Read the full transcript of Middle East Eye’s Editor in Chief David Hearst’s interview on The Big Picture Podcast with host Mohamed Hassan on “The Israel-Iran War Is More Dangerous Than We Imagine”, June 17, 2025.
The Path to War
MOHAMED HASSAN: Tehran and Tel Aviv are on fire. It is a war that many people tried desperately to avoid, while others were actively trying to ignite. Now that we’re here, what is it that Israel really wants to achieve? What options are there for Iran to de-escalate? And what will the United States do? Will it stop the war or will it join it?
Welcome to the Big Picture Podcast. My name is Mohamed Hassan, and today I am joined by Middle East Eye’s Editor in chief, David Hearst. David, welcome back to the show.
DAVID HEARST: Thank you very much for having me.
MOHAMED HASSAN: I don’t know where to begin. There’s so much to talk about. Things are moving at a breakneck speed. Let’s start with how do you explain how it is that we got to this point?
Netanyahu’s 40-Year Project
DAVID HEARST: So when I first met Benjamin Netanyahu, he was an opposition MP. He was out of power. It was the early 2000s. He was described by my host, Baikom, as an extremist. And the first thing he told me, and the first thing he would tell everyone is, we’ve got to bomb Iran. And Iran is, to use his words, the Mothership and Hezbollah and Hamas are its aircraft carriers.
And so this has been a project of Netanyahu’s that stretches all the way back to then and beyond. He said over the weekend that he has been waiting for this moment for 40 years in an address to the Israeli people. And there’s no doubt that he wants to expand the war aims from something that is really pretty focused, which is disabling Iran’s nuclear sites, to something which is much bigger, which is a complete destruction of Iran’s oil infrastructure, its hospital system, Tehran itself, all of these now, and regime change.
And so over the weekend, he got involved in a debate. Well, we can discuss whether this is a real debate or whether this is scripted in a sort of good cop, bad cop way.
MOHAMED HASSAN: With him and Trump.
The Trump-Netanyahu Dynamic
DAVID HEARST: With him and Trump. He got involved in this debate on television with Trump saying, letting it be known that he’d vetoed a hit on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. And Netanyahu is saying, well, Trump can have his opinion, he’s the leader of America, but I’m the leader of Israel, and we’ll form our own judgments. That is, he didn’t take that off the table.
And then he added that, a completely spurious claim which has got, as far as I can see, no evidence at all that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts on Trump in the last year. That is that Khamenei was a direct threat to Trump personally.
Trump is still trying to maintain that negotiations and Israeli bombardments can coexist, you know, contemporaneously, simultaneously with each other in exactly the same way as this sort of Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy employed with Hamas, that they had negotiations in Doha, but the war continued in Gaza. That’s been going on for some time. And to a lesser extent, it also happened when Hezbollah was negotiating a ceasefire in November last year. You had ongoing operations and very big hits by the Israeli army and you had a negotiation process going on in Beirut.
He thinks he can do the same thing with Iran, and Iran has ruled this out. So at the moment, what we’re doing is we’re in a period of each side trading blows with each other and finding out how far they are degrading the other side’s will to fight. And Trump just watching it.
And Trump will have a choice to make. Either he puts his weight behind, fully behind moves to de-escalate the crisis or, or he lets it continue or could eventually join in. Joining in is difficult with the new Congress in its present state. But if, for instance, Israel degraded Iran to the extent and with the speed with which it degraded Hezbollah, you could get to a scenario where Trump said, well, you see, I tried to give them a way out. I tried to give them an exit ramp. They wouldn’t take it. I warned them, they didn’t take it. I’m very sorry, but you make a bed and you lie on it.
And he could have that sort of. And I think he would get most of the backing of the big major European states. However, there are lots of other problems with that scenario, just letting the war run its course. And one of them is that the further down the line you go, that this now becomes an exercise in regime change. The more Iran will say, we’ve got nothing else to lose. We’re going to go for, we’re going to use all the levers at our disposal. We’re going to use the closure of the Straits of Hormuz or, and they’ve just said this now, they’ve threatened to pull out of the NPT. The NPT doesn’t cover Israel.
MOHAMED HASSAN: The Non Proliferation Treaty.
The Nuclear Threat
DAVID HEARST: The Non Proliferation Treaty doesn’t cover Israel, but it does cover Iran at the moment. And under it, Iran is obligated not to use, not to develop a nuclear weapon. And it is obligated to accept weapons inspections or inspections. Both of those it will now, it can now pull out of, which would be a precursor to developing a nuclear bomb.
Now, my argument, the argument I argued in today’s column, was that the more Iran’s back is to a wall, the more likely they are to develop a nuclear weapon with the fissile material that they’ve got. Now, you can bomb Natanz, you can try and bomb Fordo, which although the cascades of centrifuges are much, much deeper below ground, and it’s been built to withstand a six on Richter scale earthquake.
