Iran’s capacity has been significantly degraded, but its intent hasn’t changed

On July 1, Aaron David Miller spoke with General David Petraeus and Carnegie’s Karim Sadjadpour about the complexities of the “explosive triangle” of Iran, Israel, and the United States. Excerpts from their conversation, which have been condensed and edited for clarity, are below.

By Aaron David Miller, David Petraeus, and Karim Sadjadpour

Aaron David Miller: Are you as worried as I am about the potential politicization of intelligence now? The president’s open dismissing of his director of national intelligence’s battle damage assessment, which was put out within hours of the conclusion of the operation, and using the Israeli assessment as his own, strikes me that there’s the world as it is, and there’s the world the way you want it to be.

David Petraeus: We should recognize this is by no means unique to the current situation. If you look at what happened prior to the invasion of Iraq, there was more than a bit of a predisposition that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. It was an article of faith that it actually did exist. In fact, we bombed it a couple of times, and the description was that we had degraded their means for production and delivery. There was a search for intelligence to justify that particular predisposition and the action that would result from that.

Our intelligence community professionals will speak truth to power. They’re not without mistakes at various times—obviously, 9/11 was one of the most catastrophic of those. There are intelligence failures. There are surprises—the collapse of the Soviet Union was another. But they are doing their level best to provide their best assessment of the facts on the ground, what they mean, and so forth. Then what the [director of national intelligence] or president or other consumers do with it is their matter. I think it’s concerning if this is not put forward.

Aaron David Miller: What are the big ideas that inform the Islamic Republic at the moment, both with respect to their responses to Israel, as well as the challenge of responding to the United States?

Karim Sadjadpour: I learned [the big ideas] concept from General Petraeus. And the big ideas of the Iranian Revolution haven’t changed: hostility toward America and Israel, to replace Israel with Palestine, and internally remaining a highly conservative Islamic state. I’m reminded of the famous quote after the Bourbons came back to power in France: They’ve learned nothing and they’ve forgotten nothing. And that was evident in the Supreme Leader’s speech a few days ago, in which he essentially declared victory and congratulated his population and his government. What we’ve seen is that Iran’s capacity has been significantly degraded, but its intent hasn’t changed. Moving forward, their tactics may be a little bit different.

So let me focus on a few different ideas. Number one, they’ve essentially paused the war with America and Israel so they can clean house internally. This is a regime at war with America, Israel, and its own people, and they need to shore up their internal power. They’ve been going after hundreds of people internally, calling them Mossad spies, threatening to execute them. We know from history that they usually imprison innocent people to make an example of them.

Second, in the nuclear context, they’re not going to slam the door on diplomacy. But what they’re doing simultaneously is significantly limiting any type of cooperation with the IAEA. The Iranian parliament doesn’t act independently, so when it announced that the country should leave the [Non-Proliferation Treaty], that’s a top-down edict. These are signals being sent from the top.

There have been some concerning reports about their attempts to go after soft Jewish targets in Europe. This is something that they’ve done in the past. And they have pretty close ties with criminal elements in Europe through which they can do this. Some senior clerics in Iran have issued a fatwa against President Trump, calling for his death. I think that’s mostly symbolic.

Something I’m worried about is that Iran is going to do everything in its power to sabotage Syria’s and Lebanon’s attempts to transition to a post-Iran order. It’s been reported in the past week that both those countries are potentially close to joining the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel. One of the things I would be concerned about is Iranian attempts to assassinate leaders like Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria or the prime minister and president in Lebanon.

Aaron David Miller: It seems to me [the United States has] three options: negotiation (performative or productive), resume military actions, or some sort of slog in between regional war and peace. How does this fit into the Trump administration’s big idea when it comes to making this a success over time?

David Petraeus: I don’t think any of us are absolutely certain there is a precise conclusion at this moment in time. There is a desire for negotiations, and I think that is the right approach to take.

The question is whether there could be a negotiation that isn’t essentially compelled by this extraordinary amount of success by Israel, supported by the United States, or not. Israel is in an incredibly strong position. It can fly anywhere at any time and do anything over Iran. That is an extraordinary achievement—air supremacy. So it can employ that when necessary. And the United States needs to be keenly aware of that and arguably should use that.

Iran is in the weakest position it has been in at least since the first supreme leader drank from the poison chalice to bring an end to the Iran-Iraq war. It has watched its proxies be heavily degraded. Its position in the region is dramatically reduced. This is the time to, in a negotiation, reach Iranian agreement to dismantle its entire nuclear program, and if they need a civilian nuclear power program, we can provide them the low enriched uranium for that. It’s a time to allow the IAEA to oversee the dismantlement of this program and to be able to inspect anywhere at any time to validate and verify.

The question is whether we’ll be willing to use this position of strength and if the Iranians, who can be quite obtuse at times, would be willing to accept that. Or it may mean that Israel will have to once again take advantage of its air supremacy to finish off whatever it is that emerges that is still intact—and perhaps to continue to do that as is required.

I think that is the way it should go forward. There should be inducements to Iran, certainly. We should never give up hope that at some point, Iran could give up its status as a revolutionary state and perhaps become more of a status quo state, recognizing how ruinous their policies have been for them and also for their people.

