Toward an Axis of the Plutocrats

Juan Cole

Bushehr Nuclear Plant, Iran. Hossein Heidarpour CC BY-SA 4/0

THIS INTERVIEW WITH Juan Cole was conducted before the Israeli attack on Iran that launched the new catastrophe in the Middle East, while the genocide in Gaza continues without letup. These excerpts from University of Michigan Professor of History Juan Cole’s observations on the Middle East are from a more extensive interview conducted by Suzi Weissman for Jacobin Radio, May 20, 2025.

Juan Cole is the Richard Mitchell Collegiate Professor of history at the University of Michigan and the founder of Informed Comment, which you can find at Juancole.com. His books include Gaza Yet Stands and Muhammad Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, and more.

Juan Cole: The situation in Gaza now is worse than it was under Biden, even though Trump demurs from it in a way that Biden didn’t. He doesn’t think it’s a good thing, or it’s just inevitable that people die in war.

Nevertheless, we haven’t seen any practical pressure on Israel from Trump’s side. And he could apply pressure. George H.W. Bush did at one point. And presidents have levers, but he won’t do it.

I think the main thing for Trump is that Israel has become an annoyance, and he wants a deal with Iran. This is a country with a population of Germany and a GDP similar to that of Poland, and where nothing is going on with regard to international direct foreign investment — a potential gold mine, and Trump knows it.

What he wants is a new Iran deal from which Trump could benefit, and (Israeli prime minister) Netanyahu doesn’t want it. Netanyahu, you know, went to Congress and went over Obama’s head to try to stop the 2015 deal. And then Netanyahu insists on this horrid genocide in Gaza, which is bad for business in the Middle East.

How many Trump Towers could you make in Tel Aviv? Israel doesn’t offer the same benefits or potential benefits for money making that the Gulf does.

From Trump’s point of view, I think Israel just became kind of an embarrassment, although he likes it for various reasons. He tries to appeal to the white Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists, but he’s not one of them. They take Israel as a kind of symbol of white supremacy in the world. And for them it’s important to keep the Palestinians down, because that’s a symbolic keeping-down of all brown people by white people.

Trump, as you know, accepts that rhetoric and sometimes deploys it, blaming American Jews for being too liberal and not supporting the white nationalist endeavor enough. But as a practical matter of economic diplomacy, which is what Trump is really about, he’s going toward Iran, toward the Gulf and Syria now, because again, Syria has enormous investment potential. I’m sure that Trump is imagining a Trump Tower in Damascus.

SW: But before we go to Syria, I want to just stop for a second on Iran. What does it mean bringing Iran back into the world, stopping or allowing it to sell its oil, and creating yet another region of economic power?

JC: Well, Iran has a certain amount of economic power anyway because despite U.S. sanctions, it sells its oil to China. Iran has a civilian nuclear enrichment program. It does not have a weapons program, despite what you will read in the newspapers.

The CIA has repeatedly assessed that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. It’s a suspicious civilian enrichment program in the sense that they enrich more than they need for their Bushehr reactor. You enrich uranium to make fuel. If you enrich it to 3.5%, it makes fuel for a for a reactor. If you enrich it to 95%, you can knock it together and make a big explosion.

The Iranians have not enriched to 95%, but they enriched to 60% for which there’s no civilian purpose. Why would you do that? I think it’s to scare the world — saying that if we thought we were really under threat, we could make a bomb, so leave us alone.

It’s argued by political scientists that Japan does the same thing, that there’s a Japan nuclear option. Japan has four tons of plutonium. Why? Well, it’s because they’re afraid of North Korea and China…

The 2015 deal was designed to keep Iran from ever militarizing the program. They could only have 6000 centrifuges, so it means they could never enrich enough uranium to make a bomb. And they had to get rid of any uranium that they had enriched to above 3.5%, either by casting it in a form that it couldn’t be used or by exporting it to Russia.

They had to forswear developing a heavy water nuclear reactor, because the plutonium builds up on the rods that they put in to keep the water from overboiling and having a meltdown, and you can harvest it.

There’s some thinking that maybe North Korea used a heavy water reactor to get its bomb, so the Iranians were going to make one. And the 2015 deal said, no, you can’t have it, so they bricked it in. They gave it up.

But the deal didn’t address the other set of issues that the United States foreign policy establishment, including the Republican Party, had with Iran. After Bush invaded Iraq, overthrew the Baath regime and put the Shiites of Iraq in power, Iran suddenly had a highway into the Middle East.

It could transport arms across Iraq, to Syria, to southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah and the southern Lebanese Shiites were afraid of Israel and had developed their own militia.

Iran Weakened

Before 2003 Iran had been blocked from the Middle East…

But with the Syrian revolution, the process Bush started (with the Iraq invasion) has been reversed. The Syrian government allied with Iran from the late 1980s is gone.

In fact, the new government in Syria is a Muslim fundamentalist government which hates Iran. Iran tried to repress them. So that land bridge from Iraq to southern Lebanon is broken. And then Israel made short shrift of Hezbollah in the past year with covert ops…

SW: Anywhere else in the world that pager bomb attack would be considered an act of state terror.

