In this episode recorded during media briefing, Daniel J. Levy speaks with Dr Ilan Berman for a first reaction to the US-Iran ceasefire announcement and the 60-day nuclear negotiation period now ahead. Dr Berman assesses Washington’s political calculations, the pressure of energy markets and the midterm elections, and why he believes the framework currently gives Tehran the advantage. He also discusses Iran’s internal instability, the role of the IRGC, and what the deal could mean for Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon.
Dr Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC, and an expert on regional security in the Middle East. In the past he has consulted for the CIA as well as the US Departments of State and Defence.
Transcript
(This transcript has been automatically generated by AI — please excuse any potential errors.)
00:00:07:17 – 00:00:38:04
Daniel J. Leavy
Good afternoon. It is Monday the 15th of June, 2026. My name is Daniel J. Levy, and I am programmes manager at BICOM, the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre. Yesterday, President Trump confirmed that Iran and the US had agreed to a ceasefire mediated by Pakistan and Qatar, bringing three and a half months, almost of conflict to an end. With the opening of the Straits of Hormuz and a memorandum of understanding leading to negotiations within 60 days, which will address the nuclear issue as well.
00:00:38:05 – 00:00:54:01
Daniel J. Leavy
And today we are joined by Doctor Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and a former US government contractor and consultant who’s worked with a range of departments, including state and the CIA. So, without further ado, Doctor Berman, over to you. Thanks.
00:00:54:03 – 00:01:20:23
Ilan Berman
So, it’s interesting because I’m sort of reading and learning about the deal, the specifics of which are still uncertain in real time. So, I’m I don’t know that I have that much proprietary information beyond all of you, but I do have the sort of the proximity of being in Washington and understanding. The first thing that I think is necessary to set the table is the administration.
00:01:20:23 – 00:02:01:09
Ilan Berman
Is this administration in particular, is notoriously close lipped, right? They don’t they don’t leak very much. They don’t share very much. The policymaking process is comparatively opaque compared to previous administrations. And so, anything I get wrong. Right. That’s my disclaimer. Anything I get wrong is because of that. It’s not because I don’t know anything. My initial impressions and again, like all of you, I’m sort of reading the readouts, whether it’s from, you know, the wish list that the Iranians publish and the state media or it’s, you know, the more sober assessment of what the deal looks like in the Financial Times today, whatever it is.
00:02:01:09 – 00:02:29:03
Ilan Berman
But it seems to be that this is this part of the conversation is the Hormuz to Hormuz for Hormuz conversation. Right. The idea that Iran gets performance, performance in hand, sanctions relief in exchange for liberating the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for stabilizing markets. The heavy lift is actually not what we just saw. The heavy lift is what comes in 60 days, right?
00:02:29:04 – 00:03:10:16
Ilan Berman
The idea is this de-escalation sets the table for stabilizing world markets, gives the president a clearer path to what is shaping up to be a pretty contentious midterm election in the United States. He was getting a lot of pressure from the Republican political base about having this conflict, particularly if and here it needs to be said, particularly on the US front, if the conflict had spiralled again into a hot war instead of a cease fire, there were very likely, or at least predicted to be, very significant downstream effects on voter turnout.
00:03:10:17 – 00:03:36:02
Ilan Berman
Right. There’s already the calculus already is that the Republicans are going to lose one chamber of the legislature. The fear was that, you know, if this went sideways, as we Americans say, that this would actually lead to losing two chambers, right? So, I think, you know, all politics is local. So, I think, you know, that that was at least part of the reason, sort of informing his decision making.
00:03:36:04 – 00:03:57:00
Ilan Berman
The other is that Americans and I know it’s sort of I’m here in London and its sort of it’s a very different perspective here, and it’s a very different perspective in Europe. But Americans actually don’t pay attention to foreign policy very much at all. It is it routinely ranks third or fourth or fifth in terms of political priorities.
00:03:57:01 – 00:04:38:05
Ilan Berman
What they care about most of all consistently over time is the economy. So, the conversation about energy markets and fluctuations in prices is actually not just an economic issue in America as a political issue. And so that was another layer of complexity that the president was trying to deal with. Parenthetically, there is a really interesting threat of the conversation to talk about, because if the president knew that this conflict is renewed, conflict with Iran was coming down the pike, it would have been good to set the table by, for example, fully recapitalized and refilling the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
00:04:38:07 – 00:04:58:05
Ilan Berman
Things like that. Steps that that weren’t done or at least weren’t done publicly in a way that you could reassure American voters that if this conflict drags on, that they would be insulated from these economic shocks. So, in many ways, this was a sort of, you know, and we’ve seen it throughout the conflict. This was sort of problematic in terms of messaging from the job.
