WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Raphael S. Cohen

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Raphael “Rafi” Cohen is director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE, director of the Pardee RAND Graduate School National Security Program, professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND, and a senior political scientist at RAND. He works on a broad range of defense and foreign policy issues, including defense strategy and force planning, Middle East and European security, and civil-military relations.Cohen joined Erin Osborne on WRFH while on Hillsdale's campus. From 04/02/25.

Hello, this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Aaron Osborne. And with me today is Dr. Rafi Cohen of the Rand Group, where he is a senior political scientist. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. We're going to kind of dive right into it today. Your specialty is counterterrorism, correct? So I cover counterterrorism at Rand because we are something called an FFRDC of Federal Refunded Research and Development Corporation. That means we do consulting work for the Department of Defense. So we focus in on basically whatever is the interest of the Department of Defense yesterday. So I've done counterterrorism in the past. I've also done great power competition with China and Russia.

Information warfare, gray zone operations. We cover the whole gamut. So let's start off with how has counterterrorism changed in the past 20 years? If I'm correct, you were in Iraq in 2005, 2006. How do you see it have changed since, say, early 2000s Middle East? Sure. So, I mean, I think at sort of the broad brushstrokes, we've moved out of the major wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, where counterterrorism really was at the forefront of the policy agenda. Beginning, particularly with the 2018 national defense strategy, the sort of bumper sticker of that is that interstate competition, not.

counterterrorism is the primary focus of the United States. And so ever since then, while we've continued to do counterterrorism operations, be it in the Middle East, be it in Southeast Asia, Africa, and like, it's always been in sort of a sub-focus to that broader Great Power competition that's playing out globally. Okay. And when you say Great Power Competition, to clarify, are you speaking mostly about Iran, Russia, China, or is there anyone that you tend to focus on in your work? Yeah, so the, you know, ever since the Obama administration, the focus has really been on China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and then terrorism. So the acronym is cricket, right?

And, you know, each administration will sort of prioritize, you know, is it China and Russia on top, and then Iran, North Korea, bottom, or if it just China and then all four of them on the bottom. So there's a little bit of mixture between the two. So what's fairly clear is that China is this sort of overall national security threat. That's a pacing threat. It's, that was true under the current Trump administration. It was true under Biden. It's true under Trump won. And it's going to remain true because it's by far the largest and most important of the bunch. So what makes China the most important when we're talking about great power competition?

Because China, unlike Iran or unlike North Korea, those are primarily regional adversaries. Iran can exhort control via its proxies in the Middle East. You see this playing out with Houthis. You saw it with Hezbollah or Hamas. So you've seen it in sort of spectacular space since October 7th. North Korea can exert some sort of control to a lesser extent on the Korean Peninsula, but they're regional. Russia, by contrast, has a little bit more reach. It has most directly fairly significant combat operations in Ukraine,

the stunt grades on operations elsewhere. But all of that sort of pales in comparison to China. And the reason because is that China has, by some measures, an economy on power sauce, depending on how you want to count it. The People's Liberation Army has a most, military that's larger in some cases than the United States. The PLAN, the Navy is, in fact, larger than the United States Navy. And it also has the economic and political influence. And that is throwing all around the globe. So you see very much in today's debate about, say,

the Panama Canal or about Greenland, right? What's driving that debate is concern that China will use this economic influence to snap up either critical maritime lines of communication in the Panama Canal or critical resources in the case of Greenland and use that economic influence as like. And so that's why it's the only one that could be sort of a peer competitor to the United States. All of those other countries that I mentioned are sort of way distant seconds. Fantastic. And you mentioned kind of China as a peer competitor to the United States. Thinking about China's economics, obviously, it kind of depends on how you count it. But I wanted to ask about the influence of sanctions either from America or the Western countries as a whole.

I know that they just released, I think, sanctions on a couple things related to Hong Kong a couple days ago. What do you say about those and their efficacy? Sure. So we've been sanctioning the Chinese for a while now. And there's a, first off, there's different kinds of sanctions, right? So they are quote-unquote smart sanctions, which a term I hate. We can talk about that later. But those are very targeted sanctions against either specific members.

