TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl.

Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Eyck Freymann to discuss his terrific, timely, and thought-provoking new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China. This is the book, proof of life. Eyck, congratulations for making it real.

Eyck is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He's also a non-resident research fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. In his book, Defending Taiwan, Eyck outlines a strategy to integrate U.S. military strength, economic leverage, technological leadership, and diplomatic influence into a single, coherent plan to prevent war across the Taiwan Strait.

He convincingly argues that America must work with allies to develop a bold new vision of technological and economic statecraft to address the growing risk that China will act aggressively to seize Taiwan and make plans to secure U.S. interests if deterrence fails.

Eyck, welcome to World Class.

Freymann: Thanks so much for having me on, Colin.

Kahl: Let's start with the basics. What inspired you to write this book and why should the average American listening to this podcast care about the fate of Taiwan? Is it the fact that Taiwan is a democracy? Is it its geography and the so-called first island chain? Is it the possible implications on our security commitments throughout the rest of Asia? Or is it about semiconductors and AI and supply chains? Like, why should Americans care about Taiwan?

Freymann: When I got into studying China as an undergraduate, the reason was that I thought China's interests were global. In my graduate studies—the work that turned into my first book— I looked at the Belt and Road Initiative: how China used money and deals for political influence around the world. And I went on the trail of this initiative from Sri Lanka to Tanzania to Greece, and ultimately to Greenland, where I wrote my PhD.

Kahl: So, you were studying Greenland before it was cool.

Freymann: I was, in fact, studying Greenland. And it was very cool, but more in the temperature way. Greenland's a terrific place to be. And I think we discovered increasingly why it matters in the context of China's Arctic strategy. But it just gives a sense of the scope and the scale of China's ambition.

China's interests do not stop with its region. China wants a full transformation of international order to serve its interests for what the party believes will be centuries or millennia of CCP rule. And it is being methodical because it thinks it's laying the groundwork for that. Taiwan happens to occupy this very particular place in the CCP's ontology because it's the unfinished business of their civil war and because it's fundamentally bound up with relations with the United States.

So I became interested in this during my graduate studies. The origins of the project was that I asked a friend of mine—a naval historian—just an encyclopedia of all things military—to give me the book that I should read to understand this issue: what the military balance looked like and how it was changing, what a war with China would actually involve and what it would take to win, and just how dire the situation actually was.

And he said, well, no book like that exists. I can send you a thousand articles. Thus began this collaboration to figure out the military aspects of this story.

But the more that I researched it, the more I realized this is not a purely military issue. In fact, the military analysis is the easy part. China has a whole battery of options for how they could move against Taiwan. But the really significant ones involve creating crisis scenarios that break U.S. resolve and shatter our alliance structure.

And the way that China thinks it can do that is pushing on where we are weakest, which is in the economic domain, our inability to take pain.

And this gets to the heart of why Taiwan matters. Taiwan matters most obviously because they make the chips. 90% of the world's advanced chips, 99% of the true cutting-edge Nvidia chips that train the advanced AI models.

Taiwan matters geographically because if China could ever use it as a forward base for its Navy, it could project power all around the region in a way that it really can't today because of the U.S. position in these islands that we call the First Island Chain.

But then the third reason, the most globally significant, is that the way China would move against Taiwan would set norms about how they are going to seek to achieve regional hegemony and eventually global hegemony,

And the thing to understand here is this is not a continental region. The Indo-Pacific is an archipelagic region. You have economies that are basically not energy secure, not food insecure, the most trade dependent economies in the world, and they make everything. Pretty much nothing significant in the world doesn't include some thing that has to be made in this region. And that means that the sinews of commerce, which are mostly private airlines, private shipping companies, operating through international airspace and international waters, these are the lifelines of this region.

And if China can take control of that without firing a shot, that is how they will eventually achieve world domination.

So the question of how China might move against Taiwan, if they move against Taiwan in a non-military way, really matters because of the precedent it would set and what the United States would reveal in how it responds.

Kahl: I want to dig into that a lot because you have a lot to say about that. But I want to double click on one thing that you didn't mention in your litany of reasons why Americans should care about Taiwan, which is it's an island of 23 million people. And it's one of the most vibrant democracies in the world, frankly. Is that also something that Americans should care about that, China does not do to Taiwan what China did to Hong Kong, which is to snuff out a vibrant democracy and the world just kind of moves on?

Freymann: It’s absolutely a U.S. interest. The U.S. has a principled position on this. We don't take a stake in Taiwan's status, so we don't have a position on what that is. This is for Taipei and Beijing to work out by themselves. But we don't want it resolved by force or coercion, and any resolution has to be democratically acceptable to the people of Taiwan. Why? Because of the precedent that it sets for the broader region, not just for Taiwan itself.

Obviously, given what we have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, Taiwan is a vulnerable democracy under threat from an authoritarian superpower. Allowing them to be extinguished would be a very bad precedent. But we cared about Taiwan before they were a democracy. And if something happened and Taiwan ceased to be a democracy, we would still care about Taiwan.

And at a moment where support for democracy worldwide is increasingly politicized, I'm emphasizing these three other material interests because these are things that everyone from the most progressive Democrats to the most fire-breathing MAGA Republicans can all agree on.

Kahl: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, look: you've already established that China has perennial interests in Taiwan because it's difficult for the CCP and for President Xi Jinping in particular, to imagine achieving their goals for national rejuvenation and greatness without reabsorbing Taiwan.

And you've established that there are perennial U.S. interests that are both material and values based.

I now want to talk a little bit about the infamous 2027 timeline. So my understanding of how this originated was during testimony by Phil Davidson, who was an Admiral and the Commander of Indo-Pacific Command back in 2021, who basically said that China could make a move in the next five years. And then I think Bill Burns, who was the Director of the CIA, clarified a year later that 2027 was a potential period we should be focused on for the prospect of invasion of the mainland on the island of Taiwan.

Talk a little bit about that 2027 date, because it's almost established this kind mythological status in some circles. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that date. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Freymann: Completely agree. The date 2027 has been overplayed. The date that matters most is 2049. That's the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. And Xi Jinping will be 96. So he probably thinks that he'll be around, but who knows. That is the deadline he has set for achieving national rejuvenation, which is his all around vision for putting China at the forefront of essentially every human endeavor.

The line I like to use is he wants China to win every gold medal at the Olympics and every silver and every bronze. This is not just about foreign policy. This is about technological supremacy, ethnic harmony, cultural flourishing. It's the works.

And Taiwan fits into this story because historically speaking, the division of China is a thorn in the side of the CCP. Taiwan being a free, vibrant, technologically advanced society right across the water, is living proof that the CCP is not the ‘end of history’ for the people of China, that there's an alternative version of China that is actually better in pretty much every way to live in.

So there's a whole bunch of reasons why taking Taiwan in a way that humbles the United States and pushes the United States out of the region could supercharge China's pathway towards achieving the rest of national rejuvenation.

But 2027, as Xi Jinping has described it, is just an intermediate date. For him personally, it's a significant year because there's a party Congress in 2027. He'll be up for a fourth term, which I think he's overwhelmingly likely to get. But it's a date that he's ascribed as a readiness deadline in a number of different domains, not just military.

We knew before Admiral Davidson's statements that China had set 2027 as what they call a “building goal” for the PLA. It was also a goal for various technological and economic benchmarks. And the question is, what exactly does this building goal mean? The way that I interpreted the Davidson testimony is we have some intel that suggests Xi Jinping said, this means build the capability to take and hold Taiwan.

And it was always dubious whether China would get that capability by 2027, just because so much has to go right to make an amphibious operation work. And I think now that we're coming up against that date, most of the military analysts I talked to think they're not quite ready yet. They've come a long way, but there's still some gaps in their force structure that they would really like to fill.

But I think the way to think about it is we are nearing an inflection point where Xi Jinping feels confident enough in his own armed forces that he can start taking more risk. Which means we're entering a new chapter in this competition in the gray zone. And these military capabilities matter. They shape the dynamics of crisis even if they're not actually used.

Kahl: So I think that's really important and I want to drill down on this a little bit because you know my understanding when when I worked at the Pentagon was that 2027 was basically a deadline for his generals to report back that they could do this if he ordered that they should do this. But in part he was lighting a fire under them because he didn't think they could do it, that he doesn't have a lot of faith in his military. We've seen almost an endless series of purges that speak to the fact that she does not completely trust his military [and] thinks a lot of them are corrupt.

And so again, I think the 2027 date has been a little misinterpreted. I also, though, think it was useful in our own system to light a fire under us about the urgency of this issue, even if it wasn't 2027.

Freymann: Anyone who's ever taught undergraduates knows sometimes you just need a deadline.

Kahl: Yeah, but then they always email you three minutes after the deadline to ask for an extension.

I do I want to drill down on whether events in the past couple years outside of China may be affecting Xi Jinping's thinking a little bit. So obviously, in 2022 you get the all out invasion of Ukraine by Russia. On the day of the invasion, Russia looked on paper like the second best military in the world. They certainly had a lot of combat experience in places like Georgia and Ukraine in 2014 and Syria and elsewhere.

And yet a day later, they barely looked like the second best military in Ukraine. And I think what that illustrated is real war is real hard. Meanwhile, this year you've seen the Maduro raid, you know, that's an ally of Beijing. You've seen the Iran war, which has had mixed results strategically, but it's been pretty devastating militarily to the Iranians, a close partner of China.

So when Xi Jinping looks at these wars, do you think he draws the conclusion that war is easier or harder? And does that put more time on his clock?

Freymann: This is ultimately a speculative exercise. I wish we had a Being John Malkovich view into Xi Jinping's head.

Kahl: I mean, for all you know, the NSA does, but we can't talk about that.

Freymann: Yeah, those are secret capabilities. Maybe Claude Mythos will solve that one for us.

I think lacking that, lowly, unclear Stanford scholars like me have to read the tea leaves from the open sources.

Clearly, the U.S. decision to burn 25 to 40 % of our long range precision munitions and considerably more of our air defense interceptors in Iran was not the most enlightened decision from the perspective of deterring China over Taiwan. But I think it's significant that we paused there and we didn't burn the rest.

I also think that as the character of warfare is evolving and unmanned systems—which you can make in quantity very cheaply—continue to proliferate and get more sophisticated, Taiwan's options for defending itself Improve.

And when you think about what is involved in taking tens of thousands of men across the strait . . . which, granted, is only one of several scenarios for how China can move against Taiwan. They can cyber attack Taiwan, they can bombard Taiwan, they can blockade Taiwan.

But if they actually want to take and hold the island, what does it involve? They have to put tens of thousands of men on the ground, which means they need a beachhead or an airhead. It's very hard to deliver a significant number of people by air, as we saw in Ukraine, because it's just so easy to take down planes and helicopters with cheap things like stingers.

And the alternative— amphibious ships across the strait—they got lots of them, but Taiwan basically knows what the harbors and ports are that would be attacked. And it's relatively cheap with surface drones, underwater drones, aerial drones, naval mines, to make the Taiwan Strait a sort of hellscape.

Now there's so many questions. This question of would Taiwan fight? There's also a question of how resilient Taiwan's command and control infrastructure would be if it was bombarded for days on end. But if I'm China and I'm thinking about all of the things that have to go right in sequence for an amphibious invasion to go well.

When I consider these tail risk scenarios in which my guys are stuck in urban combat in Taipei . . . you walk through the streets of Taipei, you can see this is not a nice place to engage in urban combat. And you ask, how long will I have to resupply them? How many more transits across the strait will I need to do to deliver them food and medical and vehicles and fuel?

There are scenarios in which the opening campaign seems to be going well, and then it turns because China has these troops on the beaches who then get massacred. These scenarios, you can simulate them in all these ways, but ultimately no one knows. It's just much easier and simpler and more attractive to take the prize for free if you can.

And that is why the argument of the book is we can't take our eye off these military scenarios. They matter. But Taiwan's fate is more likely to be decided by a crisis than a war. And we got to deter the crisis, not just the war, because the crisis is bad. The crisis presents us with decisions that we are not currently set up or prepared to make. And how do you deter the crisis? You need a concept for deterring Xi Jinping in the gray zone, which right now is where the real action is.

