The Forum Roundtable, Episode 1: Iranian Power and Influence in the Middle East

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Middle East Forum ‘s (MEF) new monthly podcast series, the Forum Roundtable (video), hosted by Lauri Regan. This episode, Iranian Power and Influence in the Middle East, aired March 21 and featured Michael Rubin, Gabriel Noronha, and Behnam Ben Taleblu; their full introductions are below.

Lauri Regan: Good morning, and welcome to the premiere episode of the Middle East Forum’s new monthly podcast series, the Forum Roundtable, during which I will be moderating insightful and informative discussions with leading national security experts on relevant and current events surrounding the Middle East. Today, I am honored to host three men who I follow closely, and I highly recommend that you all do as well, through their frequent appearances on various news programs, published articles, organizations, websites, and social media platforms. For regular followers of the Middle East Forum, you must be familiar with the work of the unbelievably prolific Michael Rubin, who serves as MEF’s director of policy analysis, as well as being a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Gabriel Noronha is the executive director of Polaris National Security, as well as a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy. And Behnam Ben Taleblu serves as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Iran Program senior director. So, we have quite an impressive panel for our conversation on Iranian power and influence in the Middle East today. We have a lot to discuss.

I’ll just add that today’s program will be recorded and available for viewing (video). So, I urge you all to share it far and wide as these are critically important national security issues that we’ll be covering. And I urge you to continue following and supporting the Middle East Forum and promoting all of its critically important work and programming within your networks. I’m going to start by asking Michael to spend a few minutes talking about Israel’s various military achievements since October 7th, and their impact on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ability to project strength and mayhem across the Middle East. For instance, in Gaza, we know that despite the demise of much of its leadership, Hamas still retains control of the strip. And one recently released hostage indicated that the digging of terror tunnels continues unabated despite the devastation above ground. And of course, we’ve actually seen rockets this week from Gaza directly into the middle of Israel. In Lebanon, while much of Hezbollah’s infrastructure has been destroyed, Israel still finds it necessary to maintain five outposts in Southern Lebanon despite the terms of that ceasefire agreement.

And while Israel decimated Iran’s missile defense systems last October, the clock is ticking without any follow-up attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. So, Michael, what are your thoughts on the strength of the Islamic Republic’s ability to continue its march across the region to the Mediterranean and to attack Israel and other Western assets in the region? And again, please touch on the recent fighting that’s escalated again in Gaza.

Michael Rubin: Thank you very much, Lauri. I’m thrilled to be on this panel, especially with Gabriel and Behnam. In U.S. national security, they teach that every strategy has a diplomatic, and informational, a military, and an economic component, the so-called DIME model. And what Israel has demonstrated is great progress on the military side of this, but the Iranian strategy is more multifaceted. And traditionally, what has happened when Iran has its Axis of Resistance, when it has the terror groups it supports, is it will try to strike blows militarily, but if it can’t achieve its aims militarily, it will fall that back, for example, with a diplomatic strategy or an informational propaganda strategy to try to buy time for Hamas or other terror groups to rebuild. The danger is that others with a 7,000-mile screwdriver will try to micromanage the conflict in a way that actually snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

Now, this dynamic has changed a little bit with the incoming Trump administration, which is much more willing to be supportive of Israel in its fight against terrorism rather than to have the moral equivalence that we saw too often among some within the Biden administration. That said, there’s much more that can be done, and there’s also some faults on the Israeli side. First of all, the positives. What Israel has done, especially with what Michael Doran called Operation Grim Beeper, in neutralizing Hezbollah was truly impressive and provides a model for why we don’t need to constrain actions against terrorists. When people will say, in the case, for example, of Hamas, that, “It’s just a fact of life,” that therefore, we need or someone else needs to engage them, that they can’t be eliminated. I would point out examples such as the terrorism we saw with the Tamil Tigers who were eliminated, as well as the horror we saw in the 1970s with the Khmer Rouge, which some of the same NGOs which now sing Hamas’s praise, like that American Friends Service Committee, also ran interference for that murderous regime that killed a million Cambodians.

The fact of the matter is ideologies can be delegitimized; they can be eliminated. So, Israel has done well with regard to Hezbollah, and of course, the Assad regime is gone too, although I worry a little bit more about what comes next than many other people. The Iraqis have been very, very quiet. And what we’ve seen is Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani was able to successfully force the Islamist militias, the Iranian-backed militias there to stand down. The Houthis remain a problem. Now, here’s what I worry about, besides simply Hamas being able to rebuild, I think that too many in Israel and too many in the West are a little bit too confident in their own deterrence. Back in April of 2024, when we saw the Iranian missile barrages at Israel, people said this was a great outcome that showed deterrence, that 293 out of 300 some odd missiles and drones were shot down. That’s not successful deterrence. Because if any of the seven that got through had chemical, biological, or radiological warheads, we’d be in an entirely different conversation now. So, I do worry about that.

And we can’t let the enemy be... we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to the nuclear issue. We may define a nuclear weapon as 20 kilograms of 90 percent highly enriched uranium, but the bomb on Hiroshima was only 78 percent highly enriched uranium, nor do they need a fissile explosion. If a dirty bomb lands in the middle of Tel Aviv, the economic impact would be immense. That’s one problem. Where I would actually fault Israel is in misanalyzing Iran. Israel has responded by showing its great precision, for example, taking out S-300 anti-aircraft missile batteries around Esfahan, and they showed they can hit with impunity and they can hit hard and precisely, the problem is, and Shay Khatiri has written about this within the Middle East Forum Observer, our daily output, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s supporters only listen to what he says, they only watch Iranian state television, and they will believe that the Iranian missiles at Israel, both in April and October, were wildly successful, and that Israel wasn’t able to retaliate effectively.

