Juan Cole
Middle East Monitor / May 9, 2026
Here is my interview on the Kianistan podcast with Tafheem Kiani about the ongoing Israeli-US-Iran War.
Tafheem Kiani: Welcome to the Kanistan podcast. With us once again we have Professor Juan Cole. Professor Cole is a historian at the University of Michigan. He’s also an expert and a commentator on West Asia and South Asia. He’s also the editor-in-chief of Informed Comment, a very interesting, very important blog for information on West Asia. I would highly recommend it. Professor Cole can also speak more languages than I know the name of. So he’s an extraordinary person and there are so many topics I could talk to him about. But today we’ll try and concentrate on what’s going on in West Asia and this war in Iran. So, Professor, thank you so much for joining us.
Juan Cole: Thanks for having me, Tafheem.
Tafheem Kiani: Most welcome. Professor, to start with, I was just thinking the other day about South Asia, languages and history. In Pakistan there’s this little story that people tell. So there was a person who got arrested for some crime, got taken to the court, and the judge sentenced that you either get 100 lashes or you have to eat 100 onions. So the man thought, “Who wants to have lashes? I’ll go for the onions.” So he started eating onions and he got to like five and he thought he couldn’t do it anymore. So then he thought, “Okay, I’ll go for the lashes.” And then they gave him like 10 lashes and he thought, “Oh my god, this is really hard. I’ll go back to the onions.” So by the end he had taken 100 lashes and eaten 100 onions. And this kind of reminds me of what’s going on with Trump at the moment. What do you think?
Juan Cole: I compared Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to attempting to help a strangulation victim by putting a pillow over their face.
Tafheem Kiani: So true. So, Professor, where do we start before we go into the history of it? How do you see things as they stand now in what Trump is saying about this freedom mission? What do you think about this?
Juan Cole: We should clarify, because you’ll put this up on the internet, that we’re speaking on May 6th. And it’s a fast-moving story, so by the time people see it things may have changed. But what I would say overall is that Trump’s public pronouncements about Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the blockade shouldn’t be taken so seriously. He contradicts himself. He says things and then backs off. And I think some of it is clearly to move the American stock market, because he or proxies of himself seem to be playing the market with foreknowledge of the statements that he would make. And so he may not be setting policy. He may be simply trying to make a dollar by these pronouncements.
So that’s one thing to say — that we historians who study wars talk about the fog of war, that it’s very difficult while a war is going on to know exactly what’s happening on the battlefield. But in a sense, because of Trump’s personality and habits of thought and speech, we have a fog of policy. It’s very difficult to know what the policy is or why statements are being made.
When the Iranians took revenge on the United States and Israel for attacking them, they took the Persian Gulf and the Arab Gulf states hostage and therefore took the world’s energy hostage. This put Trump in an enormous bind, because although the United States hasn’t been so far badly hurt — and it’s technical as to why — Asia depends very heavily on Gulf petroleum. Petroleum is characterized by certain attributes. It can be light or heavy. It can be sweet or sour. The sour has a lot of sulphur and other contaminants that make it difficult to refine. But in Asia they have specialized in refining the kind of petroleum that comes out of the Gulf, which is typically heavier and more sour. And so they depend very heavily on Gulf petroleum. This is true throughout Asia, and so they are the first ones to suffer from this. But it’s all one world market of energy, and so the United States will also suffer if this goes on. So Trump is in a very difficult position, and people in Washington told him the way to deal with the Iranians is to cut them off.
Tafheem Kiani: That was remarkable. At that stage I was thinking this is the point where he has got that off-ramp that he’s looking for and maybe this is where he’s going to exit the whole scene and say the Europeans and the Asians can sort this out, because I don’t need the strait — you guys need it, you fix it. But somehow he started this whole new campaign and it’s kind of pulled him right back into it.
Juan Cole: I think he was intending to walk away, declare victory and go home, which would have been the best course for everybody. But he was convinced by Washington hawks or Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or somebody that Iran itself is fragile and depends heavily on exports of petroleum. And so if you blockaded Iranian exports from the Gulf, you could cause Iran to collapse within two weeks. Which is such a bizarre notion — and we’re going back and forth between the lashes and the onions — because during the actual kinetic conflict he had taken sanctions off Iran and off Russia because they were saying we need more oil in the market. So then from there to come and say now we’ll try this approach just shows how they don’t really have a plan. They have no plan.
