Iran Reacts to Trump’s Victory, With Ray Takeyh (Transition 2025, Episode 8)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the eighth episode in a special presidential transition series on the President's Inbox. From now until Inauguration Day, I will be sitting down with experts to unpack who will staff the Donald Trump administration and how it will likely approach the many foreign policy challenges it faces. This week's topic is Iran's reaction to Trump's victory. With me to discuss how Trump's return to the White House is seen in Tehran and the likely future course of U.S.-Iranian relations is Ray Takeyh. Ray is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council. His research focuses on Iran and U.S. Foreign policy toward the Middle East. His most recent book is "The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty." Ray co-wrote a piece last month for the Wall Street Journal titled "Why Iran May Dash for the Bomb," and a piece just last week for the journal titled "The Untold Story of Jimmy Carter's Hawkish Stand On Iran." Ray, thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's start with, I guess, the big question. What has the reaction been in Tehran to Donald Trump's return to the White House?

TAKEYH:
There's mixed reaction, but largely in terms of the official government, there is an inclination toward taking up the United States offer of dialogue. The offer was made before, when President Trump came into office in 2016, but at that time, the Iranian government had a precondition. That precondition was the United States had to return to the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which involved lifting sanctions and then a dialogue would begin. The current administration doesn't seem to have that precondition, in the sense they're willing to have a dialogue over issues of concern, probably because the JCPOA is not that big of an issue, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal, because it has largely expired by now, so there's no real returning to that agreement.

LINDSAY:
You have my permission to call it the Iran Nuclear deal rather than JCPOA. Just for convenience sake.

TAKEYH:
Sure. The Iran nuclear deal is no longer concerned to being revived because its provisions have largely expired by now.

LINDSAY:
They were designed to sunset after ten or fifteen years.

TAKEYH:
Yes, and it's been... It was enacted in July of 2015, so it's been ten years. So this is going to be a new type of negotiations.

LINDSAY:
So are the Iranians entering these negotiations in a genuine spirit of back and forth, or do you see them as wanting to enter negotiations simply as a way to stall and gain time to regather strength?

TAKEYH:
Well, the two positions are not inconsistent. You can get into negotiations to see what the traffic bears, what the other side is willing to give. What the other side is demanding. I think there are people in the executive branch of Iran, the President, Dr. Pezeshkian and others who are interested in agreement because they're interested in lifting of sanctions. Now then comes what the parameters of that agreement will be and how it will be negotiated through with the complex maze that is the Iranian political system. So at this point, there is a willingness to see what the negotiations will lead to, but even the process of negotiations is advantageous because it blunts sanctions. If you even want to accelerate the nuclear program, you can do so under the immunity of the diplomatic process. So the two tracks kind of converge, at least for a period of time.

LINDSAY:
I want to talk about the Trump administration because that's obviously the other half of any negotiation. Before we do that, I just want to draw it a little bit more on what the mood is in Tehran. I think it is safe to say you've described 2024 as a terrible year for the Iranian regime.

TAKEYH:
Right.

LINDSAY:
They saw their proxies, the groups that made up the so-called Axis of Resistance get destroyed partly by Israel's attacks and Hamas and Hezbollah, but also because of the fall of the Assad regime, which really has been sort of a game changer. There was a death of the Iranian president in a plane crash.

TAKEYH:
Right.

LINDSAY:
The economy still seems to be struggling. So just give me a sense of what the mood is in a country that is estranged from the United States and is also run by the supreme leader who's what, eighty-five, eighty-six years old?

TAKEYH:
85.

LINDSAY:
Alleged to be in somewhat ill health?

TAKEYH:
Yes. The thirty-five-year project of trying to enhance Iran's regional influence through proxies, that has essentially crumbled in eleven days.

LINDSAY:
You're talking about the fall of the Assad regime?

