Iranian news agency WANA/Reuters
Iranian news agency WANA/Reuters
CFR experts discuss the U.S. strikes on three of Iran’s key nuclear sites, Iran’s possible response, and implications for the region.
FROMAN: Oh, well, thanks very much. Thank you all for joining us to discuss the strikes on Iran over the weekend. I’m delighted we were able to pull this together for our friends in the media as well as our corporate and individual members of the Council. As we head into this, a number of questions are top of mind—how far did these strikes set back the Iranian nuclear program? How will Iran respond? What will be the reverberation around the Middle East? What are the prospects for any diplomacy going forward? How will impact they impact U.S.-Israel relations? And, more broadly, will these strikes bolster President Trump’s credibility? And how might it change the international system?
We’re privileged at the Council to have a deep bench of experts on the Middle East and nuclear security issues to get at these questions. You’ll be hearing from Max Boot, Jeane Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies; Steven Cook, Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies; Daniel Poneman, senior fellow, former deputy secretary of energy; and Ray Takeyh, Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies. We’re also very lucky to have Farah Pandith, a senior fellow and an expert in the region in her own right, as our moderator for this conversation.
And I would just add that our expertise extends beyond those on the call, including Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for the Middle East, and Ed Husain, senior fellow, as well as many others who are writing on this issue. So I hope you will continue to look to the Council as a resource on these and related stories over the coming days and weeks. And we stand ready to be supportive and helpful to you in any way that we can.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to Farah.
PANDITH: Good morning to everybody. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Dan. I’d like to start with you and talk about the tactical component of what we have witnessed in the last few days. President Trump, in his address to the nation on Saturday night, said that the objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. But others in his administration have since framed the objective in a less maximalist way, as the delay or severe damaging of the program. If you could comment on what we know about what the U.S. has said it’s achieved, and what’s the latest?
PONEMAN: Well, we had follow-on briefings, of course, from the secretary of defense and from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What’s clear is that, in military terms, it was a very successful raid. The planes evaded detection. They evaded any enemy fire. They dropped fourteen of these massive ordnance penetrators on the two major enrichment sites, Natanz and Fordow. According to General Caine, they performed extreme damage—severe damage to those sites. They had twenty-four Tomahawks then hit the Isfahan site. That’s where the uranium conversion from a solid to a gas, that allows it to be enriched, takes place. But, as General Caine said in his briefing, it’s literally early days. Way too early to make a confident bombing damage assessment. So, frankly, at this point there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know.
Clearly, the facilities that have the machines that enrich uranium and spin that material around have been severely damaged. What’s left? What has happened to the actual 60 percent, 400 kilograms, nine or ten bombs’ worth of 60 percent enriched uranium product? We don’t know where that is. There’s been a lot of speculation in the press that trucks may have carted it away. But I think it’s going to take some time, Farah, before we really know with any great precision what actually has been hit, and what’s left.
PANDITH: So what does that mean for the other sites in Iran, the thirty-plus sites that are throughout the country?
PONEMAN: Good question. (Laughs.) So, as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. And the problem with these kinds of facilities—and, of course, Fordow itself was not known for quite some period of time, as we all know—is you can hide these things in caves and places. And there are sites that are known and there are sites that they may have that we don’t know about. That’s one of the most challenging aspects about the whole nonproliferation regime.
We have this really wonderful International Atomic Energy Agency which is extraordinarily thorough and they’ve got very great expertise, but if they don’t have access to sites that have not been disclosed and they can’t find out about them through other countries assisting them, then we can actually be a lot in the dark. Think of North Korea. There’s a country where there’s just a lot that went on that we never knew about until it was too late.
So bottom line, Farah, is there’s probably a lot going on at those other sites that we just don’t know about.
PANDITH: One last question before we turn to Max. Just because the audience is very broad today—we have both press and members and others. Could you just remind us the last time anyone actually inspected these sites and what we have for the last—the last, you know, knowledge, you know, rational knowledge piece here?
PONEMAN: Yeah. The IAEA inspectors have been there, and Director General Grossi in May, you know, just a few weeks ago, gave a very thorough report to the board of governors. And it was a troubling report in which he disclosed that they are not cooperating, and I’m sure that was one of the factors that led to this decision. So—but the IAEA has been there, and of course Director General Grossi has been commenting and reporting to the security council subsequent to these events, as well.
PANDITH: Great.
Max, I’d like to turn to you, and I wanted to talk about the military component of this. President Trump said that he’d worked closely with Israel throughout the planning and the implementation. The U.S. military in the last twenty-four hours—the operation has been called by all accounts flawless. I’m just curious, was it flawless? And also, how should we be thinking about the U.S.-Israeli military coordination on the events of the last ten days and what’s happening now?
BOOT: I think the operation was tactically flawless for sure. I mean, the airplanes got—the strike package got in, got out, probably hit their aim points. But we don’t actually know what the consequence of all that is, as Dan was just saying. It’s going to take some time to figure out how much damage they actually did.
And it’s quite possible—I mean, I’m not saying this is likely, but it’s quite possible that they attack could actually backfire if Iran retains enough highly enriched uranium and enough capacity to weaponize it that it actually uses this attack as an impetus to acquire a nuclear weapon. At that point nobody’s going to look back and say, wow, what a tactically flawless strike; how great. It really depends on what the second- and third-order consequences are, which we’re not going to know for some time.
But clearly—you know, to your other question, Farah, about the Israeli-U.S. coordination, obviously it was very tight. I mean, even just to have U.S. and Israeli aircraft operating in the same airspace requires a clear degree of coordination. And I—from all accounts that’s been a very tight relationship on the military side with General Eric Kurilla, who is the current head of U.S. CENTCOM—has very close ties with his Israeli counterparts.
