the rise of solidarity, he would bring almost every briefing. back to the Soviet Empire, but particularly to Poland. And Clark says that he saw Poland as really the hub of the empire. And his feeling, as Clark will later put it, was that if we were able to assist with the unraveling with Poland, then the entirety would come apart.

So that's sort of like the approach there. Pipes, who, as you say, has a very sort of historically driven approach to what was going. He saw Soviet communism as sort of an alien body. in the Russian body politic, this sort of transnational ideology that has come in, and has to say that you can argue similarly about the situation with the Islamic Republic today, sort of an ideology that's come in from without, and is sort of resisted by the nationalist forces within the state. So that's part of the way in which Pipe sees it, but he also talks about this idea that the less hard cash the Soviets have, the less problems it can cause for us

and our friends. So this sort of economic squeezing, this maximum pressure, if we want, for this earlier era, is about squeezing the economy, and that's mainly about preventing it from being able to sort of sponsor revolutions and violence overseas, but it's also about undermining it from within. So that's the sort of way in which these voices are sort of playing out here. As I say, there are some, there are voices within the administration. Hague is very much a sort of a Kissingerian, who's more on a sort of Dayton perspective. And there's big policy debates over this. And as I mentioned before, there's also debates within the wider Atlantic alliance, even someone who will become such a staunch Cold Warrior in the imagination as Margaret

Thatcher, he's quite skeptical initially of Reagan's approach of being hardlining his rhetoric on what's going on in Poland. Let's fast forward a bit to the consequences of all this. And let's actually, let's take upon ourselves, Charlie, the burden of demonstrating that what actually happens at the end of the 80s bears some connection to all these events earlier in the 80s that you're describing right now. Because it's quite a few years past in which the Soviet Union remains intact. Depression in Poland continues. We're sanctioning the polls. We're sanctioning the Soviet Union as a consequence of all this stuff. We're providing some level of covert support. Solidarity, though, as you outlined in the paper, a lot less, for example, than we're supplying to the

Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Certainly no armed or lethal support. But there's, But we're doing a lot. And then, you know, dot, dot, dot, Berlin Wall Falls, you know, a bunch of other stuff happens. What is the Polish part of that story and what is the connection between what happens in Poland and American policy and what happens in Poland and broadly speaking with the USSR? Yeah. So, as to say, I don't want to overstate what is intended. The idea, the Reagan administration don't necessarily believe, even when they're doing some of this stuff in the early parts of the 80s, that this is fundamentally.

going to sort of bring down the regime. This is almost regime change by accident to a certain extent, even though obviously their intention is to put pressure on the regime. But as you mentioned, the actual funding that comes for supporting solidarity is on a much lower level than, say, the five billion that's being spent to support the Mujahidehideen in Afghanistan. And it's less violent. QR. helpful is the name of the intelligence operations that are being run behind Polish lines to support solidarity. And their main element, as I mentioned, at the outset, is just to keep solidarity going. Their senses that actually keeping solidarity in play is going to be effective. They don't want it to fully collapse. So what they're doing is they're smuggling

in reading material. In particular, they're also smuggling in communications systems to allow the opposition movements to remain in correspondence with each other. And it's about pressuring the Polish regime. Radio equipment is particularly crucial. There's also the role of contraband material, as I mentioned, forbidden literature. There's the liaisons with the Pope on this as well and to use Catholicism and religion as a wedge within Poland. And even though solidarity sort of drops in terms of its numbers, it never achieves that 10 million that it has in the early 80s, He does keep going throughout this period where Lesser remains as a sort of pressure point on the regime. And ultimately, solidarity becomes the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe.

At the end of the 1980s, it's at the forefront of this mass movement. And really, obviously, the most important factor within this, Reagan and the Reagan administration's policies are a help within this, but it only really changes when you get a new leader in the Soviet Union in Mikhail Gorbache as someone who recognizes some of the economic problems that he's facing and needs to respond to them. Partly it's because the, I mean, Reagan had always wanted to negotiate. He famously says with regard to the original sort of geriatric Soviet leaders that are there when he first comes into office. I wanted to meet with them and negotiate, but they kept dying on me.

I mean, there's that sense that Reagan has. And so Goulbachev is, is that he would have been willing to negotiate earlier. But Gorbachev does start to change things, but it's partly because of the pressure that's been put from without. It's the pressure that's been put within so that Gorbachev has to recognize a move towards perestroika and Glasnost. And Reagan will say, essentially, it's this clear-eyed sense that the Soviets are ultimately having to respond because the US had never sort of changed its position on the illegitimacy of the regime as a whole. So it's a, it's sort of an assist that the Reagan administration that strategy plays, keep solidarity in play so that when the situation changes behind the Iron Curtain,

there's an opportunity for them to take advantage of it. But obviously it takes a reform-minded leader in the Kremlin to allow this to happen. But I think sometimes there is a, there's a desire to sort of completely reject Reagan's role within this. He's not obviously the primary factor. bringing about the transformation behind the Soviet Union. But he does play a very important role and one which I think historians are starting to recognize more. So let's focus on parallels again

and particularly parallels between the existence of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in the 80s and the non-existence of Gorbachev in Iran today. If anything, the sort of geriatric crack about the early 80s certainly applies. I actually don't know off the top of my head how old Khomey is. 86, I think.

