Uma entrevista com Trita Parsi sobre a "profecia autorrealizável" desencadeada pelos ataques israelenses e americanos e o impasse diplomático que o Irã enfrenta atualmente.
Trita Parsi, Rajan Menon
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Consequências de um ataque israelense em Teerã em 13 de junho de 2025. Imagem: Meghdad Madadi/Tasnim News/AFP via Getty Images |
O que exatamente os bombardeios de Israel e dos Estados Unidos contra o Irã no mês passado realizaram? À medida que a poeira começa a baixar, fica claro que nenhuma das intenções declaradas dos arquitetos dos ataques — desmantelar o regime iraniano e decapitar as capacidades nucleares do país — se concretizou.
Pelo contrário, argumenta Trita Parsi, vice-presidente executiva do Instituto Quincy para a Arte de Governar Responsável e especialista em política externa iraniana, os ataques descarados apenas uniram os iranianos em torno da bandeira e tornaram a tarefa dos ativistas pró-democracia iranianos muito mais difícil. "Israel e os Estados Unidos não destruíram o programa nuclear do Irã", diz ele, "mas podem ter destruído a confiança na diplomacia necessária para buscar um resultado diplomático".
Como chegamos a esse ponto? Na semana passada, Rajan Menon, pesquisador sênior do Instituto Saltzman de Estudos de Guerra e Paz da Universidade de Columbia, conversou com Parsi por telefone para discutir a história das relações dos EUA e de Israel com o Irã, a situação geopolítica atual e muito mais.
A transcrição a seguir da conversa foi ligeiramente editada para maior concisão e clareza.
Rajan Menon
Os proponentes dos ataques os enquadraram como uma questão de legítima defesa: Israel, diante da ameaça de um Irã com armas nucleares, não teve escolha a não ser atacar preventivamente o país que pediu sua destruição. Mas as ações de Israel podem ser justificadas de alguma forma pelo direito internacional?
Trita Parsi
Quando se trata de onde o direito internacional se enquadra nisso, não há debate. Este não é um cenário em que um ataque iminente, de qualquer forma ou forma, possa ser apontado. Israel não apresentou nenhuma evidência disso. Mesmo suas declarações de que, até 2026, os iranianos teriam capacidade nuclear X, Y e Z — isso não é algo que possa ser categorizado como iminente.
As declarações oficiais europeias sobre o ataque de Israel nem sequer tentam fazer referências ao direito internacional, porque sabem que é uma causa completamente perdida. Estão apresentando argumentos políticos. Mas não estamos em uma conversa política porque o direito internacional foi pouco claro e indeciso. Entramos em um mundo em que o direito internacional não é mais a pedra angular nem mesmo dos países europeus.
O momento dos ataques israelenses quase não teve relação com o medo de um ataque iminente.
Na verdade, as declarações que fazem referência ao direito internacional vêm do Sul Global. Isso faz parte de uma tendência maior: os Estados ocidentais se desviarão cada vez mais para uma ordem falsa baseada em regras, em vez de uma ordem centrada no direito, enquanto os países do Sul Global adotarão a bandeira do direito internacional.
Em seu discurso político, os iranianos fizeram todos os tipos de declarações sobre Israel. Mas a ideia de que eles pediram a destruição de Israel não é totalmente verdadeira: suas declarações são mais uma previsão de que a entidade sionista, como eles chamam Israel, entrará em colapso. Pode-se dizer que são um tanto semelhantes às declarações de líderes ocidentais durante a Guerra Fria, nas quais afirmaram — corretamente — que o projeto comunista provavelmente não sobreviveria. Eles não esconderam que esperam esse resultado, mas isso ainda é diferente de fazer ameaças de destruir Israel ativamente. De fato, declarações desse tipo foram emitidas com mais frequência na década de 1980, mas, naquela época, Israel instava ativamente os Estados Unidos a ignorar a retórica anti-Israel do Irã e, em vez disso, a se tornarem amigos de Teerã.
RM
Então, para deixar claro, você está argumentando que o Irã não disse, na prática, que planeja destruir a entidade sionista, mas sim que, com o tempo, seu colapso ocorrerá.
TP
Correto. Os casos em que os iranianos fazem declarações dizendo que farão X, Y, Z a Israel são sempre um aviso, caso Israel ataque o Irã. Agora, isso não significa que eles não estejam usando uma retórica tremendamente venenosa contra Israel. Também não significa que eles não estejam tentando criar um círculo de fogo contra Israel, como porta-vozes israelenses o acusaram de fazer.