00:04:58:07 – 00:05:22:19
Ilan Berman
The calculation is really interesting on the part of Iran, because I think it’s very clear that the where the administration ended up in the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was where they were going all along. Right. I’ve sat in war games for two decades with U.S. military types. Every single one games out. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
00:05:22:24 – 00:05:47:02
Ilan Berman
The idea that this is not this was not foreseeable is simply not true. The problem is that you have it’s a twofold problem. One is you have a very small group of people who are not foreign policy professionals, who are doing Middle East policy. And when they widen that circle to include military planners, that’s where the discussions of the blockade came in.
00:05:47:04 – 00:06:14:21
Ilan Berman
Very naturally, they were planned. The second is that the blockade activates a very vital thing for Iran. Iran is heavily dependent on oil exports. A blockade has this cascading effect. If Iran has to draw down the amount of oil that it exports, first of all, its royals the relationships with China, you know, which consumes 90% of their exports.
00:06:14:21 – 00:06:45:19
Ilan Berman
But it also begins to affect the viability of their energy flow, of their energy fields over time. They cannot shut them down because it’s I’m not an oil industry expert, but to hear tell, if you shut down wells and pipeline wells in particular completely, it’s very hard and very costly to bring them back online. So, the Iranian idea throughout was to pump less, but to keep pumping, to keep the wells viable.
00:06:45:21 – 00:07:18:09
Ilan Berman
And so, the over under calculation in Washington was it’ll take this long, whether it’s weeks or months or whatever it is, it’ll take this long for the Iranian economy to really feel the pinch when they run out of storage capacity, when they have to make hard choices. What we know from the time scale is that this process was not given enough time to work the administration because of those sorts of the things I said before the preceding political calculations, the administration wanted to move fast.
00:07:18:09 – 00:07:43:08
Ilan Berman
They wanted to sort of to wrap this up in a bow. And so, I think there’s a credible case to say that if this pressure had lasted longer, then it would be it would have been more effective. I think you would see a more flexible Iranian negotiating position. But as it stands, where we are right now is it’s this, you know, walking back from the brink on both sides.
00:07:43:09 – 00:08:20:20
Ilan Berman
The idea is that the Hormuz is opened. The Iranians will not toll. So basically, you’re returning to the status quo ante, the status quo before the war. But America is going to be forced to provide concessions. It’s going to be forced to provide whether it’s, you know, indirectly, billions of dollars that are escrow in Emirati accounts that are then transferred to Iran, what have you in the near term, over the longer term, you have the nuclear negotiations, which the administration will tell you are performance based.
00:08:20:21 – 00:08:55:09
Ilan Berman
Right. As in more transparency, a resolution of the fate of the highly enriched uranium will result in X billion dollars being liberated. And I think that’s right. I think that’s the intention. I think it’s going to be very hard to achieve candidly. And I think the advantage over time settles squarely on Iran because the president very manifestly was not eager to go back into large scale military operations even when the Iranians were violating the ceasefire.
00:08:55:09 – 00:09:18:23
Ilan Berman
And I think it’s hard to imagine, unless maybe you’re talking about the period after the midterm elections in the United States. But over the next few months at least, it’s very hard to imagine that even if these nuclear negotiations don’t yield, the type of results at the white House wants, it’s very hard to imagine that the US is going to invest again in a military campaign.
00:09:18:23 – 00:09:44:13
Ilan Berman
So, I think from the 60, 60,000ft level, I think what we’re looking at is an agreement that is lopsided. It’s lopsided in favour of Iran because it gives Iran requisite time. The Iranian, the currency that the Iranians have always bartered on is time, time to solidify their hold on power, because the IRGC is rickety and the economy is in bad shape.
00:09:44:15 – 00:10:03:13
Ilan Berman
The Iranian riyal is. I haven’t checked it in the last week or so, but at it’s at the height of its depreciation, if that’s a term, it was trading at a million and a half Iranian rials to the US dollar, which would be what I don’t know what the conversion is, but it’s pretty significant compared to the pound.
