Tech Won't Save Us - The Long History of the US War on Iran w/ Spencer Ackerman

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Paris Marx is joined by Spencer Ackerman to discuss the US and Israeli war on Iran, including the history that led to this moment and what we might see from here. Spencer Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the forthcoming book The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. He also write the Forever Wars newsletter. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Spencer has written about the regime change in Iran, and the targeting of data centers in the conflict. Further reading on Iran’s ‘infrastructure war’. Here is the latest on discussions between the USA and Iran as of Monday March 23rd.

By another month of this war going by, we could see $150 a barrel oil. We're already looking at Brent crude. I think it got last night when closing stopped up to like $115 to $119 a barrel. This is a massive, massive economic catastrophe that's going to be felt throughout, not just the region, but the entire world. This is Iranian strategy. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with an magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Spencer Ackerman. Spencer does so many things.

He's a contributor at Sateo, has written fantastic comics, is the author of reign of terror, how the 9-11 era destabilized America and produced Trump, and is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. He also writes a newsletter called Forever Wars that I would highly recommend subscribing to. Now, obviously, you will all be aware that the United States and Israel are at war with Iran. And that is not just, of course having consequences for the countries around the region but is having repercussions around the world as we see the consequences of this war and the restrictions on you know an important fuel and important energy like oil but also so many of the other products that are associated with that

right and of course all the other products and goods and food in our world that depends on oil on shipping and how those prices can affect absolutely everything so as i was thinking about approaching this I wanted to wait a little bit to see how this war was going to evolve. But when it became clear that this was something that was going to stick around for quite some time, I said, okay, who am I going to speak to about this to get good insight into what is happening? And I figured Spencer was the perfect guest to have on because he pays a lot of attention to this, but has been reporting on these issues for a very long time now. It can give us a lot of insight into how we got to this moment.

And so in this conversation, Spencer gives us a really important history lesson in how the United States in Iran got to this point, you know, why war hasn't really happened in the past and how we got to this, got to that point at this moment, which I think is something really important to understand, right? And so for the first kind of half or so of this conversation, you know, Spencer, I kind of leave it to him to do a lot of the talking and a lot of the explaining to give us that insight into how. how we got to this moment. And then we kind of pivot a bit, right, to talk a bit more of the bigger issues of, you know, what we're seeing in Iran's response and, you know, what is interesting there, especially with their use of drones and certain types of missiles. You know, one of the things that really stood out in the conversation to me was the innovation that we see on the side of Iran on these military technologies. You know, when Spencer is talking about the war on terror, he's talking about certain explosives that it's clear that Iran has made that, unfortunately, are very

lethal, you know, have a very lethal consequence. But of course, if you're thinking about a war against an adversary, that is unfortunately going to be some of the innovation that you're doing. But then to look more recently at, you know, the very low-cost drones that Iran has been using and how affected that has been at making it feel the pain. And certainly making Israel in the United States and certainly Gulf countries, you know, use very expensive missiles to try to take down these very inexpensive drones. And what that means for the type of warfare. that is happening here, right? You know, certainly we see a lot of military innovation in the United States, but it's often focused around very incredibly expensive systems, right, whether it's missiles or

like F-35 fighter jets or things like that. And then we look on the Iranian side and we see this different type of innovation recognizing the constraints and, you know, the limited amount of capital that they have to put into these things where it's kind of like the inexpensive production, the inexpensive weapons in order to make an impact when it needs to do so. So I think that is really interesting. And then, of course, we sort of touch on the impact on data centers. Of course, Iran has struck several Amazon data centers in, I believe, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. We don't get into the broader consequences of that so much.

And I think maybe that is a reason to do another episode on that, to get into the broader strategy of the Gulf and trying to become an AI superpower in its own right and what this might mean now for, you know, its desire to kind of pursue that kind of economic strategy. So this is all to say, I think that this is a really interesting conversation, and especially this year, as we have been focusing a bit more on geopolitics and the intersection between geopolitics and technology, that this really contributes to that focus that we have had on Tech Won't Save Us in 26, and certainly in 2025 as well. So I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. Hopefully you find it really insightful to hear the history that Spencer has to share with us on how we got to this

moment, because I think it's really important to understand, you know, both as we look at the war that's playing out between our eyes, but also understand, you know, culpability, how we got to this moment and, you know, what kind of path might be available to get out of it. So with that said, if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week. So we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations

to keep you informed about the world and certainly the tech industry. You can join supporters like Atlanta from Queens in New York and Donna from Halifax in Canada by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us where you can become a supporter as well. Just the heads up before we do get into this week's episode, Tech Won't Save Us is starting to do video.

So you can now watch video conversations, you know, video editions of our podcast on YouTube. I'm sure they'll be on Spotify and eventually at some point Apple, once I figure out how that works and when they're rolling it out. But, you know, this is the way that podcast seemed to be going. And so if you do want to watch me interview a guest, I'm not much of a video podcast watcher myself, but apparently people do enjoy these things, then you can certainly do that by going over to our YouTube page. And there will be more and more of those coming in the future.

