Hubris and the Fog of War: Unpacking the U.S.-Iran Conflict 

KEVIN MALONEY: Today, on the Values & Interests podcast, I'm joined by Neda Bolourchi. She's a senior non-resident fellow at Eurasia Group's Institute for Global Affairs and an expert on Iran-U.S. relations. Together, we unpack some of the critical, moral, and political questions at the center of the ongoing war between the U.S. and Iran. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Let's get right to it.

Neda Bolourchi, welcome to the Values & Interests podcast at Carnegie Council. Thanks so much for joining us.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: Thank you so much for having me, Kevin.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is an interesting moment, to say the least, from a geopolitical perspective and from an Iran-U.S. relationship perspective, and we are going to get into all of that today, but as we do on the Values & Interests podcast I always like to start with getting under the hood of the person’s moral and political value system, where they came from, and who influenced them. Maybe you could introduce yourself to my listeners and talk about your own moral values formation, and then we can go from there.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: Great question. Thank you so much.

I think there are three things that shaped my values early on. The first one is that I actually remember at about seven years old reading biographies of John Kennedy (JFK) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), and being struck by the idea that people can change societies for the better and have notions of justice. Clearly that may be an idealized version for a seven-year-old, but I think the lesson that got imparted has stuck with me for a very long time—besides also the historical notion of the great men of history—is that ideas and leadership can genuinely shape people’s lives.

The second one, which I think most people would probably put first, is family. Many of my family members are in medicine, and so I was raised with a very strong responsibility toward helping and thinking about service not theoretically or historically but tangibly as a practical, lived matter.

Third was my education. My high school placed and continues to place an emphasis on understanding who we are as individuals and who we want to become. A requirement, a significant portion of our time as high schoolers, was not just devoted to academics but to experiences that forced us into different environments, so very early I found myself moving between different worlds. I personally went as a sophomore to a pediatrics unit, as a junior I was at a senator’s office, and then as a senior I was at the American Civil Liberties Union, so I think it was not a single experience but learning that law, politics, ethics, and public service are deeply intertwined, even when they pull you in different directions.

By the time I got to college I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I still do corporate work, but my broader worldview is shaped by that combination of family, education, and early experiences around questions of justice, governance, and responsibility.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have done work here drawing from the medical tradition, where there is an ethos in terms of the individual practitioner but also from an industry-wide perspective, and you do not always get an ethics of a specific industry. You get that in law and even in accounting; we constantly come across accountants here at Carnegie Council during our Global Ethics Day activities, for example. Maybe we can pull on that thread a little bit in terms of the influence of having family members who are inculcated with this ethos of serving others and responsibility and how there is a parallel to that in your current formation and work.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: My parents take it more seriously—and I mean that a little bit casually—than the rest of the family. I will tell you a story. My dad picked me up once from hockey practice, and I was the last one to get picked up. So, I said, “Dad, you’re late.”

And he was like, “I was saving lives.”

There is very much a double edge on that in the sense that I was the last one to get picked up, but it also gives you the notion of service to your patients and community. My dad took that very seriously, to the point where some of his patients did not like him for it. He was a strict physician in terms of what they should do and that it was not much of a conversation.

My mom was the same, except that her bedside manner was significantly better, and for them both—and my larger family—I think that comes from their educations and the notion of helping people and the community you are trying to reach and make healthier and better. That fed into my high school. My dad did not really, but my mom was like: “Oh, you should become a doctor. You want to serve.”

I think my service has clearly been different. It has been public education and public diplomacy, but everyone can, and I would say maybe should, do their service in however they define it. When you have that and it is reinforced by your education system and school—I had a very strong community and great education, and I was very privileged to be able to provide that and give some of that service back.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting that you paired the values of your parents in the medical professional with these historical figures, whether JFK or MLK in terms of leadership. You hit on something with your father, that ethical leadership does not mean being everybody’s friend all the time.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: Yes.

