The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Truth About Iran That Nobody in the West Wants to Hear with Kian Tajbakhsh

Episode Date: June 27, 2026

Noam Dworman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Kian Tajbakhsh. They discuss his years as a political prisoner in Iran, the psychology of the Iranian regime, why he believes Iran's leaders genuinely seek Israel's destruction and what the West continues to misunderstand about the Middle East. He also weighs in on Trump, the latest U.S.-Iran developments and the future of the region. Kian Tajbakhsh is Visiting Professor of International Relations at NYU and Fellow at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. An Iranian-American scholar of Middle East geopolitics and Iranian politics, he previously worked as a democracy and human rights advocate inside Iran. He spent nearly 13 months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including 8 months in solitary confinement in a high-security IRGC wing, followed by 6 years under house arrest as a political prisoner, before being released as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He is the author of Creating Local Democracy in Iran (Cambridge University Press 2022). His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, and his analysis has been featured on NBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, and NPR. He writes and comments frequently on Iranian politics, regional geopolitics, and democratic reform; author of The Iran Crisis Notebook on Substack. www.kiantajbakhsh.net kian.substack.com CHAPTERS 02:20 Arrested by Iran & Life in Solitary Confinement 16:20 House Arrest and Release 20:30 October 7 and America's Blind Spot 23:00 Why Iran Wants to Destroy Israel 35:50 Trump, Iran, and the New Middle East Strategy 49:20 Was Trump's Deal a Mistake?

I don't know how we feel about ourselves. I know. I know. But this is very important in terms of my history. Okay. And how it changed. And in fact, my position, you can, I mean, that's a very important part of what, you know, you know what, so you feel free to tell me, listen, ask me about this.

It's going to be fine. We're good at this. Go ahead. I'm going to take a lot of credit for this. I just want to be, that's not lost on you, right? Yeah, it's not. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world famous comedy seller. I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the ever-expanding comedy seller, as Dan would say.

Unfortunately, he's not with us today. He is on a cruise performing stand-up comedy and probably having a lot of adjita and anxiety about that, as he often does. And I'm Periel, the producer of the show. And we have a very, very. very, very special guest today. Kian Tajvaks, who is a visiting professor of international relations at NYU, Iranian-American scholar, and former political prisoner released as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He is also the author of Iran Crisis Notebook on Substack, and the longest-held American prisoner in Iran.

Did I get that right? Okay, thank you. Now, I, excuse me, am generally not tasked with finding the guest because Noam doesn't trust me. So when I do get that task, I take it very seriously. And he's always really weary of anything I suggest in general. So we'll see how I did. I suppose I say before we start this serious interview, there's always a slightly like public access, Wayne's World quality to your introductions.

Kind of an SNL thing. Like we were whatever hit really big. You would be the one that they would lampoon right away. Okay. So, sir. So I wanted to discuss the war and the memorandum of understanding and all that stuff. But now I'm finding out that there's a simultaneous, very interesting personal story about yours. Of yours.

And let's start there. How were you a prisoner in Iran and how has that formed your opinion about this issue? Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on this podcast. It's great to be here. The reason, I mean, my views are deeply shaped by what was really sort of one of the most difficult experiences in my life, which was being arrested by the Iranian regime for democracy. activism and human rights work. I'll give you more details, but I was arrested in 2007.

You were an American who went there? I was born in Iran. I did most of my schooling in the UK because my father was an international civil servant. He was a diplomat. He was traveling around the world. My mother actually, you know, they divorced. And my mom moved to New York City in 1970. They were completely from different opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. My father worked for the Shah's government, and my mother became a feminist and a socialist. And she actually told me, she said, well, later on I heard that she said, I want to go to New York and I want to work with a woman called Gloria Steinem. And actually, she moved into 60 Morton Street, which is not too far from here. And I remember that in 1970.

So I was like eight at the time. So I spent my adolescence in the UK, but I was coming back and forth between Tehran and New York and the UK until 1979 when the revolution happened. My father was exiled and from Iran. We were all exiled from Iran. And I moved to New York in the mid-80s in 1984, full-time. I worked as a community organizer and doing civil community-based organizing in New York City, low-income housing, tenant organizing, the stuff that I really enjoyed, which was basically around local democracy and local civil society work.

So you're a person of the left. Yes, well, yeah, I was. You know the old story, you know, a conservative is a liberal who's being mugged. And I'll tell you the story about being mugged. So anyway, to just go very fast forward, I got my, after a few years working in New York, I got my PhD in political science and urban planning at Columbia. And then I got my first job at the new school,

again, a very kind of left organization, which I enjoyed. But in the late 90s, I went back, I decided to leave academia and go back to Iran to work on the ground as a civil society, democracy, human rights activist. Now, I'm going to stop you there. Now, when you did this, even at that time, you knew you were taking some risk to your personal safety. I didn't know enough, obviously.

I mean, you know, my, that's true. That's true. So you felt it quite deeply? I did, I felt it very deeply. It was a historic moment, you know, just a historic moment Iran was opening up after the death of Khomeini, after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

It really was a historic opening when the reform movement in Iran opened the doors, told people who were expats, you can come back, you can work here, contribute to your country. I came back,

and I ended up working, I taught at the universities, but what I did in the end was I started working for international organizations like the World Bank, like the United Nations, like foundations,

but ultimately working for George Soros organization, the Open Society Foundation. In what capacity? As the program officer supporting all the civil society democracy groups inside Iran that wanted our support, they wanted money, they wanted support. We thought this was the opening that was going to break open Iran into a more democratic future. The Berlin Wall had just fallen. Exactly.

And you think this is the... Exactly. I went out on the wave of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let's just fast forward. We had a good seven or eight years. We did really good work. We worked on women's rights, human rights, lawyers, freedom of information, all the range of stuff that you would do until 2007. The Iranian regime decided that's enough.

They slammed the door down on, you know, I mean, I have this view of we were trying to push the door open. They were pushing it closed and they had more power. than I did. I got my fingers crushed. In 2007, I was arrested with two other democracy activists. This was the first shot across the bow where Iran said, enough with any Western type of support for reform or any kind of progressive reform inside Iran. And what happened is that the other two had to leave immediately. My baby daughter had just been born. It took time for me to find a outside of Iran. They said you'll never work here again, right? That, by the way, was four and a half months in solitary confinement in Evan prison under the Ministry of Intelligence. That was tough.

That was really tough. Now, just what is like, are you physically abused in a prison? Are you, what's it like? Well, you're mentally abused because being 24 hours, 24 and a half hours a day inside a very small cell, maybe six by nine feet, with no bed, with no nothing. You just have a blanket. And they torture you mentally. Is there a toilet? There was a toilet.

I had to make a big fuss to get a cell with a toilet. And that was a big deal, actually, for me, because it was just so humiliating. Otherwise, you would have to put out, like, you put this little piece of paper under the door. that's all you could do. If you knocked on the door, they would come and shout at you

and maybe hit you because they said, no noise. You just put a piece of paper under the door. If I come around, I'll let you out. That was so humiliating.

But I got the toilet. What happened is that it took time for me and my wife at the time because she was born in Tehran. She had never lived outside of Iran. She had a big family. It took time for us to get our act together. And also for me,

psychologically, to say, you know, I finally got back to Iran. I made a family, and now I have to just go straight to the airport. We couldn't do that. It took a year for me to find a job at Columbia, actually. And just as we were about to leave in August of 2009, we were planning to leave in August 2009. In May, June, there was a huge explosion of what some people may remember

as the Green Protest Movement. I mean, the Green Movement was two years before Tahrir. Square, by the way, the Arab Spring. This was really the biggest thing. There were a million people in the streets. And I was there, and this was the big crackdown. In 2009, the regime decided that's it. They cracked down no longer Ministry of Information in charge, the Ministry of Intelligence.

