Iran and U.S. Wage a Shadow War Behind Gaza Conflict

The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,” Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The United States and Iran’s long-running shadow war continues to play out against the backdrop of the conflict in the Gaza Strip. While the U.S. is Israel’s primary security and political backer, Iran has placed itself at the center of a range of militant groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militias that are fighting the U.S. and Israel in various countries across the region. Iran is the primary patron of these groups, but its central role in the current conflict, as well as the history between the U.S. and Iran that led us here, is not widely understood.

To discuss this, I’m joined now by Arash Azizi. A writer and historian who recently wrote the book, “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.” He’s also the author of the book “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions.”

Arash, welcome to Intercepted.

Arash Azizi: Thank you so much for having me Murtaza. It’s great to be here.

MH: Arash, presently, the war in Gaza is entering, I think, its sixth month at the moment, and the role of Iran in the conflict is not very well understood, especially by American audiences. Can you talk a bit about what role Iran is playing in this war, and what role it played in the lead up to the October 7th attacks, in terms of its place in the region, vis a vis Israel and various other actors?

AA: The Islamic Republic is the only important state funder of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups that conducted October 7th; particularly Hamas, which led the October 7th attacks. As the most important and, as I said, really, the sole significant state funder of these groups, both financially and militarily, Tehran has played an important role.

But, in the months since, it’s now very clear — and, in fact, the American intelligence community seems to also have come to this conclusion — that Iran wasn’t aware of these attacks beforehand, that it didn’t really plan for them. It basically looks to have been caught by surprise. All indications seem to point out to the fact that Hamas’s military leadership on this trip — for operational reasons — was allowed to sort of take these autonomous actions. That, in some ways, they had broader support from the Islamic Republic and what it calls the Axis of Resistance, this coalition of groups that it supports in the region, but that it acted on its own on that day.

Now, what we’ve seen in the last few months is that, of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran tries to bank on this global outpouring of emotions against Israel following its attacks on Gaza. That it, of course, tries to show support and galvanize support by supporting Hamas and Yemeni Houthis, who are attacking ships passing through the Red Sea. But, at the same time, the Islamic Republic is very worried about getting into a direct confrontation with Israel and the U.S., so it has actually tried hard to avoid that. And its relationship to the Axis of Resistance is interesting, because it doesn’t come across often and in certain sort of analyses out there. But, really, what you have is the fact that Iran is trying to push them back, and hold them back, and make sure that they don’t get it into a conflict that it doesn’t want to.

And, at the same time, I think, in Iran, for many people — and many ordinary people but, also, even people in the establishment — they’re very worried about this consequence of Iran having tied itself to this group of unruly militias in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Palestine, not to mention those beyond, which can then get Iran into a conflict that it can ill afford. That Iranians don’t want a war, and they don’t want a direct confrontation with Israel and the United States. So, this has really led them to question the whole policy of Iran in supporting them.

And [the question] also becomes clear: what is the response of the Arab world to this war? What is its response? Its response is actually united, basically, across the board; which is to say that they want a two-state solution. They want Israel to end its onslaught on Gaza, to plan for the day after, and to end the occupation, and allow for the creation of the Palestinian state, which is what the Arab states have wanted since 2002.

And if you listen to diplomats, sort of leading establishment figures in Iran who are not currently in power, but they were in power until recently, they’re basically pointing out to the fact that “Iran can’t be more Arab than the Arabs,” is a way that [they] sometimes put it. That if there’s a consensus in the Arab world, that that’s what it means. Iran can’t be the one who wants to continue its line that, no, Israel should be destroyed, Israelis should learn swimming, and all these different things that the leaders of the Islamic Republic have said.

So, I think there’s a reckoning there as well, that the regional mood and the demands of the Arab countries in the region, Iran can’t adopt a position that opposes them.

MH: So, as you alluded to, Iran supports this very, very broad network of groups. It’s actually kind of staggering how many groups are currently being funded or armed by Iran in various different countries. Obviously, there’s Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, the Houthis in Yemen, groups in Syria, Iraqi militias, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah, [which is] a separate organization, also supported by Iran. And, whether at Iran’s direction or not — and it may not be, as you said, as the U.S. intelligence community and others have concluded — they are the only ones actually shooting at Israel, you could say. They’re shooting at Israel, directly or indirectly, in various ways. And that may trigger a broader conflict, despite the wishes of Iran, despite the patronage of these groups.