Perception is more important than the rules. So, if Israel wants deterrence to work, it needs to hit Iran, and hit Iran hard, in a way that the regime can’t deny. I mean, taking out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters, I mean, taking out other elements which ordinary Iranians will see, that’s where I think Israel needs to take the next step. And it needs to understand, as Daniel Pipes talks, has written a book about, that the goal needs to be an Israeli victory. You can’t put out 95 percent of a forest fire and expect it not to regrow.

Lauri Regan: Thank you. Michael, you’ve touched on so many things that we’re going to continue to be talking about with you, and Gabriel, and Behnam. So, I’m going to turn now to Gabriel, because I want you to share your thoughts, Gabriel, on the impact that a Trump presidency is having in the region. Full disclosure for everyone, I serve on the board of Polaris, and Polaris during the last campaign provided critically important foreign policy analysis to congressional candidates, and you continue to, Gabriel, put out very, very important newsletters on these unfolding events. Polaris’s founder, Morgan Ortagus, is now serving as Steve Witkoff’s deputy presidential special envoy for the Middle East. And Gabriel, you worked with Morgan in the State Department during Trump’s first term, and in particular, when things like the maximum pressure campaign and Abraham Accords were implemented.

So now, Trump has come out swinging with a lot of threats, but so far, while he’s achieved some critically important steps, and there’s a lot of both living, and unfortunately, dead hostages that have been returned in phase one of the ceasefire with Hamas, it’s not clear what the big picture looks like in the region. What impact, Gabriel, do you see Trump’s policies as having on Iran and the proxies? I can also add in, do you think that a Gaz-a-Largo is a realistic vision for the end game here?

Gabriel Noronha: Well, that’s a difficult question. Maybe starting with what’s going to differentiate Trump 2.0 from Trump 1.0. Starting off is a lot more clarity about Iran and the strategic direction we want to see the Middle East going into. In the first Trump administration, the United States stayed in the JCPOA for almost a year and a half trying to fix something that was irreparably broken. What you’re seeing from this administration is maximum pressure announced, I think, 12 days into the presidency, a return to maximum pressure, a focus that Iran would not have a nuclear weapon, would not be allowed to have a nuclear program, which National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, has extended to include ballistic missiles, and then a commitment to drive Iran’s oil exports down to zero. What we’ve seen in the first two months is 116 sanctions against the Iranian oil industry, which is more sanctions than the Biden administration imposed in its first 20 months in office combined.

Now, I’m not a believer that volume of sanctions is entirely dispositive; the quality of those sanctions is incredibly important. And what we actually had yesterday was some of the highest quality sanctions, which was going after the Chinese... or so-called teapot refineries, which have been importing vast amounts of Iranian oil, going after both the refineries, the business entities, vessels, and executives. We have a lot more to sanction. When I was at the State Department, there was often the question of, “Haven’t you sanctioned pretty much everything already?” There are immense numbers of individuals, entities, relatives, vessels, airplanes left to be sanctioned. There’s a lot more work to be done. And one of the things that we’ve seen already is that the Treasury Department has taken off some of its own handcuffs and is allowing itself to go much harder, much faster from the start.

So again, if we’re looking at what is the goal of pressure, what does the Trump administration hope to see, President Trump has always been a bit more circumspect than many of the Middle East folks might want. He’s always put a couple of caveats into policies that, like Rubio, John Bolton didn’t necessarily care for. One was he said he’s not about regime change a lot. That’s based on his own political arrangement and alignment coming out of the Iraq War and its consequences, and really capitalizing on the view that the United States does not want to get bogged down into something. And the other one is that he prefers to solve Iran’s nuclear issues through diplomacy. I, for one, am extremely skeptical that that will work. I do not believe that the Iranian regime and supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in particular, have any remote interest in reaching any kind of accord that would be acceptable to either President Trump, his team, or Congress. But President Trump is giving a small window of opportunity for Iran to go where I like to go, say, “Go the easy way before we go the hard way.”

One thing that’s also important about this offer, according to Axios, the offer of diplomacy that President Trump extended to Khamenei was limited to a two-month time window. And this was acknowledging that the Biden administration got played for fools when they allowed negotiations over the Iran deal to extend a year and a half, and then eventually even much longer, which the Iranian regime used to try to get sanctions relief, get all sorts of things. So, there are real constraints on what President Trump is offering Iran, saying this is a short time limited offer to do this. The view from the Trump administration holistically really is... that shared by King Salman of Saudi Arabia who once said that Iran was the head of the snake. And that is really the view of this, that if you can deal with the Iranian regime and cut off its ability to fund its proxies, that all the problems in the region become a lot easier to deal with.

On Israel, look, this is one of the most difficult negotiations for two reasons, there’s the hostage negotiation, but it’s also really tied up with the future of Gaza, the future of reconstruction, and in the Arab mind, the future of whether there’s a Palestinian state. There are no easy answers. Anyone that thinks that we are going to get a magical deal that gets all the hostages out, that makes the Arabs happy and the Israelis happy, is simply not living in reality. We do not live in the world where we get that kind of magical realism into effect. But what we’ve seen is the Arabs come to the table with a proposal, that’s not the kind of proposal I’d love to see, but it’s better than things that they’ve done in the past, and there’s a slow and steady work towards a compromise solution to try to move us out of the October 7 world into a post-October 7 world, where we can move out beyond there. I think we’re still a few months away from that going into effect. Now that the fighting has resumed, that’s going to delay that even a little longer.

The outcome is not going to be something that anyone is terribly happy with. I think that’s, again, important for us all to lower expectations, but say, “How can we have perhaps not let the perfect be the enemy of the good?” And figure out what is the best solution that we can reasonably work with, and then try to move progress along on all other files, on Arab-Israeli normalization, on Israel’s security objectives, on dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, and so much else. But a lot of that you have to go through the first hurdle first, and that’s why Steve Witkoff has been focused really singularly on the hostage file, trying to fix that, and then using that as a catalyst to then solve the Gaza issue, because those are the real predicates. When you talk to anyone in the region, everyone is still completely stuck up on this issue, and it’s very difficult to move on to all the other secondary conversations we’d like to have and we hope that we would be having right now.

