Hussein Banai, associate professor of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, joined host Ian Masters on KPFA’s Background Briefing on July 10 to assess what comes after the war between the United States and Iran — and why he believes an uneasy standoff, rather than a decisive victory, is the realistic ceiling for U.S. policy.
The conversation built on Banai’s recent Foreign Affairs essay, “When a Cease-Fire Is Really a Stalemate,” which argued that equilibrium with Iran is the most Washington can achieve. Asked how a stalemate can be made stable, Banai said the responsibility falls disproportionately on one side. Iran, he said, is “in the midst of processing its grief and trauma” as well as substantial physical damage from the war, and so “the burden of understanding really falls on the United States” to allow Tehran some measure of authority over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
He was careful to separate prediction from prescription. “In my article, I wasn’t trying to say that this is how the U.S. is going to handle it,” he told Masters. “What I was trying to say is that this is how they should handle it.”
Banai traced the current impasse to a decades-old misreading of the Islamic Republic. Since the 1979 revolution, he said, U.S. policymakers have operated “under the mistaken impression that Tehran has a list of demands that if only they could be accommodated,” normalization would follow. In his view, the regime has never sought that outcome; it sustains itself in the space between full normalization and full-scale invasion, and “stalemate is the best you can do with this regime.” He noted that even the Obama administration eventually lowered its expectations to a narrow arms control agreement.
Turning to Israel, Banai said the stalemate he describes “is not sufficient” for a government that views the survival of the Islamic Republic as an ongoing security dilemma. Netanyahu’s error, he argued, was assuming that Israel could supply the air campaign and the intelligence while the United States supplied the ground forces. With that assumption unrealized, he said, Israeli leaders continue to look for openings to widen the conflict and draw Washington back toward regime change — leaving Gulf states caught in between and newly exposed.
Banai’s scholarship centers on Iran’s political development and U.S.–Iran relations, and he brings that same analysis directly into the classroom for students in the Department of International Studies. He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran and a co-author of Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the U.S.-Iran Conflict, and he is a frequent commentator on Iran for national and international media.
Listen to the full interview in the July 10 episode of Background Briefing on KPFA. Banai’s segment opens the program.
