Why is Ukraine targeting Iran? And can Europe stop lone-actor attacks?

What does Ukraine’s reported strike on an Iranian cargo ship tell us about the expanding war — and was it really a message to Donald Trump?

Professor Clionadh Raleigh and Bron Mills unpack why Ukraine may be taking the fight beyond Russia, what Iran’s threat of retaliation means, and where the Houthis fit into the conflict.

Plus, after an attack at a Pride event in Berlin, they look at Europe’s changing terror threat, the rise of less sophisticated, lone-actor attacks, and the difficult question facing governments: how do you prevent rare but devastating violence without over-securitising society?

For more conversations like this, subscribe to Conflicts of Interest and watch the full episode on YouTube. 

Conflicts of Interest: https://www.youtube.com/@ConflictsOfInterestACLED

📱 Did you know you can follow Conflicts of Interest on TikTok?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We obviously have a problem policing modern societies. I think that's the number one thing that everybody should agree upon.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Conflicts of interest brought to you by ACLED.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Conflicts of Interest. My name is Clina Rowley, and I'm here with the ever-lovely Braun.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hi. Hello. One thing that is occurring to me this morning, what on earth is going on in the world? This weekend does. I know, but this one is has been pretty because now when we're back and forward sometimes, aren't we? Like, oh, what's happening in Ukraine, what's happening in around, those worlds seem to have collided. And it was only the last time we spoke that you said these Islamic kind of extremist groups are not necessarily in an active phase, and you're explaining about individual actions and yet they still pose a threat. And then we're hearing reports from Berlin that there's been an attack on a pride event.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Yeah, that's true. I mean, that in and of itself is interesting because there is kind of a separate specter of Islamist terrorism, which is occurring in Europe. So these are kind of destination areas. But I mean, what was surprising about the situation in Berlin is that this was a German citizen. I believe he had come originally from Lebanon and had relocated to Germany. To be honest, Germany has had a number of these problems over the last few years. It's one of the reasons that we've been focused on what is happening to Europe being kind of an amalgamation of many forms of disorder. And this is a very, very big concern, I think, for people. It's very uncommon, but it's quite a, you know, it has a very, very significant impact on how safe communities feel. You might remember that a few years ago there were a lot of these attacks during Christmas markets and things, right? So what's going on there? Really, what seems to have happened is a little bit indicative of what those, especially on the right, will talk about in terms of losing control of the ability to secure the general public. The person who was accosted, of course, for doing this, and I believe killed. That person had quite a record of radicalization, right? I mean, this person was not what you sometimes see, which is that they're young and this is their first attempt or whatever the case. This person had all the classic signs of somebody who had both been radicalized and had traveled again to deepen his own radicalization. And there is an open question about whether or not any government of a Western democratic liberal state have the right checks in place to deal with the types of threats and disorder that is now present and will get worse. Now there's no question about that. All of it is on track to become worse. And it's not necessarily an Islamist situation entirely. I mean, again, we referred to this last week, but I think it's relevant. The attacks on currently serving or formally serving political figures like Anne Whittakom. So she was attacked by somebody who was not espousing at all an Islamist ideology, but rather just one in defiance or different from hers. And the solution, of course, was to use violence. And, you know, we also saw this issue come up, I think it was in the last two weeks, where two of the US Supreme Court judges had to go and tell Congress that they are in fact now experiencing a marked increase in threats to their person and their families and their property and all the rest of it because of the position they hold. So all of this is the form of disorder that are arising in societies that have not necessarily adapted to the free-flowing nature of these threats.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

