All Episodes
Previous Next
July 7, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:21
Has the Iranian Threat Been Neutralized? | Michael Doran
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And for the first time in history, Israel and the United States have taken military action together.
This is totally new.
To understand Middle East dynamics, I always count on Michael Duran, director of the Middle East Center at the Hudson Institute.
We sat down to discuss what has now been dubbed the 12-day war and how Middle East political realities have been transformed.
One of the most amazing things about the Israeli attack is that they totally took the Iranians by surprise.
The scientists were in their beds.
Commanders got together thinking they were safe.
That is just remarkable.
How did the strikes on Iran change the geopolitical landscape?
Was World War III ever a real possibility?
And has the threat of a nuclear Iran been neutralized for good?
And there's still a little lingering doubt that maybe some of the enriched uranium was squirreled away by the Iranians in some other secret site, so we have to wait and determine.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Mike Duran, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be here.
So let's discuss what has actually happened in the Middle East since this, what's been dubbed now the 12-day war.
Clearly, the political reality has been reshaped substantially.
So Iran has been taken down two or three notches.
I mean, if you just go back to 20 months ago when Hamas attacked Israel, and the next day, Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, opened up on the Israelis.
A few weeks after that, the Houthis opened up on the Israelis.
If I'd have told you then that within two years, less than two years, Israel was going to have an unimpeded air bridge to Iran, was going to control the Iranian airspace and was going to take out 30 top military officers in the Iranian regime and nine or ten nuclear scientists.
You'd tell me I was crazy.
But Israel did do that, and by the time they did it, Hezbollah couldn't attack.
One of the things that we all felt back in October of 2023 is that Israel couldn't afford to escalate against Iran because Hezbollah, which had 150,000 rockets and missiles, would open up on Israel.
And those rockets and missiles, like we're seeing, they basically everything that Iran has, Hezbollah has, or had.
And so we assumed that Hezbollah's missiles could penetrate Israeli defenses and they would be blanketing Tel Aviv with missile fire.
But the Israelis very deftly were able to decapitate Hamas first, then turn their sights on Hezbollah, and they were able to neutralize Hezbollah before it could open up with all guns against the Israelis.
Once they took out Hezbollah, then they were able to go and take care of the Iranians.
And so Iran was never able to carry out a full front, you know, a total campaign against Israel with all elements of its resistance axis operating all out at the same time.
So almost miraculously, Israel now has a victory at least as great as the victory it had in 1967 in the Six-Day War.
Why do you say almost miraculous?
Just because I don't think anyone could have imagined this out.
Israel was laid so low and taken by surprise on October 8th, and the IDF, which you think of as being an extremely extremely adept force, modern force, was nowhere to be seen October 7th.
And you wondered, maybe it's not as good as we thought it was.
But it turns out that the two wars it was prepared to fight, it wasn't prepared to fight the war with Gaza, but it was very much prepared to fight the war against Hezbollah and the war against Iran.
So we have, first we have this war against Hamas, then we have the neutralizing of the Hezbollah's missile systems, right?
And then we have the clearing of the Iranian air defenses.
And then there's also what happened in Syria.
That's another big one.
Oh, I left that out, yeah.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad as well, yeah, that's huge.
And which also made possible the air bridge to Iran, because as long as the Russians and the Iranians were in Syria and the Assad regime, it would be a lot harder for the Israelis to overfly Syria and go to Iran.
Of course, they could do it, but it would have taken extra resources, and you never know what the Russians would have done in terms of helping to give the Iranians early warning.
One of the most amazing things about the Israeli attack against the Iranians is that they totally took the Iranians by surprise.
The scientists were in their beds, commanders all got together thinking they were safe.
That is just remarkable.
No one else can do this kind of thing.
The United States can't do this.
I mean, it takes such penetration of the system to lay the groundwork for these operations.
I think that Donald Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were loosely coordinated throughout all of this.
I don't think it was all meticulously choreographed.
And when the Israelis went against the Iranians, my interpretation, I could be wrong, we'll find out over time, but my interpretation is that Trump gave them a yellow light, the Israelis.
He had promised them that he wanted to try to get a diplomatic answer to the Iranian nuclear program, and he had promised them that he'd only take 60 days.
The 60 days came and went, and Prime Minister Netanyahu said, we have to go against the Iranians now.
This is our window of opportunity.
And so Trump gave them a yellow light.
They executed flawlessly.
And they were so successful that Trump himself wanted to be associated with it.
And I think if they had not been so successful in this unbelievably well-coordinated attack, then Trump might have thought twice about getting the United States involved.
There's a lot of discussion right now about the reality of the nuclear program in Iran, right?
So everything from it's completely decimated, it's over, doesn't exist, to, you know, it was all moved away just in time.
Right.
From what you understand at this moment, what is the reality of that?
So from what I understand, the reality is that there was enormous damage done to it.
But we don't know that it was totally destroyed in every respect.
And I don't think we can know for sure until the three major nuclear sites in Iran, that's Isfahan, Fordo, and Natans, are investigated.
And some of these, like Natans especially and Fordo, have deep underground facilities.