Now on to this week's episode. Spencer, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me back on Paris. Absolutely. Always excited to talk to you and get your insights on all these matters. And as soon as I saw the United States attacking Iran and kind of the bigger implications of what this war was turning out to be, I said, I know exactly who I need to talk to. And of course, you know, you'd already been writing about it and giving us a bunch of insightful insights on it. But yeah, so when the United States and Israel went into Iran and really started going after the leadership, started attacking key sites in the country, were you surprised that they finally went ahead with this attack? What was your reaction? Disbelief, but not surprise, if that makes sense. The groundwork for what I want to be clear is an unjustifiable war of aggression. It might be kind of quaint at this point, so long into the Gaza genocide to talk about international law. But by the terms of the post-1945 system, primarily shepherded by the United States, this is an undeniably illegal war, but again, kind of quaint at this

point to discuss international law, perhaps. Nevertheless, the groundwork for this war has existed for a very long time, most recently in the 12-day war, as it's called, in 2025, and the prior Israeli bombing campaigns that destroyed a number of Iranian air defense system. by destroying the air defense systems, you kind of give the game away that you expect to attack in the future from the air and from sea-launched missiles like Tomahawks in the U.S. magazine depth. Beyond that, the politics of this war, the political groundwork for it, has been laid certainly since 9-11, certainly since October 7th. You could really say since 1980 with the U.S. rage at the hostage crisis, that from the Iranian perspective, they would say that this war began in 1953, when the United States, on behalf of the Anglo-Persian oil company and its own oil interests removed the, at that point, most democratically

elected prime minister in Iranian history, Mohamed. and Mossadegh, and in his place put the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the older, who presided over a 25-year campaign of terror against the Iranian people predicated on anti-communism in his geopolitical orientation, making him useful for the United States. Remember, Iran used to share a border with the Soviet Union, and as well, on behalf of Western oil companies that extracted wealth from Iran and brought it over to us. So these dueling narratives very much inform the U.S. and Iranian positions. And also, we should mention, you know, when the Islamic Republic came to power, it implicated Israeli interests just as acutely as it did American interests as we're kind of seeing the fruit of what Ruholo Khomeini,

the founding Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called the Great and Little Satan's. In his telling, you know, this was what is happening now looks a lot like what Khomeini had kind of long-heralded as Iran's eternal enemies, the U.S. and Israel together. After not, you know, I'm, you know, primarily someone who focuses on the post-9-11 aspects of this. I think I just want to jump in before you get to the 9-11 part. And it was fascinating to me. because I do want to pick up on, you know, your work on 9-11 and what we saw in the discussions around Iran at that time. But it was fascinating to me, you know, you talk about going back to 1953. And it was not surprising, but it was still interesting to see that U.S. officials, after, you know, bombing Iran, started talking about how Iran has been aggressive toward the United States since 1979 for all these years.

And it's like, you guys are missing a key part of the history there, you know? Yeah, like, you know, we had a lot of this discussion after October 7th. When do you start history? When do you start the narrative about what gave us this war? It's not surprising in particular to see the Trump administration and its allies say that, you know, this is unfinished business for 47 years because then they don't look like what they are, which is the aggressor, the ones who chose to start this war. Yeah, absolutely. And so I want to pick back up on, you know, 9-11, the war on terror. Obviously, you know, the war on terror is something that you have done, a lot of work on through your career. And people will remember if they were around at the time,

as I'm sure many of the listeners were, but there were discussions about going into Iran in that moment. Certainly there were people who were pushing for it. Someone like John McCain comes to mind who certainly is seen in a different light today, I guess, since his death. But why didn't the United States attack Iran during the war on terror? What held it back in that moment that is not holding it back now. So this is going to be a bit of a long history lesson, but I think it's, it's important. After 9-11, the Iranians tried for a detente with the United States under George W. Bush. In particular, the Islamic Republic had acrimonious relations to the Taliban on its eastern border with Afghanistan, set word through the sweat.

which traditionally have been interlocutors between the U.S. and Iran since the rise of the Islamic Republic, that they would be interested in cooperating with the United States against the Taliban. That was a potentially seismic change. The U.S. had a policy in the 1990s called dual containment, the idea being that it would seek to inhibit the exercise of both Iranian and Iraqi power, back when Iraq was still run by Saddam Hussein. And then, of course, in the 80s, the United States, both during the Iran-Iraq war, a devastating regional war, definitely a formative experience for the Islamic Republic

that we in the United States don't really appreciate. And this comes like right after the 1979 revolution. Very, very soon after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Saddam Hussein, invades Iran. This becomes battles fought on land, in air, with chemical weapons at sea in the Persian Gulf. This was the first time, in my recollection, that the Persian Gulf was mined. It was mined primarily not by the Iranians, but by the Iraqis. Anyway, a devastating, devastating war that the United States played both sides of. it armed Saddam Hussein and also during Iran-Contra also conspired to basically trade arms for hostages

kept by Iranian proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon. So the United States basically tried to position itself to weaken both combatants in that war. But by 9-11, the Iranians are looking for some kind of change in posture toward the United States. There was a reformist president at the time named Kata Mie. He attempted to kind of see what Iran's relationships could be outside of the revolutionary framework of kind of official anti-Americanism. It was a pragmatic turn and there were officials, career diplomatic officials, succunted to the White House at that point, known as the leverets, they were a married couple, who found this outreach to be really significant and pushed to kind of see where it could go. We'll never know where it could go because the higher levels of the