And also this notion that Iran could be made to collapse by blockading the strait for two weeks was incorrect. It was a stupid idea. It came out of a think tank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is of course three lies. And it works on behalf of Netanyahu in Israel. So they are the ones who did these phony calculations.
Iran is a big country. It has a non-oil income as well. It has land bridges to Pakistan, to Central Asia, to Turkey. It has a railway to Beijing. So the idea that you can blockade its economy was foolish. And moreover, with regard to petroleum, there were already a lot of ships on the seas headed for China, and over the next few weeks they will arrive, offload, and China will pay. So the income from oil is continuing, because you would have to blockade the strait for months in order to actually cut off Iranian exports.
Tafheem Kiani: You mentioned that the idea of doing this blockade came from Netanyahu and his office, which is again remarkable — that even at this stage in the whole process he is still relying so much on intelligence from Israel rather than US intelligence, which would actually put US interests first.
Juan Cole: None of us can understand this phenomenon entirely. Netanyahu seems to have some sort of special influence with Trump. We have seen this before. He admires strong men. And in his first term it was clear that Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, had some sort of special influence with him. So it’s not a new phenomenon, but it is bizarre. And of course Trump depends heavily for his negotiations with Iran on his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his friend and real estate magnate Steve Witkoff. Both of whom John Mearsheimer has called Israel’s lawyers. They are essentially arguing on behalf of Netanyahu’s positions. And to the extent that although they are Trump’s favoured intermediaries, the Iranians say they don’t really want to meet with them.
Tafheem Kiani: Professor, you’ve also studied the Gulf War and the Iraq War extensively. For my audience — I was just mentioning to Professor Cole that in my research before this interview, I found out that President Bush actually asked for his intelligence people to gather background information and dirt on Professor Cole so that they could discredit his name, which is an indication of how influential his commentary is. So Professor, I’m just thinking about the fog of war and how there’s so little information coming out. No one knows how many people have died, no one knows actually what’s happening in Israel, and Iran is a kind of authoritarian state anyway. So if you compare what’s going on now in terms of the information coming out with what happened in the Iraq War, how do you compare and contrast?
Juan Cole: Well, all wars produce large amounts of propaganda. And if you’re an analyst who’s trying to cover the war in real time, as journalists and policy thinkers do, you have to wade through that propaganda and try to make your best estimate as to what the reality might be. It’s a very difficult task.
In the Iraq War it was different in part because when the Saddam Hussein Baathist government was overthrown by the Americans, Iraq fell into chaos. There was looting. There were guerilla groups running around blowing up things. And there was no stability. From an information point of view, the good thing about the chaos was that the internet was relatively free. The government wasn’t strong enough to control it. It was new in Iraq — there hadn’t been an internet until 2003 really. And so every political party, every town, even neighbourhoods put up websites and would often post news about what was happening in their town or even part of the town. So when a battle broke out between two militia factions, or between the militia factions and the Marines, I could actually go to local newspapers and see what the local reporters were reporting and get a fine texture of detail down to the neighbourhood level. This was incredible.
That cannot be done now. Iran is, as you say, highly controlled. They have an internet — it’s a kind of internet only for their country. They have cut off contact with the outside world. Cities like Kerman or Shiraz — free individuals can’t just post what’s going on locally. To some extent, you can get this kind of information on the Telegram app, and that’s less censored, but it’s an enormous amount of information to wade through. So I don’t feel that this war is as easily covered — even though I know Persian — as the Iraq War was from the Arabic sources.
And as you say, Israel has military censorship. We don’t have a firm idea of the kind of damage that was done to it. We know the Haifa refinery was hit, which must have been a damaging blow. We know that scientific institutes were hit, and military and intelligence targets were hit. But we don’t have a full accounting of the damage that was done to Israel. And there’s a recent report coming out from NBC on the extent of the damage to the US bases in the region, which apparently they’re all more or less destroyed. I had known this from Middle Eastern sources for some time, but now it’s being admitted finally in the US mainstream press. So there is a severe fog of war even with regard to the events in the Gulf itself — the ships that Iran has hit, and the damage done to the infrastructure of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. I’m not sure we have exact information. It appears that on May 5th the Iranians hit a pipeline that brought petroleum to Fujairah in the UAE. This was the UAE’s way of avoiding the Strait of Hormuz — it can put some of the oil through a pipeline down to the Arabian Sea. And so Iran was essentially closing off that option for the United Arab Emirates and forcing it to go through Iranian waters.
