This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on March 13, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: Renad, what's the thesis of this paper you wrote?
Renad Mansour: The research puzzle that we're looking to address in this is how Iran and its networks have historically adapted, and how the configurations that we see in the last few years will transpire.
Jon Alterman: And these are networks that reach throughout the Middle East.
Renad Mansour: Yes. It's part of a project, XCEPT, Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends, funded by UK Development, which looks at transnational conflict to make the point that we can't take a country-specific approach when responding to conflict. In this case study, we wanted to look at Iran and its networks, known sometimes as the “axis of resistance”: groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon; until its collapse, the Assad regime in Syria; the PMF, many different Popular Mobilization Forces groups in Iraq; of course, the Houthis in Yemen. And Iran sort of as, for a long time, the leader of this group, but we know, as we say in the paper, that's also changing.
Jon Alterman: And Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other kinds of groups.
Renad Mansour: Yes. We get through the history of this. 2024 was a very bad year for Iran and its axis of resistance. Since October 7, several of these groups, Hezbollah, of course, and Hamas have been at war with Israel. Israel has launched a sort of transnational war, attacking many of these groups in Gaza, and elsewhere, such as the West Bank and Lebanon.
The policy thesis at this moment, in 2025, is Iran is on the back foot. It's potentially at its weakest point in the region since the Islamic Revolution. So, we went back to understand how Iran would respond to such setbacks. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a year later, in 1980, Saddam invaded Iran. Since then, Iran has gone through military shocks, political shocks, economic shocks. It's always managed, for survival reasons, to reconfigure. Our assumption is this will happen again.
Jon Alterman: What's the power of networks in responding to those kinds of shocks? What makes networks more resilient than other kinds of security arrangements?
Renad Mansour: We looked at two specific supply chains to get a glimpse into how this reconfiguration is playing out today. We looked at energy markets—so Iran's continued exports of fuel, fuel products, and oil—as well as financial flows. And what we saw is that these networks aren't just businesspeople making money. These are networks that span across formal and informal economies, licit and illicit economies. Also, other countries in the Gulf, for example, are very much part of these supply chains, and globally, bringing in China, Russia, and others.
These are networks that are fluid. What that allows is when one part of that network is being attacked or removed—in the case of Assad's regime in Syria—the networks could reconfigure. The example of this is with Hezbollah weakened in Lebanon and the Assad regime removed in Syria, other parts of that network, the Houthis in Yemen, and Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq have increased their relationship with each other and taken a bigger role in this. When we used to meet the Houthi leader in Baghdad, the representative, he didn't have much to do. It was a very formal but not a very strong relationship. That's completely changed.
That's the argument that the paper makes: looking at these supply chains, we understand that Iran and its networks are able to move across state, non-state lines, across formal, informal lines, but also across the lines of who are allies and adversaries of Western countries, allowing it to take advantage of this multi-aligned moment in the region where there aren't rigid spheres of influence dictating global order. In this transition, we think, therefore, Iran is already beginning to reconfigure following a year or two of significant setbacks.
Jon Alterman: Let me bring Sanam into this conversation. Did Iran start off thinking that it was going to build a set of regional partners, that it was going to create a network? Was that embedded in the revolution, embedded in some sort of Shia connection to other folks? Was it something that, over time, the Iranian government said, "This seems to work, let's keep doing it"?
Sanam Vakil: Yes, it certainly wasn't a strategy in a box configured by revolutionary elites in 1979. Iran has operated quite opportunistically, taking advantage of conflicts in weak states across the Middle East. It began first in the case of Lebanon, where it did have ties with Lebanese groups on the ground. Iranian revolutionaries were training with Palestinians and with Lebanese, and so they knew each other.
In the context of the Lebanese civil war, there was an opportunity to help support the birth of Hezbollah, and those relationships were built over time. Hezbollah and Iran know each other very well, and they've grown organically as stronger “brothers,” as they would call it. Iran has oftentimes been perceived to be commanding and controlling, let's say, Hezbollah or the other axis groups in the region, but that’s not quite right.