I think actually you said last week you can't help it if you're a political party, say, and then someone does something crazy and says, I've done it for this reason. So who is going to kind of benefit from that conversation and that discourse when you've got the the states who it seems at the moment really just love a label and to say, you know, that that's a problem?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Yeah, I mean, certainly the far right in Germany will benefit from what's going on here. I think anybody who takes a very hard line on internal security is going to benefit. But I I mean, I I don't even like saying that it's a benefit because there needs to be a hard line on security. The risk to the general public have drastically increased from people, individuals within their own society, and we don't have the right ways to either de-radicalize or police those threats. That's not for debate, that's true. The way that you might go about actually dealing with it, that can come under a kind of a range of possibilities. Some people might say that you should have a much stronger imprisoning and de-radicalization programs that are much more focused on security. That comes at great cost to kind of societal trust. And to be honest, like diversity and the inclusions of society more generally. But it's not a racial issue so much, especially across, let's say, Britain and parts of Europe, because of course, like we just said, you're getting kind of extreme violence by individuals from all parts of society, not solely those that might be newly arrived immigrants or asylum seekers, although those are disproportionately high, right? We obviously have a problem policing modern societies. I think that that's the number one thing that everybody should agree upon. And then whether or not you should take, let's say, uh kind of generating new cultural norms around kind of belonging to a country. Honestly, I think that there's a lot to be said for that. I do want to just emphasize here that even the norms about what it is to be an immigrant have really changed recently. And it's relevant to this discussion because I was reading a discussion recently of Argentinians in Spain. And Argentinians apparently are not a particularly loved immigrant population in Spain. And one of the reasons is because, as somebody said said it, they don't act happy to be here, right? Or rather, they don't act like they are, that they don't owe the the the native population anything for their presence, for their ability to be there, and won't adjust their normal ways of operating as a result. You know, I always thought if you're an immigrant and you choose to move someplace, or you've been accepted to live someplace, yeah, you do change the way you operate to live there, right? You do adopt that country's ways of being. And it's because this was a choice on both ends, both yours and theirs, about whether or not you would be a good fit for that state. And I think that some of this issue around can you police people's extreme political opinions or their potential political actions is this discomfort with saying that there needs to be kind of a minimum line of societal engagement, whether you and your family have been here for a thousand years or whether you just arrived. Immigrants are typically much more willing to adopt kind of the norms of this society that they've moved into. And so typically don't present any sort of an issue like we've just seen. But there's now this expectation that no one should have to adjust any of their own personal actions in order to create a productive and safe society, and that's just not true. That's not true for anybody involved.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