Mas é importante entender que os israelenses têm feito a mesma coisa: criando um círculo de fogo contra o Irã, do Azerbaijão ao Curdistão iraquiano. Foi relatado que um elemento da presença do Mossad no Irã — que obviamente foi parte do sucesso significativo de inteligência de Israel — se deu por meio do uso de refugiados afegãos dentro do país, alguns dos quais eram ex-funcionários de alto escalão do governo afegão. Esta é uma rivalidade geoestratégica que está sendo travada por ambos os lados. Ambos os lados estão fazendo coisas intensas um contra o outro.
Nada disso justifica, de forma alguma, de uma perspectiva legal, o ato de agressão que os israelenses cometeram ao atacar o Irã ou o incentivo do Irã a ataques terroristas contra Israel na década de 1990. Nem levaria necessariamente a um cenário em que se possa dizer que os israelenses não tiveram escolha a não ser agir. De fato, o momento dos ataques de Israel não teve quase nada a ver com esses fatores — teve mais a ver com o fato de que os sistemas de defesa aérea do Irã estavam vulneráveis após ataques anteriores, e Israel queria garantir que eles atacassem antes que os sistemas fossem reconstruídos.
Houve também fatores políticos. O General Michael Kurilla, comandante do Comando Central dos Estados Unidos (CENTCOM), extremamente simpático à posição israelense e que tem sido uma pessoa-chave dentro dos Estados Unidos na coordenação dessas questões, deve se aposentar neste verão (no hemisfério norte). À medida que nos aproximamos da temporada de eleições de meio de mandato, Israel teme que a flexibilidade de Trump nessa questão seja limitada. Também acredito que a resolução adotada pela Agência Internacional de Energia Atômica (AIEA) um dia antes do ataque israelense, que declarou que o Irã havia violado suas obrigações de salvaguardas, acrescentou uma oportunidade adicional do lado israelense.
RM
So while there is a great deal of publicity given to the Israeli argument that it faces a ring of fire constructed by Iran, the reality is that these are mutual rivals who have been actively trying to subvert the other. It hasn’t been a one-way street.
TP
TP
Geopolitical factors after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 pitted the two countries against each other, but it was Israel that first recognized this reality and acted on it. Prior to that, the Israelis were still guided by their doctrine of the periphery, in which they viewed Iran, regardless of what regime was in power, as a crucial periphery state that was needed in order to balance the Arab states in Israel’s vicinity. That’s partly why throughout the entire 1980s Israel was pushing the United States to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and to not pay attention to all of Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
Such talk, for Israel, was irrelevant: what mattered was that Iran was balancing out the other Arab states. And the Israelis were very upset that the United States was tilting toward Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. This is part of the reason you had the Iran-Contra scandal: Israel was pushing the United States into relations with Iran. There’s a letter from Shimon Peres to Reagan in 1986 in which he urges Reagan to get over the obstacles in Lebanon—what he meant by that was the Americans being taken hostage by Hezbollah—in order to bring Iran back into the Western fold.
In the 1980s, Israel actively urged the United States to ignore Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric and instead make friends with Tehran.
But once the Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq, the last standing Arab army that could pose a conventional military threat to Israel, was defeated. There was a completely new geopolitical environment in the region. Now, Israel no longer needed the Persian periphery to balance out the Arab nations; the Persian periphery itself was emerging as a threat. At this point the very same individuals—prime ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin—who had lead the effort to bring the United States and Iran closer together suddenly started saying that the new threat to the U.S. was Islamic fundamentalism, and that Iran personified that threat.
A New York Times article published at the time writes that American officials were “perplexed”—they use this word—by this shift in Israel’s position. Just years earlier Israel was banging on the White House’s door saying, why aren’t you making friends with Iran?
But in 1992, twelve years after the revolution and three years after Khomeini’s death, at a time when Iran had significantly cooled down its revolutionary zeal, Israel went to the United States and declared Iran and Islamic fundamentalism the main problem.
Israeli officials and key figures in Israel told me that the Israelis were very worried about their strategic position vis-à-vis the United States in a post–Cold War environment in which Israel was no longer needed as a buffer to stand against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. Israel was particularly mindful of how, during the first Iraq War, the United States was constantly talking to Bashar al-Assad in Syria and was conducting shuttle diplomacy in the region without visiting Israel. America kept Israel out of the Persian Gulf war while building an Arab coalition against Saddam and potentially making friends with Iran as well.
This was a nightmare scenario for Israel, who stood to lose its strategic value to the United States. So you start to see the Israelis shifting their rhetoric. Instead of talking about the strategic utility of Israel to the United States, they now they argued that the U.S.–Israel alliance was based on shared values. This is because the strategic argument about the need to balance Arab states and keep the Soviet Union out had been largely invalidated—the threats that it was based on were no longer there.
RM: There has been talk of regime change, from both the Trump administration and—much more overtly—from Israel. After the attack, what is your assessment of the staying power and stability of the Islamic Republic? Do you see there eventually being more space for political opposition—for an evolution toward a more democratic Iran?