You have to address the sort of the... it’s like triage; if you’re in a hospital, you have to deal with the patient bleeding out first and then you’re able to deal with other issues. On Gaz-a-Largo, we’ll see. My hopes are low. I think we will have some apartments being rebuilt. I think anyone would be a fool to pour a billion dollars into a fancy hotel and casino until we see the movement move on quite a bit further than where we are today.

Lauri Regan: Thanks for all that, Gabriel. A lot packed in there. And both Michael and Gabriel, you’ve set me up for my question to Behnam. And I’d like to wish Behnam a happy new year, it is currently the Persian New Year. So, Behnam, can you provide your insights on the thought process of the mullahs as they watch events unfold with Israel and the U.S. fighting and decimating their proxies, the amazing accomplishments of Israel’s military and the direct attacks on Iran, and the destruction of the Shia Crescent and Ring of Fire around Israel? President Trump posted on Truth Social after the U.S. began launching attacks on the Houthis, and I should say, the U.S. finally began launching attacks on the Houthis, and we’re going to talk about that more a little bit later, but he said to Iran, “Support for the Houthis terrorists must end immediately. Do not threaten the American people, their president, or worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, beware, because America will hold you fully accountable, and we won’t be nice about it.”

So, at the same time, Trump’s also, as Gabriel pointed out, sending letters to Khamenei in the hopes of negotiating new terms of a nuclear agreement, which would presumably look a lot different than Obama’s JCPOA. So, what’s going on in the minds of Iranian leadership, and perhaps, even the Iranian people? How do they perceive their influence in the region? And what is your prediction for any possibility of these negotiations being successful? And again, please touch on... there’s a new report that I’m sure you’ll be talking about, that FDD that you put out through FDD that lists 29, I think, elements that the administration should include in any future deal. So please share your insights on that.

Behnam Ben-Taleblu: Sure. Well, thank you so much for the invitation and the kind Nowruz greetings, and Nowruz pirooz to you and all my distinguished panelists, and all the viewers and listeners out there. Party like it’s 1404, they say. So moving on to a somewhat tougher framing of a lot of the things going on in the region right now, if I had to put a bow on the way the regime is looking at the region, the way the regime is framing what’s happening in terms of the ground game of its proxies and partners in the Middle East, this constellation of terror and proxy forces, that in itself calls the Axis of Resistance, and that is, of course, down but not out, that’s how they frame it, down but not out. What they’re betting on, and Michael alluded to this, is the long game that the West, or Israel, or America will tire when it comes to having a diplomatic ground game, having a political strategy towards central authority in Iraq, towards central authority in Lebanon, towards figuring out what is more important in Syria, counter-terrorism, counter-Turkey, or counter-Iran.

And in the space of that passage of time, they’re hoping that a disgruntled population, a failed state, chaos, still affords them an angle of entry to fund, and train, and equip those who are willing to shoot at those that the regime wants to shoot at. And ultimately, that’s what you see now with the way the regime is trying to diversify, how it’s still trying to keep Hezbollah in the game, and at the same time, how Iranian officials are now trying to publicly distance themselves from the Houthis, they say, “No, no, these are a local actor, a totally independent actor with pure agency,” yet for the past decade, this regime has put state-level capabilities in the hands of non-state actors like the Houthis. And I remember having this, I don’t want to say fight, but this vigorous conversation with friends and colleagues in Washington where many of them were focused on the Hezbollah threat. And I was like, “No, no, the Houthis have capabilities that Hezbollah does not have. The Houthis have medium-range ballistic missiles, Hezbollah does not have that.”

The Houthis have paraded, tested, and have used anti-ship ballistic missiles. They’re the only entity in history that have live fire in the state of hostilities that used anti-ship ballistic missiles. They are the beneficiary of this Axis of Resistance because the Houthis have also been supported by Lebanese Hezbollah, some of them have been seen on the battlefield in Iraq, for example, one Houthi official was actually even killed in Iraq, but also, they benefit from this axis of aggressors or axis of authoritarians as well. You saw the stories about Russian intel support to the Houthis, for example, the alleged Chinese weapon ties as well, and that’s because the Islamic Republic of Iran sits at the helm of this axis of aggressors and Axis of Resistance, this constellation of anti-American revisionist states, Russia, China, North Korea, and then Iran, and then the constellation of terror groups and proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraqi Shia militias, and what’s left of the mayhem in Syria.

And that, it believes, is its secret sauce, the regime believes is its way out, that the West will tire, the West will not have a ground game, and this marriage of the state and non-state actors that the regime both supports and gets supported from will allow it to, in short, limp along for the duration of Max Pressure 2.0. You still have the regime doing things to put out a whole host of fires on the domestic front, and you also have the regime being the regime, which is as they put out fires, they create a whole host of new fires; they’re vastly seen as illegitimate by large swaths of their population. The fact that the regime has so prioritized their revisionist and Islamist foreign policy over the national interest and the public good is quite literally, since, I think, 2009, been an angle of entry for mass street-wide protests against this regime.

And even yesterday in Iran, where Persian New Year was being held, that you had significant demonstrations, protests could be the word, but you had large swarms of people at these major poet shrines, poet tombs across Iran, really reclaiming national identity, reclaiming national symbols, and then shouting political slogans essentially calling for regime change at these major places. The regime will wait to use violence against them in the future, but it’s trying to kind of have a, I think what Machiavelli was allegedly calling, politics of the artichoke, dealing with foreign enemies one time, dealing with domestic enemies another time. It’s very much a one at a time kind of approach here. And when it comes to Trump’s offer and Trump’s letter, the invitation to negotiate, you saw Khamenei, the supreme leader, quote, unquote, “immediately rejected it,” but then Iranian officials say, “We’re still studying the offer.”

