We’re speaking at a moment of high tension in Iran, with an American flotilla menacing the country from the south and the regime cracking down with further mass arrests, having killed seven thousand or more at the height of the January 7–8 protests. May we start by asking you about Iran’s adversaries? The June War marked the start of a military open season on Iran, with waves of aerial attacks and assassinations by Israel and a massive bombardment of nuclear sites by the us . To what extent are us and Israeli aims for Iran in alignment?

The us effectively outsourced its Iran policy to Israel from the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. There was no longer any State Department presence in Tehran, no information coming in. Washington seems to have decided that if they needed information or policy on Iran, they would get it from Tel Aviv. That held through the decades, with a brief exception when Obama was pursuing the 2015 nuclear-limitation agreement, the jcpoa. That, of course, caused panic in Tel Aviv because it took the option of further pressure on Iran off the table—Netanyahu flew to Washington to fight it. With Trump, the us went back to outsourcing policy to Israel. Trump pulled out of the jcpoa in 2018 and imposed extremely harsh sanctions, as did Biden, because Netanyahu didn’t want a deal that merely ensured Iran was not a nuclear threat; he wanted more than that.

So the question is: what are Israel’s real policy goals? They know enough to know that ‘regime change’ is not a viable option. Short of a us military occupation, the Shah is not going to be returning to Iran. The only other option would be a coup by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, which would be far more dangerous for Israel. So their aim is most likely to do what was done with Iraq and Syria and Libya—dismantling the state. That would be terrible for Iran. It would be terrible for Europe, too, because it would lead to a flood of refugees, as happened with the other countries. That’s not going to restrain us policy—it will be no skin off America’s back for Trump, as long as the disintegration of Iran backfires on Europe, not on the United States.

Let’s go back to the origins of the regime: as a historian of modern Iran, how would you compare its consolidation after the 1979 Revolution to Russia’s after 1917 and China’s after 1949? One striking difference is that Iran did not undergo nearly such a prolonged period of civil war. The Russian Revolution was a product of the collapse of Tsarism in the First World War and was then subjected to a combined civil war and Entente intervention for over four years. The Chinese Revolution was born out of a two-decade civil war, combined with eight years of Japanese invasion, followed by three years of war with the us in Korea within twelve months of the foundation of the People’s Republic. In Iran, less than two years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the Revolution was hit by a war launched by Iraq that was then assisted by the United States, which lasted for eight years. Combined with the civil war of nine months, the ratio of external to internal violence in its experience was much heavier. What were the long-term consequences of this?

Setting the obvious political differences aside, there is a similarity in that foreign intervention strengthened the revolution in all three cases. External foes assumed that the new government was so fragile that it could be easily overthrown, but the opposite happened: even people who didn’t like the revolution rallied to defend the country. That helped the Bolsheviks especially. It was similar in Iran. In 1980, Khomeini’s government in Tehran was quite weak; it hadn’t really established itself. Saddam Hussein was told by some of the ex-Shah’s advisers, Bakhtiar and some of the generals who had fled Iran, that all he had to do was invade and the whole system would crumble. Saddam had his own agenda. In 1975 he had been forced by Iran to give up the Shatt al-Arab, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, which the two countries had disputed for many years. He hoped to take advantage of Iran’s weakness to recover the territory, but Khomeini responded that he would rather cut off his arm than yield any territory. Iran counter-attacked, and a lot of young people who didn’t much like the regime volunteered to fight for Khorramshahr, which helped to consolidate the regime in its first few years. Probably Khomeini’s biggest mistake was the decision to continue the war after it was liberated. The slogans became ‘War, war until victory’ and ‘The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad’. It turned into an eight-year war, which if anything undermined the credibility of the regime, because the losses were so heavy and victory never came. Eventually, Khomeini had to accept the poisoned chalice of a peace agreement, as he put it. But initially, foreign invasion ran parallel to the other cases: it actually helped the Revolution.

Unlike Russia or China, the political system created by the Iranian Revolution was institutionally pluralist from the start, with multiple pillars of power—clerical, parliamentary, juridical, military—and regularly contested, if never untrammelled, elections. In your view, was this outcome the result of deliberate decisions by Khomeini and his associates, or the product of compromises forced on them by other currents in the revolution?

Both of those. Khomeini was very savvy—or, you could say, Machiavellian, or pragmatic or shrewd. He always held his cards very close to his chest, never really revealed what he was thinking. But his appeal in Paris, on the eve of the Revolution, was to be very open—everyone would have a role. ‘All we want is an Islamic Republic, but we have no intention of running it. We are just old clerics, we will go back to the seminary.’ The Islamic Republic’s draft constitution, written in Paris, was modelled on de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. It was called Islamic, but it was basically a strongly presidential system with a representative-democratic framework. But once Khomeini was back in Tehran and had his hands on the levers of power, a different type of Islamic republic was revealed: a clerical republic. The actual Constitution, drafted by a religious assembly, is extremely elaborate, but its main principle is that real power should be in the hands of the senior clerics. The twelve-member Council of Guardians, six of them clerics appointed by the Supreme Leader and six jurists nominated by the Chief Justice, himself another of the Supreme Leader’s appointees, supervises the parliamentary system and can veto legislation and disqualify electoral candidates. It also approves candidates for election to the 88-member Assembly of Experts, which selects the Supreme Leader. So, yes, there are pluralist elections for city mayors, members of parliament, the president, but their conduct would ultimately be determined by trusted clerics.