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Juan Cole for Informed Comment
On Tuesday I was a guest on Sam Seder’s “Majority Report.” Sam and I have been having conversations about world affairs for a couple of decades now. Do add him to your follow list if you haven’t already. Here is the link, the embedded video, and a transcript of the segment.
Transcript.
( This is the computer-generated audio transcript at YouTube, which I ran through Claude to clean up. I checked it as best as I could and though I noted some compression, it seemed substantively accurate. Still, Caveat Emptor. ) –
Sam: We are back. I’m Sam Seder, here with Emma Vigeland on the Majority Report. It’s a real pleasure to welcome back to the program Professor Juan Cole, professor of history and Middle East studies at the University of Michigan, founder and editor and chief of Informed Comment. Professor, welcome back to the show.
Juan Cole: Thanks so much for having me, Sam. It is great to see you.
Sam: I really want to get to what’s going on within Iran, because you and I had dozens of conversations about the Iraq war over the years, starting over 20 years ago now. There was a massive buildup, a windup to the war. There were multiple countries involved across the globe. There were embedded reporters in Iraq, and occasionally independent reporters. We’re just not getting the same level of information now. CNN has folks in Tehran, but we’re not getting much information outside of Israel. It seems much harder to access what’s going on.
Juan Cole: I can remember when we first started talking, there were alarmist reports that all of our media was controlled by eight corporations. We may be going towards one. We’ve become more and more of an oligarchy, both with regard to socioeconomic affairs and with regard to media. When we started talking, Facebook didn’t yet exist, and Twitter has now become X, with algorithms that suppress things they don’t like — they suppress news, they suppress controversial postings. The media landscape is very murky. Back in the Iraq war days, I could go on the internet and look at local Iraqi newspapers from towns in Iraq. I find it difficult to do that in Iran because they’re also highly controlled. It is a very different situation, and I think it’s because our politics has shifted so heavily towards oligarchy.
Sam: We had meant to ask you about this: the satellite company Planet is essentially delaying its imagery out of the Middle East by 14 days. This is a stark change from how they approached the war in Ukraine, where that satellite imagery was more readily available. This also comes as the Israelis are heavily censoring information about the efficacy of Iranian strikes within Israel. What do you make of this?
Juan Cole: I don’t know the details of that satellite delay, but it certainly makes things murkier, and probably deliberately so. Israel is not actually a democracy and has very heavy military censorship. Sometimes newspapers appear with blanks on the front page because the military censors didn’t let the news through. We don’t know very much about what’s actually going on on the ground in Israel. There are a few people like Ori Goldman who have tweeted out when they’re very heavily hit, but you would be arrested if you showed up with your iPhone trying to take a picture of the damage in the aftermath of an Iranian strike in Israel. Lebanon we know more about because the Lebanese are natural anarchists and they are sending out reports. Iran itself of course is an autocratic government and we don’t know everything that’s happening there.
I think the overall picture of what’s going on is not so hard to discern. The United States and Israel are bombing the bejesus out of Iran. They are attempting to inflict attrition on Iranian drone and missile launchers in order to make the country helpless, and they haven’t succeeded. Moreover, Iran has figured out a strategy — it may be somewhat self-defeating, but also an effective one — of not only hitting at Israel or at US bases, but of interfering with the commerce in petroleum and gas that comes out of the Persian Gulf, which could throw the whole world into a deep recession.
Sam: Let’s tick down through this. Based on your understanding of Iran, and given that it seems almost impossible to discern what the Trump administration’s goals are here — Israel seems somewhat more legible in that they appear to be looking for some type of balkanization or internal strife in Iran, which would theoretically preoccupy them for who knows how long — what are the chances of that? Can you explain the difference between the efficacy of the Iranian revolution in creating a stable, entrenched regime as opposed to what we might see in, say, Latin American countries, where you have strongmen who come in and fall in military coups?