What Iran oftentimes does is allow these groups to flourish in their own domestic theaters. They have agency in the relationships. What Iran has sought in this model is to project power and strength beyond its borders, closer to its perceived threats—and in this case, that’s Israel—but also to help support these groups become part of the political establishment in the countries that they operate.
This is tied to Iran's worldview and thinking because the Iranian Revolution gave birth to an Islamic Republic that was isolated. Over time, it built relationships with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis, through the context of the late 1990s and 2000s in Yemen. Assad and Iran go back to 1979, but of course, the relationship took a particular turn through the Arab uprisings and the Syrian war, and that led Iran to be further embedded in the Syrian state.
Jon Alterman: In terms of the growth of these networks, was that despite Western efforts to constrain the growth of the networks, or was there not a sufficient Western effort? Because not all of them are proxies—some of them are proxies but some are client groups.
Renad Mansour: For these networks to be strong, they need to be self-sustaining. They all need to have both local power and transnational power, because the system that we're describing has a logic onto itself. There used to be this metaphor used: an octopus with the tentacles. Qasim Suleimani at the time, or Iran, was the head, and then the different groups would be in this top-down structure pursuing Iran's policy while also pursuing their own policies.
What we've seen, particularly since the U.S. killing of Qasim Suleimani in Iraq in 2020, is a much more horizontal model. Each group has to have their own agency, has to have their own autonomy. They need to be in local governments. The local is really important to this, and that allows for the transnational.
What we're describing in this paper is a geoeconomic system that is a response to Western policies, for example, sanctions. Crucial to that is all these groups have to have state and non-state power at the local level.
Jon Alterman: It feels to me, as I was reading the paper and thinking back to watching The Sopranos, that this feels a lot like an organized crime group. It feels like it's a lot about money laundering. It's moving illicit goods across borders. It's having some self-sufficiency but passing money up through the chain. Are there ways in which that’s not accurate? Or is that fundamentally what's going on?
Renad Mansour: Part of it is the economic angle. The motivation is profit. You have these groups that are motivated by profit. But I guess why I would push back a bit on The Sopranos aspect is because many of these groups also see themselves as states. Many of them ideologically see themselves as being political representatives.
For example, PMF groups don't like being even referred to as militias because they see themselves as much bigger than that. They are parts of the Iraqi state. They are political. They are social. They have all of these different programs. What unites them is they have impunity and there's no accountability. They're able to easily have both influence over formal state structures—governments, parliaments, and local assemblies—as well as the informal economies.
On the point of informal economy, the more they get sanctioned, the more the informal economy grows and develops its own logic, as we've been saying. That coupled with the fact that you have markets like China and elsewhere for these commodities to go, and this transitioning world order where there isn't a unipolar or Western-driven power dynamic means that this is becoming the norm.
Jon Alterman: Hezbollah feels to me like the first major quasi-state actor, although maybe the PLO was a quasi-state actor in Jordan before. Help us think through the rise of quasi-state actors in the Middle East. Is that an old phenomenon that's been reinvigorated, or is there something unique about the way Iran has promoted it?
Sanam Vakil: Iran looked across the region and saw the early revolutionaries were young students and protesters and watched the rise and growth of the Muslim Brotherhood. Khomeini is believed to be an admirer of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and those early non-state movements also in Egypt. I think seeing the growth of non-state actors as a means to assert influence against a weak state is definitely appealing.
Looking at a revolutionary model like that of Iran, the base of support for using non-state actors to aid the dispossessed or marginalized communities of the Middle East also makes that an appealing approach. Iran very much harnessed that in the context of Lebanon and took it forward.
The rest of the relationships were opportunistic. Again, it wasn't a model in a box that Iran said, "Now we're going to do this in Syria and then in Iraq and then in Yemen." It benefited and capitalized, going back to your previous question, on the lack of consistency—let's not blame the United States wholly—in Western engagement in the Middle East.
When there was conflict, when there was chaos, when there was the Arab Spring, when there was the U.S. invasion in Iraq, these were opportunities for Iran to replicate its approach, not in the exact same way each time, because each relationship has its particularities—Iran's relationship with Iraqi groups go back to the 1970s and goes back to the Iran-Iraq war, when Iran, in many cases, developed its network of relationships with many of Iraq's contemporary leaders by inviting them to Iran and giving them housing and a place to stay until they went back in 2003.