KEVIN MALONEY: We think a lot at Carnegie Council from a geopolitical perspective of the consequences of a more selfish, transactional, and amoral leadership, and what does leadership mean from an ethical perspective? Sometimes it is setting a standard for people to strive to in an open society. On top of that you have this tension between pluralism and democracy and a strong leader.

What are your thoughts in this moment? Maybe we can go up to a level of politics and geopolitics in terms of the tensions or fault lines in terms of leadership right now and what you think is missing or lacking or what we should be striving to or thinking about for this current crop of leaders?

NEDA BOLOURCHI: I think that is a great parlay. Clearly, from my parents, I don’t think that being a strong leader and having standards and setting a bar necessarily implies or should imply strong power. I think that soft power and people who, for lack of a better word, you can “co-opt” or in the Foucauldian sense “discipline” into your way of thinking about the world and the world structure is probably a more productive way.

When we look historically at what the United States has done over the course of decades since the Cold War, those soft power mechanisms that included international education through things like Voice of America or the United States Agency for International Development—and I will give a little side hyphen, not meaning that none of those things needed reform, improvement, or increased efficiency—but the returns on that, if we want to continue with the conversation about efficiency and put ethics on hold momentarily, the return on that has been seismic. It has not only educated the world about what democracy is, what freedom can constitute, but also that America stands for those things.

I am a person for whom actions speak louder than words, and I think those actions, while not tactical and which do not draw a lot of attention and fanfare, as time and history have shown they have done their job very well. I think one can be a leader and design systems and speak with a voice that resonates with people and draws them in, and then design a system.

I can talk about development aid. For instance, we have learned that 18 months does not do it and that at minimum you have to have a constituted program that reinforces that you are not going anywhere, that you are going to train people, let’s say in agriculture, and be there for three to five years because we know from the 1950s onward that it is not going to stay. You have to have a system.

I think those are the most profound and pivotal moments, even though there is not a single pivot point. I think you can be a very strong leader who stands for ethics and stands for freedom and democracy, and you can do it in a way that is not constituted by brute force, to use the sociological term.

KEVIN MALONEY: I love this parallel. We have to clip this. I am looking over at my producer now.

We constantly hear phrases like “hard power versus soft power” in this context of geopolitics. I love how you drew a parallel as to how those might manifest from an individual leadership perspective. There is quite the conversation right now—and I think we are going to talk about that—in terms of U.S. foreign policy and choosing the stick, the hard power, over diplomacy and soft power. In where we are investing our budgets right now, et cetera, there has been a turn.

Again, maybe we can use your background and current work as a bridge into the geopolitical moment, specifically your expertise on Iran, its political system, and cultural background. It has been dominating the news, especially in the United States, for obvious reasons, but so much of the coverage is focused on tactical strike X and closing of strait Yand the price of gas. Maybe we can take a step back, reset the board, and talk about Iran as a place, a political system, and culture and use the values and interests framework to provide some listeners with a better understanding beyond the headlines of what Iran is currently and what it has been historically.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: Another great question. I think the first thing to do is to separate Iran as a country and the people of Iran from the Islamic Republic as a government. They are related but not synonymous or interchangeable. As a historian, you should not give me that wide lane to talk about culture and civilization. We might be here for a while.

KEVIN MALONEY: I am going to cap this at 4000 years.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: I am going to try to limit it more to the contemporary moment and the people and country versus their government. I have written about how now there is a new leader of the Islamic Republic, as I said there would be, there is not a council, and how he is dealing with a broken society. The majority of the Iranians are deeply opposed to the Islamic Republic while remaining profoundly sensitive to questions of sovereignty, war, and foreign intervention.

I am going to take a little history pivot, and this does relate very much to the modern history of Iran in the sense that it was not formally colonized but was split into spheres of influence by the Russians, British, and subsequently the United States during World War II and after. There is animosity against the British and the Russians for largely dividing up the country and, Iranians would tell you, pilfering their resources and supporting monarchal regimes and state and nonstate actors who suppressed democratic movements.