Juan Cole: Iran experienced a revolution in 1978–79, and social scientists find that extremely important for the subsequent unfolding of politics. It was a mass revolution, and in the aftermath they established a parliament with representatives from all over the country who fight for their districts. There has been enormous spread of education, rural schools, electrification. Women’s literacy has more than doubled. The whole country’s literacy is quite high now. It is a mobilized population, and for all the discontents with this government, it’s not a one-man dictatorship. There are regime supporters who form popular militias on the streets of all the cities in the country. There is internal spying, but there’s also an ability to mobilize people. There are layers to this thing.
The Israelis think in ethnic terms and they hope to break Iran up ethnically, as they hoped to break Iraq up ethnically. But 90% of the country is Shiite, and it’s unlikely that appealing to small Sunni ethnicities like the Kurds or the Baluch is going to do more than cause some local turbulence of a minor sort. Doing that also brings in the neighbors, because Turkey is not going to be happy with a Kurdish resurgence in Iran, and Pakistan is petrified of the Baluch rising up because they’ll rise up on both sides of the border. All you’re doing is giving Iran allies if you take that approach.
Sam: Can you talk more about this? The regime is obviously very brutal — they’ve killed anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 people in the most recent protests. Do we have a sense of how many people have bought into the theocratic revolution?
Juan Cole: Opinion polling, such as it is — because it’s difficult to conduct in an autocratic state — suggests that the regime’s hardcore supporters are as few as 15%. People are not generally enthusiastic about this government, and we saw in mid-January masses of people in the streets. It looked like it was going towards a 1978-style revolution, and as you say it was viciously repressed with very high casualties. They shot into crowds.
But things have changed all around now, because you can’t come into the streets if you’re afraid of being bombed. The steam has been taken out of that movement, and moreover your neighbors will look at you and say, “Are you on the side of the Israelis?” I think this Israeli and Trump intervention in Iran has squelched what was becoming a movement, and quite unfortunately, it has probably strengthened the regime.
Emma: I want to go back to what you were saying about Turkey, because Turkey is a NATO member and Israel has been threatening them openly. And then you also have the relationships with the GCC countries and the United States that are financial in nature. Trump’s financial involvement in the GCC countries seems important here, because it appears Iran’s strategy is directed towards targeting them — they know it’s more bang for their buck with drone attacks on GCC countries than lobbing missiles into the Iron Dome that are most likely going to get intercepted. Could you expand on Iran’s relationship with Turkey and the other Gulf countries, and how that changes the dynamic?
Juan Cole: Turkey is a NATO member and they have used their levers in NATO to marginalize Israel. Because of the Gaza war, NATO is no longer conducting joint military exercises with Israel on the grounds that Israel has violated the laws of war and is not a suitable partner. The Israelis are furious about Turkey’s access to the inner workings of Brussels and the way it can marginalize them. They would very much like to take Turkey down a peg. I think it’s very difficult for them to do that because NATO has Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all. If the Israelis attack Turkey, I think it will bring at least some of Europe against Israel. Israeli cabinet members — not marginal people, people with real power — will talk about eventually taking Damascus or taking Turkey down a peg, but Turkey is a huge country compared to Israel. There are 7 million Jews in Israel and nearly 90 million Turks. They have an excellent military, high-powered weapons and jets, and the only thing they don’t have is a nuclear weapon — and they have an American nuclear umbrella. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what the Israelis say about Turkey. It’s just threats, and the same can be said about Erdogan’s empty threats against Israel from Turkey’s side.
With regard to the Gulf countries — the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab oil monarchies — they are largely Sunni and have given the United States bases to protect themselves. Iran has been hitting those bases, and in particular it has been hitting radar and communications technology. I’m an Army brat, so I take no pleasure in saying this, but the Iranians have hit hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of radar and other communications technology on these bases in places like Kuwait, in order to prevent the Americans from protecting Israel from Iranian missiles and drones. They’ve been very effective at it. They have also hit hotels, airports, and oil facilities in Bahrain and elsewhere.