TAKEYH:
Yes, yes. Obviously, the decimation of Hamas was anticipated. The Hezbollah situation, the way Hezbollah was damaged, was not anticipated, and that was very catastrophic for the country because Hezbollah and its military commanders were actually managing a lot of those proxies on behalf of Iran, whether it was in Syria or in Iraq itself. So there was a lot of Hezbollah officials and military officers, generals and so on who were actually involved in management of the proxies. So the decapitation of Hezbollah was a setback, but Syria was the indispensable land bridge between Hezbollah Lebanon and Iran. It allowed Iran to become a Mediterranean basin country essentially. That land bridge is now no longer really in existence because of Israeli air power and also unfriendly government that's unfriendly to Iran. You can try to supply Hezbollah through sea routes. That seems to be more dangerous in terms of interdiction, but also that you can only do small arms with large missile encampments and so forth. So the imperial project, at least part of it, has been badly damaged. Now from Iranian-

LINDSAY:
Has it been irreparably damaged though, Ray?

TAKEYH:
Is anything irreparable? I mean, at least for now.

LINDSAY:
Well, some things are.

TAKEYH:
At least for now, it'll be very difficult for the Iranian regime to connect with Hezbollah. Now, if-

LINDSAY:
So you see that it would have to be a generational project, not a reconstituted in a year or two.

TAKEYH:
To an extent, it depends what happens in Syria. If Syria collapses into a civil strife, which I think, which is not out of-

LINDSAY:
Which is not out the realm of possibility.

TAKEYH:
... Then you can play different Syrian factions against each other. And one of the things Iranians have been willing to do and have been good at doing is dealing with Sunni militants, whether it's in Taliban or elements of al-Qaeda even. So if the Syrian situation becomes murky, if there's no central Syrian government with territorial integrity intact, then I think you can play in that terrain.

LINDSAY:
So they can say Iran is down, but not necessarily out.

TAKEYH:
Yes, it depends how Syria reconstitutes itself. Now, my speculation would be Syria will have some kind of a civil strife and the current Syrian government will not have control over all of the territory. There'll be external powers involved. So in some way that could give them a pathway for re-entering the Levant, the way they did with Afghanistan, working with Taliban when that was necessary. But again, Iran's position in the most important arena, the Gulf is kind of intact. You begin to see then heavily penetration of Iraq itself, and they still have their various Iraqi militia groups and so forth, and they're mending fences with various Gulf countries, UAE and Saudi Arabia and so on that tend to be tentative in terms of their hostility toward Iran. But there is no question about the fact that the Imperial Project, which was costly and also strategically unsound, has now been damaged. How much damage depends on how Syria reconstitutes itself.

LINDSAY:
Have there been any losers inside Iran because of the collapse of this Imperial Project? Anybody getting cashiered or now on the outs because their handiwork failed?

TAKEYH:
The person who would be blamed for this would be Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, this is his project. But I think the allure and the sort of a luster of the Revolutionary Guards is diminished. Nineteen Revolutionary Guard general officers were killed during the past year in Syria by Israeli airstrikes, and their ability to project power has been diminished. That essentially attenuates their domestic political standing and any prospective role they may have in the selection of the successor to the leader. It's just as an institution, it has. Now domestically, the country is in very deep economic trouble. They have to shut down schools and offices because of heating problems, because of natural gas issues and so forth. Some of that is mismanagement. Some of that is aging institutions, aging factories and so on. It requires renovation of the infrastructure, which they don't have the resources for. So the domestic economic situation is fairly dire, and usually in a country like that, when economic situation becomes difficult, that has political ramifications. It does in all countries, the western countries-

LINDSAY:
Even in autocracies.

TAKEYH:
Yeah. And so in this particular case that may lead to once again some degree of popular disaffection and protest and so forth. You've already seen that in terms of strikes that are taking place by teachers and so on, some level of low intensity protest is taking place. It's not convulsive yet, but there's street protests taking place. So the country is uneasy at home, it is humbled abroad, and it is looking for some kind of a way out of this predicament. Well, how would I say, predicament of its own making.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So let's talk about the incoming Trump administration. What would you describe as the goal of Trump policy toward Iran? Do we know?

TAKEYH:
All administrations usually, almost entirely the Republicans and Democrats, want to have a negotiated settlement of the nuclear issue. That's been the case since the Bush administration in 2005.

LINDSAY:
The younger Bush?

TAKEYH:
Yeah, the second term of the second Bush administration, that was the case of the Barack Obama administration, and there was an agreement. That was Donald Trump's aspiration. It was Biden-Harris administration. So I think there's a continuity in that.

LINDSAY:
So in Trump one, the goal wasn't regime change?