It's interesting, isn't it? Because when you first said Argentina and Spain, my brain went to the arguments they were having about the football recently in the World Cup because the accusations of FIFA being biased and all of those things. So that's where my brain went initially. But it's interesting with the conversations around integration as well into communities, because I know we spoke a while back about, you know, how can you take a group of people from somewhere else that's larger than the population of the village and put them into that village? How what how is that going to change? And when I was little, we spent a couple of years living in Sweden. And so I was chatting to some of the team that were based there, and I I said where I lived and um that I'd love to go back. And I was told, hang on, when did you leave? Was it 20 years ago? Yeah, I wouldn't go back. It's completely different there now. Like there's the kind of community takeovers, because I know Sweden and parts of Finland, they're in the news quite a lot about this problem with integrating into society. So it's not necessarily the individuals, is it?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Well, you're right about mass movements, and I did say those things about villages in Ireland who were accepting very large numbers of young men. But there's also, you know, real success stories in Ireland. There were several mayors of Irish towns and cities who are immigrants, and this is, you know, a great way of attesting to the fact that if you want to be a society that's welcoming, you have to make room for people within your structures. I think they have done that. It's very different, of course, comparing that to putting 200 unmarried young men who obviously are from quite traumatic backgrounds into a small village of 600, right? So a terrible way to go about these policies. But you're right in the sense that some Scandinavian countries have been doing this now for a while, have been trying to figure out this inclusion problem for a while. And in part, actually, it's because Sweden was the site of some of these very, very awful, tragic events where some of their political figures had been assaulted and killed. In fact, one of the prime ministers, I believe, was stabbed when she was out shopping because they didn't have a security detail. And that was by, I'm not mistaken, an Islamic fundamentalist young man. And so what's been happening, I would say, in the last five years, in many ways, in response to this wave of migration, of course, that had occurred just after COVID, was that they really locked down on that. They said, we are actually going to return to a number of standard systematic rules about what it is to live in Sweden and Denmark. Denmark has been particularly at the forefront of this. And what they did was say, you are welcome under the conditions we set, and you are welcome to join our society. And that was quite different. I used to say to people, well, if I moved to Saudi Arabia, I wouldn't expect to have a life as an Irish person. And it works all different ways. And I think that that's the sanest way to go about having not just a multi-ethnic society, but just an incredibly flexible, adaptable, diverse, and growing society.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, you and I could talk about society all day, so we've kind of gone down a bit of a rabbit hole here. When it comes to what happened in Germany this weekend, we've seen a bit of a pattern over the years, whether it's it's worked or not worked, where there's been some kind of horrendous event and then something changes in order to kind of prevent that danger again. I don't know if you've been to a a concert recently in the UK since the explosion at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, but since then it's like getting on an airplane. And of course we know why getting on an airplane, you go through what you go through. That was again a kind of reaction, wasn't it? So, how could you possibly work to kind of curb this when we're seeing across Europe that vehicle rammings have become one of the most dominant like methods because it's less sophisticated, doesn't require planning, or even other people?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Well, that's a good point. I mean, so you've already had this in the states for quite a while, this securitization, although in the states, again, it comes down to whether or not you're individually armed. And that came from really absolutely atrocious school shootings that have happened in the States. And the NRA having as much power as it did, despite the fact that this level of gun ownership is really not wanted in the US. Again, this is kind of a situation in which the policy went one way because there was simply a stronger, clearer advocate for it one way, rather than the number of different solutions that would have taken a lot of societal upheaval to follow. So, so basically we get now more arms, right? And in more people. And then, of course, as we all know, school shootings and individual shootings in the US, individual shootings have actually gone down, like homicide rates, but uh mass shootings have not. And each of these societies has their own manifestation of these types of problems. And there's no one solution for it. I don't think that the over-securitization of society is something that anybody wants to have. Although if one of my children went to a concert, I would certainly want that. Even if I might not be thrilled about it if I had to go through it. So, like I said, I just I haven't heard a lot of coherent answers for how to deal with these rare but incredibly significant threats. What we have seen, especially in Britain, is the over policing of language, really. And that seems to be annoying absolutely everybody because it doesn't seem like your security has increased, but the role of the state in your life has increased. And it's for everybody. And I think it's still, for example, letting quite extreme types of speech continue under a free speech mantle, but I don't think it's getting anywhere near the issues at hand, which is about those that are outside or feel outside of the bounds of society using violence in order to harm those within.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

Every time we hear that something has happened and that person was known for various reasons, it's one of those like, what's going on moments, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, it totally is. But if you were, let's say, an ISIS affiliate at the moment, this is great. Your motive here is to create a quite high level of disorder in these societies. And in some ways, it's to distance potential recruits into the future from the general population. So there's all sorts of very, very difficult ways. I think that where this interacts with people's extremely low trust in institutions that are meant to be for the public good and public safety is where we are at the moment. So you have a relatively high rate of a quite amorphous, very differentiated threat from groups, from individuals, different types of people in the society. And you have that paired with a sense by the general public that their institutions cannot actually deal with this, in part because of institutional capture, but also just no one's got particularly good ideas about how to handle these threats. And I think that's leading to some of the frustration about what seems to be inevitable rates of rising violence within the general public.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

