Karim Sadjadpour

Listen, I think that if I...

If the last two and a half decades of Middle East history had turned out differently, I think we'd be having a very different conversation right now.

Now, I do believe that Iran is a very different place than Iraq and Afghanistan.

But I do think we have to be very...

honest in saying that the last two decades has proven that we don't have the ability to dictate our preferred outcome in Iran.

We don't have the ability to dictate who comes to power the day after a military attack.

Well, I think this is simply stated after 47 years of living under a theocracy whose identity has been premised on death to America.

It's the most secular society, I would argue, in the Middle East and the least anti-American, the most pro-American.

And I think most Iranians have also reached this conclusion that so long as the ethos of their government is death to America and death to Israel rather than long live Iran,

this country will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation.

There's a lot of nostalgia.

It's an interesting phenomenon, having nostalgia for a period which you never lived, because three-quarters of Iranians were born after the revolution.

But they do have this nostalgia for the stories they heard about life before the revolution, when people had social freedoms, when Iran had a dignified place in the world, when the Iranian passport could get you places.

when the country wasn't an isolated pariah state.

And so it's not to say that people want to be a lackey of the United States, but I think there's a basic recognition that

This nation, which, in my view, should be a G20 nation.

It has the human capital for it.

It has the natural resources for it.

Number two, reserves of natural gas.

Number three, reserves of oil.