>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made in the definition of success with the war in Iraq.

It is not easy to know how the Trump administration is going to define success or failure.

What would be sufficient for them to end the war?

What goals do they expect to achieve or demand to achieve?

The answer has been changing depending upon who is speaking.

Sometimes the answer changes from day to day from President Trump himself.

This weekend he said that only unconditional surrender from Iran would be sufficient for the United States to end its war.

Then he said that the United States might create their own definition of Iran having surrendered and simply stop fighting at some point.

President Trump has said that he wants to see a new democratic regime in place in Iran.

But he conceded last week that that might not happen.

In his words, what we get next might be worse.

The one consistent theme has been the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities.

Meanwhile, Iran's ruling clerics have chosen a new supreme leader, and he is the son of the recently assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei.

He is viewed as even more hardline.

Israel has vowed to kill him, too.

My guest this hour will discuss what we've learned and what to look for when it comes to ending conflicts, ending wars and that is something that Dr.

Hein Goemans has written for, written about for a long time.

Dr.

who is a professor of political science, director of the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation at the University of Rochester.

He's the author of War and Punishment.

He's written about a number of subjects related to how conflicts end in other places like Ukraine.

We've talked about and Dr.

Who, it's nice to have you back on the program.

It's great to be here.

Dr.

Randy Stone is back with us.

Professor of political science, director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

He's the author of Controlling Institutions Lending Credibility Satellites and Commissars and the forthcoming book Multinational Order.

Welcome back to the program.

Thanks for being here.

>> Nice to be with you, Evan.

>> What's the forthcoming book about?

>> it's about U.S.

foreign policy from the point of view of the multinational firms which helped to shape it.

The international order that the United States brought and how that evolved over time and helped to shape the population of international firms in turn.

>> History is moving at breakneck pace here.

I mean, the problem for both of our guests is any book that they write, by the time it's published, the world order might be changing.

And I'm not trying to to snark at this.

I mean, it's really, really remarkable.

>> Absolutely.

And the preface to the book, I, I start out by saying, this is a terrible time to write a book about international order.

>> Well, for that reason.

Yeah.

So I'll start with you, doctor Stone.

You know, this is been well covered.

This is an administration that apart for certain people who are working for this administration, they ran a campaign saying no war with Iran.

In fact, they promised that Kamala Harris would take the United States to war with Iran, that it would be another stupid Middle Eastern adventure, that the United States was going to be done with the international destruction of wars, the loss of citizens, the devastation it causes.

And we are in a very different place.

In fact, I want to listen, if we could rob to Senator Lindsey Graham on Fox, Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, talking about, you know, he thinks the president's on a hot streak.

Let's listen.

>> I mean, I'm not looking for a fair fight.

If we get in a fight, I want to win it.

I want to win it quick.

I'm in Miami.

You see this hat?

Free Cuba.

Stay tuned.

The liberation of Cuba is upon us.

It's just a matter of time.

Now, you see this?

That make a run?

Great.

President Trump said the only way to make a run great is for the people to take over.

We're marching through the world.

We're cleaning out the bad guys.

We're going to have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe.

I've never seen anybody like it.

This is Ronald Reagan.

Plus, Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago.

He is the greatest commander in chief of all time.

Our military is the best of all time.

Iran is going down and Cuba is next.

>> He's marching through the world, cleaning up, cleaning out the bad guys.

What do you think?

What do you make of that, Randy?

>> It's incredible.

I mean, Lindsey Graham used to sound like an intellectually respectable figure on the on the world stage.

Somebody who had some gravitas, who understood something about how the world worked.

he often was quoted as cautioning presidents against this sort of adventurism.

And here he is, posturing like a like a cowboy.

and that is, that's the mood of this administration that this is an administration that doesn't want to listen to anyone who gives them any advice, any experts doesn't want to hear about any constraints, about why they can't do whatever feels good at the moment.

and, you know, U.S.

foreign policy used to be based on long term considerations.

Used to be very carefully calculated and used to be based on a lot of expertise.

there used to be a robust interagency process, which happened at multiple levels in the international government.

Whenever a new foreign policy idea was brought up, it would be discussed at the you know, the deputy assistant secretaries level and then the assistant secretaries level, and then it would go up to the deputy undersecretary level, and then they'd talk about it.

The undersecretary level.

And all these agencies are brought in.

All these experts are consulted before it got to the point where cabinet secretaries were shooting off soundbites about it.

it had been carefully vetted and, and, most ideas were rejected in the process because most ideas are really, really bad.

Foreign policy is not about innovating.

It's not about the flavor of the week or trying to be on the front page of the New York Times foreign policy is a matter of thinking long term about what your real objectives are and trying to shape the world so that those objectives emerge without you having to exert a whole lot of force.

Right.

Susan Strange used to call that structural power.

