Israel's War of Opportunity

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for the US in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, about why the war came about and what it means for the region. With Bajoghli, Adam looks at the way the war has been seen by the regime’s supporters and detractors, and the effects on the Iranian population of Israel’s widespread infiltration of the country. With Malley, he considers the events that paved the way for Israel’s attack and why America’s bombing of the nuclear facility at Fordow will probably not spur Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme. Further reading in the LRB: Tom Stevenson: Trump's Midnight Hammer https://lrb.me/stevensoniran Tareq Baconi: Gaza under Siege https://lrb.me/baconigaza Sponsored link Oculi Mundi: https://oculi-mundi.com/ LRB Audio Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the LRB podcast, and I'm your host, Adam Shatz.
0:18.9	The subject of this episode is the war that began on June 13 when Israel launched a series
0:24.5	of surprise attacks on Iran.
0:26.8	On the ninth day of the war, the United States joined the battle attacking three nuclear
0:30.9	facilities which Trump claimed to have demolished, despite evidence to the contrary.
0:36.3	After 12 days, with as many as 1,000 killed in Iran,
0:39.5	including many civilians, and 28 killed inside Israel, a ceasefire was reached, but it's a fragile
0:46.0	and precarious one. Joining us to discuss the implications of the war on this episode are
0:52.0	Nargis Bejogli, a professor at Johns Hopkins, and Robert Malley,
0:56.6	a lead negotiator in the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal and Joe Biden's chief special envoy to Iran.
1:03.5	My first guest is Nargis Bejogli.
1:06.0	Nargis, thanks for joining us.
1:07.6	Thanks for having me.
1:08.4	In researching your 2019 book Iran reframed anxieties of power in the Islamic Republic,
1:16.3	you talked extensively with members of the Revolutionary Guard.
1:20.8	Could you give us a sense of how the war has been understood from an Iranian perspective,
1:27.1	by which I mean that of the regime
1:28.6	and its supporters, but also among Iranians who might be alienated from and even hostile
1:34.0	to the regime.
1:35.0	Yeah. So when I was doing my research from my first book, one of the things that I found
1:39.8	and I wrote extensively about was how the Islamic Republic and especially its Revolutionary Guards
1:45.4	and military apparatuses had switched from talking about defending the Islamic Republic to defending
	...

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