And there's still a little lingering doubt that maybe some of the enriched uranium was squirreled away by the Iranians in some other secret site before Isfahan and Fordo were attacked.
So we have to say, I think to be very, very judicious, that right now Iran is a nuclear power of indeterminate status.
So we have to wait and determine.
I think it's very obvious that this early DIA report that came out and said that it was only setback months and not years is nonsense.
There was very severe damage done to these sites.
It troubles me, though, to see how politicized it got immediately, because the anti-Trump elements wanted to deny this success to him, and the anti-Netanyahu elements wanted to deny success to Netanyahu.
They ran with this story, which said that very little damage was done.
And then the Trump administration, to protect itself, came back and said, no, no, no, no, an enormous, you know, it was completely obliterated.
Well, the answer may be slightly, a little bit more toward almost completely obliterated.
We have to wait and find out.
I think this is a question that can be objectively answered.
There's an objective answer to this question, and we have the tools eventually.
It may take weeks or months to figure it out.
We have the tools to know for sure.
So everybody should just back off a little bit, cool down, and wait and find out.
You know, my producer and I were discussing earlier that one of the things that isn't as well known is that the Iranian nuclear program has a modular nature.
It was designed this way to make it easier to not have it all be obliterated.
And of course, it's been in development forever.
I mean, for many decades.
It gives me great pleasure to think how successful the Israelis were, and together with us.
There were some 18 different sites.
The four that mattered the most were Arak, the plutonium reactor, Fordo, the deep underground bunker under the mountain, Natans, which is sort of the major enrichment facility, the hub of the whole system, and Isfahan, which was where the conversion facility, those are the four most important ones.
But there were some 14 more.
And I thought it was almost impossible for the Israelis to hit all of them, but I'm glad I was wrong about that.
Bottom line is the program has been degraded dramatically.
Dramatically.
And it won't surprise me if the Trump administration is 100% correct that it has been totally obliterated.
It's just that at this point we can't know that for sure.
But we have also sent a signal.
We've broken a number of taboos or red lines that we imposed on ourselves.
We have once again made the Iranian nuclear program completely illegitimate.
We've shown that we will take military action to make sure that they never have a bomb.
And for the first time, Jan, in history, Israel and the United States have taken military action together.
This is totally new.
There's always been a taboo in American national security culture of working together militarily with the Israelis.
There was some sense that that would taint us in the eyes of our Arab and Muslim allies.
And Trump has a totally different approach.
I mean, he's really saying association with Israeli military power enhances the power of the United States.
I think that's a beautiful thing.
Mike, we're going to take a quick break right now.
And folks, we're going to be right back.
And we're back with Mike Duran, Director of the Middle East Center at the Hudson Institute.
Well, so that brings up a bunch of thoughts I have.
Again, I'm thinking back to your remarkable article that Kings Foyle's looking at this whole situation.
Of course, a huge player in the region is Turkey.
And Turkey is no friend to Israel.
I mean, and I know just from many things I've read of yours and many discussions that we've had that you view a Turkey-U.S.
alignment alliance as actually a very valuable thing, right?
At the same time, as you just said, you view the Israeli-American alliance as a very valuable thing.
But what happened just now, isn't Turkey getting awfully worried all of a sudden?
I think it's complex.
I mean, think about it this way.
President Erdogan gave a speech recently In which he attacked Israel in the harshest terms.
And he also announced that he was giving orders to develop the missile capabilities of the Turkish military, presumably so that they can penetrate Israeli defenses.
At the same time, however, he or his government gave advice to Ahmed Ash'ara, the new leader in Damascus, who is where Turkey's the dominant power, not to get in the way of the Israelis as they make their way to Iran.
And I think we, the United States, our B-2 bombers that went to Iran also went over Syria, I believe.
If they didn't go over Syria, they went over Turkey.
So one way or another, we were able to attack Iran, and the Israelis were able to attack Iran because the Turks facilitated it might be too strong of a word.
Did not interfere and they could have interfered if they wanted.
They could have made life very difficult if they wanted.
And I think we should all remember that.
They saw it as in their interest, whatever feelings they may have toward Israel, they didn't see it as a bad thing that Israel won this war.
Well, and so now you're speaking to this dramatic realignment in the region, which I think really started with the Abraham Accords, which were one of these things that I never thought I'd see anything like that.
I don't know what you thought.
Maybe you were the one guy that was predicting it all.
I wasn't.
I wasn't, actually.
I wasn't totally on top of that.
But prominent diplomats are saying there's more coming, right?
More Abraham Accords are going to be expanded now with this situation.
Well, Steve Witkoff, the President's Special Envoy, suggested, and he said we're going to be surprised at some of the countries that are going to get involved.
I'm not sure what he has in mind.
One of them might be Syria.
Now, that would be very, very interesting.
They're saying that.
I'm a little skeptical.
I think a lot of people are, a lot of Middle Easterners are telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear in order to ingratiate themselves.
So I'll be surprised if there's a Lebanon-Israeli peace agreement, and I'll be surprised if there's a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement.
