Three CISAC scientists have joined 26 of the nation’s top nuclear experts to send an open letter to President Obama in support of the Iran deal struck in July.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) the United States and its partners negotiated with Iran will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future non-proliferation agreements,” the group of renowned scientists, academics and former government officials wrote in the letter dated August 8, 2015.

“This is an innovative agreement, with much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated non-proliferation framework.”

CISAC senior fellow and former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker is a signatory to the letter, along with CISAC co-founder Sid Drell, and cybersecurity expert and CISAC affiliate Martin Hellman.

Six Nobel laureates also signed, including FSI senior fellow by courtesy and former Stanford Linear Accelerator director Burton Richter.

The letter arrives at a crucial time for the Obama administration as it rallies public opinion and lobbies Congress to support the Iran agreement.

You can read the full letter along with analysis from the New York Times at this link.

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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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. I'm excited to pick up the mantle from Mike McFaul, both as FSI director and as the host of this podcast.

It's hard to believe we're only six weeks into 2026. And yet there's already been a year's worth of foreign policy developments.

In early January, U.S. military forces swooped into Caracas to capture Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, and bring him back to the United States. Then President Trump started making military and tariff threats in an effort to acquire Greenland, causing a major transatlantic crisis and prompting Canada's prime minister to declare that there had been a “rupture: in the international order.

Meanwhile, mass protests have rocked Iran, shaking the pillars of the regime and prompting the deployment of U.S. military assets to the Middle East and renewed threats from President Trump to strike the regime. Just a few days ago, Trump officials traveled to the Middle East to meet with Iranian officials in an attempt to negotiate a new nuclear deal just a day after meeting with representatives from Russia and Ukraine to try to settle that devastating conflict.

In other words, 2026 is off to a breathtaking start with widespread geopolitical consequences.

I can't think of any better guests to help us understand these developments and where things might be headed in the remaining 46 weeks of 2026 than my good friends H.R. McMaster and Jake Sullivan.

H.R. is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General who served as the President's National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration. He joined us here at FSI as the Bernard and Susan Leotaud Visiting Fellow in 2018, and he is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. You can catch him on his podcast, Today's Battleground, on all major platforms.

Jake Sullivan was national security advisor for all four years of the Biden administration. He's now the Kissinger Professor of Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. And he also hosts a podcast alongside John Finer called The Long Game.

You'll notice that both Jake and and H.R. have their own podcasts. So if you like what you hear today, please go check them out. And if you don't, you can blame me and you should still go check them out.

H.R., Jake, it's great to have you on the pod.

McMaster: Hey, Colin, great to be here with you and Jake.

Sullivan: Really good to be with you guys.

Kahl: Both of you served as national security advisors. That job is often dominated by crises of the day. But the national security advisor also plays an important role in shaping U.S. grand strategy, including by producing a congressionally mandated document called the National Security Strategy of the United States.

So I wanted to start our discussion by zooming out from current events to look at the big picture captured in these documents. And H.R.I. was hoping to start with you.

You know, when you were national security advisor during the first Trump administration, you and your deputy, Nadia Schadlow, produced a really excellent 2017 National Security Strategy. And I think what was most notable about that 2017 document was that it was really a hard pivot away from the post-9/11 framing of national security.

It recognized that threats that we were focused on after 9/11, like terrorism and rogue states, still mattered, but that actually the biggest challenges to the United States was resurgent great power competition, with China and Russia really challenging America's interest across the board.

It's interesting, at least to me, to note that the Trump administration's in the second term has released a national security strategy back in December of 2025. And it actually has a much different tone on great power politics. It doesn't really describe Russia as a threat. It prioritizes strategic stability. It doesn't even talk about China until page 19 of like a 30-page document and largely frames the China challenge in economic terms, as opposed to a kind of an omnidirectional challenge to the United States.

You're a close observer of these things. Do you think there's been a meaningful shift in how President Trump, in his second term, is thinking about this issue?

McMaster: I think there's a meaningful shift in really the composition of the administration overall and maybe the president's mentality to a certain extent as well.

As you know, the new national security strategy prioritizes more hemispheric defense and the Western Hemisphere—North America in particular in terms of missile defense. This is why President Trump was so fixed on on Greenland as important to to defense and Arctic security Well, you know, want to say hey Canada is pretty important to that too So maybe we should stop kicking them in the ass.

But the other aspect to this is the emphasis on industrial base. A lot of the president's economic agenda is all through it.

But I’d love to hear what both of you guys think about this: I think that Venezuela was a lot about Russia and Chinese and as well as Iranian influence in the hemisphere. Arctic security, well, who's that about? That's about competition with China and Russia. Whose missiles are we worried about coming across the Arctic cap? Well, hey, Russian and Chinese. So I think that in practice, the competition is continuing.

I think this national security strategy fell into the trap that previous ones had fallen into as well, which is describing the world as we might like it to be. It was more aspirational, that maybe we don't have as big of a problem with these two revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass.

And this is maybe in part to get the big trade deal that the president wants with China. Which, by the way, I don't think he's going to get. So I think that's kind of the big difference is to shift back to more of a document that describes the world as some people in the administration might want it to be.

Kahl: Picking up on that: Jake, you oversaw the writing of the 2022 National Security Strategy. And there are obviously a lot of differences between the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. But actually, I think there's a lot of strategic continuity on the great power competition issue between the document that H.R. oversaw and the document that you oversaw. And I think H.R. is on to something when he notes that there is an element of great power competition in what the president appears to be doing in Venezuela or with Greenland. 

But it really frames the challenges that we face from China or Russia largely in hemispheric terms and homeland defense, as opposed to a kind of omnidirectional challenge that we have to deal with in the Indo-Pacific, in Europe, in the global south.

Can you talk a little bit about how much you think there's divergence here? Do you think it reflects a shift in grand strategy towards maybe a spheres of influence model or some other model? What do you think?

