Harvard Professor Answers Iran War Questions

The victor in a war is not determined

by the side that has the longest list of kills.

It's determined by the side

that achieves its strategic objectives.

I'm Professor Tarek Masoud from Harvard University.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Tech Support Iran.

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icebergdotcom asks, What are the chances

that Iran already has nuclear weapons?

I think that the chances are fairly low.

First of all, there's no public information

that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.

The United States government hasn't alleged

that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.

Israel hasn't said that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon,

and critically, the Iranians themselves

haven't said they have a nuclear weapon.

And if they had one,

you might expect them to say they had one

because the main use of nuclear weapons

is to deter precisely the kind of attack

that the Iranians are suffering now.

Are they close to getting a nuclear weapon?

You often hear people say that Iran is two weeks away.

What are they talking about when they say that?

They don't mean that Iran is two weeks away

from having a missile

that it could deliver a nuclear warhead

to Tel Aviv or to New York.

What they mean is that Iran is two weeks away

from having enough enriched uranium

for them to actually be able to build a nuclear bomb.

Uranium basically exists in nature in two forms.

One form is uranium-238,

which is not good for building bombs,

but there's another form,

which is a kind of unstable form, called uranium-235,

and that's what you wanna use to make a nuclear weapon,

but it exists in nature in very small quantities.

So, the process of enriching uranium

is basically increasing the concentration of uranium-235.

And if you just wanna run nuclear power plants,

you only need to get to about 3% of uranium-235.

If you wanna build a nuclear bomb,

you need to get to 90% enrichment.

The Iranians right now are at 60% enrichment,

and it's estimated that if they wanted to go to 90%,

it would take another couple of weeks.

Even then, once they have enough enriched uranium

to build a bomb,

there's still a lot of steps between that

and actually having a deliverable weapon.

They have to develop an explosive core,

they have to figure out a way to trigger it,

they have to put it on a delivery system,

and all of those steps are ones that we can detect

and potentially interrupt.

And so, Iranians are close

to having enough nuclear material for a bomb,

but they're further away from having the bomb itself.

Here's a question from binne21,

Was the Iran Nuclear Deal a good thing?

What binne21 is referring to

was something called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,

or the JCPOA, which was a deal that was signed by Iran,

the United States, the United Kingdom,

France, China, Russia, and Germany in 2015,

and this was basically a deal

in which the Iranians agreed to essentially give up

or postpone their nuclear program

in exchange for sanctions relief.

They weren't gonna enrich uranium

to the much higher level needed to build nuclear bombs.

They were gonna limit the amount of that uranium

that they stockpiled.

And on top of all of that,

they agreed to a very serious regime

of inspections by the IAEA,

the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Now, was it a good thing?

It depends on who you ask.

People who think it was a good thing say,

Of course it was a good thing.

We got the Iranians to put their nuclear program on ICE,

and we didn't have to go to war.

People who think it was a bad thing

point out that first of all,

many of the provisions of the JCPOA

were set to sunset or to expire

after about 15 years, so people felt,

Well, this is just putting a pause

on the Iranian nuclear program,

and after 15 years, they're gonna race to a bomb.

The other reason that some people thought

that this was not a very good deal

was they felt the inspections were not strong enough,

particularly with respect to some of Iran's military sites.

And then they also were concerned that the sanctions relief

that we gave to the Iranians

just put a lot of money in their pocket

that they could spend on their proxies like Hezbollah

and like Hamas and like the Houthis in Yemen.

And so, when President Trump got elected,

he said he was going to undo the deal,

and he did undo the deal and opted instead

for something called the maximum pressure campaign,

which is really intended to squeeze the Iranians,

to deprive them of money,

and also to make sure that they did not get

to develop a nuclear program.

How did the Iranians respond?

They responded by basically enriching uranium,

and so now they've got about 1,000 pounds of uranium

that are enriched to about 60%,

and they stopped all of the inspections.

