Iran's (buried) Uranium Treasure - with Amit Segal and Fred Kagan

0:00As events accelerate in the Middle East, the team here at ArchMedia is increasing our coverage, more conversations, more context, more time spent trying to help make sense of what's happening, and all with an expanding cast of podcast hosts, analysts, and journalists. Our inside Call Me Back subscribers help make this expanded coverage possible. It helps us be here when it matters most. If you're not yet an inside Call Me Back subscriber, this is an important time to join us. To subscribe, you can follow the link in our show notes or visit arcmedia.org. And to our insiders, thank you. All the Israeli flag on the western wall. Maybe the picture of this war is going to be a

1:04Trump and Netanyahu in a mutual news conference having three black containers between them, saying you see the Iranian people, the billions of dollars that were taken from you are here in our hands. And this is the proof that the Iranian regime didn't care about you. And I see various signs for it. For instance, leaks to international media about the risk of the Iranian army or IRGC taking this uranium from under the rubble of Fodor or Sleshi's Fahan. We have to understand now it's no longer a commando operation. You can just get there under the protection of the two best Air Forces in the world. I wouldn't over focus on the nuclear program per se because we appear to be engaged in a military operation with the objective of changing this regime. And if you actually want to end the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons permanently, the only way that you're actually going to do that in my view is to eliminate the regime that has been so committed to doing this.

2:05So I think that the issue of securing the nuclear materials is important, but it's only part of a larger picture here. It's 6.30 pm on Monday, March 9th, your New York City. It is 2am on Tuesday, March 10th in Tehran. And it is 12.30am on Tuesday, March 10th in Israel, where Israelis are turning to a new day. The news these days is coming quickly, and as you may have noticed, ARKMEDIA has been producing more frequent, calming-back episodes to track the big questions and dilemmas revolving around the war. But we also want to give you more frequent and urgent news updates. For this, we turn to our new ARKMEDIA contributor, Debra Part Days, with the news update. This is Debra Part Days. On Monday, an Iranian cluster bomb exploded in central Israel,

3:09killing one man and seriously wounding two others. Also, a Hezbollah missile struck the center of the country. At least 16 people were injured. Oil prices hit a new high of $120 a barrel on Monday, as Iran continued attacking its petroleum-rich neighbors. Since then, oil prices have eased, falling below $100 a barrel. President Donald Trump dismissed the spike in oil prices, calling it, quote, a very small price to pay for world safety and peace. He said the price quote, will drop rapidly once Iran's nuclear threat is destroyed. Later on Monday, Trump said the war in Iran could be over soon. The war is very complete, he told the CBS reporter, noting that Iran's military capabilities have been decimated. Within a couple of hours, though, Trump was speaking to a group of Republican donors in Florida, where he emphasized that the war hasn't run its course quite yet. Adding, we've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough. According to reports, Israel's attack on IRGC oil infrastructure on Saturday

4:16surprised and dismayed the Trump administration. On Monday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham urged Israel to, quote, please be cautious about the targets you select. He said Iran's oil economy will be essential to the Iranian people, starting a, quote, new and better life when this regime collapses. Arab leaders, meanwhile, are losing patience with Iran's aggression. Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry said Iran will be, quote, the biggest loser if it continues to attack Arab states. Even Qatar's prime minister called the Iranian attacks a, quote, dangerous miscalculation and a betrayal. These were notably his first comments to the media since the start of the war. In Toronto, gunshots were fired on three different Jewish synagogues in recent days. It's part of a surge in anti-Semitic attacks across Canada, which according to one analysis more than doubled in the year following October 7th. On Sunday, local Jewish leaders held a press conference outside of one of the targeted synagogues, where bullet holes were still

5:20visible in the door. The leaders expressed frustration that not enough has been done to prevent this escalation. Police said it's too early to tell if the three shootings are connected. No arrests have been made so far. This was a news update on Debra Pardase. Now onto today's episode. Very deep underground near the Iranian city of Isfahan lies one of the regime's most valuable assets, roughly 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent. We'll explain in a moment why that number 60 percent is so important. During the war in June of 2025, the 12-day war, US and Israeli military operations resulted in sealing the site, effectively trapping the material underground. But a recent US intelligence assessment has assessed that there still may be a narrow access point, meaning the uranium could potentially be recovered. For Iran, the stockpile represents decades of investment and its strongest bargaining chip.

