Brandon Carr and Kevan Harris discuss their views on the five-week U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran that many call a strategic disaster, the future of negotiations to end the war, Israel’s continued destabilizing attack on Lebanon and the dangerous erosion of international law.
Kevan Harris is author of Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran.
SCOTT HARRIS: We begin this evening by welcoming to our program Brandon Carr, a studies associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He’s author of the book, A Social Revolution: Politics in the Welfare State in Iran. Thank you both for making time to be on our program this evening. BRANDON CARR: Yes, thank you very much.
SCOTT HARRIS: Okay.
KEVAN HARRIS: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Good. Just want to make sure you’re both on the line. Brandan, you authored along with Trita Parsi, the article before the ceasefire was agreed to, titled, “Limited U.S. Ground Operations in Iran Will Not Shift War’s Balance.” And of course, we hopefully won’t return to a war and a ground invasion, but there’s a lot to talk about in terms of “what-ifs.” But Brandan, I wondered if you’d start off by providing our listeners an overview of the current situation in the war where the ceasefire agreed to on April 7th is about to expire on the 22nd. And today, Donald Trump announced a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Is that either viable or an effective strategy to end this conflict? BRANDON CARR: Well, it’s certainly a viable strategy. I think it’s much more viable than attempting to open the Strait of Hormuz by force. The question is whether it’s going to be an effective strategy to actually end the conflict. I think the administration is trying to implement a blockade and is now actually implementing the blockade, as you said, as of 10 a.m. this morning in order to force the regime’s hand. You know, prevent them from being able to sell any oil on international markets and deprive them of their basic economic lifeline.
I think the difficulty that the Trump administration is going to run into is Iran has a lot of cards to play in response. They could decide to escalate militarily if they choose to resume the conflict. They could target our ships that are executing the blockade and they could resume strikes on civilian targets in the Middle East and the Gulf, as well as energy targets, infrastructure targets.
And the administration here in Washington is extremely sensitive to any economic headwinds that result from this war, particularly high gas prices. And this blockade has a pretty good likelihood of spiking gas prices, depending on how long it goes on for. So the blockade could very likely backfire. Now, there’s been reporting that this blockade is an attempt to enhance their negotiating leverage and that there is not actually real interest in Trump himself of resuming hostilities, but that remains to be seen.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Brandan. Kevan Harris is on the line with us tonight, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. I wanted to ask you, after these negotiations between the U.S. and Iran collapsed in Pakistan over the weekend, do we know what the points of disagreements were or are?
KEVAN HARRIS: Well, like many diplomatic negotiations, both sides start with maximal positions and given time, each side is supposed to understand what can be put on the table. Let’s remember that the JCPOA, which was negotiated between the government of Iran and the so-called P5+1, five members of Security Council plus Germany took two years to come to an agreement in 2016, which was then abrogated unilaterally by the United States under the first Trump administration. So diplomacy takes a long time.
The positions on both sides that are presented, at least as far as the media knows in Islamabad were maximal—both sides with disagreements even on what was even mentioned at the talks. But on the Iranian side, given that they, as Brandan noted, have more cards than the United States realized at the beginning of this war—have asked for the right for nuclear enrichment at some point in the future, lifting of many of the economic sanctions imposed on Iran … and are much less willing to negotiate, although they might, on issues related to regional security, the missiles, aid to allies in the region, these kind of things. So the Iranian side brought its own and a list of demands of the table and unlike in the past—as many participants in the negotiations of the JCPOA have noted today—negotiations are supposed to last longer than 12 to 16 hours.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. I was going to mention the international Iran nuclear agreement. As you said, it took a couple of years when the Obama administration was pushing for that and 21 or 16 or whatever how many hours were here. It doesn’t seem like it’s a realistic end of the road for talks. And the other factor here is Iran was in talks with the U.S. twice —June and then in January, right?
And the United States and Israel chose that moment during the talks to execute their air attacks. So Iran, whether you like the Islamic Republic or not, they’re a little wary of negotiations as cover for surprise attacks. I don’t know either if you want to comment on that, but that’s got to be a factor in the thinking of the leadership in Iran who are left alive after multiple assassinations of their government.
KEVAN HARRIS: Well, Scott, one thing to keep in mind is that we really should date this back to last summer with the so- called 12-Day War. When the United States decided to join in on that war formally at the tail end, that basically locked the United States into the next war in the sense that Israeli government knew quite well, according to reporting from New York Times and other U.S. newspapers, that in the wake of the 12-Day War, if the Israeli government decided to launch another set of attacks on Iran, it would be even more likely that the U.S. would join them. And in fact, that seems to be the discussion even as this second round of negotiations was occurring between Iran and United States, that the back channel conversations between the Israeli government and the United States were also occurring.
So it seems that the U.S. made a major strategic error in retrospect in aligning its war policy with Israel back in the summer because on the Iranian side, again, depending no matter what one’s opinion is on the Iranian government, they saw the 12-Day War as not over and prepared accordingly from last summer onwards.