So the ones vis-a-viso-hung Hong Kong were specifically PLA officers who were engaged in direct attack, direct malfeasance. And then there's sectual sanctions which go after the economy as a whole. In general, sanctions have not produced a dramatic effect. What I mean by dramatic effect is, has it stopped China from muscling type of Juan, for instance? Has it stopped China from the cohort police stations that they've run globally? Or a myriad of other things that they cause the United States concern. In general, sanctions as a pool of national security tend not to produce those sort of big, dramatic national security victories. What they can do, though, is have sort of more limited effects.

And I think you could debate whether or not that's had an effect here. I should note that it's really hard to use sanctions against a country as large and as powerful as China. It's far easier to exert sanctions against a smaller economy, particularly once. are close to us, but even in those cases, not all of them succeed. You know, good case and point. Look at Cuba. You know, we've been sanctioned out to Wausu. The communist regime still is there. Absolutely. And if you're just draining us now, my name is Aaron Osborne, and I'm speaking with a senior political scientist from Rand, Dr. Rafi Cohen. Talking about sanctions and all of that sort of thing and everything that we've seen coming out of China,

I was wondering if you could actually talk about their, military drills, I think, yesterday or two days ago in, well, around Taiwan. Sure. Yeah. So this is one of a sequence of drills that Taiwan, that the Chinese government has been launching vis-a-vis Taiwan. And what the concern is, is gradual incrementalism. So they're normalizing these drills and slowly sort of chipping away at what had been fairly well-established norms. You know, it used to be a big deal when China cross. the median line of the Straits of Taiwan, no longer. And the concern is from a U.S. national security standpoint is that one of these days,

they'll launch one of these drills, and then they just won't bring the forces back home, and they'll have established a de facto blockade of the island. That's obviously concerning from an American national security standpoint, concerning even more so if you're living on Taiwan. on. And when we talk about this kind of normalization, is there anything that would be an appropriate response to that? Yeah. So this gets into the question of like, how do you respond to gray zone activity, right? So when we talk about gray zone activity, there's responding to direct conflict. You know, we know what to do with, you know, those another country gets invaded. It's very clearly

an act war. The question here is, what happens when you do, when it's not a, a, overt aggression in quite the same way. So do you respond with something less, with sort of a lesser measure sanctions we just talked about? Do you respond about launching drills of your own? And, you know, and sort of we'll do tit for tat drill for drill. Do you respond by other sort of symbolic uses of support for Taiwan? You know, you can make the argument, like, do you have, like, send a high-level visit to Taiwan as sort of a showing the flag that way? It's, there's pros and cons to all of these measures. But those are the kind of, you know, different levers of natural powers that we think about

employing in these kind of scenarios. And do we see Chinese gray zone activities just with Taiwan or what are some other examples? I know you mentioned economic pressure internationally. Could you elaborate any more on that? Yeah. So let me give you an example. This is actually where counterterrorism and great power competition go hand in hand. So in my military capacity, and so in addition to my hand at me, and I'm Army Reservist,

and I did an exercise a few years back in Embassy, Nwachat, which is in Mauritania. Now, for those of you who haven't been to Mauritania, it is, it's in Africa, and it's in need of development in fairly dramatic fashion. I was at Embrycy Newarkat, which is the U.S. Embassy. the road outside of the embassy had only recently been paved when I was there. And the row it was paved was through Chinese investment. It's called the Belt and Road Initiative. It's basically, we will give you infrastructure in exchange for you give us natural resources.

It's a very sort of quid pro quo bit. And for countries around the world that are desperate for infrastructure development, they'll cut all these sort of deals with China or they'll take out loans that they can't repay. that trapped diplomacy. And functionally, then the Chinese will end up exerting influence to economic means as well. And that's problematic for American national security because it can lock us out of resources. It can lock us out of influence, out of basing. And that has a whole host of sort of second order effects there, too.

Talking about that, is that sort of China Belt and Road Initiative what you see with the Panama Canal too? or is that something a little bit separate? Yeah, so, I mean, China has made an effort to buy up key infrastructure or places adjacent to key infrastructure around the world, specifically around key ports or this case, straits. And the reason why that's consulting for American national security is, you know, American trade, and oh, by the way, American military power projection have to go through the Panama Canal,

particularly if you want to move from East Coast ports to West Coast ports. So the concern is that if China buy the infrastructure, in the event of a crisis or conflict, they will use that infrastructure and use that leverage to shut off that line of communication for us. You see this not simply in the Panama Canal, by the way. You see this elsewhere. You know, there's concerns about trying to buying ports elsewhere.