It's just the nature of the way Iran builds relationships that's different. It's much more agile because Iran is an isolated state by its own making. It works in less traditional ways, and one of the non-traditional ways is its network-building approach and its ability to use networks—and it's done so in Iran itself with the IRGC, with the Quds Force—using these small networks to build power and influence within a massive bureaucracy.
Jon Alterman: It seems that part of the secret that you've been describing is that you have states that try to use interstate tools, and Iran operates quite vigorously on the non-state level, and states sometimes have problems reaching things on the non-state level, especially when there's not a strong state counterpart to address Western demands. Is that by design or is that by happenstance?
Renad Mansour: A big policy puzzle for many Western states going to the Middle East is many of these states that we're talking about don't resemble that Weberian construct where there is a monopoly over legitimate violence. Many of these countries just aren't like that. The formal governments in many of these countries aren't the most powerful institutions, and a lot of social institutions or informal institutions are really governing people. That's what we're talking about.
Now, if we think about the policy side of this, a big policy approach to Iran's networks that has already come back with President Trump’s maximum pressure doctrine, is the idea of, “How can we sanction and use other tools to try and degrade Iran and its allies in the region.” The argument there, however, is Iran and its allies become most vulnerable when these states are actually built, when they have sovereignty, when they're able to hold these groups to account rather than having impunity and there being chaos.
The challenge, therefore, is instead of attacking Iran directly through these different countries, build these states, develop the infrastructure in these states so they can hold these groups to account, because the reality is the local is still very important. Absent strong state infrastructure, Iran will always be able to use these networks to navigate policy responses.
Jon Alterman: Is there any state in the Middle East that Western countries haven't spent tens, if not hundreds, if not billions of dollars trying to strengthen, invigorate, and improve its governance? It seems to me that every country in the Middle East has been the target of Western efforts to build precisely what you're talking about with mixed results. Should we expect something different because of this issue, because of the focus on Iran?
Renad Mansour: The way we've been trying to think this through is there are a set of policy tools: carrots and sticks. Some of them are punitive, and some of them are part of building states, certainly. The challenge has been they don't really speak to each other. Sometimes killing a senior leader or sanctioning a bank in a country could completely unravel any efforts to support civil society in that country or to support state-building in that country. The approach to both take punitive measures and to build states have at times been at odds with each other. Therefore, we haven't seen much success.
Jon Alterman: But even in states that we don't have adversarial relationships with, for example, Egypt—I did my dissertation on Egypt and American foreign assistance in the 1950s, and the United States was trying to build accountable government, greater community engagement. We have been working on the judiciary system in Egypt for decades. All these different things. We're not killing people in Egypt.
The problem is if you're on the outside and you're trying to encourage good governance, and people on the inside have entire business models that are predicated on what we often, from the outside, look at and say is bad governance. How do you overcome that in a place like Lebanon, which has warlords who have been dominating economies for decades? How do you move off that system with 18 different sectarian groups? How do you move from a system in Yemen, which has relied on patronage networks, controlling economies. and controlling security for decades?
I'm not saying it's not desirable. I'm saying as a sort of immediate policy response, if you really need an outcome, building resilient governance—improving governance from afar with people who come in for a year or two to work with people who are there for decades and decades and decades—is hard.
Renad Mansour: There are structural bureaucratic problems with this. As you say, can the United States and United Kingdom really do what should be an organic bottom-up local process? We know that, for example, right now in Lebanon, there is an opportunity. Many Lebanese are trying to understand: is this a moment where they can build their states? There's a new government, new leadership, this attempt to maybe move past having armed groups like Hezbollah with impunity.
As much as we talk about these groups being adaptable and across the region—the Iran groups—their biggest point of vulnerability is their own population. We did focus groups across the region, speaking to people who are the social base of these groups in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere. The one thing they'll say is, "We don't like the fact that we have these armed groups, but when we need to get something done, we go to these armed groups." That is the reality.