So on that side of Europe, we talk a lot about these kind of societal shifts, lots of protest activity, that sort of thing. On the other side of Europe, of course, there's war. And what I have been desperate to ask you since yesterday morning, why would Ukraine target Iran?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Well, I mean, Ukraine has shown itself to be quite on the forefront of some of these air wars in general. So it's a very important way to indicate and get back some of the momentum they had at the very beginning of the war when people were quite surprised about the prowess of the Iranian air defenses and how they had, for example, successfully targeted a number of different US and Gulf areas through both missiles and drones, and of course, have used both in order to continue their dominance of the strait. Ukraine had come under some really wide appeal during that time because of its own domestic program around drones and how it was kind of taking the fight to Russia. And Ukraine had come into the US good books as a way of really appealing to them on that level, which is excellent. And I think that as the US enters its second round here, you can already tell, I'm sure from the reporting this weekend, that the US is taking a rest at the moment. Some people might say it's in order to get prepared for their next iteration because they have been building up a significant amount of material and people within the Gulf more broadly, or the Middle East more broadly. Some people will say it's because, again, their munitions are at an all-time low and they can't afford to simply throw everything at it like they had done during the first 40 days of the conflict with Iran. Ukraine can come in here and offer a really good way of trying to support the US in ways that are going to matter when it comes to continued support for their struggle. I think also this is again an indirect way to get to Russia. And that's very important. You know, the longer some of these things continue, especially with an increasing oil price, the longer it's going to benefit Russia for this conflict to continue. So to Ukraine, there's really no downside to attacking Iran. You get to be one of the members of the group that are willing to stand by the US. NATO isn't particularly active in doing this. And you get to try to hear through the dismantling of the control of the strait, and again the eventual lowering of that oil price to destabilize Russia a little bit more.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

So I feel like the Strait of Hormuz is the most famous strait in the whole world at this point. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Do you think? I don't know. I think that the old Babble Manda got a got a good showing last week.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

It did get a good showing last week.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah. I mean, it may be that, you know, you got like the Straits in Malacca and places like that. But really what it is is it's a chug point. That's why it's important. And chug points are becoming super important as if we are all British maritime historians obsessed with tiny parts of the world in which land is very, very close to each other. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Yeah. And I was gonna ask, is there any significance over the the location of this reported strike in the Caspian Sea? So it's a cargo ship of Iran's, Iran's foreign minister, has said that the deadly attack, because there were fatalities on an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea cannot go unanswered. They've called it a violation of the United Nations Charter. And they've accused Israel of provoking the attack in an attempt to drag Europe into its war. Telegraph have called it a message for Trump. This is the diplomatic editor at the Times. An Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea does not at first seem like an obvious target for Ukrainian drones. More than 500 miles away from Kyiv and just days before meeting Donald Trump at the White House, Zelensky wanted to make a point. The ship which has not been named allegedly carrying military cargo between Russia and Iran. So that makes slightly more sense. So it's not directly an attack on Iran, and it's not them, I don't know, joining the war in the Middle East, but it it's a it's a signal, right? So with the Iranians talking this morning about retaliation, how real is that a threat for Kyiv?

unknown 18:14

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

I mean, I would say that what Iran is trying to do here now, like obviously it's focused quite a bit of its material recently on Kuwait and Jordan. And what it's trying to do is focus on US bases. So it's going after refueling abilities, I've got it, fuel storage, hangars, you know, actually persons. So in the salty base in Jordan, I think four US service members died over the weekend. There's been continued hits on that. But Iran has a strategy for this round of the conflict. The US strategy remains the same. They're trying to effectively either go after the infrastructure or the nuclear work or the straits themselves, but it's all to try to exhaust Iran. And that does not appear to be any more relevant now than it was before. But I will say that this is always somebody's strategy, right? Exhaust the other side, especially if you're the stronger. But it does depend on you being the stronger side and being willing to take what that means, which is that because the US has such a high domestic kind of opinion threshold to pass, they're going to be very unwilling to deal with very high rates of loss. They seem to be fine with dealing with very high money rates of loss, even though some of that money was approved by Congress last week. If the US could win this if they were willing to throw everything at it, but they're not willing to throw everything at it. And so we have this kind of starty stoppy dynamic that's going to start again.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Yeah. And how significant was what we saw last week from the Houthis in the Red Sea? And then the reports started to kind of trickle out, didn't they, about how the IRJC had just flown in some weapons to them?