But the main thing they’ve done is this: the Arab states live on oil and gas. Twenty percent of the world’s supply of oil and 20% of liquefied natural gas comes out of the Gulf. People in America don’t seem to understand how vulnerable we all are to this. It has been effectively cut off. Qatar doesn’t have a place to store all of this, so if they can’t export it, they have to stop producing it. The Gulf countries have been drawn into this by Iran as a way of punishing the United States, and it’s going to work. We will be punished.
Sam: Let’s talk about this. From what I’ve read, we’re already two months out, and if the war were to stop today it would take at least two months for this to work its way through the system. And aside from the economic pain this country and the world is going to suffer — including in food prices, since key fertilizer components are produced in this region — what happens to the GCC countries if this ended tomorrow? Are they going to decide that maybe they shouldn’t have these US bases? It seems like they were supposed to be getting protection, and instead they’ve marked themselves as targets.
Juan Cole: Dubai — which is what you’re referring to with the comedy shows and nice hotels, and I’ve been to Dubai, it’s a wonderful place and I genuinely regret the damage being inflicted on it — has been economically destroyed. It’s a finance hub. It depends on expat labor. It depends on an illusion of security. This is a heavy blow. It has had heavy blows before — the 2008 meltdown hurt it. How it comes back from this is not clear to me. There may be permanent damage to the Gulf from all of this.
There are two things to say. First, Iran is not going to relent until it gets a reset on its security. This is not Gaza. The Israelis have this cynical phrase about “mowing the grass” — they used to bomb Gaza every once in a while. Iran is not going to put up with that. They’re a big country and not a poor one. They have capabilities which they’re demonstrating. They want to fight this to a point where everybody understands: you mess with us and you can’t drive your car. You mess with us and your way of life is over. They want that message to get through, so they’re not going to stand down until they achieve that understanding.
Second, the Gulf has put all of its eggs in the American basket. Some other countries have not — like Djibouti, this small port on the Red Sea, which gave the Chinese a base alongside the British and Americans. You may see something like that — the Gulf countries may diversify their security arrangements. This whole thing could be an enormous boondoggle for the United States and a big boon for China.
Emma: The fact that China already brokered talks between the Iranians and the Saudis a few years back is really important to note here. And this also benefits Russia, because Asian countries desperate for energy can go to Putin and he can charge them an inflated price. And on the China front, this gives them a partner who may say “we’ll have your back” in a way the Americans currently aren’t.
Juan Cole: I guarantee you that at embassies in the Gulf, both the Russians and the Chinese are telling people that the Americans are fickle, that they’re not really supporting you, that they got you into all this trouble, and that you should come with them. I heard a Russian diplomat say these things to the Qataris nearly a decade ago, and it fell on deaf ears at that point.
That said, China has been diversifying its energy. Fifty-three percent of new automobile sales in China last year were electric, and energy analysts suspect that China has reached peak oil — that every year from here on it will use less. This coming oil shock, because we haven’t yet seen the real shock, is a good argument for them to accelerate that process. They have a program of buying up clunkers the way Obama did here, trying to get heavy gasoline-using vehicles off the streets. They’ve reduced their subsidies for electric vehicles because it was costing the government a lot of money, but they may put them back or introduce other incentives. I expect the Chinese to go even more heavily towards electrification of transport. Most oil is used for transport. If China goes in this direction, it takes other countries with it — the Thais, the Indonesians, and others are looking at Chinese EVs. The Chinese EV technology is so far ahead.
Sam BYD vehicles go 500 miles on a charge and are significantly less expensive than your average US car . . . What you’re saying is that we do not control the timeline here. We’re waiting to see if Donald Trump decides to end the bombing, but Iran is basically dictating the timetable. From your perspective, how much pain can they impose on the United States and Israel — and the rest of the world — and where do you think they’ll decide that’s enough?
