New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Understanding Iran Under Attack: A Discussion with Author Vali Nasr

·48 min·3 clips

Iran’s strategy is to raise oil prices and disrupt the global economy by threatening Gulf shipping and energy flows.

1. New Books in Military History turns to Iran under attack and day 11 of the war with Paul Starobin and Vali Nasr. 2. Paul Starobin is the host, and Vali Nasr is the Johns Hopkins SAIS professor whose books on Iran frame the discussion. 3. The episode asks what Iran’s war strategy, domestic politics, and leadership choices reveal about the current conflict. 4. Nasr says the war was expected after the June ceasefire ended the 12-day war. 5. He says Iran quickly absorbed lessons from that earlier fighting and prepared for a longer conflict. 6. He describes a reorganization of military and civilian decision-making to avoid paralysis if leaders were decapitated. 7. He says Iran rebuilt missile and drone stocks before the new fighting intensified. 8. He says Tehran also prepared for electricity, food, and other supply pressures in a prolonged war. 9. Nasr says Iran extended the battlefield to energy markets, Gulf countries, and U.S. bases. 10. He says Iran is trying to raise oil prices and pressure the global economy through the Gulf. 11. He says the United States and Israel have enormous firepower, but their defensive capacity is limited by interceptors such as THAAD and Patriot missiles. 12. He says the Iranian leadership sees that vulnerability as an Achilles heel. 13. He says Western reporting overreads any sign of a crack between Iran’s president and the rest of the wartime leadership. 14. He says the president’s remarks were partly about Azerbaijan and Turkey and did not show a real split. 15. Nasr argues that many Western assumptions about the Islamic Republic miss its national-security doctrine. 16. He says that doctrine is built on the belief that the United States has been a vital threat since the 1953 coup. 17. He says the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is misread when compared to Latin American or Egyptian militaries. 18. He says Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi identities make Iran complicated, but not in the same way as Iraq, Syria, or the Soviet Union. 19. The conversation is analytical, cross-checking analogies, policy assumptions, and regional consequences in a measured interview format. 20. Readers interested in Iran’s state structure and wartime strategy will get the most from it; listeners wanting light politics should skip it.

As heard by us

A measured look at why wartime Iranian nationalism can be hard for American policymakers to read.

Vali Nasser's conversation with Paul Starobin looks at what the United States can miss when it reads Iran mainly through diaspora politics and domestic opposition.

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Want to understand why war can harden the nationalism American policy keeps misreading?

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