Ep 191: Mark Dubowitz on Iran and the Trump Administration
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and host of The Iran Breakdown podcast, joins the show to discuss the Iranian nuclear program
Aaron MacLean:
Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He's also the host of a really interesting podcast called The Iran Breakdown, unsurprisingly about US-Iran relations, Iranian statecraft, covers extensively issues like the Iranian nuclear program, which is our subject for today. Mark, thank you for coming back to School of War.
Mark Dubowitz:
Thank you so much, Aaron. Great to be here.
Aaron MacLean:
Can we go back in time a bit? I want to come up, we're recording this here on Monday, April the 21st, and we're going to put this episode up right away because there's a lot happening right now on this issue and a lot of contact between the Trump administration and the Iranians on the future of the Iranian nuclear program. But before we get up to that, when did the Iranians start working on a nuclear program? Why did they start working on a nuclear program, and how has the American attitude towards all of this evolved over time?
Mark Dubowitz:
So Iran has been working on a nuclear program for decades. Actually during the time of the Shah, in fact, they had a research reactor and the United States actually was instrumental in supporting that. Atoms for Peace, I believe, was the initiative, and this was about nuclear research and ultimately about civilian nuclear energy. When, after the revolution and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini came in, initially, he didn't move forward on a nuclear program, but as the years went on, the regime decided to commit itself to a expansive nuclear program. And so they've been working on it for decades, and the nuclear weapons aspects of this became apparent to all probably 20, 30 years ago. In fact, it was the invasion of Iraq by the United States that stalled the Islamic Republic's nuclear weapons initiative. They were so afraid that they were next, that they suspended enrichment.
They were negotiating with the Europeans and they actually suspended their AMAD program, which was their program to develop actual nuclear warheads. They didn't dismantle it, but they moved it really underground so that it would not be detectable by U.S. intelligence or Israeli intelligence. And so they've moved forward on this program over the past number of decades, and I think it's fair to say, and the Israeli Prime Minister just said this recently that, were it not for Israeli assassinations and destruction of centrifuges and the activities of the Mossad and the IDF, it is fair to say that Iran would already have a nuclear weapon today.
Aaron MacLean:
What is the evidence for the weaponization dimension of the nuclear program? The Iranians, of course, I've seen and heard them say on numerous occasions that they're a modern country and modern countries can develop different kinds of energy resources and nuclear power is something that modern countries can have, and there are all sorts of legitimate uses for nuclear power that don't involve nuclear weapons. I'm pretty sure, didn't the Ayatollah issue some sort of fatwa at some point saying that nuclear weapons are bad? What's the evidence for the claim that you just made that a nuclear weapon has been a part of the purpose of the nuclear program in Iran for some time?
Mark Dubowitz:
So there's compelling evidence. First and foremost, there are dozens of countries that have civilian nuclear programs, but they don't have enrichment of uranium or they don't have reprocessing of plutonium. They actually buy their fuel rods to power their nuclear reactors from abroad. And most of those countries are U.S. allies. We've actually established something called The Nonproliferation Gold Standard where these countries are expected to sign up to no enrichment, no reprocessing in exchange for U.S. nuclear assistance and financing. And indeed, the UAE and South Korea and a number of other countries have signed onto that gold standard. The Iranians have the Iran standard. The Iran standard is they have a significant enrichment capability right now, and I'm sure we'll talk about the technical details of that. So it's a country that doesn't need enrichment capability, has it, and one has to ask why?
Well, the second piece of evidence is that Iran has enriched up to 60% of its enrichment capability. Sixty percent, there are no peaceful uses for 60%. You could make the case that at a lower level of enrichment, which is 3.67%, that's for civilian nuclear energy. You may be able to even make the case that at 20% you need that enriched material for a research reactor. But 60% is only for military purposes, and indeed 60%, and not to get your listeners confused with all of these percentages, but 60% is 97% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. So they effectively have weapons-grade uranium and they have the capabilities to produce it.
