Episode Description: This week, Reza breaks down why the Trump administration is scared of Iran’s foreign minister, why Saudi Arabia continues to do outrageous things, and why Trump’s Iran policy is par for the course in Washington DC.
Daniel Rogers, former American soldier and diplomat, chats with Reza about how fighting a war and working to rebuild the damage caused by war gave him a unique perspective on our lack of diplomatic engagement and military restraint, why a paradigm shift is needed to end our endless wars and avoid starting new ones, and much more.
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About Reza Marashi: With 15 years of experience working in both the U.S. government and Washington DC think tank world, Reza Marashi breaks down American foreign policy, the lack of diplomatic engagement and military restraint that is guiding it, the cast of characters that are making this unsustainable problem worse, and how all of this is firmly not in the national interest of the United States.
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Transcript:
Greetings. Good people of the world. Come on in. Sit down. Relax. Putting your fancy iPhone earbuds. You are now listening to the message a podcast that breaks down American foreign policy, a lack of diplomatic engagement in military strength that is guiding it. Theo cast of characters that are making this sustainable problem worst. How all of this is firmly not in the national interest of the United States. I’m your host, and my name is Reza Marashi, ex think-tanker, ex-State Department worker bee and all-around good guy who spent the past 15 years working closely with senior-level government officials around the world to facilitate diplomatic solutions to conflict.
If you’d like to say hi, find me on Twitter @rezamarashi
Before we go any further, make sure to subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcast, Google Podcast spotted by stitcher iHeart Radio, YouTube or whatever your favorite podcast might be. And if you like what you hear, do me too quick favors one provide review and rating for the podcast to maximize the amount of people that will hear it and to goto Iranian dot com, click on the donate button and help us continue to fulfill our mission of giving knowledge to the people. Every week, we’re gonna do three things for one break down three news stories that you know about to interview smart, intellectually honest people who deserve to be heard. And three, Answer your questions that you email to our mailbag.
So without further ado, enjoy the show to kick things off this week, we’re going to go beyond the headlines into a deep dive on three important news stories that the people need to know about. Why do the people need to know about these new stories? That’s a great question. Thanks for asking. The people need to know because each of these stories highlights the core tenant that this podcast is built upon, which is that the foundations of American foreign policy are firmly not in the national interest of the United States.
Story number one that the people need to know about this week Trump Iran and the World Economic Forum. Now, the World Economic Forum is a noteworthy thing here because every year it provides a key venue for back-channel dialogue between countries that don’t get along. And last year Trump skipped the World Economic Forum. But this year, as a condition of his participation, the World Economic Forum was forced to change the terms of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s invitation to make sure he did not attend.
Now, this is not only because Zarif would make Trump and his team look inarticulate by comparison, but also because Zarif’s presence at a global forum highlighting the need for diplomacy that the Trump administration claims to want but has steadfastly undercut at every turn would highlight the absurdity of last year’s decision to designate Zarif as a terrorist and slapped sanctions on him. So here we have another case of the Trump administration using sanctions and subsequent threats against Europe to extort its allies and prevent dialogue. And it is seriously limiting the formats and locations in which diplomacy can take place.
Now for those keeping score at home. Zarif, We’ve also recently barred from attending a U. N. Meeting in New York in direct violation of America’s U. N. Hosting obligations, So at this point, it should go without saying, when you eliminate all of the diplomatic options, war really becomes your only option, and you know what’s ironic about the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran is, they say, that sanctions will inevitably work by forcing the Iranian government to capitulate or collapse, but they can never say exactly when it will happen. Instead, they say that inevitably, we will reach an inflection point where the pain will be too much for the Iranian government to bear. And that’s when the paradigm will shift. And the Trump administration will get everything that it wants from Iran. But the irony in making such assertions is that’s exactly how diplomatic solutions work. You lock yourself in a room, and you keep negotiating in, negotiating, negotiating, and eventually you reach an inflection point where both sides find a sweet spot where they make enough compromises please the other side, while maintaining enough of whatever it is they entered the dispute with. That’s the magic of diplomacy.
So it should now be painfully obvious to anyone with a shred of honesty inside of them that the Trump administration’s team is not serious about diplomacy with Iran; if abandoning a nuclear deal that was verifiably working, killing a top Iranian general and reimposing draconian sanctions that none of our allies agree with isn’t proof enough. Now we have a strong-arming and international conference into pushing out Iran’s foreign minister from attending a forum literally designed to facilitate diplomacy and peaceful solutions to conflicts. So if it seems like Trump’s team is lying about what their real policy goals are with regard to Iran, that’s because they are.
Story number two that the people need to know about this week. Saudi Arabia, once again getting caught doing outlandish stuff that is firmly not in the national interest of the United States. I’m going to keep bringing this up because the Saudis keep doing it. So first, According to a recently released FBI memo dated August 2009 Saudi Arabia has been helping it’s U. S based citizens who are violent fugitives flee the American justice system. Now what kind of violent fugitives has the Saudi government but helping you ask? Well, some of these Saudi citizens who have received help from their government face rape, child pornography and manslaughter charges. Now, according to the FBI memo, Saudi Arabia will continue to help Saudi citizens charged with crimes evade the American justice system unless the U. S government takes steps to stop it. Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon said it best. “If, after this bombshell information the Trump administration still fails to hold the Saudi government accountable, it will be nothing short of an accomplice in helping Saudi fugitives evade justice.”
But that’s not all, ladies and gentlemen. Shortly after this news broke, another Saudi bombshell dropped amazon dot com, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone hacked in 2018 after receiving a text message from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS for short. Large amounts of data were stolen from Bezos’s phone, almost certainly in an effort to extort him. So if MBS hacked Jeff Bezos via text message, this pretty much guarantees that he also hacked his well-documented texting buddy Jared Kushner as well. And for that matter, we can’t rule out that he also hacked Trump. Now let’s put aside the fact that the Trump Administration is a living, breathing, daily, massive security breach, and let’s focus on the Saudi angle here that is far too frequently overlooked.
Now, unsurprisingly, much of the criticism is focused on MBS himself. But to make this on Lee about MBS is to fail to understand the deeper trends at work which have guided him and many other Saudi leaders in developing their approach to security issues. It would be convenient but mistaken to think that the only problem here is MBS and that without him all will be hunky dorey for Saudi Arabia, America and the world. I think to appreciate that there is a pre-existing Saudi proclivity towards taking aggressive and extreme postures, one has to strip away one’s prejudices regarding MBS to see the bigger picture, which is Saudi Arabia that has been socialized into thinking he can get away with anything; that this kind of behavior delivered results like MBS style did not emerge mysteriously from the ether. It is the product of a Saudi Arabia that has long been treated with impunity and indulgence on the international stage. You’re talking about links to the 9 11 hackers links to Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and being the forefathers of ISIS all preceed MBS is rise to power by decades and when it comes to the U. S. Political system, the role of money and politics is the crucial component in the machinery of managing Saudi Arabia’s good standing amongst the DC establishment, just as it is on gun control and a whole other host of issues. So one can only understand Saudi Arabia hacking Jeff Bezos and helping Saudi fugitives flee from the FBI in the context of the lesson the world has been teaching Saudi Arabia for decades, Saudi leaders have built careers snubbing their noses at the world and paying no price whatsoever. Today, Saudi Arabia is climbing higher up a tree, and it’s in denial as to the consequences of its increasing extremism. Being indulged by its friends and Western democracies has done Saudi Arabia no favors. Those doing the indulging should reflect on this. Neither Republicans nor Democrats should delude themselves that they are being helpful to Saudi Arabia by encouraging the self-defeating antics on display from MBS or failing to check them. If you fail to hold em, MBS accountable today, don’t be surprised if the result is a future Saudi leader even more delusional and dangerous to Saudi Arabia and to its protectors in Washington, DC.