86, 86. 86. Well, there we go. And, and, you know, even more significant than the age, of course, is the question of resolve. And, you know, this is this was a debate that played out in sort of think tank land in journals in the first Trump term about Iran in which at FD, your colleague Mark Dubowitz was sort of promoting this Soviet fall of the Soviet Union analogy and, you know, talking about a lot of the stuff we're talking about today, the role of Reagan, all this kind of stuff. And there was a fascinating, it was a really interesting. debate. There's a fascinating response to all this from a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Fred Kagan. All of these people, of course, guests on School of War by far their most important professional affiliation, saying, you know, the fall of the regime in Iran would be an uncomplicated good for the region and for humanity and for the American interest. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's a reason why the Soviet Union fell, and that was at some level a kind of crisis of confidence within the Soviet elite, a sense within the Soviet elite and within Gorbachev's

soul sort of individually, that this wasn't working. And so when the crisis of the end of the 80s, early 90s, finally comes in waves, there's just not the willingness or even the ability at some level to do what, for example, happens in 1989 in Beijing, where the so, excuse me, where the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party faces a major challenge in Tiananmen Square, and what does it do? It guns everyone down. It commits mass murder. And that's pretty much that for a while, even to this day. And we have unfortunately plenty of evidence in Iran that the situation is perhaps closer to the situation in Beijing in 89,

than the situation in the Eastern Block in 89. An unfortunate testimony to this effect is offered by the thousands. if not, depending on which report, you believe tens of thousands of bodies of people slaying just last month in the most recent round of uprising in Iran because they keep coming in waves. Charlie, help us understand the applicability of all this, of everything you're talking about. For an Iran that whatever its weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and they seem to be many, in particular economically, in particular in the way in which they've lost a lot of ground strategically against Israel in the last couple of years, does seem to still be ruled by a man

or maybe even a clique of people who are willing to do great violence to keep their heads attached to their shoulders. No, absolutely. And I think that's, I think as you pointed out, the similarities are there, but also there's very clear differences. And any policymaker has got to weigh those differences just as much, if not more. And I think Greg Kagan's point is absolutely well made. I mean, this is a regime that we're now seeing.

Iran, as you say, that is willing to perpetrate mass violence on the sort of scale that you talked about with Tiananmen Square, but also far beyond we see in the latter stages of the Soviet Union. We don't see even like Chalcchescu and what he does in Romania. It's not on quite the same scale as what the Islamic Republic has done in recent days, the tens of thousands, as you pointed out, so real brutality that they've been willing to engage in. At the same time, as I mentioned in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration didn't think that their aid was going to bring down the Soviet regime and they might have sort of hoped and they may have believed that this regime was, its illegitimacy was ultimately going to undermine it.

But it wasn't necessarily clear that it would collapse. So I think one being prudent, being pragmatic and not necessarily over thinking that your outside interventions are going to be going to fundamentally to sort of transform the regime in terms of it down, certainly not in the short term, you have to be cautious about what you can and can't do from that sense. But I think the other point is that you don't have to be overly cautious as well. So you made the point here of like China and the Soviet Union. I mean, these are major states and also powers on a completely different scale to what Iran is. So China in particular, obviously has been able also to provide post-Tianaman Square for all its repression, some economic

benefits to the population. The Iranian regime is offering next to nothing to their regime. They're far more vulnerable, as you pointed out, in terms of the rolling back. So if we look at the Soviet Union, the rolling back was occurring on the sort of fringes of the Soviet Union in places like Poland in terms of the Eastern Bloc, whereas Iran, this has sort of reached its borderlands. If we look at what's happened to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the collapse of Assad in Syria, all of these sort of proxy regimes, these sort of buffers that they had have collapsed. Iran, in many senses, is far more vulnerable than either of those two other regimes that you pointed out.

And I think economic vulnerability is extreme. Now, that obviously has not prevented the violence that we've seen from the regime against its population, and it's still very much able to massacre its citizens at pace, as we've seen. But that's about all it can do. The limitations of this regime are also pretty evident to us as well. So, in terms of parallels as well, you reflect in the paper about structural or other differences between the Polish opposition then and the Iranian opposition today.

