The Dispatch Podcast - The Desperate Despots Club

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

With the war not going as smoothly as he might have hoped, Putin turns to Iran for help replenishing Russia's arsenal. Frederick W. Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at AEI, joins David to explain the nature of this alliance-of-convenience and where things could go from here.Show Notes: -Critical Threats: Ukraine Stream - Critical Threats: Iran Crisis Updates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm David French, your host today. And today's topic is going to be Iran, Russia, and the possibility of regime change in Iran. We've got a phenomenal guest today. Frederick Kagan from the American Enterprise Institute, part of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. And, man, there's so many things, I could say, about Fred Kagan. Working with General Stanley McChrystal and the Strategic Assessment Team in Afghanistan

received the Distinguished Public Service Award. The highest honor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, can present to civilians who don't work for the Department of Defense. one of the architects of the surge in Iraq, which, by the way, I served in with the third armored cavalry regiment in 0708, in which we were one of our sayings about coin counterinsurgency strategy was that you, you know, we're advocating as part of the surge that was the phrase we use, it sucks, but it works. In other words, it's really tough, but it's also very effective. But we're not going to be talking about Iraq. We're not going to be talking about Afghanistan. We're going to be talking about Russia and Iran and mainly Iran.

And so what we want to do is just start with some table setting and basic explanation and go from there. But first, welcome to the dispatch podcast. Well, thanks so much for having me. Great to be with you. It's so great to have you. Well, let's start with the very basic, a very basic question. what right now is happening between Russia and Iran with an emphasis on what is happening between Russia and Iran

as it relates to the war in Ukraine? Russian to the Iranians obviously have had an entente for many years and that entente has been based on opposition to the U.S., opposition to the U.S.-led international order and a desire to establish a front of the U. honestly, a much more Hobbesian world where states, you know, can do what they want and at least strong states can and weaker states have to put up with it. So they've had that agreement for some time and obviously started to build out the rudiments of a military coalition when the Russian forces

entered it to the war in Syria in 2015. But it's not an alliance. And it's not a alliance. And it's never been anything like that because their interests only sort of align. Their interests align mainly around negative objectives rather than any positive vision of how they want the Middle East to be or how they want the world to be. One of the things that their interests interact around is the question of money. Historically, the Russians have had a lot of that and the Iranians haven't had much. So the Iranians spend a long time trying to get the Russians to sell them weapons, especially air defense systems like the S-300. And it's pretty clear that a lot of the time the Iranians were asking for credit and the Russians were demanding cash on the battle

barrelhead and so that, you know, there's a lot of scar tissue on both sides from that. So what's happened in Ukraine war is that as the Russians have fired their way through their arsenal of precision munitions, they've turned to the Iranians for the Iranian equivalents or Iranian, Iranian substitutes like the drones that we've seen used and now the missiles that the Russians want to buy. And I think the Iranians are enjoying this a lot because they spent many years begging the Russians for help. And now the Russians have to come to them and ask for help. But it's a rather transactional relationship when you get beyond the fundamental hostility to the U.S. and the U.S.-led international order. So, okay, if I'm sitting here and I'm looking at

the balance of power between Ukraine and Russia right now. And we've seen Ukraine achieve some pretty remarkable battlefield successes in recent months. And you see advanced American weapons flowing into Ukraine. And you see Russia reaching out to Iran for Iranian weapons. First blush, you would think, advantage Ukraine in that arrangement, if you're talking about who are you seeking your weapons from. But let's dive a little bit deeper into this. How effective are these Iranian weapons that Russia is seeking?

When a country like Russia has to go to Iran to get precision weapons, that's an indication the Russians are in trouble. By the way, the Russians are also buying artillery shells from North Korea. And when you have to buy anything from a country that has a GDP that rounds to zero, that's a way of knowing that you're really in trouble. The munitions that the Iranians are providing are good enough that the Russians are able to use them to hit critical nodes in the Ukrainian power grid and turn out the lights. And they are adequate substitutes for precision weapons in a basic way. The drones the Iranians are giving are problematic for the Russians because they're actually relatively easy to shoot down. And the Ukrainians have been shooting down anywhere from 50 to 75.

percent of the drones fired at them for some time. And it's now it's generally around 75 percent or higher because the drones really weren't made to operate in this kind of environment or if they were made, they weren't made well enough. So it does give the Russians a capability that they otherwise don't have and that they think they need. But it's not superb technology. And it's not as good as the technology that the Russians in principle had designed themselves but have found themselves unable to continue to generate through the war. Well, let's go down that rabbit hole just a bit. I've heard a lot of discussion about Russia's ability to mobilize its economy to replace the advanced weaponry that it has lost or expended so far. And I've also heard a lot of discussion and

speculation that essentially says they, because of Western sanctions, they just can't do it. In other words, they cannot replace all of the cruise missiles they fired because of the inability to obtain chips, for example, or other forms of advanced technology that are used to make the cruise missiles, to make the most advanced tanks, to construct the most advanced fighter aircraft. How true is that assessment? I mean, how limited are they in their ability to truly sort of mobilize their economy for a war effort and replace all of this advanced weaponry that they've either fired, expended, or lost?

