00:00Joyce, that was Ray Takei. He's a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
00:04And Ray, it's great to have you with us.
00:06My ears perked up when I heard that he said he was talking with the Houthis.
00:08The Houthis called us.
00:10And I just want to get your reaction to what the president said this morning in kind of a broader
00:13sense.
00:14What the Houthis' involvement in this conflict says about its direction?
00:19Well, the Houthis, of course, can shut down the Red Sea traffic.
00:22The administration's perspective had been that by having some sort of a U.S. Navy convoys around the Oman corridor,
00:33having the East-West pipeline and having the Red Sea traffic,
00:37that essentially stabilizes the oil markets at a fairly high level, but it still stabilizes.
00:42That was its version of victory over the past couple of weeks.
00:46And the Iranians and the Houthis have managed to disrupt that narrative in a radical and dramatic way.
00:51So it is a profound setback for the administration and the narrative of success that was conveying.
00:58I mean, the Houthis are not new.
01:00The conflict in Yemen is not new.
01:01It certainly predates this conflict between the U.S. and Iran.
01:04Why now?
01:05Why are we seeing a spike in these attacks?
01:06What opportunity do they think they have a window for here?
01:11Well, one of the mysteries of the Middle East, of which there are many,
01:15is the relationship between Iran and the Houthis.
01:18It's how directly are they involved with each other.
01:22The Houthis have a mind of their own and they have been struggling in Yemen for a long time
01:26and have managed to, of course, have some very important strategic victories recently.
01:31It appears to me that the relationship between the Islamic Republic and the Houthis is much more significant than we
01:37think.
01:37And the Houthis will engage in battlefield conflict on behalf of the Islamic Republic when that is necessary.
01:44So that relationship is not a loose alliance as it was perceived,
01:48but it might be quite a tighter one because of the exigencies of what is happening in the Middle East
01:52today.
01:54Bloomberg has been reporting there's going to be a meeting in all likelihood on Monday between Gulf nations and Iran.
01:59And I'm curious how you think about that particular diplomatic track going forward here.
02:03We've been watching the BRICS summit unfolding in New Delhi over the course of the morning.
02:07Of course, Iran is present for that as well.
02:10Is Iran in a position where it could be susceptible to encouragement to back off or move away from this
02:16active conflict?
02:17Well, what Iran has been trying to do for the past six months is to create a new tributary system
02:23in the Persian Gulf,
02:24essentially becoming the dominant power in there, which means these lesser Gulf states would have to actually pay tribute to
02:31Iran.
02:32Now, some of them already are.
02:34Otherwise, they stand to be attacked and, of course, controlling the Gulf traffic.
02:38So this is not going to be a dialogue about how to come to some kind of a cooperation,
02:42but it's about the Iranians essentially saying to the Gulf states that we are the dominant power here.
02:47We can control your economy and we can essentially shut down the traffic through the Gulf and in pipelines that
02:53the United States is promising you that it will protect.
02:55So this is likely to be a different conversation given some of the battlefield victories that Iran has had
03:01and maybe some of its recent moves about shutting down the traffic and attacking Saudi oil fields, oil pipelines,
03:07is a prelude to this summit meeting and some of the demands that the Iranians are likely to have.
03:12Great. To your point, it's always been a point of contention how much command and control Iran has over its
03:17various proxy groups.
03:18But, you know, with Iran under pressure, with the decimation of the senior leadership of the IRGC,
03:23we have seen the capacity of Hamas, of Hezbollah, really degraded recently.
03:29Why has that not also been the case with the Houthis?
03:33Well, because the Israelis aren't decapitating the Houthis the way they did in their near abroad,
03:38and the border states of Lebanon and Gaza, the demise of Hamas,
03:44and actually the military destruction of Hezbollah has been a relentless Israeli campaign.
03:49But Israelis have demonstrated they don't have that cross-regional ability to essentially do the same thing in Yemen.
03:57And the Saudi military has been incapable of dealing with Houthis in a significant way.
04:02And Houthis are much stronger, actually, at this point because of every geography, the alliance with Iran, and so on.
04:09I wanted to ask you about something we hear often from the administration, from the president in particular,
04:13and that is that Iran's in a very weakened position.
04:16The economy's under extreme pressure and duress, and we're getting to a point at which that's no longer tenable.
04:21I'm curious, from your perspective, if it does feel like the country's in a position where it is especially vulnerable,
04:27and it might be subject to some sort of change from the status quo, the stalemate that we've seen over
04:31the last few months.
04:33Well, there's no question that the Iranian economy is depleted.
04:37That is acknowledgment of the Iranian state itself, which reports about 80% inflation rate.
04:44And, of course, the infrastructure destruction, the embargo, and so forth.
04:48But I think too often we have, in the West, draw a line between economic distress and strategic acquiescence.
04:58Namely, if a country is experiencing economic decline, it will change its strategic priorities.
05:04That actually has not been the case.
05:06It wasn't the case with the Russian Federation, and it hasn't been the case with the Islamic Republic.
05:10We have essentially overvalued sanctions and economic pressure as a coercive tool, and that's why we're seeing this imbalance.
05:18The Iranian economy is depleting, but its aggression is increasing.
05:22There's that inverse proportion that we can't explain.
05:24Because in the Western mind, if your economy is going down, you need to make some adjustments to bring it
05:30up,
05:30and that essentially means coming to terms with your adversaries abroad.
05:33That has not been the case.
05:35Second of all, when the February 2026 war began, for the Iranians, it was an existential war.
05:41It was a war that they could not lose.
05:43And therefore, they're coming into this with a determination to sacrifice.
05:47At this point in the Gulf, in the case of the Iran war, it is not who can inflict more
05:52pain.
05:53Obviously, the United States can do so.
05:55It's who can endure more pain.
05:56And the Iranians are determined to do so.
05:59Whether they're miscalculating, whether they will essentially be overwhelmed by a popular insurrection,
06:04those are risks that they have to take, of course.
06:06But essentially, that's where we are today.
06:08Ray, I apologize.
06:09We've only got a little over a minute left, but we did want to ask you about some new things
06:13folks are seeing
06:14at something called Pickaxe Mountain, which is an Iranian nuclear facility.
06:18The UN Atomic Watchdog says they've observed construction activity, roads for heavy trucks.
06:24There's things happening there.
06:25How significant is this, and how much visibility does the international community have into what's going on?
06:29Pickaxe Mountain has been something that the IAEA has been concerned about for a long time
06:34because it has not had access to it.
06:36If the Iranians are reconstituting their nuclear program in Pickaxe Mountain,
06:40that is both an obvious target for attack, but also not very vulnerable because how deep it is.
06:46So it is a very disconcerting development and essentially negates another one of the president's claims
06:51that the Iranian nuclear program has been all but obliterated.
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