Tafheem Kiani: Strategically speaking that was quite a clever move. And also when we do talk about information coming out of Israel or not coming out of Israel and the USA, it is quite amazing that in today’s day and age, when it’s just so easy for anyone to pull out their camera and take pictures, how they have been able to suppress any images and information coming out. I know there’s talk about how there’s a five-year sentence for anyone who takes pictures of these hits and publishes them. But still, normally it’s so easy to just sneakily do these things. I’m surprised that not much is coming out. And also we know very little about the casualties among American troops, all the bases that were hit, the ships, and all of these things — because I’m thinking at some stage, if we find out how many casualties America has suffered and if the number is far greater than the Israeli casualties, I wonder how that would be perceived inside of America.
Juan Cole: I suspect that the number of US casualties is not high. And you know, over the long term it’s very difficult to hide these numbers because the US military has to call the families.
Tafheem Kiani: That’s what I was thinking. How do you hide that kind of information?
Juan Cole: You can only hide it for a short period of time. So there have been dozens of US woundings and deaths, but it’s not an enormous number. And the Israeli number is probably not that high either, because mostly the Iranian drones and ballistic missiles were intercepted. Towards the end, Israel was running out of interceptors and therefore the Iranians were able to get through to places like Dimona, where 33 people were killed or injured I think. And that was also because, when the Iranians destroyed the US bases, one of the purposes for doing that was to destroy the US radar installations which were tracking the incoming Iranian missiles and drones. So when the US ability to track was degraded, they started being able to get through to some Israeli targets. They did hit buildings in Tel Aviv and people were forced to sleep in bomb shelters. But I don’t think that the numbers of killed and wounded on the American and Israeli side are very large. What’s amazing is the ability of the Iranians to penetrate these defenses and to threaten the Israelis with escalating the amount of damage they were doing, because towards the end they were hitting things like the Haifa refinery, which is very serious.
And the American and Israeli side had thought going into the war that it would be a four-day war — that they would very quickly take out all of Iran’s ballistic missile launching capabilities, its drone launching capabilities, would take out the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and of the government. The defense minister was killed, who’s a civilian. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the clerical leader, was killed. And they thought the government would collapse and the military would collapse and then they could choose some IRGC general to deal with and have a government that was favourable to them. So this was a complete fantasy, and it was recognized as such by the Trump cabinet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the plan horse manure in the situation room after Netanyahu had spoken. But Trump listened to the Israeli side, and partly this is the influence of the Israel lobbies in the United States, which pour enormous amounts of money into electoral campaigns. Miriam Adelson, who’s a casino billionaire, gave over $100 million to Trump for his campaign and she very much wants this war. So Trump is caught in this nexus of pro-Israel propaganda and he fell for it.
Tafheem Kiani: I’m actually very surprised — because you mentioned that Netanyahu and Trump both thought this was going to be a four-day war. Trump I can understand. I was just watching a Channel 4 documentary earlier today and they were talking about how last year when Israel attacked Qatar, initially Trump was quite relaxed about it. Apparently he didn’t even know that there was a very important American military base in Qatar. So that’s how little knowledge he has of the area. But Israel is right in the middle of West Asia and Netanyahu, who has been in power for a long time — surely he would have known that Iran is not Iraq and it’s not like any Middle Eastern state where you take out the top leadership and everything below crumbles. Whether you like it or not, it’s a constitutional state and it has systems in place. Do you actually think that Netanyahu didn’t realize this, or do you think he led the Americans on just so that once the war starts it would be impossible to get out of until it’s all sorted out?