TP: I’ve not lost hope that the trajectory toward greater openness can be resurrected. Unfortunately, since Trump left the Iran nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—in his first term, the trajectory has gone in the opposite direction. And with their attacks on Iran, the Israelis have given the Islamic Republic a major vitamin injection. There is massive rallying in Iran—not necessarily around the government, but around the flag. But that also means that Iranians are not rallying against the government in a manner that would likely have surged again in the absence of this attack.
It’s also very important to understand the way the attack was executed and the context in which it happened: after a year and a half of a genocide taking place in Gaza. Iranians are exposed far more to the images of that onslaught than the American public, which can only see the worst of it on social media. The inhumanity of the Netanyahu government has not been lost on anyone in Iran.
Second, the attack happened right before talks were supposed to go into their sixth round. Trump even bragged about how he had engaged in a deception, which takes any legitimacy of the attack away in the eyes of the vast majority of Iranians. And the legitimacy of defending against it is stronger than it would have been otherwise.
On top of that are stupid stunts such as bombing Tehran’s Evin Prison, in some belief that this would indicate Israel is fighting the regime and helping the political prisoners. They killed at least seventy-one individuals there—many of them political prisoners, others social workers. One victim was a philanthropist trying to arrange bail for some of these people.
RM: If you want to bring about political change, killing the people who you expect to bring that change is a strange way to go about it.
TP: I don’t know how exactly to explain the idiocy of the Israelis in doing this. It may be because they are listening to some Iranian political activists who at this point seem to be motivated more by revenge than a desire for democracy. But all these things have just dramatically backfired.
Bombing Tehran’s Evin Prison was a stupid stunt to try to indicate Israel is fighting the regime and helping the political prisoners.
That’s not to say that this has saved the Islamic Republic, but I think the societal opposition against the regime is currently being overshadowed by the fact that almost everyone is rallying around the flag in the country and against the Israelis—and to a certain extent the United States—as the enemies.
Second, although the Iranians were taken completely by surprise by the attacks, displaying an almost criminal neglect for not anticipating that Israel would do something like this before the negotiations, they regrouped and took control of the situation within twelve to fourteen hours. Despite twenty or so of their top officials having been killed, the system was never close to collapsing. Within eighteen hours of the attack, they managed to shoot off 200 missiles—making clear that they were back in charge.
The Washington Post published the audio tape of a senior Iranian general being called by a Farsi-speaking Mossad agent two hours after the attacks, threatening to kill the general, his wife, and his children if he did not send them a video declaring he was fleeing the country within twelve hours. Apparently, Israel made twenty of those calls, but it appears that not a single one of those videos were recorded. To me, this suggests Israel underestimated the resiliency of the Iranian system. And, of course, the fact that the threats made against children and wives did not appear to raise any question in the West also tells you something about their complete loss of any moral credibility right now.
RM: It seems fair to say that the attack has made harder the task of Iranians who want to change the system from the inside. Even a reformist figure such as President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was voted in by the Iranian public in part because he seemed to want to take Iran in a different direction, appears to have a much more difficult task now.
TP: Absolutely. This is what many of us have said over and over again: attacks of this kind close the space for those who want to change the system from within. The Iranian government is now going after suspected cells of spies working with the Mossad, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of innocent people end up being arrested in the process. But Iranian society will likely be more forgiving of government overreach because they sense that their own security has been jeopardized by these cells—just as it was in the United States after 9/11, in which a significant amount of American civil liberties were legislated away in the name of security. Absent this attack, there would have been pushback. There would have been an uproar. We saw how Iranians protested in 2022 when one young woman, Masha Amini, was killed for not wearing the hijab correctly, for instance.
RM: We’re in a paradoxical situation, are we not? On the one hand, you have people on the outside saying, “What we want is a democratic Iran. We’re in favor of the Iranian opposition. We want to promote democracy.” But the strike that has been condoned, if not applauded, by many of these same people runs at cross purposes with that declared intention.
TP: I’ll add two more points to that. First, there is anger inside Iran about the incompetence of the government and its lack of defenses, particularly during the first twelve hours after the attacks. There will be a point, I fear, in which the government cannot defend its essential criminal neglect, but instead will respond to these types of criticisms through more repression.
The second factor is the manner that Trump is speaking in: he’s talking about how he deceived Iran, how he’s attacking the supreme leader and threatening his life. This is also making it much more difficult for people within the system to argue in favor of diplomacy. Something may have also shifted in Iranian society in the sense that prior to this, the Iranians even went and met with the European foreign ministers (even though it was really unclear whether that would have any relevance whatsoever) but it was needed to be done for them to show their population that they were engaged in diplomacy and doing everything they could to prevent war.
With the attacks, there are spontaneous crowds starting to suddenly say, “Where’s our bomb?”