Bush administration quashed that and within weeks put Iran in a famous speech, I'm not really sure, given that we're 25 years after the speech. But for those who don't know, one of George W. Bush's most important speeches of his presidency was a declaration in the 2002 state of the Union that sort of showed where he wanted to take the war on terror, kind of beyond al-Qaeda and beyond Afghanistan. And he coined a term called the axis of evil of Iraq, Iran, and kind of for good measure to show that he wasn't purely focused on the Middle East and on Islamic countries, North Korea. Now, what makes North Korea different from Iran and Iraq? Why did North Korea never get attacked? Iraq get occupied. And now we're in open-ended war with Iran. North Korea had a nuclear

weapon. North Korea went all out and developed a nuclear weapon. And that completely obviated any chance of the United States attacking North Korea. We're going to skip forward a little bit, but I'm going to come back just very briefly. After the U.S. invades Iraq, Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, who had a rudimentary nuclear program, decided that it would be in his interest to pivot his own relations with the United States

by publicly abjuring a nuclear weapon, abandoning his nuclear program, and kind of positioning himself toward a better relationship with the United States, while secretly his intelligence apparatus was torturing people on behalf of the U.S. war on terror. Ten years after that, the U.S. overthrew Qaddafi, and he ends up being killed by his own people, and a whole lot of people in the region and beyond drew a very important lesson about nuclearization from that experience. End of digression. Being put on the axis of evil was swiftly followed up

in about a year with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. So now from Iran's perspective, it has U.S. forces not just positioned around the Gulf at important air and sea bases in the Gulf, but now it has its eastern and its western neighbor occupied by U.S. ground forces additional naval power and air power assets. Also in the region, looking like from Iran's perspective that it's in a really tight spot, that now potentially the U.S. could train its guns on the Islamic Republic, as is kind of long been hinted. explicitly, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, made a very pointed remark that Iran and Syria, Syria, an ally of Iran at that point, had to be very careful about what it did next with U.S. forces in Iraq that was understood in Iran

as a military threat. And then, as you may be aware, the U.S. invasion of Iraq becomes an unmitigated disaster. U.S. forces are bogged down by persistent, well-funded, well-equipped insurgencies of multiple characteristics in Iran. There's a Sunni insurgency out in the West, and there is a Shiite insurgency in Baghdad and to the south. Rarely did these forces work together. This was a combination, occupation, foreign war, and proxy war and civil war. So the Iraq war, which I covered from Iraq twice, an incredibly complicated, bloody and painful phenomenon that in smaller scale continues to day in terms of its effects on the region. The Shiite insurgency, along with important Shiite politics in Iraq, quickly comes under the influence sway. You can kind of chop this up.

A lot of different ways, depending on your perspective, of the Iranians. Most importantly, and this is really fundamental for understanding why the current generation of military officer and also of Iraq veteran infantrymen like Pete Hegeshift, the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, are so seized with Iran. The Iranians brought in a kind of shape-charged, improvised explosive device known as an explosively formed penetrator EFP. This absolutely destroyed. I think it's something like 800 to 1,000 U.S. groups, which is a substantial.

number, something like 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq. So something like 20%-ish of those troop deaths were the result and many, many more life-changing amputations were caused by the introduction of these shape-charged IEDs, these explosively formed penetrators. Many people, and of course the insurgency in general, we should not understand that as purely an Iranian cat spa or phenomenon. That was also an indigenous Iraqi Shiite fight, but tendentious to deny that there was a great deal of aid and comfort, as well as strategic depth back in Iran to the Americans. And throughout the really agonizing phase, so like 2005 to 2008 of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, there were free.

frequent demands from both right-wing U.S. legislators, particularly like tactical levels, within the military, to go against Iran itself, to expand the war either in Iran or against specific Iranian proxy forces, meaning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which is an elite and ideologically very loyal military organization with in Iran that became responsible after the U.S. invasion of Iraq for essentially external regional security for Iran. No U.S. policymaker, whether in the Bush administration or the Obama administration, wanted to go there. Iraq was a bloody enough enterprise, a country of about 24, 25 million people and very difficult terrain. That's nothing compared to Iran. Iran is a country of

90 million people, a very mountainous country, extreme terrain issues. There's deserts, there's mountains. This is one of the reasons that a 1980 effort to free the hostages known as Desert One failed really spectacularly in a way that also that was an early mission of the Joint Special Operations Command, which reaches kind of operational maturity and political interests and political influence and prestige during the war on terror that's indelible in the minds institutionally of the Joint Special Operations Command. So neither Bush nor Obama, and also Iran has extensive coastline that Iraq doesn't have, meaning that naval assets are both put into play and put at risk. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that it would be like so much more difficult to go into Iran,

which, you know, obviously explains why they didn't try to do that at the time. And of course, you know, as you're saying, they were completely bogged down in these wars that they already had. And so finding like the manpower and the extra resources to then go into a whole other country that's so much larger, you know, that's so entrenched, wasn't going to work. So what is the change then from, okay, you know, you're explaining to us why it didn't work to, to go into Iran in that period, how does it shift then for Donald Trump and, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu certainly to decide that now is the time to go into Iran? And was there much thinking behind it or does it appear to be like a brash move motivated in part by what they

were able to achieve in Venezuela? Yeah. So sorry that this is taking so long, but it unfortunately to answer your question is going to need to. Totally. It's okay. It's fascinating history, right? So the impulse to say that the war in Iraq needed to be expanded to Iran to stop the Iranian influence over the war also functions as an alibi. It's a cope. It basically says the war could have been won but for the unwillingness on the part of cyberitic and fearful politicians to expand its scope against this entire new enemy. it serves as a way to avoid reckoning with the failure of the war, with the way that it was doomed to fail, and then accordingly learn any lessons about restraint or about how the U.S. posture towards not just Iraq, but the entire Middle East needed to be reconceived. This was something that, however, cut against, you know, a lot of various U.S. interests. At the same time, the Israelis have had for many decades a strategic fixation on the Iranian missile threat.