It's the idea that you create a situation in which your opponents and your allies, and the people who aren't quite sure which one they are, have incentives to adjust their objectives to fit what you think the world ought to look like, so that the.

and that's that's true mastery of the of the international system.

The United States used to be able to play that kind of game, but we've broken the rules.

We've rejected all of the constraints that we used to impose upon ourselves, to try to give us some credibility so that we could make deals that would stick.

And this administration has left with nothing.

But a lot of flashy bombs and a lot of rhetoric.

>> And when you hear Lindsey Graham saying, Cuba is next, we are marching through the world.

Now, what do you hear there?

>> I hear echoes of Colonel Harry summers in 1975, talking to another lieutenant, to a lieutenant colonel.

I know it was captain.

He was captain then to lieutenant colonel in the in the North Vietnamese Army.

where Colonel Summers, captain summers said to the colonel you know, you never beat us in any battle.

We won all the battles, and the North Vietnamese colonel pondered for a second and said, that's true, but also irrelevant.

The point there being that it was not just about military might.

It's much more about you know, shaping expectations, what comes in the future and what are you willing to wear?

to pay the costs of, of war to achieve your objectives.

And it turned out in Vietnam that the United States suffered about 50,000 casualties.

And North Vietnam, the Vietnamese over a million.

And what's going on at the moment in the Iran, in my opinion, is again, a question about shaping costs for the for the opponent.

So both the United States and Israel are trying to shape costs for the for the Iranians, and Iran is trying to shape costs for the, for the United States.

And it's that balance, you know, that will determine who will or the expectation of what the balance will look like, who will actually be able to settle or set the terms.

>> I want to go back to that point about 1975.

The idea of being confused.

How did we lose a war when we didn't lose any battles?

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> And Tom Nichols, who has lectured at the Naval War College, wrote about this last week.

He said that he fears that the Trump administration sees what he calls operational excellence, the excellence of an air campaign, the lightning strike that took out Khomeini and the leaders of Iran on the first day and confuses that with what does it take to actually win long term here?

Well, do you feel that way?

>> Well, I mean, yes, absolutely.

And that's why, you know, the interaction between summers and the North Vietnamese colonel was was so interesting.

Right.

>> what's what's going on is basically two, two sides grappling and, and the question that lies behind it.

And this is the public, the public should know this because it is a confusion which is which runs rampant, is that you have to distinguish military victory from diplomatic victory.

These are not the same things.

You can win as many battles as you want to in Vietnam, but not win your diplomatic victory.

And so you have to understand and understand what it takes to get to the diplomatic victory.

And as we've seen in the current administration, the emphasis of people like Hegseth is all about warriors and war fighting.

It's all about military victory.

>> So you can bomb as many targets as you want.

Yeah, they.

>> Yeah, they think.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that Texas also thinks that in in Vietnam, the American military was hamstrung by the public, and otherwise they would have won.

And that it's just that is just absurd.

Silly.

Like, I mean, do these people think that American costs should just bear, you know, any cost, you know, pay any price and bear any burden for, for some objectives which, you know, American people doesn't think it's worth it.

I mean, it's just a complete misunderstanding of of Clausewitz, right?

I mean, you know, the whole point.

Sorry to go on a little bit about him, but Clausewitz is considered this great strategic thinking about the art of war and how war is fought.

And he said, War is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means, not as often wrongly translated.. It's the continuation of politics by other means.

It means with other means.

So it is politics.

It's driving diplomacy.

And then you use force in order to help, to help shape that.

And the American public needs to understand that these two things are different, but interact.

>> Okay.

So no, look, I mean, I that's why we're here is understanding the complexity of this moment at a time when the administration seems to be attempting to simplify everything.

And so, Randy, let me build off Heine's point there with a couple of questions there.

First of all, he referenced the Secretary of Defense, who has not only, you know, sort of beat his chest in weird ways that look overcompensating to me.

But he has said that he's not going to tell the American public all of our goals here, so as not to reveal too much about what we're going to do.

I found that bizarre because no one is asking you, where are you striking tomorrow?

What building do you plan to hit next?

Where do you think the new ayatollah is hiding?

No one is asking that.

They're asking what are your goals here?

What do you want to accomplish?

How long do you think it will take?

I think the American public deserves an answer there.

So let me start with that.

Do you think the administration owes the American public an answer to that question?

>> Well, so they're trying to claim that they're using strategic misdirection and so forth and being clever.

But the the fact of the matter is they have no idea what their objectives are.

And we shouldn't I don't think we we should believe for a moment that they have a long term plan about this or about anything else.

>> Hines jumping out of a seat here.

>> No, no, I'm just one of just just I very much enjoy these occasions that I get to interact with Randy about these things.

don't you think that the Americans should let the Iranians know what their goals are so that the Iranians say, okay, we understand we had enough?