Now it appears to have been flipped: Iran’s population may not favor engaging in diplomacy but instead sees it as a sign of naivete—that the government has not learned the lesson of the deception that they fell for. As a result, there’s hesitance on the part of Iran’s political leaders to go toward talks.
RM: Do you have any sense of how Iran is processing this attack? In their aftermath, there appear to be two possibilities. One is that Iran decides to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), kick out the IAEA inspectors, and opt to develop the ultimate deterrent: nuclear weapons. The other is that it decides the quest for nuclear weapons is a mug’s game and gives it up completely, accepting Trump’s terms in hopes there will be no more sanctions, because ultimately what matters is showing the public a path to a better future.
TP: I’ve never seen the population in Iran favoring weaponization. Extensive polls have been made by groups both inside and outside the country; all show consistently strong support for enrichment, weak support for weaponization. But with the attacks, there are spontaneous crowds starting to suddenly say, “Where’s our bomb? Where’s our bomb? Build the bomb.” Again, this was highly predictable. I think that all the while, Iran was actually still abiding by JCPOA and the NPT despite the betrayal of both of those by the United States and Europe.
But now, Israel’s military action has unleashed a self-fulling prophecy. Even if the Iranians come and say, “Okay, let’s negotiate,” the Israelis will make a credible argument that you cannot trust them—that now, they will really want to get the bomb, and their effort toward diplomacy is much more likely than before to be a deception. Of course, the only reason that argument carries some credibility is because Israel bombed them in the first place.
So Iran is in a bind: Israel and the United States didn’t obliterate its nuclear program, but they may have obliterated the confidence in diplomacy needed to pursue a diplomatic outcome.
RM: How would you react to someone who says, well, if they were complying with JCPOA, which limited enrichment to 3.67 percent, why is it that the IAEA reported that they’ve enriched up to 60 percent? Was this not a violation of the JCPOA?
TP: The European position says that the Iranians are in violation of the JCPOA because they have disregarded restrictions that the JCPOA imposed. But we need to recognize that while the Iranians remain in the JCPOA and an argument can be made that they’re violating the JCPOA, the United States has completely abandoned it. And there is a clause in the JCPOA that also says that if one side is not complying, the other side can then reduce their obligations. The Iranians argue that they’re still in the JCPOA. Up until last week, they we’re still allowing for a tremendous number of inspections. They have increased certain activities that the JCPOA did not allow, and they’ve done that in retaliation for the fact that the United States has completely abandoned it. And the Europeans are only paying lip service to the JCPOA.
RM: Looking back a bit further, how have the last couple of years altered the debate within Iran’s political power structure around weaponization?
TP: We’ve already seen a strengthening of the pro-weaponization voices over the last two years because of Gaza. Gaza exposed to the Iranians and the rest of the world the falsity of the belief that the United States would constrain Israel and that, as a result, conventional force would be sufficient to deter Israel. There is no more confidence in this view after seeing how the Biden administration allowed Israel to do whatever it wanted, while only putting forward a pretense of a resistance. I think this is one of the biggest stories that has not been told: so much of Israel’s military success reflects the lifting of all U.S. constraints on how Israel could use force, breaking all codes of conduct. The U.S. military itself could never behave this way.
Israel can do things that they couldn’t do before, including the way they assassinated Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024. They had tried several times before, but the United States was concerned about collateral damage. There are now no such constraints. When Israel used 80 bombs to take down an entire neighborhood, killing between 300 and 500 people, it got a congratulatory statement from the Biden administration. When they assassinated Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, in 2004, killing nine to eleven of Yassin’s family members in the process, the George W. Bush administration condemned it.
RM: I want to talk about the reaction of the Arab states to the attacks. Whatever their public stance at some level, do you think they were privately pleased by the U.S. bombing of the installations in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan?
TP: No, I don’t think they were. I think they were deeply disturbed, because at the end of the day war would be very costly for the populations in these countries. It would have a destabilizing effect on the region. Right now they know that the path back to some form of a diplomatic solution is going to be extremely difficult, and the risk of a confrontation down the road remains very high. I think the perspective there has fundamentally changed.
They also think that the United States will continue to support Israel, but it will not support the Gulf Arab states if they end up in confrontation with Iran. This creates a very different scenario for them than one in which they thought the United States would defend them against Iran.
RM: Let’s move onto the regional and global implications. Russia and Iran, as you know, have a defense treaty: it doesn’t obligate either side to come immediately to the defense of the other if one is attacked, but nevertheless, there’s been close cooperation. Iran has bought Russian weaponry; Iranian Shahed drones have played a very significant role in the Ukraine war. But apart from condemning Israel and warning against the danger of attacking nuclear facilities, the Russians didn’t really do anything to help the Iranians. Do you think Iran expected more? And if it did, is it likely to reassess its relationship with Russia?