That is to say, the rather formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles that Iran is, you know, Iran is an advanced country. even after, and we're going to get there in a second, all of the extensive financial sanctions that were placed on the Iranians, particularly starting in the late aughts, and especially throughout the 2010s, Iran remained possessed of a whole lot of industrial capability, scientific, and technical knowledge. And the creation of its missile arsenal was an absolute fixation of the Israelis, because while Iranian missiles still can't hit the United States, the tyranny of distance there applies, Iran does not possess any intercontinental ballistic missiles. Nevertheless, it has a whole lot of medium and long-range ballistic missiles, very capable, as we've seen, of hitting Tel Aviv.

at the same time around 2003, an Iranian opposition group, one that functions quite like a cult and used to be on the U.S. terrorism designation list, revealed that Iran had a uranium enrichment program suggesting that it could possess nuclear weapons, that it had a nuclear weapons program. Since at least 2006, 7, the U.S. intelligence community has assessed, that Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program, but retains the capabilities and dual-use technologies that could achieve nuclear breakout. So any talk during the late 2000s of some form of rapprochement with Iran is out the window, you've got Iran's involvement in the Iraq War for one, and now the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon. So this looks like a really, really powerful and concentrated problem that the U.S., particularly under Barack Obama, sets out to kind of address. And the way this gets addressed is through after the placement of an extraordinary amount of economic sanctions, what Hillary Clinton, who is Secretary of State at the time, an architect of them,

called crippling sanctions. The idea was that you were going to inflict so much economic pain on Iran that it would decide it has to get rid of its nuclear program. What was kind of not really discussed at the time, I think our understanding in the West of sanctions has not really caught up to the reality of them. But the way sanctions in particular at that point in time on Iran worked was as an indiscriminate economic weapon. It was basically weaponizing inflation. So basically things just became way too expensive for the average Iranian, who now was very much worried about, you know, the price of food, the price of fuel.

And, you know, again, Iran has a, you know, one of the largest supplies of, you know, of. of energy on earth. Just to add to that too, because like, so people understand what this can be like, you know, the kind of value of the currency continues to plummet. And so you're, you know, kind of paying like ridiculous amounts of money for goods. But you also don't have access to like the international banking system. You know, when I visited Iran in 2013, it was like you just had to take out a ton of cash with you before going to the country and hope it was enough that you would need while you were

there because you couldn't tap into like the international banks. or credit card networks or anything like that because of the way these sanctions worked, right? Now, just skipping ahead to the present day really quick, one of the things that the U.S. is discovering to its detriment right now is that the 15, 16-year experience of those sanctions has now led Iran to basically keep to itself, I don't know exactly how it's done this, but nevertheless, it's not dependent anymore on accessing foreign capital through the banking system or moving money through, the international banking system. It's had to come up with hedges for that. And now it's,

you know, its industrial base looks pretty independent from it. Anyway, point being, around this same time, Benjamin Netanyahu comes back to power in Israel, where for the exception of 18 months, he's remained since. Netanyahu thinks that anything short of a decimation of Iran's nuclear threat is insufficient. The United States is not particularly worried about Iranian missiles, but the Israelis really pressed the point. And the U.S. is also looking around this time for rationales to remain in the Middle East while it withdraws from Iraq. And one thing it finds as a point of agreement, not just between Washington and Tel Aviv, but also Washington and and Abu Dhabi, Washington, and Riyadh, to some degree Washington in Kuwait, is the threat, as the region sees it from Iran.

So now you have the U.S. military's basis for being in the Middle East and creating a coalition that it is very proud of saying at the time, the Abraham Accords, are a result of this, unite important Arab allies with Israel. and it calls that anti-Iranian alliance the seeds of peace. This is also a really important alliance from the Israeli perspective, both from the emergence of both, you know, the Mediterranean on its side and then the Gulf on the gulfy side, as tech and surveillance hubs. So now there is what looks like an economic basis for a regional alignment against Iran and also a military basis, where now American military power can be kind of hub and spoke out to both Israel and the Gulf. And at the same time as this is happening, Iran has responded through the IRGC to the creation of a regional strategy that is variously called. the Shiite crescent or the axis of resistance. So basically, Iran through its enhanced position in Iraq, basically Iran won the Iraq war, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, into Syria, which at the time was controlled by Bashar Assad, its client, and through Hezbollah into Lebanon, Iranian power

now arcs to the Mediterranean. That should be understood as the fruit of American strategic failure during the war on terror. So now you have Iranian power flexed outward in a way that really alarms Israel in a way that really alarms the Arab allies of the United States. And this becomes pressure on the Obama administration against the Iran deal. Because to Barack, Obama's perspective, the issue with Iran is the nuclear weapons issue. If it resolves the nuclear weapons issue, both the Obama administration and a very reform-minded Iranian coalition is thinking, that could be the basis now for kind of ending this state of now really acute hostility with the United States. And Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi think this is a disaster that has to be