We'll give you that instead of.

>> The Iranian people.

>> I mean, I mean, isn't I mean, you have to give Warsh you have to give the other side a chance to say, okay, I accept I'm defeated and I will roll over and play nice.

But if you don't even tell them that I mean.

>> Well, and the the notion that what we're after is unconditional surrender is, of course, absurd.

unconditional surrender.

during World War Two, was was a disaster.

That was cleverly foisted on American foreign policy by Joseph Stalin.

Right.

And was was very much in his interests that our strategy was unconditional surrender.

so that we were tied in knots and couldn't I couldn't be flexible.

But of course, he was free to be flexible.

Unconditional surrender is a offers your opponent.

Nothing gives them no reason to make any concessions.

and the the only way that one could accomplish that would be to put the entire American army on the ground in Iran, which I don't think is going to happen.

>> And and the Pacific War was not an unconditional surrender, even though people tend to think of it.

But the Japanese did not offer an unconditional surrender.

They got to keep the emperor.

>> Yeah.

So a couple of points, though.

President Trump, I think two days into the war, said that they had heard from some of the surviving leadership in Iran.

And the president told American reporters, well, I'm willing to get on a phone call and talk.

You know, there's still room to talk.

Then a few days after that, well, we need unconditional surrender.

so where did the talking go?

And then he said, well, we might define our own view of unconditional surrender, so we might bomb enough targets and decide, well, that's surrender enough.

You know, we're out of here.

He has said he wants freedom for the Iranian people.

He has also said they have to do the work to rise up and take it that there is a limit to how much the United States can do for them.

And so I want you to respond to Hain's point there.

When you don't communicate not only to the foreign government that you're at war with, but to the people, because in this case, I do believe that a vast majority of the Iranian society would love to see their regime gone.

I think that that is I think that's true.

That's hard to argue.

But what are you signaling to them?

How much work do they have to do?

How much risk do they have to do?

How much death do they have to take, and how long will you back them?

I don't think anybody knows that.

I don't think the people of Iran know that, do you?

>> Right.

We've we've seen how this movie plays out before in Iraq.

Right.

The first President George H.W.

Bush pulled back and decided not to go into Baghdad, not to change the regime, but then encouraged the the Shiites in the south of Iraq, where the majority of the country to rise up against Saddam Hussein.

They did so hoping that the United States might support them.

They were massacred by the regime, and it set back any prospect of of of a popular uprising there for decades.

So I suspect that the Shiites in Iran remember that history and our not inclined to trust American assurances, even if we tried to make them, that the United States would support them if they rose up against their leadership.

I don't think that the United States is really in a point where it can send a credible signal, which would be accepted, which would which either the leadership or the people are going to to take as very informative.

So I don't think that I don't think there's an easy solution to this problem.

but I think that the real reason that we're not telling the American people what our objectives are is that the administration hasn't sorted it out yet, and Donald Trump might change his mind tomorrow.

And so Hegseth and everybody else in the administration is trying to keep their heads down and not not be wrong on this.

>> Okay.

I'm going to take some phone calls and emails.

I already see the phone ringing.

Listeners, if you want to join the conversation, you can do that at 844295 talk.

It's toll free.

8442958255263 WXXI.

If you call from Rochester 2639994, you can email the program.

As always, Connections at wxxi.org.

Last week we talked to a couple of Iranian Americans who said they are not fans of Trump, but they are desperate for change in regime.

And I feel for them.

I mean, I understand I not from personal experience, I cannot empathize, I can sympathize with what they and their families and their communities have gone through.

Tomorrow we're going to talk to two different Iranian Americans who are desperate for, I think, different leadership in Iran, but who don't support this war, who don't trust the possible outcomes.

The Iranian diaspora doesn't have a monolithic view on this, but clearly there's not a lot of love and not a lot of sadness at Khamenei is gone.

I mean, we talked to Iranian Americans who got up in the middle of the night and started singing and dancing.

So there's powerful emotion there.

But, you know, Dr.

Cummins, when we've talked about how conflict ends, we've talked about who has leverage, what what does each side see?

If the Trump administration thought that that initial strike that took out the ayatollah was going to lead to some, maybe Reza Pahlavi gets installed or somebody else gets installed and they immediately become pro-Western.

What we saw yesterday, this weekend was the son of Ayatollah Khomeini is now installed as the supreme leader.

And by all the reporting I've seen, he is more hard and more extreme than his father was.

He also just lost his father and apparently his wife and a son in the strike.

President Trump said they had other possible successors in their minds lined up, but they accidentally killed them in the initial strike.

They didn't think they were going to be part of this.

This meeting house where everyone was so two or 3 or 4 people who might have been the successor are dead now.

So talk to me about what the Iranian, what you think is the right way for Americans to see this.

Because if you don't like President Trump, you might be cynical about this whole thing.