Sullivan: You know, H.R. makes a very good point that implicit in the rationale for both the “Donroe Doctrine,” this hemispheric doctrine, and in the attempt to take Greenland, implicit in that is great power competition with Russia and China. And I do think the Trump administration has kind of tried to retrofit his obsession with actually getting dominion over Greenland through the lens of the threat of Russia and China.

But fundamentally, when you step back from the most recent national security strategy and ask who is the biggest enemy, what is the biggest threat facing the United States, this document seems to say it's immigrants. It's migrants. And it says it not just with respect to the U.S. and a combination, the kind of intersection of migration and drugs. It also says it with respect to our closest allies in Europe.

It says the biggest threat to Europe is not Russia invading Ukraine or looming over the rest of Europe and our NATO allies, it's migrants. It's people coming to engage in what the document calls, quote “civilizational erasure.”

I think this is a huge shift. It's the first time I've seen in the national security strategy in the modern era a thumb on the scale, maybe a whole fist on the scale, with respect to political preferences in allied countries. It specifically calls out “patriotic parties,” i.e. right-wing parties in Europe, needing to be ascendant and come to the fore. And this essentially writes down on paper what J.D. Vance spoke in his speech at Munich last year. So I think that's a huge shift.

And then I think the second really big shift is the strategy that H.R. oversaw and the strategy that we carried forward in the Biden administration really saw the competition with China as a multi-spectrum competition across all domains, military, technological, economic, diplomatic, you name it.

The Trump administration really does seem to telescope the China challenge chiefly down to, as you pointed out, an economic lens. And that we can have a good relationship with them on everything else if we can work things out on the economics.

This leaves huge questions about things like, what is U.S. policy towards Taiwan? What will US policy be towards allies in the region on paper? The Indo-Pacific section looks pretty similar to what our strategy looked like. In practice, President Trump seems to really be saying to Japan and other countries, look, I'm not going to have your back to the same extent vis-a-vis China as previous administrations have.

So I think there's a huge amount of divergence here. I think it's a totally different way of looking at the world. And that chiefly comes back to this question of what they perceive to be the biggest threat to American security. And I think a lot of it has to do with this fusion of migration as both a domestic and foreign policy issue.

McMaster: If I could just comment on that?

Kahl: Go ahead!

McMaster: I just wanted to point out the kind of the geopolitical dimension of the migration problem as well. As Jake is alluding to it, this is a big issue in Europe. And I believe that Putin deliberately weaponized migrants. And of course, we have great evidence of this in specific countries, such as in Finland. And what he did in perpetuating, for example, the serial episodes of mass homicide in the Syrian civil war to create a huge migration crisis in Europe.

And then governments like in Germany—Angela Merkel's government—I don't think they dealt with it very well. And so what that allowed is Putin to accelerate his campaign of political subversion in Europe by supporting both far left and especially far right parties and create these kind of centripetal forces in Europe that diminish European will to stand up to Russian aggression.

And of course, we saw a similar dynamic here in the Western Hemisphere, with the Venezuelans to a certain extent weaponizing migration and illegal immigration in particular.

And the cartels really benefiting from that tremendously as they went in heavy on the business of human trafficking.

So, there is a huge, legitimate national security aspect of migration. But it also traces back to some of these larger geopolitical competitions.

Kahl: I think you've both hit on some really important things. I don't think there's any debate that enormous amounts of irregular migration can be potentially politically destabilizing in any country that's the recipient. And in fact, the rise of populism in the United States and in Europe can be directly traced back to a lot of anxieties about migration flows.

I do think, though, that what's striking to me is that previous national security strategies largely framed democracies as kind of our team and were critical of autocracies. The most recent document doesn't criticize autocracies at all, but does criticize fellow democracies, especially in Europe, largely by externalizing our own cultural and political conversations over wokeness and over what defines Western civilization. And I do think that is a notable shift.

But I want to get back to the China piece, and Jake, maybe start with you.

The national security documents the UNHR oversaw defined China as the most consequential strategic competitor. It's the only country in the world that can challenge the United States across the board—militarily, diplomatically, technologically, economically. Russia can blow up the world, but they can't dominate the world. China can dominate the world.

But as you said, Trump seems to be particularly focused basically through a political economy lens of the China challenge. Last year we saw a high stakes game of chicken between the United States and China over trade. Trump threatened 100 percent tariffs, but then he walked the average back to I think around 47 percent after Beijing choked off the supply of rare earths essential for our defense industrial base.

We've also seen reversals on technology export controls, including ones that started under the Trump administration and escalated under the Biden administration, most recently with Trump greenlighting exports of advanced NVIDIA H200 AI chips.

It looks like Trump and Xi Jinping are going to meet for a summit in April in Beijing. They'll probably meet again at the end of the year at the G20 here in the United States. My sense is that Trump is really angling for a “Big Beautiful Trade Bill” with China and that he may be willing to go even softer on tech and maybe even Taiwan in order to get it.

But I would love to hear where you think things are headed on the U.S.-China front.

Sullivan: Yeah, you're right. I think he would like the big beautiful trade bill with China. I think he's going to get a small, less beautiful trade bill with China. I think there will be some accommodation reached with respect to tariff levels and purchase commitments, all aimed at his objective of reducing the trade deficit. But I don't believe that it is going to address a lot of the underlying structural issues that China presents to the United States and the rest of the world. 

Their industrial overcapacity that is flooding the world with products on a non-commercial basis and undermining the ability of workers and businesses in the West to compete. I don't think that anything he does is going to get at that problem.

I think what you're basically going to see is some incremental and relatively tactical gains. And by the way, on the Chinese side, I think they don't want to put all their chips on President Trump because they recognize he's in his second term. He only has so long to go. He is unpredictable. They can only bet on him so much even within his term. And so I would expect something more modest, more tactical, more incremental this year.