I’m kind of curious, can you tell us and our listeners, why is Iran supporting all these groups? Because it seems like it’s a significant outlay of resources. It seems very organizationally difficult. Just from a purely administrative strategic aspects, it’s very impressive that they managed to cultivate so many different groups in different countries, who are very loyal to it in many ways. How did they do this and why are they doing this?

AA: The Islamic Republic was founded as a revolutionary state out of the grand revolution of 1979. Revolutions are not made because you want trains to run on time or you want things to be efficient; revolutions are made because you want to change the world. 

MH: “You didn’t have a revolution for the price of melons.” I think that Khomeini said that.

AA: [Laughs.] Exactly. That’s an excellent quote. That sort of exactly explains things, right?

So, the1979 revolution was really made to change the world. When you really think about it, revolutions like that make a nation become an incubator of a grand ideological project. That was the case in the Russian revolution of 1917, that was the case in many other revolutions, [like the] Chinese revolution of 1949. So, Iran, really, as a nation state, became an incubator for this grand ideological project of, let’s call it Khomeinism, right?

And what really [is] Khomeinism? It hasn’t always been clear throughout its history, but one thing you can say, actually, that there’s been an ideological failure on many fronts, that Iran has not been able to offer a different society — has not been able to offer a different Islamic society — that anyone would actually like to follow. It’s not clear that Islamic universities, Islamic water management, all of these terms that they use, right? Islamic banking. Is it actually a significantly different sort of desirable society that you can follow?

But one thing that it has continued and has offered is a resolute anti-Israeli position, which all these different groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Houthis in Yemen, a variety of Iraqi Shia groups — they all follow. In the last few decades, Iran has been able to prop them up as this Axis of Resistance that fights the United States and fights Israel. And, of course, the tragic reality is, I don’t believe that the founders of the Islamic revolution of ’79 were Shia sectarians, right? They were Shia, sometimes they were sectarian, but I don’t think this was very fundamental to their identity. I think because they had higher aspirations, right?

Shias are only 15 percent of the Muslim world, so to rule over the Shias— Ayatollah Khomeini didn’t want to rule over the Shias, he wanted to rule over the world, really, and certainly the world Muslim community, right? And that’s usually how it’s discussed in the rhetorics of the regime.

But the reality is, in the last 20 years, there was a process of sectarianization in the region, particularly after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. And [it was] on both sides, obviously; it wasn’t just Iran that was sectarianizing things. The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq after 2006, then the rise of different groups, ultimately the rise of ISIS, right?

So this meant that these groups— This doesn’t include Hamas, obviously, which, not coincidentally, in this period, actually, Hamas left the Axis of Resistance, if you will, because it was too much of a Sunni group to be part of a Shia-led axis in this particular period. It only rejoined once the sectarian wave had receded. But the reality is, these groups were able to grow in Iraq, in Lebanon, certainly, and even in Yemen, because of this period of sectarianization, where Shia versus Sunni became an important recruiting ground. And everybody knows, in politics, you’re able to recruit people on basic tribal identitarian purposes. And this was basically how it’s done.

So, it’s harder to convince an Iraqi that they should join some sort of a Khomeini’s Islamist revolutionary project. I obviously sort of see it negatively, but it should also be understood like any other form of tribalism. You know, the reason young Iraqi Shias would go join a Shia militia was that they saw that there was a rise of these really genocidal Sunni Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, which were attacking the Shias throughout. So, they had a reason to join them, to defend their communities, right?

So, this was one dynamic, and the other dynamic was opposition to Israel. That, OK, the whole Khomeini’s political social project has failed, but there remains an opposition to Israel. And these people would join Iran and its axis, because it could offer opposition to Israel for them. And, for the Islamic Republic, this meant a raison d’etre for the regime, this meant an ideological legitimacy. And this ideological legitimacy mattered inside the country as well, because, what is the Islamic Republic? What’s the justification for it? The justification for a number of supporters it would become, “we are leading this Axis, we are fighting Israel.”