TP: The Iranians are deeply disappointed in the Russians: they expected more than just condemnations, particularly mindful of the support that they provided Russia in its own war. Iran, I think, has come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, the Russians are too compromised themselves—that they cannot risk their relationship with Trump, who they need to deal with over their own difficulties in Ukraine. Iran didn’t have much of an expectation of getting support from China, either. The so-called axis was missing in action.
If you want to bring about political change, killing the people who you expect to bring that change is a strange way to go about it.
But whereas Iran was truly alone in this, as it was in the Iran-Iraq war, Israel could not have done any of this without extensive active support from Germany, the UK, and the United States. This was not an Israeli–Iranian war: this was a war in which the Israelis had 70 percent of their expenses covered by the United States and received more or less all their weaponry from the United States, in addition to receiving extensive intelligence and air defense help. And even with that, they were still vulnerable to Iranian missiles.
RM: There’s a common assessment in the United States and Israel that Iran has never been in such a weak position: it has lost a lot of commanders and scientists, as well as been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Assad’s state has collapsed. Hezbollah and Hamas are on the back foot. Can Iran overcome these losses and regain its footing, or is it going to be licking its wounds for a very long time?
TP: Without a doubt, the Iranians have taken a lot of hits. But I think that despite a very successful initial attack, Israel failed at disrupting its command and control and failed at decapitating the regime. That tells us something about Iran’s resilience. So the question is: Are the Iranians going to learn about their own vulnerabilities from these attacks? Will they increase their ability to effectively strike Israel, which was what we saw throughout this period? Or will the Israelis learn more and faster from this and patch up the holes in their air defense systems?
I don’t have the technical knowledge to know who has the harder task. The Israelis have used their cells in Iran: most of them, at this point, are in a compromised position or have to go back into hiding. But the Iranians are going to also be involved in a much deeper cleanup than what we’ve seen. It’s not clear how long that will take.
One absolutely crucial question is where the United States lands with permissibility with Israel. If Trump moves to a place where he’s not okay with Israel doing a lot of these different things, we will go back toward a dirty war with a lot of intelligence hits but no larger direct confrontations.
RM: You have been one of the most prominent critics of U.S. foreign policy, if not the most prominent critic. If a president called you in and said, “All right, I want to cut a new path toward Iran, can you give me some idea of where I ought to go?” What might you suggest?
TP: One thing that can be said for Trump is that, at the end of the day, he is extremely nimble and can go in many different directions. He can go into Yemen, for instance, and then rather quickly change his mind and pull out instead of allowing that to become an endless war. I’m not praising him, of course—he shouldn’t have gone in in the first place—but we should recognize that he’s not as path-dependent as previous presidents have been.
I absolutely think he still can strike a deal, but it’s essential that he recognizes at least two things. First, any request for surrender, including enrichment in Iran, will be a path toward confrontation. The Iranians are not going to compromise on this point. They can agree to all kinds of creative solutions, but will reject ones that are just circumspect ways of getting back to zero. They’re not going to accept that.
Second, if you want to a better relationship with Iran, the Israelis are going to fight it tooth and nail. There is no happy medium there. Either you make a decision that allows the United States to reduce its military presence, start exiting the region militarily, and shift the burden of security onto regional players, or you don’t.
The United States needs a better relationship with Iran. And if that comes at the expense of making Israel unhappy, you should take that hit.
Trita Parsi is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.
Rajan Menon is Spitzer Professor Emeritus at the Powell School of City College of New York and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies.
Such talk, for Israel, was irrelevant: what mattered was that Iran was balancing out the other Arab states. And the Israelis were very upset that the United States was tilting toward Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. This is part of the reason you had the Iran-Contra scandal: Israel was pushing the United States into relations with Iran. There’s a letter from Shimon Peres to Reagan in 1986 in which he urges Reagan to get over the obstacles in Lebanon—what he meant by that was the Americans being taken hostage by Hezbollah—in order to bring Iran back into the Western fold.
In the 1980s, Israel actively urged the United States to ignore Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric and instead make friends with Tehran.
But once the Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq, the last standing Arab army that could pose a conventional military threat to Israel, was defeated. There was a completely new geopolitical environment in the region. Now, Israel no longer needed the Persian periphery to balance out the Arab nations; the Persian periphery itself was emerging as a threat. At this point the very same individuals—prime ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin—who had lead the effort to bring the United States and Iran closer together suddenly started saying that the new threat to the U.S. was Islamic fundamentalism, and that Iran personified that threat.
A New York Times article published at the time writes that American officials were “perplexed”—they use this word—by this shift in Israel’s position. Just years earlier Israel was banging on the White House’s door saying, why aren’t you making friends with Iran?