The big question for me—and I alluded to this in my previous answer—I think the Chinese are interested in getting President Trump to say something different about Taiwan than previous presidents have said. Something about peaceful reunification or opposing independence, some formula that moves the needle in their direction in terms of American policy.

And I think President Trump might be tempted to do that, honestly. And I think there would be reverberating impacts from that in terms of the confidence of our partners in Taiwan and the confidence of our allies in the region. So I think that's something for all of us to watch very closely in this meeting.

I should also note that I'm hearing from contacts in China that they actually expect the possibility of up to four meetings this year. There's the the Trump trip to Beijing. A Xi trip to the States that would be disconnected from the G20. Then China is hosting the APEC summit and the United States is hosting the G20.

So there is actually the possibility that we could have four separate leader meetings in 2026 alone. So, a lot of opportunity for everything I just said to be proven totally wrong.

Kahl: Ha! H.R., thoughts?

McMaster: Well, that's exactly what the president wants is really the phase two trade deal he didn't get in Trump I.

If you can picture Xi Jinping as the Peanuts character Lucy and President Trump as Charlie Brown, I think that's what's going to happen again. She's going to, you know, “Xi” is going to move the football.

So, I think what you're going to see ultimately is President Trump backing in to the kind of competitive approach that he adopted in Trump I. And it was an element of continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations.

I think what's different from Trump I to today is that a lot of the people who were actually pretty productive interlocutors for us, like Liu He in Trump I . . . they're gone. And Xi Jinping has really, with these purges you've seen inside of China, has all his people who were very hard-line, and by the way, who I think because of Wang Huning and some of the people around Xi Jinping, really, really believe that the West is in decline, that we are weak, that we're decadent, that we're divided. So I think Xi Jinping's going be feeling it when President Trump goes there in April.

He's going to feel like this is President Trump going to supplicate to the emperor. And the visuals will be designed to do that, which I don't think President Trump's going to like on the back end.

So, anyway, I think a lot could happen with these meetings and in between these meetings. But I think ultimately the president will be disabused of this idea that China will significantly curtail its unfair trade and economic practices and essentially the form of economic warfare it's waging against us.

Sullivan: Colin, if I can just reinforce this really important point I think H.R. just made. The Chinese leadership has this phrase, “the East is rising, the West is declining.” And by the East, they mean China, and by the West, they mean the United States. And they really believe that the U.S. is in secular decline and that a lot of that has to do with our political dysfunction and their view that democracy simply can't succeed in the 21st century.

And it's interesting that last year, In this episode you described of Trump slapping on the tariffs and China responding with the rare earth export controls, the lesson that Xi Jinping took from that is that China holds the high cards. That America has vulnerabilities. That China has a lot of leverage. So, you have both at a tactical and a broad structural and strategic level a real confidence emanating from Beijing right now.

And then you combine that with the fact that they they are uncertain about exactly where Trump is going to go and about this other point H.R. made, which is that Trump could easily shift from more conciliatory to a more competitive position between one meeting and another, between one year and another.

So I think all of that does add up to China feeling it doesn't have to give a lot. It also doesn't want to give too much that kind of puts it on the hook for an unpredictable president. And I think that's the dynamic that's going to really shape the engagements that we see over the course of this year.

Where I'm not sure I agree with H.R. is I'm not sure that Trump wants to move into a really competitive posture here. It seems to me that he's gonna accept something that isn't Phase Two. That short of that, I think he may end up declaring victory on that and saying, I've made peace with Xi and China and the U.S. are good and I'm reducing the trade deficit and so forth. 

So I'm not as convinced that he's going to move to the same kind of competitive strategy that he pursued when H.R. was in the seat.

Kahl: I mean, think one other continuity in the approaches embodied in the two national security strategies you two oversaw was the recognition that in today's day and age, foreign policy is increasingly a team sport and that we need our allies alongside us. It doesn't mean they don't need to be spending more on their own defense. It doesn't mean that there aren't complaints about them not doing enough.

But every single problem we face, we typically do it alongside our closest treaty allies in Europe and Japan. And not the least of which, trying to think through the China challenge, negotiating with China from a position of collective strength. I know that's something both of you have talked about.

It speaks to, what is the health of our alliances right now? We've already talked about Greenland. We've talked about the civilizational erasure issue, maybe starting with you, Jake, and then H.R.

How bad are things right now in U.S. alliances? Is there a meaningful difference between our alliances in Europe and our alliances in Asia on that scorecard? What do think?

Sullivan: It feels pretty bad in the transatlantic alliance, at least at the level of mood and vibe. Whether just at the level of structure, the reality of our shared interests and the reality of our interdependence, it's been shaken so badly that it's irreparable. I'm less convinced of that. I think a lot of damage has been done, but there still just is the reality that we are deeply tied to our European allies.

Asia is an interesting case because as I mentioned, both in words, the description of the strategy towards our Asian allies is similar to Biden and to Trump I. And by and large, what you see from the administration in terms of how it tries to sustain those alliances with Japan, Korea, and Australia in particular, but the Philippines as well, there's more continuity there.

But there was one episode that really stood out to me as concerning. And that was when the Prime Minister of Japan, the Iron Lady, Takaichi, made a comment when she was testifying before the Japanese Parliament about how Taiwan's an existential threat. And I think the technical term is China freaked out about it, imposed a bunch of coercive responses. And rather than President Trump saying—as I think President Biden would have done, or maybe even President Trump in the first term—calling up Japan and saying, we've got your back, President Trump called Xi Jinping and said, hey, what do you make of all this? Xi said to him, hey, you better call the Japanese and tell them to cool it. And Trump did that.

And I think in Japan right now, they read that as some lack of confidence that, in fact, the U.S. will have their back and some concern in quarters in Japan that they're going to have to make their own accommodation with China over time.