What are those parallels or lack thereof? Yeah, I mean, I think we look at the regimes, obviously, there seems on the surface a number of similarities. There's obviously these are revolutionary regimes with the looking to overturn assets. aspects of the order that they see as illegitimate. They export violence overseas to distract from bailings at home. We've seen, as I mentioned, just now imperial defeats are bald, rebounding back at home, whether that's the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Albanian defeats for Assad and Hezbollah. And they're both sort of these sort of kleptocracies with sclerotic

economies that are heavily reliance on energy exports. So that's all these sort of like similarities that we see here. But as you point out, the differences are really important. Iran has no institutions today comparable to solidarity. I mean, that's very clear that we don't have an opposition movement that's as united, as solidarity was in the 1980s. But I think Iranian history also shows us that leaders are not always necessary for the success of their revolutions. I mean, whether it's the 1906 constitutional revolution in Iran, which was led by multiple

leaders, or even we've seen with recent revolutions, we'd have to go all the way back over a century to look at this. We saw it with the Green Revolution in 2009 where the figures like Karabi and Masari who come in are very much bigger heads rather than necessarily leaders. So I think that is an important thing to bear in mind.

And we obviously also have the role of diaspora leadership when it comes to Iran today. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, about this sort of growing nostalgia that we've seen in Iran. We're still not clear how widespread it is, but certainly for the for the Polari dynasty, which has seen for all of its issues as being far less oppressive

and brought about greater measure of prosperity. And Iran was not at the epicenter of the regime of the region's wars at that time. So I think within that, we don't have a comparable institution in that sense, but we do have potential leaders who may emerge within this. And I think the other thing where, in terms of the, a very clear difference is, Poland was very much subservient to the Soviet Empire. And while Iran gets support from other aspects of the sort of Kink alliance with China and Russia's support, there's far less control there than it was the case with the Soviet Union and Poland. And I think what we see here is this sort of exposure of the sort of economic frailties of the regime,

that the Soviet Union simply would not sort of step in to provide credit to risk undermining its own credit rating of the entire Eastern bloc. And China has shown that even if it's reliant on oil from Iran, 90% of Iran's oil is going to China, China is not willing, it's very much a fair weather friend there. It's not willing to sort of step in and support the Iranian regime. It wasn't last summer with Operation Midnight Hammer, and it's not showing that much support now. So as a result, I think we're seeing as much as their differences, there's also a sense to which Iran, in some senses, is even more vulnerable than some of these analogies that we see.

So, yeah, I think this is, I would say that policymakers, if they're looking at these analogies, they should be looking at the analogy in the Soviet Union alongside a range of other analogies for trying to learn lessons about how you can potentially put pressure on these aggressive, authoritarian revolutionary regimes that are fundamentally opposed to American interests. And obviously is clear Iran, in terms of its ever since 1979, has been a challenge

to the United States in the region. It's attacks and killings of other amount of conservisman in the region, its exploitation of violence beyond its borders. It remains a problem however weak it might look now. So the sense of how you deal with this and how you use the internal fracture of the system within Iran, how you can put pressure on this regime to achieve American grand strategic objectives remains a fundamental question. It's funny. You mentioned the Pallavi dynasty and the sort of new feature of Iranian unrest within

the last few months, which is in previous rounds of arrest, you know, this affection for the family of the deposed Shah was not nearly as much in evidence where now it is. I mean, you see these videos of protesters chanting the name in the streets and all this kind of stuff. It's funny. I just just before we started recording, I quite innocently retweeted. I saw a video on, on X of Zelensky, Vladimir Zelensky, sitting down for a meeting with Palavi, with the Shah's son, who is now sort of, you know, obviously working to consolidate opposition to the regime abroad.

I didn't mean anything by this retweet. It just seemed like an interesting meeting. I was certainly not attempting to endorse any particular element of the Iranian opposition, but this led to a pretty dramatic exchange in the replies to the tweet between partisans for and partisans opposed to the Shah's family, how much of that was real and how much automated. I'm not in a position's concern. But it was striking and noticeable. So here, in the time we have left, you offered to, so please do talk about that dimension

of things and what's notable about the nature of the exile opposition to Iran here in 2026. And then finally, Charlie, just give us, given the complexity of the situation and your, you know, very good point that we should not just be. I'm not, I feel like we need a word for this. Mono, monocom, I want mono causal, but for an, for analogous. Yeah. Mononelagous. I don't know. That's a good one.

You should, you should, you should, you should, you should, you should be tomorrow. That's yours. It's like trying to make fetch happen. I'm going to make mononelagus happen. But, you know, we should, when doing applied history, we should. should be broad-minded and try to use as many sources as we can that seem applicable. So what would your prescription be, given the complexity of the situation? Yeah, no, it's a good point.

