Podcast Link; Writings Archive

Now let’s get to Venezuela.

The U.S. air raid into Venezuela has provoked many objections, a few respectable ones and many less so. But two stand out: That this was an unprecedented violation of sovereignty, and that it was over oil. The first point is a serious issue that requires a serious response. The second one is objectively true, but I fail to see why that is a bad thing.

Let me address a more fundamental question: sovereignty. Sovereignty has been the bedrock of the international order since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a principle that America upholds. But while sovereignty matters, its definition has been changing. However, in 1648, sovereignty was vested in the emperor, kings, and princes. That is a principle Americans rebelled against in 1776—something especially important in our semiquincentennial celebration. Rather, we created a popularly sovereign state, where the people are sovereign. This is such an accepted idea that even China pays lip service to it (but nothing more) by calling itself the People’s Republic. Same as Iran, which holds sham elections and also calls itself a republic (Latin for democracy; res publica, for the people). In fact, the most important caveat to sovereignty was championed by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s. The Responsibility to Protect was a nod to popular sovereignty, that autocrats would forgo their territorial integrity if they massacred their own peoples. If you believe in sovereignty and also believe that territorial integrity could be violated to defend nations against their dictators, the only conclusion is that people are sovereign, not autocrats.

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Controversy erupted last week when reports came out that the United States had a 28-point “peace” plan for Ukraine. The original …

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Three of the great texts of ancient time…

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If you are receiving this note, it is because you subscribed to The Russia–Iran File. Over the past year, I worked on a major project with a colleague, which led me to a realization: Europe and the Middle East, as I emphasized in my newsletter, obscured more than they explained. As the world becomes more connected, thanks to digital a…

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Lies came first. The Islamic Revolution succeeded by deceit. Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the regime, fooled Iranians into believing that he was a democrat who would stick to moral teachings, rather than becoming a monarch. After his ascent, the lies continued as the new state was solidifying its hold.

When I was in school, on the anniversary of the revolution, administrators would put copies of Ettela’at, the primary newspaper in the 1970s, on the school walls. One of them would read, “Khomeini: Marxists and Maoists have the right to free expression.” I found it funny because my father had spent five years being tortured in prison for being a Marxist, barely escaping hanging.

I wish that I could say that only the regime lies, but that is not the case. Everyone does. It starts at home, when your parents teach you to lie. Not to get ahead, but to avoid trouble. A memory I always look back to is from a morning when my father was dropping me off at school, “Remember: Don’t tell anyone that we had breakfast!” If people found out that my family was not fasting, it would raise a lot of questions and could possibly get us in trouble, especially given my father’s political status.

Parents might teach you to lie out of necessity, but when the stigma around it breaks, then people learn to lie to get ahead, too. The outcome is a society without trust because lying is normal, and honesty is for losers. My father, the most honest man I have ever met, happened to be a failure as a businessman. The regime has created a sick society, incapable of doing anything, taking the initiative, and trusting each other. Iran’s economic problems are not simply the result of corruption and sanctions but, much more than any of those factors, due to the culture that totalitarianism has created and perpetuated.

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Two distinct narratives are going around about the Gaza ceasefire. The mainstream one gives President Donald Trump the lion’s share of credit. The second one, mostly pushed by former Joe Biden partisans, is trying to share the glory. Both are wrong and for the same reason: They give the United States unrealistic credit and ignore the obvious fact that it is the belligerents who decide the fate of a war. More than any world leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves credit.

After the return of the living hostages, Antony Blinken, who served as the secretary of state during the previous administration, posted on X to explain the ceasefire’s emergence. He cited the January ceasefire that the lame-duck Biden administration reached, but that “That moment was squandered.” He did not ascribe any blame for the squandering, instead opting to share the success: “It’s good that President Trump adopted and built on the plan the Biden Administration developed after months of discussion with Arab partners, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

Blinken is correct that the two plans are similar, but devising and implementing them could not be more different. The Biden administration had an uneasy relationship with Israel. This led to Israeli distrust of any American proposal on the one hand and Hamas’s hopes that, by exploiting the tensions, it could get more favorable terms or even a unilateral Israeli withdrawal.