There’s a Persian saying for this, which is, “He pushes away with the hand, he pulls towards with the foot.” They’re basically still trying to run the clock; they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too. Engagement with Trump, as much as we are critical of the idea that there is even a deal to be had, we are putting forward the idea that if you are desiring a deal with President Trump, it shouldn’t be arms control, it shouldn’t be something like the JCPOA, it shouldn’t even be something like the INF, the prism or the framework, if you’re going to use Max Pressure and get something from this regime through diplomacy, coercive diplomacy at that, needs to be disarmament. And the models are some good, some bad Ukraine, Libya, but also South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan. Some of these models are better than others, but in the aggregate, they represent full scale disarmament. This is a position consistent with actual US sanctions law. For example, I think you mentioned ballistic missiles also have to be included, Gabe did or Michael did, if I’m not mistaken, Michael Waltz mentioned that.

This is something that has been in law since 2010 in the U.S., this is part of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 that forms the bulk, or the pillar, of much of the really hard hitting U.S. pressure against the regime. So in short, while this stuff that we’re putting forward is a high bar and engagement would be a very high price for this regime, almost akin to drinking from a poison chalice, these guys are masters for playing for time, and what this two month window that the Trump administration offers the Iranians is a way to, A, not be able to run the clock, B, cognizance of these real domestic push factors that are going to be putting the regime in a box over time, c, cognizance of these regional factors that the proxies are down but not out, and in fact, D, cognizance of a diplomatic strategy that there will be another IEA board of governors that, actually, if you are going to have snapback, you are going to have to have the Europeans involved by late spring, early summer.

So, this two month window actually nicely packages, and I would say, takes advantages of the regime’s vulnerabilities and does not let the regime play to their impression of us, which is that we are irresolute and don’t have the will to stay in the fight. And in these two months, hopefully, we will continue to see more things like we just saw from the Trump administration, which is, as Gabe mentioned, go after the first time ever this teapot refiners, so not doing what our friend and colleague at CFR, Ray Takeyh, has called the junk food of sanctions, but really qualitatively meaningful sanctions, but also, at the same time, doing historic firsts, like preemptive military action against the Houthis, trying to get the regime to realize if they’ll do preemptive military action against the proxy, perhaps the West may do preemptive military action with the patron, and use all of this to force Khamenei into a highly suboptimal solution for him.

Lauri Regan: Thanks, that was, not surprisingly, very insightful, Behnam. Michael, there’s been a lot of upheaval and instability in the region given the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s role after more than a decade of civil war in Syria, with Turkey menacing the Kurds and looking for its own expansionism, which some would even argue is aiming to replace Iran as the regional hegemon, Lebanon’s been a mess for decades, and the U.S. left Iraq in shambles allowing for Iranian influence there, you’ve labeled Syria’s new president an Islamist, and Turkey’s Erdogan we know is an Islamist, so on a more positive note, Lebanon’s new president Joseph Aoun has inspired hope that he will not allow Hezbollah to regain power and influence in the country, but the Trump administration seems to be putting him on a tight timeframe for that one threatening to unleash Israel once again if things aren’t done within a short period of time. I know there’s a lot here, but can you spend a couple of minutes just telling us how you see these players interacting with Iran, and do you believe that new and dangerous alliances will form between any of them because of the vacuums?

Michael Rubin: Okay. Well, first of all, I’m glad you talked about vacuums. The important thing, big picture, that the United States needs to remember is when there is a vacuum in the region, it’s not going to be the forces of altruism which fill it, it could be the Islamic State, it could be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it could be Turkey and the Al-Qaeda affiliates, which they have sponsored, but the point being, that we have to have a strategy that fills vacuums, and we also need to recognize that our strategy can’t be either or. All extremism and terror support that’s ideologically driven is a problem, we can’t choose between Turkey’s Sunni-backed terrorism versus Iran’s Shia terrorism, even though, again, we also know Turkey supports Hezbollah now, Iran supports Sunni groups like Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. We also need to recognize that the basis of our diplomacy has always been... well, Iranians can be pragmatic, and therefore, we should try to reach out, we should extend our hand.

Here’s the problem, the pragmatism, which our diplomats identify in Iran can just as easily be pragmatism to work with enemies of Iran in order to screw over the United States. In fact, that’s what we see repeatedly, especially, for example, with regard to Iran’s outreach to Sunni insurgents in Iraq back during the heyday of the insurgency there, or Iran’s hosting of Al-Qaeda leaders. We need to recognize that the Iranians can be pragmatic, but in a malign way. I really commend the work that FDD has been doing, because Maximum Pressure isn’t just a theory, we have seen Iran and we’ve seen Ayatollah Khamenei change direction because of Maximum Pressure in the past. Behnam had made the comment about a chalice of poison, and many in the audience may not actually know the origins of that phrase, but after swearing that he would never stop the Iran-Iraq War until not only Saddam Hussein was ousted but Jerusalem was occupied.

After more than eight years and a million deaths, Ayatollah Khamenei got on the radio and he said, “It’s like drinking from a chalice of poison, but I have no choice but to drink from this cup if I want the Islamic Republic to survive.” It was the pressure of that and the isolation of Iran that led Khamenei to accept the ceasefire short of his declared objectives, and it was also the isolation of Iran, the sanctions that forced Khamenei to release the American diplomats whom he had taken hostage. It is an evidence, historically, that Iran is susceptible to Maximum Pressure, and even if Americans conceive of history in four-year units, the fact of the matter is a broader sense of history shows that the strategy which President Trump is on can be the right strategy.