You know, I would say, you know, moving beyond—from the strictly tactical military level to the political level, I would say that there is, you know, a fair degree of cooperation between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, but there’s kind of a sense that Netanyahu is the one who is really in the driver’s seat, because remember, two months ago that we were talking about distance and separation between Trump and Netanyahu after Trump kind of cold-cocked Netanyahu at the White House by announcing that he was going to launch negotiations with Iran and pressuring Israel not to launch a strike. And from what—you know, it’s going to take a while to figure out everything that happened behind the scenes, but it seems to me that Bibi basically just decided he was going to strike and drag the U.S. along with us, and at that point, once the Israeli attack began, that imposes a certain logic on Trump to join in because I think the worst of all possible worlds is that Israel strikes but Iran retains their Fordow site and so they retain a lot of their nuclear program. That’s definitely not in the U.S. interest.
So I think there’s no question that there is a tight relationship, but it really consists of Netanyahu in a leadership role and kind of dragging Trump along, reportedly, because—in part because Trump was so impressed by the initial success of the Israeli airstrikes, he was more willing to join in now.
PANDITH: Do you think that puts us in a corner? Does it put Trump in a corner? Does he have the ability to be creative about what he wants to do, or is he not able to do the operational changes he would wish to do?
BOOT: Well, I don’t really know what the imagined end-state is here of either Israel or Iran. I mean, I think in terms of military objectives, the best case scenario is we’re going to set back the Iranian nuclear program for maybe a few years, which is less than what the JCPOA achieved in 2015. But you know, at the end of the day nobody imagines that this will permanently bar Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The question is, OK, if you’ve set them back and you’ve bought some time, perhaps, for yourself—and even that’s not clear, but assuming you have bought that time, what do you do with it? I mean, what does—what is the—what is the goal here? I mean, are we going to be able—I will defer to my colleagues Ray and Steve on this, but is this really going to make the Islamic Republic more likely to negotiate a more binding agreement or not? I think that’s kind of the question that we’re facing. Otherwise, we’re locked in this kind of perpetual war with Iran where, you know, every time there’s any detection of any advance in their nuclear program then, you know, Israeli aircraft are going to wind up having to bomb again.
PANDITH: Your Washington Post article was outstanding and I recommend it to everyone. But one of the things that you said was that the consequences of this are uncertain. And you know, as you have watched the reporting in the last twelve, fifteen hours about potentially Trump declaring on Truth Social sort of this deepfake of what he’s going to do, it gave the Iranians an opportunity to think more creatively about what they want to do. How do you see—you know, with everything that is moving in real time, this concept about being uncertain, where is the political dimension of this if, in fact, Bibi is the one who’s running the—running the show here?
BOOT: I mean, these are all great questions. I’m not sure that there has been a carefully thought out endgame here. I’m not sure, you know, if there is a strategy for translating tactical gains into political gains. I mean, you know, Trump tweeted about unconditional surrender; I don’t think that’s going to happen. There’s been talk from Prime Minister Netanyahu and others about regime change. We’ve had a lot of senior U.S. officials say, no, this is not about regime change. Then President Trump takes to Truth Social and says, yes, this is about regime change. I mean, I think we have to make our goals as realistic as possible. And while we would all love to see regime change, I don’t think that’s a realistic goal in bombing Iran. A realistic goal is to try to get the Iranians to agree to a more restrictive nuclear accord in which they give up any ability to enrich uranium, and even that’s going to be a tall order. But I think we need to keep it on the achievable, not on what we’d love to see happen but have no strategy for achieving.
PANDITH: Great.
I want to turn—you mentioned sort of the diplomatic angle in a bit, and I—and, Steven, I’d like to turn to you on the diplomacy part around what Max was just talking about. The administration has voiced its hope that these strikes will bring back Iran to the negotiating table, this time with a genuine commitment to making peace. Vice President Vance’s comments on Meet the Press yesterday seemed naïvely devoid of the Iranian perspective, dismissing Foreign Minister Araghchi’s comments that the U.S. has blown up diplomacy.
I have two questions for you. One is that, you know, what has changed? Why did Trump do this after five rounds of talks with the Iranians? And then I’ll follow up with you about sort of the more regional—the regional response.
COOK: Well, I think there’s three things.
By the way, thanks, Farah, and it’s great to be with everybody.
I think there’s three reasons that Trump changed his mind. And again, I have no special ability to read the president’s mind, but there’s a couple of things that we can infer that had happened.
One, Max alluded to one of them, which is that the president woke up on the morning of June 15 and was very impressed with the capabilities of the Israeli air force and what the Israelis had been able to do. You know, in the early going, if you were, you know, looking at Truth Social or any other social media, you know, there was this kind of wild enthusiasm about what was going on and, you know, kind of James Bond-esque exploits of Israel’s Mossad. And so he was clearly impressed by it. And you saw as the days went on he sort of leaned into Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, until the point where he said we control Israel’s airspace—I mean, Iran’s airspace, which, you know, was news to the Israelis, needless to say.
And then I think that, you know, people used, I think, the kind of unfortunate language about this when it comes to Israeli diplomacy in encouraging the United States to take part, and I want to be very, very careful here when I—the way I talk about it. The Israelis were looking at a challenge, a country that has invested enormous sums in developing nuclear technology, reasonable suspicions that the Iranians would like to weaponize. Numerous Iranian officials have threatened the Israelis. The Iranians have funded proxies to attack Israel. So, from the perspective of any Israeli prime minister, they would want American help in dealing with this problem.
And I think the combination of the American—the Israelis success and, at that moment, I think that the president was able to be convinced by the Israelis that this was both in Israel’s interest, as well as the American interest. This kind of language about dragging, and Netanyahu, and control, and sort of—it makes me very uncomfortable. (Laughs.) The president the United States is the president of the United States, who has agency. And he could have demurred, like his predecessors. But he chose otherwise. He saw something different. Maybe it was his gut. Who knows?