00:10:03:15 – 00:10:33:03
Ilan Berman
I think it’s a little bit more stable now, but the economy is in bad shape. You have the Iranian regime just undertook a very precisely because the economy is in bad shape, just undertook a very risky venture back in January, early January, when Iranians were still out on the street protesting the regime shut down. The internet and the internet, with some variations, has remained closed until like two weeks ago.
00:10:33:03 – 00:10:59:01
Ilan Berman
And this was the longest internet blackout in technological history. And there are a lot of people, and I spent a lot of time working on this issue. Also, a lot of people never thought that the Iranian internet would go back on in the way that it existed before, because they were worried about communication between opposition elements. They were worried about sort of free flow of information, by the way.
00:10:59:02 – 00:11:28:10
Ilan Berman
They were worried about accountability for the 30 plus 1000 Iranians that they killed in those protests. But a couple of weeks ago, the Iranians began loosening restrictions on the internet. So those stories are beginning to trickle out. I actually read that as a function of economic insolvency, because what you have is something like 10% of Iranian GDP is generated by online companies, by companies that where most of their businesses online.
00:11:28:11 – 00:11:45:20
Ilan Berman
So, I didn’t read this as a sign of strength. I read this as a sign of weakness, which is we have to. We don’t want to, but we have to open the internet because we need these companies to function at least somewhat. So that’s something that they’re sort of presiding over right now. They don’t know how this is going to go.
00:11:45:21 – 00:12:17:20
Ilan Berman
They don’t know whether this is going to spur another wave of protest. The Iranian what you have sort of politically is you have our military. What used to be the Department of Defence is now the Department of War. Our military now call would call what’s happening in Iran a politically a self-licking ice cream cone. Right. That’s sort of a policy that reinforces itself, because what you have now is ostensibly the Islamic Republic is still the Islamic Republic, but nobody’s seen the supreme leader.
00:12:17:22 – 00:12:52:00
Ilan Berman
He is a cardboard cutout on viral videos, and he is issuing edicts that functionally do everything that the IRGC wants them to do anyway. Right? The Regency has a wish list of things he wants to do consolidate power, import militias, et cetera, etc., etc. these are all being validated religiously, right? So, to me, that’s a really interesting dynamic, getting to the bottom of the disposition of the new Supreme leader, whether he’s, you know, in a coma, whether he’s still alive is actually really interesting because there’s a policy thread to be followed here.
00:12:52:01 – 00:13:22:22
Ilan Berman
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps doesn’t have a lot of legitimacy. If it turns out that there’s no Islamic revolution to guard. And if we can get a little bit of clarity on that, it would actually, I think, sort of reset the narrative conversation in a really interesting way. And they’re working to prevent that. And so, what you have is you have this initial deal that creates this framework for them to solidify power at home, for them to strengthen their economy because oil is going to be flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.
00:13:22:24 – 00:13:47:09
Ilan Berman
It is one that basically gives a free pass to China and to Russia. Right. The main supporters, economically and politically of these republics. And so, I think what’s going to happen is this will hold for at least a period of time. I think it will be very clear in a few weeks that the Iranians are slow rolling the nuclear negotiations, because that’s their plan.
00:13:47:09 – 00:14:09:04
Ilan Berman
They want a slow roll. That’s been their plan consistently. But I do think that the appetite of the United States has already diminished and will diminish further the longer we go under this framework. And so, I think if you’re looking at this from Tehran, you have a lot to be happy about. If you’re looking from Washington, you have less to be happy about.
00:14:09:04 – 00:14:41:18
Ilan Berman
And if you’re looking from Jerusalem, you have not anything to be happy about, because what the deal does, which is sort of the poison pill from the Israeli perspective, is it tethers the Lebanon front, the fight against Hezbollah to the core interests of the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime has been saying for a long time that Hezbollah and the Lebanon front is intrinsic, and the Israelis have been trying to pry those issues apart as much as they can with this deal.
00:14:41:23 – 00:15:08:11
Ilan Berman
Lebanon is functionally grandfathered into this nuclear agreement, and Israel’s freedom of action against Hezbollah is moving forward. Moving forward is going to be severely constrained. So, what you actually now have is you have a deal that not only potentially significantly strengthens the Iranian regime, but it’s also one that maintains Lebanese, the Lebanese political system, as a political hostage of the Islamic Republic.