But in 1992, twelve years after the revolution and three years after Khomeini’s death, at a time when Iran had significantly cooled down its revolutionary zeal, Israel went to the United States and declared Iran and Islamic fundamentalism the main problem.
Israeli officials and key figures in Israel told me that the Israelis were very worried about their strategic position vis-à-vis the United States in a post–Cold War environment in which Israel was no longer needed as a buffer to stand against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. Israel was particularly mindful of how, during the first Iraq War, the United States was constantly talking to Bashar al-Assad in Syria and was conducting shuttle diplomacy in the region without visiting Israel. America kept Israel out of the Persian Gulf war while building an Arab coalition against Saddam and potentially making friends with Iran as well.
This was a nightmare scenario for Israel, who stood to lose its strategic value to the United States. So you start to see the Israelis shifting their rhetoric. Instead of talking about the strategic utility of Israel to the United States, they now they argued that the U.S.–Israel alliance was based on shared values. This is because the strategic argument about the need to balance Arab states and keep the Soviet Union out had been largely invalidated—the threats that it was based on were no longer there.
RM: There has been talk of regime change, from both the Trump administration and—much more overtly—from Israel. After the attack, what is your assessment of the staying power and stability of the Islamic Republic? Do you see there eventually being more space for political opposition—for an evolution toward a more democratic Iran?
TP: I’ve not lost hope that the trajectory toward greater openness can be resurrected. Unfortunately, since Trump left the Iran nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—in his first term, the trajectory has gone in the opposite direction. And with their attacks on Iran, the Israelis have given the Islamic Republic a major vitamin injection. There is massive rallying in Iran—not necessarily around the government, but around the flag. But that also means that Iranians are not rallying against the government in a manner that would likely have surged again in the absence of this attack.
It’s also very important to understand the way the attack was executed and the context in which it happened: after a year and a half of a genocide taking place in Gaza. Iranians are exposed far more to the images of that onslaught than the American public, which can only see the worst of it on social media. The inhumanity of the Netanyahu government has not been lost on anyone in Iran.
Second, the attack happened right before talks were supposed to go into their sixth round. Trump even bragged about how he had engaged in a deception, which takes any legitimacy of the attack away in the eyes of the vast majority of Iranians. And the legitimacy of defending against it is stronger than it would have been otherwise.
On top of that are stupid stunts such as bombing Tehran’s Evin Prison, in some belief that this would indicate Israel is fighting the regime and helping the political prisoners. They killed at least seventy-one individuals there—many of them political prisoners, others social workers. One victim was a philanthropist trying to arrange bail for some of these people.
RM: If you want to bring about political change, killing the people who you expect to bring that change is a strange way to go about it.
TP: I don’t know how exactly to explain the idiocy of the Israelis in doing this. It may be because they are listening to some Iranian political activists who at this point seem to be motivated more by revenge than a desire for democracy. But all these things have just dramatically backfired.
Bombing Tehran’s Evin Prison was a stupid stunt to try to indicate Israel is fighting the regime and helping the political prisoners.
That’s not to say that this has saved the Islamic Republic, but I think the societal opposition against the regime is currently being overshadowed by the fact that almost everyone is rallying around the flag in the country and against the Israelis—and to a certain extent the United States—as the enemies.
Second, although the Iranians were taken completely by surprise by the attacks, displaying an almost criminal neglect for not anticipating that Israel would do something like this before the negotiations, they regrouped and took control of the situation within twelve to fourteen hours. Despite twenty or so of their top officials having been killed, the system was never close to collapsing. Within eighteen hours of the attack, they managed to shoot off 200 missiles—making clear that they were back in charge.
The Washington Post published the audio tape of a senior Iranian general being called by a Farsi-speaking Mossad agent two hours after the attacks, threatening to kill the general, his wife, and his children if he did not send them a video declaring he was fleeing the country within twelve hours. Apparently, Israel made twenty of those calls, but it appears that not a single one of those videos were recorded. To me, this suggests Israel underestimated the resiliency of the Iranian system. And, of course, the fact that the threats made against children and wives did not appear to raise any question in the West also tells you something about their complete loss of any moral credibility right now.
RM: It seems fair to say that the attack has made harder the task of Iranians who want to change the system from the inside. Even a reformist figure such as President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was voted in by the Iranian public in part because he seemed to want to take Iran in a different direction, appears to have a much more difficult task now.
TP: Absolutely. This is what many of us have said over and over again: attacks of this kind close the space for those who want to change the system from within. The Iranian government is now going after suspected cells of spies working with the Mossad, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of innocent people end up being arrested in the process. But Iranian society will likely be more forgiving of government overreach because they sense that their own security has been jeopardized by these cells—just as it was in the United States after 9/11, in which a significant amount of American civil liberties were legislated away in the name of security. Absent this attack, there would have been pushback. There would have been an uproar. We saw how Iranians protested in 2022 when one young woman, Masha Amini, was killed for not wearing the hijab correctly, for instance.