And it’s interesting. They know that this is not ultimately a very successful winning card in Iran, a country in which, for better or worse, the Palestinian cause is not a household cause anymore, if it ever was. It’s not like people care about it, particularly, compared to other countries in the world.

So, they tried different versions of this. For example, they would say, oh, the Axis of Resistance is actually an economic axis that helps the Iranian economy. There was a nationalist version of this effectively that, both for proponents and opponents of this, they would say, oh, this is really just the Persian empire, this is sort of the Iranian empire going across. So, they actually try using this kind of language at different times to justify the support.

But, as I said, I think, in recent times, especially in recent months, there’s come a reckoning that this doesn’t seem to serve Iranian national interest well at all, while it actually really endangers the country in many ways, because it creates too many enemies for it, and it puts it in risk of war, a war that it does not want, and it cannot afford.

MH: So, very briefly, right now, in this conflict, Israel is surrounded, in a way, at least geographically, by these Iranian-backed groups, and I think the most important and powerful of them is Hezbollah in Lebanon. And there’s been many, warnings, increasingly urgent warnings, I would say, that the coming months could see an expansion of the war in Gaza to Lebanon, which would be very disastrous. And I think that it’d be disastrous for the Lebanese people, but also for Israelis, in the sense that Israel has threatened — and also, in the past, carried out — very devastating attacks against civilians in Lebanon indiscriminately. And Hezbollah has tens or hundreds of thousands, potentially, of rockets, which it would deploy in a conflict against Israel, which would be very devastating to Israel’s infrastructure and population as well, too.

You mentioned that Iran is not eager to have this war right now, or it’s actually trying to hold the groups that patronize this back from having this war at the moment. Can you talk a bit about what the short-term and long-term vision is? Because I know that maybe in the short term they don’t want to have war with— You know, I’ve read for — and I’m sure you’re well aware — that they also do have a strategy of putting pressure on Israel and, potentially, in the views of many of the groups destroying Israel, by some strategy of asymmetric warfare. And I think that Khamenei has written about this, the supreme leader of Iran.

Can you talk a bit about, just briefly, what the Iranian or the Iranian government’s plan to degrade or destroy Israel is on paper, and how these groups fit into that?

AA: So, short term and long term. I think short term they are trying to manage the situation, and Khamenei sort of prides himself of having what he calls a strategic patience. That you don’t get into immediate fight because that will just destroy our forces, but we’ll grow, we’ll grow, we’ll grow, and patiently we’ll just grow our forces. And they have done that, right? Why is Hezbollah able to be such a powerful force today, after all?

There was one war in 2006 with Israel. Now, imagine how many years since Israel has left Lebanon; it’s 24 years. So, if you wanted to get into a fight every couple of years — as, in fact, Israel and Hamas did much more often, due to Israeli attacks on Gaza — if they wanted to do that, Hezbollah would have been a degraded force. Today, Hezbollah is much, much, much more stronger than it was 10, 15 years ago. It was able to grow, precisely because it doesn’t engage in a conflict.

The problem with patience is that it leads to other people’s impatience, right? So, a lot of ground forces of these groups, including ideologues and others, are very openly criticizing Khamenei, basically. Saying, this is the time, you know? People of Gaza are being killed. Why are we not going to go and fight Israel directly? So, Khamenei has been trying to calm them down and have this strategic patience. 

Now, what are the long-term goals? I think if you ask the leadership, Khamenei and them, their idea is that they’ve built up an important Islamic Republic that has been able to survive. It has survived all the enmities of different Western countries and Israel. It’s now almost half a century long. When you think about it, it’s already in the annals of Iranian dynasties, it’s becoming its own dynasty that’s been able to survive, as I said, almost half a century, and that it continues to hold on to these ideals. Khamenei has chosen not to compromise on these ideals anymore, at the cost of making life much more difficult for himself. He has made a calculation that if I give in a little to these Islamist liberal Democrats, nothing would be left of this project.

In regards to the region in Israel, I think they think ultimately they’ll be able to kick Americans out, that they’ll be able to Islamicize the region more, and lead to more Islamist regimes down the road. And I think, like many other opponents of Israel, they believe that one day they’ll be able to unite and fight, and destroy Israel somehow. Force Israeli Jews to flee, or to surrender, or to become subjugated. And this vision doesn’t make sense in any sort of a short-term sense because, of course, Israel is a nuclear power, of course Israel is very powerful militarily, has support across the world. Everyone knows that. So, I think in their revolutionary dreams, if you will, this is something that’s a very long-term plan. That maybe in 100 years, it could happen, if you just keep it going. 