I think that is a dynamic for us to watch. That's by no means a foregone conclusion. I think we could end up seeing a quite robust allied strategy under this administration in Asia. But it was a bit of a warning sign for me and something that we should continue to pay close attention to. 

Does he sort of see the whole approach to allies as being China first, allies second, or does he see it the other way around? And I think only time will tell over the course of 2026.

Kahl: H.R., do you think that it's mostly about vibes, or do think there's something deeper and more structural going on here in terms of tensions and fragility within our alliances?

McMaster: Well,I agree with Jake that the structural factors are still in favor of strong alliance. Who's gonna lead Europe without the United States? France? I don't think so. Who's gonna sign up for another European country leading Europe? Nobody will at this moment.

But what you're seeing I think are sub-regional, tighter groups within the alliance emerging. For example between the Nordic and the Baltic states and Poland.

And a lot of that coalescing, as well as increased defense spending—up to five percent and three and half percent on a hard military capabilities—is based on some doubts about U.S. reliability and an associated erosion of trust. I don't think that's good. That's not good.

And the reason it's not good and the reason why not backing up Takaichi-san is not good is that it is the perception of weakness that is provocative to our adversaries. And so I think President Trump was right to demand more defense spending, but in the kind gratuitous insult category or in not backing up Takaichi, or maybe what is going through now, the 20 billion dollar arms sale to Taiwan—that's a really important thing to track and the delivery of those capabilities to Taiwan.

And that’s why Ukraine's important. Ukraine is important because really what Putin wants, what he thinks he can get, is he can get the United States to support terms for a ceasefire that are unacceptable to the Ukrainians and the Europeans and to use that gap to break apart the alliance. This is what Putin's dreaming about. So I don't think we should do anything to encourage him or to encourage Xi Jinping vis-a-vis Taiwan.

I'm an optimist, right? I mean, we could wind up with Europe spending a heck of lot more in defense, taking more responsibility for their defense like Japan is now, like South Korea is now, and then rebuilding that bridge of trust.

So it could be the best of both worlds. I hope, I hope. Maybe even beginning here in North America with a better relationship with the Canadians. I hope that the president will be convinced of this, that he will see that it is the perception of weakness in our alliance here at home with the vitriolic partisan discourse we see and so forth that provokes our adversaries and could transform them into enemies and lead to war.

Sullivan: H.R., before we make peace with Canada, we have to beat them for the Olympic hockey gold.

McMaster: Hey, the women, the women's hockey team did a great job, didn't they?

Sullivan: That’s true! That’s true. They shut them out.

McMaster: I mean, not that I want to rub anything in with my Canadian friends right now. I mean, I don't want to. I'm sorry I even mentioned it! Sorry I mentioned it.

Sullivan: Sure.

Kahl: You know, H.R., you did use that word trust. And, you know, I think for our listeners, at some level, America's extended security commitments to our allies are always . . . it's always been kind of irrational, right? Because it basically it commits the United States to be willing to commit national suicide to defend other countries. And there's a kind of fundamental irrationality at the heart of that. And what solves that problem is trust. in the United States.

And this is actually where I think like the vibe and the mood matters, not just because it erodes trust in the moment, but I do worry a little bit that we're getting into this place where our allies will think that they can't trust the United States for any longer than four to eight year increments based on, who's in power and what their position is.

And that's a really different mindset than the kind of confidence that there was a bipartisan commitment underlying our alliances.

McMaster: Jake, I love to hear what you think about this too. Two things, really. There is this movement toward retrenchment. It actually cuts across both political parties. The frustration among many Americans that President Trump tapped into was the fact that we were covering Europe's defense bills and Europe really accounting for about 19% of the world's GDP and 50% of the world's social spending. So American taxpayers are like, hey, why are we underwriting defense and covering their defense bills and thereby indirectly underwriting their social programs?

And then the other aspect of this are the deep frustrations associated with the unanticipated length and difficulty in the wars in Afghanistan, I would say in particular in Iraq, and the belief that we really can't achieve good outcomes abroad anyway. And therefore, we should just focus on our stuff here at home. We got a lot of stuff to work on ourselves.

And so that sentiment, I don't think is going away. And what is necessary is for American leadership to explain to the American people how problems that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. And how much cheaper it is to prevent a war than have to fight one

I think making those kinds of arguments for investments in active foreign policy, diplomatic efforts, but also sustained commitments to capable U.S. forces abroad operating as part of these alliances, which have prevented great power conflict for 80 years. Why would we want to get rid of that?

But I think we can't take that argument for granted anymore. We have to make that argument as clearly as we can to the engaged American public.

Kahl: You know, H.R., you mentioned American public exhaustion with the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we speak, Trump is marshaling what he describes as an armada, also known as a single aircraft carrier with a second aircraft carrier on the way and some air defense and strike assets moving into the Middle East to put coercive pressure on Iran to cut a deal.

My own view is there's probably a deal on the table, a narrow nuclear deal, one even that Trump could frame as better than the deal that the Obama administration got.

Do you think there will be a deal? Do you think that there will be a deal on the nuclear file? Something that covers Iran's ballistic missiles, its proxy activities? Bibi Netanyahu was just in Washington this week to try to convince Trump not to buckle and accept a bad deal.

Do you think there's going be a deal with Iran? If so, what type of deal?

McMaster: I don't think there's going to be a deal with Iran. And the reason is that the Trump administration will not accept anything short, in my view, of no enrichment, probably giving up the 60% of enrichment for that they already have. They still have it. It'll have to carry over to missiles for sure. And it will carry over to support for proxies for the terrorist organizations they've been supporting.

And I think the recognition is that the real downside of the 2015 deal was the degree to which that it allowed the IRGC to fill its coffers and to double and in some cases triple its stipends to the terrorist organizations and militias across the region, really build up that ring of fire around Israel so they could light it on October 7th.