Much more meaningful, at least for the time being, is that those similarities are in the later parts of the ceasefire agreement. But the early stages, specifically regarding the release of the hostages, were different. Hamas agreed to release the living hostages drip by drip. In February, negotiations over extending the ceasefire in exchange for releasing all hostages began. That month, Biden’s envoy for the negotiations, Brett McGurk, wrote that Hamas was “playing games” with hostages, as it had during the 2023 ceasefire. He went on to endorse the U.S. and Israeli plan to add pressure on Hamas. By March, it became obvious that Hamas intended to keep some of those hostages. Under these circumstances, Israel resumed the war. The Biden ceasefire collapsed because its initial stage was unacceptable. It does not matter that the later parts of the plan were brilliant if there was never a hope of getting to them. As the Persian proverb goes, if the mason plants the first brick crookedly, the wall will reach the stars crookedly.

That was the Biden plan. The Trump plan is that, the Trump plan, mostly in name. Israeli journalist Amit Segal says, “Every Trump plan [for] the Middle East is a plan written by Ron Dermer (senior adviser to Netanyahu) and just wrapped in this shining bright gift package to President Trump.” He adds that the Israeli administration believes that “the second Israel would introduce a plan for the future of Gaza or the Middle East, it would be the exact moment in which it would die because no one would take an Israeli plan. But if it’s shipped to Washington and then sold as a Made in USA product, then it has a chance.” Avi Shavit further reports that Dermer, former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, and Emirati president Mohamed bin Zayed had been working on this plan since December 2023.

The genius of the Trump plan is not that it is modeled after the Biden plan, but that it was conceived in Jerusalem and only amended and presented by Washington.

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On May 31, the French soccer club Paris Saint Germain (PSG) became European champion for the first time after dominating France for over a decade. This would have sounded absurd to a soccer fan in 2010. PSG owes its success to the commitment of then-President Nicolas S…

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Let’s start with recognizing Palestine as a state.

That’s basically a summary of recognizing Palestine. There are two imperfect, yet internationally acepted definition of statehood.

In 1919, Max Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation:

A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order, in a given territory.

This is not my preferred definition, but, in truly tragic news, I don’t run the world. Those who do like it. There is a second definition, which I also don’t like. There are only 17 parties to the Montevideo Convention, but its formulation is de facto accepted as the settled norm for statehood:

(1) a permanent population, (2) a defined territory, (3) a government, and (4) a capacity to enter into relations with other states.

You probably can figure out that the Montevideo Convention is an expansion of Weber’s description.

Palestine can hardly qualify for any of these requirements, let alone all. The closest we come to a full qualification is a permanent population, but that is undermined by the classification of most Gazans as refugees. It does not have a government, either. Hamas was an actual governing organization, but it is a shell, and in any case it is not the recognized governing entity. The Palestinian Authority is recognized. But the Palestinian Authroity doesn’t govern anything. It has a small police force, but it is the Israeli military that provides most of the security in the West Bank: The entity that has a monopoly over violence in the West Bank is Israel. Israel also collects taxes on its behalf—making the Palestinian Authority the first state that cannot even raise revenue on its own. It cannot even establish relations with other states because foreign diplomats need Israeli permission to enter the West Bank—and unconfirmed reporting suggests that British diplomats currently there will have their visas revoked and have to leave.

What really got me going, however, was the second requirement: A defined territory. The much-loved Oslo Accords never fully settled this. Specifically, the status of eastern Jerusalem (mistakenly referred to often as East Jerusalem) was never decided on and was left to future negotiations. The Oslo Accords had been the standard to uphold—until today.

The U.K. Foreign Office has now changed its embassy address:

This is going beyond what the previous agreements have been: allowing Israel and Palestinian representatives to negotiate over the status of Jerusalem.

None of this is to suggest that I am, in principle, opposed to a Palestinian state. I’m just opposed to it in practice because there is not one.

There could have been. In the 2000s, there was a great Palestinian politician, Salam Fayyad, whose primary interest was creating a state. He never succeeded. Eventually, he stepped down from government and left altogether, now residing in the United States. He has grievances against everyone—Israel, the United States, and Palestinians—and he is mostly right. But the biggest problem was the Palestinian national character.