Now, my final point here is that when I look at Iranian rhetoric... and this has been reflected again on the Middle East Forum Observer, our daily rapid reaction site, you no longer have to wait for the Middle East quarterly, you’re going to get things in your inbox every single morning at 0600, the fact of the matter is we’ve seen in his rhetoric just in the past week, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, distanced himself and pretty much acknowledged that there is no nuclear fatwa, that everything which Obama and Secretary of State, John Kerry, based their nuclear diplomacy on was an elaborate fraud and elaborate scheme. And so, U.S. National Security... We can differ with some of the tactics which President Trump is taking, but U.S. National Security is always at its strongest when it’s based on reality rather than wishful thinking, and that applies to Turkey, that applies to Iran, that applies to the Houthis as well. But with that, let me turn the floor back over.

Lauri Regan: Thank you, Michael. So, I’m glad you ended with the Houthis because I do want to come back to them, and I’m going to ask Gabriel just to... if you could spend a few minutes discussing the importance of that, the Houthis and the Iran terror proxy network. And it’s important to recall... I think the audience should recall that when Biden entered office, the Saudis were fighting the Houthis, until the administration removed the terror designation off of the Houthis and forced the Saudis to stand down. Gabriel, you’ve actually pointed out that Biden let the Houthis build back better. So, I’d like you to spend some time talking about both the U.S. interests in destroying the Houthis’ ability to impair the safe and secure passage in the Red Sea, as well as Iran’s competing interests in supporting Houthi terrorism, support that, in recent report, indicated is coming directly from the IRGC and Khamenei.

We know how bad everything is in the Red Sea these days, but I’m not sure that people are aware that while Western ships are not able to traverse and have to go around the Horn of Africa, China and Russia have retained unrestricted transit through the Red Sea, and they both sell the Houthis weapons on top of the supplies sent from Tehran. So, if you can maybe touch on... do you see the Saudis rejoining any fight against the Houthis with the U.S.? Do you think that the U.S. will hit Iranian targets in Yemen as Mike Waltz has suggested? And do you see Tehran abandoning the Houthis as it faces mounting problems both domestically, as we’ve heard about, and militarily?

Gabriel Noronha: Great questions all around. I’ll start by a couple observations on the Houthis themselves. One is that they’re a bit more of an indigenous force, which also means that some of these airstrikes, which are intended, when we’re looking at what is the intention of these airstrikes, it’s not like Al-Qaeda or ISIS where they’re sweeping in, it’s more these people have been here, they’re deeply, again, I hate to say this, deeply embedded in the fabric, but that’s the reality, they control most of Northern Yemen and have for some time. And then the other point I’d make is that as we rank the proxies by how responsive they are to Tehran, Hezbollah is a perfect proxy, Hamas is a moderately good proxy, and the Houthis are the least responsive, they do a lot of what Iran wants, but they have some of their own will. What Trump is trying to do is to actually try to change that dynamic.

And one of the things that we saw from President Trump was the statement that we will hold Iran responsible for the actions of the Houthis. Khamenei just tweeted this morning trying to dispel that notion because that linkage is so problematic for Iran. If the United States says, “If the Houthis strike a U.S. ship, we’re going to hit an Iranian ship.” That creates real problems for Iran’s strategic calculations. And one of the best ways the United States can actually cause this to continue to be a problem is that regardless of whether they are your perfect command and control relationship or not, we are still going to treat you responsible. That would force Iran to then really reel in the Houthis as much as possible. In terms of U.S. interests, I don’t think a lot of people appreciate the grand scale to which the Houthis campaign since October 7th has hurt the international economy. Roughly $20 billion is the cost to international shipping from just the fuel costs of having to go around Africa. Each ship is roughly about a million dollars in extra costs, and there’s been roughly 20,000 ships that have had to divert.

To the Egyptian economy, it’s $800 million a month. That is the cost of decreased revenue into the Suez Canal. So, Egypt’s been under huge economic strain from very bad economic decisions. So, there’s that. And then 174 U.S. warships attacked. I think where it starts to get tricky is we start looking at what are our goals in this operation that we’re doing, and do we have the means to achieve those goals? The Obama policy from... sorry, the Biden policy since October 7th was try not to look completely cowed, strike here and there, strike some weapons depots, but it’s very much a mowing the grass kind of approach at a very high setting, so you’re not even clipping that much of it. And the Houthis survived pretty much most of this without consequence. The question is a few fold, is the intent to degrade, to eliminate? And then if it is the latter, or even if it is the former, with what are we filling that void?

And so Michael was talking about the president of Yemen coming onto the forum... or sorry, Yemeni foreign minister, and then you have the Southern Transition Council, which has served Emirati backed force, the question that I think we should think about is what is the end game here beyond simply the degradation of forces? A lot of people who are smarter than me on Yemen often point out that the Houthis are unlikely to be deterred by themselves. The deterrence question is the Iran question. The degradation question is what we’re trying to do right now on. Saudi Arabia, they’ve had an eight-year campaign against the Houthis. It went terribly. And then for the past two years of their campaign, in ‘21 and ‘22, the Biden administration completely hamstrung their efforts, cut off intel, cut off weapons, arms sales. So, a lot of this could have been averted if we had simply just enabled Saudi Arabia and UAE to go full ham on this.

The success of that operation, I think, to be candid, would not necessarily have been fortuitous. Saudi Arabia these days does not show signs of eagerness to reengage because they don’t want this to be a perpetual conflict; they atrociously failed at their counterinsurgency efforts in the past. Looking today, who has the interest? It’s actually Egypt, in theory, should have some of the interest in getting rid of the Houthis due to their economic interests, but they similarly have a rather pessimistic view of their ability to do it successfully, and they’re not eager to make more permanent enemies of the Houthis themselves. We talk a lot about how the United States doesn’t want to be the world’s policeman, but what we’ve just done is effectively done the job of world policemen. A lot of countries and actors are very grateful that we’re doing it, but no one seems to want to make the investments to do it themselves.