And that includes preparation of defense policy and changing it up a bit, but also preparing for another war. And that includes food stocks, decentralizing command and control, including internal governance over electricity, gas, governance of the general country. So from the reporting we’ve seen inside of Iran, including people who have visited more recently—I was just reading a travel log from Iranian in the UK who traveled to Iran during the war and traveled around the country.
As it’s a very large country, as most of your listeners know, food supplies were never really disrupted inside the country, electricity worked, price of gas stayed relatively the same, no shortage of gasoline. So it seems that tactically, although the United States and Israel have claimed that major capacity of the government to fight a longer war has been deteriorated, it seems that they certainly can … They seem to be able to last longer than many predicted and might be able to last if hostilities commence again.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Professor Harris. Brandan, would you like to comment on those thoughts?
BRANDON CARR: Yeah, I largely agree. And this is the difficulty that the U.S. now faces. Unfortunately, it’s strategically worse off, significantly worse off than it was prior to the start of the war. And throughout the war’s conduct, the U.S. has stated these kind of tactical goals, if you will, in terms of its overall objectives: destroying Iran’s Navy; eliminating its ballistic missile threat; degrading its command and control. The difficulty is those don’t really add up to anything and Iran can rebuild those capacities. Now, Iran has been hit extremely hard during this war and so the timeline will be pushed out for them to rebuild some of those capabilities, but based on recent reporting that we’ve seen, it’s not even clear that the U.S. was fully successful in destroying many of those capabilities. It still has a significant stockpile of ballistic missile launchers left, including the ballistic missiles themselves.
Many of them that are trapped underground in bunkers, Iran can pretty easily dig out, especially now that hostilities have ceased, so they’re not under the threat of air attack. The Department of Defense claimed to have sunk more than 90 percent of Iran’s Navy, but the IRGC Navy still has 50 percent of its fast attack boats that it uses to disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. So there’s often a line where the U.S., when we talk about the wars that we conduct, we say that we have brilliant tactical success, but we fail strategically. You would hear something like that in Vietnam or potentially Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s not even clear that we had brilliant tactical success during this war as well.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I want to reintroduce you both to our audience. This is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris, and tonight we’re speaking with Brandan Carr, studies associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. His book is titled, A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran.
And to you both, I wanted to ask you this. As the price of oil and fertilizer goes up essential to agriculture and food supplies, how much pressure is building to force both the U.S. and Iran to come to an agreement to end this war? I mean, there’s all these external factors. You’ve got countries in Asia, Southeast Asia, rationing all sorts of things, mostly energy. And I think Thailand and some other countries have gone to four-day workweeks. I mean, this is really having a dramatic impact.
The big concern is that this blocking of the Strait of Hormuz could end up pushing the world economy into a recession or something worse.
BRANDON CARR: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And in the short term, the U.S. is insulated to a degree, but the longer that the strait is closed, the more and more this pressure is going to build. And economic headwinds in other parts of the world, including in Asia and Europe, as you noted, are going to start to reverberate here. So there is a limited time horizon for the U.S. to really win out in a war of attrition against Iran. And Iran knows that, I think, which is why you’re seeing the strength of their hand in negotiating with the U.S. They do not want a return to the status quo before the war. They would like to fundamentally reconfigure their relationship with the U.S. and the broader Middle East as a result. And I think the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of good options to try to undercut Iranian leverage, unless it was willing to significantly escalate militarily in the war using ground troops, which I do not think would be wise at all.
I do not think it’s worth the cost and it’s not clear that it would produce the strategic results that the U.S. seeks.
SCOTT HARRIS: Any comment?
KEVAN HARRIS: I’d like to tell the listeners that according to Financial Times today, the last ships that left the Indian Ocean prior to the war are now reaching the United States with deliveries of various cargoes. Of course, in the U.S., as we know from our own president, doesn’t get much of its oil from the Persian Gulf, but there are other products in the supply chain and those are only reaching their destinations now. So I think it won’t just be Southeast Asia and East Asia, but I think actually over the next two weeks, we’ll start seeing supply chains in the U.S. get even more disrupted.
But the issue here is that this is a war with more than two players. So there are many other actors, whether they have leverage or not, that will demand seats at the table. Even formerly, we know that there were delegations to some of the Gulf States as observers in Islamabad, including Saudi Arabia, which has good relations with Pakistan. So it’s actually not going to be simply the great powers involved in whatever comes out of this conflict, but other states will want to have a say, including states that have been damaged such as the Gulf states. So it’s actually very difficult to predict what a final resolution will be, what seems to be more likely.
And I agree with Brandon that the tactic of the U.S. administration—although one that seems to be declining in marginal utility each time it’s used—is escalatory threats to push deadlines or stated lines a few days or weeks into the future in the hope that the negotiating power will change. But this is kind of becoming the “president that cried wolf” after the third, fourth, fifth time of high escalatory threats put on the table and then reversed or used to save face—possibly to move markets as happened today—it’s unclear to what extent Iran will take any of these things seriously.