When President Biden came back into office,

he tried to get the JCPOA back,

but the Iranians didn't wanna go back to the deal of 2015,

and they insisted that any deal that they made,

they wanted guarantees

that no future president could renege on it

the same way that President Trump

had reneged on the 2015 deal.

That was obviously something

that President Biden couldn't promise.

So, was the Iranian deal a good thing?

My answer would be,

it was good, but it probably wasn't good enough.

Here's the problem.

Iran and the United States have many deep disagreements

about a whole range of things,

so it seems kind of inevitable

that a limited deal on just Iran's nuclear program

was destined to collapse under the weight

of all of the other things we disagree on.

Here's a question from Quora,

Is Iran really that much of a threat

to the United States of America?

There's really two views here.

One view, which is the view held

by the president of the United States,

is that, absolutely, Iran is a threat to the US.

First of all, the Iranians have made no secret since 1979

about their very strong enmity to the United States.

They constantly chant, the regime at least,

[speaks in Persian], death to America.

It's almost like a national anthem.

When that regime came into being,

one of the first acts with which it announced itself

was the taking of hostages

at the American Embassy in Tehran.

These hostages, about 50 of them,

were held for more than a year.

Since then, Iran has invested in proxies like Hezbollah,

which killed almost 250 Americans in a suicide bombing

at an American military base in Beirut.

And then, of course, there is the fact

that the Iranians have been developing a nuclear program,

and some people say also developing a missile program

that was intended to enable them

to deliver whatever nuclear weapons they develop

to the American homeland.

So, that's the argument of those who say Iran is a threat.

Other people say,

Look, Iran was aspiring regional power at best.

If it represents a threat, it's mainly to Israel

and to the other countries in the Persian Gulf,

and it's eminently manageable.

And then they also point to the fact that Iran

is driven by a lot of internal conflicts.

There are lots of people who are upset

with the Iranian regime.

And if we would just stop rattling the Iranian cage,

maybe some of those people within the Iranian regime

who want to change it would have a chance of success

as opposed to us constantly causing people to rally

around the flag in that country.

Today, now that we're at open war with the Iranians,

you've gotta say they absolutely are a threat.

The aptly named Dangerous-Cost6367 asks,

Why are people talking about the Strait of Hormuz

and why does it matter so much?

Here is the Strait of Hormuz, this very narrow waterway.

It's about 20 miles wide.

That is in the territorial waters of Iran

and the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran has about 12% of the world's proven oil reserves.

That's a lot of oil.

And through the Strait of Hormuz

passes about 20% of the world's oil.

If you wanna get oil

out of what's called the Persian Arabian Gulf,

it mainly has to go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now, Saudi Arabia has a pipeline that lets it send some

of its oil across to the Red Sea.

The Emiratis have a pipeline that also allows them

to bypass some of the Strait of Hormuz, but it's not enough.

And when there is risk here,

when it looks like there's going to be a supply disruption

that gets priced into energy markets,

and you and I pay higher prices at the pump.

Now, in addition to the Strait of Hormuz,

there are two other places

that you might've heard people talk about.

One is Kharg Island, which is right there,

and that's a major Iranian facility

for loading tankers and for storing oil.

And there is now a proposal

on the table for the United States

to actually seize Kharg Island,

and that would deal a really crippling blow to the Iranians.

The second is actually on the other side

of the Arabian Peninsula, and that's right here.

That's called the Bab al-Mandab Strait,

and that separates Yemen from Africa on the Red Sea.

Practically, everything that goes through the Suez Canal

has to ultimately go through Bab al-Mandab.

We're talking there about 10 to 15% of world trade.

And guess who operates right here in Bab al-Mandab?

An organization called Ansar Allah,

known popularly as the Houthis.

They are an Iranian client

and they have the capacity to really disrupt

and interdict shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

And so, between the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab,

the Iranians have the ability

to put a major hurt on the global economy.

newt8991 asks, What would a realistic win for the US

even look like in the Iran war?

Well, if you listen to President Trump, we've already won.

In fact, we've won more than anyone's ever won

in the history of winning.