And then, I think the third thing that’s important is that the Iranians, after a kind of withering assault of the Israelis, their demands, as far as nuclear negotiations, had not changed. I think they never believed—they believed TACO, Trump always chickens out. They never believed that the president would pull the trigger. And he did. And so—but they remained steadfast in their basic demands. And I think those are the things that sort of changed between, let’s say, June 13 and Saturday—or, whenever the president gave the order for Operation Midnight Hammer.
You had another question.
PANDITH: Yeah, I do, which is on the broader—the broader component of this, and how the Arab—how the region is really reacting. So I’d like to—I’d like to hop into that. But, Max, before I—before I do that, Max, you want to respond at all to what Steven said?
BOOT: Yeah. I mean, I don’t—I don’t disagree with what Steven said. I mean, but I do think it is the case that Netanyahu figured out how to get Trump to the place where he wanted to be. And I think he gambled with the Israeli airstrikes because, at that point, the signals Trump was sending was that Israel should not do this. But at least there was kind of, at least, a yellow light. But I think Netanyahu gambled that if Israel started this war and had some success early on, that rather than trying to shut them down Trump would join in on it. I think that gamble was vindicated. And you’re right. I mean, ultimately, I mean, Trump is going to do what Trump is going to do for his own reasons. Nobody can dictate to him. But I think it’s pretty clear that Netanyahu has used his relationship with Trump to get him to where he wants to be. And, as you suggest, it’s probably where any Israeli prime minister would want any U.S. president to be.
PANDITH: So, Steven, let me come back to you, and ask you for a snapshot of how the other Arab states are responding to all of this.
COOK: Yeah. I think, first of all, if you look at the statements after American strikes, there wasn’t really criticism of American military action. There was a call for diplomacy, which is—I’m not a diplomat. No one would ever confuse me for a diplomat. But there is a difference there. And I think, like—similar to the beginning of the Israeli operations against Iran, I think where there was more criticism of the Israelis. But I think that the view has been, and this is the way it’s been related to me, is, you know, there’s going to be a public message, and then privately leaders in the Gulf, in particular, will privately admire Israel and United States’s proficiency.
And the view that, you know, look, the Iranians are a menace to the region. And, you know, damage to their ability to be a menace to the region is a good thing. But at the same time, there’s a lot of concern about blowback on them, and what the retaliation will look like, and will it affect—will it affect them? Will there be damage to Dubai? Will there be damage to Dammam? How the Iranians—how the Iranians go about doing this. You know, that has been a consistent concern. And we know in the months leading up to this that Israel’s Arab partners—and they are, for all intents and purposes, Arab partners—indicated to the Israelis that they were quite concerned about retaliation on their territory. And notice, the air corridor that the Israelis established was through Syria and Iraq, not through Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or even southern through the UAE.
PANDITH: Ray, I promise we’re going to get to you. I promise. (Laughs.) But, Dan, I know you’re leaving soon and I just wanted to pick up what Steven was saying about the Arab response. Part of that response is fear of their own health and what could be happening with radiation. So could you give us a little bit of a view on how dangerous it could be and what you think is happening?
PONEMAN: Yeah. There can be some leakage. The leakage out of an enrichment site is not likely to be serious, radiologically speaking. It’s an alpha emitter. If there’s a breach and you have the exposure to the air of the fluorine gas, combining with the hydrogen in the air, you get a gas cloud and you have chemical hazards. But it’s less of a radiation hazard than, for example, if there were an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant, where you have, you know, an active reactor, that would be a much more serious radiation hazard.
But before I drop off, I just might pick up on some of the implications of both Max and Steven’s comments, in the sense that precisely because there’s so much that we don’t know, precisely because there are sites both known and perhaps not known that are out there, I do think that the critical issue now turns to diplomacy, right? Because, you know, the implicit threat is, if you don’t cooperate further, you know, there’s more where that came from, right? And at the end of the day, we used to—when I worked on nonproliferation for decades we did deals with North Korea. And we used to talk, you know, tongue in cheek about a precision guided document.
And, you know, the one thing that you can say, whether it was the Agreed Framework in 1994 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, is it did provide some certainty. And the IAE is really a wonderful organization. And they have cameras. And they have seals. And they have onsite inspectors. And it’s much better to know what’s going on than not to know what’s going on, right? I mean, we learned that in Pakistan and India, didn’t we? So I think now that it has been shown that the United States is willing to take these kinds of measures to enforce the, you know, red line of not getting nuclear weapons, hopefully that will bring all the relevant parties into some kind of a diplomatic discussion that will lead to some settlement that will leave the region safe from the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, and not just some concatenation of ever-more dangerous events.
PANDITH: Thank you, Dan.
Ray, I have lots of questions for you. The first is, is Iran sufficiently weakened that it will return to the negotiation table, as the administration hopes? Or will the regime respond militarily? And will it do so directly, or through proxies? Which is a huge question. I’m sorry for that. But the floor is yours.
TAKEYH: In terms of negotiations, there’s kind of a narrative in Iran today of American and IAEA perfidy. The idea that they entered an agreement and the Americans abandoned it. There’s a lot of discussion that the whole Steve Witkoff negotiations were a ruse and they were designed to essentially establish their predicate for action. And there’s a lot of, surprisingly, maybe, criticism of Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, particularly by people like Ali Larijani. They suggest that IAEA essentially gave the foreign armies the blueprints to the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. There’s a lot of criticism of IAEA board of governors’ rebuke of Iran recently, that established a semi-legal predicate, maybe, for the attack. And so neither the interlocutors or the principal instrument of inspection regime is what you would call trusted in the Iranian body politic.