TAKEYH:
No, I think President Trump always wanted an agreement. Now, the parameters of that agreement were not very clear, but he wanted an agreement on the nuclear issue like all his predecessors and successors. So I suspect it'll be that and most-

LINDSAY:
So his objection to Obama wasn't that Obama negotiated a deal. It was that he negotiated a deal that Trump thought was not a good deal.

TAKEYH:
Deficient in terms of his terms. He wanted, as he said, a better deal. And frankly, that's also what the Biden-Harris administration came in saying they want a deal that's, I think the term they used was longer, stronger, and broader.

LINDSAY:
Correct.

TAKEYH:
So longer in terms of the terms of the agreement, broader in terms of areas of consideration, stronger in terms of inspection enforcement. So in that sense, the Biden administration accepted the critique of the Trump administration itself. So I suspect there'll be some probing toward an agreement. I suspect there will be negotiations. There may be some back channel communications already that usually the conduit for that is Oman and the Omani foreign minister has visited. That cycle of emissaries going back and forth has already started. Now what's being passed back and forth, I don't know.

LINDSAY:
So do you expect a resurrection of the so-called maximum pressure strategy that Trump tried first time around?

TAKEYH:
Yeah, because I think all administrations, again, believe economic penalties gives them leverage in negotiations.

LINDSAY:
So what would that consist of right now? Because at the moment Iran is heavily sanctioned.

TAKEYH:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
Both by multilateral sanctions and by extensive U.S. sanctions, is it a matter of adding more sanctions to the mix? Is it forcing existing sanctions? Something else?

TAKEYH:
I think there's been a criticism on the Republican side of the ledger that Biden administration's Department of Treasury has not been rigorous in enforcement of the existing sanctions. This particularly has to do with the sale of oil to China. The Chinese tend to buy now ninety-five percent of the Iran's oil exports, and they tend to buy it at discount rates. Now, there's some disagreements between China and Iran over the discount prices because Russia is also selling at discount, so there's a lot of discount oil. So there'll be probably some degree of enforcement in terms of not just purchase of oil, but repatriation of that money through their banking systems and so forth.

LINDSAY:
What about India buying oil from-

TAKEYH:
India, yeah, India. Turkey was a consumer of it as well. Yeah.

LINDSAY:
Do you see the Trump administration putting pressure on India?

TAKEYH:
Well, if you're going to try to lower Iran's revenue through its principal staple crop, then you have to deal with the countries who are purchasing. The Chinese government is the biggest purchaser of the Iranian oil, less so than...

LINDSAY:
I can understand how easy it would be for the Trump administration, which wants to take a hard line on China to add pressure on this front as well.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, right.

LINDSAY:
I'm just trying to understand how it would work with India because one possibility is for the Iranians, any oil that doesn't go to China to Send it to India.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, it depends how much oil is available in the international spot markets and so forth. It has to do with the-

LINDSAY:
Understood. There are a lot of other complexities.

TAKEYH:
What the Russian oil production is going to be and whether the Russian oil production comes down. But there's also concerns of-

LINDSAY:
Or what happens with U.S. production.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, and also there's a lot of concern in Iran about how their relationship with other great powers is affected by the advent of the Trump administration, in a sense that they anticipate perhaps having a lessened relationship with the Russian Federation that may want to improve relations with the United States in the context of negotiations over Ukraine. And on the other side, they may actually deepen the relationship with China because the Chinese government may be subject to trade sanctions and so forth. So also how that geopolitical angle works itself out.

LINDSAY:
Do we have a sense, Ray, of who is to have the Iran portfolio in a Trump administration? Because you've mentioned Treasury, you haven't mentioned the State Department.

TAKEYH:
Well, there's a sanctions coordinator at the State Department as well. I don't know how they're going to sort this out. If there's going to be negotiations during the last time you had very systematic negotiations was during the tenure of John Kerry as Secretary of State. So that essentially went through Department of State as a diplomatic arm of the United States. It doesn't have to be that way.

LINDSAY:
I'll note that Trump is appointed a number of special envoy's.

TAKEYH:
Right.

LINDSAY:
Actually a very large number for an administration that's just starting out, but I haven't seen one for Iran.

TAKEYH:
And you may not have one. Who does the negotiations, I really don't have any preview on that. But traditionally that has gone through the State Department as the diplomatic arm of the United States government. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It could be an emissary from one of the existing emissaries may be empowered to do that. I just have no, as they say, visibility on this issue.

LINDSAY:
Do we have a sense of what kind of deal a Trump administration would want to strike, and if there's actually any agreement among Trump's advisors as to what would constitute an acceptable or a good deal?

TAKEYH:
They were all in agreement that the Iran nuclear deal was not a good idea.

LINDSAY:
Good. That's below the floor. They want something higher than that.

TAKEYH:
They want something higher than that. There are Pompeo parameters on the table.

LINDSAY:
We're talking to Mike Pompeo.

TAKEYH:
Mike Pompeo.

LINDSAY:
Former Secretary of State.

TAKEYH:
Former Secretary of State gave a speech, I believe it was in May of 2019, in which he outlined the parameters of an acceptable deal between the United States and Iran. There were fairly rigorous terms involved, no assistance for Hezbollah of which may not be that much of an issue anymore.

LINDSAY:
I was going to say part of it-

TAKEYH:
Part of it has already been realized. It was involved I think on the nuclear front, zero enrichment. That was the last enunciated proposition from the Trump administration in the first go round. Those might not be the binding parameters today. They may be different ones because the situation changed. They may be the same one.

LINDSAY:
Well, give me your best sense of where Iran's nuclear weapons program or nuclear program stands right now. I often hear the phrase "it's a screwdriver, turn away." I'm not really sure what that means.

TAKEYH:
I'm not sure what that means either, and I don't like the term that often used. They have enough material to have a bomb in two weeks because that's also not the case. Fissile material doesn't necessarily mean a bomb.

LINDSAY:
And if you have a bomb, you also need to have a way to deliver it.

TAKEYH:
You have to have a delivery system at the time where your missiles have been exposed as deficient. It is an expansive nuclear infrastructure, and particularly they have developed advanced centrifuges, which they call IR-6 and IR-8 before the program was predicated on fairly rudimentary centrifuge technologies, which they call IR-1. But they have developed a new generation of centrifuges, which means they can operate at high velocity with some degree of efficiency. So the infrastructure is more sophisticated and they're also now burying it deeper and deeper underground in terms of preserving it. I never thought that the Iranian government thought the S-300 air defense networks were going to protect their facilities. I think they thought that going deep underground was a way of preserving it.

LINDSAY:
And you raised the issue of the S-300s because Israel has destroyed significant numbers of them?

TAKEYH:
Israel has... Well, not just destroyed them, but easily penetrated them. So the air defense network as such was not the way you would protect the program. So when they managed to get deep down, that would preserve the program, but it's by all IAEA accounts, it's a fairly vast and sophisticated atomic infrastructure, which I have to say is largely indigenously evolved. It's no longer relying on imports from abroad, technologies that are stolen from abroad designs. It's an indigenously driven program in terms of its own scientists, technicians, engineers, and ability to operate. It's penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies. I'm not saying that, but it is very much a native program.

LINDSAY:
I take your point there, Ray, but it raises the question, given how advanced Iran's nuclear program is, what is it that the Iranians could do that would assure people that they weren't close to a nuclear weapon? Because once you have the know-how, that doesn't go away even if you shut down a centrifuge.

TAKEYH:
Right, in terms of one of the agreements that they could come to rather quickly with any interlocutor would be to ship out their sixty percent enriched uranium. That's easy to do because it-

LINDSAY:
And what's the significance of sixty percent enriched uranium?

TAKEYH:
Well, sixty percent enriched uranium means you're closer to ideal weapon-grade uranium, which is over ninety percent. I should say, you can actually manufacture a bomb with sixty percent enriched uranium. It's not ideal. You want to have a higher gradation of enriched uranium, but you can do it.

LINDSAY:
And Iranians have gone to sixty percent.

TAKEYH:
They have gone to sixty percent, which is viewed as very dangerous and provocative.

LINDSAY:
Am I correct in my understanding in that it's actually harder to get, let's say, to five or ten percent-

TAKEYH:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
Than it is to go from sixty percent to ninety percent?

TAKEYH:
And then above twenty and then sixty, and then you can get to ninety. By shipping out sixty percent enriched uranium in some kind of a deal for partial sanctions relief, that gives you an interim agreement that doesn't really affect the complexion or trajectory of your nuclear program, but it does give momentum to the diplomacy. Then in six, eight, ten months, you get a sixty percent agreement and it'll take another eight, six, ten months to figure out how to ship it out, who ships it out, who gets it, who enriches it. It can be, I mean, all kinds of technical working groups have to go. So you can run out by having that agreement. You can get to the midterms and then see what happens.

LINDSAY:
If you're the Trump administration where you want results and you want them quick, how do you avoid getting in a situation which in essence, you're up against Dean Smith and four corners offense?

TAKEYH:
Well, you make your red lines clear and you time limit your negotiations. Now, I should say no administration has been disciplined enough to do that. And when the negotiations are succeeding or appear to be succeeding, when some dangerous flash points such as sixty percent enrichment is being dealt with, it's hard to walk away from the table.

LINDSAY:
So what is your advice to the administration in that situation?

TAKEYH:
Well, you make your red lines clear and you'd be willing to walk away from the table. Now, Donald Trump did walk away from the table in terms of North Korea, in terms of the summit that took place, I believe it was in Hanoi. He didn't think it was a good deal so he walked away from it. So he has that capability.

LINDSAY:
So you think the Iranians are studying that whole negotiation to see if they can do it?

TAKEYH:
That negotiation affected the way the Rouhani administration approached the Trump administration. The previous Iranian president who was president, I think from 2013 to '21. They thought that the Trump administration, in terms of his North Korea diplomacy, was more interested in pageantry than progress. So they weren't going to do the pageantry because they were not confident of progress. So the failure of the North Korean negotiations actually prevented the Rouhani administration, or was one of the things that prevented it from taking up the offer of dialogue with the United States in 2016 to '20.

LINDSAY:
Given that you raised the example of North Korea where Trump essentially flipped the script. We went from fire and fury to exchange and what he called-

TAKEYH:
And back into sanctions.

LINDSAY:
Back into sanctions.

TAKEYH:
So the script flipped three times.

LINDSAY:
Do you see any prospect that if Trump were to make the big bold offer, that anyone on the Iranian end would accept it and want to have?

TAKEYH:
Well, I don't know what the big bold offer would look like because-

LINDSAY:
Head-to-head meeting.

TAKEYH:
I think you'll get direct diplomacy. I suspect you will get that. You talked about-

LINDSAY:
But nothing like Trump meeting with the dear leader.

TAKEYH:
Can you get a sort of presidential meeting in the UN General Assembly in September? I'm not prepared to exclude that from possibility. Dr. Pezeshkian, can you have that sort of a photo op, that actually what President Macron was trying to arrange between President Rouhani and Donald Trump, that fell apart because the Iranians rejected it. It wasn't on the American side. Can you have that sort of a meeting in context of UNGA in September? Depends what happens between now and then. It'll be clever for the Iranians to do that because the next October is a deadline for re-imposition of the UN sanctions. That's when those sanctions expire, this sort of what was called snapback. So it's your interest to have a diplomatic encounter of some significance for weeks.

LINDSAY:
Because playing for the audience there.

TAKEYH:
Well, you'd hoping not to have those particular sanctions retriggered.

LINDSAY:
Let me go back to your point that the administration should have a time range in mind with some red lines. What does it do if the Iranians don't offer enough over the time span you have in mind?

TAKEYH:
Well, that's the problem because most administrations that get into diplomacy understand that the alternative is the use of force, and they don't want to do that because of all the complexities of using force in the volatile Middle East with all the other areas of concern.

LINDSAY:
And you think that remains the case?

TAKEYH:
I think that means the case for any administration, but particularly at the time when you have all kinds of domestic pressing issues, you have a lot of concern in the United States about not wanting to be militarily engaged in the Middle East again because of all the twenty years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. So there is an American hesitancy. Now, there is another factor out there that is called the Israeli factor. The Israelis tend to be very triumphant today and confident.

LINDSAY:
So how feasible do you think it is that Trump could, in essence, subcontract military force to the Israelis? The Israelis have argued all along that they couldn't do it on their own. That seems to be their public position.

TAKEYH:
I don't think they can do it on their own now. I am not a military specialist. Somebody can talk about this, but the level of aircraft they need, B-2s and all that, are not available to them. The nature of ordinances they need, and this is a dynamic issue, dynamic picture, because the Iranians every day, they're building down, down, down, down. That means-

LINDSAY:
I also imagine they're dispersing things. They're hiding things.

TAKEYH:
Yeah. So they're dispersing, they're hiding. The infrastructure is already vast. This will not be a simple military operation as was 1981 attack on Iraq. This will be-

LINDSAY:
It most certainly wouldn't be a one-off operation.

TAKEYH:
It wouldn't be a one off operation.

LINDSAY:
I would imagine you would have to do it repeatedly.

TAKEYH:
Repeatedly, and it would be incomplete at the end because we think we know where all Iran's nuclear facilities are. But with these advanced centrifuges, two, three hundred of them stored in a small room, that's a nuclear plant. So it would require for a military operation to succeed in an effective way, you have to have the necessary ordinances. You have to have the necessary aircraft, and you almost have to have perfect intelligence.

LINDSAY:
That's which you seldom have in the real world.

TAKEYH:
Which you seldom have. Israelis at this point, I don't think have any of those three, which is why most Israelis talk about more of a joint operation with the United States or transference of American military aircrafts and so on to them. But that essentially means you have to train Israeli pilots in the use of those. That's probably a sixteen year and a half month ordeal.

LINDSAY:
Yeah. Well, I can't imagine the United States is going to hand over heavy bombers to the Israeli Air Force. That doesn't seem to be in the offing.

TAKEYH:
It hasn't done it before, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.

LINDSAY:
So where does that leave the Trump administration? If at the end of the day they look at the military operation and conclude that it's not good for the United States, and they also conclude that it's unlikely that the Israelis could succeed. What does that mean for your diplomacy?

TAKEYH:
Well, they have to essentially make those two assumptions that you suggested. They may not, they may look at this differently. They may say, "Well, we can use military force."

LINDSAY:
Well, do you think they will look at it differently?

TAKEYH:
I just don't know the cast of characters and how that debate evolves within the administration to know how they look at the military option. I imagine most American administrations, irrespective of their partisan affiliation, don't want to use military force against Iran. That's been the case for twenty years, starting with Bush-Cheney administration. They didn't want to do it. I suspect that refrain remains, and therefore diplomacy becomes alluring, particularly a diplomatic track that starts succeeding in an interim way because at least you kind of lower the pressure. You say, well, the most provocative aspect of the Iranian nuclear program has been dealt with, sixty percent enriched uranium. The Iranians are busy trying to work out some sort of a work plan with Director General Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency to give them more access. So that essentially gives you more visibility into program. You can get probably those things. And then...

LINDSAY:
Would I be wrong in assuming that perhaps the most likely outcome is that both sides are going to see it in their interest to find some way to just kick this issue down the road?

TAKEYH:
Well, that's been the case. That's been the case for twenty years. There's no reason for that pattern to be disrupted. The one factor here that is different would be the Israeli factor, in the post-October 7th universe. Number one, the Israeli government has now viewed threats to the security differently given the trauma of October 7th. And number two, when you marry trauma with triumph, that produces confidence, maybe overconfidence as the United States understood in 2003 when invading Iraq. So the question is, given that Israeli variable, that's what's different here today, and the Israeli variable affects the other variables, so the status quo may be prolonged. I just don't know how the Israeli factors plays into that because that's the most essential factor right now.

LINDSAY:
Do any of the other countries in the region matter, the Saudis, the Turks, the Emiratis?

TAKEYH:
Well, the Saudis and the Gulf States matter in a sense that the Iranian retaliation is likely to target them and the global oil supply. So they are particularly interested in this conflict not taking place.

LINDSAY:
But they also want the United States to put Iran in its place.

TAKEYH:
Right? And at the same time, they're reaching out to Iran and facilitating the Iranian trade. UAE is a city-state, and it behaves like city-states do. It tries to placate all the great powers and play them against each other. The Saudis are the same in some respects. They actually will probably want to stay away from this and let the Iranians, Israelis and the Americans sort it out. But there would be the front-line states because what has been demonstrated in the past two years, it may not be the case anymore, but what has been demonstrated is Iran doesn't have the capacity to, in a meaningful way, target Israeli territory.

LINDSAY:
Any chance that the Chinese will decide to provide their good offices and try to broker something between the United States and Iran in much the way they did with Saudi Arabia and Iran?

TAKEYH:
The Saudi-Iran deal that was brokered by the Chinese, those negotiations predated China's involvement. They were actually hosted by Iraq and they weren't going anywhere, and there has been some degree of Iranian disillusionment with that agreement because that agreement was good for China because Chinese want some degree of stability. It was good for Saudi Arabia because Iran was pressing them in Yemen and also in terms of their oil facilities potentially. It is now said, what do the Iranians get out that agreement? Chinese goodwill. That's why they did it. So to some extent depends what China does on the oil purchase front that determines its leverage. So far, the relationship between the two are good, but I'm not sure if it's in China's interest to broker an agreement between United States and Iran. While it may be China's interest for United States to be embroiled in the Middle East, and at the same time embroiled in central Europe when the Ukraine war, especially, there are some very hard voices in this administration as well as in previous ones that believe China should be the principle focus of America's international relations.

LINDSAY:
Well, that suggests that Chinese policy is more likely to be aimed at frustrating the Trump administration in Iran-

TAKEYH:
Correct, right.

LINDSAY:
... Not trying to facilitate it.

TAKEYH:
When the principle of your foreign policy is pressure China. Well, I always say politics and geopolitics is like physics. For every action there's a reaction. So I don't know why it's in Chinese interest to essentially not prevent conflict, other than potentially disruption of their own oil trade.

LINDSAY:
I want to close our conversation, Ray, by changing the subject a little, and I want to talk about President Jimmy Carter, who passed at the end of last month. You've been doing a lot of work on Carter's policy toward Iran. You wrote a piece, as I mentioned, for the Wall Street Journal on the untold story of Jimmy Carter's hawkish stand on Iran.

TAKEYH:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
You have a surprising take because Jimmy Carter in I think conventional wisdom was weak when it came to Iran. You describe him as somebody who tried harder than any other American to thwart the Iranian Revolution, and when that failed, worked to subvert it.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, the unexpected Jimmy Carter. The Carter legacy, so much of it revolves around the issue of his promotion of human rights, and to some extent, that has been exaggerated. Human rights was not a real policy toward China, the Soviet Union or Iran. What comes out of the Carter experience is that he did try to press his allies among the royalist camp to repress the revolution. They didn't do it. He did try to subvert the Islamic Republic when it came into existence. That failed, whatever the program was, whose dimensions remain classified. But it reflects the fact that, as I said, I think in the piece, Carter wasn't weak on Iran. He was quintessentially American in a sense.

He thought he could control outcomes in a country that he poorly understood, but he was fairly robust and fairly effective in his own conception. And I would say one of the other things you hear in the Carter administration is there were a lot of divisions between, and a lot of poisonous divisions within the camp. What I found is that actually is more a battle of memoirs than it was at the time. Memoir literature becomes more embittered because everybody's trying to blame each other, while at the time-

LINDSAY:
And that's not isolated to the Carter presidency.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, the problem with leaks, at that time in 1977, '78, you will leak to two papers. New York Times and Washington Post. New York Times doesn't actually publish in the fall of 1978 because they're on strike. The only newspaper was the Washington Post, and having gone through all the Washington Post papers, there is only one story in December where there is a heavy administration infighting, and you had a situation where Cy Vance, the Secretary of State, didn't want to deal with Iran. He wanted to deal with peace issues, arms control, and Israeli-Egyptian one. And so it wasn't so much that administration was divided against itself, although there was divisions of the diversity of views, but it was essentially an observing a phenomenon that it couldn't condition or influence, and that's a hard thing for Americans to accept.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this eighth presidential transition episode of the President's Inbox. My guest has been Ray Takeyh, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies here at the Council. As always, Ray, it's a pleasure to chat with you and we'll have to have you come back on to talk about your book when you wrap it up.

TAKEYH:
Thanks. Happy to do it. Thank you.

LINDSAY:
This Presidential transition series, it's supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy and peace. More information at Carnegie.org. Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode, and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for the President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on the President's Inbox are solely those are the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster and Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.