What is Next on the Iranian Front Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Serah: Okay, good afternoon and welcome to yet another insightful and informative EMET Webinar. Behnam Ben Taleblu is perhaps one of the foremost experts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He’s knowledgeable in all aspects of the Islamic regime. He’s the senior Director of the Foundation of Defense of Democracy’s Iran program, and has a rapier sharp intellect knowledge of Farsi and all aspects of the Islamic regimes, theological, military, nuclear, and geostrategic influences. He’s frequently called upon for his expert analysis and opinion. Benham has testified before the US Congress, the Canadian Parliament, and the British House of Commons, and has frequently been quoted in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Fox News, the Associated Press, [inaudible] press, Politico, Axios among many others.

He has contributed articles and co-authored articles for the Wall Street Journal, foreign Affairs, foreign Policy, Politico Europe, Fox News, the Hill, War on the Rocks, Newsweek, and the National Interest. Benham has appeared on a variety of broadcast programs, including the PBS News Hour, BBC News, Fox News, CNN International CBS News, C-SPAN, France 24 and Deutsche Welle. Benham, this morning Newsweek published an article with satellite photos provided by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, revealing that the Islamic Republic has stepped up construction in the… I hope I’m pronouncing this right. Pikas Mountain Region, just South of the Natanz nuclear facility, that was heavily damaged in last June’s war.

The satellite photos revealed the construction of a perimeter security wall and several tunnels extending to the East, West, and South of the site. Do you believe that the nuclear and missile defense programs, particularly in Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan that were damaged during this war, are going to be restored?

Benham: Sarah, it’s an absolute pleasure to be with you and friends and colleagues, new and old at EMET virtually. Thanks for the time today. I couldn’t think of a more timely topic even though there are so many crises going on right now. What’s next with Gaza? What’s next with Russia, Ukraine, the President’s trip to East Asia. There’s so many things really grabbing our lapels for political time and interest and attention, let alone developments in the Western Hemisphere, potentially even regime change in Venezuela, who knows what’s up? But this issue really is a lingering, moral, political and geostrategic threat that if we don’t get right, isn’t going to create the time and the capital and the resources to be freed up to deal with all of those other global crises.

Precisely what the Islamic Republic is up to with the remainder of its nuclear infrastructure is, and I believe would argue should be of key geostrategic and national security, and political import for Washington and its partners and allies. First, let me just say, make no mistake, the Islamic Republic of Iran today is not enriching uranium and any declared uranium enrichment facility. This is a historic win that we have not had in that country since April, 2006, so despite sanctions, despite cyber attacks, despite sabotage, despite assassinations, despite diplomacy, despite deals, the Islamic Republic of Iran had not stopped enriching uranium admittedly at various quantities, and admittedly at various rates and various levels of purity for a single day since April, 2006.

What the president strike that followed the Israeli strike in June, or what is popularly known as the twelve day war earlier this summer did, was that it essentially destroyed the facilities, that housed or enriched this al material, but the regime still has a high level of nuclear knowledge and a high level of intent, and you mentioned a mountain that people who had done geospatial work, particularly this open source firm ISIS, the good ISIS, the Institute for Science International Security had discovered a few years back called Pickax Mountains.
Sometimes you see the Persian transliteration of the name, Kūh-e Kolang, Pickax Mountain. Anyway, it’s supposed to be several times deeper and more kind of subterranean than Fordow, which I think was about ninety feet underground if memory serves me correctly.

While reportedly there hasn’t been the introduction of fissile material, the fear here is that these guys are tunneling several times deeper than Fordow to be able to try to find a way to make themselves a immune to a perspective, or another Israeli or American strike, so certainly their behavior when it comes to the nuclear program, they aren’t seemingly at least reportedly based on open source, based on what Intel has leaked out, based on satellite imagery that is publicly available. They haven’t gone to recoup what many analysts and many experts believe is the uranium that is entombed in those sites that the president struck at the end of the twelve day war, but they are continuing to kind of clear roads, build walls, support facilities, both in new and in old places, so this gives you a sign of their future nuclear intent as well.