He often points to the tremendous battlefield achievements

of the American and Israeli military,

that we are taking out their air force,

that we're taking out missile sites,

and all of those things are true.

But here's the thing,

the victor in a war is not determined

by the side that has the longest list of kills.

It's determined by the side

that achieves its strategic objectives.

If our objective is just to end the Iranian nuclear program,

well, first of all, President said we'd ended

the Iranian nuclear program last summer,

so it was a question as to what we need

to do this time around

to really, really end the Iranian nuclear program.

That's still a pretty high bar

because we will never be assured that Iran's nuclear program

is completely obliterated until we have figured out

where that 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium has gone,

and so that might indeed require

some ground presence to try to find it.

Other people say that we will have achieved victory

when we've replaced the Islamic Republic

with a democratic or at least America-friendly regime.

That's a very high bar

that might require a very sustained military engagement.

The really interesting thing here, though,

is that though the bar for victory for us might be high,

it's pretty low for the Iranians.

All they need to do is survive.

MikeTorsson asks, Why is Iran bombing

seemingly completely unrelated countries?

It definitely looks that way, right?

Let's look at a map here.

So, the Iranians have been launching missiles

and drones obviously at Israel,

but they've also been launching at Kuwait,

Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE.

They even launched an attack on Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Now, the Iranians say,

We're not hitting random countries.

We're not even hitting those countries.

We're targeting American facilities in those countries,

like American bases.

Or as they did in Saudi Arabia, the American Embassy.

And the reason that the Iranians are doing that

is because what they wanna do

is they wanna raise the cost of this war

in the hope of getting the Americans

to conclude it's not worth it to continue,

and we need to make a deal with the Iranians.

One interesting fact is that the United Arab Emirates

has taken more fire than Israel.

In fact, it may have taken more fire

than all of the other countries combined,

and part of the reason for that

is because the UAE is such an important economic hub.

So far, those countries have been calling for restraint,

they've wanted an end to the war,

and they haven't joined the US and Israeli war effort,

although that might change.

But regardless of whether they joined the war

or they just sit it out and root for the US

and Israel from the sidelines,

when the history of this war is written,

people are gonna ask why the Iranians

turned the Gulf countries,

forced them from neutrality into open hostility.

It's almost like they were reading from a book

called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

Tidewatcher7819 asks, If President Trump

ordered a ground invasion of Iran,

would it be a long war or an easy victory?

If the United States has a more limited aim,

like seizing the enriched uranium or taking Kharg Island,

those things would be hard,

but there's no reason to expect

that they would create multi-year commitments

if the US remained focused on task

and mission creep didn't take place.

But if the ground invasion took place with the aim

of replacing the regime with one that's more friendly to us,

then there's lots of reasons to expect

that that would be a very long war

of the kind that we experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

is very adept at war fighting,

and they would absolutely put up a major fight

should we try to invade the Iranian homeland.

And these are the people, after all,

who trained Hezbollah and who trained the Houthis,

so they know what they're doing.

Another big question is,

how would the Iranian people themselves greet us?

Would they support us or would they see us

as replaying a century-long script

of foreign intervention and domination?

There's definitely those who say that we could go into Iran

and make short work of this regime.

My sense, though, is that the people who say that,

who say that this would be an easy victory,

aren't thinking hard enough.

Here's a question from Quora,

Do Saudi Arabia and Iran hate each other?

Prior to this conflict,

Saudi Arabia and Iran had a pretty decent relationship.

They'd kind of buried the hatchet

with Chinese mediation in 2023

and restored full diplomatic relations.

That said, there absolutely are tensions beneath the surface

for these countries, and they're longstanding.

On one level,

it's just they both happen to be two big countries

that want to have hegemony in this part of the world.

One thing you'll often find

is that Saudis and Iranians often argue

about what to call the body of water that separates them.

Saudis like to call it the Arabian Gulf.

Iranians get really upset when you call it that.

They like to call it the Persian Gulf.

So, that speaks to the degree to which both

of these countries want to be seen

as the leaders of the region.

There's also a kind of economic competition.