The issue, though, is that, thankfully, tons of people, including in the Iranian establishment, don’t want to wed their country into some sort of an eschatological dream, that one day these grand changes will happen, and all that. And are much more pragmatic, and are happy to accept the realities of the region, and have Iran be a part of the region.

So, my argument, actually, is that, I think, in the Iranian establishment, people are much more boring, if you will. Iranian nationalists are people who want a strong Iran. They want to fight with other countries in the region sometimes over who has influence where, but they’re not interested in this revolutionary Islamist dream. 

If you read this output of thinktanks, they’ll tell you that these people are Mahdist, believers in this millenarian Shia ideology, that they’ll do anything because the Imam of the time will come back, and the new Messiah will come back, and this is a key to Shia ideology. I don’t buy that. I think the leadership, I think much of the establishment of the Islamic Republic doesn’t really think that. They don’t really believe in this stuff, even though they say it now, or most of them don’t, anyway. And they know it doesn’t have any social base in Iran.

That’s why my prognosis is that, after the death of Khamenei, who is already turning 85 next month, things will change in Iran. So, you’re going to come to see different policies.

MH: Yeah. As you mentioned, and for the listeners, Ayatollah Khamenei is a supreme leader of Iran. So, he is, effectively, on paper, that’s a position with some limited powers but, in reality, it’s a very, very, almost a king-like role in the country. His views are very, very important.

Now, when he passes away, as you said, a new supreme leader will come to power, but there are other factions of the government who do not favor the same policies that Iran has undertaken, both in the region and domestically. You wrote an article in The New York Times recently that “change is coming to Iran, just not the change we hoped for.” And you talk about these members, or people at high levels in the Iranian establishment, including the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who have very different views about how Iran should comport itself in the region, and also vis a vis, potentially, domestic policy.

When Khamenei does die, what do you think may change internally in Iran? And how may Iran’s strategy vis a vis the United States or Israel also change with someone else in power who may be more beholden to these factions of the IRGC and other parts of the establishment, who you could say are more pragmatic?

AA: My prognosis is that whoever the next supreme leader is doesn’t really matter, and the real power will be with the IRGC and these other factions of power, which will vie for power with each other, right? They’ll fight, and they’ll enter a period of rivalry with each other over power. So, that’s my prognosis.

Of course, like any other, it could be wrong. It could be that a superior we don’t know emerges and wants to be the Khamenei. It could be, as some are saying, that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, is going to be anointed the next supreme leader, and he will have some power, although I personally don’t think that’s possible, frankly.

Imagine you yourself are someone in the IRGC. You fought the good fight for all these years, you’re in these positions. Are you going to cede all power to someone’s son, who nobody knew who he was until recently? It’s true that Mojtaba has apparently tried to build some links and connections to them, but I don’t think it will be enough to hold power in Iran. I don’t think someone like, let’s say, Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Parliament, currently, is going to just sit on the sidelines and allow Khamenei’s son to rule the country.

Now, what will be the changes? What I believe, the direction of changes are going to be in the direction of pragmatism, both domestically and regionally. Now, of course, what the hell does pragmatism really mean? It’s open to debate, right? But the idea is that they wouldn’t be so much wedded to the revolutionary goals of ’79, and that Khamenei, as a genuine revolutionary clearly does, right? Khamenei is a genuine revolutionary. He truly wants to continue this path that he’s been on all his life. I think they won’t have that.

So, that means, probably, in order to solve the Iranian economic problems a little bit, and also, by some social peace, they’ll be more moderate in domestic policies. And they’ll understand that they need to sort of end the standoff that Iran has with the world, for the sanctions to end, for Iran to be a bit more integrated in the global system, it’s actually possible, I think, that they’ll follow a series of rapprochement with regional and international powers.