But if you care about the freedom of the people, I want, you know, I would love to see democratic norms installed for the Iranian people.

I would love to see them out from under the thumb of a brutal regime.

How do you effectively sort of evaluate how to what to even root for and what looks possible?

I don't know how to achieve those things, but I care about Iranian Americans and friends and the people of Iran, and I don't want them under the thumb of another oppressive regime, which looks like it could happen.

And the president, President Trump said that could happen.

>> Well, I mean, first of all, my my, my analysis of what's going on is not really based in any way on my, my approval or disapproval of the, of the regime and its policies.

I'm trying to understand, you know, what what is the underlying logic and where it leads me.

Well, what's going on on Iran is, you know, for the Iranian people is, of course, terrible.

They're caught between a horrible regime, on the one hand, and an American and Israeli attack who they can't trust to have their best interest at heart in the long run.

It's it's terrible.

I mean, Randy just referred to what happened in the, in the first Gulf War with the with the Shia.

There's the talk now, at the moment that the American administration wants to have the Kurds come in, you know, and, you know, help overthrow the regime, the Kurds, who the United States and particularly Trump have the word advisedly used in this context, betrayed at least twice, said, yeah, screw you.

You're on your own now.

So it doesn't seem very much like the Kurds are.

Right.

The the wife of the of the Kurdish prime minister in parliament or the speaker of Parliament, I think, I don't know which of the two it is had a had a wrote a long letter.

So like we're not going to fall for this again.

You're going to, you know, you're.

>> Gonna and then I think President Trump said, well, we're not doing that anyway.

I was 24 hours later, he said, we're going to arm the Kurds.

Now.

They're not part of the equation.

>> And and, you know, talking about taking out all the other kind of potentially, you know, pro Western leaders in, in Iran you took out the ayatollah and there's not a few Shia in the world who actually remember that the whole religion of Shiism is based on the death of Ali, who was, of course, the great leader and the successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

And he was assassinated together with their family, his family.

And they see the parallel right here.

He is a martyr.

And this leads me to, to to two things.

The first thing is that the Iranians will seek to impose costs on the United States so that the United States says, okay, that's enough, and you should not under underestimate the possibility that there will be Shia terrorist attacks based on the fact that the leader of Shia Islam was killed and he is the martyr, and he's the inheritor of Ali's mantle.

And it's not necessarily about the regime.

This is about like, you know, 1200 years ago.

so there is going to be a surprising breadth or scope for terrorist attacks, which have impose costs on the United States.

that worries me for the long run.

every country that has attacked or bombed, first, the hard liners come together and people rally around the flag that this should not have should not have surprised anybody that that is going on.

and two things that I want to add to that.

first of all, from the United States perspective, perspective, the question is indeed what can they achieve?

And United States public will have to adjust as whether or not or make, make, make a judgment on whether those costs were, you know, whether the achievement justified the cost and said, okay or, or there could be domestic unrest in the United States.

You know, the midterms could really swing dramatically.

But of course, you know, and Randy would be the first to point out, it's not just the United States public that is looking at it, because there's heavy costs imposed on the allies, of course.

And they are going to say, was this worth it for our for our perspective?

And they might change their policies in the long run also as well.

It's the only way I can make sense of it.

And I was wondering what Randy would think of is, is that yes, there was long term talk about attacking Iran.

There was planning.

We all know that Bibi Netanyahu was very much gung on doing this to create a legacy or to get reelected and secure his future in Israel.

And there was this opportunity which came up out of the blue to take them all out at once.

And they jumped the gun.

That's the only way this any of this really makes sense to me.

>> Well, my reading of it is that they did advance the timetable by about 12 hours.

They were planning on launching the the bombing 12 hours later, but then they got a CIA report that they, they knew where Khomeini was going to be.

there were going to be a number of other high level military political leaders in the same spot.

And so this was an opportunity.

So instead of attacking in the dark, when we normally attack, they attacked early in the morning.

>> I thought it was a week okay.

But I, I thought it was a week.

>> So I've seen a couple of different reports at different times that moved these things around.

But the latest I saw suggested that it had been intended to be 12 hours later.

>> And say what you want about people who want to sort of burnish their own history or rewrite history.

So I don't know how true this is, but former under the Biden administration, former Secretary of State Blinken said this weekend that Israel had asked the United States many times and not only asked, told the United States.

We're going to be striking Iran.

So you better get with us here.

And Blinken said, every time, whether it was Obama or Biden in the white House that was brought to the table, it was we're going to call their bluff here.

They're not going to do this without us.

And we don't think this is the right thing right now.

And it didn't happen.

Secretary of State Rubio said last week that one of the justifications for this was that Israel came to the Trump administration and said, we are going to be striking Iran.

We want you with us.

And the Trump team said, well, if they do that, we're probably going to get hit.