There's also concerns about China buying farmland and around the United States, which, oh, by the way, happened to be a neo-American military basis. Very convenient. It is very convenient. It is a matter of concern. And, you know, thankfully, this is partly why you see increasing concern. You know, there's one of the few things that Washington can actually agree on is that Chinese influence is a problem. And that's part of the world where we're focusing on it today. Absolutely. And to talk about, you mentioned a lot of ports.

When I think of the People's Liberation Army, I think of a land power. Can I ask why, or has there been a shift towards more of like a naval power approach to Chinese strategy and why? Yeah. So there has been. It's still primarily a land power, but back several years ago, trying to make a active effort to downsize the size of the People's Liberation Army and grow the Navy. The reason for that is if you want to eventually reunify with Taiwan, which, President Xi has made a very clear that that is part of fulfilling the Chinese dream, you need naval power.

And oh, by the way, if you want to exhort power and become the regional hegemon in Asia, you need naval power as well. And if you want to exhort influence beyond that, you need naval power. Now, if you look at raw numbers of people, you still have a fairly significant people's liberation army. You also have a people's own police, which is this paramilitary rank, and that exhorts both influence abroad, but it also has a sort of domestic security world, too. And China cares a lot about, well, domestic security because the regime has worried about its own survival. And when we're talking about China, obviously as an international power, but specifically as a Pacific power, are there any regional competitors or is it really? the United States is a comparable entity.

So there's a United States, and this is where American allies are particularly important, because it's not just us, it is the Japanese. And the Japanese, you know, back up to the end of World War II, we built into their constitution that thou shalt not spend X amount on defense. They've busted that cap partly because of threats of Chinese power. It's also countries like the Australians, the Philippines, and a variety of others that sort of help counter Chinese influence. There's also American partners that all sort of have an interesting role here to play too. India would be a prime example here, which is traditionally been non-aligned, but has been growing closer to the United States,

largely because of concern over Chinese growing Chinese influence. And if you're just joining us now, my name is Aaron Osborne, and I'm speaking with Dr. Rafi Cohen, a senior political scientist with Rand. I wanted to talk to you about this Chinese-India relationship or the tensions that are building there. What is that centered around? So there's a bunch of different reasons here. Most notably, they have a contested border. And occasionally you will have these dust-ups on the border, which have killed Indian soldiers in the past. Beyond that, there's a competition for influence and power.

But, you know, there's questions about, you know, who has, who is going to be the sort of natural power center for Asia. India has a population that does not yet have the economy that's unparall with China. And so that's sort of been a natural fiction point as well. Do you see that as something that's really exacerbated by bricks, or is bricks something that's kind of encouraging them to try to work together? Is it altogether different? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't put the bricks. I mean, I think you do see alignment here, particularly more between China and Russia, less so between China and India. Okay. And there's a couple reasons for that. Russia has a lot of what China needs, natural resources, energy in particular. By contrast, China has a lot of what Russia needs, most notably economics and economic base. And that has become increasingly, that level of cooperation has only grown since the war in Ukraine.

Moreover, China also views Russia as a source for something that they traditionally have lacked, which is actual experience in military combat. So China's taking careful note of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, adapting that for their own use, and with other adversaries in mind, most notably else. And what would you say that China's been learning from the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Sure. So some questions about Western red lines. You know, how far will the United States and its allies intervene should you bully another country? it's learning some very tactical lessons as well. So drone warfare is something that everyone is learning from the war in Ukraine. We are learning from it. We, the United States.

China's learning for it from us well. In fact, if you see sort of Chinese propaganda videos, you'll see if drone armies and so forth. But a lot of that is being directly tied back to the war in Ukraine. And when you mention drones in their development, do you see her, how do you see that influencing the battlefield? Sure. Or even military planning.

Yeah. So let's put it. So since the end of the Cold War, the United States has, I mean, from a sort of military standpoint, gone down to fewer numbers of ever more exquisite platforms, right? So good example here is a B-2 bomber, right? Very fancy, stealthier bomber, state-of-the-art of this day, we only bought 20 of them. The reason is they cost $2 billion a pop, you can only buy so many. What drones allow you to do is to regain mass. Now, let me give you some numbers for that.