Now, different factions in the IRGC in recent years have had different ideas. Some people believe that they really take pride of a place in Axis of Resistance as their most prized project. They’ve seen that it has worked in the sense that it’s a topic of conversations around the world, and that it’s a cause of concern for the United States, so they’ll think about how they can continue that project into the post-Khamenei era.

And some, actually, have developed significant links now with Russia and China, which changes the whole idea of global integration. You know, maybe there isn’t one globe, so we should be obsessed about these Western sanctions finishing against us, and we can try to improve the relationship with Russia and China, actually, and become a more direct component of that sort of anti-Western coalition.

But I think, ultimately, it’s much more likely that they’re trying to seek a regional rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, even come to some sort of rapprochement with United States. They’ll decrease the support for different militias, because they would see that as a way of getting peace with Saudi Arabia. They’ll stop wanting to be on the frontline of fighting to destroy Israel. So, I think it’s possible that we’ll see changes in those directions.

The reason I said “it’s not a change we hoped for,” [is] I think these are overall positive developments. I think, basically, it’s a question of Iran stopping to be a revolution and becoming more of a country. But it’s also not the democratization that people like myself have fought for all of our lives, and we’ll continue to do that fight, right? For democratization, for gender justice, for social justice, for environmental justice, and all the other causes.

But the immediate change you will see in Iran after the death of Khamenei is unlikely to be that a bunch of liberal Democrats can somehow come to power, because we’re not organized, but it is possible for these other, as I said, IRGC folks to come to power and, in order to just make their own life easier, give up on the revolution that nobody really believes in anymore, and replace it with a more familiar sort of military authoritarianism.

I think of examples like Algeria or Pakistan as the models that they’ll think about. And it’s not just me saying that. I guess Algeria, I haven’t heard that example made before, but many people point to Pakistan in Iran as a potential model. They don’t say it in a good way, as in, they’d like it to be what some of them are thinking, that’s sort of where it’s headed. In a country in which military has a very important role in running things, but also the country is not wedded to a very particular revolutionary project.

MH: One thing that was striking to me recently is: I talk to friends in Iran pretty often and, in contrast to the Iranian government, which is very, very eager to be at the frontline of these conflicts with Israel and the United States, I detect a lot of fatigue or even disinterest in these regional conflicts. Which is very different from other people I know in other countries in the region, whose country, whose governments are actually not that deeply involved.

Iran’s government is the most involved, but I get the sense that the people are the least zealous, and the most tired, I would say, of the situation. Iran obviously had elections recently — I think it was at the Parliamentary level — and there was not this huge upswell of enthusiasm to take part in these elections.

You’ve written books about the subject, talked about it quite a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how Iranians are interpreting changes in the region, and also changes, potentially, in their own country, after suffering many, many years of sanctions and some dashed hopes with different political regimes in the past decade?

AA: Fatigue is a very good way of putting it. They’re just not interested, frankly. Iran is going through its worst time in decades. I actually always like to compare — it’s a very historian thing to do, to compare the current conditions to [other eras] — I usually like to compare it to the 1910s, and recently I saw that someone in Iran who I respect a lot, this journalist, also did the same, so now I have more confidence to say it.

And the 1910s, why do we say that? Because it was a time when Iran suffered a terrible famine in which 20 percent of the population died, or something like that. It was the first world war, Iran was invaded by all of the countries. No one really knew where the next breakthrough [was] going to come from. And, of course, it was the 1921 coup that really changed Iranian history then, and led to a new dynasty and everything.

So, the reason we make this comparison is, as I said, it’s because things in Iran are terrible. The crisis of competence of the government is really staggering. Tons of people are leaving the country, the brain drain has led to just a drain-drain, if you will. Everyone, tons of people are leaving. I don’t want to exaggerate it — it’s not on the level of Venezuela or something like that yet — but tons of people are living in the country.

Those who remain have very little hope in their careers. If you think about it, if you are an Iranian professor in a university 20 years ago or 15 years ago, maybe you made $2,000 a month. Now you make $300 a month. I mean, can you imagine if this happened to any of us? That you’ve dedicated your life, your career, and now you’re much worse off than you were at the beginning, you have problems affording basic things.

So, before anything else, when conditions are like this, Iranians who are already kind of self-centered to begin with, they’re obviously much more thinking about their own country and its travails. They don’t much care about the region, even though it involves us, right? So, they’re worried about the potential of war.