MOHAMED HASSAN: And this is where Israel wants the US to help them too.
DAVID HEARST: And that’s what Israel wants.
Just letting the war run its course absolutely plays into Netanyahu’s hands in terms of his ultimate goal is to dismantle Iran in the same way he dismantled Hezbollah, in the same way he degraded Hamas. And it isn’t simply the nuclear weapons which are or fissile material that’s on the table. It’s Iran as an independent state, it’s missiles that’s now also on the table.
So basically the deal on the table, if Iran did wave its hands in the air, did wave a white flag in the air, would be you can’t enrich uranium on your territory and you can’t have any means of defending yourself because you can’t have any rockets anymore. Now, which independent country is going to accept that, let alone a country that calls itself an Islamic republic.
Iran’s Failed Deterrence Strategy
MOHAMED HASSAN: So let’s talk about Iran then. And you wrote in your column about Iran being pushed further and further to seeing having a nuclear weapon as its only form of protection, as its only form of deterrence. And the last time we spoke on the show, it was a year ago. Now, it’s actually hard to believe how much has happened since then, but this was the first time that Israel really provoked a response from Iran, and it targeted its embassy in Syria, and then it of course, assassinated Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, inside of Tehran.
Both of these attacks seemed like they were designed to provoke a response from Iran. Netanyahu wanted Iran to get dragged into a war. Iran had this show of force. They sent 600 drones into the sky and moved them very slowly over the region. So to create a sense of.
DAVID HEARST: And told Israel, or told the world that they’d launched them.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Yes.
DAVID HEARST: So they gave everyone plenty of time to shoot them down.
MOHAMED HASSAN: But it was meant to be the spectacle. That said, you don’t want to mess with us. We’re a major serious military power. This is our deterrence. Don’t try this again. And it happened once and it happened twice. And now they seem to have lost any sense of military deterrence. Israel is striking them wherever they can and however they will, with appearing to have the backing of most Western leaders, including, of course, the United States.
Did Iran actually fundamentally miscalculate what was happening over the last year?
Iran’s Massive Intelligence Failures
DAVID HEARST: Well, there are two ways of looking at it. You can certainly say that Iran and the peoples closest to what the IRGC were thinking made a massive miscalculation. They thought their air defenses would hold up. They didn’t think that the most important targets were within the reach of Israeli bombers without a massive in-flight refueling system, which is also very vulnerable to missile attack. And neither of those assumptions turned out to be the case. And Iran’s skies are as open as Lebanon’s or Gaza’s or Syria’s to Israeli planes. As it turned out, that is a massive miscalculation.
The second one is that Israel appears to be able to strike the leadership of the IRGC and the nuclear scientists at will. And they’re continuing to do so. And I’m really puzzled as to how there are no serious counterintelligence efforts made by the IRGC. It’s a year, as you said. It’s a year. Roughly a year since Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an IRGC building with his bodyguard at a very specific time of the day when they just finished a meeting. And he was alone in his room. So not only did Israel know where Haniyeh was on which floor he was, but even the room.
MOHAMED HASSAN: This was hours after Iran had just sworn in their new president.
DAVID HEARST: That’s right. And basically nothing has been done to stop that level of detail going to a power with that level of force. If you consider, for instance, how it took the CIA nearly 10 years to track down Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, in Pakistan, you’re now got a situation where the entire leadership of Hezbollah and now the entire leadership of IRGC is just being picked off at will.
How has this happened? Why are everyone still in their own homes? Why haven’t they hidden all their assets? Why does Israel know where everyone is in real time? That’s a massive, massive intelligence failure and it hasn’t been addressed. So Israel’s got all its intelligence. It’s got the means to hit. It knows that Iran has never been weaker, therefore it’s now going in for the kill and it’s going for the jugular.
The real question is, what strategic reserves does Iran have? And here again, when we judge Iran, we go either from exaggerating its power, which I think we have been doing for much of the period since 2006 and the last big war in Lebanon, and Iran has exaggerated its power or believed it could establish a means of deterrence, mutually assured destruction with Israel. But we’ve also got a massive technology gap, and that technology gap at the moment is proving decisive.
However, like Russia, the West also has a habit of understating or misinterpreting Iran’s weakness. And we massively underestimated Putin’s power to recuperate against the most sophisticated Western weapons in Ukraine. And slowly, you know, inch by inch, Russia is gaining more territory and pushing back. And the same could happen in Iran if Russia decided to pile in on its side.
So another unknown question is what happens to the enriched uranium that has already been enriched and how would it be protected and will it be the precursor to a bomb? And at the moment, the warning of the NPT is a very, very clear warning of what Iran is thinking to protect itself. And it’s entirely logical that it does that.
