Trump vs the Ayatollah: what next for Iran?
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Stuart Willey and Tom Noonan. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has emerged for the first time since US and Israeli airstrikes to declare victory.

Despite 12 days of strikes on some of Iran's most sensitive nuclear sites, he told the Iranian people there wasn't much damage done and the US achieved very little with its bombing campaign.

The Ayatollah found time for some sabre-rattling as well. Threatening any more aggression towards Iran would come at a great cost. The question now, how much does the Iranian public actually believe the Supreme Leader? Could recent events have made his position more shaky? And what does Tehran now do with its nuclear programme? And what of those proxies in the region that have been so damaged?

With us to unpack it all is Bronwyn Maddox, director of the Chatham House think tank, who joins us from Amman in Jordan. Bronwyn, the Ayatollah claiming victory. Do Iranians buy that? They will have a sense of pride and relief that he claims to have seen off the country attacking them. That doesn't mean that they believe at all.

There will inevitably be a bit of scepticism because a lot of missiles fell on Iran and hundreds of people were killed, according to reports. And they will have had a long history of Iran claiming victory when it was something a bit more qualified. But there are signs that Iranians, even if they don't like the regime, have rallied behind him under this attack from Israel. Is there a sense these US and Israeli airstrikes have undermined the regime?

Or is there a rally around the flag effect? I think it's a funny mixture of both. Clearly, the regime has been weakened. It couldn't hold this attack at bay. And it's lost a lot of people. And it's had the humiliation and the fear of seeing those people very precisely targeted by Israel, implying that Israeli intelligence agents were right through the country.

At the same time, Iranians, as far as we can tell, have rallied around their regime, feeling that they do not want to be humiliated and under attack in that way. So it's got both. I think you'd have to say the regime is weaker now than it was, but that's a long way from being on the point of toppling. And the forces that, if or when they do bring down the regime, are going to come very much from inside, not outside.

And what about Iran's nuclear programme, Bronwyn? Obviously, there's been a big debate in the US about how much damage was done in those airstrikes. And unsurprisingly, Hamani says, well, not much. Do we have any better information about the state of that programme now?

This is the big question. And it's even more precise than that. Where are the 400 odd kilograms of highly enriched uranium enriched to just one short step away from weapons grade that Iran has already acquired?

the world's intelligence agents are now trying to find an answer to that question, as well as the question, does Iran have a secret bank of centrifuges somewhere to enrich that uranium just that one stage further to make an efficient bomb?

And you really have got very varying intelligence reports on this. I think absolutely understandably, intelligence agents or formal UN inspectors have not yet got back into Iran to say where this stuff is. Is it possible that Iran moved it around the country before these strikes? Well, it had every incentive to do so and quite a lot of reason to think an attack was coming. And the stuff can be transported fairly easily. It's not that bulky anymore.

Could it have done so without Israeli intelligence looking? That's a whole other question. You've got these wildly conflicting reports. We don't know. We may never know. I must say, talking to officials here, and I've been out in the region for a week, there is some suspicion that Iran has retained enough to be able to get a nuclear program again together with, certainly within years, if not a shorter period. Do we have a sense of how many years, if you had to put a number on it?

The point is we can't put a number on it. The point is we don't know. The point is that there is some chance, even if it's not huge, that Iran suddenly, let's call it in one or two years, pops up with some kind of nuclear weapon of some kind of effectiveness, if not perfect. That's what other countries are concerned about.

But they really don't know at this point. And I think it's very hard to know unless there is a deal with Iran that allows in UN inspectors to try and establish where the stuff is. But the IAEA, which is the UN nuclear watchdog, produced a report just a couple of weeks ago saying Iran has actually dismantled a lot of monitoring equipment. And even at that point before the Israeli action, we don't know where all the stuff is.

So starting from a point of a lot of question marks and adding some more to them. But this is what the world's intelligence is trying to establish and what Iran is going to be trying to conceal. Israel also targeted Iran's nuclear scientists. How many of them have been killed now?

It appears from reports that it's dozens, but there will be thousands of people working on this program. It's a program of more than 20 years. So I think you can't get rid of knowledge in that way. The thing that they can get rid of and where there is an argument about UNED, they could have caused a lot of damage, is the cascades which are a sort of linked array of these tall tubes called centrifuges, which need to be made out of especially hard steel.

then have to spin very fast, very controlled rotations and all be linked together with huge power supply. And that is a very fragile construction and a very bulky one that takes up holes. So those, it seems, have been destroyed. The question is, did Iran reconstruct those anywhere else? And there are some intelligence reports suggesting that it had done so on a small scale recently. We just don't know that. Donald Trump signalling there'll be more talks with Iran next week.

Days of bombs dropping and missiles flying. What could be achieved in negotiations? I think we should set our expectations low.

Donald Trump is giving every sign of relishing what he's been able to do so far, which is a strike that supported Israel's actions. He can claim victory, and now he'd like to claim a sort of diplomatic peace, a ceasefire. And I would think he would like to exit at this point. His own base, the MAGA base, does not want another foreign war, let alone in the Middle East, which has brought America such grief, despite many presidents trying to extract themselves from the region.

And his voters really don't want that. The opposition really doesn't want that, the Democrats as well. So there's a lot of incentive for him to try to announce some kind of peace and get out. What I think other countries, including quietly those in the region, but also Europeans will want, is some kind of negotiation that keeps Iran in the nuclear inspection regime and so tries to get some kind of assurance over all the things we've just been talking about.

In terms of incentives, could there be a route to sanctions being reduced or lifted altogether? This is a really good question. I think Trump may want to do that. He lifted sanctions extremely fast on Syria. He might want that as a kind of gesture.

A lot of other governments would like to say, make it conditional on the inspections regime. But it is something that the regime in Tehran very much wants because you've got a young, educated population which can see the rest of the world and what it is enjoying is in close touch with other big Iranian communities, including, for example, the vast Iranian community in Los Angeles.

and yet is almost entirely cut off from Western goods, including those it badly needs, like to repair aircraft, which have a terrifying casualty rate, as we have seen. So they want those sanctions lifted. It's just a question of what the terms are. And Iran's obviously developed a strategy of backing proxies across the Middle East.

How have these 12 days of conflict affected that axis and Tehran's control over it? I think Israel would not have taken this direct strike on Iran if Hezbollah, the largest of those proxies, had still been the force it was. And it was a formidable force.

really an army, an ever-equipped army. If Israel hadn't already significantly weakened Hezbollah last year, I don't think this whole conflict would have happened. But Israel's success against these proxies...

Hamas, but much more significantly Hezbollah, really paved the way for this. And Hezbollah, which does remain there and it remains essentially part of the government of southern Lebanon, it made clear that it didn't want to join in this time. It was not going to come to Iran's support. The others are much smaller. Hamas is struggling and contained in the horrendous situation that is Gaza at the moment.

The Houthis are very much going their own way, but they have reached a kind of deal with the U.S. to limit their attacks on shipping. And so for the moment, they're almost doing their own deals.

All right, Bronwyn, thank you. That is Bronwyn Maddox, director of the Chatham House think tank. The debate about just how much damage the US airstrikes did to Iran's nuclear program has obviously been fuelled by a leaked report from the Pentagon, which has drawn the ire of both Donald Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. Yesterday, we talked with the former Pentagon official Jim Townsend about the difficulties in drawing up these sort of intelligence assessments and why it can lead to a pretty fraught relationship with the White House.

Listen back to the episode, The President, The Pentagon and The League. That's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

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