Second of all, the country’s leadership and the regime is not cohesive enough to be able to come to some sort of negotiations at this point, especially negotiations, from the American perspective, whose conclusion is predetermined—namely, zero enrichment. So the Iranian position, even today, is that they have a right to enrich. There has been discussion that they will not leave the NPT. I don’t think they will leave the NPT. But I don’t think they’ll observe the obligations of the NPT and come to terms with Rafael Grossi. Dan mentioned the recent report that that IAEA issued. Ane of the things that the two sides had done was negotiate what they called enhanced verification regime for Fordow. Well, that was actually agreed upon. Now, it hadn’t been implemented. So there’s a lot of suspicion about that, about inter-negotiations. Javad Zarif used to say, “diplomacy never dies.” And there’s a possibility of negotiations taking place at some point. But I don’t think one can assume that that’s the pathway for dealing with the Iranian nuclear challenge, or whatever remains of it.
Retaliation, I don’t think the country is in a position to retaliate at this point. First of all, just in terms of command and control and continuity of government, all that stuff that you need to actually broaden the zone of conflict at this particular time, seems unreasonable. But we’re not living in a reasonable age. (Laughs.) You’re talking about traumatized political leaders in bunkers, nurturing conspiracy theories.
How they would react? I don’t think it’s reasonable for them to take on the American armada directly or indirectly. But I’m not in their position. Things that have happened to them recently that were unimaginable and how they would react. I imagine there’s some paralysis in the system at this point just in terms of decision-making. But I do think at some point they’ll try to figure out how best to retaliate and when and in what manner.
PANDITH: Do you think that the strikes are going to create a rallying-around-the-flag effect in Iran? I mean, people are hoping for that. But what do you think?
TAKEYH: It’s hard to honestly estimate that. There is—the political elites of the country are united, even those members of the political elite that were critical of the Iranian decision-making. So you see a unification of the elite society, left, right and center.
In terms of the public, you know, they’re the principal victims of this. Their lives have been turned upside down. I suspect they’re equally traumatized. It is possible to come out of this experience blaming everybody—blaming your national leadership for putting you in that position, blaming outside powers for using force.
I don’t think—the idea of nuclear science and achievement of nuclear science as pathway to economic modernity and industrialization was propagated by the regime for a long time. So what happens when this particular national asset is damaged, perhaps irreparably? I don’t think Iran’s going to come out of this experience with a civilian nuclear program anymore. It may come out of the surreptitious and clandestine weapons program. But the idea of nuclear energy as a pathway to industrialization is a narrative that no longer holds sway.
PANDITH: We’re going to, in a few minutes, go to questions. I have a lot more. But I see Max is in his airplane seat already. And so I want to just, before we go to the questions, allow the panel if there’s anything you want to comment on that we haven’t directly addressed. Please just raise your hand and I’ll call on you.
Yes, please, Dan.
PONEMAN: Can you hear me?
PANDITH: Yes.
PONEMAN: I just want to say one thing. I did see the comments from Larijani about Director General Grossi. That’s extraordinarily dangerous and unjustified. I just think the records show, and I think probably all the people online know, that the IAEA has been an extraordinary organization in Iraq. And what Grossi has done in undergoing fire in Zaporizhzhia has been nothing short of extraordinary.
So it’s an obvious scapegoating kind of comment, but a dangerous one. And I think just everyone should know that the IAEA is extraordinarily scrupulous in the work that it does. And it reminds me a little bit of the case—I think Bertrand Russell criticized JFK at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. And JFK said you should criticize the person who is stealing the cookies, not the person who caught them with their hand in the cookie jar.
So the fact that the IAEA was doing its job and called out the fact that Iran was, in fact, violating their safeguards obligations and so forth, that’s what they should be doing. And they should not be scapegoated because of that. And we need to be very careful to protect the IAEA and its integrity and the safety of the people who do that extraordinarily important work for all of us.
PANDITH: Max, did you want to say anything before you take off?
BOOT: Well, I mean, I’ll just say that I do think that the long fuse to the current conflict was really lit by President Trump in 2018 when he exited the JCPOA when all the evidence was that the Iranians were abiding by it. And at that point he said that he wanted to negotiate a stronger agreement. And unfortunately we still have not negotiated that strong agreement, and so now we have military action and this new war with Iran.
And I think my hope, and I think everybody’s hope, is that somehow this military action can lead to that stronger agreement with Iran in a much weaker position. But it very much remains to be seen, because I think, as Ray said, I mean, there’s a really big question as to whether the Iranians have their act together enough to even negotiate an agreement at this point. And certainly I think—I think Ray and Steven can probably talk to this more than I can, but I do think that the clerical regime—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—seen as unconditionally surrendering. And so I think it creates a dangerous dynamic.
But I think basically we’re still, at the end of the day—despite the initial success of the military action, I think we’re still groping for that diplomatic solution. And I think, you know, we had one that was admittedly imperfect and limited, but at least restrained the Iranian nuclear program in 2018. And now I think the question remains whether we can get to something stronger.
PANDITH: I have two quick questions before we turn to Sam for the—for the audience.
Steven, I wanted to bring in Israel, and wondered if you could comment on when you think the strikes are going to end and the perspective from Israel.
And then, Ray, I also wanted you to comment on what the U.S. administration ought to be thinking about that they haven’t, vis-à-vis Iran.
So let’s first go to Steven and then to Ray.
COOK: First I just want to say that I—this is not how I imagine Max Boot travels, but it’s totally fine. (Laughter.)
Look, I’ve had, you know, contact with some official circles in Israel—
BOOT: I’m just going to leave on my private jet for Qatar. (Laughter.)