When we brainstorm policy options, what we're suggesting is that there's something there. There are people in these social bases, in these countries, that want something different. The question of how much and how directly externals could be involved in that process is a valid question that we need to keep thinking about. The point also is some of the more punitive, top-down attacks on these groups have seen a backlash in that point where the vulnerability to these regimes should be actually harnessed rather than hurt.
Jon Alterman: When I went to Iraq five or 10 years ago, one of the things that struck me was people noted that Iranian networks in Iraq were much more embedded than American networks in Iraq, despite the fact that the United States spent $1 trillion and supposedly focused huge amounts of governmental effort on building the kind of future for Iraq the United States wanted.
In many ways, Iran didn't fight in the war, but it won the war in the post-Saddam environment. Why do you think Iran was so effective building its networks out through Iraqi communities, extending well beyond the Shia communities in Iraq? Why were they so good and why are Western governments so bad?
Sanam Vakil: The Iranians were very well-placed. They knew Iraq very well, in the same way that the Israelis knew Lebanon very well and hence have proven to be very effective at a military and intelligence level. Iran went through that eight-year devastating war, and then that was Iran's “never again” moment.
When 2003 happened and the United States came to Iran's borders effectively, there was this moment where Iran had to recalibrate and develop a strategy that I think is worth going back to in how it worked to develop over time—a political strategy, an economic strategy, and the networks, and they're interconnected. It has used institutional relationships to develop government-to-government ties, a strategic framework, to formalize the relationships, and at the same time, it worked to destabilize the United States militarily through the presence of militias and its own presence in Iraq.
Then because of sanctions—and this is very important—Iran has been working on building its resistance, resilient economy to circumvent and survive in the midst of sanctions pressure. Iraq was a perfect place for Iranian businessmen to go, for relationships to bear fruit. It was a bit of a process, a bit of shaping and shifting through many years. It's been bottom-up very much.
I'm reminded of an anecdote told to me by a Gulf policymaker who told me that he went to dinner in Iranian embassy and was very struck by how the Iranians do diplomacy. It’s something very nuanced, but the Iranians work on the bottom-up. There's no hierarchy. They're not going to just sit there. The Iranian ambassador got up, served everybody himself. There's a certain sort of personal nature to the way the Iranians do business in the region that is particular.
Someone else also told me recently that the Iranians send him a WhatsApp message every day to see how he's doing. The networks are personal. The networks become intimate. He said what began as a business relationship has become a friendship. That's how they work. They never leave you alone. They'll never give up on you. They'll always come back and call in the favor, mafia style or not.
Renad Mansour: While this is happening, the United States and the Western allies are in a green zone, secluded from the rest of society, isolated in a green zone, while Iran is in society, infiltrating across while the United States is trying to develop this Coalition Provisional Authority and setting up these structures of what a government should look like, Iran is dealing with realities and facts on the ground. I think exactly that dichotomy led to Iran becoming what many Iraqis now see as the occupying force in Iraq.
Jon Alterman: Is there a way for Western governments to replicate what Iran did? Should Western governments try to? Do the Iranians have enough ways to threaten the security of Western government officials that it's not possible to do it, but Western government officials won't threaten Iranians because they play by Marquess of Queensberry Rules and don't take people out? Has Iran turned that to its advantage and sort of blocked Western governments from playing that role effectively?
Sanam Vakil: I wouldn't make Iran 10 feet tall. This is important. Iran, as we have seen over the past 18 months, has been very much a paper tiger. It's been working with asymmetrical capabilities. I was always very struck by everyone's belief that Iran had so much power in the region, that it had the mirage of power projection through the capabilities of these groups and through bigging up this whole axis of resistance.
Regional governments, but also Western policymakers, should talk to everybody, not just the partners and allies that have shared ideological views. Something that the Iranians have implemented consistently for a number of decades now is their willingness to work with anyone.
It's not necessarily a Shia crescent. It's not an ideological alliance. It's an opportunistic set of relationships that play their part, depending on the regional shifts, the geopolitical shifts. Iran took in al Qaeda. That doesn't make sense, does it? Iran has longstanding ties with the Armenian state. It's always trying to pragmatically orient and manage relationships. This is where the West and some countries in the Middle East could do better. You should talk to all civil society groups, all political actors, and develop a better sense of what's going on in these societies, rather than this sort of zero-sum binary.