6:24For the US and Israel, removing it would eliminate one of the regime's most important strategic assets, and the attempt to retrieve it would be difficult to say the least. The site is under constant surveillance, and extracting that amount of material would require a major operation, likely under the threat of Iranian retaliation. Still, the option has not been ruled out. Reports suggest that Washington and Jerusalem are at least considering whether a special forces mission could recover the uranium. With me to unpack this, is Ark Media contributor and senior analyst at Israel's Channel 12, and Israel Hayam, Amit Segal, and Fred Kagan, a military historian and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He runs the Critical Threats Project at AEI. Fred Amit, thank you for being here. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting us. Amit, I want to start with you. You called this 400 kilogram quote unquote treasure as you described it in your newsletter, headline this morning,

7:29that is buried under the ruins of Isfahan. So what is it? Why is it so important? Okay, so all the hopes of the Aatolar regime, all the danger of fundamentalist Islam lies inside three black containers under the ruins of the Fodor nuclear site or Isfahan nuclear site depends who you believe in Iran. Those sites were bombed by both Israeli and American jet fighters in June during the rising line operation, and they haven't been moved since. Now, here is the trophy. If Israel and the US are actually to take it, it means that the entire investment of the Iranian regime in the nuclear project would be in western hands, but it is done. It's finished. If not, those containers actually have inside still the hope for a nuclear facility, because for me 60% and rich uranium, you can get quite easily to 99%. It's quite misleading. The difference between 0 and 60% is something like 10,000 times more than between 60% and 99%

8:35is quite easy to take it and to actually make it a uranium and reached to a military level. Your point is once you're at 60%, it's two weeks until you have the capacity for a key ingredient for a nuclear bomb. Exactly. Now, every war needs a picture, right? The Soviet Union flag on the ruins of the Reichstag or the US flag in Iwo Jima or the Israeli flag on the western wall. Maybe the picture of this war is going to be a Trump and Netanyahu in a mutual news conference, having three black containers between them saying, you see the Iranian people, the billions of dollars that were taken from you are here in our hands. And this is the proof that the Iranian regime didn't care about you. I think this is something that both Trump and Netanyahu work on. And I see various signs for it, for instance, leaks to international media over the last few days about the risk of the Iranian army or IRGC taking this uranium from under the rubble of Fodor or

9:38Slesh Isfahan. We have to understand now it's no longer a commando operation. You don't have to do it in disguise at night without being caught. You can just get there under the protection of the two best still forces in the world. So Fred, first question is do you have anything to add in terms of the strategic implications for the war if the Iranians get to it first? And then my second question is what would it take operationally for Israel and the US to beat them to it? Well, the Iranians aren't there first in the sense that they have been controlling this side and they've been working on this material. I would say a couple of things and I may disagree with here slightly about the relative importance of this. Yes, we have to secure this material at a minimum. We have to make sure that the Iranians are not able to recover this stuff. Getting it out of there may be a major undertaking. It depends on how thoroughly buried it is and what facilities are there. I'm sure that it's something that can be done, but I wouldn't underestimate the challenges of actually doing it. But the first priority would be securing it

10:40and making sure that the Iranians don't actually recover it. The short term threat from this stuff actually is less about making a nuclear weapon because there's no prospect in the current environment that the Iranians are going to be turning this stuff into nuclear weapons anytime soon. But you can use enriched uranium for other purposes if you get your hands on it including making dirty bombs and doing other things. So I think there's a lot of reasons to make sure that we actually secure this stuff. That having been said, I wouldn't over focus on the nuclear program per se because we appear to be engaged in a military operation with the objective of changing this regime. And if you actually want to end the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons permanently, the only way that you're actually going to do that in my view is to eliminate the regime that has been so committed to doing this. And that seems to be a major objective of the current U.S. Israeli military campaign. So I think that the issue of securing the nuclear materials is important, but it's only part of a larger picture here. I want to come back to that because I take your point