Low probability high impact, some of this behavior could also be designed to engage in denial and deception, because they know that the world is looking at them, and perhaps God forbid, given that everything that was struck in the twelve day war, be it by Israel or America was a overt or a known or a declared nuclear site, God forbid, given the fact that the IAEA has been saying since February, 2021, that the places that produce the centrifuges don’t have continuous monitoring, perhaps what the Islamic Republic is doing by moving ground and looking at new facilities, is trying to detract satellite and intelligence and political attention away from perhaps potentially smaller covert secret sites.

This is worrisome because A, we don’t have continuity of knowledge on the centrifuge manufacturing as the IEA said, given everything that we saw since February, 2021, but B, most of these declared or known enrichment sites were once undeclared or unknown, or secret or covert enrichment sites, so I think it’s great that we have this level of satellite imagery and this level of publicly available information on what Iran is doing at 1 or 2 sites, but I think we certainly need more and we have to certainly put this information into context. The president delivered a crippling blow with his support to the Israeli military operations in the twelve day war, but we’re not out of the woodwork yet, and I would argue, so long as you have an Islamic Republic at the helm of that country, not only are you going to have an arsonist in the region.

You’re going to have a government that is interested in pursuing these destabilizing weapons through all of these covert means possible, so the President has significantly handicapped them, but what you just reported about CSIS and previously ISIS imagery tells you about their intent, and that still is the dangerous part.

Serah: Right. All right. Last Thursday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Administration, said it was his opinion that, “scientific knowledge cannot be destroyed.” and right now he also said on Thursday, “Last June, we witnessed unbelievable attacks on Iran’s nuclear site. The JCPOA, which was under IAEA supervision, was gradually abandoned leading to a series of confrontations. We are now trying to rebuild trust because without inspections trust cannot be restored.” As you just said, since February of 2021, the IAEA has not been allowed in, do you have any idea how long it might take the Iranians to rebuild? And I know they have just shoed[?] President Trump’s offer to negotiate further with them.

Benham: Sure, so there’s several critical components to unpacking that question, beginning with the end about rebuilding. It is my view that what really pushed the Israelis in the Americans over the edge was that the Islamic Republic wasn’t just playing with the fissile material, wasn’t just enriching at high voles and high rates and high quantities and stockpiling this material, but that there was something of a move towards the technologies and the capabilities that would be relevant towards weaponizing this material. There were reports last summer I think twice in Axios that actually talk about the Islamic Republic borderline coming close to activities that at least you could say on a good day had dual use purposes.

Some of this activity by the way was prohibited by section T of the JCPOA. The question there always was how do you enforce the regulations that existed, or the parameters of what does and doesn’t constitute weaponization in a portion of a deal like the JCPOA that we saw in section T, but nonetheless the estimate was that it would really just be a matter of months, but the military strike that went after the facilities that house the fissile material, public available estimates back of the envelope calculation, puts the ability to get back to where they were right before the strike at a place of about 2 years. All of these timetables however, suppose or presuppose that there already isn’t urani outside of these facilities, or there isn’t material outside of IEA safeguards.

Or that right before the strike, or at some period during the twelve day war, there wasn’t any of this uranium, this fissile material moved out in canisters out of those facilities. Those are a lot of assumptions, so even though those timetables could seem long, there are reasons to be skeptical given how weighty those assumptions are. Any good policy maker is going to want to tread carefully here, rather than play to every single assumption, every good policy maker right now should be coming up with, contingency 1, contingency 2, contingency 3 for each and every one of those assumptions, if they are and if they are not true, so let’s just put that out there.

The next is what you mentioned about the IAE director general,and access more broadly. One reason perhaps and I’m taking a guess here, why we’re not hearing a heck of a lot about IAEA access, and again I’m guessing here, in Iran now. Why this lack of access, why this lack of even visiting sites that were struck, is not really moving America or is not really moving Israel, and the way that it used to move them politically at least, is because the benefits of the twelve day war. I think what that really showed was the level of intel penetration of Iran’s national security, state of their nuclear enterprise and of their military enterprise.

Eerily now in a world where international organizations used to provide the intelligence, or used to provide the information that was just as germane to policymakers as it was to intelligence people, as it was to just lay nuclear nerds as it was to other member states that had no animosity or no enmity with the Islamic Republic. Now that international organization element is out and really the crisis has been kicked up or ratcheted up to eleven, and it is a real national security crisis, and actually this is an event we’re going to be having at FED quite soon, but the parallels between Iraq after ’91 and Iran today, I do believe given this kind of lack of IEA access, this lack of international organization access, the over reliance on intelligence can put us not in an Iraq 2003 scenario, but in an Iraq post ’91 scenario.