Prior, you know, I did field work in Ukraine. It's one of the great things about being in Rand. You get to go to interesting places and ask sort of important national security questions. You know, prior to the war, they had about seven or eight companies producing a couple thousand drones. a year. This year they're on track to produce 4 million. Wow. Yes. And now, to be clear, not all of those drones are the drones that we would want to use for Taiwan Straits scenario. Some of them are very basic, very simple, but they get the job done. And drones have become one of the primary killers on the battlefield, both Ukrainian drones targeting Russians,

Russian drones talking in Ukrainians. That's going to remain true on a future battlefield when we look to, you know, a notion of war in the Indo-Pacific or else well for that matter, too. It's a revolutionary technology. And has there been any other revolutionary insights or changes

that you've seen in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Sure. So there are a bunch. There's much more use of space, and particularly the advent of commercial space. And this is where, you know, traditionally, if you go back to

the Gulf War, right? If you think about how that war was conducted, one of the major innovations was that the United States was able to do this massive left hook around into the deserts of Iraq and caught the Iraqis off guard. The reason we caught the Iraqis off guard is the Iraqis didn't believe that any country could successfully navigate out in the desert and not get lost. Now, what was enabled that was the advent of GPS, and that navigation allowed for military revolution. That's goal for one. For the next several decades, so space and GPS being one of it, those capabilities were sort of kept in-house to only the very wealthy countries who have that sort of access to government. If you look at Ukraine, and this brings us back to the question, you have a series of

advent of commercial space which everyone can get access to. Ukrainians have got access to, most notably Staling, and that keeps the communications, it keeps the Internet functioning in Ukraine. But it also means that Western journals also get access to satellite imagery. So some of the reasons why Russian disinformation campaigns don't work is partly because there's the availability of max our imagery, which, you know, read media outlets can purchase. And then we'll say, well, you know, the Russians say they're doing this, but, you know, we have the imagery that shows the opposite. It makes the world more transparent as well. And that's been a true revolutionary as well.

There's been other advances in Ukraine as well, but, you know, I can leave that. to us future questions. You just said something that really interests me that Russian disinformation hasn't been working. In that respect. In that respect. Okay. I was going to ask how you see that that's kind of shifted

or how the social media landscape or that sort of thing has changed credibility. Yeah, so it's changed the way. It's harder for us to hide, right? So there's fewer secrets. I think you could all give us the fewer secrets, partly because of what we were talking about. You know, imagery makes it fairly easy to see. Now, what you can do is put out a lot of noise.

And this is where it gets to social. You know, once we move it back to the social media, three hours, you know, thanks to the advent of bots, you can put out a lot of falsehoods. And, you know, not all of them will stick, but some do. At Rand, we published a paper who almost a decade ago called the firehood of falsehoods, right? And the argument

of the authors made was the Russian disinformation model is the firehodes of falsehoods. They just spray a lot of stuff out there knowing that a bunch of it is going to get debunked, but some of it will stick. And if your goal in your strategic goal is to

sort of gunk up the works and cause chaos, that's a perfectly fine model. Now, it's not a model that you want to adopt if you want to then govern afterwards. You're basically injecting a lot of chaos into the system. But nonetheless, it is, you know, it's a tool that's now available to people. So, you know, technology cuts both ways, you know, cleaner imagery on the one hand and then I form more complex information environment. To kind of bring us back to China, do you see China as doing this same? sort of fire hose of falsehoods, or do they approach the information space differently?

That's really an interesting question. We did a study of that sponsored for the Air Force several years ago. And at that point in time, China had not globed on to that tactic in quite the same way. And the thesis I had at the time was China, I mean, again, I'll cite another Rand report, a late colleague of mine had the title that, you know, Russia is a rogue, not a peer, China is a pure, not a rogue. So, which is like China wants to govern and therefore they wouldn't be spouting, like causing random chaos, right? You can only be a chaos monkey for so long and, like, not have things fall apart.

Since then, though, we've uncovered more Chinese disinformation campaigns as well. They've gotten closer to the Russia model. Not to the same degree that we see the Russians operating, but nonetheless, it's not nearly as clean cut as it used to be. And you mentioned domestic security as a priority for China. Is a lot of that disinformation that we're seeing related to, like, Xinjiang, or is it more externally focused looking at the West? I suppose. So they do a lot to try to control the narrative inside China. That's the great firewall.