11:42and I want to drill into that. But just afraid if you can answer this or meet, what is the physical challenge of trying to extract this? Like I'm just trying to paint a picture for our listeners and for our viewers. What are they actually removing? Is it a few jars? Is it a bunch of boxes? Is it crates? Is it something the size of a truck? Like what is this thing? Well, the immediate challenge is that we blew up the facilities and we buried this stuff under a lot of rock. So you actually have to excavate. And now the Iranians have started to excavate these facilities to try to get access to this. I don't know offhand what the status of those excavations are. But first you have to get to it. Then the challenge is it's 400 kilograms of material. And you're going to be doing this by air because we don't have a ground lot of communication to do this. So there are challenges. It's not hard to get this stuff in principle together and put it on a plane and fly it out of there, put it on a couple of planes and fly it out of there. But I don't think we should minimize the challenge even with the excellence of our special forces and Israeli special forces of going in there,

12:43securing a facility which requires a fair number of troops, securing a gang at rocket drone and missile strikes also which the Iranians will try completing any excavation that might be necessary which can mean bringing in heavy equipment and other stuff in order to do that and then getting this stuff loaded. It's all possible to do I suspect. But I think it is a pretty major military undertaking. I mean anything to add to that. So according to the reports which should be taking with the grain of salt as always and especially in times of war there is a narrow path to actually reach those containers. How narrow the path is, who knows, maybe it's just a trap for the Iranian forces. To be honest, I don't really know. But I'll tell you what the perception was around June, July after the last round had ended. The idea was that it is buried but Iranians are not going to take it because they don't want to actually cause President Trump epic fury. However, since there is an epic fury operation now and since they're desperate, the calculation

13:47now is that they might want to actually reach to this uranium in order to create an improvised nuclear facility just in order to say that they have something to actually have something to deal with when it comes to the negotiation table. I think we should see it as a race to the enriched uranium between Iran and Israel and the United States. And in your newsletter you called this uranium stockpile the load-barring beam of the regime. What did you mean by that? They invested all in all something like 20 billion dollars. I want to give an example. According to foreign sources, when Israel tried to actually obtain nuclear weapons, 10% of the country's GDP was invested in this project. It was a huge project and the costs have not become cheaper when it comes to nuclear illegal nuclear facilities. So I would say that a good deal of the Iranian budget was invested in this project. By the way, even more than the Israeli one because they learned the lessons from

14:50the bombardments of both the Syrian nuclear project in 2007, the Iraqi nuclear project in 1981. So they tried to actually plant it in various locations in Iran and then plant it deep under the ground. So it was a very expensive nuclear project, which means that if it's 100% dead and in Israeli hands or American hands, you can see the GDP of four years of the Iranian economy influence. I want to just put this in the context of where the war is overall right now in terms of how it's going. Fred, the first phase of the war was defined as a quote unquote decapitation phase. Now it seems that we are transitioning to a new phase. How would you define this new phase we're in, Fred? And by the way, is it that clean that you can define these things as like we finished phase one and now we're heading to a new phase or is it more of a blur? Well, it's as always a bit more complicated than the bumper stickers that are being presented. The first phase, which is continuing actually was the suppression of the Iranian air defense systems, the full suppression

15:53of them so that we could operate freely over Iran, including to do things like what Amit is suggesting, which which you can only do if you have absolute air dominance. So that was actually the first phase. And there's another phase or sub phase of that, which is going on, which is very important, which is the phase of going after the Iranian drone and missile launch sites, production facilities and storage sites in order to deprive the Iranians of the ability to close the strait of Ormuz and to attack regional allies and partners, including Israel. That's very important, Dan, because that phase is continuing. And that is a very important activity that people are not paying enough attention to as we get into these excessively simplistic conversations about, are we going to run out of interceptors before they run out of missiles? Because this phase is designed to make them run out of missiles faster by blowing them up before they can launch them. And that phase is continuing very actively. Another component of the current Israeli military operation is attacking the internal security infrastructure that the regime has used

16:55to oppress its people and would use to retain control. And this is very important because it does give a hint to the fact that the larger objective of this transcends the issue of the nuclear facilities and gets all the way to regime change. Now, the decapitation campaign was yet another sort of subphase, which is also continuing. So all of these activities are going on simultaneously. And the fact that we and the Israelis are conducting them simultaneously, I think points to the larger objectives of this entire undertaking, which again, I think are fundamentally about changing this regime. And in terms of when you talk about air superiority, Fred, what does that actually mean? In other words, will we reach a point soon from your perspective that the Emirates and the Bahrainis and other countries in the region and Israel for that matter are not sitting there waking, you know, every day anticipating the next siren, the next projectile that's going to be flying over their skies. Like, does that make that threat and that risk? I don't want to say it brings