How do we learn the lessons then when we had a UN mandate when there were supposed to be inspectors, when the enemy was defeated on the battlefield, how do we take the lessons then towards a previous oil rich, anti-American, anti-Israeli regime that was pursuing WMD, that was exporting terror, that was firing ballistic missiles in Israel? How do we turn the lessons then and transpose them onto today? And my fear is that if credible and competent people like Director General Grossi are still in 2025 talking about trust, when former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif way back in 2017, said that the JCPOA wasn’t built on trust, my fear is then that we have not learned the lessons.

Serah: Right, so earlier this month, great Britain, France, and Germany invoked the snapback sanctions. First of all, how has this affected the value of the Real?

Benham: This has had a significant effect on the value of the Real, obviously when you’re talking about inflation in Iran, sanctions is a driver but so is just general mismanagement and the mismanagement is so magnified and the country’s economic situation is so precarious and so volatile that the slightest news, breaking news about negotiations or breaking news about a potential, a new round of sanctions or breaking news about the possibility of military conflict growing or diminishing, makes the value of the Real relative to the US dollar on the free market much, much, much more volatile than your average commodity, so if you’re looking at fluctuations within the Real, and you overlay that with like fluctuations hypothetically with the price of brand crude, you see a drastically different picture.

Certainly you’ve had over 1 million reals to the US dollar for quite some time now. That was a major spike driven by the expectation and then the reality of snapback. It’s always actually very interesting though to remember that snapback despite containing economic sanctions, is primarily a political and legal tool. No doubt it has economic effects as we’re seeing in the market today, but where it does the heavy weight, where it does the heavy lifting is in law and in politics and policy, because it allows America not to have to spend all the time in the world that it used to have to do during Trump term 1, to convince everybody in the world that X,Y, Z behavior from the Islamic Republic of Iran is a threat to international peace and security.

It now has brought back all of the UN resolutions that actually codified and enshrined that, and they codified and enshrined that with previous Russian and Chinese votes in support of the American position.

Serah: Wow. I was thinking that the snapback sanctions might have brought the Islamic Republic closer to China, which they purchased a lot of Iranian oil and closer to Russia, where they have purchased a lot of drones. Has that moved the needle at all? And are these relationships simply transactional to counter American interests, or are they real?

Benham: Well, you’re right to note the increased reliance of the Islamic Republic on Russia and China post snapback, but that is not a story brought to us by snapback entirely. We’re about 2 generations now from the mid 2000s, or at least late ’90s. There has been a push by the hardest of the hard liners in Iran to actually embrace the major elements of the growing anti-American order, to be able to contest the West and enshrine their authoritarian regime at home, and this is ironic because not just because the Iranian population is a pretty nationalistic population, but because one of the kind of founding revolutionary slogans of the Islamic Republic is neither East nor West Islamic Republic, which kind of means neither capitalism nor communism, neither Eastern bloc nor Western bloc.

In this sense, the supreme leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who is currently the longest serving autocrat in the modern Middle East to date, his supreme leadership has been co-terminus with this push towards trying to embrace the East, and that has been met with mixed results by America’s great power competitors like Russia, like China. They’ve always kept these Islam Republic at a distance, but empowered it whenever necessary to be able to suck America and its partners back into cycles of violence, to not be able to pivot and address larger, extra regional challenges by China and by Russia, so yes, it is an access of aggressors, yes, it is an axis of authoritarians, yes, it is an axis of anti-American revisionist powers.

While there are mixed results to how much military integration, how much economic integration we see between these states, there are key political choices being made by Xi, by Putin and by Khomeini, to increasingly rely on one another, even if that’s an unbalanced reliance like Iran post twelve day war on these countries, which never really bailed it out.

Serah: Okay, so we all remember what happened to the 22 year old Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, as well as to so many others within the Women Life Freedom movement in September of 2022. Yet this weekend I think something relatively upbeat happened when women were appearing at a rock concert without their hijab, with their hair flowing, swinging and swaying to rock music. We know that there’s still Article 638 of the Islamic Penal code, which maintains the mandatory hijab laws and the morality police. Do you think that the Islamic Republic might be relaxing their attitude towards women?