I think a lot of people in retrospect look back to the 2015 deal and say, we got Ayatollah Khamenei up off the mat. And I think that that kind of an argument is going to prevail among Trump's advisors.

And as you know, what Trump really tries to do is always try to get a deal first, right? This is what happened before Operation Midnight Hammer. He gave him 60 days, didn't get it, struck. He sent Grinnell to Venezuela. Hey, maybe we can get a deal, but didn't get a deal, and then took action to arrest Maduro. So I think that's the way it's going to play out.

These guys just murdered. I mean, they murdered 30,000 people in 48 hours.

What I would love to see is a hell of a lot more diplomatic effort to isolate those bastards and to kick out every Iranian embassy in the world and show that we cannot tolerate that degree of mass murder and the horrors inflicted on their own people.

So yeah, I think there's gonna be a series of strikes that are probably aimed to diminish the regime's capacity to repress its own people, but also to go after the efforts to reconstitute the missile and the nuclear programs. But then also to maybe preemptively take out what the Iranian regime would use as a response, IRGC Navy, as well as drone locations and factories and that sort of thing. I think the chance of that happening are probably like 80% of a strike that goes in that direction.

Kahl: Jake, you have obviously your own personal experience with diplomacy with the Iranians. What's your view?

Sullivan: I'm more like 60%. I think there's a higher percentage chance that Trump looks at a deal that is going to feel quite a bit like the 2015 deal in many respects and say, hey, that's better than military action that doesn't necessarily have a very clear purpose to it.

What's interesting to me is why are we here even talking about the nuclear program right now in this way? It's because of a chain of events that was set off by President Trump actually going on social media and saying, if Iran kills its own people, I will hit them. And then saying to the protesters who went out in the streets incredibly bravely across every province of Iran and said, help is on the way.

And I talked to a Washington Post journalist yesterday who covers Iran, who made the point that, no, they didn't go in the streets because of Trump, but they definitely saw what he said and thought that America was going to have their back. And then the regime, as H.R. just pointed out, absolutely brutally, on an industrial scale, massacred its own citizens and put it down.

So now we're in this weird situation where the whole impetus behind military action was about supporting the protestors. And it's now kind of shifted to being coercive towards trying to get a nuclear deal, which just goes to show you all of this is a bit kind of mushy.

If we did take military action, you have to ask to what end? We did it last year. President Trump said the nuclear program was, quote, “totally obliterated.” Now we're talking about the nuclear program again six months later. So we could hit them again. Yes, we could degrade them. It's unlikely we're going to cause regime change through the air. So I'm a bit confused about what this military action is going to accomplish other than just continue to create a circumstance where every few months we have to go back with military force again and again.

Whereas if you got a deal, you put the program in a box you get verification and you're not constantly in this position where you have to be lining up to take out enriched material or centrifuges or missiles or what have you.

So I would hope that President Trump would look seriously at the diplomatic option. I think he might. Although if H.R. is 80-20, there'll be strikes, I still think it's more likely than not there'll be strikes, but I'm closer to 60-40.

Kahl: I do think you've hit on a key question, though, which is that I just don't think they've resolved internally—they certainly haven't shared with any of us—what the objective of the strikes would be. Would it be to degrade the missile and nuclear program? Would it be to hit the IRGC? Would it be to destabilize the regime?

Sullivan: Or just punish them, ultimately punish them for the massacres. Just you did that and we're going to  hit you for it. Which emotionally, I understand. I mean, who doesn't wanna hit these guys for something like that? But strategically, I think that's more questionable.

Kahl: So we don't know if regime change is the goal in Iran. We do know that we've had not a regime change, but a government and leadership change in Venezuela because of U.S. military action. Jake, maybe starting with you, any thoughts about what the end game is in Venezuela for the Trump administration?

Sullivan: I'm very interested in what H.R. has to say about this. This is unusual. I'm not sure there is a modern historical analog to replacing a leader, then getting the leader who is the number two to step in and essentially agree to let the United States more or less call the shots from offshore under the threat of further military action if she doesn't do what we ask of her. And it seems like this is not ultimately a long-term sustainable strategy.

But it has worked for a few weeks at least. And I think the reason it's worked is because we pretty much only asked them for one big thing, which is let American oil companies go in there and exploit Venezuela's oil resources. And by the way, that works for the regime in Caracas quite well, because they'll get their cut. And getting their cut will allow them to continue to entrench themselves in power.

The question for me is, at some point, is the Trump administration going to say, hey, actually, we need some kind of democratic transition here. I sort of thought they would head in that direction. Although the way they're kind of pushing putting down Machado, the main opposition leader, suggests that they may just be happy with the status quo. But it's an unusual situation. It is occupation by joystick, occupation by remote control, and so far they have gotten the regime to acquiesce. But I think that's largely because what they're asking of the regime suits the regime just fine and is quite limited. I just don't know if that is a tenable situation to play out over the longer term.

Kahl: I mean, there is this old phrase, “gunboat diplomacy." This is a little bit of gunboat governance. H.R., where is gunboat governance going in Venezuela?

McMaster: Well, it's not really it's it's not gunboat diplomacy as much as it is, think, coercive diplomacy or what the famous and fantastic, late Stanford professor Alexander George called “forceful persuasion.” 

And so I think what we're testing are the limits. You know, he has a great book also called The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, And Jake, we're asking him to do a heck of lot more than just, you know, let the oil companies back in. It's release political prisoners. It's kick the Cubans and the Russians and the Chinese out. Right?

And to put into place. This is Rubio's four points, a plan for a political transition. Now, will the Chavistas fire themselves? Probably not. So what it really has to be, as you're alluded to as well, is the U.S. and other countries in partnership with the Venezuelan opposition

Which, by the way, I was with members of the opposition last week. They're very optimistic about this. I mean, they really feel like it could work. I think what they're envisioning is kind of a Polish-type transition. Because after the cover of the Soviet Union was pulled back and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, then you had the Solidarity Movement, which had been bolstered and gained strength in partnership with the Catholic Church, who sat down at a round table with the communists. And the communists came up, you know, and they came to a decision on how to transition to a new form of government.