17:57it down to zero because these things are never zero. But basically a non-factor air travel resumes, commercial air travel resumes in the region. I know we have a lot of listeners who are asking me, when are they going to be able to fly to and from Israel? Like, when does that whole dynamic change? When we say air superiority, shouldn't it mean that? Well, it doesn't because it's a technical term and it really refers to the ability to operate manned aircraft and the ability of an adversary to interfere with that activity. It doesn't refer to the ability of an adversary to fire missiles or drones. So that's a different military mission and that's what we're focusing on. Now, we have seen as Senkhan and others have reported about a 90% drop off in the rate of launches of Iranian missiles and drones at a regional state since the start of the war. We are having, I think, a lot of success getting after the Iranian launch points and storage facilities and manufacturing facilities. And now we have the news, which is very positive, that the Ukrainians

18:58are sending Ukrainian experts in drone interception and talking about providing drone interceptors to the regional states as well, which could help them defend against the Iranian drone attacks in a much more economical fashion and a way that could be much more effective. So I think the trend lines are strongly indicating that the missile and drone threat from Iran will continue to diminish. It's hard to say without access to classified information, which I don't have, when exactly that will occur. But the combined forces of Israel and the US are getting after this and do seem to be doing a very good job judging by the falloff in attacks. Amit, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that Iran should expect surprises. His word not mine. What could that mean? I don't know. I can assume. First of all, the number is 4 to 5 surprises. That's what I understand. Second, I think actually taking the Iranian is one of the sort of surprises. And if people expect something like the Pager operation in Lebanon, just in an Iranian take on

20:01the Pager operation, I would say this is not this sort of stuff. It's something more strategic. I'll give you the description. I've just heard yesterday from a senior source. He said, listen, we have the regime in our grip and now we want to shake it. We want to shake it in order to cause it to fall because let's admit, as Fred just mentioned, there isn't any way to translate directly military pressure to regime change, especially if you do not have boots on the ground. So the idea behind those 4 or 5 moves is to actually shake the foundations of the regime. That is to say, it's not merely taking the naval force, taking the air force, taking the ballistic missile system, taking the rest of the nuclear project. There are some things that are supposed to give both the protesters and the IRGC members a moment to think, is it here to stay this regime or is it due to fail? And I think it's going to take a while. They speak about something like five

21:01weeks from now. So they have to keep up with one surprise a week. Fred, what can you tell us about US and Israeli attacks on Iran's internal security forces? We've seen the combined force going after the central instruments that the regime has used to oppress its population killed 20, 30,000 people during the last protests and keep itself in power. The combined force has done a very good job of destroying the IRGC headquarters and the other internal security forces, the law enforcement command forces, which are sort of their first line of defense against protests and also to attack the Basigis, the large paramilitary force that the regime uses as thugs and brutal just broods to oppress its people. And we've seen the very heavy, very intense set of activities around Tehran. And we've also seen a very intense set of those activities in the West, particularly in the Kurdish areas that have been historically the most festive in the protest

22:03movements. We're starting to see the campaign move from West to East. And so we're beginning to see them going after these institutions in central Iran around Isfahan and Shiraz and other places. And this is very important, Dan, because if you're going to see regime change in a way that is, if you're going to see regime change at all and particularly in a way that is likely to lead to some positive outcome, the area that matters is the Iranian heartland. It's Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Farz, the actual core Iranian lands, not the peripheries. The regime is not going to be brought down by a Kurdish insurrection. There has to be an insurgency in central Iran and it has to go beyond Tehran. So this is one of the things we're watching for is the continued role of this campaign into this Iranian heartland. We're starting to see that. And it's very clear that the purpose of this is to destroy the regime's ability to keep itself in power and set conditions for

23:03the protest movement, which can become a revolution. But I do want to say there's something very important that needs to happen in order for this to work. The Iranians have turned off the internet almost completely. It's incredibly difficult for ordinary Iranians. The regime, the regime is turned off. The regime. Yeah. The regime has shut down the internet, which means nobody can communicate electronically, at least through the internet right now in Iran. Right. There's some limited Starlink access, although the regime has been working to interfere with that. If you're going to have a mass protest movement that is organized and organized well enough to turn into something that can be a revolution, people have to be able to communicate with one another. And the problem is the regime has its hands on the switch that turns the internet on and off. So I don't know anything about the what the Israeli U.S. plan about this is, but I will tell you that if there is going to be a prospect for meaningful regime change, someone is going to have to turn communications back on for the ordinary Iranian people in a big way. I'm hoping that may be one of the surprises that