The third piece of evidence is that Iran is engaged in actual weaponization activities. I mentioned this AMAD program that was suspended after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Mossad, actually in a daring raid into a Tehran warehouse during the Trump administration, first term Trump, discovered a significant archive of information that the Iranians had retained about how to build warheads. And indeed, during the Biden administration, it became evident that Iran had begun preliminary activities towards weaponization, computer modeling and metallurgy work, all of which was highly suggestive of nuclear weaponization work. It's worth noting, by the way, just on computer modeling, that computer modeling was defined in the 2015 Obama Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as weaponization work. In fact, the United States hasn't actually actively tested our nuclear warheads in many, many years. We test through computer modeling. So all of this has been, again, highly suggestive of a nuclear weapons program.
Aaron MacLean:
Can I ask a really basic question? Because so much of the diplomatic context or substance of diplomacy here involves these percentages of enrichment and highly technical questions, what is enrichment? What is being enriched and to what end? And why do these percentages matter? Just as a technical or scientific matter, what are we talking about here?
Mark Dubowitz:
The physics of this is that, in order to develop a nuclear warhead, you either need highly enriched or weapons-grade uranium, or you need to reprocess plutonium in order to create a plutonium warhead. And this is really taking uranium from a gaseous state into an enriched state and then being able to take that enriched uranium and fashion it into a nuclear warhead or into a crude nuclear device. The uranium is the fissile material required to produce the nuclear weapon. Without the fissile material, again, either enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium, you can't actually have the nuclear chain reaction that would produce a nuclear explosion. That's in simple terms.
Aaron MacLean:
And the uranium, it comes out of the ground. You can find uranium out there in mines all over the world. And then there's a series of processes, which I guess we were developing during World War II. This is the kind of stuff that was going on in places like Tennessee to transform it into this state where then you could blow it up, essentially. But I guess what I'm trying to drive towards is, how do you untangle the process that leads to the weapon from other kinds of uses of uranium, for example, to generate power?
Mark Dubowitz:
It's very much focused on how enriched the uranium is. So you put the uranium through centrifuges. These centrifuges are designed in cascades and they essentially take the uranium from its very low level where you mine it, you convert it, and then you enrich it, and you enrich it to 3.67%. That's what you need for enriched material to power a civilian nuclear program. If you go to 20%, then that's what you need for a research reactor. And research reactors are used for a variety of activities including medical activities. Then if you take it to 60%, well that's actually for nuclear-powered submarines. Iranians don't have nuclear-powered submarines. So the 60% is, again, a stone's throw away from weapons-grade uranium, which is at 90%.
But even though 60% to 90% sounds like a long way to go, in fact, it's a very short hop from 60 to 90, because effectively at 60% you've done 97% of what you need for weapons-grade uranium. Once you have weapons-grade uranium, now you have the fissile material to fashion that into a nuclear warhead, affix that to a missile for delivery, or actually you can fashion it into the kind of crude nuclear device that we used in World War II that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Aaron MacLean:
So one last technical question and then we'll come back to the question of what's been going on between the United States and Iran. Just because you get the fissile material that you need, the weaponized material, you're not done, right? There's the question of how to actually fashion a device, whether it's something crude or a sophisticated modern warhead. Speak, if you would, about the principal challenges associated with that. What is the level of technical ability required to produce an actual item that goes bang?
Mark Dubowitz:
Without going into the complicated physics of this, and the physics are very complicated in terms of trigger mechanisms and implosion devices, the fact that I think your listeners need to know is that Iran has those technical skills. Iran has nuclear weapons scientists who have the ability to develop warheads. And in fact, Iran, as I said, has had these plans for over 20 years now, and these plans, again, were suspended in 2003, the Iraq invasion. The archive showing these plans was discovered by Mossad during the first Trump administration, and it's clear that Iran has at least a few dozen nuclear weapons scientists with the capabilities to do this. Iran is actually a technologically very sophisticated country with very good technical universities, and without a doubt the skills required to do the full A to Z on nuclear weapons advancement.
Aaron MacLean:
So this is now, this moment that we are in right now with these tense negotiations and the Israelis seemingly intent on some kind of strike, we've been at crisis points like this in the past. I recall living through what seemed like an extended period of crisis in the Obama administration. I know there were also discussions during the Bush administration. What happened the last time that Washington and Tehran, in a period of tension, came together, negotiated and came up with some kind of agreement as they did under President Obama to satisfy as best they could both Iranian and American strategic goals? What led into the JCPOA, as it was called at the time, and what were its consequences?