On the Building Back Better, this will be my last point because I know we want to get to audience questions, one of the things that has happened in the past that has been revealed in the past months, the Houthis have been buying hydrogen fuel cells from the Chinese so they can make their missiles and drones even further ranged, they’ve been buying weapons from Russians, they’ve been going delegations to Moscow, and then, again, that immunity that they’re providing these ships in return, very smart from the Houthis, very smart from the Russians and Chinese. And it should again be a clarifying factor to our Arab friends and Israeli friends that the Russians and Chinese are not your friends, they are the friends of radical Islamists that seek to undermine all of their interests. Again, we should always remind those who sit on the sidelines that we, the United States, are the ones who have their backs.

Michael Rubin: Hey, Lauri, since Gabriel stole my thunder, I just wanted to point out for the audience that at the Middle East Forum conference in May, one of our keynote speakers is going to be Khaled al-Yamani, the former foreign minister of Yemen who resigned in disgust when the United Nations imposed an inspection regime that didn’t work. And he’s going to be talking to the Middle East Forum about how to counter the Houthi challenge, how to counter the weapons smuggling, what’s going on at the Port of Hudaydah, what’s going on across the border from Oman, something John Schanzer at FDD just wrote about. It’s going to be a must-listen to. For those of you who haven’t signed up for the conference, please do.

Gabriel Noronha: Sorry, Michael, I didn’t realize that was to the panelists.

Michael Rubin: No worries.

Gabriel Noronha: I just realized that, but double advertisement.

Lauri Regan: No, thank you for saying that, Michael, because the forum conference last year was terrific, and I encourage everybody to go this year. It’s really... check it out online, the panels are going to be amazing. There’s going to be war games day, lots of really great stuff. So, I hope everybody attends. Behnam, just briefly, Seth Cropsey and Joseph Epstein co-wrote a column in last week’s Wall Street Journal entitled, Azerbaijan is Israel’s New Friend in the Muslim World, suggesting that the U.S., Israel, and Azerbaijan could create a powerful bulwark against the Islamic Republic. I’m curious what you think, do you believe that they will join the Abraham Accords, and what will the impact of that have on Iran, especially since Azerbaijan shares a border with both Iran and Russia?

Do you see an expanding Abraham Accords serving as an anti-Iran coalition? And given that the Obama administration leaked in 2012 that Azerbaijan granted Israel access to airfields to strike Iran, and that in 2018, that country acted as a staging ground for Israel’s theft of Iran’s nuclear weapons archives, do you see Azerbaijan helping Israel in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities assuming that something like that occurs? And we can talk about that in a couple of minutes also.

Behnam Ben-Taleblu: Well, over to Mike. No, just kidding. Listen, this is an area where I think Michael and I have a great amount of convergence actually, I mean, we tend to on a lot of Middle East foreign policy issues, but I think especially on this one, because this is one where moral clarity and political strategy does indeed overlap for us. But I think for many of our friends in Washington, it may not necessarily have that. It’s one thing to say that, obviously, Azerbaijan, a country on Iran’s border trying to play up ethnic tensions can be a vehicle for a country like Israel to launch covert operations, allegedly, the atomic archive was driven out over land from Iran into Azerbaijan when the Israelis were engaging in that heist in 2018, or conversely, this is a way to offset Iran’s border strategy, the Ring of Fire that you mentioned, Lauri, they play on our border, as well play on their borders, but I would say that would be counterproductive, not in terms of the means, but especially in terms of the ends.

Unlike many of the other countries in the Middle East, which have grown over time or been put on the map over time, Iran today is actually smaller than it’s ever been, at least in the past 500 years. And that of course, is that if you ever do have a genuine change of regime in Iran, you would actually have a broad amount of mass and popular appeal for Israel, America, and the West. And that is something that could be significantly lost if you actually allow the Aliyev governments in Azerbaijan this freer hand to engage in stoking of ethno-sectarian tensions. Those who do point to this as a positive card against the regime, they miss the fact Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, is half Azeri. You have actually, in the past 900 years of Iranian history, this Azeri kind of Persian alliance in terms of Iran’s various tribes and ethnic minorities that has actually helped become partners in power, kind of like that Robert Dallek book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power.

But almost to the point that when they have intermarriage and whatnot, you have people who, two or three generations back, don’t tend to live in the same place as that those who say, “Okay, this is an Azerbaijani Northwest quadrant, this is okay, the Persian heartland.” Things are not as neat and parsimonious like that when you look at migration patterns and intermarriage over really the past four or 500 years. That’s one. Two is, of course, naturally, I could see just geostrategically when you look at the mil-to-mil ties, the intel ties, those deepening. But then again, as Israel perhaps is being more cautious about the friends that it cultivates or the friends that it’s able to keep in the West, it may not be worth losing, I would say, broad-based Christian support, given the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, the behavior of Azeri troops during that conflict, and of course, the fact that the regime in Baku does indeed play both sides on the economic side, it plays footsie with the Islamic Republic as much as it positions itself to be a counter-Islamic Republic of Iran Force.

And indeed, it could be still falling prey to the Islamist predation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in terms of trying to co-opt a lot of the activists there and arm them, or find a downtrodden and dispossessed person and put a gun in their hand and give them radical ideology. So long story short, in terms of geopolitics, I understand why the Israelis are doing this, and mil-to-mil and intel naturally, I think if there is some kind of an attack, you could see the Israelis try to have a northern front or a northern corridor, but I think politically, this has a much shorter time horizon. And in fact, the relationship would indeed have an expiration date if you do get a fully different regime in Iran. So, I’m one who is much more dubious of this relationship, and I understand marriages of convenience, and I understand the Middle East is actually in so many ways very byzantine, and it’s not about ideology, it’s about realpolitik and machtpolitik even, but this is one where I would see it actually as having a much shorter runway.