Juan Cole: Benjamin Netanyahu belongs to the Likud party, which is an outgrowth of what’s called revisionist Zionism. And the revisionist Zionists, going back to Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1930s, understood from the beginning that transplanting European Jews to Palestine would make them unwelcome. There would be resistance. The Palestinians weren’t going to just fold up and let the Jews take their property. And Jabotinsky’s response to this insight — which was a correct insight — was that the way to deal with them is to hit them, to hit them constantly, to hit them hard, until the point where they cry uncle, where they give up. And that is the foreign policy of the Likud party. If it meets opposition, it hits hard. And you can’t say that it’s been unsuccessful. There is a peace treaty between Jordan and Egypt and Israel. Jordan and Egypt threw in the towel. Even during the Gaza genocide, you didn’t hear a peep from them. Why? Because they fought wars with Israel and they lost, or in the case of 1973, it was fought to a draw. And the people there were tired of these wars, which were destructive and expensive. And the elites decided to throw in with the Americans, to get strategic rent from the Americans — simply to take a bribe. Basically the Egyptians get a billion and a half dollars a year to be quiet about Israel. So from Netanyahu’s point of view, the Jabotinsky method of hitting out constantly and hard in order to force Israel’s neighbours, force the Palestinians, into a posture of submission has been a great success. And so they thought they could do this to Iran.
Tafheem Kiani: Do you think they’ve hit a hard limit when it comes to Iran? Because after this war has ended, Iran’s still going to be there one way or the other. And I can’t see Trump or any other administration rushing back to another war against Iran anytime soon. And given that, I don’t think Israel on its own is in a position to confront Iran again. Do you think that is the case? And if that is true, is that likely to have a knock-on effect on what happens in Lebanon or what happens in Gaza and other places?
Juan Cole: We have to distinguish between what might be in the mind of Benjamin Netanyahu and then reality. In the mind of Benjamin Netanyahu, the inconclusive character of this 39-day war with Iran is a temporary setback. He’s already planning for the next war on Iran and thinks that they have learned things now that they can deploy in the next war, and they’ll up their game and this time they’ll win. Netanyahu’s whole career has been dedicated to this iron wall theory of hitting out and hitting hard against all opposition. And so he’s not going to change his mind about this approach.
The thing that Israeli policy is running into with regard to Iran that’s different from the previous episodes is that this time Iran took hostages. It has taken the world’s energy hostage. I know this is hitting Asia very hard. Restaurants have had to close in India because they don’t have cooking gas. Hundreds of petrol stations — gasoline stations we say in America — have closed in Bangladesh for lack of petroleum. The Eastern Refinery in Bangladesh has had to close. And South Korea only has three months of petrol left. They went around and asked Russia and Kazakhstan and non-Hormuz sources of petroleum, but they’ve only been able to gather about three months of supply, after which the South Korean economy — the world’s 10th largest — would simply drive off a cliff. The traffic would go to a standstill. There simply wouldn’t be petrol. And so the South Korean president has been engaged in a flame war with the Israeli government, attacking them for disregarding international humanitarian law, which of course forbids aggressive warfare of the sort that Israel launched on Iran, and has pointed out the brutality of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. This is unprecedented. These East Asian countries that are all allied with the United States, because they’re afraid of China and North Korea, typically parrot the US State Department’s talking points. They don’t step out of line. But South Korea has gone after Israel. And why? Because South Korea is facing an existential danger to its society and economy. Why? Because Israel attacked Iran.
So I think the Israelis are getting themselves in a position where the tactic of striking out hard and repeatedly against their enemies is running into diplomatic problems with other nations who are being harmed by this. And the Israelis could say, well, it’s the Iranians who took the energy hostage. That may be true, but they did it in response to Israel’s attack. And so Israel is the proximate cause of it. I think the next time Netanyahu wants to hit Iran, a US president would have to think very hard about joining in or even allowing it to happen, because the United States can simply tell Israel no — it’s the one that supplies them with the weapons and the intelligence that allows them to behave this way.
Tafheem Kiani: Very true. And it did take Israel like 40 years to convince an American president to go for it. So I don’t know how long it’s going to take in the future to convince them to try again.
Juan Cole: Well, we unfortunately have Trump with us for another two and a half years and he is — the polite way to put it — erratic. You cannot predict what he will do.
Tafheem Kiani: I was going to ask about that actually. So in American politics, if the Republicans do lose both houses in the midterm elections, how much is that likely to curtail Trump’s ability to wage wars, whether against Iran or Cuba or anywhere else?
Juan Cole: I think it will be a substantial brake on Trump’s aggressive foreign policy. I remember in 2006 when Bush lost the midterms, his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had to resign as a result. And so if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet a lot on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth still being there in November if the Democrats do well.