Mark Dubowitz:
So what led into the JCPOA in 2015 was an interim agreement called The Joint Plan of Action, the JPOA, that was signed in 2013 between the Obama administration and Iran and was negotiated by Jake Sullivan, who was President Biden's National Security Advisor, then was I believe chief of staff to Hillary Clinton. Bill Burns, who was then working at the State Department, who then became CIA director, and Burns and Sullivan flew off to Oman and negotiated with the Iranians this interim agreement. And they did something very, very important, which had profound consequences for negotiations two years later and indeed negotiations today. And that is that Sullivan and Burns surrendered on the number one demand that Iran had, and that demand was that Iran wanted to retain the ability to enrich uranium. There had been about five UN Security Council resolutions that were calling on Iran to stop its enrichment capabilities and enrichment activities, and Burns and Sullivan flew off to Oman, negotiated with the Iranians, and actually, even at the beginning of the negotiations, not at the end of the negotiations, they surrendered on this key Iranian demand that Iran shall continue to enrich uranium.
They negotiated the JPOA, provided Iran with some sanctions relief, and it set the stage for then two years of quite painstaking negotiations with Iran in multiple cities, mostly in Europe, with Iran culminating in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is the 2015 Iran deal. Now, because they had already given up on enrichment, the Iranians came to the table and said, "Well, we're not only going to be satisfied with some limited enrichment, we're not going to be even satisfied with 500 centrifuges enriching at 3.67%," which I think was the initial U.S. offer. "We want to have expansive enrichment, we want to have an industrial size enrichment capability." And so the final deal, the JCPOA, it allowed Iran, over a number of years, through the sunset provisions and sunset provisions where the restrictions were sunsetting or disappearing, Iran could begin to have an enrichment capability that would surpass 3.67% and it could install centrifuges that were not just first generation centrifuges, 500 simple centrifuges in some above ground facility.
No. Over the course of this deal, particularly culminating in the expiration of most of these restrictions in 2030, Iran could enrich to any level that it wanted. It could install thousands of advanced centrifuges, which were much more powerful engines that could enrich uranium at much faster speeds. You therefore needed a fewer number of them, Aaron, therefore, they were easier to hide in clandestine enrichment facilities, and Iran could build up this massive industrial size enrichment capability. All of that they could do legally under the agreement, and they could establish a legitimate massive nuclear program. By the way, these enrichment facilities are buried underground, so they're 40, 50, 60 meters underground, hardened by concrete and therefore very difficult to take out from the air, maybe even very difficult to take out from the ground. All of this was negotiated in the JCPOA, in the 2015 agreement, unlimited enrichment capability, massive size, thousands of advanced centrifuges buried underground in these enrichment facilities that were immunized against or increasingly immunized against U.S. or Israeli attack.
Aaron MacLean:
And all sanctioned by the JCPOA itself, one of the interesting aspects of which of course was that it was not a treaty. There was a complex legislative dimension to it that did not amount to a treaty, but because there was no treaty ratified by the Senate, President Trump, who famously called this a... I'm blanking on the exact words, but very bad deal. The worst deal in history.
Mark Dubowitz:
"The worst deal ever negotiated."
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. President Trump, to much criticism from some quarters in his first term, pulls out of the deal. And then what's the Trump One approach to this question, the Iran nuclear file?
Mark Dubowitz:
So President Trump called this the "worst deal ever negotiated," and I think, Aaron, rightly so. We focused on the nuclear physics side of this, but it's worth noting that there was another dimension to the deal, and that was sanctions relief. And based on our estimates, Iran was going to get over $1 trillion worth of sanctions relief, economic relief from U.S. and European sanctions as a result of this JCPOA. So Iran would not only emerge with this massive nuclear capability and patient pathways to nuclear weapons by waiting for restrictions to sunset, but many of the most powerful sanctions targeting Iran's economy would be lifted or suspended, and Iran would get over $1 trillion with which to fortify its economy against future economic pressure, but also to fund its malign activities throughout the region.