24:03Prime Minister Netanyahu is talking about is that the Israelis will have some way of turning this communications back on because that's going to be essential to facilitating any kind of large movement by the Iranian people. Amit also during the weekend, this past weekend, Northern Israel has seen heavy bombardment by Hezbollah. We thought Hezbollah was sort of had exited the stage and now it feels like Hezbollah at least in some form is back. Did Israel underestimate Hezbollah's ability to attack Northern Israel? I think it overestimated, do not explain. Hezbollah began its monstrous career in the 80s and the 90s as a terrorist guerrilla organization trying to actually hit and run to target soldiers in southern Lebanon, fire a few rockets a week a day or a month. Then after the Israeli withdrawal in the year 2000 and thanks to one billion dollar annual funding from Iran, it became a monstrous terror army with rockets more than I think almost every single country on the

25:08planet. What Israel did in 2024 was to destroy Hezbollah's army. It took 80 percent of its rockets. It killed the entire leadership of the organization including the leader Hassan Asala. It killed 3000 of its top fighters named the Red One Force and it actually reduced Hezbollah back again to the 90s version of guerrilla terrorist organization and that's exactly what we have seen over the last few days. Hezbollah re-adapted its strategy from the 90s and it took time for the Israeli soldiers to actually adapt to it. Now here is the crazy fact, the soldiers who are fighting in Lebanon as we speak were high school pupils when October 7th happened. So they haven't fought in Gaza yet. The war was quite long so for us it's like a one long story but for them it's the first time they actually encounter terrorists so they're not used to it. So the IDF will have to adjust to the old EU version of Hezbollah. I'm quite optimistic about it.

26:11Of course it's a shame that Israel lost two soldiers over the last weekend. And what does it mean for the possible evacuation of Israeli citizens from the North? I think this was by far the number one mistake of Israel since October 7th. This was a huge price for terrorism meaning the first evacuation meaning after October 7th when they pulled 100 plus thousand citizens after October 7th. Yes. Yeah. No one is going to do it again. It would be a grave mistake and the entire idea after October 7th is that every time there is a danger it's the other side that should evacuate itself rather than your side. By the way I think that another evacuation necessarily means that a few dozens of the Israeli villages on the northern border would never be inhabited again because no one is going to live their house twice in two years and come back for the third time. But can you just for listeners to understand those listeners who are not in Israel what it means it's one thing in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or other parts of Central Israel when there are sirens that go off and you have a little bit of response time before

27:15you have to get into your momod and to your safe room. In the north when those sirens go off it's let's just say virtually no response time when that siren goes off you have to be in your safe room immediately. Exactly. It's something between 15 seconds one five and one minute. Right. So it necessarily means that you cannot actually have normal life even if technically officially you can go to work no one is going to actually go to teach or to study or to have their shop open if within 15 seconds you have to find a shelter and and hence there are not I mean there aren't any tourists any students any shoppers which means that the entire north is paralyzed I don't think this situation can actually keep on for long and I think therefore that we are going to see a dramatic escalation especially when his balein is in such a disastrous situation in Lebanon and I think this is the number one change in the last five or six rounds his bale was perceived as

28:16the protector of Lebanon as the one that actually defends it from the Israeli aggressor nowadays everyone understands even those who do not like Israel that hospitalized the protector of Iran that this has nothing to do with Lebanon only with the autolo regime hence the dramatic decisions made by the Lebanese government I think that what we are going to see is a dramatic escalation from the Israeli side followed by yet another step taken by the Lebanese government to actually dismantle his baleis and army within the country Fred does that sound plausible to you yes I mean I think the it's also important to keep in mind what I mean said about the damage that Israel did to Hezbollah and the fact that the IDF largely pushed the Hezbollah forces out of the area south of the Latani river and so Hezbollah is having to rely more and more on long range strikes from deeper into Lebanon and it has is lost the ability to threaten northern Israel in the way that it had previously because when you had the rod one forces right on the border when you had Hezbollah