COOK: You know, look, I think the Israelis—the Israeli chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, made a statement before the American strikes, telling the Israeli people that they should be prepared for a longer conflict. Privately the IDF, which has been providing briefings to folks like me, have said things like a week ago that they had about—what they estimated, a week left on their target list, and that when they exhausted that target list they will wait for direction from the political leadership. They’ve recently said that they now have a number of days left, which is sort of consistent with what they originally said, about two weeks.
If you notice the targets that they went after today was Fordow as well as those parts of the Iranian state that are dedicated towards political and social control—the siege headquarters; a variety of other things along those lines.
So I think the barely implicit goal here for the Israelis is to weaken the regime and hope that the Iranian people take matters into their own hands.
Israelis tried to keep up with—just Israelis who I know—their view—first of all, this has been an extraordinarily scary situation for them. Ballistic missiles are different from rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas, and it has made an impression on people. And, you know, there has been death an injuries—less than what the IDF and the homeland command had expected, but still, it’s quite scary. And so their view of the American strikes on Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan has been—we hope this is the beginning of the end of everything, that we can live not under the threat of Iran’s nuclear program and that it will finally provide an opportunity with the Iranians weakened for the Israeli government to bring hostages home and bring this terrible situation in Gaza to an end.
That is where they are responding. There is a certain stiff upper lip aspect of it. But I think that there’s a lot of political support for what Prime Minister Netanyahu has done in Iran, and a lot—tremendous amount of support for what the United States has recently done, which is in stark contrast to the way in which Israelis have come to view their morally-ambiguous-at-best operations in the Gaza Strip.
PANDITH: Thank you.
And, Ray, what should America be thinking about that they haven’t thought about in terms of tactical proficiency and strategic success?
TAKEYH: Yeah. First, this is exactly the way I envision Max traveling. (Laughter.) Dan is the one with private jets, so just get that—let’s just get that sorted out. (Laughter.)
The position of the international community today actually is zero enrichment. When Abbas Araghchi met his European counterparts, their position was zero enrichment, proscribing indigenous enrichment. That was the European position they day before Israeli attack; that was—have been the international community’s position since the advent of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. So that position seems to be quite maximalist.
I would say in assessing the situation in terms of—the administration should obviously work on force protection and other means like that. That seems obvious. But we tend to forget in situations like that that other countries have politics and their politics tend to be volatile at this point. I don’t know if Ali Khameini can actually impose a consensus on the system. He may—if he physically survives, he may continue to become a leader but he certainly will not be supreme. And while a lot of people are looking at the challenge from the population, from the larger society, he has to be concerned about the challenge from the right. The right means the elements of the Revolutionary Guard and all there is to—essentially been saying since the Israeli invasion—Israeli attack on Gaza that if Prime Minister Netanyahu changes the rules of the game, so should we. And there was actually loud calls for nuclearization of the program, which he seems to have resisted.
So he’s in a lot of trouble with his core constituency that he needs now for maintaining power. I don’t know if this system can come together at this point and actually offer a zero-enrichment proposition. Zero enrichment, they rejected it. They took a considerable degree of economic penalties because of that. And now they’ve been bombed. So I don’t know if coming out of that Ali Khamenei has sufficient stature or authority to impose that kind of a maximalist demand on his constituency.
By the way, when we say negotiations leading to zero enrichment, that’s kind of a capitulation. That’s not—that’s not negotiations; that’s, essentially, you go in and accept the surrender terms which have been offered to you on social media platforms. I don’t think Ali Khamenei can survive that politically if he does that.
PANDITH: Thank you so much, Ray.
I’m going to turn it over to Sam, who will give us instructions on asking questions.
OPERATOR: Thank you so much.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
And we particularly welcome questions from members of the media.
We will take our first question from Jim Puzzanghera.
PANDITH: Go ahead, Jim. Thank you.
Q: Hi. This is Jim Puzzanghera from the Boston Globe Washington Bureau.
This might be outside your expertise in terms of potential retaliation, but I’m wondering how likely are Iranian-backed terrorism attacks, cyber or conventional, in the U.S. in response to these strikes; and if there’s any concern, given that the Trump administration has reportedly shifted counterterrorism resources the past several months to immigration enforcement, about our ability to detect and deter those sort of attacks.
PANDITH: Jim, that’s a great question. Thank you.
Who would like to answer it? Steven, you’re on mute.
COOK: I can—oh, I’m sorry. I can at least start with the question.
I think that we do know from past history—and I defer to Ray on what he views as the actual capability here. But what we know from history is that the Iranians do have a global reach, you know, everywhere from Europe to Latin America if you go back to the early 1990s, and the capability, the Iranians or the people that they pay, to do a lot of damage to people. And so I think at least American officials need to keep it within their, you know, kind of realm of what they think about in terms of potential threats as a result of this action that the president has taken.
Certainly, the Iranians have been capable cyber warriors attacking Israel, you know, going after their transportation system, and their water system, and so on and so forth. Those attacks weren’t successful, but certainly you learn in the process. So I think that these kinds of things are possible and things that, again, the realm of things that I think American officials should be worrying about.
I only know about, you know, what’s gone on in the federal government from what I read from—in papers like the Boston Globe, and so that worries me if all of those resources have been shifted to immigration enforcement that we aren’t paying attention to these threats that may be upon us. Whether that’s realistic or not I don’t know, but that seems to me there’s a history of the Iranians doing these kinds of things outside of the Middle East. And it seems to me, based on what I read, that we are less prepared than we were as a result of the focus on immigration enforcement.