Our base is in the Middle East, are going to get hit by Iran.

We might as well get in there first.

And they went with them.

And Rubio essentially said that they tried to walk it back the next day.

But he said that.

>> Yeah, I mean, this is the perfect segue to the thing that we have to discuss also, and we haven't done I mean, United States is not fighting on its own, right?

It's fighting with Israel.

And it may be the case that the United States is not entirely sure what its goals are.

Then we should ask ourselves, what are the goals of of of Israel?

And there is lots of talk all over the place.

There is a little bit of a gambling for resurrection that Netanyahu fears elections.

There's lots of talk that Israel is expanding into southern Syria, into southern Lebanon.

It once weak, fragmented states all around.

So, you know, if Israel says we're going to take out the Khamenei as well, and the next one and the next one clearly means that they don't want a particularly stable Iran, right?

They it may mean that they do want this balkanization or this breaking up of Iran into fragmented states, so they don't have to worry.

>> About the most.

You couldn't say that Israel has not come out and said that their goal is a democratic Iran.

The people are prioritized.

That is not their intention.

>> No.

I mean, and you have to look at, you know, the policy elsewhere.

I mean, it is you know, they're going into southern Syria to create a buffer for a buffer for a buffer.

they're doing similar things in southern Lebanon.

you can understand the logic of some of this, but, I mean, it seems that Bibi is quite happy with having weak states all around them.

And then, surprisingly, a lot of people point to, Mohammed bin Zayed, the leader of the UAE, who is similarly inclined to to fragment the states in the Middle East to increase his own influence.

>> So before I go to some phone calls and some emails, which we'll get to in just a second here.

doctor Stone, is there a way that you see this?

and ending is the wrong word?

I mean, the consequences of this are going to be unfolding for, I mean, as far as the eye can see.

So when I say ending, I mean the active war campaign ending, is there a way that you can see it resulting in something that truly makes the world safer and makes the world better for the Iranian people?

>> You know, I don't think you make the world safer by fighting wars in the Middle East.

I just don't think that that is is a possible outcome of this kind of scenario.

you make the world objectively more unstable more dangerous place.

And if the Iranian regime is more unstable, it will there will be a proliferation of non-state actors who, as Hein was pointing out, will engage in more terrorist activities around the world.

and you you don't make friends and influence people by dropping bombs on their houses.

That's just not a strategy that works.

What it might accomplish is setting back the regime's nuclear program.

that that seems quite plausible, that if you destroy enough infrastructure, you make it really hard for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon for some period of time.

You also reinforce their determination to develop whatever tools they possibly can to hit you.

some point in the future.

And instead of deterrence, which is what they've been thinking about doing, they're going to be thinking about revenge, right?

Because deterrence is clearly not possible for them.

I think one interesting implication of all of this is that the United States is now shown in the course of a couple months, that we could seize the leader of one country, Venezuela, and we could assassinate the leader of another country, Iran.

and that strategy has is attractive if you think that the problem for U.S.

foreign policy is these obstreperous leaders who have too much power in their own countries, and if we could just get them replaced by somebody else, we could make a deal with them.

and in personalistic dictatorships, like like Russia, you might think that that might actually work.

You know, if you were able to eliminate Vladimir Putin, then maybe you could make a deal with his successor, whoever it was, because Putin has gotten himself stuck in a bad war in Iran, in Ukraine, he might be willing the successor might be willing to make a deal that Putin can't afford to make.

So that's a kind of an attractive strategy that's terrifying to people who are at the top of personalistic dictatorships.

That's terrifying to Vladimir Putin.

It's terrifying to XI Jinping in China.

So these, these these leaders have to think about how do you deter the United States if they have access to this technology now, it's easier to do it in Venezuela and in Iran than it is in in Russia, and much easier than it would be to do it in China.

but the CIA has assets everywhere, and this wouldn't be the first time that foreign leaders have overestimated the capacity of the CIA to do dirty tricks in their backyard, right.

So this means that in order to protect themselves, they have to somehow cultivate a deterrent capability that would that would deter someone like Donald Trump.

That probably means going after Donald Trump himself and his family.

which means that they have to develop greater covert capacity within the United States.

And the attempt to fight back against their effort to develop that covert capacity will be seen as weakening deterrence that protects their leader.

Right.

So we now have an arms race in the intelligence services, which was one of the things we managed to finally put to rest with the end of the Cold War.

And that was a very good thing that we managed to put that to rest.

>> I mean, if you will if you will allow me talking about nuclear weapons, there has been, you know, Bibi Netanyahu has been saying since 1992 the Iranians are going to build nuclear weapons.

>> They're a month away.

They're they're two weeks away.

>> And everybody still says, oh, Iranian nuclear weapons.

To be quite honest, I've always been somewhat skeptical.

Khamenei.

And Khamenei have said there was a fatwa.