You know, they try to wall off their citizenry from the truth. And that's, you know, it's a sign of all authoritarian regimes. But they also do target abroad. So most notably, they target Taiwan, just try to encourage gradual reunification. But they target elsewhere as well, including the United States. And how do you, do you see that as fairly effective? is that being done? Yeah.

So, measuring the efficacy of disinformation campaigns is a really sorny issue. Because the issue becomes is, do you believe something because of this tweet you saw on social media? Or is it, this was always your belief. And, you know, the fact that Russia or China sort of amplified it doesn't have that. much effect. And so it's really so if you look at the very variety of studies, including from my organization, but also from the US government or from all allies, it's the findings about how much of how effective this is is always significantly caveat. There's also a function of what you'll see here is increasingly both Russia and

China will rather than generating their own content is simply amplify voices that have already been existing in the political spectrum. So it's an organic voice. It serves their purposes, and they just want to make sure it gets a little bit of extra oomph. And since you mentioned your organization, just to clarify, if you're just joining us now, my name is Aaron Osborne,

and I'm speaking with Dr. Rafi Cohen of the RAND Corporation. Talking about organic voices and that sort of thing, it makes me think about a debate that was going on in Washington last year, on TikTok. And I wanted to ask what your thoughts were on that and the Chinese presence in that space. Yeah. So the problem was TikTok is a couple things.

First, there's a disinformation problem. Then there's a problem that they would use the data from TikTok to harvest it and then target Americans later on. By the way, we've seen something similar to this. This is actually where Ukraine is actually a really good case study. because back 20 about a decade ago most Ukrainians were on vk and okay which were Russian social media platforms that had links back to the Russian security services and so they were not only being used for disinformation purposes but then they were turned into targeting purposes because you get a lot of sort of personal details that you would then use for malign

purposes now the Ukrainians ban vk and okay and it's actually one of the few case studies that we have of where a country tries to ban a social media network wholesale. The interesting thing is that most Ukrainians then go on to American platforms, Facebook, Instagram, what have you. There are a handful who still use it using VPNs and touch. And what it would happen is that if you look at sort of the disinformation content inside VK and okay, pre and post ban, It just becomes somewhat more concentrated there as well. Now, stepping back to this back to the American context with the debate about TikTok, this gets into sort of really swarney questions here, you know, which I assume undergrad here.

So they all are debating because there are two competing interests here, right? There's a national security interest. But we also have First Amendment privileges, right? And how you balance those two, you know, what weird? the national security interest, Trump, First Amendment, and freedom of speech issues, is one that's, it's really murky, right? And there are a lot of different disagreements about that. And so you see some of that playing out in Washington? I'm sure you have some of that here on campus, too. And I'm going to, I know we keep on doing like a world tour here, but.

It's always fun. I saw that you do a lot of stuff looking at European security, and I know that that's been kind of a point of contention is that free speech or free press line with disinformation or what have you. Could you comment a little bit on that? Sure. So the Russians are very active on anything Ukraine related. And they're active inside the United States. They're inside Western Europe.

And they want to sort of undercut Western support for Ukraine. That's fairly clear. Now, where this becomes sorny from sort of a few. free speech question here is. It's one thing if, you know, I say I'm John Doe, organic American and I'm actually a FSB agent, you know, sitting in, or better yet, you know, I'm part of the internet research agency, you know, sitting in St. Petersburg somewhere. The more soony question is if you have an actual American sort of mirroring Russian talking points that Russia then, you know, using a bot or so on, then amplifies.

And that gets to the real question about, you know, where does free the lines between free speech and national security end? Now, there's also a host of other problems with Russia in Western Europe that you gave me the opening. They do some stuff that is like, that's less, you know, murky of, like, sabotage or killing dissidents inside Western Europe. that's fairly clear-cut national security problems that you need to combat. That has obviously pure freedom of speech issue questions. Maybe a little fewer moral qualms too. Yeah, and fewer moral qualms too, precisely. I mean, so, you know, and that's really what you're, and the Russians have gotten very active on that.