Story number three that the people need to know about this week, you know all of the recent drama surrounding America and Iran has had me thinking about this state of affairs. When I first started following this stuff closely around 20 years ago. There was no war-torn Afghanistan, no war-torn Iraq, no war-torn Syria or no war-torn Yemen where Iran could project its power. There was no talk of Iran controlling for Arab capitals or no talk of Iran carving out a corridor to the sea. It was just Iran sitting there with no real friends to speak of building a nuclear program.
Now, this nuclear program was apparently the greatest security threat to world peace. I remember walking into a political science class in 2002 and my professor looking up asking me half-jokingly, how long until Iran has the bomb? So there was no interest in diplomacy with Iran at this time. Zero. Perhaps Not surprisingly, however, there was the same headlines and phrases that we see today for describing the uncontainable menace to world peace, that Iran will seemingly forever be in the eyes of the DC establishment, a meddling rogue exporter of terror across five continents, with the opaque a irrational political system filled with carpet sellers posing as politicians who under no circumstances would ever live up to their end of the bargain. Sound familiar? Now, around the same time, the US started two wars that destroyed the country’s to Iran’s east and west. Tehran brokered the agreement that stabilized Afghanistan, and it caught and repatriated Al Qaeda operatives. American officials are on the record confirming all of this.
In return, George W. Bush promoted Iran to the axis of evil, together with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea. So the more things change, the more they stay the same. And then, in 2003 the Bush administration kicked off a choreographed campaign to demonize and bomb the axis of evil, starting with Iraq. And, as Bush’s chief of staff said about the need to gin up a weapons of mass destruction pretext for destroying Iraq, the country at the heart of the Arab world, he said from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August. Now, as a wise woman once told me, the U. S. Is like a bad journalist. It chooses the war first and then writes the story. That’s why the two never match up.
So at no point in the past 20 years, apart from under Obama has the U. S genuinely sought to resolve its concerns about Iran, its nuclear program and the vexing fact that Iran cannot simultaneously be shunned from regional security solutions and then be expected to behave collaboratively in the region. This is because the concerns are structurally more useful than their corrective. Many in the DC establishment need Iran to be America’s enemy forever, partly because Israel needs Iran on to be it’s forever enemy. The specter of Iran is the right-wing Israeli distraction and cover for its forever occupation of Palestinian territory.
Now that the Saudi and Emirati protection racket post Arab spring needs a forever enemy, I suppose they decided that it makes sense for everyone to share.
Now, this has been Iran’s historic role. It’s why Iran’s nuclear program was the greatest security threat facing the U. S. And Israel in the civilized world until it wasn’t anymore. And then the deal that resolved that great threat suddenly became the greatest threat in two different guys. According to the Trump Administration. The imminent death of the Iran nuclear deal may seem like Trump’s fault, but the more I think about it, it’s also really the same old game just amplified on steroids. If the DC establishment couldn’t swallow its pride and prudently pursue American interests by bringing Iran in from the cold in the late 1990s and early 2000s they’re even less likely to do it now when the Iranian government accidentally is ascendant in the region, thanks largely to American mistakes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now, if this cycle of ineptitude does not stop in Washington, the large, influential and independent nations of the Middle East are destined to be marginalized and invaded one by one until all that’s left are dependent client states like Saudi Arabia or chaotic mess is like Iraq finding.
Now I think Iran knows this game very well. It has lived it for arguably a century, with prime ministers and monarchs product in and out by western wind. The men who run Iran today, they’re old hands. They’ve been in the game for a minute. Rouhani was doing deals with Oliver North at the Tehran Hilton in the 1980s, so they know exactly what’s up. And as the Trump administration looks to put the finishing touches on killing the nuclear deal that the core of the D C establishment never wanted. As they try to gin up an Iranian opposition ahead of potential war, the Iranian government leans over and whispers to Iranians inside of Iran. Don’t think for a second that Trump has your best interests at heart. If he did, would he humiliate you with sanctions in a travel ban? Would he prevent you from visiting your family? And a lot of Iranians believe it, despite knowing full well that their government sucks because it’s the truth.