JC: It was an act of state terror. However, even more important was that the Israelis demonstrated that they had penetrated Hezbollah. If you were a Hezbollah leader having a meeting with your colleagues and you were planning out an attack on Israel, I think now you’d have to assume that one of those colleagues will go home and report the plan to Mossad.

So Hezbollah is a shadow of its former self. Syria is blocking Iran from the Levant. The Iraqi government is cautious, so the whole of what the West called the Iranian axis of resistance — I would prefer alliance of resistance — has been broken.

SW: The final part of it was when Putin got bogged down in Ukraine. It was no longer lending any air support to Syria. And so without Russia and without Iran, it was just bound to fall. Right?

JC: Exactly. But that’s relevant to negotiations that Trump is conducting with Iran now. Trump switched around from wanting to assassinate people like (the top Iranian general) Soleimani, which he did in 2020, to wanting to deal with Iran. If he could make a nuclear deal with Iran now, with its geopolitical position in the Middle East already very weak, he doesn’t have to make part of the deal pushing Iran out of Syria.

And then you open Iran. This is something that the French saw back in 2015. As soon as Obama signed these papers, the then French president François Hollande took a hundred French CEOs to Tehran. The head of the perfume industries were there. They just imagine what kind of a virgin market Iran is. I think that kind of Parisian enthusiasm that was there in 2015 is now present for Trump.

SW: Let’s just talk for a minute about Syria, because now you’re in a situation where you have a new person in power, a former radical Islamist. As soon as it fell, Israel began to disable Syria’s military capacity for its own benefit. It really seems to be setting off what I described as a regional competition for influence. Turkey is very much a part of this.  I’d like to hear how you characterize the developments there.

JC: Right. Trump says that he was persuaded by Turkish president Tayyip Recep Erdo?an and by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to recognize the new Syrian government and to lift sanctions. Those sanctions, by the way, are congressional sanctions, and Trump can’t actually lift them, but he can issue waivers. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has said that they’ll issue waivers every six months and at the same time work with Congress to remove the sanctions.

Israel wants those sanctions continued on Syria. Since Congress is not always attentive to American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Israel lobby, it may be an uphill battle to actually get the sanctions legislated out of existence. In the meantime Trump can waive them…

[In Syria] I expect there to be a lot of trouble. There have already been attacks, not by the leadership but by rank-and-file Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas, on Alawites and Druze. The Israelis have a Druze population, and I think Netanyahu plays for their support by intervening in Syria, allegedly on behalf of the Syrian Druze.

But I have to say, Suzi, that in taking the sanctions off of Syria, I think Trump did the right thing. A lot of the European countries like Germany have talked about lifing sanctions gradually, as a carrot. But Syria has been through one of the most horrible civil wars in modern history. Half of the population was displaced or were made homeless. I think four million ended up in Turkey, a million in Europe. People were  internally displaced as well.

SW: One of the biggest internal dislocations since the Second World War.

JC: It’s incredible. Imagine how many buildings and infrastructure were destroyed. There’s no electricity. And these sanctions are preventing rebuilding. However you feel about the new government, it’s not good for the ordinary Syrian to have these international sanctions remain.

SW: With lifting sanctions and now Saudi Arabia is paying Syria’s debt off to allow rebuilding, is the U.S. interest just to make money, or to sideline other interests in Syria, or what?

JC: Well, I think there’s a lot of money to be made. I think Qatar and Saudi Arabia want to invest, Turkey wants to invest and I think part of the subtext here is that Netanyahu didn’t want it.

I think it was Reuters or maybe AP reporting that Netanyahu, the last time he met with Trump, pleaded with Trump not to lift sanctions on Syria because the Israelis want to keep Syria weak. Netanyahu said he was afraid that these are fundamentalists who might attack Israel the way that Hamas did. But that’s a lie, as with most of those things.

Who has been attacking has been the Israelis. They invaded Syria. They have troops there. They occupied territory. So it’s all on the other side. Trump has defied Netanyahu on this and implicitly also defied probably most of Congress, which would stand with Netanyahu on the issue of sanctioning Syria. He’s instead sided with Turkey and Qatar, which is very interesting.

It is a Trump impulse. He has really good relations with Erdo?an. He once gave an interview in which he said that he has hotels in Turkey. So he’s maybe a little biased, but whatever it is, it’s business interests or something about Erdo?an as a strong man that appeals to him.

Although Trump’s so erratic and zigzags a lot, there’s some stability to his relationships with foreign leaders. Now that he’s made friends with the rulers of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in a way you see a new configuration in the region of who Trump really sees as the most significant allies. And it’s not Israel, it’s not even Egypt, although he has good relations with El-Sisi there. It’s Turkey, which is in the G20. Saudi Arabia, which is in the G20, and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which are filthy rich. So it’s an axis of the plutocrats.

July-August 2025, ATC 237