This was the IRGC. These are the people running around the Middle East. This is the people who the U.S. is now fighting with. arrested me, along with all the leading politicians, dissident politicians, put us in a cell, again, five months under solitary confinement. And by the way, this time was like, it was high school versus like college this time. This was, these were like serious military high detention, you know, facility. It was cleaner because it was newer, but it was, it was really tough. There were some days in which they would put me in somewhere like a crypt

where there was no other prisoners, they would lock the doors of the corridor and turn off all the lights. God. And it was just like a crypt. And I could hear no sound, that you could go crazy. And the way that, you know,

I was never physically tortured because I was a high value prisoner. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, called for my release from the White House. And as soon as the Iranians heard that, they thought, we can get some money from this guy. Right. This is a guy hostage.

Give him good food because we don't want, yeah. That is my next question. Yeah, give him good food because, you know, when he comes out and we get lots of money, we don't want him to complain that we abused him, et cetera, et cetera. So I was again in solitary confinement in the IRGC section of the prison for four and a half months. That really was mentally tortured.

They were tortured me. saying, oh, you know, I don't like the answers you're giving. Maybe you're not going to get a phone call from your wife or family for another few days. And you know, when you have no idea when you're going to be in touch with anyone, it can, you can, you can, you can start going crazy. But I, you know, but I try to keep my, my stuff together. How? How?

I finally got some, I finally got them to, uh, allow some books to come back from home. And what I decided is I would do. because I am an academic, I'm an intellectual, I read, and I just sort of like read every word closely. And I actually, I wrote an essay about this in the New York Review of Books where I would actually, when I got a few books that were like six or seven, I would put them on the far wall. I would put them like on my bookshelf, like a little bookshelf. And I would say, oh, okay, if I read really slowly, each of those books is going to take me a month to read and I will try to memorize each of these books. And as soon as I had like a plan,

all of a sudden I was like more in control, you know, because I was in the I was in crowd of my time. I was like every time that went to, I would have pulled out for interrogations in the middle of the night. They would go for many hours. And then I would say, well, you know, I'm going to get through this because I got to get back to my reading. So let me ask you a question. And John McCain was interesting in this regard too. Having experienced a taste of this horror as a person fighting for democracy, fighting for liberal causes that we all believe in, how does that inform your opinion of how, when you hear these stories,

and certainly some of them are true, if not most of them, of mistreatment or very harsh treatment of prisoners at Hamas prison. in Israel. And you know, I can tell already that you're no fan of Hamas. But what kind of criticisms of the Israeli treatment of those prisoners come to your mind, even though you hate those prisoners, but you have some sympathy for their situation in some way? Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that what I understood, I mean, and I'll say this, I'll say credit where credit is due in the sense of, you know, look, the Iranian jailers, I was fortunate by being under the wing of a professional group of security intelligence operatives.

They knew what their job was, and they weren't like savages and arbitrary. Now, 40 years ago, just after the revolution, before the whole organization had become professionalized, it was chaos. Prisoners were abused because, you know, they wouldn't know how to triage them. So, for example, I am a professor. I'm also a democracy activist. I'm someone, you know, I'm an intellectual. They're not going to get a lot of cooperation out of me if they start whacking me around. One guy did, actually, one jailer did, because he just thought that's what you should do. You should just sort of like push someone and be there. And he got, he got, he got, he got, reprimanded, because that's not what you do.

They know that with me, all you got to do is like, take away my books. Yeah. And you just, go crazy. Yeah, that would really hurt Perry L's feelings too. But yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. I mean, I mean, you know, I mean, I think that, um, I think what I think about those prisoners is that, look, abuse of prisoners is never justified. You can be in a war. And, you know, I mean, I remember growing up, you know, you read all the stories about old wars where generals would, you know, would be, you know, would meet each other after the battle day. You know, the Iranian regime knew that they were in a war with the West. I was a reprehs. I was a representative of them.

And a traitor. And a trader, but I was also Iranian. Right, that's what I mean. Yeah, I was also Iranian, but in the sense that they also gave me the kind of respect. I see. Okay. And, you know, the face-saving thing for them was, well, you were duped. You were, you know, you were like, you know, fooled.

Let us straight. Exactly. I'm assuming you speak Farsi fluently. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, just to finish my story, after I got out of the Solidary, confinement in 2010, I was put in a group cell with the central committee of the two main reform parties of Iran. No one in my circle would ever have that experience. I mean, this was four months. Imagine you've gone to like camp with, you know, these people who were,

these were right-hand men of Khomeini when they made the revolution. And now they were in prison because they had become Democrats. And they knew their jailers. In fact, many of them had hired the jailers. One of them came back, he had been the former deputy minister, a guy who I really, really like and respect. And he's still in prison. Wow.

After all these years, he came back, just completely red. And I said, what happened? What happened? He said, I had a shouting match with so-and-so, who I hired as the deputy chief of the IRG-C. This was an in-house fight. After that experience, I was released on parole. Then I was held for six years under house arrest from 2010 until 2016. Now, house arrest was literal house arrest for a few months. Then I told this guy, I said the guy who was a liaison and I would be completely surveilling me all the time. I'd say, you know, why am I, why are you sticking me in the house? I have a two-year-old daughter, three-year-old daughter. I need to go. walk in the streets. I want to walk out of school. I want to go to my in-laws. They said, all right, fine. But you report everywhere you go and you're under surveillance. You're like,

you're like parole. And, and, uh, and he said, you don't talk to anyone except family. No friends, no work, no official places, nothing. And he, and he looked at me and he said, look, and he was actually quite polite to me because he was a young guy. And he said, look, I want you to know, make my life easy. It's a typical thing people say. And I understood it for the first time. He said, do what we've agreed. Because he said, I'm not the only one looking at you.

I don't think you put him in some jeopardy. Well, because he said someone's looking at me. And I was a high value target. In 2016, so I was home and I spent that six years basically reading, trying to educate myself about things that I didn't know enough about. One was religion and politics. I brought up as a secular liberal. And here was a religious,

the only really religious state in the world, the Theocracy, who had just imprisoned me. I taught myself about international relations. I had been a political scientist, but I never really studied diplomacy, and I studied that. And 2016, under the Obama, deal. I was one of the four Iranian-Americans who whose release was

secured, negotiated and we left. Now, all of that experience is what shapes the way I have been thinking, writing, and teaching about this whole Middle East since I came back. So that's, I'm sorry if that went on like too long, but it's fascinating stuff. I, just as I, because it came to my mind, when you're under house, arrest, how do you earn a living? Well, fortunately, we had

some savings. We had a couple of small rental properties, which we used the rental property for, and we used and family and friends. Rental properties in Tehran. In Tehran. Yeah. And, you know, that gave us a little bit of money, and we lived modestly.

We, I, you know, I own my own apartment. And of course, friends and family, helped out with loans. That's a harrowing story. And okay, so let's fast forward to now. And then we'll talk about the world. And how has this all shaped your current politics

and your view of the world? Okay. So, you know, I was teaching, I'm now at NYU, but for the last 11 years, I've been at Columbia. And I was teaching Middle East politics. on October 7th, when it happened in Columbia, and I was there for those of the two years, I just joined NYU now.

