The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz

Japan occupies a unique position: a close ally of the United States, a strong partner of Israel, and a longtime diplomatic interlocutor with Tehran.

In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, Japan’s Ambassador to Israel, Yusuke Arai, offers a rare perspective on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the threats it poses to Israel, lessons from Japan’s experience with North Korea, and the limits of diplomacy and the importance of military deterrence.

Ambassador Arai is a veteran diplomat with over 30 years of experience in foreign policy, national security, and intelligence. A former Director-General of Intelligence and Analysis at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he brings a distinctive security perspective shaped by his experience examining Iran and the Middle East from both Tokyo and Israel.

To understand the war unfolding with Iran today — and where it could lead — you have to understand the history that brought the Middle East to this moment.

In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, Mark Dubowitz sits down with acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, to put today’s conflict with Iran in its deeper historical context.

When did this war really begin — with October 7, the direct 2025 US-Israel-Iran confrontation, or the Islamic Revolution of 1979? Montefiore traces the forces that shaped the modern Middle East and examines how Khomeini’s revolution transformed Iran, political Islam, and the regional order.

The conversation explores what the current war is actually about, how victory should be measured, and whether external pressure can break the Islamic Republic. Mark and Simon also look beyond the current regime: If the Islamic Republic eventually disappears, which parts of Iran’s regional ambitions disappear with it — and which are rooted more deeply in Iranian history, geography, and nationalism?

Are we witnessing another violent turn in the Middle East — or the end of the revolutionary cycle that began with Khomeini in 1979? And if that era really is ending, what comes next?

Elliot Kaufman and Yonah Jeremy Bob are the co-authors of the new book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis – an inside account of the decisions, debates, and personalities that shaped Israel’s multi-front war, from October 7 to Hezbollah and ultimately Iran.

Elliot Kaufman is an editorial writer and member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where he focuses on Israel and Iran and has covered the war since October 7.

Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military analyst at The Jerusalem Post and the author of several books, including Target Tehran.

Their reporting draws on extensive access to senior military, intelligence, and political officials.

The Islamic Republic may discover that surviving the war was the easy part. Its military has been mauled, its deterrence shattered, its proxies weakened, and now an already dysfunctional economy faces relentless pressure — with no victory to rally around and no economic rescue on the horizon.

On the latest episode of The Iran Breakdown, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by FDD’s Miad Maleki, a former senior Treasury sanctions official, to explain why the regime’s greatest threat may no longer come from American bombers or Israeli jets, but from an economic crisis it cannot bomb, repress, or print its way out of.

For decades, Washington and Jerusalem worried about Iran dominating the Middle East. But as the Islamic Republic weakens, is Erdogan’s Turkey positioning itself to become the region’s next great revisionist power?

Mark Dubowitz is joined by two Turkey and Middle East experts: Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at FDD.

They discuss Erdogan’s ambitions, Turkey’s growing confrontation with Israel in Syria, Ankara’s support for Hamas, its complicated relationship with Tehran, its future in NATO—and whether Turkey could eventually pursue nuclear weapons.

The central question: As Iran declines, is Turkey the next big Islamist threat?

In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, Mark Dubowitz sits down with FDD’s Rich Goldberg for a wide-ranging discussion on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, global energy markets and America’s growing energy dominance.

Rich leads FDD’s Energy and National Security Program and served in the second Trump administration, where he helped establish the White House National Energy Dominance Council. During the first Trump administration, he served at the White House as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. A former Navy intelligence officer with experience on the Joint Staff and in Afghanistan, Rich also spent years on Capitol Hill, where he was a lead architect of sanctions against Iran. Iran sanctioned him in 2020

Mark and Rich examine the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, the resilience and the risks in global energy markets, emerging workarounds to bypass the strait, America’s expanding energy power and China’s role in the equation. It’s a conversation about more than barrels and pipelines—it’s about energy, economics and military power, and the central question: Does Iran have Trump over a barrel—or is it the other way around?

Relevant article: Tehran is losing its grip on Hormuz, and with it all its leverage

What makes the Islamic Republic of Iran different from a conventional regime seeking security, prosperity, and survival? Its ideological DNA fuses Maoist revolutionary thought, Frantz Fanon’s vision of anticolonial struggle and redemptive violence—channeled through Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati—and a revolutionary Shia theology of martyrdom, resistance, and struggle against oppression.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder and first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, forged these currents into a revolutionary state whose legitimacy rests not simply on governing Iran, but on resisting an international order it considers fundamentally unjust.

That helps explain the regime’s remarkable ability to turn military defeats, economic devastation, and mass suffering into narratives of resistance, sacrifice, and even victory.

Haviv Rettig Gur—Middle East analyst at The Free Press, and host of Ask Haviv Anything—joins Mark Dubowitz on The Iran Breakdown to unpack the ideological DNA of the Islamic Republic, why it has endured, and what its enemies still misunderstand about the regime they are fighting.

The next battlefield isn’t in the sky or at sea—it’s underground.

The Islamic Republic, together with Hamas and Hezbollah, spent decades building a subterranean fortress: hundreds of miles of terror tunnels beneath Gaza and Lebanon, and deeply buried nuclear and missile facilities designed to survive even the most powerful airstrikes. At the center of that strategy is Pickaxe Mountain, where Tehran is constructing hardened underground infrastructure intended to shield its nuclear weapons program from U.S. and Israeli airpower.

In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, host Mark Dubowitz sits down with Yadin Soffer, co-founder and CEO of Traysar, a startup developing autonomous systems for underground warfare. They explore how this emerging technology could detect, penetrate, and neutralize subterranean threats—and whether advances in underground warfare could change the strategic equation against deeply buried targets like Pickaxe Mountain.

Iran isn’t dismantling its nuclear program—it’s burying it deeper underground.

At the center of growing U.S. concern is Pickaxe Mountain, a massive underground complex that signals the regime has no intention of abandoning its nuclear ambitions. Buried deep beneath solid rock and heavily fortified, the facility may be the most challenging nuclear target the United States has ever confronted, raising difficult questions about whether it can be destroyed by conventional means.

Andrea Stricker, deputy director and research fellow in FDD’s Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program, joins Mark Dubowitz on The Iran Breakdown to explain why Pickaxe Mountain matters, what makes it so difficult to neutralize, what military and non-military options remain, and which other parts of Iran’s nuclear program deserve urgent attention.

The United States has launched a fresh wave of strikes against Iran, hitting roughly 90 targets along the country's coastline, as tensions over the Strait of Hormuz threaten to unravel a fragile ceasefire between Washington and Tehran. With diplomatic channels strained and the regime holding Hormuz hostage, the path back to de-escalation looks increasingly uncertain.

To unpack what comes next, FDD Senior Advisor Richard Goldberg joins Mark Dubowitz on The Iran Breakdown to break down the state of the ceasefire, the latest developments in the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington's shifting strategy.