Aaron MacLean:
Let me ask you a first order strategic question. Why do we care so much about whether or not Iran has a nuclear weapon? I understand why, if you're a neighbor of Iran or a near neighbor of Iran, as is the case for Israel, why that would be a matter of pressing concern. We're not Saudi Arabia. We're not Israel. We're a bit further away. We have a massive nuclear arsenal. The notion that the Iranians would use their nuclear weapons to strike America or Americans, well, it seems like it would invite American retaliation that the Iranian regime, possibly the Iranian nation as a historical entity could not survive. So deterrence seems possible on some level. We've spent so much effort and we've run such risks over the years trying to keep an Iranian nuclear weapon from coming into existence. Why? Why not just accept that on some level that might be inevitable, and actually it's a pretty manageable situation?
Mark Dubowitz:
Well, first it's worth noting that, yes, Iran can reach the United States or has a plan to reach the United States with nuclear missiles. And Iran has an active intercontinental ballistic missile program, ICBMs are designed to carry nuclear warheads, not conventional warheads. And the ICBMs are not designed to hit Israel or Saudi Arabia or any of our allies in the Middle East because Iran has long-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles already in its inventory for those targets. The ICBM is designed for the American homeland. So first of all, there is an active program to develop a nuclear ICBM to threaten the United States. The second is multiple U.S. presidents dating back to Bill Clinton have committed that the United States will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, I think that shreds U.S. credibility with respect to the very deterrents that you're talking about.
Number three is, we are very concerned in the United States about nuclear proliferation not only through the Middle East, but through East Asia. And it is, I think, an almost certainty that if Iran develops nuclear weapons, that other countries in the Middle East and in East Asia will abandon this gold standard that I mentioned earlier, this pledge to have civilian nuclear energy without the ability to develop nuclear weapons on their soil, and they will move to an active nuclear weapons program. And they'll probably follow the Iran model, which is pretend that they've got civilian nuclear energy programs, but actually have the key capabilities that gives them breakout at a time of their choosing. And so the question is, as Americans, do we want a Middle East with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, and I could go on, all with active nuclear weapons programs, all on a hair trigger in a region that is, without nuclear weapons, volatile and on the brink of war at the best of times?
And also in East Asia where I think we're even more concerned strategically these days, there's no doubt in my mind that the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Taiwanese and others will start to distrust the U.S. nuclear umbrella that we have committed to defend them under. And with the Chinese threat rising in that region will move to nuclear weapons capabilities themselves. It's worth remembering, the Taiwanese actually gave up their nuclear weapons capability. The Japanese actually have a threshold capability. They have a civilian nuclear program with the fissile material for that program. Now, obviously, in Japanese fashion, it's very responsible. It's actively monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The South Koreans have pledged to this gold standard of having a civilian program but not having fissile material on their soil.
There's no doubt in my mind our East Asian allies would walk away from those commitments, develop their own nuclear weapons programs, and now we would have nuclear proliferation in East Asia. So in two of the most vital areas for us strategic interest, we would have multiple countries, both allies and adversaries with nuclear weapons programs. That's a multi-level deterrence conundrum that I'm not sure the United States could successively implement.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, to start to bring things up to the present moment, what do you take this administration's attitude to be towards proliferation? Because on the one hand, you do have President Trump, on the record, extremely hostile to the notion of an Iranian nuclear weapon. It was a major theme of his first term. He's reiterated that view multiple times over the last few weeks. We can talk about how much that view matches with the diplomatic strategy we see being pursued, but nevertheless, he's repeated it many times.
On the other hand, some of the rhetoric, some of the action that you hear leaking out of the Pentagon potentially... With the recent purges there, who knows what's actually going to come to pass? But you do see discussion of, for example, significant drawdown of American conventional forces in Europe. Well, that naturally leads the Europeans to look up and look around, if you're the Poles, for example, and to start to think about what nuclear weapons might mean for you. Whether your own, whether some sort of cooperation with European powers like the French who have nuclear weapons programs, all these things are sort of live conversations for our allies in a way that is unfamiliar.