We can talk about the Constitutional Revolution of Iran in 1905. I think Americans largely know about, or if they don’t, the pivotal moment in U.S. history is 1953, when there is a prime minister and a coup d’etat is led against him. The British were initially unsuccessful for a number of years in convincing U.S. presidents to lead a coup. Prime Minister Mosaddegh had been gaining power and came into power in 1950-1951, and then when you had changes in presidents of the United States and the rise in fear of communism, which has historically been considered the excuse as opposed to control of oil, the United States and Britain engage in Operation Ajax.

Many analysts and historians will tell you that that is the precursor that leads to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Lots of people in Iran also believe that. I would just remind people that a lot happened in 36 years. We can say it is a linear trajectory, but there are lots of ups and downs, and I don’t think intimidation and coups are necessarily inevitable in their results. Historians of Iran can definitely disagree.

That is some of the background going into what was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which got Islamized, and immediately there was a notion that there would be another movement and coup to restore the monarchy to power, so when we talk about—and as I have written about—the Islamic Republic as an “endurance regime” it is built to withstand as an endurance regime the kind of scenario where one person or multiple people can be taken out in a foreign intervention.

I wanted to lay that out but also return to this notion of the people of Iran being against their government. They have been against their government at different points over the course of more than a century, and we should not forget that people can love their country but hate their government. I think that is something that Americans often underestimate, but once I say it, it just seems obvious and universal.

KEVIN MALONEY: When you talk about the desire to draw causality between X and Y equals government Z, it is always a big challenge to criticize ourselves from an academic perspective. Sometimes we pick a lane and try to find the evidence in support of that, even if it is in good faith. It is very interesting to hear about this.

One of the things that popped up in your initial overlay was the non-inevitability of the revolution of 1979 and the Islamic regime that came into power. How do you think about that as something that was a “container that worked” in terms of a revolution. Think about Christian nationalism in other places or the communist approach in stripping these things away and having only the state. When you think about the variables of right place, right time, and right ideology, how do you think about that in terms of cause and effect, or is it more difficult to think about causality there?

NEDA BOLOURCHI: One of the things I would caution and remind those who are a little more historically grounded in the history of Iran is that the Pahlavi government was not anti-religion. I know that has become a narrative by the Islamic Republic. Being secular does not mean you are anti-religion, and in fact Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for the course of his life talked about how he was saved from an assassin’s bullet by the will of the Shia Imam and God.

The government and foundations poured money into religious institutions and mosques, and while technically his father’s prohibition against hijab and Islamic covering remained, you have pictures of women—and I know there is this obsession about the state of women’s dress and undress—from the 1960s and 1970s of women wearing the more traditional full covering called a chador, one large sheet that covers you from head to toe you had to hold it with a hand, in streets with women wearing miniskirts.

First, I want to separate and make a corrective there. There could have been a lot of things the former government could have done—specifically, not fund religious institutions and mosques—and also remind people that the shah had the opportunity to execute Khomeini, and he was convinced to not do that out of respect for the religion. There are so many different places where different actions could have been taken that it begs the question of inevitability.

Second, in contrast to what we are seeing from the Islamic Republic, the shah’s government—I am not going to suggest that they did not engage in questionable behavior or what has been documented as the torture of individuals in official numbers of 3,000 to 5,000, but that does not compare.

Going back to your question of how things happened in 1979, there is a whole slew of different things that could have transpired. I have just given you a handful of small things, and why religion was left is because the state did go after leftists. Initially it began with the Tudeh post-1953 then you have a split and it leads to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and then the Fadaiyan-e-Khalq, then Maoist groups, so all these different groups are forming, splintering, and continue to rise, so the one thing the government really does not have tolerance for is the left.

To this day you have children of leftists who resent their parents and blame their parents for their actions, or you have former leftists who were like, “I was 20-something years old,” and some who are not apologetic about the fact that they didn’t know better.

In answering your question again and returning full-circle to 1979, some of that is that the Khomeini-ists were numerous, they were underground, they were allowed to grow, they engaged in communications that were not largely picked up, and were not really traced. I think it has been called “one of the largest intelligence failures” by the United States government. Also, there was the other opposition.

