(23 Jun 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington, DC, USA – 22 June 2025
++STARTS ON SOUNDBITE++
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Aaron David Miller, Carnegie Endowment fellow:
"Well, I guess you have two kinds of wars. You have an Iranian response directly against American assets. Geography is destiny. We have 40,000 troops deployed within range of Iran short range ballistic missiles. They have thousands of those. 2500 troops in Iraq, probably less than 1000 in Syria. They’re vulnerable. So, if the Iranians decide to strike frontally against American assets, there was a newswire coming across that the Iranian parliament has now voted waiting for the Supreme Leader and, by the way, we haven’t heard anything from the Supreme Leader, voted to close the Straits of Hormuz. Which would be a back door, frankly, to an escalation between Iran and the United States. Because if the Iranians try to close these straits, the Americans will open it and they will come in contact with the Iranian navy and a lot more. So that’s one kind of war. I would describe that, I guess, as regional war because the Houthis would become involved, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria would become involved. Iranians could pursue asymmetrical cyber terror attacks abroad against Israeli and American interests. And we’d witnessed what we had never seen before, which is a more comprehensive war involving the United States and Israel and Iran. The other, the alternative is the Iranians, the Supreme Leader decides that he can’t afford to take on Israel and the US and he looks for a, I don’t know, middle ground response through proxies which don’t strike the US directly with an Iranian hand but still easily traced back to Tehran. And the Americans respond and maybe you get a tit for tat for a day or so, but you avoid the more comprehensive version. That seems to me, I mean, more likely if you were calculating what the ultimate objective of the Supreme Leader is, and I quote my colleague at Carnegie’s Karim Sadjadpour, who says that the day after any revolution, the most extreme revolutionary becomes a conservative because preserving the revolution now becomes the prime, the organizing principle. And of all the things that Ali Khamenei must feel right now, trying to get back at Donald Trump for killing Qassem Soleimani, getting back at the Israelis, the Iranians responded last night, this morning, with 30 ballistic missiles which caused substantial damage in Israel. But the one thing he wants to avoid is any interruption in the succession process, to pass on the revolution to his successor or successors. And he has to calibrate that response very carefully. I don’t think we’re on the cusp of regime change or even regime destabilization, but you never know, in the event that you end up with a major conflict, what the upshot and consequences should be. So, I guess those would be the two sorts of wars that I would describe. There’s also the possibility that in the weeks ahead this devolves into basically in a very familiar piece of the Israeli-Iranian story where the two sides go at one another with cyber, with assassinations, with black ops, an occasional strike or two. Iran relies on its proxies. That’s another possibility here."
++ENDS ON SOUNDBITE++
STORYLINE:
Carnegie Endowment fellow, former State Department analyst and Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations Aaron David Miller says there’s a few possible scenarios now that the US has hit Iranian nuclear targets.
Speaking from Washington DC on Monday, Miller said that it could result in "two kinds of wars" – regional or proxy.
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