In Venezuela, you have the benefit of the constitution still being there, you know, to be resurrected. And you have a history of democratic governance.

So, you know, I think you're right to be skeptical, Jake, on this, but I think that there's a chance here if we stick to it, if we keep the pressure on, but I think it might take more than we've got on the table now to convince the Chavistas to essentially fire themselves.

Sullivan: First of all H.R., those are good points. I wasn't even really trying to express skepticism. It's just we haven't really tried something like this before. So it's interesting to see how it will play out. And I do think it's somewhat tenuous.

Good point on the political prisoners. And I think there's been positive news on that. Although we have seen that movie before with Venezuela where they do releases and then they round people back up.

McMaster: They've already had that prominent re-arrest, right?

Sullivan: Exactly. They're already doing that. So I'm a bit more skeptical of how much of that is theater and how much that is real.

That's why I kind of zeroed in. I assume this democratic transition has ultimately got to be a part of it. This is where pulling that off, the solidarity analogy is an interesting one, which I want to take a closer look at. Pulling that off, really challenging. And I have been struck by the degree to which they have kind of treated Maria Carina Machado as a nuisance as opposed to an ally in all this. But that may be public posturing and quietly they're doing things that we don't fully understand.

That to me is ultimately the test of how this will all play out. Does it move in that direction or do we lock in a longer term scenario where you essentially have a dictatorship sitting in Caracas essentially doing resource extraction deals with the United States?

I think there's a good possibility that that's where we are a year or two from now, but let's see. I think it's definitely worth watching closely because it is a novel model for the exercise of American power.

McMaster: And hey, we ought to say it's a righteous endeavor based on the nature of Maduro's regime and the Chavistas. I mean hell, they drove 8 million Venezuelans out of the country and destroyed that country. 

Sullivan: Absolutely.

McMaster: So let's hope.

Sullivan: But all of those guys other than the top dog, they're all still there, wetting their beaks and doing their thing.

Kahl: Well, and this is really the dilemma that we'll have to see unfold in 2026, which is: things seem relatively stable by remote control now because essentially the same folks can continue to corruptly acquire rents off of economic activity. And as Jake, as you said, know, oil deals go through, they'll get their cut.

When you're talking about a democratic transition, suddenly some of these guys are going to face the prospect of going to jail. And a lot of these guys have guns. And that's, I think, the dilemma that the administration is going to have to deal with if they do approach this.

Well, listen, there's a bunch of other things we could have talked about. 2026 is going to be a big year, I think, for Ukraine. It's going to be a big year as it relates to the disruptive implications of artificial intelligence on the economy. There are a lot of other things. So I hope to have the two of you back on to talk about those, not to mention whatever else crazy happens in the world between now and the end of the year.

But I wanted to end my first podcast hosting World Class with a bit of an homage to Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein runs a great podcast. He always asks his guests for three book recommendations at the end, which is awesome because I'm an academic. There are books all around me, but I don't have any time to read a single book these days, let alone three. So I'm going to ask you a different question, which is what is one article you would recommend our listeners read to understand the world?

McMaster: Jake, go first, you go first.

Sullivan: All right. I just recently read a piece in The New Yorker called “What is Claude?” which is about how Anthropic is really actually trying to understand the nature of this artificial intelligence capability we are developing and trying to look inside the black box with all of these emergent properties. How do we characterize it? What is happening in there? What do we understand? What don't we understand?

I think it's a pretty accessible way to get at some of the really elemental questions about artificial intelligence and what exactly we are dealing with here. So, I would highly recommend that to everyone and a thousand other articles besides, but that's one.

Kahl: Alright, H.R., how about you?

McMaster: I'd like to recommend an essay by my colleague here at Hoover, Stephen Kotkin, in the December issue of Foreign Affairs called “Weakness of the Strongmen.” And if I could do my Kotkin impersonation, it's basically about strongmen being dependent on five things, five things to stay in power.

And then he talks about the five elements of authoritarian control, but also he explores how exercising those tools of authoritarian control create weaknesses that can be exploited. Great essay.

Kahl: Awesome. Well, I encourage everybody to go check those two articles out. H.R., Jake, thanks so much for joining the podcast. And make sure to check out Jake and H.R.'s podcast too. 

Sullivan: Thank you.

McMaster: Thanks guys.

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's happening in the world and why. 

TRANSCRIPT

McFaul: Hey everyone, you're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanfo rd University. I'm your host, or maybe I should say I'm your co-host, or maybe I should say this is the last time I'll be hosting World Class from Stanford University. Because as listeners and followers of FSI’s news may know, after eleven years, I just stepped down as the director a few weeks ago and I've handed the baton to my guest today, Colin Kahl, who's the brand new director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

And it is fantastic, Colin, that you agreed to take on this assignment. This is another form, I consider, of public service just like what you've done for the U.S. government and the United States of America.

Colin, as you're going to hear in a few minutes, is the perfect mix of scholar and practitioner that we so value here at FSI. And we are really lucky that you are taking up this assignment.

So Colin, welcome to World Class where everybody will be listening to you forthcoming for, I hope, many, many years.

Kahl: Thanks Mike, it's a real pleasure to be with you and most especially thank you for your tremendous decade plus—eleven years—of service to FSI and the Stanford community. And I look forward to continuing to work with you as you transition to the next thing. And we should talk about that too. But it's great to be on the pod with you.

McFaul: Glad to be here. And just so everybody knows, I stepped down from FSI, but I'm not retiring from Stanford. I still have my various day jobs here. We can come back to that a little bit later.

But Colin, why don't you just tell our listeners and our viewers a little bit about your road to this present position.

Kahl: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in the East Bay in Richmond, California. I applied to Stanford as an undergrad, didn't get in. Applied again as a graduate student, didn't get in. So I got educated elsewhere. I went to the University of Michigan, which is a great school.

McFaul: Very fine institution.

Kahl: And then I went to Columbia University where I got my PhD in political science, focused on international relations and conflict studies. I did my PhD work in the 90s when the field of international relations was trying to figure out what the field even meant after the end of the Cold War.

So it was an exciting and very kind of plastic moment to be doing scholarly work.

I then started my first teaching job at the University of Minnesota in 2000. And of course, a year after that, 9/11 happened. And it was a terrible event for the United States and for the world. For those of us who lived in New York City—I did my graduate work there—it was especially painful.

And it really drove me to want to figure out a way to both do the academic side of understanding the world, but also see if there was a way to engage in public service. So my fifth year at the University of Minnesota, I actually got a fellowship through the Council on Foreign Relations . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . that put me at the Pentagon for a year and a half. This was during the George W. Bush administration. Don Rumsfeld was still the Secretary of Defense. I worked there for a year and a half. I kind of caught the bug, the Washington bug.

McFaul: What was your portfolio back then, Colin? Just remind everybody.

Kahl: So I worked in a small office called the Stability Operations Office. It was only 24 of us. worked within the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. It had historically been called the Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs Office

McFaul: Right, right, I remember that. They changed it, right.

Kahl: But Rumsfeld was not a fan of peacekeeping, so they changed it to ‘stability operations.’

But at the time, most of what our office did was try to help the U.S. military reform itself in the face of the struggles that the U.S. military was facing in Iraq and Afghanistan with the stabilization missions there.

There's a lot of dark humor at the Pentagon, but we sometimes joked that the 24 of us were doing stability operations while the other 24,000 people in the building were doing instability operations.

McFaul: [laughing] Instability operations, yeah, that’s right.

Kahl: But anyway, it was totally exciting. You know, we were there when when U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine was being revised and a bunch of other things.

So that was 2005, 2006. I kind of caught the bug and decided to try to stay in Washington. So I actually took a job at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service where they were kind enough to give me tenure and I taught in the security studies program there for a decade.

McFaul: Let's just . . . hold on, hold on. Let's be clear. They were not ‘kind enough’ to give you tenure; you earned tenure. Nobody gives tenure anywhere. Congratulations that you landed that job.

Kahl: So, I was in the security studies program there for ten years, about a half that time I served in the Obama administration. We served together . . .

McFaul: Together, yes!

Kahl: . . . in the first few years. I was back at the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the drawdown of our forces from Iraq during the Arab Spring.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: During the first flare up of Israel-Iran tensions over Iran's nuclear program. By the way, none of that was my fault, but I was there when all that stuff happened.

And then I went back to Georgetown for a few years and then I got pulled back into the Obama administration at the end to work at the White House as a deputy assistant to the president and as then-vice president Biden's national security advisor. So I was there for Russia's first invasion of Ukraine . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . and the Central American migration crisis and tensions in the South China Sea and the campaign against the Islamic State and the Iran nuclear deal. A lot of interesting things.

And then, when Trump was elected the first time, Mike, you reached out to me with this amazing opportunity at Stanford, the Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow chair that I currently occupy. Applied for the job and got it. It was an opportunity to come back to Stanford. I’ve sat at CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation here at FSI. And I was the co-director of CISAC for a couple of years.

And then last but not least, when Biden was elected president, he asked me to serve as the undersecretary of defense for policy back at DoD, which is essentially the number three civilian and senior policy advisor to the secretary. And I did that for the two first two and a half years of the Biden administration.

Also also very interesting times: fall of Afghanistan . . .

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: . . . Russia's further invasion of Ukraine, rising tensions with China, dealing with the aftermath of COVID, lot of changes in the world.

So anyway, I'm glad to be back at Stanford. I've been back since the summer of 2023, and I'm excited to try to fill the very big shoes that you've left at FSI after eleven years.

McFaul: Well, let's talk about the future in a minute, but just two follow-up questions on your history. You've had lots of government jobs you just described. I can't think of anybody that's had a more diversified set of experiences in national security. We are lucky to have you here.

Tell us about the best day of any of those jobs and tell us about the worst day and maybe reverse that. Worst day first, best day second.

Kahl: So first of all, I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve my country. I believe in it strongly. I've served in Republican administrations and Democratic administrations. I've worked for two Republican secretaries of defense and two Democratic secretaries of defense. So I think I've demonstrated my nonpartisan bona fides in how I've served my country.

And I just want to mention that because I think it's important.

McFaul: Yes, it is important.

Kahl: Because, of course, FSI is a nonpartisan place.

Worst day and best day: in a sense, it's almost the same. There was no more harrowing experience than the collapse of Kabul.

I was actually at the NIH getting a medical treatment when I got a text message from the secretary's chief of staff that I needed to hurry back to the Pentagon. So I literally pulled an IV out of my arm and raced back to the Pentagon because Kabul fell.

And obviously that was a tremendously terrible event for Afghanistan. It was a particularly harrowing way for the 20-year U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to end. But it also put us on the clock. You know, we had basically 17 days before the deadline for all American forces to be out of Afghanistan, and we suddenly had to do a lot of things.

We had to flood forces back into the country to occupy an airport that was now in hostile Taliban territory when the Taliban took over Kabul. We had to secure that airport. We sent five or six thousand soldiers and Marines to that airfield. We had postured them in the region previously to be able to do that, but we had to get them there.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: And then we then had to oversee the evacuation of 125,000 human beings in two weeks, which had never happened in human history and no other country in the history of the world would have been capable of doing. And it was pretty horrible.

McFaul: Yeah.