Jon Alterman: Renad, do you think there are legitimate constraints to the kinds of interactions that Western officials can have in Middle Eastern countries?
Renad Mansour: Certainly, issues such as designations of terrorist groups have impeded how much the United States can interact with powerful actors across the Middle East. While these designations may serve a political purpose both at home and abroad, they have at times limited what Sanam is saying, which is the power of engagement. You don't have to agree, but this is a negotiation, and there is a reality. In some places, the reality is that these groups are representing power. Engagement needs to always be one of the policy tools if there is to be an agenda in these countries.
Jon Alterman: It strikes me, too, that there's an issue of expectations, that people's expectations are that Western governments will have huge resources and be willing to do large things, and the expectations of Iranians are, "Well, maybe they'll just patch something up." To what extent is there an expectation gap that has to be overcome?
Renad Mansour: Yes, and again, I want to make the point that many people aren't necessarily thrilled that Iran is so powerful in their countries. In fact, across Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria until the fall of Assad regime, there have been calls, not just for reform, but to remove Iran. Iraqis, since 2014, 2015, have been saying, "Iran, out, get out."
Again, I come back to this point that the elites in these countries see benefit from the relationship with Iran. It may look like Iran is a monopoly over Iraq's energy trade. But that's not the case. There are people in Iraq who benefit from that specific type of arrangement, and we can go across supply chains.
Jon Alterman: Although people benefit from arrangements with the United States, with the United Kingdom, with other governments, too, and in many cases at larger scale.
Renad Mansour: Yes. But Iran is a neighbor. Iran is integral to the supply chains across the region. That's not to say that the people in these countries don't want Western, U.S. and European products, supply chains, all of this. Certainly, what's being stressed across the governments in this region is, “We want multi-alignments. We don't want us and them anymore. We don't want East and West anymore. We want it to be okay to have relationships with Russia, with China, with Iran, and with the United States and Europe.”
Jon Alterman: Do you feel there are times when the Iranian willingness to break the rules is uniquely attractive to people in a way—whether it's protection rackets, bribery, other kinds of things? Is that a major part of the Iranian toolkit, or is it sort of incidental in your experience?
Sanam Vakil: It's certainly there as the nature of these illicit supply chains. This is part of the sanctions-busting economy that has developed over a number of decades. The ironic outcome of sanctions against the Islamic Republic is that it's taken a country that has been strategically isolated in the region and it's built greater connectivity between Iran and its neighbors, obviously in malign, rather than benign, ways. Then, Iran takes advantage of weak governance, weak enforcement, lax border policing, and all sorts of things in order to break the rules.
Renad Mansour: There's this point on Westphalian-Western diplomacy, that the minister of a European country needs to meet with their counterpart, the minister in Iraq, for example, to sign an energy deal. The reality is in a country like Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere, the minister isn't the most powerful person in charge of that file.
Iran isn't going to only meet with that minister. Iran will understand who the power brokers and choke points inside that ministry are and be able to leverage one off the other.
Jon Alterman: How do you do that and follow the other policy recommendation of your paper, which is improve governance accountability and essentially strengthen the command chain inside a ministry or inside a government, while you are understanding he's the tribal leader, he's the power-broker, he's the boss, he's whatever? Are those in tension, to build up orthodox power and to engage effectively with the people who actually have the power?
Renad Mansour: What we're arguing in the paper, the fundamental problem in these states is that these are states of impunity, which means there is not accountability, which means that these types of informal economies become normal, and no one can check it, no institution can check it. Certainly, any contracts and any engagements, any trade needs to be coupled with an effort to ensure that this impunity is checked. This, again, as we've been saying, needs to be a bottom-up focus, it should be an organic local focus, but that's the fundamental problem, the impunity that fuels the supply chains.
Jon Alterman: How do outside powers that have much less of an enduring stake in the trajectory of these societies shape the actions of people who have a much larger stake?