29:18fighters with short range missiles and drones and things that could strike right mass right south of the Latani on the border the threat to northern Israel was much greater now the Hezbollah has to rely on longer range systems that first of all give more flight time second of all have opportunities to be shot down and third of all that just don't have the same amount of mass so the IDF has done a terrific job of degrading Hezbollah's ability to threaten northern Israel to begin with and now yes I agree that as Hezbollah has demonstrated that it is fully prepared to commit suicide on behalf of the suicidal Iranian regime that the IDF will probably continue to fight here and degrade it further and back to Iran Motaba Hamani the son of Ali Hamani the now deceased supreme leader has become the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic any thoughts in terms of what you think we should be focused on about him how significant is it that he's been elevated to the rank of Ayatollah or is this just we're now going to be in this steady stream as leaders

30:18are killed they're going to be replaced and the nature of the regime is not changing well the nature of the regime is clearly not changing because Motaba is a continuation of his father's policies this is a hardline dude he is heavily networked into the IRGC especially the IRGC intelligence organization he served during the Iran Iraq war with some of these guys and has maintained tight IRGC networks he advocated for Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election and then he played a role in suppressing the protests that followed Ahmadinejad's election this is a continuation of the Hamane regime in fact and not just in name it's noteworthy that he took power in the midst of a bit of a power struggle there was an effort by what people were you know a faction that people regard as more moderate or pragmatists folks led by Ali Larajani but that also includes Hassan Rahani and other so-called moderates and pragmatists to try to avoid having Mochibah selected right now the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other hardline factors

31:23factions were pushing to get Mochibah selected very rapidly among other things because they want to get Ali Larajani who has been effectively running the country since Hamanej's death out of there and they want to get regained full control over what's going on they won so that hardline faction won this many power struggle which tells us that it remains dominant which means that the regime is still the regime which brings us back to what I think is the key point here which is having started a war of this scale and having set conditions as US and Israel have been doing to facilitate hopefully a revolution that will bring about the change of the regime it's very important to push forward and it's very important to do everything we can to make that happen because if we leave a regime that is like this that is headed by Mochibah in power then I fear that whether or not we get the enriched uranium we will have missed a multi-generational opportunity to eliminate a fundamental threat to the region. I mean before you go Israel's action suggests that one of its objectives in this war is regime change although they are sometimes more or less

32:26explicit about that depending on the day do you think the US sees the end game differently from the Israelis in other words some days you once thinks that from the US perspective just neutralizing the nuclear threat neutralizing the regime's capacity whoever is in charge in Iran neutralizing their capacity to be a menace in the region is the objective and it's like you know who's actually governing the Iranian people is not as paramount the Israelis I think view things a little differently is there a world in which there's like a divergence here in terms of how this war ends do you worry about that I think we should actually turn the table around and think for the first time about the US in more ambitious terms than Israel let's admit the fact I mean no one is going to say explicitly but if in a week from now Iran has 70% less ballistic missile launchers 99 percent less naval force 100% less air force no nuclear threat diatola is dead and so does the

33:27leadership of the IRGC Israel is very happy with the situation because Iran is no longer a threat to Israel however for President Trump the mission is way more ambitious he is actually in the business of regime change I know it is not said deliberately but there is no other way to interpret it by the way for Israel it's quite clear I mean Benjamin Netanyahu has had many political problems he was accused for many times over the last two and a half years for initiating a war for political purposes in Gaza Lebanon et cetera no one actually says it when it comes to Iran because everyone in Israel understands the situation that Iran is an existential threat to the Jewish state this is not the case in the United States I know it's not the lion's share of the Republican party but there are something like between 15 and 19 percent of the Republican party supporters that actually wonder what the hell do we have to do with the Iran yeah but the polls are showing really across the board the majority of Republicans support what Trump is doing in Iran right now of course no no what I'm trying to say in Israel it's a bipartisan question I see in the United States in the