Tafheem Kiani: That would be such a good day to behold. And also, if that does happen politically, then maybe Trump will just use up the remainder of his time in office just battling court cases and litigations and everything.
Juan Cole: Or impeachment. And yes, if the Democrats get back in, it’s going to be very difficult for Trump to act unilaterally as he has been acting in the past year and a half.
Tafheem Kiani: Okay, that is something to look forward to and not too far off, Professor. Also, we were talking about UAE. Recently we’ve seen UAE leave OPEC. We’ve also heard about the possibility they hinted at of leaving other organizations such as the Arab League. And even before this war there was an increasing tension between UAE and Saudi Arabia, which now as a result of this war just seems like West Asia — at least the GCC countries — are splitting into two clear camps: one where Saudi Arabia is more closely aligned with Turkey and maybe Pakistan, and UAE would be closer to Israel and closer to India. How big a rift do you see this? And do you think UAE can afford that kind of a position going forward, where it’s antagonistic against both Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are two big powers in the region?
Juan Cole: Well, of course, the policy is being set by Muhammad bin Zayed, who is the leader of the Abu Dhabi Emirate but also the president of the United Arab Emirates as a country. And MBZ is a kind of militant secularist. He is actually responsible for a lot of Islamophobic propaganda in Europe and elsewhere. He hates populist Muslim movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and of course Khomeinism in Iran. Partly because these popular Muslim movements have a republican premise to them — that power should well up from the Muslim populace. And he’s a monarch. He doesn’t like that. And he sees them as potentially interfering with his hierarchical, pyramid-style relationship with the tribes of his country. And so he has invested enormous amounts of money and diplomacy in fighting Muslim fundamentalism throughout the region — in Libya, in Egypt, and in Yemen.
For a while, after King Salman came to power in 2015 and his son Muhammad bin Salman was made crown prince and emerged as the power behind the throne, MBS and MBZ were on the same page. They agreed about these things. They were very anti-Iran, very anti-Muslim Brotherhood. And it was a moment when they launched together their war on Yemen. MBS was young and I think impressionable and saw Muhammad bin Zayed as his kind of guru. And in the past five years that relationship has soured. In part it’s because of places like Yemen, where the United Arab Emirates backed a southern secessionist movement which came into conflict with the Saudi proxies in Yemen. It ended up that Saudi proxies and UAE proxies in Yemen were fighting each other rather than fighting the Houthis, which was the whole point of the proxies. And ultimately Muhammad bin Salman became so upset about this situation that he gave the UAE an ultimatum just to get out of Yemen. And the UAE didn’t fight him on this. And so the Southern Transitional Council has collapsed in Yemen and one of its leaders has had to flee. And Sudan is another place where the two countries are not on the same side.
And then when the Iran war broke out — when the Israelis and the United States attacked Iran and Iran adopted this tactic of involving the Arab Gulf states in the war by sending drones against them because they hosted US bases — the Iranians attacked beyond the US bases. They attacked these countries themselves. Apparently Muhammad bin Zayed wanted to fly his fancy American jet planes against Iran and bomb it: they hit Dubai, we’ll hit Tehran. But the United Arab Emirates is a postage stamp country. It has a million citizens and about nine million expatriates, many of them Indian and Pakistani. So the idea that these million UAE residents could take on a country of 92 million like Iran is ridiculous. He would have needed at least Saudi support for this plan to respond aggressively to the Iranians, which I’m sure he also wanted to coordinate with the Israelis. And apparently Muhammad bin Salman said no.
It’s quite remarkable because when he first came to power, Muhammad bin Salman had a reputation as a wild man.
Tafheem Kiani: Yes — what he did in Yemen, and like you said, kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, and the Khashoggi incident which was blamed on him. So that he should be emerging as the voice of calm reason is quite a remarkable development.
Juan Cole: And it’s not just him. I think the Gulf Cooperation Council countries — the six Arab Gulf countries which are oil and gas rich — understand, except for the UAE, that they’re going to have to live with the Iranians forever. And they don’t want a state of war with Iran, and they understand that if things go too far, Iran might start hitting their energy facilities, which it already has. It hit the Qatari natural gas facility and damaged 17% of it. And it did extensive damage to the oil facilities in Kuwait, including hitting the headquarters of the national oil company. Kuwait has exported no oil in the past month, which is the first time since the Gulf War of the early 1990s that this has happened.