Kahl: So I want to come back to that. I do think you made a really important point. If I'm Xi Jinping, on the one hand the United States burned through years worth of production of the critical munitions necessary to fight a war with China over Taiwan: long range strike capabilities like the new Prism missile or or JASM, advanced air defense interceptors for that, Patriot, and others. Not to mention relocating assets from the Indo-Pacific and all of the rest.

So on one level, the U.S. deterrence posture is inarguably weaker  in the Indo-Pacific and across the Taiwan Strait today than it was before the war with Iran.

On the other hand, I think both the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran show that even very powerful actors can be stymied by asymmetric approaches, especially using large numbers of attritable munitions. So, think of cheap missiles, especially cheap drones.

And that's, I think, a good news story for Taiwan and for the reasons that you point out. So I do think that's relevant. And I think it goes to this point the invasion is the riskiest outcome. I've participated in war games on Taiwan in the unclassified and classified settings, and they almost all culminate with whether China gets a lodgement, right? They get to the beaches.

And I think what you just compellingly argued is that, they don't just have to get to the beach once. They have to get to the beach every day with food and fuel and men, and then they have to crawl through the jungles and the mountains and occupy cities. It's a big deal. So if Xi’s going to do this, I'm convinced it's much more likely that he's going to do it through some squeeze—a quarantine, a blockade, a customs regime.

So walk through what you see as the non-amphibious invasion. If the Chinese don't do D-Day, what do they do?

Freymann: Well, the option that has drawn most attention for decades is blockade. And the reason is we've known for 130 years that you can blockade very easily with dumb mines. You seed them in the water and then no one wants to navigate through. And we're seeing this now in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran doesn't have a navy, they don't have an Air Force, they supposedly don't have any missile launchers, they don't have leadership that's willing to show their faces, and yet, they can shut down the flow of commerce through the strait.

And the United States can offer insurance to these vessels. The American president can tweet, show some guts. But these people don't want to die. And so they can make a rational calculation that it's not worth it. At some point, maybe that will change. But clearing mines is very difficult.

So, if China just wants to do a scorched earth medieval style siege, that option is on the table. And we have to take it seriously because if Xi Jinping persuades himself that this is an ugly but assured forced checkmate, he might be tempted by other options because he thinks, well, this is a guaranteed fallback plan. So I take the scenario seriously in the book because you have to show Xi Jinping that it is not assured victory.

And breaking out that blockade would be nasty. It would almost certainly involve large-scale strategic bombing inside mainland China. It would involve the risk of nuclear escalation. The challenge of resupplying Taiwan's population would be orders of magnitude harder than resupplying Berlin during the Berlin airlift of 1948-49. But it is still something that we should work on that I am sure the Pentagon has very detailed operational plans for, because you have to show China that we could do this if we had to while deterring nuclear escalation.

Kahl: What do you make though . . . so, there's the blockade or a scorched earth. But one lesson from the Strait of Hormuz is you can create the psychological risk that ships that get too close to Taiwan could be at risk. But you would also just impose a customs regime, right? That requires every ship coming in and out of Taiwan to check in on the mainland first.

And it wouldn't be putting mines in the water. It wouldn't be putting missiles onto the island of Taiwan. It would simply be to assert China's sovereignty over the island through a kind of lawfare and coercive means. What do you think of the customs possibility?

Freymann: Well, that's exactly right. And this is the scenario that I think is the most likely and dangerous. And I hope that we can dig into it. But the reason I talk about blockade first is that a lawfare customs quarantine thing: it's a completely different beast.

The reason that a blockade is an unattractive first move is that it has a lot of the disadvantages of war for China, but none of the advantages. It's not clear that Taiwan just surrenders overnight and it puts the Americans and the allies on notice that something extreme is happening. It's a totally barbaric humanitarian disaster. It's an act of war against the civilian population of Taiwan. And it causes our gargantuan global financial crisis because all of a sudden it's not just Taiwan. No shipper is going to get covered to go anywhere near Taiwan.

So all of the supply lines in and out of South Korea, Japan, mainland China, everything gets busted. So China creates this shock. It's horrible. It's economically disruptive. And then the rest of the world lines up behind the United States and says, well, we have to make them cut it out.

The reason that the quarantine scenario is attractive for China is it doesn't do any of that stuff. It doesn't break supply chains on day one. It doesn't trigger a financial market panic necessarily on day one. China just says, “We're just enforcing our existing customs law. We're not saying you can't deliver to Taiwan. We're just saying you have to come through a mainland port.”

The goal is: establish the principle without disruption. And then if the Americans accept it, they're checkmated. Because in the long run, China then can make the character of Taiwan's exchanges with the outside world a subject of gray zone pressure, and they can squeeze that dial all the way to black. And that is how China gets Taiwan's fabs intact. That's how they seize control of the engine of the AI revolution without the Americans destroying it.

Now the Americans always have the option of escalating it up into a war or disabling the fabs: blowing them up, cyber attacking them, what have you. Like the U.S. has this capability. But the decision to do that is really significant. The decision to do that is essentially a big red button on the president's desk that says the financial crisis that ends my presidency.

And what China's banking on is that we will just choose option A and allow Taiwan to slip away while pretending that nothing meaningful has changed so that we're totally screwed in the long run because we lose AI, but we avoid this really acute short-term crisis and the politicians get to kick the can.

Kahl: I think it's a real risk and one of the things that's hardest to deal with. So let's talk the solution set, which is essentially the last 60% of your book.

Back in 2022, when I was working at the Pentagon as the undersecretary for policy, we wrote the 2022 National Defense Strategy. At the heart of that document was this idea of integrated deterrence. Integrated deterrence meant a lot of things: integrating across the domains of conflict, but also integrating across the instruments available to the U.S. government, not just military, economic, diplomatic, technological, integrating across our allies and partners since that's kind of our ace in the hole globally, and integrating across the spectrum of conflict, recognizing you are trying to deter from the gray zone to nuclear war. That's a lot.

We were criticized by hawks in Congress and elsewhere for essentially offloading the idea of deterrence—which is traditionally thought of as a military instrument and predominantly as a punishment instrument—offloading that to civilian agencies like the State Department or Treasury or Commerce or others to use other tools so that we could lower the defense budget or something by offloading it to civilians.

My view was always, it was, “Yes, and . . .” The military had to be robustly capable of deterring and prevailing if deterrence failed, but you also needed to supplement that military deterrence with economic and diplomatic measures, which I think is squarely where your book lands.

So, walk our listeners through how you think of integrated deterrence and especially how you think about integrating these non-military instruments—political, economic—into deterring the types of scenarios you've been talking about.

Freymann: Well, first of all, Colin, this is why I'm so thrilled to be on this podcast, because as I describe in the book, your concept of integrated deterrent is the inspiration for what this is trying to do. Obviously, we didn't achieve the aspiration as fully as we might have in the Biden administration. And then in the Trump administration, we are essentially gutting the interagency process. We're antagonizing our allies. We're doing the opposite of whatever integrated strategy is.

But I think what you say is absolutely right. China has an integrated strategy for Taiwan and to achieve national rejuvenation generally. They link together every tool of their national power— their control of supply chains, technology, diplomacy, information operations and propaganda, the military, everything. It's organized towards a specific set of goals. And that gives us that gives them carrots and sticks to use against other countries and us.

We need to do the same thing or we are going to be outmaneuvered because we will not be able to muster the tools of our national power to push back effectively. And by the way, because we will never be able to beat the CCP and how we organize ourselves, we need allied scale to do a lot of this stuff in response. That is very much the spirit of the book. Before we talk about the pillars, though I'm happy to get into them.

My question for you would be, what did you learn over the course of the Biden administration? Is this just a pipe dream? Is it impossible based on how the U.S. interagency is set up to do integrated deterrence? Or is this the kind of thing that we could theoretically do if we had political leadership that was determined to do it?

Kahl: First of all, whose podcast is this, man? But I would just say this. The jury is still out. I think in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were a lot of efforts to try to convince Putin that there would not just be military costs in the sense of helping Ukraine defend itself, but there would be economic and political costs to the Russians.

Obviously, that attempt to show that there was a wide range of costs that would be significant, also thwart his ability to achieve his objectives. It didn't succeed. Putin invaded the country.

On the other hand, I think if Putin knew what was coming in retrospect and looked back and says, look, four plus years on suffered a million casualties because of all the support we provided the Ukrainians. Russia was, at least for a period of time, significantly isolated from a big chunk of the world economically and also pushed into the arms of China and in weird ways made Russia dependent on countries like North Korea and Iran. Russia was basically unplugged from the West buying a significant amount of oil and gas from them, I don't think he would have done it. So I think the jury is still out about whether it is possible.

Xi Jinping, though, has seen all of those things, right? And so  my own view on China is Xi Jinping's theory of rejuvenation requires China to be thoroughly integrated into the world. And you can hold that at risk in some ways. And I take a lot of the substance of your book as pushing in that direction as well. So why don't you let our readers pull back the curtain and let them know a little bit about how you see the pieces of deterrence fitting together.

Freymann: Great. Let me dig into it. The reason that I ask this is I want to know if it's a pipe dream to think that these things can ever be done in combination. But here's basically what I think we should do in each of the domains. In the political diplomatic domain, we need to manage China, engage Taiwan, and establish our core coalition.

What does that mean for managing China? Keep the One China policy, but communicate to China that just because we have strategic ambiguity as to what we would do if they attacked, we're not going to stand idly by as they push in the gray zone. If they push in the gray zone, we will push back proportionately, in a manner that we think is proportionate, in a domain of our choosing to maintain an overall stable situation. And if we get wind of a potential big move on Taiwan, in the same that we had advance notice of Putin moving on Ukraine, we shouldn't say that we're going to wait until they fire the first shot to reveal what our action is. We should reserve the right to act preemptively. And that's all within the format of our existing One China policy. It's just changing how we communicate it.

Kahl: I think you'd call it structured ambiguity instead of just strategic ambiguity.

Freymann: I call this structured ambiguity. It's the same substance, but it's a new way of communicating our existing policy. Just to remind China that when they push in the gray zone, they are hollowing out their commitments to us under the three communiques. And those communiques are the political foundation of our relationship. And they should understand that there's risk associated with doing that.

With engaging Taiwan, you just have to show the people of Taiwan that we understand that they're a democracy under threat and that we stand with them. And that includes respecting the right of the people of Taiwan to make their own choices, which means not picking favorites in Taiwan elections, being willing to work with whoever they work with, supporting them with technology partnerships, energy partnerships, people-to-people exchanges, just being present for Taiwan.

And then the core coalition is making a statement that we have allies that have skin in the game too. Japan, obviously. They now say publicly it's existential for them. The Australians, it's arguably existential for too. If there's any kind of crisis over Taiwan that results in financial flows or trade in and out of China being messed up, I mean, that's a financial crisis in the UK because HSBC and Standard Chartered, the two biggest UK banks essentially . . . that is their bread and butter.

Then Canada, who obviously we've been abusing lately, Canada has skin in the game as well, because we are one big economy with Canada. And if we have to decouple from China, in whole or in part, for any reason, they are going to be collateral damage or they're going to be a country that gains opportunities from working with us.

So we need to bring this coalition together, start treating these partners with the respect that they reserve, and then do what we can to communicate with a common voice what we would do. If we had in the events to do something big and economic, we would have to work with this core coalition because the Europeans, they make these decisions by consensus. So it's less predictable what they would do.

Kahl: Before you go on to the economic, though, I want to ask you to go one layer deeper on the alliances piece. Because one of the things we saw early on in Ukraine was actually it wasn't just the North Atlantic community responding to Russia. It was actually a coalition of advanced liberal democracies in Europe, in North America, and in Asia, imposing costs on the Russians.

And I think my sense is that Beijing worries very much about a similar coalition being aligned against a raid against them. But to say the least, the status of our alliances right now . . . not so hot. what do you think? And I think they're probably better in Asia than they are in Europe in terms of the health of our alliances. But how much of the need to build this political coalition has been complicated by recent tensions with our allies?

Freymann: It has not gotten easier in the last 18 months. And I think we should brace for it to get worse. But we have common interests, these five countries that I named, essentially the big Anglo countries plus Japan, we have a common interest in deterring this crisis. And then if the crisis happens, we have a common interest in dealing with it effectively, working together.

