Views from The Bluff, episode 1: Anne Santiago on the Iran war

Below is a transcription of the podcast.

Kaylee Monahan 

Well, thanks for joining us today, Dr Santiago, it's great to see you. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your expertise?

Anne Santiago

Yes. So I am an associate professor in political science and global affairs, and I would say like my expertise is international relations broadly and comparative politics. And of course, I am a little bit of a generalist, being at University of Portland, because I teach a lot of variety of courses, but I don't have an expertise in U.S. politics. But the reason I went into this field is because of U.S. foreign policy and what we were doing across the globe in the 1980s and ever since then, I've been paying pretty close attention.

Maggie Dapp

We're talking today about the war in Iran. For those who don't know, Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran. So I guess my first question is, why did this conflict begin?

Anne Santiago 

Isn't that interesting, right? So I don't think there's much that has been said about why Iran right now and why the strikes happened at this time. I think we have to go back in history, as I think we do to understand anything, and you know, one of the big markers for the United States is 1979 when the Iranian Revolution happened and the Ayatollah came into power, right, overthrew the Shah of Iran. When I'm teaching about this, I always point to, we need to go further back and talk about the 1950s when the United States overthrew Mosaddeq, who was a democratically-elected leader in Iran. 

I think also it's important to just sort of understand that since the end of World War II, the United States has become the biggest power in terms of sort of protecting how it sees itself, protecting the global structures that were put in place post World War II, and in particular, since Eisenhower, we've really declared that we would be the entity that ensures the free flow of oil out of the Middle East region. So I think all of those factors are really important. 

More recently, of course, is the issue of nuclear weapons and the development of nuclear weapons by Iran, which they're not at a point where they have nuclear weapons, but the United States, ever since they started suspecting Iran of wanting to move in this direction, has sort of made it a goal that we are going to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. Compounding that, I would say, is Israel within the Middle East and Israel under a particularly right-wing administration right now, under Benjamin Netanyahu, who sees Iran as an existential threat to Israel's existence. So all of those factors, I think, are important. Iran has also been seen as a sponsor of terrorism, so supporting groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis a little bit in Yemen. But I can't answer the question of why we decided this was the time to strike Iran, because we had struck them a year ago in the summer, saying that we got rid of their capacity to build nuclear weapons, and yet here we are again bombing them further, and that's where we're at.

Maggie Dapp 

A common idea I see on social media is that wars in the Middle East are just all about oil. How do you interpret that as a political science professor that tends to look at a lot of different factors when analyzing a conflict?

Anne Santiago

Yeah, I think oil is important, and it's one of the reasons that we've got bases in the Middle East. You know, it's certainly a key concern for a lot of actors globally. We see what's happening with the economy, global economy right now, and I don't think it's the singular issue. I don't think you can understand the region without looking at history, right? And the colonial powers, we didn't touch on that, the colonial powers that dominated the region, not that Iran was colonized. It was its own Persian Empire, but all of the dynamics of history impact the present calculation. So it's an easy answer, and I think Americans like easy answers, but I would say there's a lot more complexity. 

The other thing that you know goes around in my brain is that the United States sees Iran as this evil empire, right? We love to talk about good, bad, right, wrong, yes, no. But who is to say that they're better or worse for their people than the Shah of Iran, right, who was also not a great leader and oppressed a lot of people. So when it comes to like the idea of regime change or intervening, I think oil is a big motivating factor, but I think so is the back and forth of history.

Kaylee Monahan 

Yeah, thanks for providing that context, and touching on the complexity of it. As you mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is Africa, a continent that continually deals with conflict. So based on your knowledge of Africa, do you notice, like, what are some of the immediate and future impacts of a conflict like this on Iran's people?

Anne Santiago 

So for Iran, the people are, you know, they're going to have to deal with the aftermath of this, which means huge devastation. We know, historically, and we've over, you know, we've overthrown regimes in Guatemala, in Congo, in Iraq. You know, there have been a lot of interventions that the United States has sort of taken this view that, “Okay, well, if we get rid of that bad actor, then something better is going to come in,” right? There's no guarantee of that. And, in fact, it has not yet worked, right, aside from maybe World War II, right, where you had a much bigger conflict, a lot more people involved. So in Iran, there's no guarantee that we've taken out between Israel and the United States a lot of the leadership. And whenever you do that, it creates a leader vacuum, right? So who is going to be in the competition for the next leadership position, whether it stays as a theocratic state with, you know, Shia Islam as sort of the raison d'etre of the state, or whether people are able to, you know, push that aside. Nobody knows the answer to that question, and some people want the theocratic regime, and other people don't, you know, and that's internal to Iran. 

But I think always in the immediate aftermath of the war is the destruction. How do you rebuild that? How do you provide security and safety? And then all of those questions are going to rest on who doesn't come into power and who's willing to assist them or not assist them, and that, some of that is going to also depend on, like, what are the larger global impacts of bombing of Iran as far as oil economics? How is that going to impact states in the region? All of those are up in the air.

Maggie Dapp

Young Americans on social media seem fearful of a draft and a ground invasion. Are these legitimate fears and going off of that, what are some other things students should know about the conflict and how it might affect their lives?