So the rest of them understand that playing this game with Iran over the medium to long term is not a winning proposition. They don’t want to bomb Iran. And MBZ is very frustrated with them — he sees them as timid and as taking the wrong side. So I think it could be the end of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which was initially formed in the 1980s to face down Iran. But they have developed such different ideas about how you do that that the organization may not survive. And the Arab League, although it has allowed Egypt and Jordan back in, has a general bias against recognizing Israel. And MBZ really wants to be team USA, team Israel, as a way of maintaining his sovereignty in the Gulf. And the rest of the Arab world doesn’t think that — some of them disagree in principle with this notion, but others think it’s impractical.
Tafheem Kiani: I think you’re so right. I was surprised by Trump that he started this war to begin with, because I just couldn’t see any way this could end up well for Israel and America. There was no upside to it and there was lots of political downside for Trump. From an Israeli point of view I was not very surprised, because obviously it benefits them if they can make sure that America is with them in the war. But MBZ really surprises me, because it’s clear — and it’s clearer now than ever — how vulnerable they are. The desalination plants, the power plants, the oil processing plants — all of these things are completely vulnerable. They’re vulnerable not just to Iran. They could get attacks from Yemen and couldn’t defend against Yemen, let alone Iran. And with that in mind, given how everything is unfolding, you would think he would be pragmatic enough to understand and read the tea leaves and act accordingly. I’m also wondering — do you see any tensions within UAE among the different states that comprise it? I think I heard there was one or two that might be thinking of leaving UAE entirely.
Juan Cole: There’s a rumour circulating on the internet — I have no way of verifying it — that the Qasimi ruling family in Sharjah may secede from the UAE. There are seven emirates, as you say, and the Qasimis are very close to the Saudis. On the other hand, Sharjah doesn’t have oil. Abu Dhabi has the oil, and so the rest of the emirates are pretty dependent on Abu Dhabi economically. And so I don’t know whether Sharjah could replace the income it gets from Abu Dhabi’s oil with some kind of emolument from Saudi Arabia. But I think the war has revealed many fissures throughout the region and it is reconfiguring the politics of the Gulf and of the wider region in ways that were unforeseen. The emergence of Pakistan as a major diplomatic player was not foreseeable. To have Trump put his trust in Field Marshal Asim Munir in Pakistan and have Munir be the interlocutor with the Iranian government is something that hadn’t been foreseen, and it kind of sidelines India, which also has enormous interests in the outcome of this struggle.
Tafheem Kiani: So true, Professor. I think a lot of people either don’t understand Pakistan in the region or underestimate it. Pakistan does have a lot of economic problems. But when it comes to foreign policy, I think Pakistan has a remarkable ability to balance competing interests. It is one of the only countries that has extremely close relationships with both the USA and China and increasingly good relationships with Russia. It’s always had good relationships with Turkey and Saudi Arabia even when Turkey and Saudi Arabia didn’t have great relations with each other. And it’s been very successful in balancing the competing interests between Iran and Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that they now have this defense pact with Saudi Arabia while at the same time having an increasingly strong relationship with Iran. I think they’re playing their cards really well and I can see them having a really important role in whatever happens in the future.
But also, since this defense agreement came about between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, there’s been news that Qatar might be thinking of joining. And previously there’s been talk that Turkey might want to join as well. But from Turkey’s side, they’re talking about an increasing defense agreement with Egypt. That I don’t understand, because Egypt has one of the largest armies in West Asia, but at the same time they’re so entrenched in the American-Israeli camp and so reliant on funds coming from America. What benefit would Turkey get from a closer defense agreement with Egypt? Am I missing anything there?
Juan Cole: Well, you bring up an excellent set of dynamics. I think one problem with the Saudi pact with Pakistan was that the Iran war tested it and the Saudis were not pleased with the results. Pakistan didn’t lift a finger to protect Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was hit by Iranian missiles numerous times, and the Pakistanis didn’t do anything about it even though they had promised to defend Saudi Arabia, because the Pakistanis prized their relationship with Iran. Pakistan is a relatively big country of 250 million people or so and also has a fairly large landmass. But it’s surrounded by potential enemies — it has bad relations with India, bad relations with Afghanistan. So I think Islamabad doesn’t feel that it can afford to have bad relations with Iran as well. And that put Pakistan in a very difficult position. I think the refusal of the Pakistanis to take a militant position against Iran is one of the reasons that the United Arab Emirates demanded its $3.5 billion back that it had invested in Pakistan, and the Saudis have had to cover that — because I think Islamabad has made the case to the Saudis for a diplomatic resolution of these problems rather than a military one.