And we have other allies with skin in the game too. I don't mean to leave out South Korea, the Philippines, but these countries, for political reasons and because of their vulnerability to China's economic coercion, they are very close to the core, but they may choose, depending on the circumstances, not to be the core of the core. And that's okay.

When we're thinking about coalition building, we need to be more flexible than saying you're in the tent or you're out. We need to understand this as essentially a group of concentric circles or overlapping Venn diagrams, where different countries might collaborate on different things. And that is essentially a call to expand the viewpoint from just treaty allies to partners too. And we can get to this and talk, we talk about economic deterrence.

Kahl: Yeah, let's turn to that. So you've talked about the political piece. There's a U.S.-China piece, a U.S.-Taiwan piece, and a U.S.-allies piece. What are the other aspects of integrated deterrence in your thinking?

Freymann: Well, there's conventional military deterrence, which is the standard deterrence by denial. Show them you could defeat the invasion of the blockade. And that means replenishing our magazines of these long-range precision munitions, air defenses. Air defense is critical for Taiwan. Making sure the right stuff is forward deployed in the region, including all of the fuel and the spare parts. Because our logistics chain would struggle in any kind of protracted fight. The distances are huge. It's a tyranny of distance.

Helping to build up the supply chains for stuff like drones. Revitalizing our submarine industrial base. It sounds like a lot and is a lot, it's a few hundred billion dollars over five years. And we've already bought about half of it. So on this issue in particular, at least, the Trump administration is doing reasonably well with the big exception, obviously, of spending down all these munitions in Iran.

Kahl: But know, the value of $1.5 trillion to try to make up for lost time.

Freymann: If they get even a much smaller version of their defense budget, that takes us a lot of the way there towards getting the conventional force in a position to sustain deterrence into the 2030s.

The nuclear side is trickier because strategic deterrence is no longer just about nuclear mutually assured destruction. Our nuclear forces depend on a command, control and communication system that extends to space.

ground stations that can be cyber attacked. And that means the resilience of our space architectures, our resilience to cyber, our offensive cyber. This matters hugely for this mutually assured destruction dynamic that looms in the background of any potential crisis or fight. And AI plays a role in this. And we don't really understand how. But as we see with this new Claude Mythos model, maybe AI very quickly could totally disrupt the cyber balance in a way that could be favorable to us, but also potentially unfavorable.

And I don't come down with a clear position, but I think we need to study this. In the short term, we need to stay as far ahead in AI as we can. And then we need to be open-minded about what some kind of arms control or more stable strategic balance might look like in the future, because AI, we don't really understand yet, but it will play a role.

Kahl: You used a really important word, which you heard a lot in the Pentagon in the last administration because it was in the National Defense Strategy. You hear less about it now. And that term is resilience, which is not a terribly sexy concept, but actually quite important to deterrence as it relates to China, because their entire theory of victory over the United States is to paralyze the networks that undergird the American way of war. Undersea cables, constellations in outer space cyber networks, critical infrastructure in the homeland that supports power projection. And so a lot of, think you're right to kind of emphasize that part of strategic deterrence succeeding is convincing China that they can't paralyze either our conventional or nuclear forces.

Freymann: So what is strategic deterrence? I define it as fundamentally a threat to the survival of another state or regime. And in a world where the CCP is increasingly paranoid, AI is increasingly useful for propaganda information operations, China's population has been kept isolated, not knowing about the world.

If you can potentially bust the great firewall and deliver messages about the corruption of the party and Tiananmen Square and all this other stuff to the people of the PRC, you could potentially deliver a devastating threat to the survival of the CCP and you don't have to nuke anyone and you don't have to shut down any critical infrastructure. But if I'm the ministry of state security, I'm very concerned about that.

And all this is to say, what strategic deterrence involves is expanding across domains in ways that we are only beginning to understand, and AI is deeply tied up with it. And potentially that's useful for us, but potentially it's also destabilizing. And I'm sort of kicking the can on this because there's only so much we can say at this particular point in time. But it does matter.

Kahl: Let's talk about two of the chapters in the book really drill down on the economic statecraft associated with integrated deterrence. You want to flesh that out a bit for our listeners?

Freymann: So there's a temptation to think of economic deterrence as an extension of strategic deterrence. The U.S. and China are so economically intertwined that if we shut down that relationship, it's like an economic nuke. And that is how I think members of Congress have thought about it. There was legislation called the Stand with Taiwan Act that would have imposed these crippling across the board sanctions.

I think that that basically doesn't work. Yes, there's some really, really extreme scenarios in which we could plausibly do that. But in the crisis scenarios that I think are most plausible, I don't think that option is strategically attractive or politically available.

And what's dangerous is that we don't seem to have an affirmative economic contingency plan. If we get into a crisis and the president says, “Give me options that don't blow up the world economy,” and the president's advisors say, “I'm sorry, sir, we haven't done our homework.” That seems like a big problem because then the only option left on the table is just capitulate.

And then if China learns that it can extort us by threatening us with economic breakdown, then they can do it again. So we need an affirmative vision for a post-rupture economic order on the table, plausible, discussed, something that in a crisis situation might plausibly be of interest to both Democrats and Republicans and a bunch of other countries, and which is structured to be flexible so that the details can be worked out in the event, because obviously you can't work out the details in advance.

And the framework that I talk about is called avalanche decoupling. The basic idea of avalanche decoupling is it's just fantasy to imagine that you can decouple from China all at once like a light switch. It's just fantasy. We tried that on Liberation Day.

Kahl: Avalanche decoupling for our listeners: massive secondary sanctions, cutting off all trade, cutting off all imports of components for critical technologies, those things?.

Freymann: Exactly. And we tried a version of this on Liberation Day. The president is like, a hundred percent tariffs on China. And then the stock market crashes and then the bond market crashes. And then various captains of industry call up and say, Mr. President, you have to reverse this or we're done for. And then within a week, the president is like, lol, JK, I'm rolling it back.We're making a truce. And that reveals to everyone, including to China . . .

Kahl: Then he later threatened to do it again and China calls his bluff by putting export controls on on rare earths and he and chickened out again

Freymann: And then we see another version of this in Hormuz, where Iran takes 20% of global oil offline, and now the United States is suing for peace and essentially abandoning all of its grand designs of regime change or ending Iran's right to enrich. The U.S. is on the back foot and it's because it can't take even a small amount of economic pressure.

So if we imagine scenarios where it's not politically available to make an already bad situation vastly worse. But China has revealed that this is an abusive relationship and they're going to use our economic dependencies to squeeze and coerce us.

What do we do? Well, basically there's two things you can do. One is you can cushion the short term blow with large scale fiscal and monetary action, like we did at the beginning of COVID, coordinated with as many other countries as possible, essentially help the world economy through the crisis rather than having the world go into depression and it's our fault.

So China's doing this to the world, but we're bailing you out. And then set in motion a process that will break your critical dependencies as fast as reasonably possible, and then leave the non-critical stuff to do later, if ever. In other words, it means not maxing out on punishment of China, but focusing on our own economic interests first. And then hopefully punishing China over time as a side effect.

And the way you do this in avalanche decoupling is with a tariff or a quota that moves. Let's take the example of drones and drone parts. Right now, the United States cannot make a drone without buying parts from China. And that's crazy. It's crazy.

But what are we supposed to do? Because if we say, starting tomorrow, you can't import drone parts from China, then we can't make more drones. The only way to do it is to phase it out, to say, on X date, we will no longer buy drones from China, or there's a tariff that is going to move up in a consistent way, or a quota that will move down in a consistent way, and then by date, it will be effectively impossible to buy from China. You'll have to buy it from some safe country.

I think we can do a version of that now for like the 1% of our trade with China that is most critical, the drones, the medicines, that kind of stuff. And you can do it in a way you coordinate with allies because the French and the Japanese, they don't want to be dependent on China for this stuff either. If you can do that now, then you have a proof of concept that if a crisis happens and we need to do it for 20% of our trade with China or 50% or 70%, that that option is available and that we know how we would do it.

Kahl: My experience, and maybe this is my bias, because I've worked at the Pentagon so many times, but I also worked at a White House, and I worked around a White House that tried to integrate around interagency planning. And it remains true that even in a White House that has a lot of process and really brings the interagency together, mostly you're reacting to crises. You're not doing break glass, day one planning for these things.

The only place that does that is the Pentagon. And I think what you're seeing in a place, in a situation like Iran is that the military piece of things, like what targets to hit, how to hit them, how to generate effects, is pretty remarkable, actually, because the military is really good at planning and executing that type of stuff.

But all the other stuff fell by the wayside. The diplomatic plan, the plan to deal with the economic second and third order effects, the diplomacy in the region with our allies. It's not a critique one way or another necessarily is just of of this war—people can make up their own minds about that.

But it's just to say when we don't bring all instruments together and plan around them ahead of time, it's hard and that that's not gonna happen naturally at places like Treasury and the State Department and Commerce and Energy. That's gonna be something that requires the White House to bring people together, knock heads, and keep people in windowless rooms for as long as it takes to create the type of playbook that you were talking about.

Freymann: That's been my experience. I started briefing this stuff around the interagency and on the Hill in 2024 because the House China Select Committee had done this report and they had found the United States . . . they wrote this in the report, quote, “The United States lacks a contingency plan for the economic and financial effects of a conflict with China.”

This is December, 2023. And I read that and I was appalled. I said, “What do mean there was no plan?” Surely somewhere in Treasury, is a plan. No, there's no one office in Treasury that's responsible. Took it around the Hill, briefed it to everyone from the most progressive Dems to the MAGA Republicans. Everyone's like, yeah, of course there should be a plan.

But it's too big. It's no one's job because it's too big. And also it just gets to the difference in approach to military folks versus economic folks. Economists don't do contingency planning. It's not their thing.

So what is the purpose of what I'm doing here? It's an outsider putting something on paper. Well, I think it's helpful to start talking about these things now. We have to start having this conversation now, because in the event, we're going to find out that we don't have a plan, but maybe we'll have what the president once beautifully termed a concept of a plan. The broad outlines or the principles that would describe what it is that we're trying to achieve, what it is that we're trying to avoid, and how we aim to achieve that.

And if we put this down on paper and we start to convene conversations about it among allies, between Democrats and Republicans in an informal way, just say, imagine that our relationship with China turns openly abusive and we decide we have to start getting divorced. And yeah, divorce sucks, divorce is expensive, but divorce is also sometimes necessary and it's an opportunity. And you're imagining life on the other side.

Let's think from a blank sheet of paper. What do we want the global economy to look like as we are divorcing China? If we have the opportunity to rethink or reverse some of these mistakes that we made in the last forty years of outsourcing all these jobs, letting China steal all our IP, and we get to start again, how would we do it? That's an opportunity. And that's potentially something that politicians could sell to the American people to say, listen, we made some mistakes, now we're going to pay for those mistakes. But it's going to work out better in the end.

There's a brighter future at the end of this, where maybe we'll bring more good jobs home that we had lost. Maybe we'll become less vulnerable to coercion. Maybe we'll make a better, safer, more secure and prosperous world. And it's not an easy sell, but then the other options are not that good either. But at least it's something to start from in a crisis. So we're not starting from nothing.

Kahl: I think it's a really important point and maybe one we’ll conclude the conversation on. It’s a the very different context, but the Biden administration spent four months between when the intelligence was coming in that the Russians intended to invade Ukraine and the actual invasion and spent that four months doing an extraordinary amount of interagency work on the day one playbook for what would happen if the invasion actually happens: how the sanctions would be implemented, how we would deal with getting security assistance into Ukraine, how we would deal with the economic fallout.

And we didn't get it all right. I think we didn't do enough on things like food security that ended up being a big problem. But I know how hard it is, even when you have the intelligence that says something really bad is about to happen. The China piece is way harder, both because the problem is bigger and because we aren't going to be compelled by four months of warning, and that may not be enough.

So I think you're clarion a call in the book, which everybody should go read, for that thinking to happen as far in advance as possible and to start talking about it so that China knows that we're thinking about it and therefore hopefully is deterred by the fact that we have a plan.

All right, everybody's supposed to go read your book. But at the end of World Class, we ask all of our guests to name one article that people should go out and read if they want to understand the world.