To be clear, in some ways, like today, you had societal opposition to the monarchy, but only one of those oppositions was left alone. And the Khomeini-ists were not that honest in some regards, and even some of the initial supporters of Khomeini or the notion of a secular but religiously guided government had a rude awakening. A whole slew of them were executed. That Islamization of Iran and how quickly the Khomeini-ists moved, which was compounded by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, did take a large portion of the population by surprise.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to unpack the nuance there. From an ethics perspective here, we constantly talk about the danger of moral absolutism, and that is amplified when you choose repression and choose violence as a tactic to solve a political problem. As you laid out with the shah’s regime there, they went after leftists and emboldened their own destruction in doing that, even if it is not a straight line.

What ethics allows us to think about here is having humility in not understanding every consequence of your choice and having to own that consequence. But when you choose a kinetic means, when you choose something as definitive as murder, executions, violence, and torture, the consequences balloon to something you cannot actually track as an individual.

Maybe that is a good pivot to go to the current moment with the United States, Israel, and Iran. Maybe you can give us a sense of the current moment, and maybe we can think about the Iranian population and the multiple “truths” they are trying to reckon with in terms of living within this country where they are anti-regime but coming together in a nationalist moment when they are being attacked by an outside force and how you are thinking about this. Then maybe we can go to the diaspora community on that also. It is an extremely complicated moment, and I think we have to reckon with a few of these things.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: We absolutely do. It puts us squarely in the gray, and so many people around the world, inside the U.S. government, and people of Iranian heritage do not want to grapple with that gray. They want to stand on one side or the other. They want to take a binary position, and it does not really work like that. As somebody who has studied Iran on the ground as a human rights lawyer and as an academic and historian, you should not be confused with trying to understand what is happening and have that assumption folded into the notion that there is a moral endorsement.

One thing you said that I think I should clarify. I have put estimates at 15 million Iranians as the core constituency. We can quibble as to whether that is taken from the 66 million voting population or the 92 million general population. In any case, it is nowhere near a majority. That is 20 percent of your voting population, so we won’t even get to the larger population. I use that number because a senior colleague I have disagreed with on a number of things corrected me to say, “Well, I think it is actually 18 to 20 percent.”

I said, “If the two of us are that close, you know what? Neither of us are wrong, and I am not sure it matters.”

To the larger point of constituting the Islamic Republic, the opposition to the government may stand. I think there have been points of no return, and I say this because the narrative of “rallying around the flag” has not been what it would have been 15 years ago.

I think a number of people who thought that the Islamic Republic was reformable got a rude awakening in 2019 with those protests. If not in 2019, it was absolute in 2022 with the murder of Mahsa Amini, and I did not think it was going to go up another level, but when Iranians around the world and Iranian Americans saw blood literally running in the streets in January that became another point of no return, and I think it is the reason why so many within and outside of Iran supported if not vocally at least implicitly kinetic action against the Islamic Republic.

The last four years have been profound for the people, and I think in that sense they have lost whatever hope was left. There was some notion of, “Well, maybe there’s a chance that U.S. bombing will do something.”

I will say that I find it extremely irresponsible of anyone with the power of the president to say, “Help is on the way,” and then wait weeks and understand too late or maybe not at all that you have an endurance regime that is entrenched and has spent 47 years entrenching itself, studying itself, and understanding itself of where its weaknesses are. Sometimes they overreach, sometimes they overestimate, and sometimes they are blatantly wrong, but they are structurally designed to endure.

Two other things: When February 28 comes, one, it is not possible for even some of the most strident opposition to the Islamic Republic to get out on the streets when they are being bombed. People cannot protest legitimately when they are being bombed; and, two, I think that the blowback and some of the collateral damage that transpired made what was theoretically hopeful into tangibly questioning.