They're both major oil producers,

and they don't always see eye to eye on prices.

And then there's ideological differences.

On the one hand, Saudi Arabia adheres to a brand

of Sunni Islam that sees the Shia Islam

that Iranians practice as a form of heresy,

and that has absolutely been a source of conflict.

And by the way, Saudi Arabia has a population

of Shiites in its eastern province,

and it's always worried that Iran is going to instigate them

and turn them into a fifth column against the Saudi state.

The Iranian state is based on a revolutionary ideology.

After all, 1979, they came to power,

and they promised to export an Islamic revolution,

while Saudi Arabia is a conservative monarchy.

They're not so interested in Islamic revolution.

And then finally, the Saudis are typically pro-American.

They've had a good relationship with the United States

ever since the World War II era.

And obviously, Iran sees itself as the leader

of an axis of resistance against the United States,

and so it's inclined to see Saudi Arabia

as kind of an American puppet.

Now that the war has commenced

and that the Iranians have hit targets in Saudi Arabia,

the reporting is that the Saudis

are urging the United States to finish the job

and to finally rid the region of this irritant

that has caused so much damage.

This one is from the explainlikeimfive subreddit,

Explain like I'm five, who is Hezbollah?

Hezbollah is a militia

and political party that operates in Lebanon.

Hezbollah means Party of God,

and it was established in 1982

with serious Iranian support for two reasons.

The first was to protect Lebanon Shiites.

They are about 30% of the population,

and they weren't always treated so well.

But the second purpose was to push Israel out

after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Hezbollah has developed into probably one

of the most capable military forces in the Middle East.

They have waged war against Israel.

They were a major part of Iran's attempt

to shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria

after popular uprising in 2011.

There are reports that they trained Hamas

and helped Hamas prepare

for the October 7th attacks against Israel

that killed more than 700 civilians.

One of the things that Hezbollah did after October 7th

is they would launch rockets into Northern Israel,

resulting in a serious evacuation of Israelis

from that part of the territory.

And with the war with Iran,

Hezbollah started launching rockets again

at Israeli targets.

They really are the key organization that people talk about

when they talk about Iran's proxies around the world.

Now, today, Hezbollah has suffered some serious blows.

September of 2024,

the Israelis basically decapitated the organization.

First, they planted a bunch of exploding pagers that killed

and maimed several hundred Hezbollah leaders.

And then that same month,

they actually killed the Secretary General of Hezbollah,

a cleric named Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike.

And so, Hezbollah today is a much diminished organization.

The Israelis are now saying that they need to finish the job

and eliminate Hezbollah entirely,

and so they have actually invaded Lebanon

and moved all the way up to the Litani River

with the express aim of completely ending Hezbollah.

Here's a question from Quora,

Why does Iran hate the USA and Israel?

One of the big reasons that Iran hates the United States

is that they still hold a grudge against the US

for supporting the Shah

and for helping orchestrate a coup

against more or less democratic prime minister in 1953,

who's only sin was trying to nationalize Iran's oil assets.

Another reason they hate us, though,

is because we support Israel,

and they hate Israel because they see it

as having stolen Muslim land and oppressing Palestinians.

In fact, this is something that really matters

to the Iranian regime.

They named the special forces of the IRGC the Quds Force,

which which means the Jerusalem Force.

On the last day of Ramadan,

they hold a rally called Quds Day,

which means Jerusalem Day.

You might be asking,

why would the Iranians care so much about Israel?

It's so far away.

And there's really two explanations.

One explanation is that Iran

is based on a pan-Islamic ideology,

and so naturally, they're going to have deep sympathy

with Muslims around the world,

and Muslims do care about the fact

that Jerusalem is no longer under Muslim control

and that Palestinians are oppressed by the Israelis.

Another argument is that it's totally cynical,

that what the Iranians wanna do is they want to appeal

to the Arab street in their campaign

for gaining influence around the region,

and they know that playing the anti-Israeli card

is a sure way of doing that.

So, those are all the questions we have for today.

Thank you for watching Tech Support Iran.

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