So do you have a recommendation for our listeners?

Freymann: Yeah, there's a new piece out from Evan Medeiros, former Asia director on the National Security Council. It's called “A New Era of U.S.-China Interaction from Competing to Racing.” And I would urge everyone to read it. It's a very important piece.

Medeiros' argument is that the trade war that escalated in 2025 between the U.S. and China has created a new chapter in U.S.-China relations where essentially the two countries are are racing to de-risk from one another, to reduce their vulnerabilities in case the really acute crisis happens again. And China is thinking much more seriously, and they're working much more aggressively to break those dependencies than we are.

And we need to get serious and recognize what race we're running, otherwise we're going to get caught behind.

Kahl: Well, Eyck, I think that's a great place to end. First of all, thanks for writing such an important book on such an important topic at such an important time. I hope it does well. I hope our listeners go out and check it out. Thanks, Eyck.

Freymann: Thanks, Colin.

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe to Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

Introduction and Contribution:

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has been one of the most devastating conflicts of the 21st century. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine has experienced not only mass casualties but immense cultural destruction, as well as the forcible deportation and adoption of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russian families. Ending the war requires understanding its causes, particularly from the point of view of Vladimir Putin and other key Russian decision-makers. 

Some observers of Russian and global politics — as well as Putin and his allies — have claimed that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO caused the war. The argument here is that as a superpower, Russia could not tolerate the security implications of a country on its border joining a rival alliance. Russia’s war, then, was a preventive one — less a choice than a strategic necessity. Any superpower in such a situation would do the same.

In “NATO Did Not Cause Putin’s Imperial War,” James Goldgeier and Brian D. Taylor convincingly challenge the NATO hypothesis, showing it to be more a piece of Kremlin propaganda than a plausible account of Putin’s decision-making process. Instead, the authors draw our attention to Putin’s most deeply held and longstanding beliefs: that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation state, that Ukrainians would not freely associate with the West and its alliances (unless they were being manipulated), and that dominating Ukraine is essential to Russia reclaiming its status as a global superpower, one that is constantly disrespected by the West. 

As many social scientists focus on improving the causal power of their statistical inferences, Goldgeier and Taylor helpfully focus our attention on the beliefs and reasons of political actors who cause political outcomes such as wars and revolutions. More importantly, the authors provide a starting point for thinking about ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, one focused not on the distraction that is NATO arguments but on Putin’s imperial ambitions.

Pitfalls of the NATO Explanation:

The authors begin by noting that NATO enlargement clearly played a role in the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West over the past 25 years. In part, this is because many Russian elites — owing to their imperialistic beliefs, more on this below — never accepted that former Soviet Republics were free to join the alliance. However, NATO enlargement was but one item in a long list of Russian grievances, some based in reality and others fictional. These include the 2003-04 Color Revolutions — mainly reflecting widespread domestic sentiment, not Western machinations — and alleged American support for the 2011-13 Russian protests in the aftermath of Putin’s rigged elections, which were similarly homegrown.

There is good evidence that Putin and his inner circle neither feared NATO aggression nor believed that Ukraine could realistically join the alliance. After George W. Bush’s failed bid for Ukrainian membership in 2008, no American president has seriously entertained or pushed for Ukraine’s admission. NATO took minimal action after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, before which time Ukrainians themselves didn’t support joining the alliance (likely because they anticipated the negative consequences for Russia-Ukraine relations). NATO itself has worked against admitting Ukraine; indeed, much of its security assistance has been designed to make it possible for Ukraine to defend itself without formal admission. What’s more, no country bordering Russia joined NATO after 2004 until Finland did so in 2023.

When Putin decided on war in 2021, his invasion plan was based on the assumption that victory would be quick and easy, evidencing his lack of concern for NATO intervention. Further, he knew that NATO lacked the troops and would be extremely wary of confronting nuclear Russia. 

Putin’s Imperial Beliefs and Goals:

For several decades, Putin has expressed the belief that Ukraine is not a genuine nation-state and that Russia both gave away and was “robbed” of much of its territory. One of Putin’s key goals is arguably to rebuild Russian greatness via imperial conquest. The West is not merely intervening in Eastern European politics but, according to Putin, actively working to downgrade Russia to a second-class country and undermine its sovereignty. Putin views the war as key to reversing Russia’s declining status.

Because Putin and his inner circle view Ukraine to be a natural part of Russia, the possibility that Ukrainians would freely tie their fortunes to the West is inconceivable — Ukrainian elites must have been tricked, co-opted, or bribed. Some Russian propagandists have even described the war as one of “Russians killing Russians.”

Putin’s imperialism is not only confined to privately held beliefs. During COVID-19, he spent a great deal of time reading historical texts to prepare a 5000-word article on the alleged historic inseparability of Russia and Ukraine. What could such an undertaking have to do with NATO expansion?

Russia’s wartime conduct also provides strong evidence for the imperialism explanation. As mentioned above, Russia has gone to great lengths to destroy Ukrainian culture. It has rejected multiple peace deals that would have prevented Ukraine from joining NATO. Putin saw these as failing to address the conflict’s “root causes,” arguably a euphemism for Ukrainian sovereignty. Instead, Russian conditions for peace include making Russian an official language, disbanding “nationalist” political parties, and ensuring the influence of Moscow’s Orthodox Church. These conditions smack of Russian chauvinism.

Of course, elites’ imperial beliefs do not necessarily lead to war. And indeed, Putin initially sought to control Ukraine through political measures, such as election interference. However, the authors argue that when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized the assets of a key Putin ally, Putin realized his position was weakening. Russian security officials then assured Putin — likely out of fear — that overthrowing Ukraine’s government would be easy. This flawed decision-making process led to war. Readers will come away struck by how many lives have been lost while policy and scholarly debates remained focused on the NATO hypothesis.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The Japanese public is largely opposed to dispatching the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) to the Strait of Hormuz, but framing the issue in terms of Japan’s energy dependence substantially raises support for military involvement in Iran. By contrast, arguments invoking the Japan-U.S. alliance and legal legitimacy for military action have no such effect. These are the findings from a vignette experiment fielded by the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB) in March, one month after Japan’s February 2026 general election.

The results also reveal that mentioning energy dependence moves opinion in favor of military deployment even among respondents who are told that diplomacy, not deployment, is the right response, suggesting that energy-dependence messaging changes minds regardless of policy recommendation. Alliance- and legal-focused messaging, by contrast, have no measurable effect.

SJB is a large-scale, multi-wave public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. A project of the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), SJB is led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC and the Japan Program, and political scientist Charles Crabtree. The vignette experiment on the Japanese public's attitude toward military deployment in Iran was part of the final, three-wave panel survey SJB fielded around Japan’s February 2026 snap election, which focused on identifying public attitudes toward immigration.

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A Public Wary of War

The SJB experiment finds that, without any contextual framing, Japanese respondents lean against JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz, averaging a score of 2.00 on a four-point scale, where 1 represents "strongly oppose" and 4 represents "strongly support." 

This baseline skepticism reflects the Japanese public’s reluctance to deploy military forces abroad, rooted in Article 9 of the postwar constitution, and a broader wariness of entanglement in the Iran conflict. But the crisis in the Middle East has fueled deep economic fears in Japan, which relies on the region for over 90% of its crude oil imports, making it highly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for energy security.

The SJB team wanted to know: Could this energy security argument shift the public’s baseline opposition to military deployment, and if so, how, compared with other justifications?

The Energy Argument Works Both Directions

The experiment randomly assigned respondents to read one of several short policy statements before answering whether they supported JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz. Some arguments favored deployment; others opposed it. Each invoked a different rationale: energy security, the Japan-U.S. alliance, and constitutional legitimacy.

The most striking change in attitude came from the energy-dependence framing.

Respondents who read a pro-dispatch energy argument – emphasizing that a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would devastate Japan's economy and living standards, making military involvement necessary – showed a statistically significant increase in support for JSDF deployment, rising approximately 0.12 points above the control group.

Notably, respondents who read a con-dispatch energy argument – which presented the same energy-dependence facts but concluded that Japan should pursue diplomacy through its own channels with Iran rather than deploy forces – showed an even larger increase in support, rising approximately 0.28 points above the control group.

That is, simply mentioning Japan's vulnerability to an oil supply disruption raised support for JSDF involvement, even when the message explicitly argued against military action. “This pattern suggests that the energy-dependence information itself, rather than the normative conclusion drawn from it, is what moves opinion,” the researchers write on the SJB website.

Alliance and Legal Arguments Fall Flat

In contrast, two other commonly invoked arguments – obligations related to the Japan-U.S. alliance and constitutional authority – had virtually no effect on the Japanese public’s support of JSDF deployment.

The alliance framing emphasized that contributing to U.S. operations in the Strait of Hormuz is essential, given the centrality of the U.S.-Japan security partnership to Japan's defense. A counter-argument noted that many international observers view U.S. strikes on Iran as violations of international law and that most European allies are declining to participate.

Neither version significantly moved opinion on JSDF dispatch.

Similarly, arguments about whether the conflict legally qualifies for the exercise of collective self-defense – with one version arguing that new legislation could authorize dispatch and another arguing that no existing legal basis permits it – produced near-zero effects.

These null results are particularly striking given how frequently alliance obligations and constitutional legitimacy dominate elite debates over JSDF deployment in Japan. The data suggest that, at least in this scenario, these arguments resonate far more in policy circles than with the general public.

The findings carry important lessons for Japanese policymakers, who are walking a tightrope between the United States and Iran: “Concrete economic stakes are more resonant than foreign-policy abstractions,” note the SJB researchers. Still, the Japanese public’s default position is opposition to JSDF deployment in Iran. “The framing experiments shift opinion at the margins, but do not reverse the underlying skepticism toward JSDF dispatch.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I’m your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a major military campaign against Iran with profound implications for the Middle East and beyond. Given the urgency of this topic and our desire to bring our podcast listeners insights from scholars here at Stanford’s FSI, we’re doing something a little different on today’s episode.

We’re bringing you a panel discussion on the Iran war held at FSI on March 4, moderated by professor Jim Goldgeier. It features a conversation with me, Abbas Milani, and Ori Rabinowitz.

Jim Goldgeier is a research affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation here at FSI and a professor at the School of International Service at American University.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, a visiting professor in the department of political science, and a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Ori Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer at the International Relations Department at the Hebrew University in Israel, and a visiting fellow of Israel studies here at FSI.

So without further ado, here’s our panel discussion.

[BEGIN EVENT AUDIO]

Goldgeier:  Welcome everyone, thanks so much for coming today. Thanks for those who organized this event for moving with lightning speed to put this together. I’m Jim Goldgeier. I’m a research affiliate at CISAC and at CDDRL, and I’m delighted to moderate this panel with these three experts.

Abbas, let's start with you for an understanding of what's going on inside Iran.

Milani: Well, first of all, my understanding is about three hours old. Things are changing so rapidly, and there's so much we don't know,

We don't know, for example, whether Iran has chosen a successor to Mr. Khamenei. We are fairly sure, or some people even doubt that, that Mr. Khamenei is dead. Some people think they have whisked him away. But I think, credibly, they're organizing burials for him.

But we don't know whether there is a successor. We don't know whether the committee, the council, the 86-man council that is supposed to pick the successor has met. We know they haven't met where Israel bombed and thought that they were bombing the meeting. But they are meeting on Zoom and trying to figure out the successor.

We had known for several years that Khamenei had been trying to place his son as the successor. There had been many meetings with high ranking ayatollahs and within that 86 men body to line up his son, Mojtaba, about whom I'll tell you a little bit.

He did not succeed by all accounts. There was resistance to him from the elder clergy. He is clearly a man of no experience outside being his daddy's central chief of staff. As far as I know, there is only one five-minute talk of him that has ever been publicly shown. It's a class that he taught in theology. And they showed that only because they wanted to indicate that he's now at the level that he can be the successor. In order to be a successor, you need to have the equivalent of a PhD. They had him teach a graduate course in theology, and they put that online. As far as I know, that's the only public lecture of him we have.

Yesterday there was news from one of Iran’s satellite TVs claiming that that committee had met and under command of the IRGC essentially named Khamenei's son as the new leader. Today there is less doubt that that is true. There is increasing evidence that that was leaked by intention. I don't know whether it was.

Kahl: Probably by the number two guy. Because the number one guy is probably going to get killed.

Milani: That's one theory. That really is one theory.

Rabinowitz: The HR is already on it.

Milani: That they leaked his name because that would put him as the number one target. The other theory is that they're trying to preempt everyone else's discussion, essentially make him the designated successor. And I think the more credible story is that there is resistance to him.

The meeting hasn't concluded. And it isn't even clear whether they will decide on one successor. So you have essentially a military right now in Iran that is fighting that doesn't have a commander-in-chief.

At the same time, you have a military that claim are winning this war hands down. If you read the Iranian media, you will think that Orwell missed a boat on how you can concoct a reality that is completely irrelevant to intellectual reality, mental reality.

According to Iran's narrative, they have completely weakened the assault. They have defeated the U.S. plan that was to decapitate the regime and have it fall immediately. They are now—again I'm verbatim quoting—that the U.S. is now begging, and Israel is begging, Iran to allow for a negotiated settlement to end this. In other words, they have gone to the same playbook that they did at the end of the 12 Day War. According to the Iranian regime, they won that war as well. And they ended it at the behest of the United States and at the behest of Israel, who deplored Iran to end because they realized Iran is not about to fall and it's stronger than it was.

The economy is, I think, absolutely on the verge of collapse. There are credible reports from international organizations that the banking system is unable to sustain itself for long. If you go to an ATM in Iran today, you can't get more than $10 of your own money. Iranian currency is now increased to 170,000 to $1.00. To give you a contextual point of comparison baseline: in 1979 you had 7 tomans you would get a dollar. You now need 170,000 tomans to get a dollar. And even that you can only get an equivalent of $10.00 per day.

When the news of Khamenei’s death was announced, there was really a remarkable exhibition of joy in the streets. It wasn't a propaganda. It wasn't the diaspora. I have contacts inside Iran. And it was just truly remarkable. It shows the distance between the regime and the people. So you haven't isolated the regime. I think you have a weakened regime. And the only alternative that it sees is to disrupt international trade, increase the price of oil, not even necessarily inflict damage to the U.S. military.

There was a theory they had that said the Americans can't stand casualties. If we kill a few of them, they will have to change. They will end [this]. They are not here to stay. We are planning for the long haul; the U.S. is planning for the short haul, we will win this war. That's their public position. But clearly what they're trying to do, in my view, is increase the economic cost, make everyone else pressure the U.S. and Israel to end.

My sense has been for the last two days that from the second day they were trying to find someone to mediate a negotiated ceasefire. There are some indications today in the New York Times that they did actually almost immediately after the death of Khamenei try to negotiate

My guess is that they're trying to make these encroachments and these rather—in my view—stupid attacks on Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, even Turkey. These were countries that if there is anyone who would be siding with them in this war, they would be these four countries.

China has been rather silent. Russia has been equally rather silent. And they have now managed to put those on the other side.

So,I think people are in a moment of suspended disbelief. Markets are virtually closed. Shops virtually don't open unless they have food stuff that they sell. Everybody thinks holding on to what you have is more secure than selling it, because you won't be able to buy anything to resupply your store.

Goldgeier: Thanks for that opening. Ori, I'll turn to you next, Give us a sense of Israeli objectives, support within Israel for this, how this is playing out within Israel in terms of the objectives that Israel has sought and whether they are thinking that they're achieving what they set out to do.

Rabinowitz: First of all, as opposed to the U.S. and the U.S. public, the Israeli public is predominantly supportive of the war. It's portrayed as a move which will likely remove an existential threat.

The Iranian decision to launch a combined ballistic and drone missile strike in April 2024, an operation that the Iranians titled True Promise One, was the first time that Iran directly attacked Israel, not through its proxies. And it showed the Israelis that Iran is willing to attack Israel face on. It caused the Israelis to upgrade the threat assessment and the perception of threat which Iran emanates.

So, very different to the U.S. prism. Within Israel there's also, of course, the political debate. We're now in an election year. The original date for the election is slated for around September. Could be either September or October.

Usually speaking, not during a war, Israeli governments tend to be toppled in the last year because it's a coalition system and the junior coalition parties have an incentive to topple the government and show their voters that they were willing to stick up for whatever it was that they believed in. This is regardless of the current war and the current political situation. And it's highly likely that we'll see something similar developing now.

It's also increasingly likely that Netanyahu will maneuver to have an election in June, because what we learned following the June war was that the bump that he saw after the June war was actually rather short-lived. The Israeli public have a short memory. If waits until October, he might not reap any political dividend.

The political dividend, of course, will only be on the table if he manages to convince the public that the goals were achieved.

If it's okay, I'm going to talk about the three war scenarios and then maybe we can draw on that. I think that we can generally foresee three different war-ending scenarios. This is true to both the U.S. and Israel and just general observers.

First of all, the worst outcome—at least in Israel's perspective, but probably also for the U.S.—is that the regime somehow survives either with the Mujtaba or any other kind of more radically aligned regime. It could be one leader, it could be a triumvirate of leaders. We don't know the exact formalities of that. But the biggest challenge here is the following: what happens if the radical version of the regime ends up staying in power, and they decide to go nuclear because they decide that just having a nuclear latent capacity isn't enough?

So, just to underline and stress: Khamenei, the supreme leader, was an awful person and I think personally that the world is better off without him. And he did bring Iran to the threshold of nuclear capabilities. But he was also adamant. He never gave, as far as we know, the political directive to go nuclear and to cross the threshold.

What happens if the calculus changes? If we inherit a more radical, or just a regime that's just as radical? So that would be the worst outcome and a complete failure.

The second scenario is that the regime undergoes some sort of an internal change. Other internal factions, probably within the guards and not necessarily from the clerical establishment, they seize power.

And under such a scenario, can foresee a situation where that specific faction is a faction that the U.S. and perhaps Israel can live with because it's not a faction that's as radical, that's as determined to spread violence in the Middle East.

Just as a form of comparison: there are regimes—radical to a degree, but not as radical—there are regimes in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. If you think about the al-Sharaa regime in Syria. Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Jolani, is a former jihadist. He took control of the government. He implemented certain policies. And he's someone that the U.S. can live with. To a different degree, the same goes to General el-Sisi in Egypt. There are leaders that are not democratic leaders in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. So will we see the ascension of someone like that in the Iranian context?

I'll give you one interesting quote from a reporter called Nadav Eyal. He's an important Israeli political analyst. He interviewed Israeli sources on that. And this is what they told him: “The chances of finding a George Washington who will liberate Iran and lead it to democracy are small. The more plausible scenario is a Gorbachev scenario. Someone who attempts to reform the system and ends up bringing it down.”

As to what we mentioned here before, that Israel reportedly struck the building where the assembly of experts were meeting to vote—either vote or not vote on Mojtaba. He was either elected or not elected. They also went on the record giving the following quote that the site was targeted purposefully, but they weren't attempting to kill the people that were there. Assuming this is correct—I'm not telling you it's correct. I'm quoting a source. I can't verify it independently.

Maybe they bombed the parking lot, maybe they dropped the bomb next to them. They wanted to signal that these people were vulnerable, not necessarily to take them out. And again, this plays into a scenario where you want to increase factionalism within the regime. Again, I don't have a way to confirm this.

And lastly, of course, there's the idea that the regime would completely collapse. I don't know how likely this is. But I think what's important to understand here is that the comparison to 20th century-style aerial bombing campaigns is wrong. We're not talking about a 20th century-style aerial bombing campaign where you just bombed them from the air and you hope that the regime collapses. We already know that it's highly likely that there are covert ground-based operations  coming along. We don't have verifiable sources, but there are certain indications if you're an intelligence analyst and you follow reports from the ground, there are certain flags which basically tell you that it's likely that covert ground-based operations are taking place.

There are also reported operations. We already know, and there are reports and leaks that Israel has been bombing the border between Iran and Iraq. And there has been a phone conversation that Trump held with leaders of Kurdish factions that are willing to go into Iran and some reports maintain that they will go into Iran in the coming two days.

So this isn't going to be a 20th century style-aerial bombing campaign that's purely an aerial bombing campaign. So it could have unforeseen consequences like the collapse of the regime.

So, I'll end here.

Goldgeier: All right, Colin.

Kahl: So first of all, thanks to all of you for coming together on short notice. And as FSI director, I'm just humbled by the degree of expertise we can marshal on short notice to bring scholarly rigor to contemporary policy issues. And I think that's actually one of the things that makes FSI so special.

How many of you have heard of the term the fog of war? The fog of war is real. And I think we all have to be humble that none of us have complete understanding about what's going on. And I think that's an important caveat to say right at the beginning.

But I think in the fog of the Iran War, two things are actually kind of unquestionably true.

The first thing that no one can question is the prowess of the American and Israeli militaries. They are doing things that no militaries in the history of the world have been capable of doing. They are engaged in a stunning series of strikes to degrade the IRGC command and control and capabilities, to go after Iran's missile arsenal, to go after their missile launchers, to go after their weapons stockpiles, to go after their military production locations, to sink their navy. From a kind of tactical and operational sense, it is extraordinarily impressive.

Okay, so no one can question that. It is objectively true and apparent. That's thing one.

Thing two is no one can question the nature of the Iranian regime. This is an Iranian regime that has killed  hundreds of  Americans. It's an Iranian regime that has terrorized its neighbors for decades. It's an Iranian regime that has brutalized its domestic opposition. It's an Iranian regime that has sought nuclear capabilities that could destabilize the region and threaten American interests. These are objectively true facts.

But none of that means that there aren't huge questions about this war. And they're actually, frankly, questions that neither the American or the Israeli leadership have been forthright in answering. So that's what I really want to focus most of my remarks around.

I think there are huge questions, especially about how this war will end and ultimately what the strategic implications of that end state will be, particularly for American national interests.

So the question of how long the war goes on, I think, will fundamentally be determined by two dynamics. The first dynamic is military.

Iran's strategy, such as it is, is to expand the war horizontally and temporally. That is to cause as much pain to as many countries as possible for as long as possible to militarily and politically exhaust the countries fighting them.

So they are targeting U.S. bases throughout the region. They're attacking American diplomatic outposts. They're attacking commercial centers throughout the region, energy infrastructure, shipping across the region. They're hitting targets in the Gulf and in the Levant. They've hit targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. That is a very horizontal campaign. The goal ultimately, in my belief, is to exhaust the U.S. military and regional states, ultimately having the regime survive on war termination terms that allow them to fight another day.

Here, Iran's strategy depends in part on their ability to continue widening the conflict, for example, through the use of proxies: Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shia militia. But most importantly, it depends on this hide-and-seek between Iran's ability to launch especially short-range ballistic missiles and drones, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to target those drones and missiles before they get off the ground.

I think actually the campaign has made dramatic success integrating the medium-range ballistic missiles, especially the launchers that can attack Israel. Good news. But those are not the same missiles and launchers that can rain down on  countries in the Gulf and U.S. bases and facilities in the Gulf. Those are different launchers. There's much more plentiful ballistic missiles and they basically have an inexhaustible supply of short-range one-way attack drones.

These Shahed drones, they only cost about $35,000 apiece. We are shooting them down with $2 million missiles. That is an exchange that Iran will take any part of the day. So there is now a game of hide-and-seek. I don't mean “a game” to be a flip way. Literally the war is being paced to the ability of Iran to continue to move its forces around and deal damage to the region, especially in the Gulf, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to go after those targets. That's the military dynamic, and that will determine which side is essentially exhausted first.

The second though is a political dynamic, namely the degree to which political pressure grows on President Trump to declare victory.

If he wanted to declare victory today, he could do it. If the goal is simply to massively degrade the Iranian regime's power projection capabilities, which is what the Pentagon has asserted, we're probably pretty close to that  already. We know that there are debates in Congress about war powers. That is putting some pressure. We know that there's grumbling in the MAGA base that an “America First” president keeps intervening in these foreign wars.

MAGA originated in part out of a sense of forever wars in the Middle East and exhaustion with that. That's become a political problem for the president's base. And we know that the one thing the president has actually responded to are signals from the market. And oil prices, gas prices, and the stock market are extraordinarily turbulent at this point. So political pressure is going to grow at home to wrap this thing up.

The cross current of that is actually international pressure, where I think this issue is complicated. First, the Israeli position is not going to be complicated. They were going to want the United States to fight as long as it takes to destroy this regime. That is the goal of the Israeli political leadership. It is supported by the Israeli people, to Ori's point.

The more complicated international political equation is probably in the Gulf, where in the near term they're outraged, right? The Emiratis have suffered hundreds of ballistic missile attacks and hundreds of drone attacks. Other Gulf countries have been hit. Iran might have believed that that was going to cow them into submission right away. It has not had that effect.

There's actually a chance that the UAE and Saudi could engage in defensive strikes inside Iran. But right now they are exhausting their supply of air defense interceptors. That is especially true, I think, in the UAE. But it will be true across the region. And that is exactly Iran's goal. And there will be a point at which the countries in the Gulf do not want their ports and their infrastructure and their airports and their hotels bombed. And they will call for a timeout.

So, I think political pressure in the near term is not so high, but in the medium term, meaning in weeks, will grow as the Gulf gets tired. And I think the military exhaustion on the U.S. side will also play into this dynamic as the Pentagon warns that our own interceptor arsenals will be depleted. I'll come back to that.

So that's the dynamics I'm looking for in terms of how long the war lasts.

But I think there are even bigger strategic questions here. It's a lot easier to start wars than end them. It's a lot easier to achieve tactical victories than strategic ones. And so I think we should all be on the lookout as analysts on a few things.

First of all, what is the political end state that the Trump administration is seeking in Iran? Is it regime change? They've suggested that it is at times, and at other times that it's not. Is it behavior change? Is it simply to leave whatever regime in place so badly degraded so that it can't threaten its neighbors for some interval of time? That's certainly how the Pentagon has described its objectives.

To say the least, the Trump administration has been highly inconsistent and they have not been forthright with the American people. And separate it apart from whether you think Congress should get involved or not, it is the obligation of the President of United States to explain to the American people why he has authorized our men and women being put in harm's way at the scale that's happening in Iran. And it is crazy that that has not happened.

The second and related question: is how much divergence ultimately is there between the US end state and the Israeli end state? So Israel clearly favors regime change, but I also think basically that Plan B for Israel is simply Iranian domestic chaos. That is that Iran is so internally divided and consumed that it doesn't threaten Israel. By the way, this was basically Israel's posture for most of the Syrian civil war, which is to contain the direct threats to Israel, but basically let everybody else inside Syria kill each other. The jihadists, Hezbollah, the regime, the Russians, everybody. They could all kill each other, Israel would deal with the weapons that threaten them from Syria, and other than that, it was fine for Syria to be in a civil war.

I think they could have a similar perspective towards Iran if you don't get a kind of managed transition or regime change. As we said, the Trump administration has been all over the place on regime change. They've also been all over the place on whether they actually support Israel's Plan B, which is just domestic chaos. To Ori's point, there are credible reports that not only is Israel bombing the guard posts on the border between Northern Iraq and Iran, but the United States is working covertly and maybe overtly to agitate Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to infiltrate Iran and threaten the regime.

Now, maybe that is being done largely for coercive reasons, or maybe it's to stir up a civil war inside of Iran. And I'm old enough to have been a U.S. official during the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya to suggest that once a country starts down that road, all hell can break loose. And Iran is not a small country, okay? Geographically, it is the size of Iraq and Afghanistan put together, and it's 90 million people. It's the heart of Eurasia. An Iran that collapses into a violent civil war will convulse the world.  So we should just keep that in mind. So that's the second question I have.

The third is, will the Iranian people rise up? You know, Trump basically says the cavalry is on the way, but he said, stay in your home so you don't get killed, but the second the bombing happens, come out on the streets. Will they? And if they do, and the regime brutally cracks down again, what will the United States do?

Because, of course, this entire thing got started because Trump said you can't slaughter your own people and that's what they did by the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. It took us several weeks for the U.S. military to show up en masse. They then launched. So if the Iranian people come out and they start getting gunned down, does that drag the U.S. military back in? Is there a mission creep dynamic here? If it does, then the campaign's going go on. If it doesn't, and that's what happened during the Arab Spring?

Or, do we abandon the protesters in the streets and let them be slaughtered, which is essentially what happened to the Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War, right? Which is a blow to U.S. credibility. So one pathway to mission creep is if the people do come out into the streets and then it does become an effort to back whatever they're doing to change the regime or abandon them and face the credibility consequences from that. So that's the third question.

The fourth question is what is the implication for nuclear proliferation? Jim, to your point about like first they said it was obliterated and then they said it's two weeks. Both are true in the following respect. What wasn't obliterated are the 400 kilograms of 60 percent highly enriched uranium that were probably in tunnels under Isfahan or somewhere else that weren't destroyed last summer.

400 kilograms of 60 percent HEU is enough for 10 or 11 nuclear bombs—not the bombs themselves but the fissile material, the explosive material for the bombs, if further enriched to 90 percent. They could do that in a couple of weeks, hence the two weeks. Were they about to do that? I have no idea. I'm not privy to the intelligence, but there's no indication from reporting that they were. And believe me, if there were indications, both the Americans and the Israelis would be putting it out there.

But the question then becomes, well, if you don't get a hold of that material and the regime survives, what are the implications for nuclear proliferation in Iran? Because 400 kilograms of HEU doesn't take that many IR-6 centrifuges in a warehouse somewhere to spin up the explosive material for a nuclear weapon. And if I'm the regime, my missiles weren't enough to deter, my drones weren't enough to deter, my threshold nuclear capability wasn't enough to deter, I might draw the conclusion that only a nuclear bomb could deter this from happening again. So will that be the future?

The next question I would ask—and I'm sorry for going on so long, but I'm almost done—will a dramatically weakened Iran, which I think is inevitable . . . Iran will emerge from this dramatically weakened under every set of circumstances. Will a dramatically weakened Iran liberate the United States from the Middle East or pin us down in the Middle East? Proponents of the war, especially the America Firsters, are saying, look, we never get to be out of the Middle East as long as this regime is there. We have to swat the regime back because that liberates us to focus on, take your pick: the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, whatever the Trump administration says they care about the most.

The challenge with that is that's historically never the way it's worked in the Middle East. In the aftermath of this, there will be enormous pressure from our own military command to keep forces in the region to contain the aftermath. There could be mission creep, which pins us down. And all of the Gulf states who now have seen Americans flow in and seen their own defenses degraded by this war, will be begging us to stay and will be telling us if we pull a single American out of the Middle East, we're abandoning them.

So the pressure to keep the United States trapped in the Middle East after we spent so much time un-entrapping ourselves from the Middle East will be profound, and that will have consequences on our ability to do anything else.

There was a reason why it took a few weeks for the U.S. military to show up in the Middle East. Not because we don't have the most powerful military in the world, but because they were busy in the Caribbean. So they had to be relocated across the world to do what they've done. And if they're pinned down in the Middle East, it means they're not available for contingencies in Europe or in Northeast Asia or in Southeast Asia or in the hemisphere.

A related question is: what does this mean for post-war U.S. strategic exhaustion? We're going to win this tactically and operationally. That's not even a close fight. It will be highly imbalanced. But I was at the Pentagon overseeing our war planning for all of these things. We basically get to fight one protracted war. And once we do, it's going to be a couple of years before you are ready to fight another one.

And that's why they are so desperate to recapitalize the munitions, because we are expending a lot of long range precision munitions and a lot of air interceptors. And a lot of these weapon systems are exactly the weapon systems you need for a contingency in North Korea, across the Taiwan Strait, in the Baltics.

And so as a consequence, the paradox is that this war is likely to be operationally a demonstration of amazing American military power. And maybe weaker countries around the world will be like, “Woah, woah, we don't want that to happen to us. Like, wow, what they did to Iran, what they did to Maduro, like no way do we want any piece of this.”

But if you're in Moscow and Beijing, you count things. And you know that for the next two or three years, the United States' cupboard is going to be bare. And so what does that mean for our ability to deter what they do in the Baltics? Across the Taiwan Strait?

And my own intuition is that the Trump administration has basically been punching down at weak actors and not punching up at major powers, and that Trump is keen to accommodate Putin and Xi. And that actually this will encourage him to do that for the next two or three years because frankly, a more confrontational posture will not be viable.

And the last point I will just make is what are the implications for the international order? Whatever one thinks of the war, it does not fit traditional understandings of international law. That's true in Iran. It's true in Venezuela. Basically what the United States says, we can do things unilaterally. We didn't even try to build a broad coalition. Even George W. Bush built a coalition of the willing before the invasion of Iraq. We didn't do any of that. We didn't appeal to international norms. We didn't appeal to international law. We didn't build an international coalition. We said that the United States can unilaterally decide to decapitate foreign regimes. We did it in Venezuela. We did it again in Iran.

And if you're in Moscow or Beijing, you will draw the conclusion that the United States has no moral, legal, or ethical leg to stand on in opposing you from doing the same thing. Will that change Putin or Xi Jinping's inclination to do something in the Baltics or in Taiwan? No, it won't. But will it make it harder for a future American administration to rally the world to deter or defeat that aggression? 100%. And so from an international order perspective, that's a problem.

I don't want to pretend any of these things are easy. They're not. Nobody should believe that Iran is a good actor. They're not. But these are the strategic questions that our leaders owe us answers to. And I have not heard an answer to a single one of them.

Goldgeier: Colin, I want to follow up on two issues, one you mentioned and one you didn't but that have been in the news a lot recently.

So one is the stockpile question, how much we actually have in order to fight a war. And people have made all sorts of accusations that we've sent too much to Ukraine and that leaves us short, or we need more in the Indo-Pacific that we don't have. And here we are fighting this major war against Iran.

You mentioned the challenge it poses for other contingencies elsewhere in the next two to three years. But what about how long we can sustain this war with what we have? That's one question.

And then the second is, there's been a lot in the news recently about Anthropic and Claude. And before the war started, it was about how the U.S. government was going to go after Anthropic because they didn't want Claude used in certain ways, especially regarding mass surveillance of Americans.

But the stories in the paper the last couple of days have been about the use of Claude for targeting and the ways in which this has really enabled the United States to fight this war in a way that it wouldn't have been able to previously. And just get your thoughts on the role of Claude.

Kahl: Okay, big questions. On the stockpile  and the “How long?” question. Thirty seconds of background: so there was a lot of underinvestment in the defense industrial base in the post-Cold War period. And to the degree that we were investing, we were investing in platforms, not munitions. And so when the Ukraine war burst out and we started to send stockpiles to Ukraine, it became increasingly evident that if we sent too much of anything, it would start to imperil our ability to defend our own interests in the context of certain contingencies.

This was a critique, in fact, as you mentioned, Jim, of those who said we provided Ukraine too much, including many who currently sit in the administration. Of course, there are also people in the administration that claim we didn't provide enough.

The Biden administration invested billions in recapitalizing the defense industrial base. The Trump administration wisely is doing the same. The challenge is that it just it's not about money. It's not how much money you spend. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't build factories, you can't hire the workers, you have subcontractor issues.

And just as an example of the scale: we currently, by shot doctrine, shoot two to three Patriot interceptors at every Iranian missile. The Iranians have shot hundreds of missiles. Do the math. We only produce 600 Patriot interceptors a year. So you're gonna burn through that stuff pretty fast.

CENTCOM has made a big deal of the fact that the Army is now using this new long-range precision strike missile called the PRISM. That was designed for contingencies in places like the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. So everything we are shooting off in the Middle East is something that's not available in the near term for any other contingency.

How long can it go? Well, it depends on how much risk the president is willing to take on our ability to do anything else. So could it go for weeks? Certainly. Could it go for months? Probably. The longer it goes, does it cause trade-offs with our ability to do anything else anywhere else? Yeah.

And I'll tell you that the Russians and the Chinese are really good at counting things. And they will know exactly how long we can fight them. And the one thing is for sure, we can fight them less ably after this war than when the war started. It's not an argument for why the war is a bad idea, but it is an argument that that strategic trade-off is real, that you get to fight the one big war and was this war in the context of this regime at this moment what you wanted to expand American power on, separate and apart from everything else?

One thing I'm confident of is the lesson they are not drawing in Moscow and Beijing is, “This could happen to you.”

What they are drawing is because this is happening to Iran, it's actually less likely it's going to happen to you anytime soon. And then the question is, what do they do about that? I don't think it means that either one of those countries is likely to start a new war, actually. I think what it means is they're going to pursue their current objectives more aggressively with less fear that the United States will put pressure on them, and more sense that they will be accommodated.

So in Ukraine, it will mean they're more confident the United States will not send a bunch of weapons to Ukraine. In Taiwan, it could mean the same thing, or I think Xi Jinping basically wants to achieve his preferred outcome in Taiwan peacefully but coercively. And I think this will strengthen his hand in negotiations with Trump this year, especially as they meet in Beijing in April for their first summit and probably a few more times this year to try to reach some “Big, Beautiful Trade Bill.” I've always believed that Trump was likely to go soft on some combination of technology and Taiwan. And I think Beijing will calculate this gives them a stronger hand to play. So I don't think it's new aggression. I think it's their current path, but they'll see it as easier to pursue. We'll see.

Okay, Claude. As you've probably read in the news, Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude, is one of the two or three best frontier AI models in the world, alongside the offerings from OpenAI and Gemini and Google DeepMind. But the thing that separates Claude is that Anthropic was the first company to actually put its models into classified computing clusters, and Claude is also integrated, reportedly, into the Maven Smart System.

For those of you who follow Silicon Valley soap opera around national security issues, you'll recall back in 2018, Google had a Maven, the Maven contract—this was about using AI for targeting, a target identification on drones and things. There was a revolt by Google engineers, Google dropped the contract, Palantir picked it up. Anthropic is a partner with Palantir. Now Palantir integrates Anthropic's models into the Maven Smart System.

The Maven Smart System is being used in Iran. It was previously used to help the Ukrainians. All of this has been publicly reported. This is not autonomous killer robots. These are AI decision support tools. Basically, it means fusing all classified intelligence: think signals intelligence, emissions from radios, radar, satellite imagery, full motion video, social media that's geo-located, fusing all of that data at a scale and speed that human analysts would not be able to do to generate points of interest that are turned into targets.

And so basically, it speeds up the targeting process. By the way, Israel uses similar systems called Gospel and Lavender to accelerate targeting in places like Gaza and Lebanon. Maybe Ori can talk more about that.

But the point being that AI's role in warfare is already here. It is here in the Middle East. It is here in Ukraine. My suspicion is you're seeing reports about Claude’s use in Iran because people at Anthropic are trying to remind people of the costs of trying to disentangle Anthropic's tools in terms of the costs on ongoing operations. And I would be doing the same thing.

But it is a reminder that a paradox of Secretary Hegseth's approach on AI is that he released a memo in January saying we need to go at warp speed on AI. There are even posters in the Pentagon that are AI-generated of him pointing at people saying, “Use AI.” And yet in the feud with Anthropic, they're going to spend the next 6 to 18 months taking steps backwards to rip Anthropic out of their operational architectures to replace it with something else, which is not a step forward. It strikes me as a step backwards, or at least sideways.

Goldgeier: Thank you. Abbas, the issue came up, this question about regime change versus behavior change. What are your expectations regarding either of those two things? And if you could also say a little bit about the Kurds in this whole unfolding within Iran, that would be very helpful. I'm going to ask Ori to also comment on the Kurds as well. But this regime change versus behavior change first.

Milani: I think what can in the short term or midterm be expected is more  change of behavior rather than a regime change. There isn't the kind of boots on the ground, whether in terms of the opposition  or in terms of Israel or the U.S., to dislodge this regime.

But the regime, in my view, is desperate enough that it realizes that unless they make these kinds of changes of behavior, they won't survive. I believe that even if Mojtaba comes, Mojtaba —even with the IRGC—have no choice but to recalibrate with the people, recalibrate with the international community.

That's why when they were pitching Mojtaba, there's two pitches about him. One is that he's intimately connected with the IRGC. He is the central founder of the IRGC intelligence, that he is very deep into the economic shenanigans. But they also dropped hints that he is Iran's MBS, that the only person that can do for Iran what MBS did in Saudi Arabia is him, because he has the clout, he has the connection, he has the IRGC. So they have created both of these, and this is before this crisis.

To me, the fact that they launched this PR campaign for him indicates they know themselves that the status quo is untenable, that they need to restructure, rethink, recalibrate with the people.

And to me the idea that arming the Kurds was a very foolish thing to say and a very foolish thing to do. I think it will convince some Iranian people that what the regime has been saying is all along is true. Because what the regime has been saying is that this is not about the nuclear program, this is not about our behavior. Israel and the United States and primarily Israel want to destroy Iran, they want to dismantle Iran.

They point to some article twenty years ago that said Iran needs to be weakened. That this is part of some master plan. To me, it was was a very foolhardy.

There are people within the regime that have clearly, unambiguously, to different degrees, been saying for the last 10 years—if anybody was paying attention—that the status quo can't work. Some of them are in prison right now. Tajzadeh, example. Qadianii, for example. These people have been calling out Khamenei by name, saying you are the source of the problem, and unless you change, unless we remove you, we can’t save our own.

And in recent months, Rouhani joined them. Zarif joined. These are people who are part of the regime. Rouhani, in all but name, systematically pointed to Khamenei in saying that you have been wrong on every strategic decision. In one conversation, Rouhani said, we were in a meeting with Khamenei, and we said, Israel and the United States might attack us.

And commanders of the IRGC said, absolutely not. They won't dare. We have 200,000 missiles. We will destroy Israel the first week. And said to Khamenei, that these are stupid imaginations. They can hit us. And Khamenei sided with those. So there is that tendency. There is that desire within the regime to recalibrate, whether there will be anything left of them to do this.

One last point about the bomb, your question about the bomb and the strength of FSI. Sig Hecker, one of the most eminent scholars of  nuclear science, the head of Los Alamos, he and I wrote two articles about Iran's enrichment program, one twelve years ago and one about five months ago.

And in that one, we said, the only thing that is left of your enrichment capacity, virtually, is this 460. With this, you can make a few dirty bombs. Give it up and make a compromise with the international community that will allow Iran and you, the regime, to survive.

Absolutely, they did the opposite and began to threaten that they're going to use this and that they have the capacity to withstand all of these pressures, that there will not be another war. Khamenei famously said, there will not be war, there will not be negotiation. There has been war, there has been negotiations. And many people within the regime are basically saying that maybe a change of behavior.

Again, I can't believe that the regime change can come from outside. I was very much opposed to the idea of trying to bring regime change through attack. I thought the U.S. should help the Iranian people, not kinetically, not attacking Iran, [but by] making the battle between the Iranians and this brutal regime more equitable by giving them satellite connection, by the kinds of non-interventionist things that I think would have enabled a very viable democratic movement to bring about the change that hopefully brings peace to the Middle East.

Goldgeier: Thank you. And for Ori, what should we be looking for as we think about the Israeli objectives versus the U.S. objectives? The convergence, the divergence? How are you looking at this? And also, if you have anything you want to add on the Kurds,

Rabinowitz: I'll string together a few thoughts. So, with the Kurds, I think that there are two primary objectives. I'm not convinced that just starting a civil war is a defined objective. I think that it's more likely that the Israelis want to see a non-hostile faction take cover, but I'm basing this based on the statements. And again, fog of war, maybe these statements are just not being made. I can only use what's out there.

I think that the idea is to first of all stretch Iranian security forces and weaken them, to pave the way for those unnamed opposition forces or the factions that are more amenable to collaborate with the U.S. and Israel, and to encourage other ethnic minorities like the Baluchis and the Azeris and maybe therefore encourage the Iranians to rise up.

They haven't really given indications, the Israelis or the Americans, that they think it's now time to go tomorrow because we're still in the air. I think this is just day four, right? I mean, it looks like a hundred years from my perspective, but I think they're still kind of preparing the ground. But it's likely that we'll start seeing more . . .

Kahl: It's day five. We're like, 20% further ahead than what you . . .

Rabinowitz: Wow, yeah. Sleep deprivation will do that to a person. So just to follow up, to give you some numbers to elaborate on what Colin said. We have relatively good numbers with the UAE. I haven't been able to compile the assessments on Israel. Everything is based on open source and different analytical reports. And there's an analyst called Fabian Hoffman. He does a terrific job, and he compiled the numbers for the UAE.

In the first two days, we saw 165 ballistic missiles that were launched from Iran to the UAE, and in the following days we saw 9, 12, and 3. So these are five days, not four days. So I lost a day. So, day five of the war.

So, we saw a decline in the launches. We also saw a decline with the drones. And exactly like Colin said, if you run the numbers of how many Patriots you need to intercept these missiles, the analysts think that about 410 interceptors were probably required, which roughly amounts to anywhere between 20 to 40% of what the UAE will assess that they have in their stockpile. So you can imagine that if you're a UAE decision maker, this is going to make you rather stressed about how many interceptors you're going to need in the coming days.

So everything really depends on the success of the hunting missions that we now see in Iran.

The numbers are declining. Are they declining fast enough? We'll know in the coming days. I should mention that it looks like the numbers with Israel are probably somewhere aligned with this thing, but I don't have the actual numbers. But we did see a decrease, and we also saw a decrease in the intensity of the salvo. So when I say salvo, I don't mean a single machine that's firing repeatedly. We're talking about a bunch of launchers kind of shooting together as a pack. Think about the wolfpack submarine style from World War II. They're coming together and they each have one missile and they launch it together.

During the 12 Day War, saw the salvos shooting 40, 50 missiles together. Now we see them increasingly in lower numbers. This indicates a lot of disruption to Iranian capability to coordinate the launchers shooting together. But they're still launching, but again, in smaller numbers.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the Israeli-U.S. possible divergence. So just to frame this, because the hunt for the launchers is now the primary objective, it's definitely what the U.S. and Israel are most interested in. We didn't see a lot of Iranian nuclear facilities being hit. We saw some, and again, fog of war. I'm relying on open source reports.

There are reports that Natanz was hit. There are reports that Isfahan was hit, [but] we don't know which facilities inside Isfahan. Are we talking about the tunnels with more than 400 kilos of enriched uranium, the entrance to the tunnels? We don't know yet.

But—and here's a very interesting nugget from yesterday evening—the IDF reported that one of the sites that they hit was a secret site, not previously reported, where the Iranian weapons group was working on a trigger mechanism for the nuclear bomb.

Again, I can't verify this independently. This is something that was stated and it ties on to recent reports, again, just from an hour before we convened here, that the Israelis have intelligence that the Iranian rebuilding effort was much more intense following the 12 Day War. That specific report mentioned the missile program. I'm assuming it also touches on the nuclear issue.

The U.S.-Iranian talks about the nuclear program were held last week. It looks like a millennia ago. They were held last week. Witkoff and Kushner gave for the record briefing and off the record briefing as administration officials. And apparently they were a bit shocked because what they said in all these briefings is that the Iranians basically were taunting the fact that they still have their 460 kilos of enriched uranium and they can do whatever they want with it.

And another thing that they were stressing is their ability to produce advanced centrifuges. These advanced centrifuges are called IR-6. The number itself doesn't matter. The idea is that they were insisting on their ability to produce these machines. And I think this is something that really was significant in the decision-making process.

And here we come to the divergence. I think that the biggest possibility of divergence between Israeli and U.S. perception of the war would be if we do end up seeing a Mojtaba or another faction from within the guards taking over the regime and being convenient or malleable enough for Trump and the U.S. to work with foregoing any nuclear thing, perhaps foregoing most or all of the nuclear program, but not forgoing the ideology, the anti-Israel rhetoric, the support for destabilizing Israeli-Arab normalization, etc.

So imagine something that is somewhat similar to a Qatar actor, right? Qatar is an actor that the Trump administration is very at home with, but Qatar is an anti-Israel actor. So what do you get when you have an actor like that that the U.S. can live with but Israel isn't happy with? That's where you'll see the divergence.

Goldgeier: Okay, great. Thank you.

Milani: Let me give you a little history. Iran was the first Muslim country next to Turkey to de facto recognize the state of Israel. Iran had very close relations with Israel from 1950 to 1979.