I was in Atlanta on February 28, and the family I was with proceeded to get calls from all over Iran, some people crying with hope, crying and dancing, thinking that things were going to change, and that has significantly diminished for a very large percentage of people inside of Iran—I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations that I understand all 92 million people because with 92 million people I promise you the Iranians have 90 million different opinions—but the notion and the data points—

I have talked about the data historically where you have had U.S. interventions, and those countries are not better off. We have civil war, disenfranchised governments, and in some places we have literal slave markets, and that won’t even get to things like child soldiers. As part of my Ph.D. I was in Syria, and the atrocities that have been committed under the hubris of military action and intervention really are crimes against humanity, whether it be ISIS or the Taliban but also the people who perpetuate the idea that we can change societies.

KEVIN MALONEY: You talked earlier about the humanitarian intervention space and that 18 months is not going to cut it if you are thinking about a values-based, political, grassroots system.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: And that is just teaching agricultural skills.

KEVIN MALONEY: I don’t think the political system is going to change by a few launches.

One of the things we are also thinking about a lot here at the Council is this dehumanization arc over the last few years, whether it is with what is happening now or Gaza. It feels to me like the Iranian people right now are caught in this dehumanization pincer. They are in this current country, they have gone through this horrible round of repression, and now you have this irresponsible rhetoric around freedom. We talk here about assuming a moral mask to do something political, and you have that from the White House, and you have literal schools filled with girls being killed. It is just this storm for people to deal with morally but also politically. What do you think about this pincer that the Iranian people find themselves in right now?

NEDA BOLOURCHI: I will say that that ability to hear has been dampened by what is an ongoing internet blackout and something I have personally talked about with the State Department, members of Congress, and the former national security advisor, across branches of government. This is a recurring situation, we can align it with protests, and the Islamic Republic is building what I refer to as the “white wall,” and they now have legislation for tiered access.

It keeps the rest of the world from understanding what is transpiring. It also keeps Iranians from providing intelligence but also documentation regarding human rights abuses and what is happening. That pincer and our ability to hear is significantly reduced.

I know you are going to want to talk about the Iranian American community, so I will say this and come back to the pincer moment. The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans puts out an annual survey, and if you look at it for a decade some of the Iranian Americans who have been in the United States for 50-plus years still have family and friends in Iran and speak with them, 78 percent weekly and 68 percent monthly. My point of bringing that up is because, not conclusively, but I would imagine those conversations include what is happening not only in their personal lives but also those loved ones’ opinions of what is happening inside of Iran.

This gets me back to my point about the pincer and my own dampened sense of what is happening. In academia we call them “informants” from an anthropological standpoint—I don’t like that phrase—but the people I would talk to about it are cut off, and I cannot hear what they have to say, but that pincer really is revolving around the lack of delivery, the idea that the president has not delivered, the understanding that he likely cannot deliver, and what it would actually mean to try, the human cost of trying to uproot multiple layers of a government that has a core constituency of 15 million. That is where they are at.

Going back to the historical data on U.S. intervention, when I give that data people do not want to hear it. Professor Pape at Chicago is the person everyone turns to for some of this historical data, but also we have Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Sudan. They don’t want to hear those numbers, but even if you give them the numbers, emotionally the response is that Iran and the Iranians will be the exception.

Back to your pincer question of where people are at, there is this notion of exceptionalism. To compound that I will give you an example: I had a voice message left for me one morning, and somebody said, “Neda, I woke up wondering if there was going to be a miracle today.” So there is this understanding of where they are at, the impossibility of that position, and now the phrase being used—by at least one person, for whatever that amounts to—is “a miracle.” So, yes, they are caught.

KEVIN MALONEY: I know you have done a lot of work on the era of intervention and the costs related to that in U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect a lot of the work has been on not just the tactical and strategic failures but, as you said, the hubris that went along with the decision that American hard power can solve these political problems. It felt like that was very out of fashion for a while, and even with the current administration their platform was very much anti-interventionist.