So it's, and it's going to be a problem that we're going to be dealing with for quite some time to come. So would you, this is kind of a twofold question. One, would you consider those kind of gray zone activities? And two, have those increased or how have those changed since the war in Ukraine? So they've been stepping up. There's been some great investigative journalism that's shown like the ramping up of sabotage throughout Western Europe. Russia has, I mean, in you wonder, and in fairness, if I would put myself in Moscow shoes, I would want to try to disrupt supplies of weapons and such going into Europe. Ukraine. Nonetheless, because I'm not in Russia's shoes and I am in Washington shoes, it's a real

problem. And by the way, it's the same problem for the British, it's a problem for, you know, all of our allies as well. Because, you know, they are actively targeting the flow of military presence in Europe, the flow of weaponry into Ukraine. And I think the working The same assumption is that Russia will want some sort of revenge once the war in Ukraine ends. So it's in the problems that's not going to go away, even if we do get a ceasefire. And as we're talking about Russian influence in Western Europe, has there been a lot of that in, say, the European elections, or is it primarily these acts of sabotage and disinformation? No, there have been accusations of that as well. So even before the war in Ukraine, Russia has had ties to both fall right and fall left of the political spectrum. Again, they're equal opportunity.

Again, because what they're aiming for is just to gunk up the walks, really. And so anything that they could do to undercut Western unity is sort of Moscow's interest. And so if you have a left-wing isolationist or a right-wing isolationist from Moscow's perspective, both of them are useful. Gotcha. And you mentioned kind of that there's a sentiment that Russia might seek revenge or go somewhere else after the war in Ukraine hopefully meets a ceasefire and a peaceful resolution. Would that be in Moldova or Georgia, or is it sort of anybody's guess, or do you think that it would just be

more gray zone escalation in Western Europe proper? In the short run, it's going to be gray zone escalation. Russia has been badly battered by Ukraine. They've lost tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. have been killed or wounded. Their economy is suffering from rampant inflation. It's going to take them a while to recover to the point where they want to go and invade another country. Add to that, there's a geographical dimension here too.

Invading Moldova is rather difficult unless they annex all of Ukraine, which is not going to happen. So short run is going to be a great-zone activity. Long run, though, you have to worry about. about them threatening other countries they have a border with. And so that thing, which includes data partners, most notably is places like the Baltics or Georgia. And then out close allies like Georgia. And you mentioned that Russia's kind of been very drained by this.

I think I might have seen a couple days ago something that was saying that Putin's doing yet another military drawdown. How is that or how does that kind of square with their own reasons? resources? Yeah. So, I mean, Russia's a very large country, 100 million plus people. And if you're an autocracy, you can mobilize that. And they have more, at least manpower than the Ukrainians do. So, you know, they could continue to draft people not on an infinite item, but the consort has to be is that they will continue to draft people and mobilize resources for a longer rate than the Ukrainians can naturally withstand. And that's sort of the consulate. guiding some of the questions about ceasefires in Ukraine. And talking about drafting more people in, we've seen also reports in the past year, in the past couple months, especially that North Korean soldiers are entering into this war.

How do you see, how did you see that coming about? And what would you say are the implications for something that we might think about, like great power competition? Sure. So the concern is, you know, I had a peace and foreign policy. a couple months ago, that, you know, highlighted this fact.

And you're seeing our adversaries growing closer and closer together, right? So most notably, most visibly you saw the North Korean soldiers show up on the battlefield and Kursk and along the Russian border. But even before that, Russia was getting artillery shells and the like from Pyongyang. You've seen a series of Chinese ships that are suddenly happening to drag their anchor on your major communications nodes in Europe. You know, so that aspect there. China has been sort of backstopping them on the defense industrial base there as well. There's a level of coordination between China and Russia, North Korea and Russia.

Oh, by the way, there's the Iranian dimension here, which we haven't talked about. Maybe that's where the next stop on our world tour. But, you know, Iranian Shihid drones have shown up on what in the war in Ukraine, which, you know, another sort of testing bad for level intactors. That's one of the reasons why you have to care about what happened in Ukraine. Well, I think you saw the itinerary ahead of time on where I was going to take it. If you are just joining us, my name is Aaron Osborne, and I'm speaking with senior political scientists from the Iran Corporation, Dr. Rafi Cohen. On the note of Iran, is that something that we see kind of going one way? We've talked about Chinese or North Koreans and Russians all, or sorry,

North Koreans and Iranians all involving their military technology or even their soldiers in Russia. Does that kind of go the other way? Do we see an increase in Russian activity, Chinese activity, North Korean activity with the Iranians? Yeah. So this is actually, Iran is a fascinating case because it used to be, that it was going the opposite direction, right? So the consort was that Russia would backstop the Iranians. Most notably, if you look at Iranian air defenses, S-300s, it's a Russian-made system. And there has been concern about Russian military know-how flowing to the Iranians.