And, of course, the other thing that is sort of ironic, it’s that, of course, Iran’s direct involvement in being a battlefront is, in being on the first battlefront against Israel, in confronting the United States, is what has led, from the perspective of Iranian people, is what has led to their economic degradation, to all the sort of economic crises that they face.

I saw an Egyptian intellectual that I respected a lot recently wrote something that people write all the time, that I cannot believe that the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement of 1979 is still there. And people of Palestine are suffering… and then we still have this peace treaty. Which begs the question, is there a demand that the peace treaty should be torn apart and Egypt go to war with Israel? If that happens, then the Egyptian people will have to pay a very, very serious cost, right?

So, my point is that, I don’t know, then, whether they actually want that, whether they want that war and the price that will come with it. And I don’t know what would be their views if they had to pay such a cost, I don’t know what would be their views on the issue ten years after that, you understand my point? The Iranians are the ones who have had to pay this price. It’s very different when you don’t have to pay the price, and you can make all sorts of loud pronouncements about things, right?

But Iranians have had to pay the price for the government’s adventurist regional policies. And, really, the heaviest price, I want to emphasize what I just said about the economic situation. Now, the national minimum wage in Iran, which just got announced very recently, as the Iranian new year was last week, it’s like $180 per month. It’s 600-and-something dollars in Turkey, right? When would Iranians have dreamed that our national minimum wage would be one third of Turkey’s? This is a staggering reality.

So, the price has been incredibly high in Iran and, thus, there’s very little support for these regional policies. As I said, people care about Iran, and they want foreign and regional policies that would serve Iranians and their interests. It’s not that they’re not interested in the world or region at all, but it’s that they believe that these policies are in support of ideas that they don’t support, Iranians are not particularly crazy about.

These ideas are not popular in Iran; as you mentioned, in the parliamentary elections, a minority of people voted. They’re spending all their national wealth on projects that they don’t support. So, obviously they’re not going to be happy about that.

MH: Arash, you mentioned that, obviously, these economic problems, many of which are stemming from U.S. sanctions on Iran. Iran on paper should be a very wealthy country, because of its oil resources, and educated population, and so forth, but it’s not, it’s in this very dire state, as you said.

But it’s interesting, because the Iranian government, even under Khamenei, did try to seek rapprochement with the United States several times over the past two decades. During the era after the invasion of Afghanistan they cooperated with the U.S. very closely, and there was a very conciliatory Iranian president in power at that time, Khatami. And then, again, during the period of Rouhani, the previous president of Iran, the Iranian government sought a nuclear deal with the United States in exchange for economic integration, and removal of sanctions, and the introduction of Western companies to invest and buy from inside Iran.

But these efforts were actually rebuffed from the other side. They were rebuffed from the American side, or undermined in various ways. So, I’m kind of curious, would the Iranians actually try to do that again? Or would they be wary of the fact that perhaps American — and, I would say, behind that, Israeli — hostility is so implacable that we’d be fools to try to do this again? And then, our only hope out of this economic morass is to try to integrate with a new Global South type of world, with China and Russia and so forth.

How do you interpret that history in terms of what’s possible in the future? And, also, what opportunities have been missed for people in the region, and Iranians particularly?

AA: When we look at the history of Iranian-U.S. relations since 1979, it really is a history of missed opportunities, almost like a tragicomical history of things almost getting there, but not. I always think in my mind about the coincidence of when you have one U.S. president with one Iranian president, or a sort of political condition, and it just never quite works.

When you think about it, for example, Bill Clinton is in power in ’92, Khatami comes to power in ’97. They only have a few years that Khatami and Clinton are both there, and they really try to make things happen, even in those short few years. But, of course, Khatami has limited power, there are tons of other things, Bill Clinton has other concerns.

It’s never actually been one long night of hostility, interestingly enough. Every U.S. president has worked with the Islamic Republic in one way or the other at some point. Reagan, of course, had Iran-Contra, helped Iran get arms during the Iran-Iraq war with Israel, right? With Israeli arms with the Star of David on them going to the Islamic Republic as it fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

We mentioned Clinton under George W. Bush, who put Iran in the Axis of Resistance. Iran worked super closely with the U.S. against Taliban after 2003 and, later on, in Iraq, effectively. United States and Iran effectively ran the country as quasi-colonial powers, frankly, for a period, because the United States realized that the only way you could run Iraq, or sort of maintain influence in Iraq, was with some sort of an effective rapprochement with Iran. So, it has been like that.