Maybe we can talk about this parallel “case study” that is happening right now in terms of Venezuela, also with large presence and diaspora in the United States, and also being a political lightning rod for many years, having a leader they could point to as the bogeyman, and then having this “tactical” success in the beginning of this year. Maybe you can talk about the geopolitical dominoes that you saw from that “success” in taking Maduro.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: It has been put out there that Iran is not Venezuela, but not for the reasons people are talking about, corruption and ideology. These are actually not what separate Iran and Venezuelan. Anti-American rhetoric, mafia mentality, and all the other things that we can ascribe to both governments are actually not what distinguishes them. It is their structure.

You had Ambassador Story here at Carnegie. I will tell you that the Islamic Republic is something I advised United States Central Command on years ago and was again the notion of the Islamic Republic as an endurance regime. It is structured horizontally. While everyone refers to the leader or supreme leader, although that is not the exact translation, as this pivot point who makes the decisions, one should actually think about the leader as the person who announces the decisions, as maybe the final vote.

There are a slew of intersecting institutions and organizations that make decisions in the Islamic Republic. That is why one doesn’t know who is in power, even though you may have the leader of legislature as the speaker. You have all these people who in theory are in positions, and then everyone looks to the leader, but by the time that he makes an announcement it is because there is generally some kind of consensus that has transpired in the multiple horizontal layers underneath him, and he tips it one way or the other.

There is this ongoing discourse, say, with the former Khamenei, about whether or not to engage in diplomacy and nuclear negotiations, and he hears what were previously called the “reformers” and basically says, “Okay, I keep hearing you guys. I’m going to go with you for a little bit. You have won out for the time being.”

Then, 2016 happens and he says, “See? I gave you your opportunity. The United States has shown us all who they are and what they stand for,” and as the Arabs would say, “Huss.” But they adhered to the agreement for another year.

That is a little bit more of how that conversation happens. Some people or their institutions gets a louder voice, but it is not, going back to Venezuela, the vertical structure that Venezuela has.

Iran is not Venezuela. You cannot just take out one person or a tier of people, as the president has found out. You cannot even take out three tiers of people because the Islamic Republic is multitiered, horizontal, and one thing they learned about themselves is that if there was going to be foreign intervention, they would aim for Tehran.

One thing I have noticed is that the Revolutionary Guard now—and it is one of the things that I talk about. You are going to aim for the communications—it is called Seda o Sima, and they did bomb it—and you’re going to aim for Tehran because this is the capital, this is where the majority of government is located, and it is where your telecommunications are housed. So if you can cut off the periphery from the center, then your ability to take over is significantly increased.

The Islamic Republic understood itself like that in the same way that military war games played that out. The Islamic Republic understood that and they operate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps autonomously in 31 provinces, so we are not even looking at a central government that is multitiered and horizontal. We now have a police force, if you want to call them that.

KEVIN MALONEY: To recap for the listeners, you think about the supreme leader, although it is not a direct translation, as a manifestation of a more diffuse system, and in Venezuela we see it as this transactional hierarchy, almost a mob state. The United States captured the leader of Venezuela and his wife, and that system remained, so if that system manages to stay in when you take out the leader, you can only imagine the hubris of thinking about taking out a single leader in the Iranian system and expecting collapse.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: I will say this in terms of the tactical operations. People don’t like it when I say this, but they were wildly successful, and the strategists who did understand the tiered horizontal system had this card of people taken out because they understood that. What they did not understand is that the ideology and the endurance that the multiple layers underneath have been imbibed with over decades. That is not the same thing as what is transpiring in Venezuela. Venezuela is transactional and it is much closer. Iran still operates like a mob too, but in different ways. So it really is the structure.

For the Iranians it is compounded by this history that I have talked about—coups, war, revolution—that imbibes that structure and gives them a moral sense of their own righteousness.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to close today by shifting to the Iranian American community a bit. There is no end in sight in the current conflict, but there is also the possibility that you get a Truth Social post at 2:00am that says, “We’re done.” So the strategic playing field and the timelines on these things are very different.