RM: We’re in a paradoxical situation, are we not? On the one hand, you have people on the outside saying, “What we want is a democratic Iran. We’re in favor of the Iranian opposition. We want to promote democracy.” But the strike that has been condoned, if not applauded, by many of these same people runs at cross purposes with that declared intention.
TP: I’ll add two more points to that. First, there is anger inside Iran about the incompetence of the government and its lack of defenses, particularly during the first twelve hours after the attacks. There will be a point, I fear, in which the government cannot defend its essential criminal neglect, but instead will respond to these types of criticisms through more repression.
The second factor is the manner that Trump is speaking in: he’s talking about how he deceived Iran, how he’s attacking the supreme leader and threatening his life. This is also making it much more difficult for people within the system to argue in favor of diplomacy. Something may have also shifted in Iranian society in the sense that prior to this, the Iranians even went and met with the European foreign ministers (even though it was really unclear whether that would have any relevance whatsoever) but it was needed to be done for them to show their population that they were engaged in diplomacy and doing everything they could to prevent war.
With the attacks, there are spontaneous crowds starting to suddenly say, “Where’s our bomb?”
Now it appears to have been flipped: Iran’s population may not favor engaging in diplomacy but instead sees it as a sign of naivete—that the government has not learned the lesson of the deception that they fell for. As a result, there’s hesitance on the part of Iran’s political leaders to go toward talks.
RM: Do you have any sense of how Iran is processing this attack? In their aftermath, there appear to be two possibilities. One is that Iran decides to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), kick out the IAEA inspectors, and opt to develop the ultimate deterrent: nuclear weapons. The other is that it decides the quest for nuclear weapons is a mug’s game and gives it up completely, accepting Trump’s terms in hopes there will be no more sanctions, because ultimately what matters is showing the public a path to a better future.
TP: I’ve never seen the population in Iran favoring weaponization. Extensive polls have been made by groups both inside and outside the country; all show consistently strong support for enrichment, weak support for weaponization. But with the attacks, there are spontaneous crowds starting to suddenly say, “Where’s our bomb? Where’s our bomb? Build the bomb.” Again, this was highly predictable. I think that all the while, Iran was actually still abiding by JCPOA and the NPT despite the betrayal of both of those by the United States and Europe.
But now, Israel’s military action has unleashed a self-fulling prophecy. Even if the Iranians come and say, “Okay, let’s negotiate,” the Israelis will make a credible argument that you cannot trust them—that now, they will really want to get the bomb, and their effort toward diplomacy is much more likely than before to be a deception. Of course, the only reason that argument carries some credibility is because Israel bombed them in the first place.
So Iran is in a bind: Israel and the United States didn’t obliterate its nuclear program, but they may have obliterated the confidence in diplomacy needed to pursue a diplomatic outcome.
RM: How would you react to someone who says, well, if they were complying with JCPOA, which limited enrichment to 3.67 percent, why is it that the IAEA reported that they’ve enriched up to 60 percent? Was this not a violation of the JCPOA?
TP: The European position says that the Iranians are in violation of the JCPOA because they have disregarded restrictions that the JCPOA imposed. But we need to recognize that while the Iranians remain in the JCPOA and an argument can be made that they’re violating the JCPOA, the United States has completely abandoned it. And there is a clause in the JCPOA that also says that if one side is not complying, the other side can then reduce their obligations. The Iranians argue that they’re still in the JCPOA. Up until last week, they we’re still allowing for a tremendous number of inspections. They have increased certain activities that the JCPOA did not allow, and they’ve done that in retaliation for the fact that the United States has completely abandoned it. And the Europeans are only paying lip service to the JCPOA.
RM: Looking back a bit further, how have the last couple of years altered the debate within Iran’s political power structure around weaponization?
TP: We’ve already seen a strengthening of the pro-weaponization voices over the last two years because of Gaza. Gaza exposed to the Iranians and the rest of the world the falsity of the belief that the United States would constrain Israel and that, as a result, conventional force would be sufficient to deter Israel. There is no more confidence in this view after seeing how the Biden administration allowed Israel to do whatever it wanted, while only putting forward a pretense of a resistance. I think this is one of the biggest stories that has not been told: so much of Israel’s military success reflects the lifting of all U.S. constraints on how Israel could use force, breaking all codes of conduct. The U.S. military itself could never behave this way.
Israel can do things that they couldn’t do before, including the way they assassinated Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024. They had tried several times before, but the United States was concerned about collateral damage. There are now no such constraints. When Israel used 80 bombs to take down an entire neighborhood, killing between 300 and 500 people, it got a congratulatory statement from the Biden administration. When they assassinated Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, in 2004, killing nine to eleven of Yassin’s family members in the process, the George W. Bush administration condemned it.