Exactly the same process is at work in Russia. In fact, when I was a correspondent in Russia, I had endless briefings from people who really knew what they were talking about when it came to war gaming, nuclear war between the Soviet Union and America and then post-Soviet space. And they said, look, it’s very, very simple. We know our conventional forces are rubbish and we know that America, NATO forces could cut through them like a knife. We know they’re corrupt, so that makes us rely even more on our nuclear arsenal.
Exactly the same logic applies to Iran. Even though it doesn’t have a bomb yet, it must now be tempted to think the only way to get a bomb is to do it quickly. And therefore, if you’re actually interested in preventing the nuclearization not just of Iran, but of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, all the Gulf states of a real nuclear arms race, the only way out of this is a voluntary agreement of the JCPOA type or some form of guarantee that Iran’s nuclear enrichment is peaceful and it is inspected. But we’re miles away from that now and we are led by the nose by a messianic leader of Israel whose life’s ambition has been exactly the war that we’re now seeing.
Western Leadership’s Puzzling Response
MOHAMED HASSAN: And that to me is the most alarming aspect of this is that Israel and Netanyahu, to a certain extent, I feel like we have a good grasp on what his drives are, what his ambitions are, and what makes him take these decisions. What I find less understandable is the reaction that we saw from the rest of Western leadership. And you mentioned the JCPOA. These were the same countries that signed that deal with Obama to curb Iran’s nuclear program and then left those sanctions. And that was seen and agreed upon by most of Western Europe as well as the United States to be the most sound, the most rational way of bringing stability to that part of the world.
The Nuclear Dilemma and Western Hypocrisy
DAVID HEARST: But the sanctions were never lifted. And a major problem with going back to the table again, even if Iran agreed to the condition of not enriching its own uranium, which it won’t do now, but even if it did, and even if he said, fine, right, we’ll sign the deal on the table. Exactly. Trump will give you exactly what you want. Trump would not be in a position to lift those sanctions because it now requires a two thirds majority by Congress. And Congress would not lift those sanctions because there’d be completely under the sway of Netanyahu.
So even Joe Biden didn’t lift the sanctions that the previous Trump administration maximum pressure sanctions imposed. So it is France’s position, for instance, is one of the utmost hypocrisy when it comes to nuclear proliferation because it says we cannot have a Iranian nuclear program. And so it supports the war aims and it basically supports Trump. But France was the one that gave Israel its nuclear weapons in the first place. And Israel, everyone knows that Israel has got at least 200 warheads and no one talks about it.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Yeah.
DAVID HEARST: And when there was a serious.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Israel has never admitted officially that it has nuclear.
DAVID HEARST: No, but there was a serious attempt to actually say, let’s put these on the table and discuss the complete nuclearization. It was Amel Musa, the Egyptian Foreign minister, who did that. To his credit, everyone just laughed that off. But if you really wanted to stop a nuclear war or a nuclear exchange happening in the Middle East, Israel’s nukes have to be put on the table. Obviously, they’re not a member of the NPT and they’ve, as you say, they’ve never acknowledged that they have over 200 warheads or the submarines to deliver them.
So you’re in a position where there is no logic. And we’re asking of Iran something that we’re pushing Iran into absolute corner. We’re really pushing it into the sort of North Korean logic that the only thing that can guarantee its security from a fickle, untrustworthy west that constantly breaks the deals that Iran signed is to actually get a nuclear weapon itself.
The logic of now pushing full scale for a nuclear deterrent is becoming unassailable from Iran’s point of view. Whether or not you have an ideology that says death to Israel or a theology that says basically God is on your side and we are a religious state, you can put all of those questions to one side for Iran’s self preservation. If you have people who will dupe you into negotiations while knowing an attack is imminent, what incentive is there to go back to the negotiating table?
Europe’s Moral Collapse
MOHAMED HASSAN: This time last week we were looking at a Europe that had become more critical of Israel and Israel’s government and in particular the ongoing genocide in Gaza than at any time over the last two years. You had somebody like Emmanuel Macron who was going around actively lobbying other leaders to get behind him and Saudi Arabia’s UN push to recognize the state of Palestine.
He made a speech in which he said that if Europe doesn’t do this, if it doesn’t take action against Israel, then it risks losing credibility and it risks undermining the international rules based order. And then within hours of Israel launching its so called preemptive strike against Iran, all of their positions changed. And all of a sudden you had France, you had the UK, you had Germany, of course the US and others rallying behind Israel, rallying behind Netanyahu and condoning his attacks on Iran, this war that he has ignited.
What happened? What are these? The same people that have taken both of these positions, were they ever serious about protecting this rules based order and upholding their own credibility?
DAVID HEARST: They are so weak and so without a moral center of gravity that it’s easy for Israel to manipulate them by events. Macron has become chicken feed, not the leader of a great country. And before that, even if the conference had gone ahead, the UK probably would not have backed a Palestinian state because they would be bullied into it by Netanyahu saying, okay, we’re going to unilaterally announced the annexation of two thirds of the West Bank.