Benham: This is authoritarianism and I’m going to grab the third rail here. Terrorism and the randomness of authoritarianism and the Randomness of terrorism in full view. I too Sarah saw that video. It essentially was, you could call it like an un unlicensed, impromptu street performance in a pretty youthful hip part of town,in Tehran. The country’s capital that did yes indeed, as you mentioned, have plenty of hijab list, women mixed in with men in like a small circle around the band that was performing a western rock song, and no doubt that snapshot was true, but that snapshot did not tell you the larger story because there has been this back and forth, this back and forth and this randomness with which some things go unpunished and in some sections of town go unpunished, and in some things go over punished or in some parts of town become over enforced.

The Islamic Republic understands the fragility of the position it’s in. It just got humiliated in rapid succession by America and Israel, and it’s looking to not have domestic pressure be correlated with foreign pressure because that’s the ultimate insult, but it’s still too much of an ideological regime to give up on these tenants like death to America, like death to Israel, and certainly when it comes to gender segregation and gender apartheid and western norms and values, and and cultural things, in the Islamic Republic, they’re certainly not going to be giving up on that anytime soon, so this mixed track record of tolerating in the moment acts of resistance, but being able to expost punish that.

Whether that is text messages that actually notify women based on street cameras when they’re not wearing their hijab, or liens or fines based on their property, like their houses or their automobiles, if they’re seen driving without the proper head covering, there is this implementation, or move towards using the electronic and the national security state to carry out phase 2 of this repression. Whereas phase 1 required too much manpower that could stoke and actually drive the next round of anti regime protest against them, so unfortunately I don’t see this as a sign of reform. I see these as selective signs of the regime having an elite conversation within itself about the future of the hijab for sure, but that’s a conversation among an increasingly narrow pool of elites.

It’s not a conversation influenced by or participated in when it comes to the vast masses of the anti regime population. This is a quest for the regime and the next oligarchic more kleptocratic generation of the regime, positioning themselves to not get put on the chopping block by the anti regime population, in a situation where there may be another protest or another war, or an unforeseen event that takes out the country’s aging 86 year old supreme leader who is perhaps popularly most identified as being behind many of the enforcement of these norms and of these laws, and trying to kind of position themselves to say, I’m the proponents of letting off a little bit of steam in society, whereas they continue to have their kleptocratic oligarchic hold on society, on the state, and on the economy.

I would be very, very careful, and I have been exercising a lot of caution with friends and colleagues here in Washington around the world, who have been amplifying those images because that is particularly designed to give a false hope to the West about the potential for reform still from within. Whereas in reality this is at best selective and stylistic, rather than sustained and substantive.

Serah: Okay. This week you published a very I think extremely well-written article in Providence Magazine, discussing the alleged support, for Christianity within the regime. With images of the Virgin Mary flooding, the internet of a newly opened metro station. Can you just elucidate the regime’s relationship to Christianity and to other religions including Sunni Muslims, Jews, so Australians and Bahai in particular?

Benham: Absolutely, and thank you for the kind notes on the piece, which I co-wrote with a colleague at FDD, Bridget Tomi, who’s been covering a lot of things in nextdoor Iraq as well, because this weird model of embracing Christianity but fighting Christians or making life harder for ordinary Christians in really the cradle of Christianity, which is the ancient near East, has been part and parcel of the Islamic Republic, for lack of a better word, using Christianity as a han shield to deflect pressure, from what otherwise still essentially remains an authoritarian kleptocratic and Islamist enterprise. No doubt Iran is different socially and societally from many of its Sunni Arab neighbors, and that tolerance that you may see in society is not because of the state.

It is actually in spite of the state and when you do bring the state into this, you actually disaggregate that tolerance, disaggregate that pluralism, and then you get those fragmentation or balkanization of the state’s ethnic and particularly religious minorities, to the point where that they’re pitted against each other. There are groups of recognized religious minorities and unrecognized religious minorities, recognized religious minorities are afforded representation in Iran’s parliament. However, in an authoritarian system, being afforded representation in Parliament is really more akin to functioning as a Potemkin village, giving legitimacy to a regime that actually doesn’t have representation by foreign of the people, so there are different kinds of Christians, Armenian and Assyrian Christians that have seats in the Parliament.