But I’ll say a couple of things very quickly. First of all, the Islamic Republic, the revolutionary ethos of this regime has always been anti-American, especially since the end of the Cold War. In the first decade of the Islamic Republic [when] the Cold War was going on — the Soviet Union was still there — Iran, its official line was against both Moscow and Washington, and it had to sort of balance that out, although it actually did end up working quite closely with Moscow on certain questions, as scholars like Timothy Nunan have shown how this worked in relation to Afghanistan, and Syria, and other countries.

But, ever since then, its anti-Americanism has been very central to it, there’s a “death to America” rally every year that the regime organizes. And Khamenei, the Supreme leader, he really sees that as central to his work, so it will be very different when that is taken away, as we talked about previously.

I think, in the future, when I say rapprochement, we’re just talking about establishment of diplomatic relations, like Algeria has with the United States, like almost all countries in the world have them, right? It won’t necessarily be a hitching of the wagon for Iran to become a pro-Western country, in a way, what does that even mean anymore? Not to get too Huntingtonian here but, outside the core Western civilization, what does it mean to be pro-Western? I mean, Turkey is a member of NATO, but I don’t think any of us would really describe it as pro-Western anymore. It sort of stands out for its own interest.

Same as India. India, it’s a democratic country, it’s a liberal democratic country. It’s still largely traditionally considered to be sort of friendly to the West in the last couple of decades, at least — of course, it has its own proud history of nonalignment, and you can say during the Cold War, it sometimes was closer to Moscow, actually, than the West — but it has its own interests.

So, I think the way I think most Iranians — including myself, by the way — when you think about the future of Iran in this multipolar world that is emerging, is that Iran does not need to be against the U.S.. It also doesn’t need to be part of some sort of a U.S. Western-led coalition, necessarily. And I think, according to what kind of changes you see in Iran, this will be hotly debated. I think many Iranians on a popular level are more pro-Western, frankly, than anything else, they’re not pro-Russian or pro-Chinese. How that would make itself felt in policy is something that remains to be seen. I see this sort of the future of the world like that.

You mentioned Iran being a wealthy country and all that; one of the tragedies is, Iran is actually very well suited to become an important power in this multipolar world, of a power of its own kind. And it’s the kind of regional policies that have stopped us from being that. So, Saudi Arabia next door is a member of the G20, Turkey is able to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine. What is Iran doing? Like, this buffoonish policy in Russia and Ukraine of supporting Russia and its invasion of Ukraine goes against everything that Iranian diplomacy has stood for.

And also, I should say that Iran has a very proud history of an independent statehood. We are one of the only countries in the world who were never colonized. Iran was a founding member of the League of Nations, it was a founding member of the United Nations. It sat on the Council of the League of Nations in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s through the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. Iran was one of the countries invited to be part of an international sort of conciliation. And not quite peacekeeping, but international efforts to end these conflicts, you know?

So, this is the history of our country, and I think a lot of Iranians wanted to go back to playing such a role, as opposed to becoming a supporter of terror groups, and militias, and a sort of boogeyman of the international order. And it’s a very different boogeyman than, let’s say, Russia and China or North Korea.

Obviously, we don’t want to be North Korea, that has its own state, but Russia and China, when the question of their confrontation with the West comes with these two grand powers, and that’s the way it’s discussed. Whereas Iran has the potential to become a very important middle regional power, and that opportunity is squandered by it being effectively a vector for these kind of policies.

And I should say that, if you look at China, for example, I guess one of the questions that is often asked is, can Iran become part of an anti-Western bloc with China and Russia? But if you look at China, China doesn’t actually prioritize some sort of anti-Western revolutionary ideas. It really doesn’t. Which is why, in the region, China has much more closer economic ties with a variety of Arab countries — Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and others, who are close allies of the U.S. — and even with Israel, than it does with Iran. So, it’s not like China says, oh, Iranian brothers are a great anti-Western force, so we’re going to support them against Israel or anything like that.