My position was controversial among many of my colleagues, not all of my colleagues, but many of them, particularly those in the department that I was in the humanities. They were all part of the encampment. They were all part of the, let's say, supporting the the the Gaza uprising

and so forth and I took a different position now I my view is not only shaped or formed by my personal experience as if I have a grievance or I have an emotional reaction I'm a scholar I've written a book

I mean if I may say so on air I mean I I summarized 20 years of on-the-ground empirical research on how Iranian political system works in cities and villages and provinces throughout Iran. Things that very few people don't know. I spent many years or 10 years traveling around all around Iran, small villages, doing research, doing interviews. And I got a sense of how Iran actually works, both the good and the bad. So my views are informed both by my lived experience as someone who suffered under an oppressive regime, but also someone who is able to, you know, look clearly and clear-eyed and analytically, step back. So I would say, look,

you don't, my view was you don't seem to understand, you don't seem to take seriously what I know to be the fact, which is that when it comes to the question of Gaza and Israel and so forth, the Iranian regime really does mean it when it says it wants to eliminate Israel. They're not kidding. This isn't a negotiating point. Well, I have an expert here. This is very fascinating. Why do they want to eliminate Israel?

So I wrote a, you know, I tried to make sense of the Iran. And maybe, maybe this will be a way, a segue into the, into the, into the, understanding what's going on now, I wrote a piece in my substack called the layered roots of the Iran crisis. And essentially, to summarize that I said this, I said in 1979, the Islamic revolution that won the revolution, Homanie, they declared war on four fronts simultaneously. the United States, Israel, Western cultural modernity, and the majority of the Iranian people who oppose them. Each of these were not words.

On the American front, they took over the American hostage, the embassy, and then they have been fighting the Americans ever since. On Israel, they formed Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas support all these groups to eliminate. I'll get to Y in a minute. Okay. And third, against cultural modernity, you want just one clear example,

Salman Rushdie. Up to this day, they have never rescinded the murder fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and of course he just barely escaped with his life last year. And fourth, against the majority of Iranians, they just mowed down possibly 10,000, people in two days who protested in January.

Now, they declared those four things, and they mean it. I looked at IRGC, you know, peril, yeah, I got to tell you, I looked, I spent many hours, many, many, hours, months, years, in fact, but many hours in interrogation with IRGC officers, and I looked them in the eye, and I would talk to them about this. they are deadly serious. But what's the reason? Like I understand, I can understand why they hate America.

We were involved in the coups and we held them out, whatever it is that they have that story. There's two questions. Why do they want to destroy Israel? But then the other question is, okay, even if you want to destroy Israel, why are you ready to mortgage your happiness,

your economy to do it? Like, just because you want it, doesn't mean it's worth everything to you. Yeah. But apparently it's worth everything. It is worth everything. Why is it worth everything? Well, first of all, that's the difference between being ideological and being zealot about, you know, being quote-unquote, I mean, that's the literal definition of a fanatic.

A fanatic is someone who is very hard to kind of like bargain with because he has a very intense preference for a particular goal. The Islamic Republic was born with the idea that the, you know, that the, you know, the, you know, the foundation of the state of Israel was a historic wrong that needed to be undone. Now, to go back to that, I have a theory which, yeah, I mean, I've written about this. Let's say I haven't developed it into a full academic thing, but I trace this back to what I call a historical trauma of the loss, the collapse of the Islamic Caliphate, after the World War I. So the Islamic Caliphate was the sort of central historical power

in that area for 500 years. And the Ottoman, it was led by the Ottomans. When that collapsed after the First World War, that's when all these Islamic movements began, the Muslim Brotherhood and all of these began to grow as a way to regain a sort of, status. So that began in the 1920s and the 1930s. Then with the foundation of the state of Israel,

the Islamists felt that this was a, both an imperialist imposition, but mostly it was an insult to what's considered the pristine lands of Islam. So there is this idea. of a greater Islamic lands and that those lands should not have infidels on them except as second-class citizens. I mean, in other words, Iranian and Muslim societies allow Christians and Jews to live, but only as second-class citizens. But Jews are worse than Christians or the same? Worse are Jews. Jews are worse, yes. Because? Jews are worse because, you know, I can't go through the litany of reasons. You know, because I, you know, I mean, there's just so many of them.

They're a bit much. You know what I mean? It's like, oh my God, there's like so many reasons. It's just endless. Yeah, endless. Because one of the, you know, Sam Harris talks about this. But one of the problems I think we all have is America. By the way, no matter how many times I convinced myself with this, I constantly reset,

is that we just can't believe this martyrdom, jihadist stuff that they say is real. Yeah, why? Because, like, I can't conceive of sending my kids off to die, looking for landmines, and then handing out candies. But when you see it. I know, I know, you're right. So, but I don't understand it. So, I mean, you know, it's like, I have people who are, like, unfortunately,

I don't like to, I like to be analytical. But really, there are a lot of useful idiots here, Iranians in the West, who echo or reinforce the speaking points of the Islamic regime. And in fact, one of them was on with Tucker Carlson the other day. You know, they were like, they made friends, you know, like over this because they both hate Israel. You know, and what I say to them is they say, no, it's not really real. This is all sort of, yeah.

I say, you know, it's very hard to keep up a pretense for half a century. Yes. I mean, you know, it's like, by that time, you've persuaded yourself, you believe it. And so, okay, so what is the reason? You know, what's amazing is if you go back to the early 1950s. So actually, I'll tell you one thing about the issue about Israel and Iran, is that many people say that the ones who want to bash the U.S. and say the reason why the Iranians hate Israel

is because it was part of an imperialist plot by the Americans. Actually, it turns out that Khomeini's writings against Israel come way before he had anything to say bad about the United States. In other words, before the so-called 1953 coup, which I think is just like, you know,

please, you know, I make a joke. This is one of my jokes. maybe I tell, I tell people I say, I'm on film here, but I say, listen, if I hear about the Mossadee coup, 1953, one more time, I'm going to pull out my hair. You know, that the record show that he's bald. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Oh, sorry.

Well, yeah, shaved. Bald by choice. There you go. That'll be the title of the episode. So, well, then comment on this. So many people suspect, I think Tucker Carlson believes, that if America would stop defending Israel, and maybe if Israel would just do the nice thing and disappear,

that Iran would no longer have such a beef with America. Is that true? That's absolutely nonsense. Tell us about that. Because I think, because as I said, they have a grievance, which are separate grievances against both these countries. They both see them as separately,

problematic, but they also see them as connected. They call the United States the great Satan, and they call Israel the little Satan. They do see it as a sort of puppet, you know, the whole thing, and, you know, it's like, I got to tell you know, one of the things that really, I had a really hard time with when I came back in 2016, and then when I got onto campus, you know, what really bothered me was not that I couldn't get into a discussion with people about Gaza and so on and so forth. But I started going, I got like, you know, as they say, I got like triggered. I said, wait a minute. My colleagues here and the students, they're saying exactly what my jailers had been saying for like 45 years. What happened? I escaped there and I've landed up here and I'm just

hearing exactly the same thing. Settler colonialism, apartheid, all the stuff. Not that one can't enter into a discussion about all these things, but it was just the kind of

one-sidedness that bothered me. And so I just wanted to say, what was it you asked me? I asked you, I was asking why, about the, how they feel about America, would they...

Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, it's completely separate. It's completely separate. Because, well, let me ask you this, add to it. Because I could imagine that they hold out the hope that they can defeat Israel or really make Israel's life miserable. But they certainly know they can't defeat America. So maybe they'd be ready to have a detente, as it were, with America, where they're never going to stand down against Israel as a practical matter.

Is that make any sense? No. No. I mean, it makes sense, but it's never going to happen. because they are dedicated to either remaining, they are, they live for resistance. You know, you can admire them for their nobility and their resilience, but their goal, the whole revolution is based on resistance.