So they were just willing this declaration on so that they could then announce what they’ve already done, which is to annex West Bank. So Israel has got, or Netanyahu in particular has got a very shrewd understanding of exactly what a paper tiger Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are, and Trump that wavers from one reality TV announcement to another and not have even a credible line that would stop a major war taking place in the Gulf.
I think Netanyahu has read Europe’s weakness brilliantly, and he’s very confident that he can keep Trump on side while defying him. I mean, okay, now we can talk about is he really defying him, right? Or is this actually just a very clever good cop, bad cop routine?
Trump’s Deceptive Diplomacy
MOHAMED HASSAN: Well, I’m sure this is the exact question that Iran is asking themselves, is that this whole, these weeks of negotiations, this very public promise by Trump that he really wanted a deal and he wanted this to be part of his peacemaking legacy. Was it all smoke and mirrors, or has Israel figured out how to lead U.S. foreign policy by the nose?
DAVID HEARST: I think Israel has done exactly that. I think Trump’s playing around with negotiations allows him to say, look, I gave him every chance. It allows Israel to prepare secretly for a massive blow. He is continuing to supply that blow. There are no indications that he’s restraining Israel in any way in terms of the number of bombs they’re dropping or the quality of them or the missiles.
And in fact, the US are fully engaged on shooting down Iranian drones. So they’re fully engaged on Israel’s defense from an Iranian counterattack while doing nothing to restrain Israel. And the war aims, that is dismantling Iran’s capability to threaten Israel, are the same. Slightly different means, but exactly the same. So if Israel just carries on trading blows and degrades Iran, that’s, you know, Trump will have a big smile on his face.
The Gulf States’ Precarious Position
MOHAMED HASSAN: Sitting in the middle between Iran and Israel, geographically, but also politically are the Gulf states who just weeks ago hosted this extravagant welcome for Donald Trump poured almost a trillion dollars worth of investment into US tech companies.
DAVID HEARST: A trillion. It’s like 4.5 trillion, isn’t it?
MOHAMED HASSAN: Okay, I’ve got my numbers right. Of an insane amount of money. And it appeared that all of that was as a way to win Trump’s favor and loyalty. Right. And, you know, he had a huge smile on his face as he was leaving the region. It’s the happiest, I think, I’ve seen him in a long time. He was marveling at the marble and the jets and the red carpet and all of this kind of stuff.
And part of that also seemed like these Gulf states had figured out how to win Trump over without having to appease Israel, which always seemed to be the cost of doing business with the United States. Now they’re at a position that seems very precarious. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They don’t know how vulnerable they are. They have these military bases, these US Military bases that have protected them and now feel like a liability. Where are these states now?
DAVID HEARST: Where are.
MOHAMED HASSAN: What are they thinking and how are they assessing the situation?
DAVID HEARST: They must be crossing their fingers and they must be wondering whether the money they shelled out to Trump was actually good value for money, because Trump hasn’t protected them and he has endangered all the oil and gas traffic in the Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz is a passageway that deals with 21% of the world of the global supply of oil and gas, petroleum liquids, and that’s a huge quantity. And that is explicitly now being threatened by Iran.
MOHAMED HASSAN: It’s also their lifelines. All of these. All of these states.
DAVID HEARST: Yeah. Now they have much better relationships with Iran, and they built it up since Iran undoubtedly attacked Aramco four years ago and more now, actually 2019. 2019, yeah. Six years ago. And mine their ships as a way of getting deterrence. Saudi Arabia has allowed Iran now back into the Hajj again. They have come to an accommodation over the Houthis. And it was to protect that accommodation that Saudi Arabia persuaded Trump to stop bombing Ansar Allah in Yemen before his Riyadh conference.
And they must now be scratching their heads and saying, how on earth can we stop this before this becomes. Before Iran really does reach for the nuclear button or at least pulls all the levers at its disposal, and one of them must be stopping all oil and gas traffic out of the Gulf.
So they are obviously issuing quite strong statements. The Emirati statement over the weekend was very strong. They are absolutely all on side of a mediated stop the war as quickly as possible. But do they have a favor to call in? No, they don’t. They’ve just got all this money that they paid out, and they must be praying that this war stops very, very quickly, because the more the list of targets of the Israeli Air Force spreads, and it starts in a general bombing campaign of Tehran, which is what I believe we’ll see happen.
It’s certainly what Katz, the Israeli foreign Minister, has threatened over the weekend, that they will now start targeting Tehran’s population.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Said Tehran will burn.
