Will Trump or Netanyahu Attack Iran? Karim Sadjadpour speaks with Ravi Agrawal on FP Live.

Last month, after the United States toppled and captured the leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, there was an immediate expectation that the White House would try something similar in Iran. But President Donald Trump reportedly held back partly because he didn’t have enough military assets in the Middle East. That is now changing. In recent weeks, the Pentagon has stationed a carrier strike group and missile defense systems in the region, even as diplomacy between Washington and Tehran has ramped up.

Will Trump actually pull the trigger? To understand his motivations and constraints, I spoke with a leading Iran expert, Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on the video box atop this page, or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: The White House’s posture toward Iran is similar to its posture toward Venezuela at the start of this year: a big military presence and the threat of decapitating the top leader. But Iran is not Venezuela. How likely is it that the United States will use force?

Karim Sadjadpour: The military option is still likely, but it’s probably not imminent. I do think, despite the talks that have happened and are expected to happen in the coming weeks, that the likelihood that Trump will take military action is much higher than the probability of a deal.

It’s useful to look back at Donald Trump’s more than eight-year history with Iran. In 2018, President Trump famously pulled out of [former President Barack] Obama’s nuclear deal, the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], although many of his aides warned him that that could trigger regional conflict. In January 2020, he assassinated Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Suleimani, despite the best advice of many of his aides, who worried that could trigger a regional conflict. And then last summer, he dropped 14 bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear sites, which many believed would also trigger a potentially global war.

In Trump’s mind, each of these gambles were vindicated. And now, Iran is weaker than it’s ever been, because it doesn’t control its own skies or own its own airspace. So if Trump sees that these negotiations are not going anywhere, the likelihood that he will take military action is higher than the likelihood we get a deal. But it’s not necessarily going to happen in the coming week or two.

RA: You used the word “gamble.” It strikes me that gambles can go to plan or go completely awry. Part of the assessment here is what Iran’s defenses are like, how desperate they are, and what they might do in response. Talk to us about the state of play on that front. During the 12-day war last year, it was clear that Iran had lost air control. But they still possess ballistic missiles, and over the course of those 12 days, they improved at targeting those missiles—so they could feasibly still inflict serious regional damage, right?

KS: One thing that Iran has telegraphed this time is that if they are attacked, they are going to regionalize the war. They still have thousands of close-range ballistic missiles, and they are threatening to use that against U.S. bases and potentially oil installations throughout the Persian Gulf.

After last June’s war, some of the [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard [Corps] commanders, and potentially even [Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei, believed that their lack of a strong response projected weakness. For that reason, they now need to threaten that there will be a significant cost.

One of the audiences are the Gulf countries whose leaderships have a close relationship with President Trump. They want those countries to weigh in with President Trump to try to restrain him from taking military action.

RA: It’s well-known that Trump doesn’t like long, protracted conflicts, but he sees the advantages of a quick, short burst of force with a very clear objective. Many people cite Venezuela as a classic example of decapitation at the top while leaving the regime intact. Will that be a template in Trump’s second term? Is that even possible with a leader like Ayatollah Khamenei?

KS: President Trump himself has telegraphed that his Iran playbook will likely be taken from his Venezuela strategy. But Venezuela is in the Western Hemisphere; it’s a country that we’re much more familiar with. We haven’t had any relationship or embassy in Iran since 1979, so our intelligence capabilities are much more limited compared to Venezuela.

Iran’s supreme leader hasn’t left Iran since 1989, and there’s been no contact with him or his senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. We haven’t seen any meaningful fissures at the top. Political decapitation in Venezuela was preceded by weeks, if not months, of economic strangulation. That part of the strategy is potentially just now commencing on Iran.

RA: Let’s turn to the diplomatic angles underway, as well as the coercive elements that you just mentioned. One thing that stands out to me is that the last nuclear deal which the Trump administration pulled out of, as you mentioned, took years to negotiate and involved real domain experts on the U.S. side. Things feel very different right now: more rushed, fewer experts in the room, a gun to the head of Tehran. Does that mean that diplomacy here is destined to fail, or is this precisely what was needed?

KS: I’m not optimistic about the diplomatic path, in part because there’s no real expertise on the U.S. side when it comes to the issues that we’re negotiating. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has two decades of negotiating experience. He knows the nuclear, missile, and proxy files inside out. Whereas the U.S. team—in particular, President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who will readily admit he has a real estate background—doesn’t know these files intimately.

The second point is that, despite the fact that Iran is under unprecedented threats both internally and externally, they’re not behaving like they are, or negotiating like they are feeling existential angst. If you didn’t know better, you would think that Iran’s foreign minister is representing the superpower.

RA: Why is that?

KS: Ayatollah Khamenei’s worldview has long been that when you’re being pressured, whether internally or externally, you have to project strength. You should never project weakness, because that’s going to embolden your adversaries. One of Khamenei’s formative experiences was participating in the 1979 revolution. In late 1978, when the protests against the shah were mushrooming, the shah went on television and said, “I have heard the voice of your revolution.” I found a speech Khamenei gave years later in which he said that the shah thought that by apologizing to us, he could pacify the protest, but on the contrary, that’s when we saw how weak he was. We smelled blood, and we pounced. That is just one example of Khamenei’s worldview.

Khamenei’s worldview has long been one of defiance. There’s a tension between his two most profound views, because on one hand, he is arguably the longest-serving autocrat in the world. He’s been ruling since 1989, and you don’t get to have that title if you’re a reckless gambler. So he has very good survival instincts. But at the same time, he does have these defiant instincts. These two instincts have been in tension with one another.

RA: It’s one thing to use force internally when you have all the cards. But it doesn’t strike me that Iran has all the cards right now in an external sense. The United States has an array of both offensive and defensive military programming around the region, and it’s unclear that Iran has a great way to respond, certainly in a way that could act as a deterrent.

KS: I think that’s right. Iran doesn’t control its own skies, and it’s one of the loneliest governments in the world. It has no real reliable allies after the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in 2024. So you would think that the regime would be very anxious these days.

The negotiations that are now being discussed are meant to have four parts. It’s not only discussing Iran’s nuclear program—in that context, the U.S. position is that Iran must cease all enrichment of uranium. But the United States has also demanded to discuss Iran’s regional proxies, its missile program, and its internal abuses. Iran has said it will only speak to the U.S. about nuclear.

RA: Yes, because at least on one of the things you mentioned—the ballistic missiles—Iran has absolutely no incentive to give that up.

KS: Their argument is that they need the missiles for self-protection. But so much of what we’re talking about with Iran always goes back to the character of this regime. The nature of the Iranian regime, from 1979 to the present, has been this ethos of death to America and death to Israel. They’ve sought their own security and the insecurity of their neighbors. They’ve constantly threatened their neighbors and cultivated proxies throughout the Middle East.

Under normal circumstances, if Iran behaved as a country rather than a cause, it would be easier for them to debate that they need to have a missile program for self-protection. But in the current context, given the character of the regime, both Israel and the neighboring countries that have been targets of Iran’s missiles are very worried about any missile program that goes beyond Iran’s immediate borders.

RA: I want to turn to Iran’s internal challenges. You and a co-author, Jack Goldstone, wrote an essay in the Atlantic in which you pointed to five specific conditions for a revolution to succeed: a fiscal crisis, divided elites, a diverse oppositional coalition, a convincing narrative of resistance, and a favorable international environment. You said that for the first time since 1979, Iran is checking nearly all five boxes. Since you wrote that piece a month ago, Iran has now basically squashed all opposition and resistance. So, is the takeaway that absolute repression just works for this regime? What changes that dynamic?

KS: My co-author and I agreed that if we cited five conditions, 4.5 of those boxes were checked. The remaining box that hasn’t been checked is divisions among the security forces. There are divisions among the political elites, but so far we haven’t seen any public, meaningful divisions within the Revolutionary Guard. As long as the Revolutionary Guard, a force of around 150,000 men who control other security forces like the Basij, remain highly armed, highly organized, and ready to kill en masse, the Islamic Republic can continue to muddle along.

But at the same time, I would not be very confident betting on the survival of this regime. I describe the Islamic Republic now as a zombie regime: a regime with a dying ideology, a dying legitimacy, a dying economy, and a dying leader, but with lethal force. As we know from history, lethal force can keep you in power for some time, but not forever.

RA: Can you expand on this idea you mentioned that Iran is a cause, not a country? What is the cause? What is the value proposition of the current regime? I ask this question knowing that there’s a massive water crisis in Tehran, the economy is in shambles, security is a clear issue, there’s a brain drain. What exactly is the theocracy selling at this point? And who’s buying that?

KS: Ayatollah Khamenei still is, in my view, a true believer. He believes in the principles of the revolution. We often refer to people like Khamenei as hard-liners, but they refer to themselves as principlists. They believe that if you compromise on your values, that’s not going to prolong your shelf life; that’s going to hasten your collapse.

I think he’s actually right, Ravi. This is an observation that some of the great political philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli have also pointed out: The most dangerous moment for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. So there’s a survival reason why they’ve been inflexible and uncompromising, but I do believe in the case of Khamenei, it also is an earnest reflection of his worldview.

I spoke to someone in Tehran a couple of weeks ago and they said that at this point, Khamenei is not really even interested in governance. His goal, his raison d’être, is essentially fighting America, fighting Israel. I’ve often said that the three pillars left of the 1979 revolution are death to America, death to Israel, and the hijab, the mandatory veiling of women. It’s notable that despite most women, certainly in Tehran, no longer abiding by the hijab, the regime refuses to remove that as compulsory because they fear that if you remove hijab—which [former Supreme Leader Ruhollah] Khomeini called the flag of the Islamic revolution—then people are just going to ask for more concessions.

I have a friend in Tehran who’s a political science professor, and he told me a couple of years ago that at the beginning of the revolution, the regime was composed of around 80 percent ideologues and about 20 percent charlatans. Now it’s the reverse. Even within the regime, there’s probably only around 20 percent ideologues. The rest are simply kind of going along for financial and political expediency.

RA: You’re painting a picture of a revolution in which all the pillars are crumbling, and the people are watching it crumble. The United States is fascinating for me here because it has, of course, been responsible for so many problems in the Middle East and the broader region. How is President Trump viewed in Iran? How is America currently viewed in Iran, as protesters call for an American intervention?

KS: Let me separate President Trump and the United States. On at least nine occasions, President Trump very specifically warned the Islamic Republic that if they killed protesters, the United States was going to intervene. The United States was “locked and loaded.” He incited protesters to seize their own institutions, and he said “help is on the way.” These are direct quotes from President Trump. I’m not making the argument that Iranians protested because of Trump; they have so many reasons to want to protest the Islamic Republic. But I do think that President Trump’s incitements and his support impacted people’s risk calculations. When you hear the most powerful man in the world saying “take over your institutions,” “we have your back,” “we are locked and loaded”—that impacts the way you’re thinking about this issue. I think there was an expectation from Iranians that President Trump was going to intervene.

Now more than one month has passed. I think that the vast majority of those who protested the regime are still waiting and hoping that President Trump is going to intervene somehow. Now, these folks are not military experts. Understandably, if you’re living under an oppressive dictatorship, you want a magic bullet, which is only going to harm your dictators and is not going to cause any societal suffering or chaos. But we’ve seen from the last two decades of America’s history in the Middle East that a clean route doesn’t exist.

But I do think that no country in the world has a greater gap between the conduct of its government and the aspirations of its society than Iran. It’s a regime which aspires to be like North Korea and a society which aspires to be South Korea. My view is that the organizing principles of the Islamic Republic—death to America and death to Israel—need to be replaced with nationalism, with patriotism, with “long live Iran.” Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation so long as it has an adversarial relationship with the world’s greatest economy and the world’s most powerful military, the United States. It’s not to say that Iranians want to go back and become a satellite state of the United States or be beholden to the United States. This is a very proud population. But I think that the vast majority of the country recognizes that it’s in Iran’s national interest to have a better relationship with the United States, and they’re very much hoping that President Trump will deliver on his promise. If he doesn’t, I certainly think public opinion toward the United States will sour.

RA: To add one more dimension to this, how do Iranians think about Israel, especially with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu coming to the White House this week? How have their views toward Israel evolved?

KS: In Iran, we’re talking about upward of 90 million people, so there are certainly diverse views. I’m sure many Iranians watched their television sets and their smartphones over the past few years and saw Palestinian suffering and were angered by that, but at the same time, many Iranians recognize that the fight with Israel is not primarily their fight. One of the slogans you hear in the protests is, “Forget about Lebanon, forget about Gaza, think about us.”

When and if Iran transitions into a government that prioritizes its own economic and national interests before revolutionary ideology, there will be a profound change in the Iran-Israel relationship. Iran is an energy superpower; Israel can import Iranian energy. Israel is a tech superpower, and Iran can benefit from the technical knowledge that Israelis have. I’m not arguing that the two countries will become best friends, but it is likely that we will see normalization and a very complementary relationship.