Anne Santiago

Yeah, I would say a draft is incredibly unlikely. We haven't had a draft since Vietnam, and a lot has changed as far as warfare since then. You know, mostly what we're seeing is aerial bombardments, right? We're sending lots and lots of missiles, and so right now, I don't think we're going to see a ground invasion, possibly some elite troops on the ground, but I'm not, I don't have that sort of military expertise to say strategically what would make sense. If there were some time in the future where the Iranian regime turns over to a Western-friendly government, maybe we would send in rebuilding sorts of troops and others, but I don't see that as happening. The U.S. public has very little stomach for, I think, sending troops abroad in large numbers and given the nature of warfare, we don't really have to do that very often anymore, right? Second question was about what? Not draft, but.

Maggie Dapp

What else students might, you know, need to know about this. 

Anne Santiago 

Yeah, the impacts. 

Maggie Dapp 

You know, it’s the first war in the Middle East they might have lived through.  

Anne Santiago

Yeah, we’ve had some others. I would say probably the biggest impact on young people's lives is going to be economics, right, and how this is going to affect, you know, just long term. Gas prices are incredibly important for everything related to industrialization, right, and industry drives a lot of the economy. So what is it going to look like for jobs? A lot of it depends on how quickly does it end, right? And how quickly can ships get through the Straits of Hormuz, and how much of the U.S. is going to, I mean, we're already a big producer of oil, right? 

The other thing that I would say is fairly uncertain, is that the Trump administration doesn't seem to have a plan for what comes next, and really didn't have a very good, it seemed very impulsive, right? We've heard lots of different explanations as to why we did this at this time, so I would have some hesitation in trusting that this administration is going to follow through on like domestic promises if they're distracted by a war in another country, right? So that's always a thing that becomes problematic, that if it drags on, you end up focusing your time abroad, rather than on changes happening in the United States. So those, those would be the things that I would be most concerned about, probably as a young person.

Maggie Dapp

Do you see this conflict being an opportunity for some of the kind of theoretical things we might expect, as, you know, political science students during a war, like the “rally around the flag” effect, for instance, or, you know, a regime becoming more authoritarian when they have a conflict going on abroad?

Anne Santiago

Yeah, I mean, I think because the United States is so divided politically right now, I think you've got this like about 35% of the public that no matter what Trump does, he can do no wrong, right, and then you have a little bit larger percentage than that of people who lean Republican, who lean right, who, you know, are more traditional Republicans. They don't really like foreign wars, but they'll support it if they think it's in the interest of, you know, long-term success. So I don't know that we're going to see a lot of rally around the flag, unless it drags out. And if it drags out, the impact might actually be less support because we've had so many wars in the Middle East, right? 

When it comes to the idea of the administration becoming more authoritarian, that is, for sure, a fear like I see internally. We've already seen a great deal of democratic decline in the United States like, I think with the second Trump administration, we've realized how much our system relies on norms, which are the rules of behavior that people agree and abide by, because that's how we've managed to function in a society that's very diverse and somewhat divided, but this administration doesn't seem to adhere to those same norms. So I'd say they've already been quite authoritarian in a lot of things, like threatening the press if they're not covering the war in a way that the White House says it's going, that's highly authoritarian as a mechanism, right? So I do have some concern, sort of, by November, what does this look like if it's still ongoing. Or if it's not ongoing, how might it be used by the administration to say, “Look, we've done this great thing” or, you know, “You need to make sure we stay in power so we can continue with this,” that does often tend to happen when we're in the middle of a foreign conflict.

Kaylee Monahan 

Well, and given that ambiguity, when do you see this conflict ending?

Anne Santiago

I mean, if you listen to different things that the President has said, we've either already accomplished our goals or we're in the middle of accomplishing or we haven't, right, so I think you can only bomb a nation for so long and that be an effective mechanism. So we had this discussion last night, and Dr. Meiser was there, and he talked about “mowing the grass,” right, this idea that you bomb a place enough to subdue their capacity, and then as they build up again, you bomb them again, right? And that might be the model that we're actually going to see. So when the United States and Israel, who are very much partnered in this, decide that they've eliminated the capacity of Iran enough militarily, then we will see them maybe pull back for a while, and then if they see them ratcheting up and building again, maybe we'll see another sort of episode like this. So it's really hard to predict. 

One thing that I should have mentioned when it comes to sort of Iran, I think Iran is a country that looks in terms of sort of centuries rather than the next election cycle. And for me, even if you get the current regime out, and you put in a more progressive regime, I think you are going to get more sort of individual terrorist actions. And you know, maybe they're going to be plotting for a long time against Israel in the United States. So, you know, we have very good counter intelligence now, and we haven't had attacks on U.S. soil, but I think the administration really miscalculated that there's not going to be these consequences. I think there's going to be long-term consequences when it comes to sort of radicalization of people who have never wanted the United States there, and who continue to see the Western presence, whether it's United States or other countries, as being detrimental to what they want for the region.

Maggie Dapp

Okay, well thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. 

Kaylee Monahan 

Thank you, Dr. Santiago, it was great to talk to you. 

Anne Santiago

Yeah, thanks for asking. I really appreciate it.

Evan Guerra is the Multimedia Editor for The Beacon. He can be reached at guerra28@up.edu.