The Iran-Iraq War Legacy
DAVID HEARST: Yeah. The more Iran will be thrown back into the sort of situation it was when it came under existential attack from Saddam Hussein. And it was from that point, just after the revolution, when they were attacked by Saddam Hussein. And they really didn’t have an army to fight back, and they really didn’t have the weapons to fight back. They had very old Second World War rifles that today’s policy, its enrichment program, but particularly its missile, strategic missile capability was born.
It was from the Iran Iraq war that the policy was born of establishing militias that could really fight Israel right next to its borders and have those militias stretch from the Mediterranean to the coast of, to the borders of Iran. And it was in that war that of course, Saddam Hussein had the absolute undivided backing of American technology, German technology companies provided him with a precursor for sarin gas and for mustard gas that he used on the battlefield.
And he had the great blessing of Ronald Reagan and his then bright young envoy called Donald Rumsfeld. And there are still people in Iran who are suffering from those gas attacks. They’re still veterans of that war who do it. And it left it, it was a very, very bloody episode. It took eight years for Iran to expel Saddam Hussein and they’ll never forget it. And that’s the crucible of Iran’s foreign policy and its reason for setting up the network which now appears to be much weaker if not dismantled.
MOHAMED HASSAN: And the Iran Iraq war, I think, is a very important touch point to look back on because it was, as you said, you know, Saddam Hussein went into that war with full backing from the west, who believed that they could use him to deteriorate and undermine and ideally collapse the Islamic regime in Iran.
DAVID HEARST: Just after the revolution, just after the.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Revolution, before they had even were able to get on their feet or prepare for an eight year long war. And it failed. And we are here now, 40 years later, with this regime that has survived a lot of hits from the outside, a lot of upheaval from within its borders, popular protests, popular attempts at uprisings, sabotage, all sorts of things. What is the likelihood? I mean, if they survived all of that, are they strong enough to survive what this could be?
The Strategic Depth Question
DAVID HEARST: That is the key question. And honestly, I can’t answer it. I don’t think anyone can, because you’re dealing with a completely new range of technologies and weapons which have been tried, systems which are tried, being tried out for the first time. Those systems can be deployed with total impunity and Western backing. There’s no break on Israel yet.
And assessing Iran’s strategic depth, which is what we’re talking about, is very, very difficult. The conventional wisdom is that Israel will not be able to break through the hundreds of meters of rock in which the cascades of enrichment centrifuges are buried in Fordow. But we’ve seen conventional wisdom being upended before.
The conventional wisdom is that Iran is a country of 97 million people being attacked by a country of 5 million people, and that it is a real country and a real state, unlike anything that Israel has fought since 1973. So Israel has purely been used to fighting civilian populations and insurgencies and militias. It’s never come face to face with a proper army and a proper state with its own missiles. And we’ll see how it copes with that.
The other unanswered question is, so two unanswered questions. How much punishment can Iran take, number one? Number two, how long can Israel keep it up? Because their population faces being in air raid shelters for not just one night or two nights, but for months on end? Israel’s economy is shot to pieces. There’s water war fatigue from the reservists. They have difficulty getting reservists for another stage of the campaign in Gaza, which is still carrying on.
How long can they keep up war on all fronts, which is now the recipe that Netanyahu has delivered. And at what time will they say, enough’s enough, we’re now going to sue for peace, which would involve kicking Netanyahu out of power and a new election and a new government. But what we’re not asking ourselves is how long can physically Israel keep this up? So we’re now in a situation where people trading blows, but neither side quite knows how tough the other side is.
The Iron Dome’s Limitations
MOHAMED HASSAN: Right. And because, I mean, a lot gets said about Israel’s Iron Dome technology, which has protected it this far from any kind of real fundamental damage from Iran’s missiles.
DAVID HEARST: But although, I mean, Israel is sustaining more damage now than at any time in the last two years, and this.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Is costing it so for it to replenish its Iron Dome. This is billions of dollars every single day that it is spending on these anti air missiles.
DAVID HEARST: Yes. And I mean, the other thing is that Ben Gurion airport is shut, Israeli airspace is shut, and that will be costing Israel untold millions of lost trade and lost income. How long can it keep on carrying on like that? That, again, these are unanswered questions.
So it’s now a question of, you know, they’ve just had the equivalent of Operation Barbarossa when Hitler attacked Stalin by surprise. And Russia had this massive strategic depth, although it lost a huge amount of its industrial output in the western half of Russia, but moved everything it had eastwards out of range of the Luftwaffe. Will Iran be able to do the same thing against a completely different technology which allows Israel to roam literally all over the airspace? And will it have that strategic depth just to keep on surviving and keep on functioning as a country? At war and fighting for its very survival.
Russia’s Dilemma After Syria
MOHAMED HASSAN: Let’s talk about Russia. I remember six months ago now, you and I were at the Doha Forum and it was a very consequential weekend because it was the weekend that Bashar Al Assad fell. And very quickly you saw how all of these kind of foreign delegates that were there were scrambling to try and make some sense of what was happening.
