Robert D. Kaplan, Author And Foreign Affairs Expert Talks Iranian Blowback
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EasyCater, your business tool for food. To learn more, visit easycater.com slash podcast. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Robert T. Kaplan, over a stretch of over 20 books, just simply speaks of the map. If you're one of those believers in get out the map and look at it,

Kaplan is definitive. His new tour de force is Wasteland, a world in permanent crisis. This coming off my book of the year a few years ago, The Loom of Time from Morocco to Persia. Robert Kaplan, thank you so much for joining us. I'll cut to the chase. You say technology has permanently changed our map, our geography. Is that true of this war with Israel and Iran?

Yes, it is to an extent, because Iran is a long distance from Israel on the map.

But yet the Israelis and, of course, the Americans have condensed that distance through technology. The American—excuse me—the Americans sent B-2 bombers all the way from the center of the United States, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, to bomb Iran, so that Iran is as close to America in operational terms

as Kansas was to the Indian Wars in the middle of the 19th century. And let me just make one thing very clear here. - Please. - Yeah, people who were saying that this could lead to another forever war, Middle East quagmire, they're making a mistake of category.

Iraq was in a different category

than Iran. Iraq was in the category of Vietnam and Afghanistan and Korea, in the sense that it involved tens of thousands of ground troops, which got stuck literally in a quagmire. Here we're dealing with just air and naval assets. The war could go in a number of ways. There could be blowback.

But as long as we stick with air and naval assets, there's not going to be a quagmire. There's going to be something different. It may be something bad, but it will simply exist in a category different from those four forever wars: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Robert, what do you expect the response from Iran will be?

I think there will be a response. It may take a few days or a few weeks. It may be a terrorist attack in Europe. It may be an attack by pro-Iranian Shia militia in Iraq on US troops not too far away. There certainly will be blowback, but it's gonna take a few months at least

to really register whether this decision by President Trump to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities was a wise or an unwise decision. It will unfold in stages. And you're the loom of time. And folks, I can't say enough about this is your single concise read on the span from Morocco to the Eastern Arab world and over to Persia.

You talked there, Robert Kaplan, about the giant of your academics, which is Clifford Geertz.

And it's the idea of culture. Describe for our American audience today the Persian culture, the Persian culture extant since the theocracy of 1979. Yes. Persia, Iran is not the Arab world. It is not Iraq. It is not Syria. It is not Libya.

Iran has been a nation state of sorts on the Iranian plateau for thousands of years. Iran was the world's first superpower in antiquity. You're dealing with a highly sophisticated, highly evolved culture and civilization where there is not one center of political power, but multiple centers of political power.

You know, I've been to Iran several times. It takes two hours in traffic to drive from one end of Tehran to the other. Being in Iran is like being in Egypt or India. That is, it's overwhelming. You feel overwhelmed.

So the so the idea that, you know, that a singular attack on nuclear facilities is going in a linear fashion to lead to a regime change is far too simplistic. They're they're made, you know, they're very, very well likely coups.

could be a regime evolution, as I call it, but it will involve many other factors and it will be internally driven. It won't be imposed from the outside. Robert, what do you think our U.S. strategy should be towards Iran at this point? Again, over the weekend, a significant escalation in military action. What should be our strategic plan?

Well, at this point, we should try, as President Trump said, to keep it a one off, that we try as hard as we can not to attack again, not to respond again. You know, if they're just going to do a desultory pinprick response like they did after President Trump ordered the assassination of Khabib,

Qasem Soleimani, the head of the al-Quds Force back in 2020, in January 2020, I think it was, there's no need to respond. You know, the policy now should be to lower the temperature, not talk about changing a regime from the outside, because the damage has been done. It will take days or weeks to more properly assess exactly how much damage was done.

But the idea that the Iranians are just going to rebuild their nuclear facilities is very simplistic. They're never going to rebuild it to the point that Ferdow or Natanz was. You know, way before they get to that point, the Israelis will be able to attack them. So this attack really did do substantial damage.

What do you expect Israel to do here? Because a lot of folks are suggesting this is a unique time for Israel here in terms of exerting and expanding its role within the Middle East and adding to its security. Is this a unique time for Israel? Yes, it is, because Benjamin Netanyahu, love him or hate him,

is a world historical figure. People may forget Clinton, Obama, and Biden, and half of the European prime ministers, you know, who will be forgotten in the course of the decades. But decades from now, people will be writing biographies about Netanyahu.

Because he's been in power so long, and the way he was able to achieve tactical surprise in his attacks on Iran, and then, I'll use the word, manipulate President Trump into taking action on his own, is nothing short of extraordinary. Right.

I think what the smart thing for the Israelis to do now, now that they got help from the U.S., is to give the U.S. something. That is, start the process of withdrawing from Gaza. Robert Kepin, one final question. We've got to run on with the day. And again, folks, I can't say enough about wasteland issues.

Robert Kaplan's new effort in the loom of time, my book of the year. You wrote a monograph, I'm going to call it the tragic mind, taking us back to Greek mythology and how we need tragedy to move forward. Does President Trump have a tragic mind?

In there somewhere, is there a philosophy of tragedy as a foundation to strength? That's a very hard, yeah, Tom, that's a very hard question to answer because I don't sense it. I think he's too vain and superficial to really have a deeply developed sense of tragedy. But I could be wrong.

I could be wrong on this, because the person who really did have a deeply evolved sense of tragedy was President George H.W. Bush,

who is very cautious. You know, the great thing about his administration was not what happened, but all the bad things that did not happen because of his governance. This has been wonderful. Robert Kaplan, thank you so much. It's a must-read, folks. Wasteland, a world in permanent crisis. For enterprise organizations, managing all your food needs is a tall order.

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