They’re not doing that. They’re following their own economic interests, and the idea is that Iran should do the same. I think that’s the idea that will come to really rule Iran after Khamenei, and I think that’s the idea that makes sense to the Iranian people.

I think if you ask average people on the street— Frankly, it works on most people in the world, right? If you ask people, what do you want your government to do in the world affairs, they probably say they want to follow some concept of national interest, before having interest in what ideological grouping in the world they should join in, or what kind of contribution they can do to the world order.

MH: Arash, my last question, obviously, in 2022, there were these huge protests over the killing of a woman named Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Iran, on allegations that she’d worn a quote-unquote “improper hijab.” This obviously triggered a huge outpouring of anger among Iranians and a sort of social rebellion, which I think has been playing out in the country, even to this day.

I have friends in Iran — in Tehran, at least, in the capital, which may be more liberal — who have told me that in many places, restaurants, establishments, that people are not dressing according to the guidelines of the government. They’re rejecting many of the very strict social/ideological rules that characterize the government at present. And even in more conservative cities like Mashhad, I’ve also heard of similar things happening.

Just to conclude, what is the future of this movement in Iran, the social movement, which is rebelling against the regime? I think it’s mainly made up of younger people. How may it continue manifesting, especially as the government transforms and changes following the death of Khamenei, which we can expect in the years to come?

AA: Social rebellion is an excellent way of putting it. And I think, right now, you have a sort of astounding scene of millions of women — tens of millions by some counts — just daily breaking the mandatory hijab rule, and just coming out on the streets without wearing a headscarf. I sometimes FaceTime with friends or family in Tehran. I’m shocked. The other day I asked my friend, I said, “Are you in Turkey? I just called you.” Like, I thought they were not in Iran, but it was Iran, but tons of women were not wearing the hijab.

And, by the way, they’re not doing that because the government is lax. Government is not lax at all. Government is still putting people in jail, closing down cafes, fining people. A government official recently suggested that they’re going to have a smart system of fines in which cameras get you, and if the cameras detect you without a hijab, they’ll automatically take money out of your bank account. These are all tactics of intimidation.

And, despite that they’re doing it, I also, Murtaza, if I’m speaking honestly, I actually think we are really seeing a social resurgence on many issues. I think, for example, there is a new feminist consciousness, if you will, in Iran, that is not just about the regime; it’s about patriarchal structures in society, and even patriarchal beliefs that might exist amongst groups opposed to the regime. And I think we’ve had that in the last few decades but, in this new generation, we have its resurgence again.

I think the movement of 2022, and the beautiful “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan that it sort of adopted from neighboring countries and made its own opened up questions amongst Iranians — especially young Iranians, as you mentioned — as to, OK, well, we hate the regime, we want it gone, but what kind of country do we want? What does it mean to be Iranian? What kind of life do we want to have? What does it mean to be left and right, and what’s the meaning of democracy? And I think these questions were really posed in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and they had been left out or became subjects of fatigue, as you also mentioned earlier, but I think this movement gave new energy to them in many ways.

And, even though Iran right now, people are already sick and tired of the Islamic Republic, I think the conversations that came out of that movement are going to continue for a very long time. So, I think, really, when it comes to this movement, we need to have a longer view of Iranian history.

Often, many scholars — including myself, but also many of my ustads, or professors, as we say — they compare it, let’s say people like Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet or Ali Mirsepassi, they’ve compared this movement to the constitutional revolution of 1905, 1906, the first grand Iranian movement for rule of law, for liberty, for human dignity, and this very long process of Iranian struggles for a better world. We start understanding that this is how this movement should be viewed, and how it made some political demarcations, and also gave new political ideas to people. 

So, while my short-term prediction for Iran, as I said, is that it’s very likely that we’ll get some sort of a change in rulers. I think just because we changed the crown with the turban once in 1979, and once we changed the turban for a military beret, this doesn’t mean that the struggles will stop, or will finish. I think struggles for social justice and change and democracy in Iran will continue.

MH: Arash Azizi, thanks for joining us today.

AA: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Murtaza.

MH: That’s Arash Azizi, he’s a writer and historian specializing in Iran. You can check out Arash’s new book, “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.” He also wrote “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions.”

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.