Nuclear weapons are un-Islamic.

That was, you know, fatwa is a big deal.

>> You trust that?

>> Well, everybody that's the old that's what everybody always says.

Like, do you trust that I take the fatwa relatively seriously?

If you break it, it's a big deal.

but even if it's just only 10 or 15% relevant now you have a new leader who can say like, oh, well it's the survival of the of the of the Shia state of the Iranian state that's at stake.

The Islamic Republic is at stake.

we have to reassess our options.

The, deterrent strategy of the Aegis, the Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi is insufficient.

And the only thing that we can do is race to nukes.

And you can be sure there's people in the Revolutionary Guard who are saying, let's race to nukes.

So have you increased the likelihood?

Let me just say, I mean, I do believe that the fatwa has some weight.

Let me say that there is an argument to be made that their likelihood or the need to produce nuclear weapons is perceived as to be higher among influential elites in Iran than before.

>> In other words, if this regime isn't entirely annihilated, their desire to move even more quickly toward nuclear weapons as a means of survival, it's the only accelerated.

>> Yeah, it's the only deterrent.

Everything else has failed.

I just pointed out, what do you have?

>> I mean, yeah after our only break, we'll come back with doctor Stone and Dr.

Coomans from the University of Rochester.

really?

International experts with long resumes on understanding war and conflict.

And we're going to get some listener feedback, questions, comments phone calls, emails.

On the other side of this, only break.

I'm Evan Dawson Tuesday on the next Connections.

Last week we heard from some Iranian Americans in the Rochester region who said that they may not be fans of President Trump, but they are deeply grateful for this war and the possible elimination of a brutal regime.

But we also heard from a number of Iranian Americans after that conversation, saying they want their voices heard about why they oppose the war.

We'll talk about it Tuesday.

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>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Let's move quickly.

A lot of feedback, Greg and San Diego first.

Hi, Greg.

Go ahead.

>> Hi.

You know.

>> things a few weeks ago were really fairly stable or stable as things in the Middle East can be.

Now, every corner is in chaos.

Did we go to war?

Did we invade Iran to protect Israel from being attacked?

Well, now they are being attacked by Hezbollah.

Did we do it to protect the oil supply?

Well, the supply of oil to the entire world is now less secure than it was before the war started.

Okay, yes, we did get rid of Khomeini in Iran, but it's even more chaotic there.

Now there are the Kurds who are being encouraged to fight.

I and I don't think that either Russia or China will just let Iran fade away or fall into total chaos, that they will keep them supplied with missiles.

the Gulf states who were strongly, you know, pro-American now have to be wondering, do we really want to be so closely allied?

You know, I'm speaking of Kuwait.

Bahrain, the Emirates they as Saudi Arabia, you know, have been basically pro-Western.

Now they have taken a lot of destruction.

and, you know, as far as oil prices, God only knows that's going to affect the entire world.

So I see nothing that has been achieved, but a whole lot of chaos and questions from China and Russia's reaction to you know, what is going to happen to Israel, to a very small country.

It doesn't take a whole lot of missiles to destroy a lot of it.

and with Hezbollah attacking from the north, I don't think any any government really knows what to do at this point.

They're still trying to figure out, you know, where where is it all going.

>> Greg?

Thank you.

Randy, you want to start with a response?

Go ahead.

>> Well, one one thing that Greg mentioned China and one has to wonder how this affects China's long term calculations about when and whether to invade Taiwan.

XI Jinping has made it pretty clear that he intends to reunify China and Taiwan.

and this has been prevented by a kind of tenuous deterrence, that the United States has maintained, although we don't officially recognize Taiwan, we still make ambiguous statements.

And there have been a couple of militarized disputes between China and the United States over the decades that have indicated the United States was prepared to defend Taiwan.

The Biden administration made it very clear, yes, we will fight to defend Taiwan, and the Trump administration has made it very fuzzy.

and if the United States gets itself heavily involved in an operation in the Middle East, then its ability to do anything else in the world becomes compromised.

And so many of these other relationships that are fragile could, could crumble because we've we've tied ourselves down.

>> Not just in Iran, but also Venezuela, perhaps Cuba next year.

Our attention is in a lot of different places, doctor.

Humans.

>> Well, I wanted to, you know, reply to what Greg said.

I mean, as an unusually well formed American on what's going on in the Middle East.

I mean, I think what he what he says and what how he looks at the what's going on is shared by a lot of people.

They look on the ground and they say like it's a big mess.

And the thing I want to emphasize to him and all these, all the listeners here is that it's perhaps a bit of a mistake or, you know, too much emphasis to look at what's happening at the moment.

Now you got to look at how these actions are supposed to shape the expectations of the other actions, other actors in the future.

It's all about what you think is going to happen in the future.

That will then make you actually adapt your behavior in the present to either forestall a bad future, or welcome a better future.