Juan Cole: They won’t stop until they’re convinced the world has gotten the message. They’ve taken our energy hostage. Imagine your gas bill doubling. Some analysts will tell you that the United States has its own natural gas from fracking and its own petroleum and mainly imports from Canada and Mexico, so we’re not dependent on the rest of the world. It doesn’t work like that. It’s one global market. The prices track very closely between, say, Brent crude from the North Sea and West Texas crude — they go pretty much in tandem. Because it’s one world market, if there’s upward pressure on prices it affects everybody, regardless of whether you have oil or not. Your oil becomes expensive because everybody wants it.
If you take 20% off the market, the price doesn’t just go up 20%. Both demand and production are inelastic. It’s very hard to produce a lot more oil, especially since the swing producers are in the Gulf. So you’re going to see more and more people competing for a lesser amount. And it’s very hard to simply stop using oil if you’ve already bought a gasoline car — you have to get to work, you don’t have choices, you can’t absent yourself from that market. Demand is inelastic, supply is inelastic. If supply goes way down, you’ve got more and more people competing for less and less oil.
Sam It becomes a bidding war for every gallon of gas —
Juan and it happens all over the world simultaneously. It will happen in the United States as well.
Emma: In terms of Iran dictating the timeline, the question becomes: how does Trump get to declare victory? We played a clip of Caroline Levitt saying Trump can declare unilateral victory and he gets to determine what that means — they want to win the PR battle. But if you have Khamenei’s son as the new leader and the regime still in place, I don’t even see how Trump can spin this as a regime change victory, because it’s literally the son of the man he just killed.
Juan Cole: Yeah. That’s awkward. As long as Mojtaba Khamenei is the leader in Iran, relations with the United States are going to be tough. They may improve when Trump leaves office. The Iranians really are the ones who will determine when all this ends. The Americans and Israelis think: they have a limited number of missiles and missile launchers, we’ll attrit them, and after a while they won’t be able to do anything. But it doesn’t work like that. They have these Shahed drones which cost $20,000 to $30,000 to make apiece, they can make 400 of them a week, and they’re making them as we speak. They had a big stockpile — 30,000, 50,000, it’s not clear — and many of them can be launched from under the sand, so it’s very hard to see where they’re being launched from. They can go on hitting near neighbors — Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia — for a long time. Attrition is not going to happen anytime soon.
And again, Americans don’t understand who the Saudis and Qataris really are in the world. They’re like the world’s country billionaires. The Saudis have a trillion-and-a-half dollar investment fund and a trillion-and-a-half in reserves — roughly $3 trillion in what amounts to walking-around money. This is not money they need to build roads or run the country. Imagine what you can buy with that. They’re not going to put up with this. They’re going to put enormous pressure on everybody to cut this out and make a deal with Iran that everybody can live with. They’re furious at Iran because Iran has attacked them, but they also don’t want to get involved in a war with Iran, which they know they can’t win. They’re small countries with small populations. Iran can outlast them, and Iran is nearby — it can even conduct guerrilla operations against them.
The Gulf countries are going to be a major player in settling this, and they are very upset with Israel. People always think of them as potential allies of Israel. The Israelis are hoping that now that the Iranians have attacked the Gulf states, they’ll swing around towards Tel Aviv. I’m going to tell you, they are furious. They are livid with Israel for dragging them into this, and they’re not going to accept having this done to them on a recurring basis.
Sam: So the Abraham Accords are dead? And is MBS on the phone with Donald Trump saying, “I appreciate you letting the journalist murder slide, but I need you to shut this down”? And what was Israel thinking? I can understand people coming to Trump and saying, “Do this — it’s going to be like Venezuela, you’re going to control part of Iranian oil, you’re going to be the guy who beat Iran.” But does Netanyahu actually believe this could work out, or is he doing this purely to keep Israel in a state of war for his own personal and political reasons?