And at the heart of them was the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov. And I’ll never forget the look on his face during a one on one with an Al Jazeera reporter where he was asked about what on earth is happening in Syria right now, this kind of key proxy that Russia had spent so much time and effort trying to protect from falling. And he, and he looked over and said, I’d rather talk about Ukraine.
DAVID HEARST: Yes, why aren’t you asking me about Ukraine?
MOHAMED HASSAN: Yeah. And I wonder what Russia is thinking at this moment and what options they’re weighing up. Are they going to let Iran potentially fall or are they going to get involved and risk escalating this into something that might go beyond what they’re prepared for?
Iran’s Strategic Importance to Russia
DAVID HEARST: Well, when I was last in Tehran, a big delegation, Iranian delegation had just returned from Moscow with great smiles on their faces about all the trade that was just about to happen. I attended an Iranian conference of automobile manufacturers and they’d all just come back and received this fantastic welcome and lots and lots of contracts for car parts basically.
And we knew then that that developed not just into car parks, but into really big transfer of Iranian drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Something like 9,000 of them have been used in the last two years, according to the Ukrainians.
Now, is Russia going to treat the potential fall of Iran in the same way that it treated Bashar al Assad when basically shrugged their shoulders, as did indeed the IRGC, as did the Hezbollah. They all, when they realized that the Assad’s troops weren’t fighting and they were walking away, they walked off as well pragmatic. But that was the end of that. And now their tone to the people who ousted Bashar al Assad is very businesslike and they’ve done a deal to keep their two bases down.
These are the very same people they described as jihadis when Damascus was about to fall. And they then intervened and they said, had we not intervened, you would have had the Islamic State in control. It’s obviously not Islamic State, but it’s former Al Qaeda people in control. So it’s the very people they described as irredentists takfiri, jihadi extremists. They’re quite happy to deal with that.
In terms of Iran, I think their thinking will be very, very different and always was. Iran is vitally important for Russia geographically. It’s basically the whole of the southern Caucasus that it’s behind. It’s a very, very sensitive area for Russia. It’s always been part of the great game between the west and Russia. Who has got Iran?
If America recaptured Iran, Russia would be extremely vulnerable to attack from the south as well as from everywhere else. It would be exactly like return to the days of the Shah, when the relationship with Israel and the west was absolutely central to, you know, taking back the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. It would be really a return to those days. Will Russia allow that to happen?
MOHAMED HASSAN: No.
Netanyahu’s Decades-Long Strategy
DAVID HEARST: Now, the relationship between Putin and Netanyahu goes back a long way. And there was a time I can remember when Netanyahu flew by private jets secretly to Moscow and persuading Putin when the missiles were literally on the flatbed trucks, to not supply Iran with the latest generation of S-400s.
So if you look at the whole scenario, the attack on Iran has been decades in the making because it required Israel’s certain knowledge that it had not only the latest generation of bombers, but that Iran did not have the latest generation of air defense, which can only be supplied by China and now by Russia, and that they had a huge technological advantage. Now, putting that jigsaw in place took decades.
MOHAMED HASSAN: It was a life’s work, as you described.
DAVID HEARST: This has been taken. So he’s not going to send suddenly now say, oh, mistake, I’m now going to retreat. There’s nowhere for Netanyahu to retreat domestically. He can’t retreat. He has to. And if you notice this, each war, one closes down, another war opens up.
So at the very point at which Gaza was coming, possibly to some sort of solution, he opened up a new war with Lebanon and expanded with Hezbollah and expanded it. Hezbollah just traded. Initially, they just traded far in the Shebaa farms, but it quickly ballooned out and out and out and became more and more as each side traded blows. Israel said, you see, this is a war about the whole affecting the whole of the north of Israel. Therefore, we’re going to invade.
When that closes down and there’s a ceasefire, Syria starts up. When Syria comes to some sort of deal with Israel again, another power that did everything to not fight a war with Israel, even though Israel just bombed the Syrian navy and its air force out of existence as soon as that settles down, there’s a war with Iran.
So Israel has consciously moved from one war to another, finishing or trying to finish each foe off at a time. And the question, the real big question now is, is Iran a bridge too far? And I can’t answer that question. I don’t think we can until it actually happens. Or will it have the strategic depth to just keep going and to reply? And as it does so, the pressure on Netanyahu domestically will increase.
Iran’s Desperate Options
MOHAMED HASSAN: Because what are the stakes here, not only for Iran, but for the region if it continues to have its back pressed more and more against the wall and it runs out of options to continue defending itself from these attacks? What does it look to do if it gets desperate, if it becomes existential for the Iranian government to keep itself.