You know, one of the things I, you know, They didn't go into this business to run a country. They went into this business to fight this battle. Fight this battle and to control this country and use this as a base. You know, one of the things I, you know, for people to understand the costs they are willing to pay, exactly as you said, imagine. There are only, not a lot of people know this. That's actually a Michael Kane line, which I always like. But anyway, not a lot of people know this.

Oh, very good. I'll actually do a good, Michael Kane. There are only two countries in the world. world, which don't host the U.S. embassy. Only two. What's the other one? North Korea. Oh, North Korea. I've told you

period. No, I do it. But that's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. In other words, Russia, China, you know, they do. But Iran is willing not to even have a U.S. embassy

for half a century. It refuses to. It says death to America as its official slogan It's in the preamble of the Constitution. It's what the regime, it's in the DNA. So when you hear this amateur, J.D. Vance, speculating out loud that through some sort of policy of engagement, we're going to soften the Iranians. You think he's a fool.

Correct? Is he listening? No, he doesn't listen to this podcast. Yes. You do. And even more so, what about these fucking morons wandering around? New York City who couldn't even find Tehran on a map. That's more so than the vice president.

I mean, it must be maddening the arrogance with which some of these students are sounding off, no? Yes. And I know them. I know because they were my students. I know. And I was grading their papers. And I was saying, do you know anything about the Middle East? You're not listening to my, you're not listening to my lectures.

So, you know, J.D. Vance and this whole thing, I've got to tell you, I mean, you know, my head is spinning. My head is just spinning. I mean, I'm reeling, although as a, you know, analyst, I have to be very sort of like, you know, I have to step back and try to figure out what's going on. And this whole MOU is just one of the most incredible things I have ever, ever seen. It's been a big lesson to me as a political scientist, as an activist or someone who's worked in politics for years. Like, What the fuck happened? I mean, really? I mean, this has gone from Iran Hork to Iran appeaser, a 180 degree switch. And I thought, what happened? I kind of figured out, I think, what's happened. Yeah, I'm going to tell you after you give us what happened,

why, despite the fact that I share your politics, basically 100% from, at least from what you've told me so far. I'm sympathetic to this memorandum of understanding for practical reasons, which I'll tell you what my reasons are, but you go ahead first. Tell me what your analysis. Well, I mean, I, you know, my, you know, my take is, you know, I can, I can, I can, so there are three basic, you know, there are three basic takes. I wrote this in one of my recent substacks.

three ways to read the MOU. One is just an abject's instrument of surrender. It's just we've lost this battle. We're giving up. We are so weak that the enemy gets whatever they want. The second way to read it is that it was basically Trump cutting his losses and pulling out and not getting into the swamp of a kind of Vietnam or an Afghanistan where it goes on and on and on, throwing money out, good money after bad.

He realized that he couldn't, they hadn't, he had no answer to the drones and missiles in the Straits of Hormuz, whoever's problem or fault that was, which is really bizarre and weird. Like, hello, everyone is saying you've been wargaming this for 50 years and then all of a sudden they outflanked you. You know, I, I, I analogize this to a weak fighter and an M.M. in an MMA fight, who, you know, is behind on points, but finally gets an arm lock.

And he's found the pain point, and he's going to break the guy's arm. And the strong guy says, okay. The third, the third. On that, I think I saw, but I didn't read it carefully, I think I saw one of the initial releases from this new Haberman book

that's coming out about inside the White House that, I think it was reported that Trump said, they're not going to do that. You know, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Well, it was a gamble. It was a gamble. They're too weak.

They're not going to do that. Right. It's a gamble. He thought they would fold like Venezuela and they wouldn't have time to do this. But, you know, he miscalculated. I mean, people miscalculate sometimes, right? You invest in the stock market,

you put a million dollars and you lose it. You know, it's like... Right. That's number three. Yeah. So number three is what Vance was going on about, that this was a transformational opportunity in which all of a sudden,

we're like, I, you know, I looked into the soul of these IRGC officers and they, and they told me we're real buddy buddies. Now, for me, there are only two options out of this. Either he's a complete, you know, cynic and liar, or he's completely naive and gullible. Probably a combination of two, but I think that it's very clear. It's very clear. Trump cut his losses. He then is pivoting to the midterms. J.D. Vance is his bridge to the MAGA base. Rubio is his bridge to the Republican establishment.

But he needs, he wants the MAGA base. He has to, you know, cozy up to the Fuentes and the anti-Israels and the- I don't think he really does have to, but yes, he's determined that he has to. And that's what that play is. Now, the only thing I'd say about the MOU, which is like what's puzzling, but I got to work out, is why I'm reallying is because I don't,

I think Trump could have pivoted and found that off ramp without giving up the store to Iran. And I think the MOU gives far beyond what Trump needed to have the off ramp to have a pause for six months until he gets to the midterms. I just cannot understand. I mean, I figure, I mean, we'll get to the. that. I mean, it's only a psychological understanding of his narcissistic style that can explain

why he's given away the store. I mean, what he did in Article 1 of MOU is just unbelievable. He's given Iran Lebanon. He's given Iran the Hormu Straits. And he's almost given around the entire Persian Gulf. And he's given them the nuclear thing. I mean, there are things ambiguous there, but

that's why I think it's a terrible deal. So let's go through it. So let me just preface it by saying, you know, one of the things I always think about is that when you make a good decision, often you can never be recognized for it. So for instance, Bill Clinton will always be known for having opted not to take out bin Laden. He'll never live that down. If he had done the right thing and taken out bin Laden, he would have earned a spot on, you know, like Noam Chomsky's. list of war hawks, right? But bin Laden wouldn't even be known today, wouldn't even rate as a final jeopardy answer. Like, he would have taken him out, and this entire chapter would have never

happened, and Bill Clinton could never prove to the world that what he did was one of the most consequential things in history. So it's always the counterfactual. With Trump here, obviously, I've been puzzled about the same things. It's, but it's some combination of him being warned that Our time is running out on the world economy. Our Gulf allies have don't want to get bombed anymore. The midterms are coming. And we have no reasonable hope of getting anything much better out of it. They're not going to fold.

And so get out now. And, you know, you can take this up again. Maybe they kid themselves. Maybe they really will take it up again after the midterms. after they replenish their weapons after the oil stocks. What we did learn in this conflict, I'm going to jump around, is that the world's economy didn't crash in 10 days, like Robert Pape said it was going to.

That's right. It went on four or five months, and now everybody is in the process of figuring out how to survive this. The next time it happens, which means pipelines and oil stocks in Venezuela and all, and who knows all the clever things that in you. genius humans do. So, you know, if they want to take this up again a year from now, closing the straight will be X percentage even less threatening than it was this time. So that's the kind of

thing they can talk themselves into. But from, and I told Peril, I like take it from each country's point of view. From the Israeli point of view, first of all, we have to acknowledge that Israel was, as I've been putting it, Israel was part of the psychological, critical mass which Trump reached to make this decision to go in to Iran. I don't want to say they're responsible for it, but today before the show, I looked it up what Haberman reported, if you believe her sources in Jonathan Swan. Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as

pointing to near certain victory. Iran's ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal. Besides, Mossad's intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again, and with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion, an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front

in the northwest, further stretching the regime's forces and accelerating its collapse. Mr. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president. Sounds good to me, Mr. Trump told the prime minister. So this is real. Now, well, I mean, well, maybe not 100%. I agree that whoever leaked this had their own agenda. But on the other hand, there haven't been loud denials of it.