So you see my point. On the one hand, the president's been pretty firm rhetorically and in action in his first term on the question of Iranian nuclear weapons. On the other hand, a lot of the basic logic of what we're talking about in terms of American strategy seems to push in a direction of acceptance of some level of proliferation. It's not clear to me how we would, for example, just to state an extreme scenario, which it's not at all clear to me we'd actually pursue it, but it's not clear to me how we walk away from NATO and then prevent further proliferation of nuclear weapons amongst current NATO members.
Mark Dubowitz:
That's right. So first of all, I think it's very important. I think President Trump has made it clear that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He also made it very clear that Iran's nuclear program should be dismantled. He said basically, "Let's do a deal and then the Iranians will blow up their own facilities under U.S. supervision." Mike Waltz, National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, other administration officials, Marco Rubio, have come out very clearly, "Iran must dismantle its program." Leading Republican senators, Senators Graham and Cotton and Cruz and others, as well as House Republicans have come out also very clearly, "Iran must dismantle its nuclear program."
And what they all mean by that, and they've been very clear, is that Iran must not be left with any ability to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on its soil. Because they understand, again what we've been talking about, that if you allow Iran to have any capability, then at any time Iran can dial up that capability and they can go from 3.67% to 90% very quickly, and they can use that to engage in continuous nuclear blackmail, and at some point they can develop a nuclear weapon. So the administration has made it very clear, "Iran must dismantle its nuclear program." And by the way, dismantle its strategic missile program. And we talked about the threat from ICBMs. Iran has had the largest ballistic missile inventory in the Middle East. Now, the Israelis did some serious damage to that in terms of their production capability. But as we learned last April and last October, Iran is capable of firing hundreds of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles at Israel and obviously at U.S. allies.
So Iran is in a position where they are facing a Trump administration that I think has been clear that they must dismantle the program. The problem is that you've had discordant voices, and the most important voice in this whole discussion that we haven't talked about is a gentleman named Steve Witkoff, who is Trump's lead negotiator, an old friend of his, very successful real estate magnate who has been appointed by Trump to negotiate the deal between Russia and Ukraine, the deal between Israel and Hamas, and now the deal between the United States and Iran. And Witkoff, publicly to the Wall Street Journal, Tucker Carlson's podcast and other forums has said, "Well, actually, maybe we should give the Iranians an enrichment capability, and then what we'll do is we'll verify that Iran has not actually produced a warhead." So again, we've talked about the problem of giving Iran that enrichment capability. Now, Witkoff had walked that back most recently and came out after some criticism publicly and maybe through conversations with Trump, one doesn't know, and said, "No, no, dismantlement has got to be the goal."
But if Steve Witkoff is willing to give enrichment to Iran, and if he thinks he can verify warhead development, well, we've got a major intelligence and political problem. And the intelligence problem is that Iran can build a warhead probably in a laboratory the size of a classroom, in a country that's territory is more than two and a half times the size of Texas. So imagine the U.S. and Israeli intelligence community being able to detect that a small group of scientists are working on a warhead in a laboratory the size of a classroom in this massive territory. If Steve Witkoff thinks that we can verify that, I think that's delusional.
And so, Trump administration is now coming out with different voices, different demands, and they seem, at least today, to be sticking to the dismantlement red line. But Aaron, I have to tell you, I'm very worried over the coming days and weeks that they will walk away from dismantlement. They will concede enrichment, they'll concede strategic missiles, and where we effectively will be is JCPOA 2.0, where Trump will literally be going back into the very deal that he walked away from seven years ago.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, you have to balance the statements that seem to walk back, permitting Iran from getting an enrichment capability in an ongoing fashion with what comes from the Iranian side of things. Now, we've had two sets of, well, they're sort of in-person meetings, right? They're largely quote, unquote "indirect", which seems like an odd thing, but maybe you could speak to that. But we had a meeting a week ago in the Middle East, and then you had a meeting just this past weekend in Rome, and I read in the Wall Street Journal, the lead Iranian negotiator sounding quite positive with the direction, at least what I saw, without citing specifically the sources of his positive view.
A week ago you had the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting... Or do you say that anymore? X-ing on X that negotiations, he's not super optimistic, but he's not super pessimistic. We'll see how it goes. Which I took as a vote of confidence from him. So you have a general atmosphere of reserved Iranian positivity about things, which I can't imagine if what the Americans are saying in the room is, "You got to burn all this stuff down as we watch it," is how they would react.