00:15:08:12 – 00:15:15:11
Ilan Berman
Thank you. Sorry, sorry for sorry for the glass half empty. But that’s sort of how I’m reading it. Good to.
00:15:15:12 – 00:15:36:07
Daniel J. Leavy
Good to be realistic. Sort of overly peppy and optimistic, for sure. So just to kick off the discussion, two names that we’re hearing a lot and sort of connection with governance, absence of the Supreme leader. And Vahid, perhaps you comment on the dynamic between them. Would there be any competition? Are they working in tandem with each other?
00:15:36:08 – 00:15:40:20
Daniel J. Leavy
And for all intents and purposes, who are the US going to be negotiating with?
00:15:40:22 – 00:16:06:08
Ilan Berman
It’s a good it’s a good question. And I think I you know, when I did a webinar for you guys a while ago, I think the story that I told was that when Vice President JD Vance went to Islamabad and had the initial round of negotiations, the reason he and the American delegation ended up leaving was because they heard the Iranians arguing in the next room, because there were proximity talks, they weren’t in the same room.
00:16:06:08 – 00:16:34:13
Ilan Berman
And the conclusion from the American side, I think, completely accurately, was they can’t even agree amongst themselves. How can they come to come to terms with us? I think that’s clarified somewhat since then. I think it’s very clear that the Revolutionary Guards is, as an institution, is in the driver’s seat of national politics. I think to the extent that he is, he has other ideas.
00:16:34:15 – 00:16:50:22
Ilan Berman
I think he’s given a little bit of free rein because he’s the one, he’s the interlocutor that the United States and in the U.K. sort of is most comfortable with. Right, because you wouldn’t do to negotiate with Ahmed Vahid and, you know, sort of.
00:16:50:24 – 00:17:12:02
Ilan Berman
Puncture the fiction that Iran is, is not a military dictatorship, which is what it is now. But I, I think what you have now is and what you’re going to see over the next several weeks is this process of consolidation within the Iranian regime. You’ve had all the factions; they’ve all thought it out. Galba and others, they’ve sort of come out on top.
00:17:12:02 – 00:17:20:02
Ilan Berman
And now you have a situation where it’s going to be all about consolidation of power. It’s going to strengthen the economy and coup proofing the regime.
00:17:20:04 – 00:17:29:01
Daniel J. Leavy
And looking into Jerusalem. Now, where does this leave Israel? American relations. Because, as you said, there’s nothing to be happy about in the Israelis view.
00:17:29:02 – 00:17:52:23
Ilan Berman
So, this is really this is really hard to parse. And, you know, I sort of anything I say is provisional because I think everything, as you guys know, everything changes pretty rapidly. But I would say that this is probably the biggest loser in all this is Benjamin Netanyahu for a very simple reason. Israel has elections coming up, right?
00:17:53:00 – 00:18:22:07
Ilan Berman
Whether it’s at the end of October or the beginning of September. Right. It’s immaterial, because remember that Netanyahu, who’s been a fixture in the Israeli political scene for a generation, has made his bones by being Mr. Security right now. That reputation was dented pretty significantly on October 7th, and that is going to be an issue. That accountability issue is going to be, I think, front and centre in the coming in the upcoming elections.
00:18:22:07 – 00:19:00:10
Ilan Berman
But so is the aggregate state of Israeli security, where, you know, Netanyahu gambled very significantly in the idea that there was no daylight between him and President Trump. And this was always a risky play. But I think right now the Israeli electorate is looking at this and saying, you know, they you know, we’ve been betrayed. We’ve been you know, we’re hamstrung in a way that, frankly, is a core national security interest because a third of the country of Israel is within Hezbollah firing range.
00:19:00:10 – 00:19:30:03
Ilan Berman
And so, what you have is you have an existential problem, because it’s not just that Israel is petulantly going after Hezbollah and doing expeditionary operations. The Israelis have a problem because those northern communities from those northern cities will not go back if they’re within firing range. Right? They schools can’t open. People are sitting in shelters. And so now the Israelis are being told that they’re most significant strategic partner is actually perpetuating that condition.
00:19:30:03 – 00:19:33:01
Ilan Berman
And I think that’s going to spill over into the ballot box.
00:19:33:03 – 00:19:35:12
Daniel J. Leavy
Okay. Doctor Berman, thank you so much.