So we have to think about, you know, as Randy just pointed out, how do these events shape expectations of what's possible in the future and what is not possible?

and that's that's why it opened.

Indeed.

That is wide open because, as he pointed out, Hezbollah is now attacking in the in the north.

And yeah, people said Hezbollah is decimated.

It's all true.

But because Hezbollah is doing this, Israel has to move some forces and intelligence and ships out of there, focus on Iran and refocus them on on southern Lebanon.

>> This is from Charles, a defense of the American operation in Iran.

He says, I believe it's worth mentioning to your listeners that the United States military has systematically killed members of a regime which has spent decades oppressing women, oppressing gay people, and anyone who did not share their religion, not to mention barracks bombings, hostage taking and creating IEDs and sponsoring terrorism worldwide.

That is from Charles.

>> That's all true.

And that is, you know, bad guys.

I wish there were a few bad people in the world.

you know, the question is, will the next people be any better?

And they could very well be worse.

And that's that's a gamble that, you know, you have to go in with open eyes and you have some kind of ideas of what is possible.

It seems, from what you earlier suggested, that, you know, the American administration was not as careful because they killed people who thought they could work with in the future.

So things can get worse.

Things can always get worse.

>> By the way.

The way the President Trump described that was he said we were too successful in the opening strike of the war, not killing not just Ayatollah Khomeini, but also possible successors.

So that's an interesting definition of success.

>> Well, and I think we should make a distinction again between personalistic dictatorships and other kinds of authoritarian regimes.

Iran is not a personalistic dictatorship, although the the Ayatollah has tremendous power and is the preeminent religious leader as well as the most important executive and legislative and judicial figure in the government.

He has a lot of power, but they have a collective leadership body which has a pretty clear sense of their objectives.

There's a lot of consensus there and there.

There's some depth to their leadership.

They anticipated after last June's attacks which already were supposed to have eliminated Iran's capacity to build a nuclear weapon.

Right.

We we already already did this.

And back in June last year.

And that was supposed to solve the problem.

They said.

>> It was totally annihilated.

>> Yeah.

Now we've got to do it all over again.

so they they set up a response, which would be, they would have four levels of replacements in place for anyone who was killed.

They anticipated that they would they would their leadership might be decapitated, but they ensured that the policy thrust would continue.

And I think this is a regime that has a lot of a lot of staying power.

The Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful organized force within the country.

They have the capacity to do an awful lot of repression.

>> And they're true believers.

>> That's right.

And they and they they just brutally repressed a widespread popular uprising in the country killing some estimated 6 or 7000 people in the process.

>> Could have been.

>> More may have been more it's going to be really difficult regime to to to dislodge.

So if you if you want to change that regime, you have to put the American army in Iran.

And I don't think we I don't think the country wants to do that.

I think it would also be a profound mistake, given the current state of the world, to commit ourselves to a long term failing war yet again in the Middle East, when we have much more important interests at stake in other parts of the world.

>> Well, the argument is now that we're going to send some special forces and Israeli special forces, and we're going to dig 2 or 3km into the sites we have just blown up to get the to get the we we're gonna, you know, we're gonna send Special forces in together with the Israelis, and they are going to dig through the mountains.

We just blew up to take the 60 kilos of enriched.

>> Uranium.

They're going to go get it.

>> Good luck.

I mean, maybe, I mean, but I don't think that's again, I don't think that's the end all and be all.

I don't, you know so Iran has the has the capability, they have the knowledge.

And I know that Israel has been trying to assassinate nuclear physicists in Iran as much as they can to destroy that knowledge.

But there is that knowledge base, and that's I don't think you're going to wipe that out.

>> So before I grab one more call, Jack, hang there for one second.

What do you what do you think this is about from Israel's perspective?

Do you take Netanyahu at his word that this is about a dangerous regime that would use a nuclear weapon the moment it had one on Israel?

>> Well, I don't think that Iran would do that.

But maybe Bibi believes that.

I mean, I do think this is a cabinet stocked with a couple of true believers about Greater Israel.

seeing this is the opportunity to free themselves of the constraints of any constraints they perceive in the Middle East once and for all.

I, I, I think that is, that is you know, with Ben-Gvir and of course, with Smotrich and with other people and a large majority of the Israeli public as well.

I don't think that the overwhelming urge for the Israeli public is to expand territorially.

there's a small group who does want to and does want to settle the land.

But I do think that Israel wants to say we are free of constraints.

We are the regional hegemon, and we get to call the shots.

>> I think the average American, this is probably me in that category.

Until recently.

If you're only listening to Netanyahu, I would urge you to read what Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and others in that leadership have said.

They have extreme views.

>> Yes.

>> On the world and on Israel's place in the world.

and it's I think it's valuable to at least understand who is leading some of that policy and decision making.

doctor Stone, what do you think this is about from the Trump administration's perspective?