As well as Jews, as well as Zoroastrians, but to think that Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians receive in terms of the view from the state equal treatment, is fundamentally not true when it comes to what is the official faith or the official creed of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is the Khomeini’s interpretation of twelve Usli Shiism, basically 1 sect of Islam, and in this world even printing the Bible at home in an unauthorized fashion is prohibited. Any kind of online church group, any kind of non-state sanctioned church activity is immediately linked to some kind of Zionist espionage sale. You’ve had years and years and years of State Department as well as independent human rights reporting on the repression of Christian groups.

Certainly there are deeply integrated Christian groups within Iran, like Armenian Christians who have been there for centuries, or Assyrians who have been there for over 2 millennia, but they are made to feel now like ordinary Iranians are made to feel, which is strangers in their own home because of this religious discrimination, and because of a very narrow pool of what is and isn’t state sanctioned activity, and the regime is now bolding and magnifying this state sanctioned activity to catch the eye of… I don’t want to use the word isolationist or Christian nationalists, but folks more interested in the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who have foreign policy views that tend to correlate somewhere between realism, nationalism, and isolationism. In a bid to say we are fundamentally different than the Sunni Jihad Swarm, that you see in the Middle East brought to you by ISIS.

Look, the Supreme leader spends Christmas holidays sometimes with Christian martyrs and their families from the Iran, Iraq war, and look, there’s a recently inaugurated metro station in honor of the Virgin Mary, but when you just scratch at the surface a little bit, these things are facades. These are attempts to grapple onto the tolerance within society and make it manifest for political benefit of the state, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Just earlier today, Ali Ajani[?], the head of the new Supreme Defense Council, former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, a millionaire, political military elite and heavyweight in the Islamic Republic, tweeted at the mayor of Tehran, congratulating him for producing that Virgin Mary Metro station for the murals, and for just engaging in what he literally said was a PR exercise.

These folks are not interested in bettering the life of Christians, and again the cradle of Christianity which is the ancient near East. These folks are not interested in the values that have helped move the Christendom and help propel civilization in the West. These folks are interested in using what’s left of their Christian populations as human shields to avoid more fallen policy pressure.

Serah: I think you mentioned in your article that more people are converting in secret to Christianity in Iran. What is the punishment in the Islamic Republic’s penal code if you’re caught converting?

Benham: Well, it has to be proven, but in general across the board, proselytization is heavily, heavily, heavily punished and conversion even on some of the more lay or lax interpretation of Sharia, which admittedly the Islamic Republic filtered Sharia in a very weird way through its own kind of hybrid authoritarian system, is death. Conversion is called apostasy, and apostasy is punishable by debt. It really just how they choose to carry out the state sanctioned death penalty, which by the way there have been years of internal and external religious and non-religious campaigns to repeal the death penalty, particularly for these sorts of things.

The thing that catches the eye of the West a lot is these Islam republics overuse of the death penalty for drug enforcement, but there is also attempts to use that and the fear of the death penalty to prevent proselytization, and to prevent conversion and on the backend use it against them, so that is a powerful ideological deterrent that the regime has, but nonetheless it hasn’t stopped the growth of those underground churches. It hasn’t stopped the growth of one of the fastest growing religions in these underground kind of churches, which is a Protestant form of Christianity.

Serah: How old is Khomeini and does he have a successor?

Benham: Khomeini is believed to be 86 or 87 years old, he’s the longest serving autocrat in the Middle East. He’s the second Supreme leader in a regime that is 46 years old. He does not have a designated successor. There is a process by which the next supreme leader is chosen, but the trend is that the supreme leader is chosen in a way that is not concurrent necessarily with the law and the politics of what is prescribed, which is the use of the assembly of experts, so it’s totally possible that we have lots of instability headed our way. I think if you asked me this question 10, 15 years ago, given the elite that we’re still alive in the Islamic Republic and the ruptured, but still not as badly ruptured state society ties, I think that the debt of Khomeini would not have been the inflection point that it certainly will be today.

I’ve said this at a conference publicly a little while ago, but have been messaging this publicly and privately for a while now, that what Washington needs to prepare for is the possibility of evolution, devolution or revolution, as well as mediocrity, limping along. Evolution in reality, or more likely evolution in style only kind of by an Islamic Republic 2.0, that is going to try to give up a bit more selectively on some of those ideational pillars to keep its oligarchic and kleptocratic hold particularly on the economy. The next is of course is devolution because it’s the Middle East, things can always get worse not better, and it’s the more militarization and the coarsening[?] of the state post Khomeini, and then there’s the revolution where if the actual social forces on the streets, civil society, diaspora, expatriates, whatever, you want to call it.