Fayyad was interested in creating a decent state, and Palestinians were invested in destroying the decent state next door: Israel. So you either had to give him the full reins to rule like a supreme dictator and ignore the public will or fall. And falling he did.

Fayyad’s fate was a symptom of the rot: Not only is there no Palestinian state, but there cannot be one either because its democratic mission will be the destruction of Israel.1

Today, the Palestinian Authority is run by an autocrat, Mahmoud Abbas, who is corrupt and uninterested in state-building. Worse, he is 90, and there is no clear indication of who will succeed him. He has pledged to implement meaningful reform, but even if we accept his competence and sincerity—I wouldn’t bet the house on it—he will die soon. Can we trust that his successor will continue the work? My guess is not because there is an ocean separating the acceptable minimum of a good state and the mean of Palestinian politics, a difference so vast and so simple: the difference between construction and destruction, between building and ruin, between civilization and barbarism.

There is no Palestinian patriot like Fayyad. And the liberal democracies so invested in recognizing a Palestinian state are hypocrites because they want the glory without putting in the work. There is nobody like Palestinian Fayyad, but there is the United Kingdom, there is France, there is Canada, and there is Australia. If the creation of Palestine is such an imperative, they can go there and build it. Press releases are easy and cheap; state-building is difficult and expensive. So press release it is. Which is to say, the status quo will persist, and Palestine will not exist.

It pains me greatly that I cannot say the same thing about Russia. Worse than existing, it is also the largest country in the world.

Two weeks ago, Russian drones swarmed Polish territory. The Russian state “clarified” that it was a mistake. You’d think that it would apologize for making mistakes, which Russia did not. Because it was not a mistake. There were approximately 20 drones that penetrated Poland. One or two could be a mistake, not 20. Russian soldiers are stupid, but not this stupid.

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Could Iran’s Water Shortage Fracture the Regime’s Hardline Base? (MEFO)

We are China hawks. Don’t pivot to Asia! (Breaking Defense with Mike Mazza)

What do Iranians want? (The Spectator)

Before we proceed, please share this newsletter and/or post with your friends and on your social media. It will be a huge benefit. I am not good at marketing—not that I don’t know how to, just that I don’t want to make money off of the rage politics on social media. My best tool is word of mouth. Thank you!e

An American dog was bragging to his Polish and Russian friends that “Whenever I’m hungry, I bark, and dad puts food in my bowl.” The Polish dog responded, “What’s food?” The Russian dog asked, “What’s barking?”

This is one of my favorite Cold War jokes, one that Ronald Reagan used to tell.

The Islamic Republic has topped communism. It has combined food shortages and censorship and added water and power outages. All to establish the rule of Islam, but 75,000 mosques that have closed down in recent years due to a lack of attendance belie that.

The mark of political maturity is acknowledging that there are tradeoffs to any policy. Except in Iran, where you lose something in return for losing something else, too.

You might be thinking that I’m rambling at this point. I’m not. When I was growing up, the state TV loved to boast about how Iran was the leading country in dam construction. I always found it peculiar as a kid. It was just odd to me that, out of all the countries in the world, Iran had figured out how to build dams best. I just couldn’t accept that the United States and Germany were lagging behind Iran in their dam-building capacity and knowledge.

But what does a 14-year-old know? Quite a lot, it turns out. It’s not that the rest of the world didn’t know how to build dams, as much as they knew better than to build dams.

The regime always pretended as if dam building had no downside to it, while the benefits were plenty: boosting the agricultural industry, generating electricity, helping economic growth. Pretty much like a Persian mother convincing her son to drink tomato juice because “it’s great for your hair, your heart, your brain, your manhood, everything” and if you don’t drink it you’ll die.

I have written in the Middle East Forum Observer article linked above about the political incentives the regime had. On a policy ground, many have speculated that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s notorious paranoia about invasion was also a factor in trying to boost food production at home—indeed, self-sufficiency in producing wheat, rice, etc. was another recurring theme of state TV, but that I didn’t have the wisdom to rebuke at 14 and had to wait until I got my hands on The Wealth of Nations years later.