prevented. Now, one of the things that then happens is the rise of ISIS. And ISIS kind of destabilizes this moment to a tremendous degree, but also ISIS does not just threaten the United States and what it's built in Iraq. It threatens Iran. The ISIS believes Iran way more than al-Qaeda originally did are essentially not Muslims and are an apostate regime that has. has to be destroyed. That leads to a situation where the Iranians are fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and the U.S. is fighting ISIS in the air. Tassedly, the U.S. provided air cover for Iranian forces and Iranian-backed forces in Iraq, and that's a major, major issue. But that, while that might have, you know, that might have been the case on the ground, it was never

kind of allowed to bubble up to anything more than tactical in terms of its politics. Then in 2015, the Iran deal is reached. Israel hates it. American allies of Israel in American politics, hate it to include Chuck Schumer. And the Gulfies hate it because now they think that this coalition that's come to protect them against Iran is going to ultimately shatter once the, you know, to, you know, once the big patron in the United States kind of starts to see, perhaps it can work with Iran. The important thing to say about the Iran deal is that this was an incredibly technically complex deal that did not rely on rapperschement more broadly, politically, with Iran, but absolutely from a technical perspective blocked Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. So the thing that reasonable people

might say, that's problematic for Iran to do, the deal stopped that. As a consequence of the deal, because this is how diplomacy works, Iran got sanctions relief from that. And the pro-Israel coalition there realized that that was a potent cudgel against both Obama and the deal, that now Iran was free to pursue its malign regional activities. And they also tried to say that a real deal would include constraints on Iran's missile programs. That was never, because that was never part of the deal. And from Iran's perspective, if it doesn't have his missile programs, it doesn't have a deterrent against an Israel that certainly in the beginning of the 2000 was very frequently threatening to bomb Iran itself. Trump comes to power with a very motivated base that's against the Iran deal

for various reasons. Some of it just reduces to, you know, pure and reflexive hostility to anything Obama did. Some of it reduces to Zionism. Some of it reduces to the residual distaste of, you know, the original 1980s era, Hulkomania, anti-Iranian hostility that kind of lingers ambiently in the American right-wing imagination. Nevertheless, Trump violates the Iran deal. Now, U.S.-Iranian relations are restored to a point of extreme hostility. I should also say that Obama as kind of a gimmy to the Saudis and the Emirates allowed them to decimate Yemen, cause a famine there, cause a cholera outbreak there, cause one of the regions, really just devastating wars. Once an Iranian ally, Ansar Allah, the Houthis, as we call them, took power in a great deal of Yemen.

Their things remained until 2020 when the architect of Iranian regional strategy, Kossam Soleimani, of the IRGC, was visiting one of his key allies, Abu Maktial Mahandis, an Iraqi political and security figure, and Trump assassinated them both with a CIA missile fired from a, with a missile fired from a CIA drone. that was a shocking move in the region that resulted in the first real exchange of fires of Iranian missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq. The Iranians exercised extreme restraint. Trump back then was talking about, and I thought this really could be a kind of long-heralded war, the white whale of the war on terror. But Trump didn't really have the appetite, nor did the Iranians. for anything more extensive than that. Yeah, it seemed like for some time as the United States would try to attack Iran, like Iran would continue to do a response, but one that would not really try to create something bigger out of it, right?

To show they had to retaliate, but not to try to spur some bigger war. And, you know, this is just a difficult question with deterrence theory in general. What can stop the adversary from attacking further, but also not draw you into a war you might not be prepared to fight? Biden comes to power suggesting that he'll return the U.S. to the Iran deal, but also suggesting that he wants a stronger, tougher deal. In the back of his mind politically and those of all of his advisors is the acrimonious relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyi. Yahoo. Biden, who for his entire political career, has called himself a proud Zionist, doesn't want that. And October 7th happens. Biden stands four square behind the Israelis, let's Israel, materially supports Israel, not to mince word, materially supports Israel and it's genocide of the

Palestinians of Gaza. Iran seeks to impose costs on Israel for that. It has long given aid to Hamas, although Hamas's relationship with Iran is not Hezbollah's relationship with Iran, is not Ansar Allah's relationship with Iran, is not the Islamic resistance in Iraq's relationship with Iran. In particular, they had real, very serious and deep disagreements over Bashar Assad. And Hamas never came to Assad's help the way Hezbollah mobilized into Syria. The Iranian strategy against Israel heralded the Iranian strategy against the United States, which is that it was going to utilize the axis of resistance to attack Iran, primarily Hezbollah, and then answer Allah in Yemen, in order to, and then also against U.S. forces. I should have said that more clearly, in Iraq, in Jordan, in the region, to basically say, United States, you and I are the patrons here. It's up to us to stop the clients. If we want your client in Israel to stop what it's doing in Gaza, we are going to impose costs on you that you find

intolerable, so you will do that. Biden went a different way. And as he did that, the Israelis understood not just from the free hand Biden gave Gaza, Biden gave Israel in Gaza, but the free hand that Biden gave Israel in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Yemen, to then spur the Israelis into a kind of recognition that they had a unique opportunity to roll back Iranian power in Lebanon, in, they failed in Yemen, but in Lebanon, certainly in Syria, and they succeeded at that tremendously. The 2024 campaign against the axis of resistance gave the Israel. Israelis a sense, and this is indispensable for understanding what's just happened, for understanding that perhaps Iran is in a weaker position than traditional security presumptions had held,

to the point where Israel killed Ismail Hania, the head of Hamas, in Tehran, which just absolutely unthinkable before 2023. And so now the Iranians start to feel the hand of the, you know, certainly the little Satan and then behind it the Great Satan on its own territory. And this is unacceptable for the Iranians. The Houthis become far more active. They shut down, shipping, closing the Babel-Mandep entranceway between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, tremendously, commercially crucial waterway. The United States responds not by saying, okay, we should restrain Israel from its genocide, but saying now we're at war with the Houthis, and we're going to have a giant maritime campaign to open the Babel-Mand-Dib. It fails.