I won't be shocked completely, and I wouldn't say it won't happen, but I'm more inclined to say, well, let me see how this unfolds.
A couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, Steve Witkoff talked about Armenia and Azerbaijan joining the Abraham Accords.
Now, there I know the Turks are very much ready to normalize with the Armenians, and the Azerbaijanis are almost ready.
There's a couple of points where there's sticking points, but we could see a historic reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.
But the bottom line, and this is what I think I'm hearing after thinking through everything we've discussed right now, is that this has reduced the CCP's power and influence in the region.
Totally.
I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
It's enhanced the United States, and the United States and its alliance through Israel.
So if the Saudis normalize with the Israelis or move closer toward normalization, they're not going to call it Abraham Accords, because Abraham Accords was the UAE.
And I don't know that they're going to rush to do that right now because the Gaza conflict is still going on and it soured relations somewhat.
But if we move in that direction in a year or so, and I think it's quite possible that that could happen, we should think of Abraham Accords and related developments as the American answer in the Middle East to one belt, one road.
And just speaking about Gaza, what do you think the implications are for the Gaza war?
I think that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are going to try to solve the war and to end the war in Gaza sooner rather than later with some kind of big deal.
And if they do that, if there's a major deal and all the hostages are returned, I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu will go to early elections.
You know, there's a cloud hanging over him because of October 7th, because he was the man in power on October 7th, because he's the dominant politician in Israel of the last 20 years.
So some measure of responsibility for October 7th attaches to him.
He has almost completely redeemed himself because he has removed an existential threat to the Jewish people.
You know, all Jewish holidays are they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.
Let's eat.
Yeah, that's the, as people go, it's Friday as you and I are talking to each other, as they go to have their Shabbat meal tonight.
This is basically what they're all going to say.
They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.
And Prime Minister Netanyahu knows he's got that story now, and this was his life's mission, ending the Iranian nuclear threat.
On that basis, I think he's going to want to go to elections.
And just very briefly for the record, the threat of war in the Middle East, which there always is some more or less at this point.
Oh, much less.
Much less.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, we discussed many of the reasons why that might be the case, but succinctly, why does this arrangement right now, after this 12-day war, after the U.S. involvement, which a lot of people feared would create more war or unleash even a world war?
I mean, this is what some of the people are.
I never understood how they were seeing.
How is it going to be a world war?
China is supporting Iran, but from a distance, like we discussed with the companies providing data and missile technology and that kind of thing, but they're not getting directly involved with their military.
Russia can't get directly involved because it's been weakened by Ukraine and it's busy in Ukraine.
So who's going to come to the aid of Iran?
And Iran is a third-rate military power.
You know, it's like a boxer that has one arm that's atrophied.
There's no regular military.
There's no regular Air Force to speak of at all.
What do they have are terrorism, ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles, and a nuclear program.
And that's it.
And the United States can handle that clearly.
We saw it with President Trump.
So there wasn't going to be any kind of large coalition coming and attacking America.
Iran was behind all of the wars in the Middle East of the last 20 years.
And so we're going to have a little bit of stability now.
Because the ring of fire is gone, basically, right?
Except for the Houthis.
Except for the Houthis, right, right.
Which China is going to be interested in keeping on a low boil, I think.
Mike, as we finish up, of course, Israel wanted to degrade the nuclear program of Iran.
That's obvious.
But we have basically different motivations, all these different stakeholders that are playing out.
We've got the Gulf states, we've got America, we've got the Iranian people, which are certainly not the same thing as the mullahs.
Where do you think they stand in this picture?
All of those different elements.
I think the American people were overwhelmingly in favor of what President Trump did.
He did split his own coalition because there is this younger crowd that's very much influenced by these online influencers who saw this as some kind of betrayal of the MA ethos.
But the polling shows that the American public, and particularly the MAGA base, were supportive of this.
Every president since Clinton has said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
In Israel, again, overwhelming support, particularly among the Jewish population, but even a very significant percentage of the Arab population was supportive.
In the Gulf, I think you have a kind of duality in people's minds.
People are afraid of instability.
They're afraid of another regime change war, more turmoil.
And in particular, in the Gulf, they were afraid that the Iranians might retaliate against the Americans and the Israelis by targeting them, by targeting Saudi oil fields, the Emirati oil fields or even Emirati population, and so on.
So there was a lot of vocal opposition by the leadership in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the war, which was partly out of fear of the thing devolving into something that was going to be detrimental to everyone and partly out of fear of being targeted by the Iranians.
Nobody in the Gulf, nobody in the Gulf is sad to see Iran cut down a few pegs, to see its proxies neutered, and to see its nuclear program destroyed.
They're all ecstatic about that.
Mike, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
A final quick thought as we finish?
My final thought is that there's a gap between the Israeli position, stated position in the war, and the American.
The American position is that we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
The Israeli position is that we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and prevent them from developing their ballistic missile program.
I think the Israelis have it right, and I hope that American policy will put as much emphasis on the missile program as on the nuclear program, because that missile program is being put at the service of the global coalition, the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian coalition against the United States.
Well, Mike Duran, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Mike Duran and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
▲
Export Selection