DAVID HEARST: From it develops a bomb, it closes the Straits of Hormuz, it goes to Russia and says, we helped you in Ukraine, you’ve got to help us against Israel. And there’s a very, at the moment, Russia is basically strongly on the side of negotiation and de escalation. But if it gets to the stage where it’s about to lose Tehran, that calculation might change. But those are the three things that immediately come to mind. There are probably many more.
The Collapse of the Rules-Based Order
MOHAMED HASSAN: And I guess my final question is if we imagine, if we think about the last two years and what has been happening in Gaza and what Israel has been navigating internationally in terms of public opinion, in terms of legal challenges, in terms of Western backing, there has been this question about the rules based order, about international human rights, about the structure that we, at least on paper, believe that we had lived in for the last half a century.
And there has been a lot to undermine that by allowing Israel to continue as it has. And now we’re at a point where there doesn’t really seem to be any opposition at all diplomatically, politically, economically to Israel and to Netanyahu pursuing this war against Iran.
The Generational Shift in Global Opinion
DAVID HEARST: But there’s huge opposition on the streets, there’s huge opposition in public opinion. Israel’s lost a generation of supporters in America. Anyone who turns on the telly and starts the clock of looking at the Middle East in the last two years will be anti Israel. Anyone.
So what we’ve got is a generation of politicians that are unrepresentative of a massive change. Israel and Gaza. And the Palestinian cause has become the number one global human rights issue in exactly the same way that ending apartheid in South Africa was so many years ago. I think it’s bigger than that now.
So Israel has lost global public opinion. It hasn’t yet lost the leadership of the representatives of all Western powers. It’s lost the Global South, it’s lost Brazil, it’s lost Africa, it’s lost China and it’s lost Russia. That’s quite a lot of the world. It’s got India, but that’s quite a lot of the world to say that. And that one would have thought would have over time, a huge effect on the status quo that allows, that gives Israel complete punitive action.
The Battle for International Justice
And there are battles everywhere. There’s a battle. We’ve been covering that battle in the Hague, in the ICC, where Israel has absolutely tried to pervert the course of international justice with pressure on Kareem Khan, the British KC and prosecutor who is trying to serve two warrants on Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and serve more warrants on other Israeli ministers like Smotrich and Ben Gvir.
They’re absolutely involved in threats, in open threats to the ICC. So if we say we need an international court of justice to try the likes of Muammar Gaddafi or Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army or Omar Al Bashir of former President of Sudan, how can we possibly maintain, as Lindsey Graham so delicately put it, this is a court for Africans only. It’s unsustainable.
And I think basically we’re seeing the last generation of Western leader who gives Israel that blanket support. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the west turns into an enemy for Israel, but I think the era of impunity for Israel historically is at an end. But you’re seeing a very long tail end of that impunity, which is all about European guilt for the Holocaust.
But we’re moving to a post Holocaust generation where those arguments now no longer apply. And if anyone talks about the Holocaust, they’ll say, well, what did you do in Gaza?
The Collapse of the Rules-Based Order
But the other process that is happening here is that while Israel is getting stronger and stronger, simply militarily stronger and stronger, and is now using all the arms at its disposal in a way that is completely unhindered and unchained and is being supported. It’s being supported by Britain now sending RAF jets over to the area. They’re probably also shooting down drones. They did the last time. We don’t know what they’re doing now, but they could easily be shooting down drones, the Iranian drones, to protect Israel.
And you know, British involvement could be actually quite overt if the Straits of Hormuz did actually close, because they could say this is a British interest and we’re going to put our boots on the ground to stop it.
So I think, you know, the other thing that is happening is that as Western powers argue the unarguable, argue the unsustainable, while it is so obvious that Israel has driven a sort of D9 bulldozer through a rules based system, it’s impossible to argue now that Israel is a force for good in the world. Put crudely, you’re seeing the end of the Western rules based order or the shrinking of it, it will not apply much beyond anywhere else.
And so the next time the west has to appeal to anyone outside it to say, oh, support us because it’s the right thing to do, people will say why? Why should we support you? The sort of America first nationalism and the other nationalisms that are going on in Europe will lead us aid to governments that are all far right because the Macrons of this world or the Starmers of this world will lose to the far right eventually because the economy, over the economy. Trump is endangering the global economy.
And we won’t have at the end of it any props or any international system because it has been weakened. I mean, routinely the UN argue that the Gaza war should be stopped on humanitarian grounds. And routinely it is completely ignored. It’s now become just a talking shop. It has very, there’s no power. The UN has got absolutely no power now in Gaza. And once it had a huge say and a huge moral voice.
But if you don’t have the Western leaders who are willing to back it up, you’ve got no UN and we should really look at this because we will need the UN at some point because our power will decline and China’s will increase. How can we then go to the UN and say stop what China’s doing. We won’t be able to do that anymore. So it’s desperately short sighted policy. It has, it is so obviously wrong, it can’t be defended. And it is the cynical tail end of a colonial era that is passing and declining.