Mark Dubowitz:
There's a clear split screen here. First of all, I think you're exactly right. The fact that the lead negotiator Araghchi and the Supreme Leader Khamenei are sounding quite positive about the direction of negotiations suggests to me that, in the room, that Steve Witkoff has conceded on this most basic and important of Iranian demands, and that is enrichment. But the other side of the split screen, which I think is just worth reminding everybody, is that Iran has never been weaker probably since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. To be fair to Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns, to Obama in 2015, John Kerry, Wendy Sherman, who were the lead negotiators, at the time, Iran was weak economically, but Iran had its entire axis of resistance, or I call it the axis of misery, intact. They had Hezbollah, they had Hamas, they had the Shiite militias in Iraq, they had Assad controlling Syria, the most important Arab proxy in the land bridge from Iran to Lebanon to resupply Hezbollah.
They had their entire ballistic missile production capability intact. They had their strategic air defenses ringing the country. Those were the S-400s that the Russians had provided them. They were still in a pretty strong negotiating position when John Kerry and Wendy Sherman sat down with them in 2015 to conclude the JCPOA. Well, by the way, Aaron, all of that is gone. All of that is gone. The Iranians today have lost Hezbollah effectively, lost Hamas, the Iraqi Shiite militias are too afraid to take on the Israelis because they know what's going to happen to them. The United States is bombing the daylights out of the Houthis in Yemen. Israel destroyed Iran's strategic air defenses, and they reduced their ballistic missile production capability by 93%. That's where the Iranians are today. So it is actually interesting, and this is how they negotiate, and they're very, very savvy negotiators. They're projecting a lot of self-confidence, both publicly and I assume privately. But the reality is they're on their knees.
And we haven't even talked about the fact that the majority of Iranians despise the regime, have been on the streets in continuous protests since 2009. There's polls done and studies done, analysis that the majority, 70, 80% of Iranians oppose this regime. So they're facing internal dissent as well, and then load on top of that their economic situation, which is really dismal. So this is a very weak regime projecting confidence at the negotiating table, sticking to its red lines as it does very well, demanding that it retain its enrichment capabilities, its centrifuges, its material, its enrichment sites buried under mountains. And what is the explanation for that? I think you put your finger on it, and that is, and maybe that Steve Witkoff has already conceded this most important concession only after two weeks of negotiations.
Aaron MacLean:
It's hard for me to imagine, should negotiations, for whatever reason, break down, President Trump ordering American military action to take out the Iranian nuclear program. President Trump is always capable of surprising. He could always surprise us, but just based on his general attitudes and strategic statements over the years, that seems like an unlikely outcome to me. The more likely outcome would be some level of American permission or even at some level support, whether through aerial refueling or whatever, for an ally, specifically Israel, to strike the Iranians. And then you hear this option being on the table obviously is what gives force to the diplomacy. It's what theoretically ought to focus the Iranians on why a deal is in their interest. You hear two arguments really against permitting an Israeli strike or facilitating an Israeli strike, and I've heard from Israeli contacts, as have you many times, that they seem to think they're in some kind of window where if they're going to do this, it needs to be soon.
Argument one, it's futile. The nuclear program is hardened, it's fortified, it's spread out, it's underground. So even a really relentless campaign, which by the way, the longer you're up there, if you're talking about multiple nights, multiple weeks, you're talking about special operations type actions. A lot of this seemed to have been leaked to The New York Times not that long ago in terms of what Israeli plans might be about this kind of thing. But you don't need to be a professional military planner to think through some of this stuff. That's a risky operation and an expensive operation in and of itself, and at the end of the day, what are you really talking about here? Are we setting this thing back one year? Are we setting this thing back five years? What is the actual juice going to be as a consequence of the squeeze? And one argument is, not enough.
Argument two is, even if it is a strike led by the Israelis, it's reckless. It's going to drag us into another Middle Eastern war. And if there's one thing we know that President Trump is against, it's against endless Middle Eastern wars. You, I don't think, are persuaded by either of these arguments. Talk to us a bit about your response to both of them.