Sanam Vakil: I think if we consider the trajectory going forward, I think the impulse is going to be to force people to make tough choices. That's going to be a tricky approach. In a region that understands that geography is destiny and security has to be managed in multifaceted ways, it's a harder sell to make, but rather than asking partners, be it economic or political, to pick sides, I think you have to ring-fence arrangements and actually take a long-term type of engagement inside these countries, at least at a commercial level.
Jon Alterman: Help me understand what ring-fencing engagements for long-term relationships looks like.
Sanam Vakil: If you're going to build an economic or commercial contract, have it be long-term, sustainable, and durable, obviously adaptive to the conditions on the ground, but don't just be there for a few years and leave. That's how you can be there and enforce accountability over time, but not throughout the entire system.
In the case of Iraq, for example, where we can maybe imagine that maximum pressure will result in choices and pressure on the Iraqi government—how can you ask the Iraqi government to make those choices when they're existential and Iran is their neighbor? So, trying to create economic arrangements that perhaps incentivize and enforce governance but are also long-term would be one avenue to show consistency and accountability.
Jon Alterman: Even in friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, for example, creating accountable bureaucracies, creating that sort of accountability for outside powers is remarkably hard, because not only do they have their history, they have their futures out in front of them, and their futures are based on their long-term interests, which sometimes are not about creating the sort of Westphalian models, the sort of rules-based orders, all those things. They're based on “People in power retain power.”
To me, one of the challenges is that this is a problem throughout the Middle East, in friendly countries and in conflict-affected countries of all stripes, whether they're friendly or unfriendly, and we've been working on addressing this problem set for a long time with mixed results. In fact, it's hard for me to think of a place where we've been able to push countries over the hump. Am I missing an example of success?
Sanam Vakil: No, you're not. But this is where maximum pressure can have negative consequences. If we're going into maximum enforcement of maximum pressure, the unintended consequences will take place in the countries where you do seek to push Iran out or remove Iranian influence, and that weakens civil society. That has knock-on consequences for livelihoods and thereby also for governance and accountability. It is the unintended outcome of this persistent tension and adversarial dynamic with Iran.
Jon Alterman: Let's talk about a country that has had a persistent adversarial relationship: Israel, which, in many ways, treated the Hezbollah presence in Lebanon as something that was deeply threatening but couldn't really be moved until it decided to move it and use military and covert means. Hezbollah is profoundly weaker now than it was on September 1. First, why do you think military instruments were so successful in what Israel was trying to do, and how do you think Hezbollah is likely to adapt to what Israel did to it over the last five months?
Renad Mansour: Military instruments have often, in the short term, been successful. You could remove a regime like the Saddam Hussein regime. You could remove a group like ISIS multiple times and its iterations in Iraq and Syria. You could weaken Hezbollah, certainly. The question is always: what is the political aspect that is necessary to be part of that military aspect?
The assumption we have based on the work that we've done, historically, is that Hezbollah at some point will have to reconstitute itself. When it comes out, it will be different to what it was, as you say, on September 1. But we know historically that military solutions on their own do not suffice to changing realities or facts on the ground.
Jon Alterman: Although you could argue that diplomatic solutions also, from the Israeli perspective, also don't suffice on their own. Maybe the question is how do you hopefully combine them?
Sanam Vakil: With the facts on the ground very much changed in Lebanon, with a new, perhaps, technocratic, and more motivated Lebanese government for the first time in a long time, that's where the negotiation and the political settlement process needs to go. How it's going to get there, we don't have the answers. Is it going to be a conference? Is it going to be behind-the-scenes negotiations? What sort of incentives are on the table to change Hezbollah's behavior? That's also going to have to be discussed and thought through.
I think Hezbollah is going to focus locally, it has no choice but to do so. And it has done so in the past. That is one way for Hezbollah to channel its purpose in word and deliver accountability to its own community.
Jon Alterman: Do you think the Iranians will be able to continue supplying $1 billion a year to Hezbollah, given that both Hezbollah may be more local with less opposition to Israel, and there's not that supply chain that can run through Syria, which Iran has grown very reliant on?
Sanam Vakil: Yes. It will be reconfiguring. It's already trying to reconfigure. Obviously, the planes are not being permitted to land, and they'll be looking for new channels in. Turkey has been flagged and is also trying to put blocks in. There has to be coordination at the international level to enforce that accountability. And it will be interesting to watch, and maybe our hypothesis is wrong, that it won't adapt and Hezbollah itself will morph into something else.