That is actually pushing for representative government and secular government, and a nationalist government and again a democratic government, that would be revolution. Those are 3 different pathways, and what I say to policy makers is, be prepared for things that start on one pathway but pivot and go in the other direction, because these are 3 non-linear pathways of change, and then the fourth thing I say to be aware of is, this is also the middle least mediocrity can limp along. You can still have the same level of IRGC penetration of the state, and yet another mediocre religious figurehead as supreme leader, and people’s lives can continue to get worse not better, but I certainly think in the back of Khomeini’s mind who saw the previous transition and who saw what happened to the son of Ruhollah Khomeini, his name was Ahmed Khomeini.

Who played a huge role in the politics of the Iran, Iraq War, and really was something like a chief of staff to his father, particularly when his father was ill, given his father’s age and some of his father’s health crises. I think Khomeini may be looking to try to find a way to secure not just his regime survival but his family survival, and to those who say, oh, Benham, this is some quest for monarchic succession in the Islamic Republic would never entertain that. Well, the Islamic Republic is based on twelve Shiism and legitimacy, and twelve Shiism is a 100% patrilineal, so those folks who say that clearly have not looked at the ideology on which this regime is based.

Serah: Is there any way of knowing if there is a sizable minority or an oppositional group? And I know there’s a lot of disagreement within the Persian community as to who a successor might be.

Benham: There is no heir apparent in terms of opposition politics, particularly domestically because the Islamic Republic has been so good at fracturing them, but I will say this, I think right now the situation that we have, given the stranglehold on society, given the stranglehold on cyberspace that the regime have, particularly the security forces. You cannot get the next generation of political leadership on the ground, given the fact that any level of competence, any level of capability, any organizational talent, any charismatic authority will be snuffed out. That’s precisely why we haven’t had the cadres of leadership, and that’s precisely why the regime has been meeting round after round after round of protests with violence, with repression, with jailing, because they’re actually shaving off each generation of leadership.

I think we’re going to have to marry external and internal. I know that’s politically loaded but you’re going to have to be able to benefit from the diaspora, working in freer Western democratic societies to be able to find ways to support their loved ones and compatriots back in Iran, to be able to get a bridge in a post Islamic republic in a post Khomeini scenario, and there have been figures like the Crown Prince who have talked about this transitional period. You basically just need a beachhead or a bridgehead in a post Khomeini world, where the people can actually vote to get themselves into power, and this question is increasingly going to have to be in my view tied to the kind of foreign policy that the West is going to be entertaining, and in particular America and Israel.

Is going to be entertaining towards Tehran because if it’s just containment and hands off, well the guys with the guns will continue to win.

Benham: Okay, I know that Voice of America has almost depleted the Persian vehicle for informing the public. Are there any vehicles that we have to influence the Iranian population within Iran for regime change?

Benham: I would say this, there is no doubt that the population is looking for the next opportunity, but they’re looking to take that next opportunity in a way that is as safe to them as possible. Again, they understand that when they’re going onto the street, that is in a way a death sentence in a way, a death warrant, given the fact that they are cognizant of what happened in 2022, 2023 Women Life Freedom, what happened between 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, with the various iterations of anti regime protests, and even what happened in 2009, and even what happened in 1999. They are the intellectual and political heirs to that legacy of street protest that moved from reform now seeking wholesale change, wholesale revolution.

The good news is if one is looking at this through the messaging perspective, the Iranian people know who their oppressor is. Even at the height of US sanctions they’re saying our enemies here, they lie when they say it’s America. The Iranian people continue to chant because of the behavior of their government. Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life only for Iran. This is a chance started way back in 2009, and has featured in every single round of anti regime protests, so the Iranian people don’t need in my view, some foreign media organization that probably doesn’t function that well anyway, trying to tell them who their oppressor is. They know that on a granular scale better than anyone else this is not a question of knowledge.