And they are now sending some troops to Saudi Arabia and stepping up to their obligations more. But yeah, I think everybody now is thinking about what the next war would look like and who it would be with. Some of the Israeli politicians have begun talking about targeting Turkey, and the Israeli policy of breaking the legs of neighbours could be applied to Ankara as well.
The Israelis find obstacles to attacking Turkey, even though I think they would like to, because of Turkey’s role in Syria and Erdogan’s repeated denunciations of Israeli policy in Gaza — he called Netanyahu Hitler. But Turkey is a member of NATO and NATO has pledged to defend one another from attacks. So if Israel attacked Turkey, some of the European countries might come to Turkey’s aid against Israel. This is not a position Israel wants to be in. I think they’d like to break up NATO if they could — they have the same idea as Putin — so as to make Turkey more vulnerable. And if a war broke out between Israel and Turkey, Turkey wants as many allies as it can get. So of course it reached out to Cairo.
Although the Egyptians have been sleepwalking through this war with Iran — as they did with the Gaza war — surely President Abd al-Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt must be disturbed by what the Israelis have managed to do in the region. They took out Syria’s military. As soon as the revolution succeeded, the Israelis just destroyed all the bases and much of the equipment, even naval ships, and left Syria helpless. And now they have apparently bombed Iran 1,300 times along with the Americans and inflicted substantial damage on Iranian infrastructure — not only missile launchers but also steel mills and universities and so forth. So at any point at which Egypt came into conflict with Israel, which you can’t rule out, wouldn’t they do the same thing to Cairo? So Egypt is going to want some guarantees against that. And the other big military power in the region is Turkey — it has, I think, the best equipped army aside from that of Israel. And it’s a NATO member and it just unveiled its own intercontinental ballistic missile. And Erdogan has Trump’s ear just as Netanyahu does. It’s not clear who Trump would choose if he had to.
Tafheem Kiani: That’s so true. But again, we thought MBS had Trump’s ear as well. And look where he is now.
Juan Cole: Well, I think MBS took the lesson that he can’t depend on Jared Kushner, who was his link to Trump. When Jared went out in the first Trump administration as Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, he said it was like being the new kid in school — if you move to a new school and you don’t know anybody and everybody kind of looks at you hostilely. But MBS embraced him, so he says it was like finding a friend your first day at school. So MBS gave Jared $2 billion as a bribe, and I think he thought he had bought the Trump administration. And so for Trump to join Netanyahu and suddenly attack Iran in a way that blew back big time on Saudi Arabia — because their GDP is going to be down like 10 to 14% this year — was a huge shock. Not only did Trump and Netanyahu attack Iran, which had blowback on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and these countries, but they didn’t even put any mitigations in place. There was nothing, no plans to defend these countries — even though from an Iranian point of view they had done exactly what they said they would do. They had been saying over and over again that as soon as you hit us we’re going to take out these military camps in all of the GCC countries.
Tafheem Kiani: But also, Professor, talking about this defense agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — I was actually very pleased to see that not only did Pakistan not try to do anything silly militarily, but they didn’t even send any signal. Because I thought that could be really dangerous if they sent out some kind of signal to Saudi Arabia that we’ve got your back, and that emboldened Saudi Arabia to do something silly. The reality is that Saudi Arabia is so vulnerable and so naked in front of Iranian missiles that there’s absolutely nothing Pakistan could do to defend those countries. If Iran decided to take out a desalination plant in Riyadh, what could Pakistan do? At the moment, this defense agreement they have in place is just an agreement. It hasn’t been implemented. There’s no command and control, no radar systems, no troops as such out there to defend Saudi Arabia from Pakistan. So at the moment it’s more theoretical, and if Pakistan had done something to encourage Saudi Arabia I think the result would have been very bad for Saudi Arabia. So I think they’ve done pretty well.