Michael Rubin: Lauri, I’m going to just add in 10 seconds. It’s clear that in NATO, Turkey has become a Trojan horse, using its position in NATO to disrupt the organization. Now, Heydar Aliyev, the former president of Azerbaijan, who’s the father of the current president, described the Turkey-Azerbaijan relationship as one nation, two states. My fear of Azerbaijan joining the Abraham Accords is that it too could become a Trojan horse as Turkey, and as Azerbaijan’s capacity as Turkey’s little brother might actually use its position within the Abraham Accords to disrupt further expansion and pursue an anti-Israel agenda. If Azerbaijan is forced to choose between Turkey and Israel, there’s no question that it’s going to choose Turkey.

Lauri Regan: All right, thanks to both of you on that, very important points that were not raised in the Wall Street Journal column. I want to pose actually a few questions, before we have to go, to all of you to chime in as you deem appropriate. The first question is, what are your thoughts on the relatively new Russia, China, Iran, North Korea axis in the context of how it’s helping to empower Iran and help maintain Iran’s hegemonic influence and goals in the region? Do you view in expanding Abraham Accords together with a strong CENTCOM as a counterforce to that new axis that can keep this dangerous alliance contained? Anybody?

Michael Rubin: Look, big picture, the post-World War II liberal order is under threat, and we need to recognize that when George W. Bush was pilloried for talking about the axis of evil, he was actually onto something. The fact of the matter is revisionist states want to upend the world order as we see it. And so we can talk about the Abraham Accords, we can talk about The Quad, we can talk about any numbers of these other sort of coalitions among democracies, coalitions among Western-minded, more liberal states, even if they’re not democracies, that is important and we need to recognize this. Now, this is more FDD and Behnam’s bailiwick, but one of the things I most worry about when I look at the sanctions regime on Iran is that Iran and North Korea, or Iran and Russia, can do the anti-sanctions three-card monte. Look, centrifuges to enrich uranium take up a fairly large amount of space, but the mathematical modeling for warhead design doesn’t, or for warhead construction.

So, who’s to say that Iranian scientists aren’t going to be operating in North Korea, and North Korean scientists evading sanctions there inside Iran, but the narrowness with which the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors actually gives these countries an ability basically to avoid accountability as they proliferate.

Lauri Regan: Thank you. Michael. Anybody have anything to add before we move on?

Behnam Ben-Taleblu: Super brief... Yes, go ahead.

Gabriel Noronha: Very quickly, I’d note the Abraham Accords are not going to be able to fuel a military counterweight to the Axis of Aggression. What needs to happen really there is building out the economic and diplomatic linkages to serve as a bit of a bulwark, but it is the West, in its dysfunctional form, which must increase the defense spending and defense co-production build the arsenal that’s necessary to build that out. Without that, and without real European and East Asian defense spending, we’re up a creek.

Behnam Ben-Taleblu: This is just a final little political point about these countries versus our block. These countries actually have a fair amount of disagreements, the economic, political, and even ideological lack of synergy, but they have a least common denominator that is growing. And sometimes, unlike us, particularly unlike us here in Washington, these countries, this authoritarian axis, are often able to build on this least common denominator and compartmentalize their baggage and compartmentalize their rivalry. So, their relationships really will be kaleidoscopic. Look at Iran and Russia they, in terms of economies, are literally opposed to one another, but politically, there is a drive to bring them together. So, they’re compartmentalizing one problem and then focusing on the area where they can collaborate. And there’s stuff that’s in the public, and then there’s stuff that certainly is in the private sphere. There still are so many unknown unknowns about Russian support for Iran space program, for example.

So, word to the wise policymakers in Washington, with respect to our allies, rather than play up the differences with our allies, let’s play down those differences, let’s not air our dirty laundry in public. And the same goes for our allies with us. And let’s build up on that least common denominator, because our allies are quickly trying to turn a Venn diagram into two overlapping circles, and we have to detect that and put it in bright lights. But step number one, no own goals. We can’t afford for our own overlapping circles to be turned into a Venn diagram, to be turned into two separate circles.

Michael Rubin: Lauri, let me just very quickly add to that. We also can’t navel-gaze. When you’re as bald as I am, you have to wear many hats, and one of my hats is I’m a columnist for Firstpost, which is an Indian outlet that’s owned by CNN India. And when I talk to the Indians about what’s going on in Yemen, they have a very different narrative from what we hear in terms of the Israel-Hamas conflict and so forth. Back in September 2023, the Indian Middle East economic corridor was unveiled by Joe Biden and Prime Minister Modi at the G20 summit. Basically speaking, what it would do is ship goods from India across by sea to the United Arab Emirates, across to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and then into the Eastern Med. What was cut out of that was Iran. Now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as FDD is expert at, is a major economic force within Iran.

And so, when the Indians look at what the Houthis are doing, they see this as not just about the Israel conflict, they see this as targeting Indian ships because Iran wants the money, Iran wants to divert the trade. If we don’t navel-gaze and only accept one narrative, if we recognize that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps strategy is always to kill multiple birds with one stone, we may find allies that we don’t know truly exist on this.

Lauri Regan: A very insightful points. Great points from all of you. And I don’t want to let you all go without focusing some time these last few minutes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. You all mentioned that Trump keeps saying that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapons program, which includes no missiles, no weaponization, no enrichment, and he has stated outright, it seems, seemingly, that the U.S. would use military force if necessary. He said, and I think one of you has already repeated this, “I would rather have a peace deal than the other option, but the other option will solve the problem.” So, in that light... and I know this is an intelligence question, but do we know exactly how close Iran is in attaining weapons-grade uranium if they actually wanted to? How long it would then take for them to weaponize it in a deliverable missile form?