This is the question of capability, so the US government needs to focus the time, the resources, the money on the capabilities that can actually empower the Iranians to actually take their country back, and for lack of a better word, make Iran great again. The low hanging fruit of those capabilities is VPN funding. It’s very disappointing that the Trump administration did not live up to both the rhetoric and the reality of what they were able to do in term 1 when it came to standing with the Iranian Street. Their VPN funding has not been granted or has not been given to potential VPN grantees. There’s lots of stories about this, unfortunately throughout 2025, that folks who are interested can read about.

If you are interested in having the Iranian population not have to use government sponsored ways to get onto the internet, which could have the government monitor what they’re doing on the internet, as well as their telecommunications with themselves and with the outside world, you should be supporting the very, very baseline bare minimum which is VPNs for Iranians. That’s baseline what should be done. Next, a lot of thoughts should be put into how to get satellite internet deeper Iran, how to explore direct to sell ways, how to basically puncture the national security state of the Islamic Republic in cyberspace. This needs funding, this needs support, this needs public private partnerships from the intel community, from Silicon Valley.

If Washington is not going to lift a finger here, it is essentially guaranteeing that the thing it’s going to have to lift a finger on is guns and bombs.

Serah: Right. Okay. Are there any women in the regime at all?

Benham: I use the word ornamental or instrental when they actually trot out women, sometimes there’s government spokespersons that are women. There have been in the past women VPs, but it’s a very, very select minority, that the minority is again being ornament or instrentalized, or even just today for example on Twitter, which I’m still very, very new to, I shared a video that first Iran International had shared about the regime, citing a young woman who said that she would lead the charge against Netanyahu, and that Iranian men would defend Iranian women at the hijab was a choice, so the select times they feel okay to empower women is when they basically get women by hook or by crook to basically amplify their messaging.

You don’t have a plethora of women in Iran’s political elite, even though you do have them but it’s certainly not a plethora, but you have a lot of TV anchors, again, wearing full chador, that are women. You’ve had vice presidents in the past that have been women. You’ve had government spokespersons currently that are women, but again I see this as ornamental and not, not really kind of pluralistic if you will. This is kind of designed to occupy a post.

Serah: Yes, and you said we are like 2 years away from the nuclear program reestablishing themselves. What about the missile program? I know during the twelve day war we knocked out a lot of their defensive missile shield.

Benham: Certainly I believe today the Islamic Republic has not been able to restore the coverage of its own airspace, with its own surface to air missiles. Put differently, if Israel or America was going to strike again, they still have a relatively free hand in terms of penetrating Iranian airspace. That problem has not been resolved with the Iranians, but I think the Iranians are not rushing to solve that problem. What they are rushing to solve is the offensive missile capability. They still have large amounts of ballistic missiles. I still believe they have the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. In the previous conflict it is believed that they expanded five hundred and seventy four ballistic missiles, and fired them at Israel, and then a much, much, much, much smaller portion at that satellite at the US space in Qatar to end the conflict.

The vast, vast, vast majority of that number fired toward Israel we believe. Israel reportedly had a success, a rate for interception at about 86%, but make no mistake, there are lots of videos of impact. Thankfully not a high number of casualties on the Israeli side, no military folks, but lots of damage particularly to universities, particularly places near defense centers but lots of residential complexes, hospitals even. They use cluster munitions. They understand that this is the capability that they have. Not drones, not terrorism, not cyber. This is their number 1 capability in another hot or kinetic conflict with Israel, so they are working to rebuild the missile production assembly lines.

You’ve had IRGC people say that we have such a kind of robust domestic industrial base, perhaps not on the scale of the Soviet Union, but they have such a robust domestic industrial base that there are things within Iranian industry that produce components for the missile program, that even the industry doesn’t know what is the ultimate end use or purpose for this technology, or this raw material for, so certainly that stuff is still continuing on steroids. They’re also going to be building up their tells their transporter erector launchers, because one of the successes of Israel’s strategy in the twelve day war was not just to defend against Iranian missiles, was not just to target Iranian missiles, but to go after the archer rather than the arrow to go after the launchers, and it is believed that Israel has halved Iran’s inventory of tells.

About four hundred, two hundred. This is a very rough open source estimate, but tells are basically just fancy trucks that can move and transport and launch missiles at the proper angle, and allow you to fuel some of these missiles on these flatbed trucks as well. This is what makes Iran’s missiles road mobile and can come in and out of tunnels and mountains and these kind of places, and that’s why the mobility of these systems is why they haven’t been old entirely targeted at once, because again they can go back to being hidden, so I believe that they’re working on that. I believe that they’re working on increasing the number, and I believe that they’re working on diversifying in terms of just the domestic industrial supply chain.