Going back to my wisdom at 14, I also didn’t understand the argument for energy production because the regime’s we are awesome and sit on some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world and we desperately need to generate more electricity with dams did not go together. (The same goes for we desperately need nuclear energy.)

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Throughout the war, decisions were made independent of his counsel, knowledge, and consent. There are many explanations for Iran’s awful performance during the war, but the biggest one is that there was no supreme commander, therefore, no strategy.

It is truly regrettable that most of my readers do not know Persian because the memes are great! The most important meme going around is a video of a Khamenei speech from the 2000s, in which he is boastfully contrasting American leaders remained hidden for days after September 11 attacks with how he and the rest of the regime’s elite would “wear battledress, ahead of the nation, ready for sacrifice,” if a crisis erupts.

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The story has already been proven not to be entirely accurate. Jennifer Griffin reported that the report is “low confidence” and only focuses on Fordoe (that’s how it’s pronounced; Fore-doe, not Fore-dow). The assessment focuses on satellite imagery and signal intelligence, though signal intelligence could just be scanning heat and electric signals coming out of the site, and that’s likely it. Griffin also reported that the entrances to Fordoe are caved in, which makes it impossible for the Iranians themselves to go in and do the damage assessment for us to eavesdrop on.

Satellite imagery is very unreliable in this case because bunker busters penetrate before exploding underground, and Fordoe is 300 feet below the surface. Assessing the damage from the space is impossible for that level of depth.

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Khamenei can survive war. He can stand on top of the rubble of his nuclear program and claim that what matters is that he never caved to pressure, that he never gave in. He could, and will, …

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To be clear, this is sparkling wine, not champagne. I continue to boycott France for the crime of existing.

In 2023, I moved back to Arizona. What a wonderful decision! Except for being sick right now. I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m trapped at home, bored. I can’t read because I literally am having a difficult time keeping my eyes open. I can write with my eyes shut, but I won’t be editing this one. So excuse any typos and bad writing.

Speaking of the New Year’s celebrations in Arizona, I am having a flashback. Six years ago, when I was young a still able to go to raves—as opposed to now that I’m old and unable to go to raves but do nonetheless—I was at Decadence. What’s Decadence? This is it:

It was an odd moment. At the age of 28, I was finally about to finish college. Next stop: Realizing my dream of attending Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, and starting a new life in Washington, D.C. (both of which I regret now). I was at the top of the world, at a mindless, two-night rave with 15,000 people, yet I was anything but mindless.

Only a few days earlier, nationwide protests in Iran had begun. It was the first instance of anti-regime protests. Whereas 2009 and previous protests were mostly directed at specific policies and factions, 2017 was directed at the entirety of the Islamic Republic. It was surreal for me.

I didn’t grow up with a romantic view of Iran and Iranians. Rather, my romanticism was for America and Americans (which the U.S. immigration system has turned into a resentment for). After leaving Iran, I’d always say that I didn’t just flee Iran but also Iranians. I’d dance around it in explaining why—too traditional, too backward, too politically conservative—but really, what I meant was too non-revolutionary. Iranians were too comfortable with the tyranny they lived under.

I opposed the Iran nuclear deal. They supported it. I hated reformists. They had hopes for reform. I thought that the regime was the problem. They thought that hardliners were the problem. I liked the Republicans because they were tough on Iran. They liked the Democrats because they were soft on Iran.

The protests of 2017 changed that. For the first time, they had caught up with me. They finally saw what I had seen, asking for what I had asked.

At the party, my mind couldn’t stop thinking about Iran. For the first time, I was looking at it through a romantic lens. For the first time since leaving, I wish that I were there, not at one of the most fun parties in the world, with the best DJs and the hottest girls. I wanted to party by killing a few IRGC members, not at a rave.

Since then, my views of Iranians have drastically changed. I can separate them from their government because they have made it clear, over and over again, that they are different than their government. Since then, many have been killed, more tortured, even more imprisoned. Yet they haven’t stopped protesting and rioting. They haven’t stopped challenging the authority that oppresses them. You can’t find a more telling indicator than this. The authorities teach schoolchildren to say “Death to Israel,” and they respond, “Death to Palestine.”