RM: I want to talk about the reaction of the Arab states to the attacks. Whatever their public stance at some level, do you think they were privately pleased by the U.S. bombing of the installations in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan?
TP: No, I don’t think they were. I think they were deeply disturbed, because at the end of the day war would be very costly for the populations in these countries. It would have a destabilizing effect on the region. Right now they know that the path back to some form of a diplomatic solution is going to be extremely difficult, and the risk of a confrontation down the road remains very high. I think the perspective there has fundamentally changed.
They also think that the United States will continue to support Israel, but it will not support the Gulf Arab states if they end up in confrontation with Iran. This creates a very different scenario for them than one in which they thought the United States would defend them against Iran.
RM: Let’s move onto the regional and global implications. Russia and Iran, as you know, have a defense treaty: it doesn’t obligate either side to come immediately to the defense of the other if one is attacked, but nevertheless, there’s been close cooperation. Iran has bought Russian weaponry; Iranian Shahed drones have played a very significant role in the Ukraine war. But apart from condemning Israel and warning against the danger of attacking nuclear facilities, the Russians didn’t really do anything to help the Iranians. Do you think Iran expected more? And if it did, is it likely to reassess its relationship with Russia?
TP: The Iranians are deeply disappointed in the Russians: they expected more than just condemnations, particularly mindful of the support that they provided Russia in its own war. Iran, I think, has come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, the Russians are too compromised themselves—that they cannot risk their relationship with Trump, who they need to deal with over their own difficulties in Ukraine. Iran didn’t have much of an expectation of getting support from China, either. The so-called axis was missing in action.
If you want to bring about political change, killing the people who you expect to bring that change is a strange way to go about it.
But whereas Iran was truly alone in this, as it was in the Iran-Iraq war, Israel could not have done any of this without extensive active support from Germany, the UK, and the United States. This was not an Israeli–Iranian war: this was a war in which the Israelis had 70 percent of their expenses covered by the United States and received more or less all their weaponry from the United States, in addition to receiving extensive intelligence and air defense help. And even with that, they were still vulnerable to Iranian missiles.
RM: There’s a common assessment in the United States and Israel that Iran has never been in such a weak position: it has lost a lot of commanders and scientists, as well as been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Assad’s state has collapsed. Hezbollah and Hamas are on the back foot. Can Iran overcome these losses and regain its footing, or is it going to be licking its wounds for a very long time?
TP: Without a doubt, the Iranians have taken a lot of hits. But I think that despite a very successful initial attack, Israel failed at disrupting its command and control and failed at decapitating the regime. That tells us something about Iran’s resilience. So the question is: Are the Iranians going to learn about their own vulnerabilities from these attacks? Will they increase their ability to effectively strike Israel, which was what we saw throughout this period? Or will the Israelis learn more and faster from this and patch up the holes in their air defense systems?
I don’t have the technical knowledge to know who has the harder task. The Israelis have used their cells in Iran: most of them, at this point, are in a compromised position or have to go back into hiding. But the Iranians are going to also be involved in a much deeper cleanup than what we’ve seen. It’s not clear how long that will take.
One absolutely crucial question is where the United States lands with permissibility with Israel. If Trump moves to a place where he’s not okay with Israel doing a lot of these different things, we will go back toward a dirty war with a lot of intelligence hits but no larger direct confrontations.
RM: You have been one of the most prominent critics of U.S. foreign policy, if not the most prominent critic. If a president called you in and said, “All right, I want to cut a new path toward Iran, can you give me some idea of where I ought to go?” What might you suggest?
TP: One thing that can be said for Trump is that, at the end of the day, he is extremely nimble and can go in many different directions. He can go into Yemen, for instance, and then rather quickly change his mind and pull out instead of allowing that to become an endless war. I’m not praising him, of course—he shouldn’t have gone in in the first place—but we should recognize that he’s not as path-dependent as previous presidents have been.
I absolutely think he still can strike a deal, but it’s essential that he recognizes at least two things. First, any request for surrender, including enrichment in Iran, will be a path toward confrontation. The Iranians are not going to compromise on this point. They can agree to all kinds of creative solutions, but will reject ones that are just circumspect ways of getting back to zero. They’re not going to accept that.
Second, if you want to a better relationship with Iran, the Israelis are going to fight it tooth and nail. There is no happy medium there. Either you make a decision that allows the United States to reduce its military presence, start exiting the region militarily, and shift the burden of security onto regional players, or you don’t.
The United States needs a better relationship with Iran. And if that comes at the expense of making Israel unhappy, you should take that hit.
Trita Parsi is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.
Rajan Menon is Spitzer Professor Emeritus at the Powell School of City College of New York and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies.
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