So I think the United States is exhausting some of its leverage and it’s very unclear how the traffic in the Hormuz can be opened. You can have a blockade of basically a blockade, and that’s kind of what we’re temporarily entering into now, but it’s unclear to see how long this is going to last as a tactic. I mean, Iran does sell oil through the Gulf, it has buyers, but Iran has many borders. A lot of its foreign exchange comes from non-oil products. Of course, some of those have been destroyed over the war, steel, petrochemicals, gas, but not all of it. So predictions of this as a kind of tactic to collapse the Iranian economy, to bring it to the table are basically untested and unmodeled.
And of course, those were also being sold to the Trump administration over a month prior in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that this is what we should do. This is really going to bring Iran to the table. Almost every other tactic that had been sold to the Trump administration has failed.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Professor Harris. It’s clear that the United States and Israel have different objectives in this war. And of course, it’s hard to really know what Donald Trump’s objectives were. They’re erratic, they’re constantly changing from regime change to recovering a thousand pounds of enriched uranium, to limiting Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. And then of course, Israel continues its war in Lebanon, which is a dealbreaker for Iran in terms of a long-term ceasefire or ending this war. I’d like to turn to you first, Brandan, in terms of the different and conflicting objectives of both the United States and Israel here in this conflict.
BRANDON CARR: Yeah. You put your finger right on it. And this proved to be a sticking point very early on in the ceasefire where Israel not only continued its strikes in Lebanon, but increased them as the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. went into effect and Iran was not happy about that and made it a point for the U.S. to try to control Israel to some degree in its conduct in Lebanon in order to get negotiations underway in the ceasefire.
This is going to be an extremely difficult variable for the U.S. to manage because in essentially about two weeks, it’s trying to negotiate the entire basis of U.S.-Iranian relations from its nuclear weapon program to its ballistic missiles. And then it also has the wild card of Israel as well, who is much more hostile to Iran. Netanyahu has made clear that he would like to continue the war rather than being forced into a ceasefire.
So it remains unclear how far Trump is willing to go in order to get Netanyahu’s compliance in any agreement.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, we’re almost out of time and I wanted to ask you both a final question here, and I’ll turn to you first, Professor Harris. Before this war began and there were major demonstrations across Iran due to the collapse of the Iranian currency and generally horrible economic conditions there, Donald Trump was saying, “Help is on the way.” There was this notion that the United States would intervene to help the internal opposition or overthrow the regime. What’s the condition now inside Iran for internal opponents of the Islamic Republic? By many accounts I’ve read, this war has undermined them. Maybe that’s just a short-term thing, but what’s your view of how this war has helped or hurt those proponents of democracy inside Iran?
KEVAN HARRIS: Well, there’s a longer-term process going on in Iran for the last 15, 20 years of activism and movements from below, often attempting to force schisms or divides within the Iranian government’s different factions. And this space for politics, which has produced different types of surprises and social movements, but never really changed the kind of core direction of the Islamic Republic. That space has increasingly shrunk over the last 15 years, partly due to the internal government’s turn towards the right towards a more conservative stance, but also because the increasing securitization of Iranian politics, given the international pressure on Iran and the linking of every internal domestic policy with a kind of security mindset.
So the internal and the external are linked inside of Iran. And on the one hand, this has been the shrinking of domestic politics that is institutional or linked to elections or other types of social movements that are organized and more sporadic, violent, militant, which really culminated in the January protests that were repressed and resulted in massacres of unarmed protesters.
So the likelihood of that type of politics to overthrow the Islamic Republic, in my opinion, are very low.
Those protests were used as a kind of ammunition by the U.S. and Israeli governments in a policy that they already kind of were going to do anyway. Or at least had agreed that that was a goal of theirs. And so I think for the listeners, we should separate these two out in our mind. And it’s true that many Iranians, or certainly not all, thought that this kind of omnipotent U.S. power would be on hand to deliver some type of change or wholesale change in the government in Iran. But many others warned against that, including activists and dissidents inside of Iran. So I think that we won’t go back to status quo ante given the way that the government has managed to defend the country, but one could at least hope that this space for politics at some point in the future after a war is resolved will open up again.
And then we’ll see what happens.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right. I know no one’s got a crystal ball. Brandan, I’ll give you the last word if you had any comment about the future of negotiations or what you hope for.
BRANDON CARR: Well, we’re in early stages. I know reporting has indicated that the administration is still interested in continuing to try to find a negotiated resolution to this war. I certainly think that’s in the U.S.’s best interest to not start hostilities again. So let’s hope that the U.S. is able to do that successfully.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right. Well, I certainly want to thank you both for joining me tonight and our listeners to talk about this critical war that still could reignite at any moment. And thank you, Brandon Carr, studies associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. I want to thank you both and hoping we can stay in touch and have you back hopefully with some better news that we can dissect and provide some commentary on. So thank you again.
BRANDON CARR: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Bye-bye. This is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris.
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