It's somehow close to true. Something like that happened. Now, this is from Israel's point of view. The worst possible thing that could happen now is if Trump went to try to open up the straight with one of these military plans and Iran gets lucky and sinks a ship, takes some American hostages, sucks America into this, somehow. And now, as opposed to Mir Shimer, who's been blaming Israel for the Iraq war, falsely all these years, now Israel, whose support in America is in a free fall as it is, is now responsible for talking

the American president into the greatest military quagmire of the modern day. And this all will be laid on Israel's footsteps or whatever, whatever the expression is. And Trump will shift the blame because that's his want. Even though I think he's quite pro-Israel, he will shift the blame as a personal matter. Yeah, right. So this is the 9-11 that has been avoided by Trump's capitulation here. And I don't like the capitulation. And maybe if you spell out to me, actually, they could have done this and they knew they could have done this.

And I say, oh, yeah, actually, you're right. They should have done that. I don't think they've actually given Iran, Lebanon. I think Trump says things six months for now. He's also going to be back to bombing Lebanon as they ever were, because they have to, right? And we'll see what happens with the nuclear thing. I'll say one more thing. But as a matter of triage, initially, Iran was about to sprint to an atom bomb.

Like, after they had been humiliated, they knew we have only one thing we can do now. We have to have an atom bomb. So Trump was right. They had to do what they had to do right then. And I think they've set them back some amount of time. And Israel can continue to... Finkelstein hates this expression, but can continue to mow the lawn in that way.

So that triage has been taken care of. And now the next triage urgency to me is that Israel has to shore up its relationship with the United States. They're going to have to eat shit for a while. They're going to have to figure this out. But they cannot afford the risk of some American hostages being

taken while articles and books are about to come out about had Netanyahu talked. And by the way, Netanyahu would not shock me if in the back of his mind, well, I know it might not work out this way, but once the Americans are in, they'll stay in. I mean, he's a, he's a partisan Israeli looking out for his country. He's not an angel, right? He, this is not, you know, so, and I can imagine just the scene in the White House where Netanyahu now says, a president Trump, I think, how can you signed this margin of memorandum of understanding, you need to go in and get the straight. And Trump's saying to him, motherfucker, weren't you the guy who told me the regime was about to fall over?

And now you have the nerve to tell me I need to go further. I joke yesterday. Clear out your desk and get the fuck out of here. You know, I think. I'll say, one other thing has something. And I think that's basically my whole spiel. You know, I always make fun of liberals because anytime they have an idea for a, you know, policy, the schools, whatever it is. And it flops. They always say, well, we didn't spend

enough money. We didn't go big enough. Yes, that's right. Neocons, of which I'm basically one, risk the same criticism. Every time they advise, go into Iran, go into here, they'll greet us as liberators, we'll do this, and it doesn't work out. Say, ah, well, we didn't, you have to go bigger next time. We didn't go big enough. Fine, but you didn't tell us we needed to go big. I agree. And now, as I say, Israel, you're going to eat shit for a while. What you really needed to have taken care of, which is the nuclear threat, has been taken care of.

You're still way better off than you would have been. I have my own stuff to worry about. I'm talking about President Trump. Obviously, if I had known I would find myself in this situation, I would have never done it. Let the world adjust to the new risk of the straight-or-homuz, and we'll revisit this in 27 or something. I don't know. It all makes sense to me. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's not, you know, that's not crazy. That's not unreasonable.

I think that that is the best kind of defense one could make. But I think it's missing a few things, first of all. First of all, I think. With all the respect. Yeah. With all, yeah, yeah, yeah, with all due respect. I mean, this is the way I read it. First of all, I mean, I think there's already been a few pushback from that account that came out in the New York Times and was going to come out in the book. it sounds a little too neat to me. I, you know, I, you know, I've never been inside the situation room, but, you know, I've seen lots of movies, you know, so. So, but you can also imagine I do this in my class and so forth, you know, you know, that sounds like a little too cartoony or a little too caricatury. First of all, the American, you know, the American president is not going to just sit there and say, you know, hey, B, B, you know, you promised me.

I mean, he might say that publicly, but that's not how these things work. So, I mean, and the Israeli ambassador, when was asked about this report, said, you know, I was in the room. And I obviously, I can't tell you exactly what was said, but that's not how it went. But forgive me, but just to, you could be right, but perception does become reality and Trump will shift the blame even if it didn't have. All right. But that's, but that's his genius at spinning and shifting the blame. The logic of the situation, I mean, if we go back, so there are two ways of. looking at this no i mean the way i did it the one the one thing when i started coming out and by the way

for many years for 10 years i mean just about it's like being on this podcast for 10 years um about eight years i uh i rejected all uh invitations to go onto iranian tv uh because the intelligence officer when i left when i was about to leave the country i asked him look i've had enough trouble you tell me why What is the red line? I don't want, you know, I'm going over to the, I'm going to the U.S., I'm going to get involved in all sorts of discussions. I have family here.

I don't want them to be harassed. What's, what's the story? He said, I know you're going to go into the university, and I know there's going to be seminars, and there'll be like critics and so on and so forth. He said, if you stay within the university, we don't care what you say, which, by the way, I love telling this to my university friends, which is how fucking useless all of you are. you know, it's like, I left academia because I didn't want to be there. I'm back there because, you know, it's a safe landing.

And we need you there because... Yeah, well, I mean, I'm enjoying it. But I'm not exactly, you know, I'm not like exactly, you know, celebrated by any of my colleagues. What I'm trying to say is... Either was Galileo. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, yeah, thanks.

But I... Something happened to him, I think. Yes. But what I'm trying to say is that when I came out, in the women life freedom movement. I told my wife, by the way, who goes back to Iran in the summers. I'll never go back. But she goes back and I don't want her to get into trouble.

But I told her, look, this woman life freedom movement, people are asking me and I really feel very strongly about this. I want to go on Iranian TV. She said, go for it. We'll sort it out if I get there or something. I'll say, I disagree with him or something like this. The first thing I did when I was on CNN, which went viral, I'm saying this only to say this is a this is not what I do, but, but I, they asked me about the war and

I said, what turned out to be a kind of talking point on the right, which I didn't, was not happy about, but it makes sense. I said, I don't think Netanyahu and Trump started this war with Iran. I think Trump and Netanyahu want to finish a war that Iran started 47 years ago and have never ceased fighting. And I know this. I know this. I know this. So for me, the war on them is inevitable. It is inevitable. The Iranians, now, what I said actually just a few nights ago was doing the right thing

is different from knowing how to do it right. So I was on a show with someone from the other side. It was in the Obama negotiating team. And he said, oh, this was a misconceived war of choice. and I said, actually, my view is different. I think this was a badly planned and badly executed war of necessity. In other words, this was going to happen.

All the presidents had kicked the can down the road. It came to Donald Trump. He picked it up. Even Obama knew. You know, in 2015, he said to NPR, I remember this clearly. I was in Iran. I was listening to it.