When you marry on things like potential support from Russia or China, that threat grows significantly, and it is the evolution of the missile program that I believe American and Israeli national security planners need to watch very closely, and need to develop red lines for. Thresholds for potential use of military force, because it’s very clear that the US is taking a victory lap now when it comes to nuclear, but the conflict could just as easily restart, not based on nuclear but based on missile, and that could actually drag the US in at round 2, 3, 4 of a conflict, so rather than be dragged in, best to work with your partner now about understanding what are the benchmarks, where is the threat, where is it headed, and what do we have to do politically, economically from an intelligence perspective?

Then lastly militarily to counter this. This is the time right now to create the timetable. This is what successful containment and rollback looks like. You have to maximize the win and grow the window afforded to you by the win. Otherwise the twelve day war is just going to be another blip in a larger cycle of violence.

Serah: Okay. Recently there seemed to have been a rockman between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Can you elucidate a little bit about this?

Benham: I think the fundamental driver of that is not a change in Saudi Arabia about the nature of the regime in Tehran, but a change in Saudi Arabia’s assessment of American resolve, to kind of get back into the fight earlier. Whether that was on the Houthis front for many years, whether that was on the JCPOA, whether that was on efficacy and great power competition, whether that was on actually being able to restrain and constrain Iran, and I think Saudi and also GCC hedging particularly the UAE toward Iran, again it’s not driven by love, is driven by an understanding that they live on the front lines of any conflict, and that’s why they are trying to on balance, be seen as engaging with the Islamic Republic in a bid to prevent them, particularly as some of them like the UAE and Bahrain have moved closer to the western camp via Israel post Abraham Accord normalization.

To prevent them from being the primary targets in another potential cycle of violence in the Middle East.
It’s why Saudi Arabia didn’t really sign on to anything to patrol the Red Sea, even though they have a major Red Sea. A Red Sea Maritime border throughout this entire crisis with the Houthis and the post October 7, middle East, because they hadn’t got their own separate ceasefire with the Houthis, so I think it’s multi varied, many reasons why the Saudis and the GCC are playing this game. I think politically it is a dangerous and damning, game because it ends up giving more legitimacy to the regime, and any kind of lack of coordination at least public between America and these partners is a net win for the Islamic Republic, but the proof is in the pudding for them.

2017, Trump first went to the region on his first foreign trip and you got max pressure, and these countries felt the crunch, and then 2025 Trump’s first trip to the region in his second term, and these countries all of them had been auditioning. Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, auditioning to be mediator. Oman for many rounds between the Americans and the Iranians, and that’s driven from a desire to insulate themselves from a potential conflict that could come and to potentially grow the power of their regional diplomacy, and those 2 forces coupled with their perception of American irresolution is driving these changes in Saudi and in GCC foreign policy behavior.

Serah: One quick last question. Is there any kind of economic inducement for the Islamic Republic to be close to Saudi Arabia?

Benham: From the best of my knowledge I don’t see any. I know that there have been attempts when trying to design a future, potential nuclear deal or regional enrichment consortium, to instead of America have to underwrite the sanctions relief to have the Saudis underwrite the sanctions relief. This stuff is entirely theoretical. I think the wins for the Islamic Republic by trying to get Saudi closer to it is entirely in the political realm thus far, not in the economic realm. Again, these are 2 major oil exporting countries that are structurally predisposed to compete rather than to collaborate. Nevermind the fact that one is pro-American and one is anti-American, so that question I think is still very, very far off, and again the Islamic Republic doesn’t really have a mercantile list or a foreign economic policy like some other status quo states in the region do.

Serah: Right. Okay, so I really cannot thank you enough, Benham for your vast, vast knowledge, and I want to remind all of your listeners, if you have not responded yet, please join us on November 19th for our Rays of Light in the Darkness Dinner, where we are going to be honoring Israeli Ambassador Yahel Lider, Senator John Federman, Hungarian Ambassador, and Leo Terrell from the Department of Justice and many, many others, and we’d be delighted to see you there, and I’m very, very delighted to be welcoming Benham to that event. Thank you very, very much.

Benham: Thank you. A real pleasure.

Serah: Real pleasure. Bye.

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