And the other thing I was just thinking — listening to what you were saying about NATO and Putin’s interest in seeing its end — it seems like Netanyahu would also want to see the end of NATO, so that if they do have a conflict with Turkey they don’t end up facing the whole of NATO. And at the same time, it might be in Trump’s view as well that if he wanted to further help Israel in any military campaigns against Turkey, then from an American point of view it would be better not to have NATO so that America is freed from that obligation. What do you think about that?
Juan Cole: Well, I should clarify — I wasn’t criticizing Pakistan for not going to war. I think they’ve played an extremely valuable role as diplomatic mediators, and that’s the role they should have played. I was just saying that I think initially at least Riyadh was upset with them, and maybe by now has come around to seeing the Pakistani point of view on this.
With regard to Turkey, Trump has hotels in Turkey. He once gave an interview in which he said it made it difficult for him to deal harshly with Erdogan because he has economic interests in that country. So I don’t think he would go to war with Turkey. In fact, every time Turkey asks him for something, he gives it to them. And I think it’s partially because he’s making money off of them.
Tafheem Kiani: I know absolutely that if Turkey was going into war, Pakistan would be right there — because when Pakistan had a war with India last year in May, Pakistan got support from Turkey, from China, and from Azerbaijan, and directly and indirectly from Saudi Arabia and other countries. So I think they have this very strong and increasingly growing military cooperation. Professor, before you go, I’m wondering what are your thoughts about the future for American presence in West Asia? I can’t really see them rebuilding all of these military bases all over again because it’s such a huge investment. And now they can see that it’s not well protected. How would US presence look in West Asia going forward after this has ended?
Juan Cole: The United States has been incredibly weakened by this war. And not only is it not clear that the Americans would want to rebuild all of those bases, but it’s not clear that the countries that host the bases would want them back — if in essence the bases were meant to protect them from Iran and instead made them a target of Iran. So some of them may decide they don’t want that target on their backs. I think it depends on the country, on how vulnerable they feel and how much they feel they need to hitch themselves to the Americans. A little country like Bahrain, where you have a Sunni monarchy and a Shiite majority, is very afraid of Iran — and Iranian politicians sometimes claim Bahrain — so I think Bahrain will want the Americans back. But some others may not.
And the limits of American power have been demonstrated. These little $30,000 Shahed drones — they’re kind of like a small car — that Iran can apparently make hundreds of a week, have taken out equipment worth millions and billions. And shooting them down requires anti-missile missiles — THAADs and others — which themselves cost a million and a half a piece. So you have to spend a million and a half to shoot down a $30,000 drone. The whole architecture of American military operations in this region has been altered by Iran’s kind of technological guerilla war, and its ability to play spoiler and to take the Gulf oil and gas countries hostage — and therefore the world hostage — is also a big change in geopolitics. It’s not going to go back to the way it was.
In fact, I think if Asia is smart, they’ll just go green — people will just get electric vehicles and put in solar panels. Asia has a lot of solar potential. Even the Pakistani peasants in the past couple of years have imported 17 gigawatts of Chinese solar panels for their villages. The government in Pakistan is not very efficient and it hasn’t been good about providing people electricity, so people just took things into their own hands. I think you could see a lot of that happening. And there are now electric rickshaws in Kenya, and a lot of people may go to electric three-wheel vehicles — powering them with solar, which after the initial investment is free — rather than going on paying very high petrol prices for combustion in automobiles. And I don’t think the Iran war is over. I think there will be further such episodes. The Israelis are not going to sit down. So why would you hitch your future to this very unstable region?
Tafheem Kiani: So true. Professor, thank you so much for your time and your insights. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you. And for viewers, if you enjoyed this episode we will also leave a link to the previous chat I had with Professor Cole. And Professor, do you have any recent publications or anything that’s come out?
Juan Cole: Last year I published a book on the historical context of the holy Quran. It’s called Rethinking the Quran in Late Antiquity. The time that it grew up — the late Roman Empire was there, the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople, and the Sasanian Empire in Iran. And I tried to look at the era in which it grew up as a context for some of its passages.
Tafheem Kiani: That’s so amazing. All of the work that you’ve done is so fascinating and so important. Please share with me links to your publications and we’ll make sure to include those in the show notes. And we’ll leave a link to your blog as well. Once again, Professor, thank you so much for your time. We’ll speak again soon.
Juan Cole: Thank you, Tafheem. It’s been great being here. Thank you.
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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan
