Dr. Ron Schleifer delivered a weekly briefing on psychological warfare and cultural understanding, focusing on Iran's strategic mindset.
He discussed how Iranian advisor Hossein Versailles's comments about President Trump demonstrated the need for Westerners to better understand Iranian culture rather than dismissing such statements as irrational.
Dr. Schleifer explained that cultural understanding requires changing one's operating system rather than just the disk, citing examples from World War II, IBM's international business studies, and the failure of Western academia to properly understand Middle Eastern cultures.
He highlighted how Iran has conducted a decades-long deception campaign that compromised institutions like SOAS in London and contributed to intelligence failures including 9/11 and the October 7 attacks on Israel.