Mark Dubowitz:
I'm not persuaded by the arguments because I spent 20 years in this town sitting through multiple meetings with successive administrations and with policy experts who were always telling everybody that there was going to be World War III every time there was a question on the table about the application of U.S. or Israeli force. I heard that there was going to be World War III if a U.S. president killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC Quds Force, Iran's most dangerous and brilliant battlefield commander who was responsible for killing and maiming thousands of Americans in Iraq. And no U.S. president was willing to take him out. George W. Bush, Barack Obama not willing to do that. Donald Trump did. There were obviously a lot of people in town saying, "If you kill Qasem Soleimani, there was going to be World War III," because he was so important to Iran and so important and dear to the Supreme Leader that the Iranian response would be massive and we'd be engaged in a massive war.
Well, Donald Trump killed Qasem Soleimani, the Iranians lobbed some missiles with forewarning at a U.S. base in the Middle East. I don't want to minimize it, it did cause some injuries, but it certainly very quickly de-escalated. And Iran was very concerned that Donald Trump was going to go after the regime. I heard the same thing when Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, "If you withdraw from the agreement, the Iranians are going to massively escalate their nuclear program." And the massive escalation of that program, it would trigger a necessity for a military strike, and that would cause World War III. Well, it turned out that the Iranians didn't massively escalate their nuclear program after Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement. They, in fact, made a few incremental advances, very small. Then he killed Qasem Soleimani, then they froze their nuclear escalation for 11 months.
Then President Biden was elected, and Biden was elected on the promise that he'd abandon maximum pressure and start to engage in diplomacy with Iran and go back into the JCPOA. And then, only then, did Iran begin to massively escalate its nuclear program to 20%, to 60%, they enriched 84%. They started experimenting with uranium metal for a warhead. They started installing thousands of advanced centrifuges. And by the way, and then we had October 7th, and then we had Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and on and on. So all of that occurred because the Iranians perceived American weakness, not American strength. We heard these same arguments when Donald Trump decided to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, that this would trigger a massive crisis in the Middle East and street riots, and there would be riots all over the Middle East and angry Arabs would bring down our allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Bahrain and across the Middle East.
Well, that actually didn't happen. We heard that the Iranians were going to massively escalate to war when the Trump administration designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, which the Trump administration did, and there was minimal Iranian response. Now, all of these examples I'm giving under President Trump, there was that one example that occurred under President Biden for which Biden deserves no credit, but the Israelis do, which is that, while Hezbollah was attacking Israel, the Israelis began to escalate against the Iranians and they killed the top leadership of Hezbollah. They took out 80% of Hezbollah's missile capabilities, and then they killed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, who was probably the world's most dangerous terrorist after the late Qasem Soleimani. The Hezbollah reaction to that was to stand down. They are now afraid of Israeli military capabilities and Israeli deterrence. And of course, Aaron, you followed on your podcast the incredible operations by Mossad with the beepers and the walkie-talkies.
And by the way, the Israelis also took out a notorious terrorist, Haniya, in an IRGC safe house in Tehran, and the Iranian response was limited. So all of these predictions of "we're on the verge of World War III and escalation will only bring us to greater war," it turns out that escalation leads to de-escalation if the Iranians and their proxies fear American and Israeli power. So I hope I've addressed your one question. The second question is, well, how much damage could be done? Now, after the past year, I've also given up trying to predict anything because I think that the Israelis have demonstrated over the past year some pretty incredible and creative capabilities that nobody foresaw. And if I told you or your listeners a year ago that Israel would've basically severely degraded, if not in some cases destroyed Iran's axis of resistance or axis of misery in only a few months, taken out their strategic air defenses reduced their ballistic missile production capability by 93%, et cetera, et cetera, no one would've believed that at the time because the conventional assumptions were very different.
