ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Iran said today that it will not negotiate directly with the United States as long as the U.S. is in violation of an agreement the two countries reached in June. And President Trump has told Axios that he is now, quote, "low-keying it," only semi-negotiating with Iran. Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility today for an attack on an oil facility in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Iran and its allies, sometimes referred to as the Axis of Resistance, have succeeded in complicating the war. The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran-backed Iraqi militias have remained resilient and dangerous, writes Peter Salisbury in a provocative Foreign Affairs Magazine article this month. Salisbury teaches at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and I called him up to ask how these groups are reshaping the war.
PETER SALISBURY: The Axis of Resistance is a network of non-state armed groups that Iran has been investing in for the last 20 to 40 years and has really built up the capacity of - to the extent that groups in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq are all now launching drones, missiles at various adversaries. And in particular, the Houthis and the Iraqi groups are able to launch cross-border missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia and on commerce in the Red Sea in a way that has proved very difficult for the United States.
SCHMITZ: Is this a top-down structure, like, with Tehran at the top, or how do power dynamics work within this?
SALISBURY: Increasingly these groups, while they're still very closely tied to Tehran, still very reliant on Iran, they have their own autonomous capabilities, their own supply lines and have their own connections to one another and pool knowledge across what's less kind of a network and more an ecosystem. And that has allowed them, after a series of attacks by the United States and Israel over the past several years, to reconstitute themselves and continue to pose this kind of threat.
SCHMITZ: And describe the training of some of these groups and how involved Iran might be in that training.
SALISBURY: So maybe 20, 25 years ago, Iran started really investing in training not just Hezbollah, who it's got this long-term investment in, and not just Hamas, which it had kind of this loose connection with throughout the 1990s, but really started building up a curriculum almost from basic military education up to higher education. So you can now be trained not just in basic military tactics but in how to use relatively advanced drones and missiles, how to build them, including sending people off to technical training and even kind of higher institutes of learning in Iran, but also at training sites in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Yemen. They're not just sending them weapons and telling them which buttons to press.
SCHMITZ: On the note of weapons, you know, I'm curious, you know, how much of a role has the newer and cheaper technology that we've seen played - like the usage of drones - in these groups' ability to wield power?
SALISBURY: I mean, it's been transformative, frankly. Maybe 10, 15 years ago, the U.S. and other Western powers were able to limit access to advanced weapons because they controlled most of the technology, most of the parts - what are known as intermediate goods - that were flowing around the world. Fast-forward a decade and a half, a lot of what goes into Houthi drones, Hezbollah drones, the Iranian drones, as well, are manufactured very cheaply at large-scale in China, in particular, so the choke point for those goods has moved.
SCHMITZ: How do these particular groups obtain these parts? I mean, are they obtaining them directly from China?
SALISBURY: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, most of these groups now have their own fairly sophisticated international supply chains. They work with businessmen, with traders in China, across the world, in the Gulf to get things onto ships and either brought into ports or smuggled that kind of last mile into the territory they control, so again, fundamentally different than 10, 15, 20 years ago, when most of what they got had to be shipped directly from Iran.
SCHMITZ: That's really interesting. How are the U.S. and its allies fighting these types of groups, knowing this type of power structure?
SALISBURY: The assumptions behind Epic Fury and the assumptions behind things like the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign was that they were powerful enough and that enough of the capabilities, the needs of these groups were concentrated in specific places that they could simply kill the right number of people who had the knowledge needed to run these processes, blow up enough warehouses, manufacturing sites along with doing all the things they've been doing to try and constrain their economies.
And what they're learning now is that because the pool of knowledge needed to procure the parts, build the drones, get them up in the sky is actually much more diffuse and distributed. The Israelis used to describe Iran and the Axis as an octopus with tentacles, which suggests this relatively simple, almost mechanistic structure. And really, what you're dealing with, something - it's like the difference between an old-fashioned telephone exchange where everything's routed through one site, and the internet, where everything kind of moves through a hundred different places all at once before your data, your information gets to you.
SCHMITZ: So given how decentralized and diffuse this network is, what kind of new strategy might be needed for the U.S. and its allies?
SALISBURY: It's going to be very difficult to uproot these groups 'cause it's not just affecting conflicts in the Middle East. It's affecting conflict all over the world, from Ukraine to Sudan to Ethiopia and beyond. And it's going to become an even bigger challenge for powerful states and for peace and security everywhere in the coming months, years, decades.
SCHMITZ: That is Peter Salisbury. He's a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Thank you.
SALISBURY: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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