Trump’s New World Order
MOHAMED HASSAN: And it seems that Donald Trump, and we’re only four months into his second term, it seems that he is in a lot of ways heralding something new or actually something old, an old way of power, an old way of leadership. And in a very, very short amount of time, you saw a lot of European leaders go, not just European leaders, a lot of world leaders go from being cynical and oppositional to him to falling in line and finding ways to appease him and, and talk to him and speak honeyed words into his ear to get his attention.
And you have this situation that is unfolding very dramatically that he definitely has a hand in and he has no intention of trying to stop. And when we talk about the rules based order, when we talk about the ICC, which is now under sanction by the United States government, and the United Nations, which has been actively undermined and attacked by even Trump himself, who threatened at some point that he might defund the United Nations. Are we now entering, have we entered a new reality, a new way of doing things? And what does that look like?
The Chaos of Might Makes Right
DAVID HEARST: What does the world look like at the moment? It’s chaos. And might is right. I mean, every time one sort of thinks about or I’m asked about Trump, I immediately think about, well, hang on, what happened under Obama, what happened under Biden. This decline and this retreat happened over three, four presidencies. The whole history of intervention basically since Kosovo.
So you’re talking about the first quarter of the 21st century and the last few years of the last century have all been military defeats for NATO or the coalition of the willing. It’s not a single thing that’s gone right. And we’ve had very big economic shocks and could be about to have another one as well if America defaults on its historic debt.
So this decline and things going wrong for Western military projects or liberal interventionism has been happening over a number of presidencies. It’s not just Trump. Trump is an accelerant to a process that’s now been happening basically ever since, since 1999 when the ruble crashed and we suddenly said, who lost Russia? That’s the moment at which everything’s gone wrong for us.
So we’re dealing with a really quite. And China has grown through by default rather than by design. It’s fitting the spaces. It’s the only country that basically hasn’t fought a war in the last quarter of a century. And it’s booming from that point of view. Yes, it has an awful lot of the problems from COVID and also from the bubble of its real estate. This is still a country whose GDP is substantially lower than average GDP of the average American. It’s still a long way behind.
But it’s the only country that hasn’t fought a war and it’s the only country that’s currently arming and arming and arming and arming. And it will also want to ensure its oil supplies from the Gulf and from Iran. So Iran as a supply of oil to China and to Russia would be a very good excuse for both China and Russia to enter the war on Iran’s behalf, because it is a strategic interest. It’s not the major one, but it is a strategic interest.
The End of an Era
So what sort of world order are we entering? We’re certainly entering the decline or the end of the peace that settled over Europe for over half a century since the end of the Second World War. We’re entering an era where the west as such is in a far weaker position to determine other people, people’s choices, economic choices. A weakening of the dollar as a reserve currency, although it still is the global reserve currency and it’s replaced by other currencies.
Basically, the euro or Swiss franc is actually a safer reserve currency than the dollar at the moment. So certainly you can see that this is an end of an era. What you can’t see necessarily is what replaces it. And I mean, no, I don’t have rose tinted spectacles on when I think about Russia or certainly when I think about China. I don’t think necessarily what replaces this world order is going to be necessarily a better one. But it’s certainly going to be more chaotic.
And anyone in the middle of this, like particularly the Middle East and particularly the Gulf states, have got to think very carefully of how they hedge their bets. They cannot place their trust in America as their umbrella. They have to replace it with other things. And they may turn to China increasingly. The relationship between Saudi Arabia and China is actually really quite interesting because they’ve started to deal with each other not in dollars, but in other currencies. So long term, I see those relationships developing, particularly security relationship.
Now, you can argue that all of these will actually force America to see that following Netanyahu blindly down the footpath that he has so carefully laid for America and for Trump is not in America’s best interest. But so far, that hasn’t happened. It’d be interesting to monitor in the next few days and weeks the opinion of Republican senators in the Congress because that might give us the first indication of second thoughts about following Israel into regime change in Tehran for all the reasons we’ve been talking about for the last hour.
MOHAMED HASSAN: David Hearst, it’s always a pleasure.
DAVID HEARST: Thank you.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Thank you. We’ll keep an eye on what’s happening. I’m sure there’ll be many surprises in the days to come. And yeah, again, thank you for being here.
DAVID HEARST: Thank you for having me.
MOHAMED HASSAN: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Big Picture. And a big thank you to Middle East Eye Editor in Chief David Hearst for being our guest today. You could read his column by going to our website at MiddleEastEye.net as always, you can listen to all of our episodes in audio format. Wherever you get your podcast from, please leave your thoughts in the comments below. Tell us how you felt about this conversation, what you think about the war that is unfolding between Iran and Israel. And as always, my name is Mohamed Hassan.
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