He said, look, at the end of this deal, Iran is going to be like a week away from a bomb. Yeah. Right. He knew that when it sunsets. So all Trump really did. From having your physical, from a breakout of the Iran, which is not the same thing as the bomb. But yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, basically he said, you know, this kicks the can down the road. Yeah. Someone else is going to have to handle this. So basically my argument about the structural necessity or the strategic coherence, a lot of people said at the beginning, he has no idea what he's doing, he has a no plan, he has no strategy. I just thought that was just wrong. It was very clear what they were saying. All they were saying was we have to put back on the table the three things, the two things that

Obama took off. So we have enrichment, proxies, and missiles. And those are the war aims. It was very clear. And it made perfect sense. And this was nothing new. I had had discussions in the 2000s when I was, when I had gone from a delegation to the Bush White House. And I said, these are the things you have to have on the table, including human rights, by the way, including human rights. And that's a whole other issue. You know, it's like, I mean, the moment of levity here about like what also blows my mind is, you know, Trump saying, you know, at the beginning, you know, to the Iranian people, you know, go out on the streets, take your government. Help is at hand. And, you know, the bitter joke coming out from Iran is, oh, we heard Trump when he said help is on his way.

we just didn't know he was talking to the Iranian regime. And so, so, so what I'm, what I'm saying is that this, there was a structure, there was a, there was a logic to this that had to happen. Having failed, essentially, to handle the, the, the missiles and the fast boats in the Straits of Hormuz, Trump cut his losses. What I don't understand, that I can understand. What I don't understand is, giving away the store in the MOU. What he has done is thrown Israel under the bus in Article 1. I mean, it is mind-blowing.

Why would anyone do this? He has basically said that Hezbollah, Iran has a say on what happens in Lebanon when the president of Lebanon is saying, Hezbollah and Iran are foreign actors violating our sovereignty. He has accepted the thing that Iran has been. fighting for for 47 years. Yeah, well, the reason has to be, although he could be...

Why did he have to do it? Well, okay, it's interesting, because a lot of things come back to mind, so during, I'll tie them together, but during, when the JCPOA happened, Kissinger and other people, I remember, commented that, well, actually, Iran took the measure of the situation, and they knew that Obama was more afraid of military conflict than they were. So Obama had no leverage with Iran. And if only Obama had used his military leverage or at least the credible threat of it, maybe they would have exceeded or given it in some way, buckled in some way.

And then we fast forward now and we killed 100 plus of their leaders and we're destroying them and bombing them and they have air superiority. And they're still not giving in. So number one, maybe Obama was right in a certain sense that he was getting the best deal that he could get. And number two, I think that Trump's attitude is just sell them whatever we need. This disagreement is not going to be worth the piece of paper that it's written on. We're going to be back to bombing them. They're not going to live up to anything.

And we're going to have plenty of chances in the future to say they violated and do whatever the hell we want. let's just get the straight open now let's replenish all our oil and let's get the world economy on a strong footing i don't know why so what they've done so that has to be his reasoning yeah but what i don't understand i said what i think is puzzling what i think is really puzzling and i don't have a good answer for this right now is why you have to go far beyond i mean that m o you could have been a pause in the work in the works first of all because they wouldn't agree to it well you don't have to you You don't have to, well, in that case, in that case, I go back to my interpretation number one. It's an instrument of surrender.

You're so weak. So I're so weak that you have to give up. I mean, look, first of all, why did Vance lie? This was like one of the most amazing things, you know, everyone has the transcript has the text in front of them in the audience, and he's saying what's in the text. And they're all looking at saying, hello, it's actually not in the text. He's saying they don't get a penny until they deuce XYZ, conditioned or performance or something. It's not true. They already have money flowing into them.

So, I mean, look, so. Let me interrupt you because I heard something yesterday off the record. But I have to say when I've heard these things from these kind of sources in the past, for instance, one was weird that like James Comey was senile. Like I heard that like a year and a half before he testified before the Senate. Remember he actually was? So I heard that Trump had been told by his advice. early on, don't worry about the straight being closed.

We have plenty of time. We have strategic oil reserves. Don't believe the economy is going to be all right. And that recently he was told, you have maybe less than a month. We're running out of oil. We're tapped out. It's going to get tight. And that could be the reason.

And the Iranians probably knew this as well. But why do you have to give them Lebanon? Why do you have to recognize and throw Israel under the... The reason is, I'm not saying they should have. I'm saying the reason is because Iran says, Iran says, we're not budging. Yeah. We want to see the economy crash.

Well, then. And Trump says, I can't take it. But as a Jew, as a Jew, I'm like the last thing I want to see, as much as I want to see Iran get what's coming to them. They're not going to get what's coming to them now. But the idea of the world economy crashing because of Israel. But why is it because of Israel? I don't buy that.

Because that's what people are going to say it is. Well, if you're anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, you're going to say it anyway. Maybe, but more and more people, this is getting a snowball, a psychological snowball effect. People that you would have never in a million years expected to say certain things about Israel and the Jews are saying them now.

And this reporting, and this book, maybe I'm paranoid, or maybe I'm just like overcautious. But the idea that Israel is so a part of this story and that you're saying, what about, why give them Lebanon? Who cares about Lebanon? Most Americans say,

they don't give a shit about Lebanon. Israel cares about Lebanon. You won't give them a deal because of Lebanon. That to me means you won't give them a deal because of Israel. That's how, and that's not a ridiculous argument. I think it doesn't make sense. politically. It doesn't, yes. I mean, in other words, I mean, so the argument is you have a,

you have a leader who has to stand up. I mean, I'm with you. Look, I mean, no, no, no, I understand what you're saying. But I mean, you know, sometimes practicality is going to come back to haunt us. Yes. Because, I mean, in six months, the idea is people say that Trump could go back to bombing in six months. But in six months, Iran is going to be much more powerful. It's going to rebuild its missiles. It's going to probably rebuild. We don't know how much, but it's going to rebuild its anti-aircraft, which have been, you know, batteries, which have been destroyed. They're going to get more anti-ship missiles from, you know, from China. And they're going to beef up Hezbollah.

This is not in the U.S. interest. Well, and I know you're going to agree with this, too. First of all, it's important to acknowledge there is no democratic legitimacy for this war. and if America were sucked into actually ground troops, the country is just not going to stand for it. The country is not behind this war. And this goes to the most damning criticism of Trump as a president, this kind of seat of the pants commander-in-chiefing.

He needed to explain to the American people and somehow try. Maybe it wasn't possible. But at least, I mean, you agree with me. There are very compelling arguments that most Americans can understand as to why this is necessary. He hasn't made any of them.

I agree. And that's part of the predicament. Right, he made, well, I mean, I got to tell you, I wrote an op-ed a couple of weeks ago, and it was sort of subtitled, a superpower should not debate the Iran war in the language of the gas pump. It was rejected by all the major newspapers,

even Newsweek, which was like, you know, Batya Sangaro or something, That's our friend. That's our friend. Yes, I know. I mean, I don't think she was there anymore, but she used to be. But I was kind of surprised. I wrote it, you know, I took a lot of time.

Maybe is that guy Josh, Josh Hammer now? Is that a thing? The guy we have, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, so that was the argument. You know, I said there was an argument to be made. You know, look, in the end, in the end, the idea that a superpower cannot afford like a dollar at the pump to maintain its vital interests of freedom of navigation

in the world is a loss of understanding of what geopolitics and the world order is. But it's more than that. Just to be fair, it could be a dollar at the pump. It could be a recession. It could be pressure from our allies, their recessions. You don't know, I don't know all the ripple effects that are with. within like what economists would say is like 75% likely. But it's more than just higher gas prices.

Well, it's a cost. Whole cascading economic disaster. Well, I mean, as you pointed out, it wasn't as if the actually the economy was tanking. No. There was a lot of movement around. There's a lot of adaptation around. I mean, I think it's- I'm risk averse.

That's my problem. I have a question. Why do you think people are so against, hearing this position coming from you who obviously is infinitely more knowledgeable than all of them. Like, what is this resistance other than just really hating the Jews? And I do understand that we... He's not Jewish. I know.

No, she's saying putting all the blame on Israel. Oh, I see. I thought you meant why they wouldn't take his column because of a... No, no, no, not his column. Well, they are calling me Jewish, actually. on the Twitter now they say he's a Jew. And you probably work for the Mossad they're saying too. I can't tell you though.

You and Epstein. No, no, no. I'm not talking about his column. I'm talking about the piece that he wrote. I'm saying in general. Yes. What is this resistance to this position other than the fact that they hate the Jews, right? Okay.

Apart from the question of Israel and the Jews, it has to do with an old left-wing kind of tick and instinct within the United States. Someone like Noam Chomsky is very famous for this, represents this point of view that essentially says that the cause, the main root of all the trouble in the Middle East, and in fact, in the whole world, has to do with American militarism. America is too militaristic. It's too aggressive. And that's why we have caused the pushback throughout the world. When it comes to the Iran question,

those useful idiots that I dismiss as being essentially mistaken in their understanding, it comes down to one of two different points of view. Their point of view is,

if you ask the question, where is the roots of this toxic relationship between the United States and Iran? They will always say it's in Washington. Okay. So I say it's in Tehran. For me, it's, you know, there's just, there's just no question about this. I mean, actually, I'll tell you, I'll tell an interesting anecdote about this. I was in my, one of my, you know, endless interrogations with my nice, relatively nice, polite interrogator. And, you know, when the hours went on and I got tired and I was after many months of interrogation, you know, you get to know someone. And as I said, he was never really nasty or mean to me,

but he was always like interrogating me. I had to write less of stuff. And then I would get like, you know, we'd have a cup of tea and then I'd say, you know, I'd get a little bit loose with him. And I'd say, you know, you, you, I said you, I said you, I'd say you people, you know, but rude, you know, so.

But I'd say, you know, your side always says that America, is a bad country because it wants to imperialistically impose its way of life on other people around the world. Is that right? He said, yeah, that's right. I said, but don't you also say that America is a hypocritical, selfish power

that gets into bed with any nasty dictator an autocrat in the world to serve its own interests? He said, yeah, that's right too. I said, they can't both be true. They can't both be true. And then I waited because he was like,

and then I said, look, guys, the U.S. has given you the same deal on the table that they have given Saudi Arabia. Get out of our hair in terms of geopolitics. politics, and you can do whatever the fuck you like inside your country. Yes, we'll put out a few.

Every year we'll put out a State Department human rights report against what's going on, but you get to run your country. Just stop harassing us and getting in the way of all our allies in the region. Iran says, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want that deal. We don't want to be integrated. So you ask about Vance, completely delusional. Completely delusional. I hate him more than I've hated any politician in my lifetime. Well, I was just, I was just floored by the fact that he would lie like that and he would be like nasty like that. And anyway, I, you know, I had no dignity in the, in, you know, being being snubbed by all the people in Geneva and not knowing what to do and so forth. I mean, that's all optics. I hate him also largely just based on.

my visceral reaction, instinctually, this guy, like, this humorlessness, the stiffness, the phoniness, the phoniness. Self-righteousness. I could go into some examples of answers he's given. Everything about this guy rings alarm bells for me. I agree. I agree. When he basically played both sides with Nick Fuentes at the conservative conference, I thought that was it. For me, that was the red line. another thing. That was a, that was a, so we have to go. This has been a very interesting thing. You know, I'm extremely pro-American. And of course, America's done bad things. Of course, people have legitimate beefs with us historically. But, you know, some of these things are 50 years ago, 75 years ago. Like at some point you have to have to move on. Exactly. But there's one reality,

which it's almost going to be a tried observation, but sometimes these things are worth like remembering is that the West and the alliances between Western nations are truly based on a kind of love, like a kind of affection for each other and actually shared values and actually a happiness in mutual prosperity of other countries that for the most part recognize our belief in human rights and in a liberal rights and wanting people to achieve fulfillment in their lives and all these kind of nice things. The allies on the other side, the alliances on the other side are based on the most cynical marriages of convenience. There is nothing that China and Iran and Russia actually have a deep connection, at least to my understanding of the world, connection on. China is a

communist country that rejects religion. Iran is like you could just, they just exist and join each other for what can easily be described as evil purposes. There's no goodness or optimism or seeking something better for the world in these alliances. And the West, warts and all does. We want good for the world. And maybe we get selfish, maybe do something and maybe behind closed, yes, of course. Or screw up, yeah. But we need to understand who we are.

We should not be ashamed of our essence. They should be ashamed of their essence. If we could have what we wanted for the world, their people would thank us. If they could have what they want for the world, our people would be outraged. Absolutely right. I mean, you know, I tell my students,

I say, you know, I teach a class called, you know, competing visions of world order. And we go around the world and we say, okay, what does the Chinese government say, is that how they would like the world to be organized. And how did the Americans think about it? How did the Europeans think about it? How did the Islamic world think about it?

How did the African world think of it, et cetera? And then I say, well, which one of these would you like to live in? I mean, a world that is, you know, if Iran becomes the hegemon and is able to impose its way of life on the region and then the world, what would it look like? well, it would look like how it imposes on its own people. And I don't think that's something that I, as a liberal, I'm a classical liberal. I believe in, you know, the fundamental, you know, libertarian.

I kind of lean more libertarian these days than democratic in the sense of, you know, just majority rule. But, you know, that's what we struggle for in Iran. I mean, the basic, you know, some basic freedom to live your life and to thrive. I mean, women in Iran are not allowed to sing. they're not allowed to sing I mean you know it's like what is going on and by the and this

and this carries over to the Arab Israeli conflict in public they're not allowed to sing yeah you know we do have to go the the idea that Israel has done A, B, C, X, Y, Z things wrong vis-à-vis the Palestinians the reality that

people in charge of other people treat them badly and abusively and over time it gets worse and worse and worse and I get all that and the left I said on the show like if my if I was living in Israel and my daughter wanted like to volunteer to do advocacy for Palestinians on the West Bank I'd be proud of her I'm sure there's a million stories there of people that need need good Jewish Israelis to defend them I can accept all that but what I can't accept from these supposedly intelligent people with Columbia is the most basic obvious fact

that do you actually think that if you put these people in charge of those people, this is not going to end in misery and bloodbath and civil war? Like, how can you not, how can you say that with a straight face? How can you imagine a Hamas-led majority ruling over the Jews and say, yay, this is a fantastic outcome? Yeah, freedom from the river to the sea with Hamas ruling it. And this is where people, you know, like her, who scream anti-Semitism too often,

this is why they say that, because at that point, it's off the rails, and you begin to search for other unspoken explanations, for people advocating positions, which you really can't believe they mean. Can I... But really, they're just dumb. Can I just add something?

I mean, you've mentioned the idea of relationship with Jews and Israel and so forth. And as I say, there is a very important part of my experience, which relates to my relationship with Jewish culture or Jewish people and Israel. Before my incarceration and before having the boot of that Islamic totalitarian state on my neck for a long time, I was relatively kind of like agnostic about the question. about Israel and so forth. When I was in prison,

I was pressed more than once to denounce the person I worked for, George Soros, as a Jew. I refused. And that was dangerous to refuse. And I was never going to go down that road. When I came out, and as a result of living under a regime,

which it's blood, okay, and this is what drives me crazy about New York City, when like 40% of young Jewish people have all voted for, you know, people who denounce the state of Israel. You know what I'm talking about. We can come back and talk about my urban planning. All right, let's do that. You know, because I have a lot to say about, you know, who's running the city and how to run a city and how not to run a city. But anyway, when I came out of that experience, it became very clear to me. It became very clear to me that Israel was an was a really you know was in a really dangerous position and that and that

October 7th what I've argued essentially is that the war that Trump started was in a sense inevitable because October 7th changed the rules of the game of geopolitics in the Middle East any kind of JCPOA type deal could not have survived I've been I spoke to a senior member of the Obama negotiating team who agreed with me on this. And he said it just couldn't survive. And drones. Drones have changed.

Yeah, but the fact is Iran used the JCPOA to prop up Hamas and Hezbollah so much that the result was October 7th. And I made another controversial thing, which was a zinger on these viral things, which was that I said, you can make a strong argument that there's a straight line between the JCPOA in October 7.

And if that's the case, then this war was inevitable. I think Trump blew it. I think it was bumbled. I think it was badly planned. It was badly there. But it was going to happen this way. And the fact that he pulled out now and so on and so forth, as I say. So for me, the idea of Israel is a real, a beacon for me in the Middle East.

It's an important part of the experience of, Middle Eastern peoples. It's pluralistic. It has human rights. It has so on and so forth. And I have to tell you, I am stunned by how little my students know about just some of the basic facts about what is going on in Israel. Including the Jewish students. Yes, including the Jewish students. If you ask them, so, I mean, so this is my go-to thing. I know we've gone on far too long. I don't want to keep, I don't want to pose on your time. No, no, no, it's fine. I'm coming to your show. Not my show. But, you know, I mean, so I ask them, okay, here's the go-to thing when you're in, when you're in a debate with your friends. Ask them, when you say you're against the occupation,

do you mean 1948 or 1967? Now, most of them say, what's the difference? And you say, okay, we have a big problem here. Is the problem, I mean, not the occupation, but is the problem 1967 or is it in 1948 and when you when they've realized that it's 1948 and I told them in class just class I said okay can you do me a favor when we were we did a case study actually of the Gaza war I mean I do this and we don't get into any fights because I do it very analytically everyone takes different positions understands different things so forth I say okay can you pull up the website of the main Palestinian organization what is the logo

the flag. Can they do it? Yeah, they look it up. It's Islamic. Yeah, but it has a particular thing on it. It has the entire state of Israel green. Yeah. I said, that is the bargaining position of that side.

I mean, how can the other side enter into a bargain where they want to partition where the other side says, we don't want any partition? Well, you know, I snuck in drones, but it's, it's, oh yeah, now this is. I'm so pessimistic because, you know, for years we heard that Israel can't get out, can't leave the West Bank without a deal because it's the high ground and they can divide the country in half. You know, it's only eight miles wise. And technology has brought that all to bear now, despite the fact that they still have.

of the West Bank. The fact that the future seems to me, unless it's very, very bloody for these poor Palestinians, that's what I'm worried about, they now have the ability to have Israelis living in and out of bomb shelters every day of the week in Tel Aviv. And Israel's not going to stand for that. everything they worried about the high ground this is done already that's no longer a worry technology has brought the high ground to them

so much so we're going to have a show in a couple of weeks with this professor Sobelman very smart Israeli professor I want to discuss with him like to revisit the arguments against unilateral withdrawal because

Israel occupying this territory forever is it's a disaster. 20 years from now, Israel occupying millions of Palestinians with all the... used to be, there were very good strategic reasons

not to take that chance. And when I want to revisit with him, do all those strategic reasons still hold up because of drones and all this stuff, which is bringing it all to Tel Aviv? I'm so worried and pessimistic about the future.

And October 7th has given that side a taste that they can win and has turned the world to their side in a way which is unbelievable and ignorance and lack of being informed as such a big part of it. But anyway, I'm just kind of just rambling now,

but it's just all this kind of hopeless thing, piling one on top of another. And that's why I'm so worried about yet another straw on the camel's back, which is an American disaster or militarily, while Israel is just too much already. Israel needs to find a way out of this. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there is a way out.

Yeah. I mean, there isn't a way out. I mean, I think, you know, in a book years ago, Zabigneu Brizinski drew a map and he put a big circle around a lot of this area, and he called this the global zone of percolating violence. Basically, it's a kind of cauldron that will always bubble. And is it Islam? is it the Muslim factor?

That plays a very important role. The fact that, I mean, the Gulf Arabs are moving away from that, which is an amazing thing. I mean, the other thing, you know, I mean, you know, the other thing that Trump, you know, in his narcissistic style, he could be like really angry. So one kind of interpretation of why he, you know, wanted to throw Israel under the bus with this MOU is because he's really angry at Netanyahu for not finishing the job in Gaza because what that has done is that it's made Saudi Arabia completely pull away from the idea of the Abrahamic Accords and for Trump that was going to be his legacy and his Nobel Prize. And actually he said this to Netanyahu and I think, you know, from a military point of view,

one could say they actually, this is maybe a whole other thing and it's maybe a minefield, but I don't want to enter into this. But I, you know, one, one can make the argument that the Israeli government really bungled the Gaza war because they fell under the, they fell into the trap of, this is very controversial. I thought my view, but it, the uh that's what i say if it didn't work you need you need to go big enough well well well well well well i think here it was strategic to fall into the trap of the hostages oh i agree was a disaster that led the country uh for to go he was trapped by himself he let public opinion in in israel grow hostages are unfortunately it's tragic but they are prisoners of war

And what he did is one, you know, one could argument that basically what he did was he kept hostage nine million Jews, citizens of Israel for 100, 100 hostages in Gaza. And so wasn't able to finish the job. And, you know, I think it was Ben Gurion or someone who said the Israeli military doctrine should be, you know, short, quick, and decisive. And so this. And stay close to a superfluous. power. Yeah, and yeah, that's right. I think that's what he said. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, so this is, so this dragged on, Trump got upset because he said, look, you know, I would support you up to a point. You, you've now completely alienated MBS in Saudi Arabia. You've ruined my chance of a Nobel Prize and, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I'm really pissed off at you. You know, just to say two things about that. We do have to go. that, first of what, we don't know, even if Israel had thrown all caution to the wind, if there was a better outcome in Gaza. And second of all, we talked about this at the time, for an Israeli prime minister to publicly say,

we're not going to consider the hostages anymore. We have to, we have due. This would be a breaking of the Israeli soul. It would mark a new era in how Jews relate to the world. It would damage the country so deeply that it's the kind of thing which he had to be duplicitous about. Behind closed doors, I'm sure they had to say, listen, we do our best for the hostages, but we have to do what we have to do. And if they die, they die.

That's the kind of thing a leader would have to say Ben-Gurion as well. to make that overt policy is a psychologically breaking thing for an Israeli Prime Minister to do. It's one of these things. Like if it had happened, just by analogy, Tyler Cowen wrote a column recently about how, you know, this legalizing of marijuana was nothing like we thought it would be. I know it's a very like, you know, flippant comparison. But the point is like, you don't really know until you do something. something like that, how it's all going to turn out.

It almost never turns out like you think it will. So I have sympathy for it, although, yes, on a case-by-case basis, I was always like, listen, they have to fight. They can't be hamstrung by some hostages if victories achieved. Well, many, many more lives will be saved, right? But it's tough. The last thing I wanted to say to you was that you didn't buckle. You told another story just now, but I was going to say before you said,

they wanted you to disavow. you kept yourself respect even at risk of your life. And that, I'm guessing, makes it much harder for you to respect when someone else buckles, like the American president. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. I can see that.

All right. On that, it's been an absolute pleasure. Hopefully, well, now you're NYU. I hope we have you on again. It's been great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah. You're going to take them to see a show with the?

at the cellar now? Well, I don't know if I can take him to see a show, but... You'll hook him up? Yeah. You know, bring a friend or... Yeah, well, maybe one of my students is going out of it. Yeah, that's great. Okay.

All right. Thank you very much, sir. Oh, thank you. That was great. Thank you so much. I don't see... Go ahead. Steve hit.

It was like really...