The same guy who's running the war today, Admiral Brad Cooper of Central Command, previously ran this failed war against the Houthis in Yemen, that failed on its own terms, that resulted in the most consistent, sustained naval combat, the United States is in engaged in since World War II. And the United States lost it. They lost that under Trump, but nevertheless, the seeds of the mistake were laid under Biden. It was not like Trump was going to resolve that. And then in 2025, Israel, after exchange, you know, after missile exchanges and drone exchanges between the Israelis and the Iranians, which were like saturation level from the Iranian perspective. I forget. I think it was like 2,000 drones and ballistic missiles fired

at the Israelis. And even at once the U.S. joins in in 2025 for the 12-day war, at the U.S. megabase at Al-U-D in gutter, which is an absolutely crucial location of U.S. military power in the Middle East. And so now, for the first time in the history of the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the U.S. and Iran have now, like, formally not through proxies, exchanged fire. And from the American perspective, live to tell the tale. The Iranian response was, we can debate the use of the word restrained, but not looking to expand the war really kind of beyond that and throughout there are messages diplomatically being exchanged through the

Umanis who do a lot of the diplomatic work in the region very quietly. And at the same time, Trump is also predicating a lot of what he's doing with the Iranians on the idea that Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner are going to negotiate a tougher deal than the Iranians were willing to give Barack Obama because he's Trump and he's strong. Now, interestingly enough, this is very forgotten at this point, but Whitkoff in, I want to say, in Whitkoff in spring of 2024, so before, in 2025, before the bomb start falling, agrees briefly, before he has to walk this back, that the Iranians can perform domestic uranium enrichment, which is one of the, he clearly fucked that up.

He was like on the wrong page of where, uh, where, uh, and broader conservative catechism, which is that Iran has no right to enrich any nuclear fuel under the nonproliferation treaty to which Iran is a member and nuclear Israel is not. Iran absolutely has that right. And the Iranians understandably saw that as a matter of sovereignty, that Trump is presenting them with a deal designed for them to say no. It says that Iran has to both restrain and get rid of its missile program. It can't do any uranium. It can't do any uranium enrichment. It has to transform its regional strategies so that it no longer backs any groups that threaten Israel and so forth. This is a capitulation term. And the Iranians understandably

rejected it, but also kept negotiations going to see where they could go to the point where right before this bombing campaign, the Omani foreign minister has been trying to tell everyone he can. And while, you know, you can feel all sorts of different ways of hesitating about Jo Kett, the guy who just quit at the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, a very far-right individual who would probably enjoy throwing us both out of a helicopter. Nevertheless, he has said that the Iranians were, in fact, negotiating very seriously and were looking toward some form of resolution here. And then for reasons that are still going to remain probably obscure for a while,

but Marco Rubio has attributed, as has Lindsay Graham, to deep pressure from Israel, the United States and the Israelis came to the conclusion that Iran is weak and now would be the time to transform its relationship to the point where it could impose its will through war. And that's where we are now. It's been a complete disaster for reasons we can get into next. I know I've taken up most of our time talking about the history that led to that point, but it's really important. You also mentioned Venezuela. The quick success Trump enjoyed in Venezuela has made him in the administration feel invincible. And that is an absolutely crucial aspect of what's happened here. Basically, the Americans and the Israelis did not engage in this war. because they felt something had changed in Iranian security posture that made Iran more hostile,

they thought that they had an opportunity worth seizing to destroy the Islamic Republic or subordinate it. I think the U.S. and the Israeli missions here are divergent. But they thought they could do this at a point where Iran was weak and not able to withstand. the impressive amounts of military force, really punishing military, particularly airpower that both the U.S. and Israel could apply. And the experience of Venezuela, where Trump kidnaps Maduro does something absolutely shocking from the perspective of the extant international system and then doesn't overthrow the entire Venezuelan government but decapitates it and puts that basically under control of a proxy to the United States. Now, I should also say that we're

probably at Act 1 of the Venezuela story. So we shouldn't presume that the way that Venezuela is in, you know, mid-March, 2026 is going to be how Venezuela stays. But nevertheless, that's very clearly an experience that shaped as a kind of proof of concept for Trump what he's done in Iran, except in Iran, it's failed. The Iranians have a far more durable regime even after withstanding the protests of late 2025, early 2026, the numbers are disputed, but thousands of Iranians were killed by government militias, government security forces to retain control. Nevertheless, the experience of external assault has revealed a resilience of the Islamic Republic that it seems pretty clearly

neither the U.S. nor Israel counted on. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we have seen many examples of that over the past number of weeks since this war on Iran has begun from the U.S. and Israel. And if we think of that response, you've given us such a fantastic history of how we got to this point. But one of the things that we've clearly seen is Iran's ability in a way that it feels like the United States and Israel did not account for, you know, to actually make them feel the cost of starting this war. And one piece of that is, of course, the use of drones and the targeting of, certainly, you know, Israeli and American infrastructure, but also the larger, you know, kind of Gulf region and infrastructure in those countries as well. So what have you made of the Iranian response in the way that they have been able to utilize their missiles and their drones in order to make, you know, their adversaries feel the pain? So right there is the heart of the question and accordingly the answer.