My ultra-Zionist bias is showing here, of course. But there’s more. The old friends who would accuse me of being a traitor for my Zionism and support for Republicans still launch the same accusation at me. Now, for being critical of Bibi Netanyahu and anti-Trump, the two saints of the Iranian resistance.

After Russia started its full-scale war against Ukraine, the Russian diasporas either kept silent or began explaining that we really don’t understand the conflict and it’s too nuanced to be black and white, etc., etc. (by the virtue of their looks, I often find myself in the company of Russian women and have firsthand knowledge). The Palestinian diasporas have even less shame in apologizing for Hamas. The Iranian diasporas, on the other hand, show up at pro-Ukrainian and pro-Israeli protests.

The only thing left is for every Iranian to get a tattoo on their foreheads that says, “DO YOU GET IT? WE HATE THE REGIME!”

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The Houthis overtook most of Yemen in 2014 with the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Barack Obama’s administration said have at it. The Saudis and Emiratis were not too comfortable with a satellite of Iran which is have cult and half a terrorist group across the border, so they went to war to remove them. They asked for precision-guided munitions. U.S. Senate, led by Chris Murphy and Rand Paul, one Democrat and one Republican, both representing Tehran in the U.S. Senate, blocked the sale. So the Saudis and Emiratis had to use dumb bombs. Then Americans got upset that the Saudis and Emiratis were killing too many civilians and had imposed a blockade on Yemen, calling their war strategy cruel, even though Americans refused to give them the tools to fight that war in a way that spared more civilians. So when Joe Biden became president, he finally pulled the plug on the war, and China entered to end the war in favorable terms to Iran and the Houthis.

Since Obama brilliantly decided, as he has publicly acknowledged, to enrich Iran to create a balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran has multiplied its satellites and proxies, both in size and nominality, increasing its influence throughout the region. But the ridiculous thing is that that strategy might have worked if you let them balance each other (and I still doubt that it would have worked), but what ended up happening is that the Democrats mostly try to leash the Saudis and leave Iran free to maneuver, as seen in the Yemen War. If you look at the Middle East map and the change in political control, since 2011, Iran has become much more powerful. It is now present in Iraq and Syria directly, its satellites control Lebanon and Yemen, and its proxies now attack U.S. forces without any meaningful pushback.

Which brings us to the current problem. I love the Houthis. I really do. Islamist governments for nearly a century have said that they hate the Zionists, not Jews. One of Houthis’ official slogans is “Damnation upon the Jew.” Finally an honest one! Gotta admire the transparency. Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, take notes!

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I apologize for the hiatus. Moving back to Arizona was a lot of work. When you move, you’d think you hire a moving company who will pack everything for you, and then it’ll take a week to unpack. What you miss is that the stress of moving could be pretty paralyzing, and, also, you’ll spend a lot of time seeing everyone before leaving and catching up with everyone back in Arizona whom you haven’t seen in quite a while. But I’m finally settled. So expect me to flood your inboxes.

Where do I begin? Oh, right, there’s a war in the Middle East. There’s another one in Europe, too, rumor has it. The only place where turmoil is absent—for now—is the Indo–Pacific and East Asia. It turns out that, when you assure the entire world that you’re done with it to give your complete focus to Asia, evil tyrants in the rest of the world, in Moscow and Tehran and Gaza, take you for your word, concluding that you’re done with them, and they have a free range. Who could have thought!

Speaking of Tehran, I recently published an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the Islamic Republic gave the green-light for the attack of October 10: “Why It’s Obvious Iran Approved Hamas’s Attack.” Take a look.

Since the attack, President Joe Biden and his communications surrogates have been adamant that they have been clear to Israel that they should be very mindful of civilian casualties. That’s a terrible message.

Indeed, Israel must be wary of civilian casualties. Israel knows it. Because of the anti-Jewish double standards that Israel faces in wartime, it goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties more than the U.S. military does.

It’s also worth adding that the understanding of civilian casualties in the United States is somewhat spoiled. The last time the United States fought an existential war was in the 1860s. Since, even at the height of World War II, the war was not existential for us. When you don’t fight with the fear of losing your nation, you have the luxury of putting extra care into the welfare of the enemy and civilians in war zone.

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