I mean, one thing I would say is that emigreys were able to play a really important role in Poland as well. I mean, it has to be remembered, and this is the best book on what happened in Poland in the 1980s is entitled Empowering Revolution. And it's very clear, whatever the propagandists for regime say, that was in Moscow and Warsaw during the Cold War, whether in Tehran today, that these are indigenous organic movements. These are not being sort of like, these are not,

these are not just been created by American intelligence operations. And what the US can do, it's very, very clear that these are, by not intervening in any way on behalf, but potentially treating the regime that's in power as the legitimate government with no, recognition of the opposition, non-intervention is a form of intervention in that sense. So what I would say with regard to this is that the US during the Cold War was able to help empower the revolution in Poland, and it was partly by through aiding not just the

poles on the ground, but also hemagre figures who were able to provide support into Poland, that was smuggling in contraband material. And I think what we see today is that it's the, because of the nature of the repression within Iran, then emigre figures are going to be important in being able to amplify voices from without. And in terms of the work that they can do with with those on the ground. I mean, obviously, they don't always have the experience of those on the ground.

But there has to be some role for those Iranians outside. of the country, just because of the nature of the brutality of the crackdown that offers very little space for political organization that isn't suppressed. I think that's the role which at least the Shah's son has sort of presented himself in. That's the way in which he sort of modified his role that he sees himself as sort of a gateway to a potential more sort of constitutional settlement within Iran. This is not necessarily about the return of the monarchy and the dynasty. That's the way in which he's presented himself. Now, it's, I don't think this is necessarily for, for me or for others to sort of talk about the, the, his significance and his

hold on the Iranian population. We just don't know in terms of the, any, any sort of opinion polls within Iran. But as you say, it was striking to see the amount of support that was expressed on the streets, whether this is how widespread this is. It's impossible to tell. But I think it does reflect this idea. Actually, the Islamic Republic has been such a monumental failure for the people of Iran. I mean, its economic degradation has been so profound. Economically, the Iranians were better off in the 1970s without a doubt than they are today. And whatever repression existed at that point, it's not on the same scale as what they're facing today.

So in that sense, there's almost a politics and nostalgia, which is why Polari's Sun. is being held up. It's almost a sense. There's an element of trolling about it. They're trolling the regime. They're saying, like, you are so, you're so bad that actually, even those who came immediately before you were far better than you were. So there's an element of trolling, but there's also an element of actually, of a nostalgia

looking back to better days. So in terms of like the sort of prescriptions of things that could be helpful, I do think that what we've seen in terms of communications from, Starlink is sort of almost like a modern version of what, was going on in the 1980s in providing communications equipment to the opposition allowing them to not only communicate with each other, but also be able to broadcast what was going on to the outside world. And I think that is a really important part of the support that can be provided from without. Maybe about 60, 70,000 Starling terminals are in Iran today, not enough for the

the populations and more support in that sense, but also the ways in which cell phones that allow you to get onto the internet when these crackdowns are coming, that would allow them, would allow Iranians to get beyond the crackdown that's, I think, is really important. But also, I think, sort of the same sort of thing occurred within the 1980s with sort of soft power institutions like radio free Europe and other aspects of communications. And we see that whenever there's a crisis in Iran, that, People flock to international media rather than to the regime's outlets. So during the Iran-Israel war, traffic to Radio Free Europe's Instagram pages surged 344% at the beginning of the war.

All of these sort of Persian language broadcasts, they provide a trustworthy news outlets, working with labour movements as the US did during the solidarity period, strike pay being provided. Those sort of things are certain insights that you can get. But as you point out, the level of brutality, the level of repression means that there's no exact playbook that you can follow from what occurs in the 1980s. And it's in terms of the different policy tools at your disposal, the role of this of armed diplomacy, the role potentially of strikes may have to be considered. But this is a different sort of approach to what the US. adopted in Poland, but even just these very prudent, be pragmatic ways where you provide very modest means of support.

What solidarity showed and the Reagan administration's policy showed was that even these very modest means of support can have quite explosive consequences within such repressive regimes. And I think what I would just finish on is this idea is that we tend to try and ignore often in international politics the nature of domestic regimes and that we have to negotiate with these regimes as they are. But to sort of paraphrase Leon Trotsky's famous line about war, we may not be interested in the regime.

The regime is certainly interested in us. They're certainly looking to meddle in the West. They see everything through the prism of their revolutionary ideology. And unless we take them and understand them and the ideology that motivates them, then we're never actually going to be able to achieve our own objectives and interests when it comes to Iran. Charlie Laterman, professor at the University of Florida, the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education there.

As always, it's been a really interesting conversation. I hope you'll come back sometime and will continue to try to draw useful analogies from history. Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure to join you. And I look forward to listening to more of your episodes in the near future and hopefully to joining you as well.