In 2025, the Iranians attacked Israel with a massive amount of drones and missiles. It didn't do that this time around. It attacked one mega-US base with one important volley that it heralded through diplomatic channels in advance. So it didn't cause that much damage. This is much different. Here, the Iranians recognizing that that strategy, failed to reestablish their military deterrent against the United States, have now expanded the war to basically making U.S. interceptors, basically missiles to block other missiles in both

the Israeli and American magazines, as we call missile stocks. They have to defend much, much more territory. They have to now defend an arc that stretches all through the Persian-slash-Arabian in Gulf and the Israeli interceptors have to do the same thing around their major population centers. And instead of releasing this all at once, they've decided to take a more patient, persistent approach. We've heard the Pentagon repeatedly boast that they're doing this because they don't have the size of a missile inventory, the magazine depth that they previously did. To some degree, that's got to be true, just because of the expenditures of the missiles, but neither the U.S. nor the Israelis seem to have a really good idea of the size of those stocks. And in addition to the ballistic missiles that they've launched,

both long and short range, because remember, the kinds of missiles that hit Tel Aviv don't have to be the kinds of missiles that hit Doha, that hit Abu Dhabi, that hit all of the different ports, hitting Jebel Ali. What the Iranians have also supplemented that with the use of, of the Shahed 136 drone, previously seen on the battlefield of Ukraine. This drone is like a real case in point of an economic weapon, even before we get to the other economic weapons that the Iranians are really using here to quite a great degree of effect. Estimates vary for how much the Shah had 136 costs.

Standard understandings are like between 20. $30,000. My friend is Fandiar Battenich, who's an economist who looks at the region extensively, thinks it's actually closer to about something like $4,000 to $7,000. Interceptor missiles, a Patriot Pact 3.7 million, in Arrow 3,3 million dollars, an SM2, 2.1 million, and then as you scale up to like a fad battery, those interceptors just get more expensive. So you are really looking at a capability that even an Iranian economy battered by, you know,

a decade and a half of sanctions can produce at such cost in supplement to its missiles that can make the U.S. coalition have to expend far more expensive, far more difficult to replenish stocks of interceptors faster than Iran can send its missiles and its drones. What are they hitting? It's not just that they're hitting this larger axis, you know, this larger geographic axis across the Middle East. They're hitting some of the most important ports in the world, Jebel Ali in the UAE, which, you know, past, I think it might be like among like the top five, you know, ports by cargo in the world. And remember that, you know, part of a key component of emirati power around the world is its ports ownership through Dubai ports world of so much

shipping and commercial infrastructure that's absolutely crucial. Hitting, you know, the, the kind of psychology of the Emirates that they were, this kind of island of stability and oasis has now been shattered, especially, you know, catering. as it does to the, you know, to the 1% in the point, you know, you know, sub 1% of the world, it's clearly not been prepared for the idea that it has to, you know, fight a war on its own territory. And, you know, now after Israel attacked the South Pars gas field, a crucial shared gas field between Qatar and Iran, now this week we saw Iran, we're recording this on Friday in Now this week, we saw Iran respond by attacking a really crucial gas refinery plant in the UAE,

drones sent to Saudi oil infrastructure. And remember, one of the things that really prompted the Saudis earlier in the decade to try and seek some kind of previously unimaginable rappershment with Iran was the 2019 Iranian attack, probably Iran, attack on Saudi Aramco. So once the Saudis recognized that their oil infrastructure could seriously be put at risk, the sources of its wealth could be held at risk. The Iranians took note of the change in Saudi behavior. But they're not just hitting the energy facilities. There have been exchanges of fire at desalination plants, targeting desalination, plants, the Middle East does not have much fresh water. Destroying a desalination plant can be crippling to a country. I think there used to be, there was, there was that one cable that WikiLeaks

published a very long time ago where a U.S. diplomat recorded that if the desalination plant around Riyadh came offline, the Saudis would have to abandon their capital. That's an extremely dangerous way that this were, can spiral out of control. But also, they have to, haven't just hit the oil infrastructure. They've also been hitting the compute infrastructure. They've been hitting the data centers in the UAE, something that probably listeners to this podcast are familiar with the emerging cliche, conventional wisdom, whatever you want to call it, that compute is the new oil, that technical computational infrastructure crucial to

the advance of the AI industry, not just the surveillance industry, but now it's, it's, its transformation over into an AI industry is as important for that industry and all of the economic scaffolding layer to top it as oil is for the rest of the kind of economic fuel of the present day. Iran has now held both of those crucial resources at risk, and they did that before closing the Strait of Hormuz, which from a strategic perspective is the reason that the U.S., aside from all of the other, you know, attended difficulties of a war with Iran, has not been willing to do what Trump did on February 28th, because closing the Strait of Hormuz closes a massive amount,

something like 20% of the world's oil transits through it, but also a third of its fertilizer, which is, you know, a petrochemical product, particularly something that the Qataris have a great deal of a hand in refining. So we're looking not just at spiking, spiking oil prices. The day we're recording this, the Wall Street Journal reported from, I think it was a Saudi Aramco figure that by another month of this war going by, we could see $150 a barrel oil. We're already looking at Brent crude. I think it got last night when closing stopped up to like $115 to $119 a barrel.