And to add to this question is, do you believe that a military strike by Israel alone would be successful, or is U.S. involvement necessary? I have been told by some that Iran keeps burying this stuff deeper and deeper the more time that they have and that U.S. bunker busters may not even be able to reach the target. So, if there’s other aspects to conducting strikes while Iran’s... the other aspect to this is striking while their defenses remain impaired, thanks to the Israeli strike back in October. So, if you guys can each address this before we have to go, I’d appreciate it.

Gabriel Noronha: Very first crack, which is on the uranium enrichment side, it’s 7 to 10 days to get that 90 percent, which is the perfect weapons-grade uranium, and then in three months up to 15, or perhaps even more, weapons... The weaponization side is the hard part. Look, I could go and say we think it’s three months away, but in reality, the U.S. intelligence community does not have a perfect track record of knowing everything. And so it’s the unknown unknowns that is very concerning that it could be a breakout anytime if they have clandestine workshops that we simply have not found out about. And are we really going to take that risk? I don’t think we ought to.

In terms of military strike, all I would say is the United States needs to be involved; that does not mean we have to be in the lead. Israel’s going to be in the lead, they’re there, but we can’t sit out that fight. And Israel knows that they need to do this in coordination and conjunction with the United States, that’s always been the view, and I think that remains the case today. I will note that there is a high-level U.S.-Israel meeting next week on Iran, and so I suspect we’ll see some further cooperation there.

Lauri Regan: Terrific. Anybody else?

Behnam Ben-Taleblu: Yes, just very briefly, seconding all the timelines, on the weaponization, you popularly hear 12 to 24 months, sometimes, from the Israelis, you would hear a little bit more, sometimes, you would hear a little bit less, but I would point folks out to an earlier story this year in the New York Times that actually talked about an even less than six-month timeframe. Because again, as Michael mentioned, the perfect is not always the enemy of the good. Just because there is a declared, technically sufficient way to do something does not mean that that is the way the adversary is going to proceed. Their military-industrial complex does not look like our military-industrial complex. Their decision-making tree does not necessarily look like our decision-making tree. One rational view and one person’s... one definition of rationality and one person’s worldview is not rational in the other person’s worldview. And here, they may believe they have a good-enough-for-government work kind of solution for a crude nuclear device that could be performative, or that could be announced and then be made performative later, or that could be used in a low-probability, high-impact scenario preemptive attack.

So, I think, absolutely, you have to tread with the least bad case... the worst case, which is six months or even less, if they want to go there. And then lastly, to be able to shape Iran’s decision-making calculus, which is, if they haven’t gone there already, why is that? We have to think about the most secret side that Michael alluded to, which was the weaponization side, the stuff that could be happening in a phone, or in a laptop, or a briefcase, or a schematic, or in someone’s textbook, for example. And you want to delay that process and hinder that process as long as possible. Remember when Ahmadinejad was talking about they created a counter-Mossad unit and turned out the head of that unit was a Mossad agent? Or when Rouhani’s intel minister, Mr. Younesi said that, “No Islamic Republic official should sleep safely at night because this is the level at which you are penetrated.”

These are the things that can keep the hedging behavior of the Islamic Republic in perpetuity rather than have them actually say, “Oh, you know what? Maybe we can go around these guys and then make that final sprint, turn that final screw and go for the bomb.” Creating the reasonable doubt, max pressure, max support, max defections, these are all necessary. They’re not sufficient, there really does need to be an intel ground game to show these guys how penetrated they are, that if they would be doing this, they would themselves be signing their death warrant because they would be caught. And when you look at the things that have gone boom or bump in the night, really since 2000, really since we lost the fight over fissile material, unfortunately, Gabe is 100 percent right, they could do this in much less than a week, go to 90 percent purity.

And as Michael said, they don’t even necessarily even need to go to 90 percent purity if they want to go all the way. We have unfortunately lost that fight. And what the Israelis have shown, if one does believe that all these things going bump in the night for the past four or five years has been them, is that the hardest thing to penetrate has actually been relatively penetrated. And that’s not saying to take solace in that, but that is to say take as much advantage of that as possible to scare them from going the final breath.

Michael Rubin: I’m not going to repeat what was said, Lauri, I’m going to just make two quick points. First of all, what you had said with regard to they’re just going deeper and deeper in burying sites under mountains, as Chuck Wald has said, General Chuck Wald from JINSA, “You don’t need to destroy those underground sites, you only need to destroy the entrances to them.” And so, it is possible militarily to counter this. If the Iranian scientists want to be entombed under a mountain, that’s their decision. Now, I also used to teach for the U.S. Navy, and for 10 years, I would ask Admirals and Chiefs of Naval operation and so forth, “What posture should the U.S. Navy take if we want the Iranians to take our diplomacy seriously?”

And to a man and a woman, what they said is, “We need to withdraw our aircraft carriers from the Persian Gulf.” Now, that might seem counterintuitive, but in the Persian Gulf, they’re susceptible to missiles, to mines, to drones, to the suicide speedboats, but if we’re 400 miles away in the Northern Indian Ocean, we can hit the Iranians, they can’t hit us. And that military posture would lead the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to realize that every time they go to sleep, they might not wake up.

Lauri Regan: What a wonderful way to end. I can’t thank you all enough, Michael, Gabriel, Behnam, you always surprise me with your brilliance, and I love walking away from discussions with you all with having learned so much more. Thank you, everybody, in the audience for joining us for our premiere of the Forum Roundtable, and I hope that you continue to support the Middle East Forum and all the wonderful work it does, as well as the organizations, JINSA, and Polaris, and FDD that our guests are affiliated with. Great work from all of you. Thank you, and I wish everybody a wonderful afternoon.