So there's a simple answer to that and a complicated answer, though. The simple answer is, evidently, it is true that they can't do that because they're buying this stuff from the Iranians instead of producing more of their own. Right. Now, the more complicated question is,

could the Russians have mobilized their economy if Putin had tried to do that. And to what extent can they mobilize it now that he seems to have realized that he needs to? And this gets back to the fundamental mistake that Putin made going into this war, which was that he didn't think it was going to be a war. He thought the Russian troops were going to waltz in and the Ukrainians would grade them as liberators and that kind of stuff. So he didn't put his economy on the war footing. And he waited until a long time into the war, even to start talking about putting his economy on a war footing. So now he's sort of trying to do that,

but it's rather late. And it really does seem to be the case that the Russians have not stockpiled the kind of chips and other things that they would need from the West, nor have they been able to generate other routes for getting that stuff at scale, such that they don't seem to be able actually to churn out this high-end weapon systems rapidly at scale, even as they're trying to mobilize. Now, will they be able to address that problem over time? It's hard to tell. They can't produce chips indigenously. They don't have the capability to do that. So they would have to get them from somewhere. Part of this may become a cat and mouse game of Western sanctions and countries trying to lock down Russian routes to circumvent sanctions, you know, or the Russians

may try to find other ways to do this. But it's rather hard to be. build smart weapons without chips. Right. And if you don't produce them yourself, then you have a problem. So I think the Russians have a problem. It would seem that this dynamic is meaning, not just are you reaching out to Iran for whatever Iran can give you, but it's also incentivizing or maybe incitivizing is probably the wrong word,

but rendering necessary a reliance on lower precision weapons. In other words, mass artillery fires. A lot of discussion that I've read about the capacity of the Russian military, to continue to blanket the battlefield with artillery. It would seem that purchasing rounds from North Korea would indicate that that ability might be reaching its limits. But how much do we know about the ability of the Russians to just sort of continue to use raw firepower,

unguided artillery munitions to make up for its deficiencies in precision weapons? The fact that the Russians are buying artillery rounds from the North Koreans is just mind-boggling to me. This is World War II technology we're talking. It's a World War I technology, really.

Right. There's nothing hard about producing artillery rounds. So there's something very fundamentally wrong with your military industry if you are not able to produce rounds like this, especially where the Russian military has always prioritized and prized artillery.

There's clearly a big problem on the Russian side as they try to do this. The problem, I think, is more complicated than the issue of production, though. And it's been complicated by the provision of U.S. Himar systems to Ukraine even before the Russians started running out of shells. Because if you want to use artillery en masse, World War I style, to blanket the battlefield, you need to have huge dumps of artillery rounds

close to your guns. And as long as the enemy can't attack those dumps, It's fine. But once we started providing the Ukrainians with High Mars that could reach out and hit those dumps close to the front lines, one of the things that we saw was that the Russians had to adapt to that. So they started drawing their supply depots further back and also decentralizing so that they had more smaller depots. And the problem is that that introduces a lot of inefficiencies into your bombardments because it takes longer to drive trucks around. and all that kind of stuff. The Haimars had already complexified the Russians' ability to do this.

They're still doing it. They were finding around somewhere. I mean, Ukrainians, it's evident from the battlefield that there's huge amounts of Russian artillery fire landing all over the place. But again, the problem with artillery is, so you bomb the bejesus out of some area. We discovered in World War I, you never kill everybody in the area when you do that.

You never destroy every armored vehicle there. There's still defenders. And when you're done bombing them, you've got to do something about it. And this is where the Russian army has just failed terribly. And at this point, now you have to look at the very poor quality of Russian soldiers, the extreme demoralization, lack of supply, lack of enthusiasm for fighting this war. That just means that even when they bombed the bejesus out of Ukrainian defenders, the Russian commanders still have a very hard time getting their guys trying to move forward.

And when they do, the Ukrainians generally stop them. So the artillery offset has made this a horrific bloody war for Ukraine, but it's no longer really giving the Russians an advantage on the battlefield, and it won't even, however many, shells the North Koreans ship. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones

and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance, can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage, with a 4.8 out of five-star

rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through ethos. It builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. This Iranian relationship with Russia, the Iranian supply lines towards Russia and the war, Is this having any impact in ongoing U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations? Are there ongoing U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations? Well, let's back up a little bit. Is the idea of resurrecting the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran essentially over at this point?

Look, the only person who knows if the idea is over is President Biden, and I don't know whether the president has decided that this isn't going to happen or not. It's evident that the Iranian Supreme Leader Chaminet has not been very enthusiastic about accepting President Biden's offers to reenter the deal because if Chaminet had wanted to do it, President Biden put it on the table pretty much the moment he took office. Right. So there's a calculation in Tehran that I think the Biden administration, didn't expect that has held the Iranians back from accepting U.S. offers to this point.

We've had a lot of pessimistic statements from Rob Malley and other U.S. administration officials about the deal. I think it would be very challenging to defend restoring the deal, which would involve lifting sanctions on a lot of Iranian organizations while the Iranians are engaged in an absolutely brutal, vicious crackdown on their own people. and supplying the Russians with the wherewithal to attack Ukrainian civilians and commit war crimes. I think that would be a tough sell at this moment domestically.

So I'm not sure what the administration's theory would be if they were carrying on with that, but I haven't seen any indication that they really are. So this is a question, you know, when you said that Tehran might not be interested, I can imagine a lot of listeners would be surprised by that. Why would Tehran not be interested in entering into negotiations with the Biden administration.

I mean, I guess, you know, one thing off the top of your head you can think of is, well, the United States broke the deal before. Why would they want to say, well, this time, oh, yes, this time we're going to enter into deal with you and this time you'll keep it. But why would Tyron say, no, no thank you to Biden administration overtures? That's one reason. The Supreme Leader was always lukewarm about this deal, and it was apparent in the run-up to the deal and then after the deal that his guys, and especially President Rouhani, really had to work hard to persuade him to accept the deal. And Humane's opposition or reluctance seems to have been based on a few factors.

One was he never trusted the U.S. He never thought that we would commit to the agreement. And he never thought we would keep our word. And at the time of the deal, we had reports that suggested that Rohani and others, you know, might have sold him on the basis of, look, even if the Americans pull out, we'll get a short-term benefit. You know, it doesn't require us to do anything that permanently shuts down our ability to pursue a nuclear program. So it's okay if they pull out. And I think the Supreme Leader accepted that.

But he always expected us to double-cross him. And then from his perspective, we did. So one can only imagine that argument being even stronger now. But I also think it's worth interrogating the other basis on which he was always lukewarm about the deal. Supreme Leader Chaminet, like his predecessor, Khomeini, doesn't understand economics and has a fundamentally mercantilist view of economics. And he has been championing for a long time an economic vision that is fundamentally autark. and opposed to integration into the global economy on two bases. One is the more integrated Iran is into the world economy,

the more vulnerable Iran is to sanctions in the future. And so the way to sanctions prove Iran is just not to be involved in the global economy. So it's kind of a weird, you know, committing suicide for fear of being murdered, right? We're worried that we might be sanctioned. So we'll just basically sanction ourselves. But beyond that, look, the Supreme Leader is, committed to a socio-religious agenda first and foremost. And that's become even more apparent as he continues to double down on enforcing the wearing of hijab, which is blowing Iran up right now.

But he's the one who's insisting on that. And one of his concerns, stated concerns about integrating into the global economy has always been that if you integrate it to the global economy, the West comes in. And with the West comes all of the cultural baggage that he sees as the greatest threat to the revolution. So it's more than just a question of U.S. perfidy or whether we will keep our word this time. The Supreme Leader's always been uncomfortable about every aspect of this deal. And I think that that discomfort probably won the day here, possibly by a small margin, whereas in 2014, President Rouhani was able to push him in the other direction, again, probably by a pretty small margin.

What does all this mean for the Iran nuclear program? What is the state of it now? Is this a country that is in active pursuit of a weapon? If so, how close do we believe that they are? Where are we? Well, you need to get a different expert on your show to offer a really definitive answer. Are they pursuing a weapon?

I don't know. Are they pursuing the basis to be able to have a nuclear arsenal? Yes. And I think it's important that we not get so focused on the question of the decision to build a nuclear weapon now or the breakout to one nuclear weapon that we lose sight of the fact that the Iranians have been constructing an enrichment program that would support building not a weapon but an arsenal. and they have been willing to suffer really horrific economic consequences to defend that program. And there is no reason for them to insist on a program at that scale if all they want is peaceful nuclear energy. So it's very hard to look at the enrichment program and see it as anything other than part of a determination to create the capability to have a nuclear arsenal if and when they ever choose to pursue weaponization. So let's move from weaponization and nuclear Iran and talk about the protests.

What is your sense of how widespread these protests are? How serious are these protests? If you're an American who's sort of been longing for the Iranian regime to fall, is this false hope, wishcasting, or is something going on that potentially is an actual threat to the regime. So first of all, let me plug the terrific work that the Critical Threats project Iran team has been doing with the daily tracking, daily mapping and daily updates on the protests, which you can find at Critical Threats.org, which gives me a fair amount of confidence and saying, no, this is really serious. This protest movement is different

from any previous protest pattern than we've seen in Iran. It's lasted longer. It's following a different pattern of ebbing and flowing. People have been willing to continue to go out into the streets, even as the regime has started shooting people, as the regime has imprisoned 14 or 16,000 demonstrators and is reportedly doing terrible things to people whom it does arrest. The nature of the protest demands, or complaints anyway, have morphed. It obviously started as a protest against the hijab requirements and the horrific killing of mass. Amini for violating them. But it's now become very much of a political protest movement. And it's increasingly becoming an explicitly revolutionary protest movement. Again, we need to be

careful there because Iranians chanting death to Chaminé down to the regime is not new. We've seen that in previous protest waves. But we are seeing chants and slogans that say, no, this really is a revolution in a way that is clearly intended to make it clear that this is being Beyond Mark Barr Homone, you know, death of hominay, this is meant to be more than that. We're also seeing the emergence of protest organizations that the regime should be very worried about because previous protest waves didn't last long enough to have organic leadership and organic organization develop within the protest movement. But this one has.

And on the one hand, it appears to be a highly decentralized organization, but that makes it much more resilient and much more robust. I think that this really is serious, and I think there's another factor that we need to bring in here, which is the prospect of Supreme Leader's succession. Now, we need to be careful about this because Chaminet has been supposedly about to die for decades. You need to be cautious making any observations about that. it's really pretty clear that he had an actual health scare early on in his protests such that the regime was talking about succession in a much sharper way than they had before. And I think that that's important because the prospect of Supreme Leader Succession is now hovering over all of the regime decision making. And even as regime insiders are arguing with one another

about what to do, they're also clearly looking around and thinking about how they want to position themselves whenever Chaminet actually goes. And that was not a phenomenon that we really saw in previous protest waves. And it's generating hesitancy on the part of the regime and tension within the regime about how to react to the protests that, again, we really haven't seen in previous protest waves. So I think when you put those two factors together, we have to acknowledge that this is a very serious protest movement that's going on. And it probably poses the most significant threat to the survival of the Islamic Republic since it's, well, since the Iran-Iraq war anyway. Well, let me, as we're getting closer to our time here, let me ask you this

question. This is going to be a hard one. Let's just imagine that President Biden calls you and says, can you come visit with me in the Oval Office? And I really want to understand your perspective on prudent measures that my administration could take to help foster the success of efforts to depose the regime in Iran and to replace it with something that would be constructive and better, both for the people of Iran and for American national interests. How would you advise the president in that circumstance? Well, it is a difficult question. I would say, first and foremost, we should be doing everything we possibly can to help the Iranian people communicate with each other in the world.

And that's probably the single most important thing that it's appropriate for the U.S. to do. I have no interest in having the U.S. try to decide what the future government of Iran should look like or try to make that happen as I don't need to tell you that's a very fraught undertaking. And the truth is that the Iranians are going to have to decide that for themselves. But I do think that we can and should help the Iranian people defeat the regime's efforts to silence them and to stop them from organizing and to stop them from communicating with the world. There are various other things that we should do, and some of which we are doing about holding the regime responsible and accountable sanctions, which we've been pursuing, although at this point we're at risk of sort of making the rubble bounce with the sanctions. And I'm in favor of that, but the impact of that is likely to be limited. Our ability actually to help the Iranians overthrow the regime in ways that are appropriate and won't end up compromising the revolution if there will be one or having very undesirable

consequences are limited. But let me tell you what I'm actually worried about and what I would want to tell President Biden. We should not assume that an Iranian revolution against this regime now will implode in the way that the 1979 revolution did. And by that I mean that a combination of the way Khomeini pursued that revolution and the fact that Saddam invaded Iran almost immediately meant that for the first decade of the Islamic Republic,

to a very considerable extent, the energy of the revolution was contained within Iran, with limited spillover to the region. It obviously significant spillover. I mean, the Iranians created Lebanese Hezbollah and various other things, but it's relatively limited. Most of the energy was contained in Iran. I don't think that will be the case in a revolution that might emerge from this movement for several reasons. First of all, the Iranians have now created an interoperable military coalition of their proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, secondary.