And I think conventional assumptions of what Israel can do to Iran's nuclear program may also be very different. They may indeed also be wrong, and that the Israelis have capabilities that we're not aware of, capabilities that they haven't been talking about. I always say that those who know, don't say, and those who say, don't know. And I think the past year of Israeli capabilities demonstrates the wisdom of that statement. So I think the Israelis could do much more damage to Iran's nuclear capabilities than conventional wisdom assumes. And I think the most important thing to understand about this regime is that, having lost their capabilities, even for a year or two, that is a devastating blow to the legitimacy of this regime. And if the Israelis and Americans were smart, they would match strikes against nuclear capabilities with strikes against leadership assets and military assets. And this is really an opportunity to do severe damage to the regime in Iran, which again, as I said, is weaker than it has ever been since the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Aaron MacLean:
What are you watching? What are you paying attention to as these negotiations continue to play out? I think we've got a technical level meeting coming up, and then a few days after that, another political level meeting. What are you monitoring and what do you think the scenarios are that either most concern you or most give you hope?
Mark Dubowitz:
So I'm monitoring the pace of meetings. The more meetings that are happening more quickly, the better. Because if the Iranian game plan is to stretch this out to trap the Trump administration in a series of protracted negotiations, they want to do this because, number one, they want to rebuild the very capabilities that I talked about that Israel has destroyed with Chinese and Russian assistance. They think the Chinese and Russians can help build up their, or rebuild their strategic air defenses, their ballistic missile production capability. By the way, some of the very sensitive equipment that Iran needs for warhead development was also destroyed in the October attack by Israel. So the Chinese and Russians can help the Iranians rebuild those capabilities the more time Iran has on the clock. So that's number one.
Number two, there's an important snapback that should occur before October. What the snapback is, it's a feature of the JCPOA, probably the only positive feature of the JCPOA in my estimation, that gave one of the members of the P5+1, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, the right to unilaterally snap back those UN sanctions that I spoke about earlier. And no one can veto that. No one can stop that. That ability to snap back those UN sanctions expires in October. And actually the mechanism to begin that snapback at the UN probably needs to begin in June.
So there's very little time to take advantage of that snapback. And by the way, that snapback is very important because it reestablishes the baseline of no enrichment as the international standard. And those UN resolutions also contain with them requirements for the international community, re: China and Russia and Europe, to impose economic sanctions and comply with U.S. economic sanctions. So it's a very important snapback mechanism. The Iranians want to run out that clock and make sure that that mechanism can't be leveraged. So I'm looking for the pace of talks to make sure that Iran is not running out the clock.
The second thing I'm looking for is that the Trump administration doesn't fall for a fatally flawed agreement. There are two fatally flawed agreements that they could fall for. One is the JCPOA. Again, it's just a rewarmed version of the JCPOA with a few bells and whistles that President Trump could call now "the greatest deal ever negotiated," submit that to the Senate for ratification as a treaty and browbeat Senate Republicans to support it and even get 14, 15 Democrats to support it because they'd rather have a deal than war. And so he gets his nuclear treaty. JCPOA 2.0 would be a devastating end to this. Probably as bad, if not worse, would be an interim agreement similar to the interim agreement that Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns did in 2013.
And this would be a freeze for freeze. You can imagine the Iranians say, "All right, well, we'll tell you what, we'll give the 60% enriched material to the Russians. So Vladimir Putin will take care of that for safekeeping. Maybe we'll even give you our 20% stockpile, but we're continuing enriching at 3.67%, and we're going to continue to have our advanced centrifuges installed, our facilities open, our missile production capabilities being rebuilt. And you're going to give us significant sanctions relief in return. We'll do that freeze for freeze, and that'll be a pause on our nuclear expansion in some areas in exchange for more time to negotiate a final agreement."
So for Iran, the more time is always important, and they can get them more time by stringing out negotiators or doing some kind of freeze for freeze interim agreement. I'm watching all of that. And then finally, as I said earlier, I'm watching whether the Trump administration adheres to its red line of full dismantlement or very quickly steps back from that, concedes to Iran that there will not be full dismantlement, and there will be the retention of enrichment capability and other key capabilities that Iran needs to turn on. Again, at the turn of a switch, they can crank up their nuclear program to nuclear weapons capability at a time of their choosing.
Aaron MacLean:
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of FDD, host of the podcast, The Iran Breakdown, which goes into what we've discussed here and other aspects of the Iranian regime's behavior in much greater detail. Thank you so much for coming on School of War.
Mark Dubowitz:
Thanks for having me, Aaron.
Aaron MacLean:
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