PANDITH: If you’ll permit me as moderator, and it’s my hometown paper, so I just want to say one thing to add on to what Steven is saying. The CP3 office at DHS has been—is now run by a twenty-two-year-old. The grants that are partnership grants on the grassroots level with American NGOs that are looking at the ideology and what is inspiring have been closed down. So, to me, the threat level in the United States around the ideological implications of both Gaza and what’s happening in Iran is really important for us to look at through the CT perspective.
Ray, did you want to—
TAKEYH: Yeah, I’ll just say one thing. Steven is correct about the capabilities, although I think they are diminished. At this particular point, the principal concern of the Iranian security services would be profound counterintelligence cleansing of the system. As tactically brilliant as Israelis are, they couldn’t have done this without a lot of domestic accomplices. So that’s the first thing that happens. But, whenever you begin to purge your security services, that essentially engenders hostility, suspicion, and so that creates further paralysis in the system. But the first challenge of the day is how did this level of penetration come. And this is not the first time Israelis have done this, and they have to kind of sort it out.
Now, the real answer to that question where Israelis are able—having this kind of penetration because there is so much dissatisfaction with the regime. But that is not the answer they’re going to come to.
PANDITH: Max, do you want to say anything before we go to the next question?
BOOT: No, not really. I mean, I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and to keep in mind that Iran has a very long history of supporting terrorism, you know, dating back to the 1980s. And they have conflicted massive losses on the U.S. going back to the, you know, Marine barracks bombing in Beirut ‘83, the attacks in the U.S. Embassy. So, you know, there’s a long history of Iranian terrorism against the U.S. And that is something we need to be very much on the guard against.
PANDITH: Thanks so much, Max.
Sam, can we go to the next question, please?
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Gary Samore.
PANDITH: Hi, Gary. I think you’re on mute.
Q: Thanks very much. This has just been a terrific discussion.
I have a question about Russia for Max, if your plane hasn’t taken off yet. I mean, obviously the Russians have made noises, but they haven’t lifted a finger to help Iran. And Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in Russian involvement in mediating an end of the conflict. But what implications, if any, do you see for the Ukraine war? Does this create some openings for the Russians they didn’t have before? Or will they suffer because Iran can’t provide them drones anymore?
BOOT: I don’t see it as having a big impact on the Ukraine war, because although Iran has been—was very helpful at the beginning stages in providing Russia with drones and Shaheds, Russia has now started manufacturing their own version of the Iranian drones, and actually kind of souped them up with jet engines and stuff. So I don’t think that they’re as dependent upon Iran as they were in the past. At the moment, I think they’re actually a little bit more dependent on North Korea. So I don’t think it has a huge impact on Russia. But it is interesting that, you know, Russia is kind of—I mean, it’s sort of really amusing to see, you know, Vladimir Putin denouncing unprovoked aggression. Truly, you know, dictators have no sense of irony. But I think it also shows that Russia is not a very valuable friend, because they’re not really lifting a finger to help their allies in Iran, in return for all the help that the Iranians have given them. But, again, these are all these are all, like, I would say, pretty low-level consequences.
And, as you can hear, I think they’re trying to get us to taxi out to the runway here. (Laughs.)
PANDITH: Max, thank you for joining us. And I’ll say goodbye before you take off.
Steven or Ray, did you want to comment on Gary’s question? OK. Sam, can we please go to the next question?
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Charles Duelfer.
PANDITH: Please go ahead, Charles, and identify yourself, please.
Q: I’m Charles Duelfer.
Relevant here, I used to do the weapons inspections in Iraq. And my question is on that point. I’m wondering if there is—in terms of a—in the context of a political solution, is there any thought and attention being given to more extensive inspection authorities, to include going beyond what IAEA does? The reason is, having blown up the country now, it makes making a material balance extremely difficult. It’s the circumstances we encountered in Iraq. It’s also a case where it becomes more of a coercive disarmament as opposed to a voluntary one. And I just wondered where that stands in the consideration of a political settlement. Thank you.
PANDITH: Thanks so much, Charles. Steven, do you want to take that, or Ray?
TAKEYH: I’ll just say one thing. The Iranian nuclear program was under what was called additional protocol, which essentially was an enhanced inspection regime. But that obviously has gone away with their lack of adherence to it. There’s going to be a challenge in terms of actual inspection simply because if the view continues to be that IAEA is an instrument of Western espionage now, then it’s difficult to see which neutral international body is going to step in here to actually conduct that inspection regime.
PANDITH: Steven.
COOK: I was just going to make that point about the IAEA, based on what Ray had said about the IAEA previously. I don’t know where this inspection regime would be situated.
PANDITH: Thanks so much, both of you.
Sam, could you kindly take the next question?
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Paul Heer.
Q: Yes. This is Paul Heer from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
I wondered if the panelists could speculate on the decision-making process at the White House behind these strikes. What do we know or think about who was advising Trump on this decision? Who might have been trying to outline the pluses and minuses of a strike? Basically, how much—how confident are we in the strategic calculus behind this decision? Thanks.
PANDITH: Thanks so much, Paul.
COOK: Yeah. I’ll take that. Look, let’s just take it back a few months—or, less than a month, or whenever it was, when the president essentially fired Mike Waltz, his national Security advisor, and then a number of weeks later, the administration greatly reduced the National Security Council staff. It created this kind of storm in Washington, but it was—it was not obvious to me that President Trump wanted a traditional national security advisor or needed a National Security Council, from his perspective. And I think this is one of the reasons why actually the Gulf leaders really like him, because he makes decisions like they do—with, like, five other people. And those five other people in the room have been Witkoff—on this decision, have been Witkoff, General Kurilla, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, and, I believe, Susie Wiles. Perhaps Marco Rubio was involved as well, but Tulsi Gabbard was not. Whether that was she decided not to attend or was not invited to attend because he didn’t like what she had to say on this issue. But that tight circle—Wiles, Witkoff, Caine, Kurilla, and possibly Rubio—were in the room.