I mean, do you feel like you is it the nuclear regime is.

>> I think that they have a list of objectives that they would like to achieve around the world.

and they have no particular hierarchy among those objectives.

and they opportunistically pull one of those objectives when it it suits Donald Trump's mercurial temper.

he he moves around so fast, I think his advisors can't keep track of what the how to explain this as a strategy.

Right.

It's it's kind of like when he was you know, doing the The Apprentice show, and they would have a script for him that included who was supposed to win and who was supposed to lose, and he would mess it up because he just, he liked to to change things, and they'd have to rewrite the script, you know, in order to catch up with him.

His advisors are doing the same thing.

They're trying to keep up with this.

This bull in the China shop who loves shiny objects, right?

And he's just he he he he sees one, and he just has to go get it.

and he doesn't want to listen to anyone telling him, well, that's really a bad idea.

That'll have long term consequences that are going to be disastrous, or it's going to tie us down in these various ways, or, you know, there are constraints.

Oh, there's this thing called international law.

I don't want to hear any of that.

Just just explain to explain to the public why everything I did was brilliant.

>> But I mean, what Randy points to is, is the possibility that we haven't examined yet.

Let's say this is a great success.

Let's say that Iran buckles down and says, yes, Grand Ayatollah Trump, you were right all along.

You know, you get to pick our next successor.

Trump is going to be emboldened, and he's going to gamble even bigger stakes next time.

And I am seriously worried about what that would mean for the world.

>> All right, Jack in Greece.

Hi, Jack.

Go ahead.

>> Oh, thanks, Evan.

Hey.

yeah, I, I haven't heard the entire conversation, but I'm going to come back to.

It's my belief at this point that Donald Trump decided to do this because he was heavily influenced by Netanyahu.

My opinion is that Netanyahu can live with chaos in Iran because they've eliminated the threat.

Of Iran's ability to support all these terror arms that they have.

Hamas has been very weakened.

And he's and he can live with that.

but for us you mentioned how do you see this ending?

Well, my opinion is the greatest military success does not destroy an idea.

These people in Iran.

I mean, I still remember these people are, to use the word fervent is an understatement.

These people the way they supported the Ayatollah coming back to their country, starting their Islamic state.

I mean it's nice that there's a lot of people that seem to want to support possibly a democracy.

But on the other hand, there's a lot of fervent believers that have the weapons in Iran, and I don't see us going in.

So you mentioned how do you see this ending?

Well, my opinion, I think it was Israel at least from Netanyahu's standpoint, will feel stronger because they've eliminated that existential threat of Iran for us.

I it's hard to believe that there'll be less trust than the United States.

But I think we've managed to do that.

We were in the middle of negotiations, supposedly, that were going very well.

And then how do we end those negotiations?

Well, we killed them.

We bombed them.

So you know, and how how does it also end?

Well, I think Donald Trump can decide at any point.

Well, we've totally obliterated them, just like they did when they went in.

They blew up the nuclear stockpile back in June or whatever it was.

They said they obliterated it so he could do the same thing and say, we're walking away.

We're done.

so.

>> yeah.

>> That's the way I see it.

>> Yeah.

Jack, I appreciate that.

We're down to our last minute about 30s apiece.

Randy Stone.

I think Jack echoes the idea that there's still a lot of chaos here.

What are you looking at next?

>> Well, I. How we end this depends on what the Trump administration.

Which means Donald Trump and his conversation with himself decides he he wants to do.

And I think it can it can go very, very badly if he decides to double down and expand the U.S.

presence in Iran and actually try to change the regime, I think that that that will be tempting to him.

And it would be really disastrous.

if if he decides to withdraw instead, I think we've still made the Middle East a more dangerous place, but at least we don't have the the damage of a long term land war.

>> But Iran gets a voice.

It's not just whether, you know, Trump says he will walk away.

you know, Trotsky tried to do that in 1970 and says, oh, to the Germans, we're going to walk away.

And the Germans were like, what?

What the hell do you mean?

And then came back and forth for longer.

I mean, there is there is room for for Iran to decide and for the Shia worldwide to decide to inflict greater cost on the U.S.

>> It's also the fog of war.

And there's so much that could happen.

Secretary Hegseth and the president have tried to downplay the deaths of Americans.

They yelled at the media for asking questions about the dead Americans.

So far.

If you see that number dramatically rise, there's any number of things that could happen.

And they seem to think that that's impossible.

I want to thank our guests, Dr.

Hein Goemans and Dr.

Randy Stone, for being here.

Thank you very much.

Randy, come back and talk to us about Multinational Order soon.

If you if you could.

will do.

he's got a new book coming out, but I know we're going to talk to both of these gentlemen soon.

We always appreciate their time from all of us at Connections.

Thank you for being with us.

We are back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

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