34:32best case scenario it's a Republican cause right so President Trump desperately needs a regime change even if it's not spoken out loud in order to say I listen when the war began this was a very problematic evil fundamentalist octopus and now we brought back Iran to the Middle East as a pro-Western pro-Israeli pro-American peaceful nation so for Trump the horizon is broader than for Israel I mean we know you have to drop we'll say goodbye to you we're going to keep Fred on for more minutes thanks for me thank you so much bye bye Fred any response to my question of a meat in his response I think President Trump himself is vacillating a little bit between exactly what he's prepared to accept here and he had signaled it various times that he would accept in the destruction of the nuclear program and so on I think the the selection of most of a to replace his father is likely to continue to encourage Trump to drive for the more complete outcome that Amid is talking about I think we need to be careful talking about pro-Western pro-whatever

35:35you know Iran because as Amid pointed out we're not putting us boots on the ground to control the transition here so I do think we need to be clear right about the fact that knocking over this regime assuming that that's feasible is going to lead to a very messy situation and then a very likely a civil war and it's very hard to say exactly what's going to come out of that I personally think that it's it is for all of the badness of that which is very bad and the dangers of that it is better to accept that situation than to accept continued decades of this regime so in that regard I was pleased to hear you know President Trump saying he's not excited about having a Kurdish army go in and really put the the ethnic aspects of the potential civil war on steroids there Fred we've I know you're more you do have real concerns about the possibility of civil war we've had others like Elika Leban just on our podcast we recorded her on Sunday Iranian obviously Kareem Sajapur has been on the podcast and elsewhere talking and they're less concerned about the possibility of civil war obviously they're not saying it's not a zero possibility but tell me

36:40what you think they're missing or what you're more concerned or alarmed about in terms of the threat of civil war well look we have four or five ethnic minorities in Iran that have historically been restive and historically been unhappy about the way that the country is governed the Kurds have been the most active in this regard the Baluchis have been very active as well and they are more they are organized both of them are organized in ways that I think would make insurgent action of various forms likely and that there are other minority groups as well so to begin with I think there's a high likelihood that we would see some effort on the part of some of those organized minority groups to push for some kind of federalization or something else which the Kaur Iranian population will oppose but I also think it's we should not imagine that the people who really believe in this regime which is the you know the Kaur IRGC guys the Kaur Basigi's the guys who are really invested in this stuff are going to go quietly into that good night there will be what you know in in the context of 2003 we called bitter enders there will be

37:42an effort on the part of the people who are committed to this regime just to wage their own insurgency and I just think it's very path dependent if how the regime actually goes down if it goes down because it can go in certain directions where this risk is minimized but we will not we will not be in control of that because we're you know we're not going to send the hundreds of thousands of troops into Iran to control this transition so I think we have to take very seriously that the likelihood that there will be multiple factions that will compete for power including people who will be trying to restore the regime that has fallen so from my perspective I think a you know 1989 1991 scenario with a sort of peaceful collapse of Iran like the Soviet Union is unlikely and we should be prepared for internal conflict that could spill over borders and the one of the big differences from the end of the Soviet Union is that you had leadership in the Soviet Union that had made the decision that was implicitly you know without fireworks the kind

38:43of gradual decline and wind down of the Soviet Union and to you I think what you're saying is it's not clear there's a leadership in Iran today in the regime that has that same attitude about that this is the regime's last chapter but no on the contrary I mean even the so-called moderates pragmatists like Larajani have been prosecuting the war you know he hasn't been surrendering he hasn't been so you're talking about removing the entire leadership of this regime one way or another and that will leave a power vacuum because there is no organized force to take over this isn't like 1979 in the sense that you know homemade he had huge numbers of followers he had an organization he had the wherewithal to bring about a planned revolution that he controlled which of course brought about this evil even so and even with the Shah stepping aside there was a civil war in Iran in 1979 that that home any ultimately won so this is the more normal way that regimes go down and again I don't think this is an argument for not continuing on with the never to bring this

39:43regime down but I just think that we need to be clear right about what a serious risk is of what may follow here and we should be thinking about how to mitigate that risk as best we can without of course you know planning to commit the hundreds of thousands of American troops to this which we don't even have available all right Fred we will leave it there thank you for this and I'm sure we will be seeing and hearing from you in the days and weeks ahead honestly I think the critical threats project at AEI and the products and research from and analysis from the institute for the study of war which I know you and Kim Kagan are spending a lot of time on with the terrific team are invaluable always but especially now and we will link to all of these resources in the show notes and encourage our listeners to turn to them I know we do so thank you for this thank you very much then that's our show for today if you value the call me back podcast and you want

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