TAKEYH: I don’t have anything to add to that, other than Steven didn’t mention Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
COOK: Who wasn’t there. (Laughter.)
TAKEYH: This is kind of a—
COOK: He wasn’t there. (Laughs.)
PANDITH: I’m hearing from some of my colleagues at CFR that Qatar has just closed down their airspace. So I just wanted to let Ray and Steven know that, and our audience. And let me just follow up on one component of this who’s around advising the president. Steven, there’s been a lot of talk about parallels between 2003 and Iraq and decision making. How are you—when you—when you hear those kinds of questions, do you see a similarity? Or how are you—how are you responding to that?
COOK: I can understand why people might go to that, but these are vastly different situations. And, you know, how decision making—there was a very significant apparatus of the U.S. government that was involved in the decision making and advising and policy process. Regardless of how you felt about the invasion of Iraq, there was that machinery of government that was—that was at play there. I think that the—I think that obviously isn’t the case here. The president doesn’t like process. I also don’t—I think that the missions are different.
I think that if we get into regime change, it’s because the president has backed the United States into regime change because the strikes did not totally obliterate, or whatever words he used, and he’s confronted with a country that is racing to weaponize, as Ray has mentioned. And the Iranian people—and then you leave it to the Iranian people to bring down the regime with, I guess, American encouragement. But he’s confronted with an excruciating problem, in that he might have to confront a weaponized Iran, which was not his intention, the solution of which is the end of this regime.
TAKEYH: Can I just very briefly say, there is some vague—during the Bucha administration decision, it appears to me—and when I talk to people—nobody advised George Bush not to do it. Did everybody think it was a good idea? Colin Powell didn’t tell him not to do it. In this particular process there was one person who was—essentially said to President Trump not to do this, Tulsi Gabbard. Whatever you think of her, her exclusion from the council of decision making means, essentially, opinions that are dissenting from the consensus are not allowed. That is not a good thing for a decision-making process. That essentially means that the permission to enter the room, you have to first have agreement and not necessarily criticize or dissent from the decision making.
COOK: I don’t know why that should surprise us, knowing what we know about the president’s style.
PANDITH: It’s an excellent point, Ray. Thank you.
Sam, I’m going to turn to you for the next question.
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Serge Schmemann.
PANDITH: Great.
Q: Yeah. Hi. Great discussion. Thank you.
I had a question basically for Steve. You discussed the goals that Israel and the United States have, which are not entirely the same. So my question to you is, to what degree are they acting in concert at this stage? And then, building on what you said before but this is pure speculation so maybe you can’t or don’t want to answer, but might this make Trump a little more dangerous? Maybe he’s going to be a little more happy to use force in search of deals in the future.
PANDITH: Thank you.
COOK: Well, actually, Serge, let me start with the second part of your question. I mean, if—it seems to me that the president is always looking for leverage. He’s the master dealmaker, and you need the leverage to get the deal. So if this—if he believes—and that may have been part of his thinking here, is that this will give him leverage for diplomacy and to get the better deal.
That’s where we get to your first question, where there has—may have been extraordinary IDF-U.S. Armed Forces cooperation, and precision, and you know, Israelis and Americans operating in the same airspace. It is not at that level where there is going to be differences; it’s where the president says, oh, now I have more leverage with the Iranians, let’s get a deal. And that deal may not be something that sits well with the Israelis, which also gives you another sense of why they themselves went after Fordow today. I think it’s, one, whatever their view is of the effectiveness of the American airstrikes, and also to send a signal to everybody that they went into this as an Israeli operation pursuing Israel’s interests and they’ll finish it that way.
PANDITH: Ray, did you want to comment on that? OK.
Sam, if we can go to the next question, please.
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Jonathan Hilzinger.
PANDITH: Great.
Q: Hi there. This is Jonathan Hilzinger with the Department of Defense.
My question is, you know, short of capitulating, for Iran the window of opportunity for diplomacy here if the—if the United States is going to search for a deal, what levers does the president have to bring Israel to the negotiating table, who has basically said that they are not willing to accept a nuclear program and has actually taken military force—initiated this military conflict to achieve that end?
PANDITH: Great. Thank you, Jonathan.
Steven, do you want to take that?
COOK: Yeah. Look, I don’t think that the president—I mean, in theory the president can use leverage. But if you don’t use leverage, you don’t use—you don’t have it. And so he could—you know, there’s a whole range of things that he can do. But clearly, he’s not prepared to do that. And the Israelis, as I was articulating before, are—will not be satisfied with any kind of deal unless their interests are met. And I haven’t seen a deal yet in which they are satisfied. And again, you know, you can understand that if you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and the Iranians are developing a nuclear program that you have every reason to believe is going to—they’re going to drive for weaponization, and they have funded all of these groups that have sought to attack you, and that you believed up until October 7, 2023, your deterrence would work, and now you have to believe people when they say they want to kill you.
So this is a major complication in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and it has been a complication in the U.S.-Israel relationship. It has been accentuated since October 7 in that first the Biden administration and then the Trump administration wants deals, and the Israelis want victory. Prime Minister Netanyahu himself said it on October 9, 2023: We’re out to change the Middle East because that will be better for our security.
PANDITH: Ray, did you want to comment? OK.
Sam, can we go to the next question, please?
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Gray Heppner.
PANDITH: Terrific.
Q: Hi. Gray Heppner, U.S. Army officer, retired.
I wondered if you could speculate further on the instability of the Iranian economy and populace in terms of whether they might at some point be a driving force for concessions or regime change. Thank you.
PANDITH: Thanks so much.