early Afghanistan that has very significant military capabilities and some financial and a lot of leadership capabilities independent of the Islamic Republic. That coalition, which the Iranians call the axis of resistance, is not just going to vanish in a puff of smoke if this regime falls. So we need to have a strategy for dealing with the remnants of that coalition and the efforts it will certainly undertake to either resolidify its own power base independent of Iran or to undermine any successor to this regime that might emerge in Iran. So that's one concern. The other concern that I have is that one of the things that makes this revolution or this movement very dangerous to the regime is that it's fueling ethnic insurgencies that have always

been burning in Iran at relatively low flame most of the time, specifically in Kurdistan and Balutistan, secondarily in Huzestan. And the fact that Masaamini was a Kurd, meant that this movement burned into Iranian Kurdistan very quickly and clearly ignited Kurdish sentiment against the regime. This is an interesting time in history for there to be a Kurdish insurgency in Iran, if that insurgency becomes part of a revolution that overthrows this regime because of the territory that Syrian Kurds have carved out for themselves, because of the much greater degree of autonomy that Iraqi Kurds have, and at the same time, because of Turkish President Erdogan's enthusiasm for invading Syria and for bombing Syria and Iraq to attack

the Kurdish populations there. So we would really need to be concerned about the possibility that an Iranian revolution now could lead to very significant regional destabilization that would have immediate impacts on the U.S. because the U.S. is basis in these Kurdish areas. And we still need them because there is still a huge ISIS population in the ISIS camps that the Kurds are currently protecting or guarding rather. and ISIS is eager to resurge. It's not done. And there are U.S. bases there that are vulnerable to Iranian attacks, Turkish attacks, or just getting caught in the crossfire.

This is what I'm worried about. I think this administration, like its predecessor, but more so, has decided that we're done with the Middle East. We're not fighting in the Middle East. We don't need to be prepared to fight the Middle East. It's all about China. There's maybe a detour to deal with Russia, but we're done with the Middle East. And my concern is, The Middle East isn't done with us. So my main advice, the president, would be make sure that you're getting some very serious military and political advice about all of the ways that an Iranian revolution might go down. And what all of the implications of that might be for the U.S. forces in the region and what forces and capabilities we might need to defend ourselves, let alone to defend our allies and partners in various different courses of action that this can take. So my main concern is that we could be sleepwalking into a very predictable bad situation. You know, I think that is exactly the cheery note that we need to end on.

No, I really truly appreciate the conversation and really truly appreciate your work. As I said, you know, I was directly involved in the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest of roles in connection with the work. you did with the surge, but I did see its success firsthand. I saw the transformation in Dialla province where I was from November of 2007

when we flew in a in a series of Chinook helicopters because we could not move on the ground without inevitable attack. And in September of 2008 when my armored cavalry squadron left,

we rode out because we had secured that entire territory. The surge made a dramatic difference, and that's something that maybe on an anniversary of it, we can have you back and walk through that particular history because I think it's a really, really important history, and I'm very happy to talk to you. Thank you so much.

And let's plug Institutes for Study of War, has been following the Russia-Ukraine War day by day since the start. It is a destination. It's absolutely a destination site for me. The Critical Threats Project at AEI, also a destination site. Anything else that you'd like to let the people know about? No, well, first of all, I thank you for what you did on the ground in Iraq. I helped people have an idea.

You helped make it happen. And I hear you because I remember driving into Bakuba in the back of a buttoned up striker. the first time I went there and being able to walk around after that it was amazing so thank you for all of the work and sacrifice I'm incredibly proud of the team at the Institute for the Study of War

that has been following the Russia-Ukraine war since before it started and of the Iran team at the Critical Threats project that's been doing that for these protests so find our great work at Critical Threats.org and

understanding war.org thank you so much for having me. Oh, thank you so much. And listeners, thank you for listening. And please rate us and please subscribe. And as always, please check out our continued work from the team at thedispatch.com. Did you lock the front door? Check.

Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitor. for our personal info on the dark web? Uh, I'm looking into it.

Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply.