Greetings dear listeners this is another exciting edition of the Remnant Podcast.

I'm Jonah Goldberg your host in the studio we have the indomitable Jack Butler the producer of the show and we've got to get some point come up with a label for him and our guest today is my friend currently

from the American Enterprise Institute a formerly of the Brookings Institution that's when I first started to follow your stuff and I'm one of our resident Iran scholars do you ever get into like serious nerdy trivia contest with like Michael Rubin about any of the stuff?

No I think that's a fruitless I don't believe in ramming my head against walls and again I have tried on numerous occasions to retrap approach my with Iran so perhaps I am just that foolish perhaps maybe a trivia fight with with Michael would be a more fruitful endeavor it would be interesting to have like a field of expertise jeopardy style contest here just to see how obscure people can get with things.

So I want to have you on simply for I'll just admit it purely lazy puntit reasons that I feel like I need to catch up on what the hell is going on with this Iran stuff and I figured rather than call you on the phone I would get double do the dollars and just put you on the podcast and we could talk about it so what the hell is going on?

Okay well the I want to back up too much right because it's a wrong we could back up 2,500 years to Cyrus the great talking about obscure let's not do that.

There are listeners who would like you to do that but it's okay we can fast forward for the moment.

Okay let's start with some more recent history under the Obama administration the United States and the Germans the British the Russians the Chinese reaching agreement with Iran about its nuclear program.

Everyone in the world was very concerned about its nuclear program the deal that Obama reached which is called the joint comprehensive plan of action was effectively that the Iranians put their nuclear program on ice for 10, 15 years in some ways permanently in theory in other ways and in return they would get a lifting of both international sanctions and American sanctions.

Now what's important to understand is like most deals nobody was happy with it the Obama administration thought it was a reasonably good deal almost no one else did I will say that I was in favor of the deal but my my feeling about the deal was that it was the minimum that we needed it was not a great deal but it was good enough.

But that that 10 to 15 year window I mentioned was a really important aspect of it for the Obama administration they they're feeling was we're going to have a rapprochement with Iran and so 10 to 15 years is really all we need because that 10 to 15 years will cover us through the rapprochement 10 to 15 years from now Iran will be completely different country we won't have to worry about the nuclear deal.

My own perspective and I think that of a lot of other people who were at least cautiously supportive the deal was different which is 10 to 15 years is a nice window that we can use to put in place a more permanent deal and of course there were lots of other people who felt certainly folks in Washington felt like this is a terrible idea 10 to 15 years in can it be enough the Iranians would just go right back to what they were doing at the end of it and then there were plenty of people who just wanted the end of the regime and felt like if you get rid of the sanctions you're not going to get rid of the sanctions.

Right. So it's just just a clear for so for people like me who I was opposed to it wasn't incensed by my opposition to it like some people were but it seemed to me that what the deal did was say okay you're going to pause if they comply right because there's always a work concern that they would still do stuff in secret and then we would we were basically guaranteeing them the ability to have a nuclear program after 15 years.

So rather than them keeping them in doubt about whether or not we were going to keep screwing with them with stocks net type stuff or whatever we were like okay here's your runway it's longer than you would otherwise like and at the end of the runway you get your nuclear bombs and that was my objection to it and that's so that was a very reasonable position and again my perspective was you may very well have been rights but without that long runway as you described it would have been exactly and it gave us that long runway to deal with the problem okay so that's the American side and that is important.

Every aspect of that's important I want to come back to it in a minute on the Iranian side though it was also a tough deal right the Iranians were just as divided about the deal as we were you had a group of I'm going to call them pragmatists we call all kinds of different things but it's really their president Hassan Rouhani and their foreign minister Javad Zarif and a bunch of people around him all of whom felt that Iran needed to get the albatross of the United States and its sanctions off Iran's neck to allow its economy to be

revived and that that would fix Iran's most basic problems the people would be happy that would allow the regime to stay in power they of course were opposed by a group that we typically call the hard liners and it's made up of a lot of different people but these guys are hardcore right they hate the United States they believe in Iran's expansion for a whole variety of reasons and they hated the deal and what they said at the time was a terrible deal for us we shouldn't be putting our nuclear program on hold at all we have every right to have it

the sanctions relief we're going to get really isn't very significant and most importantly what they consistently said was and the Americans will never honor the agreements they will cheat they will break the deal right the Iran's went along they signed it fast forward two years style Trump comes into office and basically within a year he pulls the United States out and that's important on the Iranian side because that absolutely confirms

the hard liners in their position right into basically everybody in Iran starting with the only guy who matters around supreme leader Ali Hamina what they predicted is exactly what happened the United States renegs on the deal pulls out but everybody else expects are on to abide by it

all right on our side the Trump administration is also divided lots of people want different things our old colleague John Bolton does seem very much to want real regime change in Iran Trump seems very focused on getting a better nuclear deal whatever that would mean Pompeo somewhere in between

but nevertheless that's where they are and they all agreed on this this strategy of maximum economic pressure on Iran and every part of that statement is important the maximum part is important under Obama there was pressure but not this much it's economic because and that's where they want to keep it focused so they really haven't done very much against Iran in the region right point to fact in the Middle East the Trump administration is mostly given the Iranians a free hand

you know president Trump himself when he was asked about you know pulling the troops out of Syria and one of the reporters said to him you know what about the Iranians he said the Iranians can do what they like in Syria which you know drove a lot of people in Washington and pretty much everybody in the Middle East absolutely crazy right so they put this tremendous pressure on Iran and it has been a lot more pressure than the Iranians could deal with right so the Iranians are hurting their economy is in very tough shape

inflation is like 40% exactly the real is lost about 60% of its value against the dollar yeah a third of the population is living in absolute poverty people are very unhappy about it is hurting the government

...