At Carnegie Council we thought that the action in Venezuela would be the thing that would have dominated congressional hearings and the media in the United States for months and months, and now it doesn’t even have a shelf-life of 45 days. To go back to the Iranian American community, how are they thinking about this moment in terms of the possibility of hope but also coming to grips I think with some of the costs of the violence and maybe the political reality of Trump promising X but delivering Y?

NEDA BOLOURCHI: In a very large sense, you do have sizable portions who are sitting on each end of the spectrum. If you had 50-60 percent—I am using two different polls conducted in February and March—of Iranian Americans who were in favor of the war on Iran, that number has shifted as the costs have been demonstrated.

Coming out of January the Iranian American community was at the point of no return. I think we have seen the percentages shifting so you have a smaller portion that still is about the president not relenting, that he has made a promise and it historically can go back to the 1980s. He has statements from the 1980s about what he would do if he could do it.

I want to pause a bit and say that for everyone who thinks that the president doesn’t have agency, the historical record, his own record, shows you otherwise, that he had a partner, and the prime minister helps him in some sense, but let’s not excuse the decision. He made that decision. There is a portion of the Iranian American community that continues not only to support that decision but to encourage the president to reactivate the U.S. military in kinetic action.

In contrast, there is a portion, the other side, that was antiwar, no war on Iran at all costs, because of the familial, personal connections, and the heritage. If you don’t go, you don’t go. As Iranian Americans, if you don’t go to Iran, what is it to you? What is it to you if protestors are tortured and murdered? That brings us to the ethical questions and then the bigger ethical questions of, do we live with that kind of violence and knowing it exists, or do we think about the additional thousands of people who are going to suffer through bombings?

So you have these slivers, and I don’t have even approximate numbers, but they have gotten smaller. The further out that we go from February 28, those two sides have gotten smaller and the middle has gotten larger, where the idea is that this is not what was supposed to have happened. The United States is the best military force in the world, and there is this precision targeting, and if one can be so precise in so many other ways—decapitation, the assassination of one person without bunker busters, and I am talking here about foreign leaders inside of Iran—why can there not be precision when it comes to this regime?

Then, largely you see the middle starting to talk about how this war has split the community and families and also being very concerned about those who are already here. In the first Trump administration students from Iran were allowed to come. They were vetted, they came, and that exemption does not exist in this version of the travel ban.

Then you have United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which has stopped reviewing, so student visas are expiring. Are you going to send back student protestors who have learned freedom and democracy in America to a government that is going to kill them potentially? That is where I think the Iranian American community is, largely wanting to see change, trying to effect change, and hoping to hear I think a strategy or at least tactics they can engage in domestically to help in one way or another.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thank you for laying that out for our listeners. So often people want to paint with a broad brush or put a group and a certain subset of that group into the narrative that supports their political alliance or ideology, so I think it is important to parse that out.

One of the big things I am going to take away from this is just thinking about the parallel case studies of Venezuela and Iran and potentially around Cuba, and I think the list goes on in terms of the current government, but it really is thinking about violence being tactical versus strategic and the classic conundrum in geopolitics of “war being politics just by other means.”

There is a choice there. There is always a choice involved in that. It is top of mind in many arenas right now, depressingly so.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: I agree 100 percent. The one thing I would add to the parallels of Venezuela and Iran is that for an endurance regime you have to give them a win, and I think in that sense the notion of corruption is overriding for the Venezuelans, if I can use that a little casually. In their transactional nature of governance much has not changed. They cannot declare a win and they have complied with the transactional notion of the intervention. The Islamic Republic, again because of its structure, you have got to give it a win and it has to be generally agreed upon, so I think these differences in case studies impact millions of people.

KEVIN MALONEY: If the end goal is to get back to the table to hash this out diplomatically, it depressingly makes you ask, “What as the point of the violence in the first place if it did not change the status quo massively?”

This is a big question, an ethical question in terms of the preference for kinetic over diplomatic or coercive over reciprocity.

Neda, thank you so much for coming by Carnegie Council. I really appreciate it.

NEDA BOLOURCHI: My pleasure. Thank you, Kevin.