Juan Cole: Netanyahu is the victim of his own success. He’s been in power a very long time and has accomplished many of his goals over time. He has effectively destroyed the Palestinians and reduced the Gazans to fourth-world status, deprived them of potable drinking water. He’s brought the Egyptians into line — they’re cooperating with him, and they’re the major nearby military power. The government in Syria, which was an enemy of Israel’s, has been overthrown. Hezbollah has been taken down. Netanyahu went from what he saw as victory to victory — not in the sense of actually securing Israel’s long-term security, which would require good relations with neighbors, but in acquiring power and inspiring fear. So he thought he could do to Iran what he had done to these other neighbors. And Iran is a different kettle of fish entirely. It doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t understand Iran, because one of the problems with the Israeli elite is that although they are in the Middle East, they don’t know very much about it. It’s as if you had Polish people running the place. In fact . . .
Emma: Can you talk more about how Iran may react in terms of nuclearization? Kim Jong-un, who never promised to denuclearize, is looking fairly prescient right now — especially when you consider what happened to Gaddafi after he made an agreement with the West in the early 21st century and was subsequently impaled and assassinated. And now Iran, after doing a deal with the Americans through the JCPOA, is facing the bombing of its entire leadership, 1,300 people killed including civilians, and active environmental devastation from the bombed oil fields. Aren’t they creating more incentives for more countries to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent?
Juan Cole: Absolutely. From the inception — when the French and the British connived at giving the Israelis a nuclear weapon — they set off an arms race in the Middle East. Iraq had a nuclear program for precisely this reason. Iran– this is controversial, but in my view the Islamic Republic has never actually wanted a nuclear device. They were pursuing what is sometimes called the Japan option. Everyone knows that Japan has lots of plutonium and is highly capable technologically, so if they wanted to, the Japanese could make a bomb fairly quickly. The hope is that since everyone knows this, it has a deterrent effect — adversaries won’t dare attack Japan because the response could be that Tokyo would suddenly be nuclear-armed. I think the Iranians were trying for that, but it didn’t work.
They also have a theological objection, and Americans — oddly, given how religious this country is — don’t really understand religion in this context. The Iranian leadership always said it doesn’t want a nuclear device because you can’t use one without killing large numbers of innocent civilians, and that’s against Islamic law of war. They genuinely believe that. People push back on me and say they obviously don’t believe it, they’re hypocrites, they’re lying. I ask: does anybody believe the Pope has a condom factory in the basement of the Vatican?
Sam: No …
Juan … because we take him at his word that he doesn’t approve of birth control — he issued an encyclical. The leader of Iran, Khamenei, issued numerous considered legal opinions stating that building an atomic bomb is illegal under Islamic law.
Now, they’ve killed Khamenei. And the way Islamic law works in Iran, the fatwas — the considered legal opinions — of a dead jurist don’t carry forward. The new leader has to issue his own fatwa, and we don’t know what that’s going to be. It could well be that Iran moves toward nuclearization. It has many underground facilities and still possesses a great deal of highly enriched uranium.
I also think the Saudis are not going to accept being left vulnerable. The Israelis bombed Doha in Qatar last September, and that set off alarm bells throughout the Gulf: we need better protection. They went to Pakistan and said, “Would you protect us?” — Pakistan has nuclear weapons — and the Pakistanis said yes. But now the Saudis are calling Islamabad every day asking, “What are you doing to protect us? You promised.” And the Pakistanis don’t want to get involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if the outcome of what Netanyahu has done is to push the entire region toward nuclearization.
Sam: Professor Cole, it is always incredibly informative to speak with you — not always cheery, I have to say. We’ll almost certainly be turning to you in the coming weeks, and hopefully not the coming months, about all of this. Thank you so much for your time. Folks should also check out Informed Comment, which has been a read of mine for over 20 years, which is also a little disturbing. Really appreciate your time today.
Juan Cole: Thanks so much, Sam. Great to see you — and nice to meet you, Emma.
Emma: Nice to meet you as well.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole
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