Aaron David Miller: If the fight is going to be over Iran’s demand to enrich uranium on its own soil, and the administration’s position is zero enrichment, you’re not going to have a productive negotiation. So that leaves the Middle East always where it seems to be left: neither here nor there. No transformations, just transactions. No war, no peace. Am I correct in assuming that would be the Supreme Leader’s preferred outcome?

Karim Sadjadpour: It’s very important to approach these negotiations with a very clear idea in our heads about what our goal is, what our endgame is. And I’m not sure that in Trump’s head there’s a clear sense of what we’re hoping to achieve.

Iran is in a much weaker position than it was three weeks ago. Rather than simply limit the discussions to the nuclear file, we should talk about other sources of great concern with Iran.

One of them is the regional context. In that context, there are issues you can open up, which also our partners who have decent relations with Iran feel very strongly about. If you talk to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, they will speak with one voice about their demand that Iran respect regional sovereignty. That’s an issue that the Chinese, historically, have also felt strongly about. It’s very valuable to approach Iran with these concrete demands, and you’re much more successful against Iran when it feels like it’s facing a united diplomatic front.

Now, if we rewind to 2013 and the [Iran nuclear deal negotiations]. What we saw from the Supreme Leader was total defiance. He didn’t give any indication whatsoever that he was going to prepare to compromise. What Obama essentially did was he checkmated them economically. He made it clear that nations and businesses around the world had a choice: Either you can do business with America, or you could do business with Iran. For most countries and companies around the world, that was a clear choice. But that process took a while, but it led to the Supreme Leader’s famous speech calling for heroic flexibility. This time around, it’s worthwhile having these very tough demands from Iran, not just in the nuclear context but also in the weapons context and the regional context. But they’re not going to agree to unconditional surrender next week or even next month. That’s a process that plays out the more we tighten the economic grip on their ability to export oil.

Aaron David Miller: Should there be a change in Washington’s position with respect to regime change?

David Petraeus: I think we have to be very, very cautious about the situation. There is no organized opposition. If you become a successful organizer, a charismatic leader, you’re going to end up in jail, if not killed. There’s no large armed opposition.

Normally, if a regime is so weakened that it can be overthrown, the group that is on the top of the hill when it’s all said and done is the one with the best leader—in terms of knowledge, charisma, inspiration—and a large armed force. But the guys with the most guns far and away are within the regime.

Yes, 80 percent of the population may hate the regime. They may resent what it’s doing to them economically, politically, and culturally. But you don’t see the kind of force that is there that could overthrow. And if the people really come out again, we’ll see the Basij militia, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds Force, the regular forces that’ll swing pipes and, if necessary, even shoot at their own population. And there doesn’t appear to be that kind of crack there now, not saying that it would be visible to us in all cases. But the idea that it would come from the outside I just find very unlikely.

We should recognize that there are ethnic and sectarian groupings in the Islamic Republic that might want a degree of autonomy or even independence. That’s different, though, from overthrowing the regime, and I don’t think that is likely either. In fact, as soon as the dust began settling, the regime forces began reasserting themselves, especially in the areas of minority ethnic and sectarian groupings.

So who would you support? We didn’t support the Syrian opposition before it had extremists in it, when it had a real possibility of actually overthrowing the minority regime government of Bashar al-Assad. So how we would do that here I just find a bit elusive.

Karim Sadjadpour: In Washington, if we look at Reagan’s Cold War strategy, there were three broad elements to it: arms control, supporting our allies against Soviet expansionism, and supporting the cause of freedom and dissidence and the information war. And that is, in my view, something that’s been lacking in the current context.

In the past four or five months, a lot of these institutions that played important roles during the Cold War—the National Endowment for Democracy, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe—have been gutted. Those institutions, especially Voice of America, needed significant reform and modernization, but I think it was a gift to the Iranian regime to simply gut them. There were institutions that the leadership in Iran was very much concerned about it. Ayatollah Khamenei has believed that America’s strategy for destabilizing the Islamic Republic is not hard power. It’s American soft power.

In Iran, I do believe that it is a politically mature society. It is ripe for representative, accountable government. Anti-government protests in places like Saudi Arabia or Jordan would be a cause for concern for most American officials. But in Iran, they’re a cause for hope, that it would be an improvement on the status quo.

But leadership is so critical, both inspirational leaders and organizational leaders. At the moment, that demand for representative government and demand for change inside Iran, there’s not a supply of leadership to take people to where they want to go.

I think everyone is really waiting for Khamenei [at age 86] to leave the scene. In many ways, I think that the Islamic Republic is going to face a similar fork in the road that both the Soviet Union and China faced in the mid-1970s: double down on revolutionary ideology or put economic and national interests first?

I could lay out both those possibilities for you in Iran. Khamenei dies and is replaced either by his son or another revolutionary leader who just continues to double down on this ruinous ideology, which has not led the country to anything but economic malaise and isolation. There’s the other possibility of someone who has the credentials of a first-generation revolutionary figure but says 2025 is a different world than 1979, and if we want the system to survive, we need to put the national interest first. Right now, [the latter] is probably something that a lot of Iranians are hoping for. Given how impervious the regime has proven to both reform and collapse, perhaps it can be a process from within.