The interesting thing about the Ukraine conflict is this is where the technology flow began working at the opposite direction. So, the Iranians built a Shaheed, you know, which is a drone factory inside Russia, and begin supplying advisors to help operate those. Since October 7th, so you also see Russian ties going back to the Iranians. And in fact, if you look at some of the statements coming out of Moscow, you know, particularly when we've been talking we and the Israelis have been talking about potential military action against irradiate nuclear sites. Russia has been the one sort of like, well, no, you're not going to do that.

It's backing the Iranian. So it's very much it goes back and forth. Now, for Iranian connections to North Korea, which I think was also part of your question, it's notable to look at Iranian missiles because they look awfully like a typodong, which is their North Korean system. And in fact, North Koreans have showed up. in Iran to help facilitate technology transfer. There's some questions about North Korea assistance

to the irradi nuclear program as well. So, you know, the term axis of evil has got a bad rap under the Bush administration. But there is a closer coordination between all these beloved attackers, and that interconnection is only increasing. And from an American National Security standpoint, goes back to why you can't simply be a counterterrorism

bad analyst. You have to care about the entire like mish-bash of them because they all are increasingly intertwined. So this might be an impossible question. We'll see. If you were to say, you've mentioned two things about Iran.

You've mentioned either, well, their great power competition and their nuclear program or missile program, and then drones we could lump in there too. And you've also mentioned their proxies. Which, if you had to choose which you think is a greater or more pressing threat, which would you say? Okay. So it is the formal rather than the latter. That's

largely because of the war in October 7th and everything that happens subsequent to that. Let's back up for a second of what the world looks like on October 6, 2023. Iran had a range of actors, Hamas in Israel, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank. You had Hezbollah, which is sort of the crown jewel of the Iranian proxy network in Lebanon, Ketab Hezbollah in Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, and the like. This is a fairly formidable bit. Now, look up where we are today. Hamas is not gone, but it's specifically.

badly damaged. The open source estimates are these Israelis have, well, they've killed all the top leaders, Ishmaelinaia, Yaya Sina, Mohamed Dave, sort of the Thai command, but also eight of the brigade commanders, eight out of five, by the way, so they've regenerated some, only to be killed again. Saudi out of the 24 battalion commanders, 165 or so, platoon and company commanders. Again, massive demonstration, and then tens of thousands of foot soldiers. With Hezbollah much the same way. So in addition to going after the senior leadership, much of the long-range rockets that Hezbollah had was destroyed in this short but very intense war that is all fought.

And the Iranian proxies in Iraq have been sort of dialed down a little bit. Now, the hooties are still alive and kicking, which we, the United States. are trying to do something about that along with some of our allies. But that's been degraded significantly. Now, what has Iran done in response is they've leaned more into their nuclear program. And that's what's driving some of the real concern here about, well, or we'll be out of runway to do something about that before they eventually get a nuclear bomb. And if you look at sort of enrichment rates, they've ramped up dramatically in the consultants that they're going to move to breakout capability.

I'm trying to figure out if I can think of a pep your question as we're wrapping up to a close here. But I might say, is that something that could be countered through sanctions in gray zone activities or is that something that you think is just going to be, is going to come to a real head? I think it's going to come to a real head. I mean, the reason, sanctions in gray zone activities take a while to work, right? And we've tried gray zone activities of our own.

against the Iranian nuclear program. This is the, if you remember back, there's a Stuxnet virus, right? So we, along presumably with Syria 3LIs, insert a computer virus to sort of degrade the Iranian nuclear program, and we cause the actual damage to someone's nuclear reactors, but it doesn't stop it. Nonetheless, all of those sort of gray zone activities take a while. Sanctions take an equally long time to work.

The Iranians today are by, by some estimates weeks away from having enough physo-material for a nuclear bomb, time doesn't allow. So what that means is either they're going to make a deal or you're going to have to do military action or they get a bomb, those are your three options. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining me on our little world tour today. And once again, this has been Dr. Rafi Cohen of the Rand Corporation. And my name is Aaron Osborne.

And you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale, WRFH 101.1.7. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having.