Gordon Carrera

And then that civil war becomes bloody and violent and goes on for years.

So I think one of the challenges for the

in Iranians is that in Washington, and I think in some other places, they're looking at that going, that is not necessarily a successful model or outcome to go do some military strikes on, say, Iran, which some people have called for on some of the security forces, because you don't know where quite that will lead.

And it could lead to destabilization and chaos, as happened in Libya, rather than some kind of happy outcome

of a democratic regime change in Iran.

I think that is one of the things in people's minds and one of the reasons why I think we saw the caution from the Trump administration to actually necessarily pull the trigger.

I think there are some other reasons as well.

Arab states were saying to them, you know, who knows where this could lead or what you could do.

I think the ability to affect change as a foreign power is often quite limited and could be overstated in these cases ultimately.

I think there is some really interesting kind of political science evidence that the most successful

regime changes, uprisings, revolutions are the ones where they are organic and from the people rather than with outside help or support, which just kind of adds a different dynamic, delegitimizes it sometimes because people can go, you're just being supported by a foreign power.

You think about Iraq, you think about Libya in these cases.

And I think that is one of the kind of challenges people face is that it's hard to see what the role of outside powers would actually be, even though some want it.

So I guess, David, as we come to an end, I mean, we've talked about how difficult it is to predict what's going to happen.

So I think trying to predict what would happen would be slightly foolish for us at this point.

But I guess we can talk about what some of the scenarios might be and what we might look at.

It's interesting, I spoke to someone, a Brit who knows Iran really well, and his view was this is a regime in its death throes, which is flailing around desperately at this point, which has lost its legitimacy.

But I think we both agreed, you do not know how long those death throes may last.

That doesn't give you a timeframe.

But I think his view was very much that it would be very hard for it to regain any legitimacy.