But there are also options here for Iran. Iran itself can adapt. Because as the iterations of the axis have changed through the years from being much more Iran-managed to then becoming horizontal, then this transnational moment where they tried to coordinate all together, we don't know how the axis is going to reconfigure.
Iran's certainly been debating internally how it should fortify itself in this moment of perceived, if not actual, weakness and think about what steps it needs to take. This is an opportunity also to, perhaps, press Iran to align its foreign and economic policies and engage in a different way across the region. But that requires actually thinking about the Iranian political system, the dynamics and intentions between the Iranian factions, the growth and empowerment of the IRGC itself as a non-state actor within the Iranian state, and this brings up more sad complexities.
Jon Alterman: What are the policy things that Western governments can do to push Iranian networks to adapt in ways that Western governments think are more constructive? To what extent should it be clamping down on some activities, turning a blind eye to other activities, promoting some activities?
Renad Mansour: At the moment, we both believe that it's about opening Iran up rather than keeping it closed. I think we both believe that, at some point, engagement and reaching some kind of a deal and bringing Iran back in will allow some of these issues we've been discussing on accountability and these networks to not just become these informal, secret, illicit networks but to sort of “come in.” That is where we've landed, and especially in the paper, we discussed that there needs to be engagement, and that will be felt transnationally. It's transnational because it'll be a deal in Iran, but it'll be felt in Beirut, it'll be felt in Baghdad, it'll be felt elsewhere in the region.
Sanam Vakil: Yes, and it's the harder sell in this geopolitical climate and perhaps also in Iran. That's also to consider. Having watched Iran for many years, I continue to see sanctions as having weakened the Iranian economy, but it hasn't changed Iranian behavior. The persistent aim of containment—depending on how it's enforced, because some would contend that, in different administrations, there's more containment or less containment— has enforced Iran's predatory behavior in the region rather than change Iranian behavior.
What Iran does really well is adapt, is resist, is constantly crisis-manage. That's what it has been doing for 46 years. What Iran doesn't know how to do is normal, business-to-business relationships, regular government-to-government dynamics. Signing business contracts when the JCPOA was signed in 2015 took forever because there just wasn't that commercial mind muscle in the system, and it needs to learn how to be normal, and maybe normalcy will, over time, change the dynamics.
Jon Alterman: Renad, several times you've talked about the region's desire to be unaligned. It seems to me that the two powers that are most interested in promoting a less aligned, less ordered world are Russia and China, which keep talking about the Global South, largely, to my mind, as a way to differentiate the overwhelming majority of the world's population, a growing percentage of the world's economic activity, and keep them isolated from the West and aligned with themselves instead.
It seems to me that their interest is in keeping Iran as an outlier, to keep the region in some level of churn, not too much churn that it might negatively affect their interests, but enough churn to create enduring tensions for Western countries, to keep countries from falling into Western paradigms. If the Russians and the Chinese are constantly trying to feed elements of informality, instability, lack of accountability, because they see that world as threatening, how should Western countries respond to that?
Renad Mansour: I would first say that this idea of multi-alignment or not being aligned isn't just being now pushed by Russia or China. You see it across the region, across the Gulf even. Gulf countries have come a very long way. Just a decade ago, there was no relationship even with Baghdad, because they thought Iraq was lost to Iran after 2003. Since then, on the economic file, you've seen much greater linkages with both Iran and Iraq. And even politically now, Gulf diplomats and representatives are saying, "We want multi-alignment." This is just the reality.
We're talking about a completely different space where it's not just Russia and China, but it's even traditional allies of the United States and the West that are saying, "We are seeing something different. We live it. This is the region we are living in. This is what we're seeing. We need to adapt to it." Multi-alignment is here.