SPEAKER_00 19:55

What I will say about the Houthis is this, right? Well, I'll say two things about them. The first is that they don't do anything they don't want to, you know, whether or not Iran flies in or not. The second is that not only did they want to do this and upset especially the Saudis by attacking their ports and I think several ships, they are very annoyed at the Saudis because of the blockades that they have. And they are suffering quite a lot of economic problems as a result of this. And they have to look like they know how to run the place. And so they they were more than happy to seize an enemy, right? And make their entire motive about dealing with this big enemy, whether it's the US or Saudi Arabia, anything to distract them from actually being a domestic government of Yemen, they will more than willingly take. So to address what the Houthis were doing at the time, the Houthis do not do what Iran wants as and when they ask, right? It has to seem like a it will definitely benefit the Houthis, not necessarily Yemen, but certainly the Houthis. And the Houthis also have a tendency to find an enemy at very opportune times. So anything that can distract from the fact that they're actually quite poor as the domestic government of Yemen. So whether it's Gaza, whether it's Israel, whether it's the states, whether it's Saudi Arabia, whether it's Iran asking for something, they're in quite economic straits at the moment. And we're more than happy to also protest the blockade that Saudi has over their own engagement in the Babel Mandab.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Yeah, because early conversations around Iran, we were talking about what the chances are and what what the risks are with the friends groups of Iran and what position they might take. And we were quite surprised early on, weren't we, about how quiet the Houthis were. Is this a sign that they're they're in now or have they just made the one big splash?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

No, I mean look, you went on how this went in the past. They like to make one big splash, right? They're not trying to get in well with Iran, right? That's that's neither here nor there, I think. What they're trying to do is to force Saudi Arabia to make some concessions or to take this to a new level. But really, I would say Saudi Arabia has the solution. It's not like Saudi Arabia and the Houthis are going to come down to blows within the Red Sea, but the Houthis will continue to needle and to make life extremely difficult for any power in the Red Sea, even those that they're allied to.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

So given everything that we've covered today, what will you be watching this next week? Right. Uh, this next week, what am I concerned about?

SPEAKER_00 22:25

I'm concerned that the US don't have a plan still. Their engagement with Saudi Arabia last week around the nuclear abilities was in part because Saudi Arabia had come to back to them after seeing that Pakistan was a bit unwilling to provide those or wouldn't be reliable. But then tying that to normalization with Israel, I thought was a positive step. I'm getting a little bit worried about whether or not Modi has the political skills to contain what's happening in India. And I don't think it necessarily should be contained, but rather whether or not that movement has what it takes to keep going. The cockroach movement, great name, very memorable. I am, as always, worried, I think, about the levels of domestic disorder that we're seeing in Europe, whether it's sabotage or hybrid acts, things like that. I'll be worried about that in an indirect way while I'm away. And yourself.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

Yeah, I think India is one that's really caught my attention recently as well. Because I think it's nice to feel when when we see kind of mass protests, you think, oh, yeah, here we go. But I really like what they're standing for. I think that it's it's really great that it's like we deserve better, more opportunities, education and stuff. So I am enjoying following those. And obviously the marketing of it is flawless, and I can appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yeah, yeah, it really was good. I mean, the summer often brings a big protest movement. You know, in the past two years or so it's been Kenya and other places, certainly Sri Lanka and and the others. They do tend to die out, maybe without the kind of meaningful changes to the government logic that they hope for. I do think that there's a really strange and kind of despotic system of exams within India, for sure, that both are designed to be kind of this random obstacle course for individuals. It sounds awful, and yet their entire life depends on it. It's a again, it's another outdated system that has not been adapted for modern life. That clearly not doing anything about it is easier for the government than doing something about it, but it's a kind of major cause of change for these young people. For sure. I hope they're successful at reforming it.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

You've been listening to Conflicts of Interest with Professor Cleaner Raleigh, brought to you by ACLED, the world's leading source of political violence and protest data. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow us on socials for updates in the meantime.