TAKEYH: The Islamic Republic has for the past forty-six years always faced popular insurrection, almost ritualistically and on calendar: 2017, ’19, ’22. There will be another opposition group at some point, triggered by events that are almost impossible to predict ahead of time.
The question, therefore, will be: Can a weakened regime be able to deal with that more effectively? Does it exercise the same domestic controls? Islamic Republic rules by fear. Today, the fear barrier is down. So the question is, is it going to stay down? What are the regime’s vulnerabilities? And so on. That will—that’s almost impossible to predict ahead of time. You’re talking about some sort of a revolutionary uprising.
The question will be when a popular social protest movement takes place, and it certainly will because that’s the history of the Islamic Republic. How will the regime be able to deal with it in the aftermath of what is largely perceived as losing wars? Losing wars abroad doesn’t help you at home, particularly because your authority is based on your strength, and your valor, and so on and so forth. So we’ll see.
PANDITH: Ray, if Khamenei is dead, or he dies soon, there is a plan of action. So could you comment a little bit about what happens next?
TAKEYH: That’s a very good question. Even before these events, the question of succession had come and there was the issue of maybe establishing some sort of—constitutionally, statutorily, the assembly of experts would be responsible for choosing the next leader. That’s the body of 88 elderly clerics. Now, but that in practice has never been the case. And the Islamic republic only has had one succession to that position.
Today, if there is a succession, if he dies tomorrow, the predominant voice in selecting the new leader will be the Revolutionary Guards. It is often said—and I don’t think that was ever true about the Islamic republic, that they’re going to go the way of the Prussia, where they used to say, you know, in Prussia the army has a country, as opposed to the other way around. But today that will be the predominant voice. And there’s some reporting that Ali Khamenei has actually yielded to them important controls moving forward.
PANDITH: Thank you.
Steven, do you want to comment at all? OK.
Sam, we’re going to take the last question, and then I’m going to ask Steven and Ray to include in that any final words that they want. So we have about four minutes left. Thank you.
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Erin Dumbacher.
PANDITH: Hi, Erin. Go ahead.
Q: Good afternoon.
A question for both of you about how you might rank order the likeliest and most immediate responses, perhaps militarily or otherwise, that Iran and Israel might take, given the U.S. events. We had the question earlier about cyberattacks and the like. And obviously we’ve briefly talked about force protection for U.S. forces all in the region. But how would you rank sort of the first one, two or three likeliest next events we will see?
PANDITH: Great question. And just a reminder, Ray and Steven, just add in to that any other final things you want to say before we close.
Steven, please go ahead.
COOK: Well, I’m intrigued by the reports of the countries closing their airspace. I wonder what that is about. But until we have more information about it, I don’t really want to speculate.
Look, I think that the—Ray’s point about the regime being in disarray and being focused on, you know, sussing out who helped the Israelis with all of this is well taken. But I think probably you don’t have to be as coherent to do a cyberattack or to, you know, try to bomb a Jewish center somewhere around the world. I think that those are strong possibilities. I don’t know how to rank them per se.
As far as Israel’s response, Israel’s response has been continuing. The United States dropped massive ordnance penetrators on Iran’s three main nuclear facilities, and the Israelis have continued their airstrikes as they go down their target list.
So again, I don’t know how to rank order them. I’m just worried about things like cyberterrorism, and so on and so forth. And I think we should be aware of those contingencies.
As far as my last comments go, I think, you know, there’s a stunning irony in all of this. The president was in Saudi Arabia about three weeks ago in which he excoriated nation-building, regime changers, and sort of—it was a good speech. It was a very good speech. He said, you know, we should leave it to the people of the region to develop—you know, to pave the way for their own paths, and so on and so forth. And now he’s talking about or leaning into this idea of regime change. I think it’s probably unlikely that the United States is going to get that—go that far down the road. The president will drop this issue eventually.
But what I do think will be the case is that we will be in the region in a—we’ll have a larger American footprint in the region than I think the president imagined when he took the oath of office, because we’re likely going to be confronted with an Iran that is beyond a diplomatic agreement and that is searching for ways to weaponize what’s left of its program. And that means a mission of deterrence and containment, which neither precludes dialogue nor military action, but it does mean a more robust presence for the United States in the region than I think he or anybody else had envisioned when he became the president.
PANDITH: Thank you.
And Ray?
TAKEYH: The—traditionally, the way the Iranians approach superior powers is to—is indirect attack using proxies and allies, because, traditionally and historically, indirect attacks have immunized them from retaliation. Whether those rules apply today, I don’t know. And I would so—so that would be the logical way of responding. Again, but this day the rules do not apply.
I want to pick up on the last point that Steven made. We’re in a new era of counterproliferation, kinetic counterproliferation. Before we thought of counter-proliferation as arms control agreements, inspection regimes. And the debate was whether the arms control agreements were strong enough and inspection regimes intrusive enough. Now it’s going to be national intelligence communities reporting on surreptitious, clandestine activities that can only be disarmed by the use of force.
So what we saw in the past week, maybe not to this degree, is likely something to repeat itself—Israelis or American intelligence, or somebody, French intelligence, will say, there’s a suspicious installation somewhere doing suspicious things. Iranians will not grant access, and whether you want to take military action. So we’re in a new era of kinetic counterproliferation. And also, I don’t know what the lessons of the international community from this episode. It’s yet another episode in a long story that if you have the bomb, you don’t get bombed.
PANDITH: Well, that’s a great way to end, Ray. (Laughs.) I just want to remind the audience that CFR has a lot of material on their website. If you’re interested in these subjects and more please go to CFR.org. And then, in addition to that, I want to thank my panelists, some of whom are still with us, for a really important conversation. With that—
COOK: Thank you, Farah. Thank you.
PANDITH: Have a good and safe afternoon. Bye-bye.
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