This is a massive, massive economic catastrophe that's going to be felt throughout not just the region, but the entire world. This is Iranian strategy. This is Iran, in addition to its military strategy, which it's now known as the Mosaic strategy, which is how it dealt with the decapitation strikes, the assassinations of the Supreme Leader, Ali. Khomey by distributing essentially, you know, autonomous military command down to lower and lower levels of, in particular, the IRGC and its missile batteries, but now also the distribution of

economic pain around the world to include now a modification of that, where the Iranians said that the straight is closed, but at the same time, we're going to allow friends. vessels to pass through. That is also reminiscent of what the Houthis took as their posture toward the Red Sea, that if you weren't U.S. or Israeli or allied flagged ships, you can go through without attack. Now the Iranians are doing that. The reason why Iran is doing that is China, because China needs a massive amount. And China not only needs a massive amount of its energy, and imports a massive amount of its energy from Saudi and from Iran. So, there, They're now banking on the idea that as long as the major patron internationally, not

patron's the wrong word, but one of the other major nodes of world power can not experience so much economic harm from this that's immediately a diplomatic force multiplier. And that's kind of where things stand right now. The U.S. is trying to figure out if it can force this straight open. I want to just say really quickly because this is probably a, you know, a bottom line that I should have said much earlier in this podcast. Trump has lost control of the war. Bibi has lost control of the war. The most important fact of the war right now strategically is the Strait of Hormuz. That's not been American or Israeli initiative. That's purely Iranian initiative. So from just like a matter of, you know, analyzing military, you know, progress in this campaign, the Iranians have the initiative. That's not something that the U.S. ever wanted to say.

It's something that Hegseth and Kane deny in every single one of their press conferences. They focus on the air superiority that they've obtained. They focus on the reduced rate in missile fires, as if that tells you anything. It looks more like the Iranians are conserving their missile batteries to sustain this war. They've reckoned that at this point, in what is, you know, from their perspective, an existential conflict, from the Israeli perspective and Iranian Islamic Republic existential conflict,

they're going to draw this out. They know that Israel wants a much, much longer war than the United States does, and that the United States is going to be looking to find some kind of exit strategy, especially given the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the overwhelming economic pain that's going to be attributable

to its decision to launch this war of aggression. Yeah, I think really well said, And there's a lot more that I could ask you with regard to, you know, what is going on here, the broader consequences. But I just wanted to end with this question. You know, you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the history here that the United States was looking for a reason to stay in the Middle East, right? You know, and certainly saw Iran as part of the reason to do that and has built up all of these military bases through the Middle East, has built these, you know, deep relationships with the Gulf states, certainly. does this war with Iran and does the kind of wider consequences for the region threaten the United States position within the Middle East or at least within kind of the Gulf?

And do you actually see a reasonable off ramp in the near future for this or does it look like it's going to continue for some time? So will it get American power out of the Middle East? I don't, I kind of don't think so. And the reason why I don't think so is because the experience of the Gulf states in being attacked directly by Iran in such a sustained capacity and without the ability of the United States to fully prevent these attacks, you might think that would cause the Gulfis to reestablish, to kind of just reexamine their relationship with the United States. But instead, what you're actually hearing from them is that they want, you know, more sustained security guarantees. They're basically saying, like, what did we invest in? We need the United States to come to our rescue to protect us and so forth. And I could see, you know, certainly if this war ends before the summer, it would probably have, you know, it would end with, you know, the Islamic Republic intact.

And so those Gulf states would be looking towards a new relationship with the United States that can, you know, more clearly defend them. They would, you know, quite likely be looking, you know, as well for some kind of way to, you know, to live with Iran under threat. But I don't think they would, they would basically say, you know, U.S. out of Aal U.D, you know, Bahrain kicking the fifth fleet out. I don't really see that as likely. I think that's one of the dangers of this moment is that Trump and Netanyahu miscalculated to such an enormous degree that the pain that Iran is inflicting in response to their war could be such that it doesn't actually end the fundamental dynamics and the war has to end before any of those fundamentals are addressed. That makes a lot of sense. And it sets up kind of a scary path forward for us,

It's hard to know exactly where this is going to go. But as you were saying, the pain that a lot of people are going to feel, of course, certainly people with bombs dropping on them, which is the worst kind of pain, but the broader economic consequences that the world is going to feel. And that certainly we talk about in light of gas prices and increased inflation of food prices in North America and Europe. But of course, the Global South is going to get hit by this immensely harder because of the limited ability for them to respond.

And it was really great to get your insights on all of this, Spencer, to figure out what is going on here to understand the history of how we got to this moment. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you very much, Paris. Spencer Ackerman is the author of Rain of Terror and of the forthcoming book, The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan, which comes out in spring of 2027. He also writes the Forever Wars newsletter. Tech Won't Savas has made a partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Husson. Tech On Savas relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives

on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pleasure of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.