Jon Alterman: My point is, if we're talking about formality and accountability and transparency and all the kinds of things that represent good governance, and Russia and China have an interest in keeping countries from drifting into that category, because they are comfortable with informality—they are comfortable with a lack of transparency and accountability; they're very comfortable with a region that continues to distract Western powers from activities containing Russia and China. How do you create order when there's somebody who's actually encouraging a country like Iran to challenge the kinds of trajectories that you're trying to encourage? They would like Iran to continue to keep the Middle East in a certain amount of churn.
Renad Mansour: The issue isn't formal versus informal. Many people in the region, when they see a truck driving by, there's less of an issue of, “Is this formal? Is this not formal?” The first issue is, are these systems responsive to the needs of the population? And the assumption is, too, if these systems are more accountable, they're more likely to have to be responsive.
Whether China and Russia prefer or work in informal sectors is one thing. The pushback on this point would be that the people don't want this. That's what we continue to stress. How can policies: A) do no harm, and B) if possible, support the people in their demands—for the economic processes that we see to trickle down to actually support their needs, rather than any sort of external or transnational need?
Jon Alterman: It's hard. I think it's been hard to get people to support good governance, because what we've seen in Lebanon and certainly in post-war Iraq has been good governance is lovely in the long term, but right now, I need something, and I need an address, and I need somebody who can get it for me quickly.
Renad Mansour: Then, basically, should there be a long-term strategy or not? Because what we've seen in Iraq and elsewhere is exactly what you're saying: "I need something done today. I'm in Baghdad. I'm ambassador only for two years. I need a win."
It needs to be longer term. There needs to be something institutionally reconfigured to say, "Yes, we can get the little wins, but how are these little wins that we need taking us to an end state?" That coherent strategic thinking has been lost because of the churn of this diplomacy.
Sanam Vakil: I would also say that there is an opportunity, as governments are overstretched and bandwidth is an issue, to work more robustly with the private sector. Private sector relationships across the Middle East have been very important for the United States and other countries. Empowering the private sector a bit more to build the longer-term sustainable relationships, not just with the oil companies, but bringing others in is another avenue that can lead to the long-term sustainability. But I'm conscious that this is a hard ask.
But ultimately, for the region, governance and accountability has to come from below. In the context of conflict, geopolitical competition, and bandwidth, and the need for quick wins, the below processes are completely neglected and abandoned. This is just about perpetuating elites, ultimately, at the end of the day. And the policies are ultimately going to cause tumult for these elites. That's where we're going in the next few months or forward.
Jon Alterman: Sanam, you've talked about how this is a network of networks, and the reason it's so resilient and adaptive is because it is a network of networks. It seems to me that the private sector, the business community, is the ultimate network of networks. There are rules. Is there something that Western governments should be doing to enhance the network capacity of the private sector that would move the policy issues in a really decisive direction that they haven't been doing?
Sanam Vakil: The United States under the Biden administration started the ball a little bit by trying to put forward ideas about broader regional corridors and connectivities. That's one strategy about outsourcing, bringing the private sector in, and creating a broader network of players. It will be interesting to see if that approach is taken forward. It's hard to immediately see that developing in the climate of conflict. We're in a really embedded period, and we have to overcome this conflict for those relationships to develop.
You know better than all of us, that this is a region that doesn't trade together, that doesn't work together, and this is the time where we can harness the private sector, albeit it will be very difficult to bring some of these projects along, but to build those sort of connectivities.
Renad Mansour: Yes, there is a moment now where there is this desire to start to build interconnectivities where we're no longer talking about the axis of resistance as being isolated from the rest. In Iraq and other countries, there is a desire to engage with the Gulf and other partners. Creating more of these networks of networks can dilute some of the malign aspects of the axis and create something that could be more sustainable and interconnected.
The Iraqi government, for example, very much believes that its Development Road initiative, which will connect Basra in the south of Iraq all the way north to Turkey and toward Europe, is something that is important. These types of initiatives, there's a big question as to whether they'll work or not—but there are initiatives out there. But connectivity is the key, because this networks of networks is, especially in this multi-aligned context, going to be the standard operating procedure.
Jon Alterman: Renad Mansour, co-author of The Shape-Shifting Axis of Resistance, Sanam Vakil, thank you very much for joining us here at CSIS.
Renad Mansour: Thanks for having us.
Sanam Vakil: Thank you.
(END.)