Israel was a supporter of Iran's nuclear program, and there is evidence that Israel worked with South Africa to help Iran develop a bomb in 1975. But Iran was also systematically under the Shah, the defender of a two-state solution, demanding that Israel must give up the territories, and a democratic Iran that recognizes, contrary to what this regime has done for 47 years, that does not believe that the destruction of the state of Israel is Iran's top, or one of the top, strategic goals. That can bring peace in the Middle East, can help bring peace in the Middle East. It can't guarantee it.

You cannot, in my view, have peace in the Middle East without the recognition of the rights of Palestinians to a state. You're not going to have long-term peace. And the Abrahamic Accord, in my view, is de facto a reality on the ground. The Shah was the outlier with Turkey having diplomatic relations with Israel. Everybody in the Muslim Middle East is now craving to have that relationship. The problem is Palestine.

Rabinowitz: In opinion, Israel needs to work towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians. This is a minority opinion. I'm not representing the Israeli public here. I'm representing my own opinion as an Israeli and as a scholar of security studies in the Middle East. The only way to translate wartime achievement into sustainable political goals is to do something political with them.

I think one of the negative things that this specific current government has done in Israel was to squander away the opportunity to reach normalization with Saudi Arabia. Colin can talk more about this, but specifically in May 2024—this is still during the Biden administration—there was a relatively concrete offer on the table, but Netanyahu, due to various political considerations— they will tell you that they're altruistic and me, myself personally, as someone who doubts his motivations—I think they were politically motivated to maintain the integrity of the Israeli government. He insisted on maintaining a very right-wing political component of the government and that precluded any kind of progress in the Palestinian-Israeli path.

So that's a very simple answer, but I don't have an answer of how we get there, because again, I'm a minority. How do I convince more Israelis to agree with me? When the government calls for a snap election, which we now think will be in June, will they vote in political parties that share this? I don't know how to do this.

Kahl: First of all, I think we should acknowledge that there's no agreement on what peace even means in this context and what peace would be durable, sustainable. There's not agreement inside the United States administration. There's not an agreement between the United States and Israel on this question. So it's hard, right? So all I can speak to is what would I think winning the peace, like from my perspective, which is only as valuable as you value my opinion.

I think first it would be a peace that is an outcome where Iran is so weakened that it either changes its intention to threaten its neighbors, or for a meaningful period of time does not have the capability of doing that. I think in some ways that's the easiest objective here to achieve. Not easy, but the easiest objective to achieve because of the asymmetry and the military capabilities that are on display at the moment.

I think a second condition though, is a more integrated region that shares a sense of collective security and that is integrated across the Arab-Israeli divide. So think of it as an expansion of the Abraham Accords: more integration between Israel and moderate Arab states, looking after their defense and cooperating more with each other, not just on military issues, but intelligence and economic and energy and environment.

But a third is that it is a peace that doesn't require tens of thousands of Americans to be trapped in the desert for forever. That's not something the American people want. That's not something that is militarily wise or sustainable from the United States. And in a world of intense geopolitical competition, is strategic malpractice to keep Americans at scale trapped in the Middle East. So from a narrow U.S. interest standpoint, a stable peace is a peace that is sustainable without the United States having to do everything.

Goldgeier:  Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you all so much for your insights. We really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming. Please join me in thanking the panel.

[END EVENT AUDIO]

Kahl: You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening around the world, and why.

2. U.S. Security Partnerships Can Make Arab States Targets

Yom highlighted a paradox shaping the strategic environment of Arab states: the closer their security ties with the United States, the more vulnerable they may become in a regional confrontation.

“For the most part,” Yom explained, “the intensity of Iranian counterstrikes and retaliation on Arab states covaries with the degree of their relationship with the United States.”

States hosting American military bases or deeply integrated into U.S. security strategy are more likely to find themselves on the frontlines of Iranian retaliation.

“The more of a client state they are, the more troops they host, the deeper their foreign policies are tied to the demands of American grand strategy — then the more likely they are going to be struck.”

This dynamic creates a fundamental strategic dilemma.

For decades, small and medium-sized states in the region have relied on alliances with Washington to enhance their security. The current conflict illustrates how those same alliances can also increase their exposure to regional escalation.

3. Arab Governments Are Trying to Avoid Being Seen as Participants in the War

Arab governments today face a difficult balancing act: responding to Iranian attacks while avoiding the perception that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel. Many Arab governments must navigate public opinion that is deeply skeptical of Israel and wary of Western military intervention in the region.

As Sallam put it, these governments are trying to avoid creating “the impression that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel in this war.”

The result is a diplomatic tightrope: condemning attacks on their territory without being drawn into the broader conflict.

4. A Regional War Threatens the Gulf’s Economic Transformation Projects

A fourth major takeaway concerns the economic stakes of regional stability.

Blaydes emphasized that wars can have far-reaching political economy consequences. Major conflicts reshape investment patterns, redirect state resources toward security priorities, and increase global perceptions of risk.

When governments must divert resources toward defense spending and crisis management, economic diversification plans can quickly lose momentum.

For Gulf regimes that have tied their political projects to visions of economic modernization, prolonged regional instability therefore represents a serious political challenge.

“Suddenly, when you have a conflict that disrupts the flow of investments, tourism, and even trading routes in places like the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea,” Sallam observed, “this shakes the foundations of these projects.”

5. The War Is Occurring Amid Deep Divisions Among Regional Powers

The discussion highlighted that the war with Iran is unfolding against the backdrop of a significant regional rift.

According to Sallam, one emerging divide involves different visions for managing instability in fragile states. Some regional actors — including the UAE and Israel — have tacitly or directly promoted fragmentation of political authority in places like Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza.

Others, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, have tended to favor more traditional models of centralized authoritarian stability.

These competing strategic preferences have already clashed in multiple regional conflicts, most recently in Sudan and Yemen.

Thus, Iran’s potential neutralization as a regional power player as a result of the war, Sallam noted, will not necessarily result in regional stability. It will simply intensify these rivalries among the remaining powers.

6. War Strengthens Authoritarian Politics and Weakens the Prospect for Reform and Development

The panel highlighted the negative ramifications of regional conflict for reform and development.

“The constant violence is not productive for the promotion of democracy, development, or the rule of law,” Blaydes noted. “Having a constant stream of weapons, conflict, violence, post-conflict reconciliation, [and] regional rivalries…undermines all three.”

“Anytime a regional conflict breaks out,” Yom argued, “it’s always bad for democratic struggle on the home front.”

The war, according to Sallam, could result in outcomes that would be “catastrophic not only for the people and society of Iran, but also the people and societies of the region at large.”

A full recording of the March 3 panel can be viewed below:

Iran’s Revolution and Economy Are Intertwined

Taking a broad view of Iran’s revolution, Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies, says that understanding the country’s future requires understanding its past.

“The 1979 Iranian revolution was no revolution at all. It was a cunning bait-and-switch game cleverly played by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who put himself at the head of the movement,” Milani writes in the New York Times.

For decades, this regime, first led by Khomeini and until recently his successor, Khamenei, has successfully kept its population under repressive control through a combination of fear, violence, and brutality, says Milani. But that stronghold has shown cracks, and fear of the regime had begun waning prior to the U.S.-Israel attacks. Coupled with frustrations with a failing economy, skyrocketing inflation, and plummeting currency, Milani sees opportunity for real change within Iran.

“The economy is a clear source of constant threat to the regime, and the new secular women and men of Iran are unwilling to accept anything less than what they were initially promised before being deceived nearly half a century ago. The machinery of the regime may survive today. But the counterrevolution of yesteryear is begetting the revolution of tomorrow.”
 

America’s Firepower Is Superior, but Not Infinite

Speaking at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), FSI Director Colin Kahl, a former under secretary of defense for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, acknowledged the magnitude and deft execution of the unfolding military operation.

“The U.S. and Israeli militaries are doing things that no militaries in the history of the world have been capable of doing. From a kind of tactical and operational sense, it is extraordinarily impressive,” he said.

But Kahl also warns that an extended military campaign could spell trouble for the United States both in the current conflict and for future readiness.

“Iran has what is basically an inexhaustible supply of short-range, one-way attack drones that only cost about $35,000 apiece. We are shooting them down with $2 million missiles. That is an exchange rate Iran will take any day of the week.”

China and Russia are also watching this conflict and America’s artillery usage, says Kahl:

“We are expending a lot of long range precision munitions and a lot of air interceptors. And a lot of these weapons are exactly the systems you need for a contingency in North Korea, across the Taiwan Strait, or in the Baltics,” he says. “If you're in Moscow and Beijing, you’re counting those, and you know that for the next two or three years, the United States' cupboard is going to be bare and a more confrontational posture will not be viable.”

U.S.-Israel Interests are Aligned but Not Identical

Unlike in previous conflicts when the U.S. was joined in combat with NATO allies or other partners, the strikes on Iran were conducted in tandem with only one other nation, Israel.

Amichai Magen, the director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, believes some of the impetus for the strikes is to send a message to anti-American and anti-Israel actors.

“If you can take out Maduro or undermine the regime in Iran, you are signaling to Russia and China that America is repositioning and re-establishing deterrence against its peer competitors,” Magen told NBC Bay Area.

Or Rabinowitz, a visiting scholar of Israel studies, also points to Iran’s insistence in recent negotiations on keeping its ability to produce advanced centrifuges as being particularly significant in the decision to execute military action.

But there is the possibility of divergence in the United States and Israel’s overarching goals as well, Rabinowitz says, especially when it comes to questions of nuclear capabilities. 

“Take Qatar as an example,” she told the CISAC panel. “Qatar is an actor that the Trump administration is very at home with, even though they are an anti-Israel actor. Something similar could emerge in Iran that feels malleable enough for the U.S. to work with on the nuclear issue, but they don’t forgo their ideology, their anti-Israel rhetoric, or their support for destabilizing Israeli-Arab normalization. The U.S. may choose to live with that even if Israel isn’t happy about it. That’s where you’ll see divergence.”

China Is Likely to Sit This One Out

When it comes to Iran’s partnerships and allies, experts believe Tehran is unlikely to see much help from Moscow or Beijing. Writing for Foreign Affairs, Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani track how Russia’s focus on Ukraine has diverted its ability to engage with players in the Middle East, citing its meager response to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and limited engagement with Iran in the aftermath of the airstrikes in June 2025 targeting nuclear facilities.

Lisa Blaydes, an FSI senior fellow, thinks China—Iran’s major trading partner—will take a similar backseat approach to the current conflict. 

“We think that China might have some leverage over Iran. But it's not clear how much will there is in China to get involved in this,” she explained at an event hosted by the The Program on Arab Reform and Development. “We know one of the only planes to land in Tehran recently was a Chinese plane that was bringing weapons to support the Iranian regime. Will this continue? Is it a one-off? Is it a pattern? I don't think we know yet.”

While a majority of Iran’s oil does end up in Chinese markets, China also has important economic and trade interests in the Gulf, says Blaydes, where all six Gulf Cooperation Council nations have been hit by retaliatory Iranian missile strikes.

“The Gulf is an important part of the Belt and Road Initiative. And there's a lot of money at stake. Disturbances in a place like the Strait of Hormuz would cause major disruptions to global supply chains. So I don't know if the Chinese want to weigh in strongly on either side.”
 

The Risk of Global Destabilization Is Real

The question on most people’s minds in regards to the war is, “What happens next?” Hesham Sallam, a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, acknowledges the complexity and gravity of the situation.

“This is a very unpredictable situation. And it is concerning that multiple U.S. officials don’t seem to have a consistent answer about a situation that is so consequential and that puts so many people in harm's way,” says Sallam.

If not handled carefully, Sallam warns that the threat of escalation is very real. Faced with a potentially existential risk, leaders in what remains of the regime may seek broad global destabilization. 

“There’s a logic here for the regime that if you don’t exact more costs and prolong the conflict and make this as inconvenient as possible for everyone, Iran will not be dealt with on equal footing,” he says. “So they may be looking to exact huge costs not just on the U.S. and Israel and countries in the region, but to disrupt global energy markets and the flow of trade as a means of ensuring something like this never happens again.”
 

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