Kahl: A lot of terrible human tragedies. Obviously, we got a lot of people out. A lot of people weren't able to get out. There was the terrible ISIS bombing that killed 13 of our brave service members. Toward the end of the evacuation, there was an errant U.S. strike on what we thought was an ISIS operator that turned out to be an aid worker and his kids. It was horrible.

But I'm also incredibly proud of what we were able to do. I mean, in the macro sense, because we were able to project our power back into Afghanistan, lock down that airfield and get all of those people to safety, including the family members of some Afghans who worked for me. We were able to get a lot of people out.

We were able to bring them to bases and facilities that didn't even exist when the crisis . . . I mean the bases existed, but the facilities to house these people in the Gulf and in Europe and back here in the continental United States . . . the amount of diplomacy that required, the amount of logistics by the U.S. military that it required. It was an unbelievable operation.

And so it was terrible. But it was also an extraordinary demonstration of what the United States was capable of doing even at these dark moments.

McFaul: That's a great way to put it together. I would guess we would not have been able to do that if we did not have NATO allies and bases in that part of the world, or is that incorrect? I don't know the logistics of that part of the world.

Kahl: If anything, it's an understatement. I think one of the things that distinguishes the United States from every other superpower or global power in history is the depth and breadth of our network of allies and partners. At the heart of that are our treaty allies in the NATO alliance, but also in the Indo-Pacific region, so think South Korea, Japan, Australia.

McFaul: All of them, right.

Kahl: But we also have very close security partnerships in the Middle East. And so literally it would not have been possible to fly aircraft into Afghanistan, fly people out from Afghanistan into places like Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia. But then we brought them to Germany and Spain and other U.S. bases in Europe. And then we brought them back to bases here in the United States.

And that network, literally that network made it possible. And had we not had those allies and partners when that happened, we couldn't have done what we did. We couldn't have done any of it. We couldn't have gotten any of our people out.

And so that really is like some of the secret sauce to America's power and influence in the world. And it remains the case that we have more allies and partners than any other country in history.

But it's also the case that those alliances and partnerships are probably more strained than they've been in my lifetime.

McFaul: So, one other historical question about you. Why did you come to Stanford? I mean, you've got this great job at Georgetown. You obviously are connected to the policy community. We're far away out here. Tell us about that decision.

Kahl: Part of it is I grew up in the Bay Area. Part of it is that, mean, Georgetown is a remarkable place, but Stanford's one of the two or three best universities in the world. We had a great community of scholars out here. And a lot of the issues that I'm particularly passionate about now—especially the intersection of technology and geopolitics— I mean, this is ground zero for a lot of that.

And so it was for a mix of kind of lifestyle reasons and professional reasons. And it's been awesome.

McFaul: Well, that's a great segue to what I wanted to ask you next, which is about the big agenda items. I mean, FSI has a lot going on: we have lots of centers here, as our listeners know, because we've had many guests from all, I think all of our centers over the time I've been here.

But you've got some particular things that you want to focus on. I know, because I talked to people that were part of the selection committee, that that was what was most impressive about you, is that you have a big agenda. Tell us about that agenda, Colin.

Kahl: As your longtime listeners undoubtedly know, FSI is an interesting place because FSI Central, where you were the director until three weeks ago, and now I sit, essentially sits over nine main research centers that cover everything from democracy to international security to regions like Asia and Europe to issues like technology and defense innovation, food security, global health.

And the breadth of this place is extraordinary. But it's also a highly decentralized place. Yes, we oversee the centers, but in many respects, the centers are kind of quasi-autonomous nation states.

McFaul: Exactly, exactly.

Kahl: So this isn't about trying to micro-manage our centers; that would be a fool's errand. It is actually, though, trying to look for ways to have the whole of FSI add up to more than the sum of its parts. And to look for synergies across our centers on really big questions.

You took the helm of FSI, I believe, back in 2015?

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: To state the obvious, the world in 2026 is a lot different than it was in 2015. And so, FSI has to adapt to that world. And I think there are four really big questions of the moment that I think FSI really needs to be impactful on.

One is that we're in this new age of geopolitics. And it's become kind of trite to note that, you know, we have a resurgence of great power politics and competition between the United States and China and Russia and other major powers. But it actually runs deeper than that.

The distribution of power in general across the world is fundamentally different than it was 15, 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. The United States remains the world's most consequential actor, but China is nipping at our heels as a global superpower. And while Russia can't dominate the world, Russia can blow up the world. And we also know that countries like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran are working more closely together.

At the same time, the traditional role that the United States has played in the world since World War II or since the end of the Cold War is changing. And our relationship with our traditional allies is changing. And I think anybody who kind of paid attention to the World Economic Forum in Davos over the last few days heard speeches from the Prime Minister of Canada referring to the rupture in the international order.

And there's just the sense that things are fundamentally changing. And some of that may be a direct reaction to some of the policies of President Trump. But frankly, I think a lot of it is structural, that the policies of the current administration are as much an artifact as they are a cause even if they are accelerating some of the structural dynamics.

And then of course, there's big chunks of the world that doesn't want to be on anybody's team.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: That wants to be non-aligned and multi-aligned. A lot of countries in the so-called ‘global south’ fall in that category. So we should be studying this new era of geopolitics

I would encourage you to say more about how you plan to study it, because I know you have a really fascinating project in this space that brings FSI and Hoover scholars together on some of these questions.

Kahl: So, one issue is the new geopolitics. The other though is what I call the new techno politics. It's actually a term I think Ian Bremmer coined.

But it's not just the notion that technologies like AI, biotech, quantum, space, clean energy are transforming our world, but also that the actors at the heart of these innovations are these multinational corporations that if their market cap was translated into GDP,

they would rank as G20 nations, right? When you're Nvidia and you have $5 trillion

McFaul: That's a great point.

Kahl: Like that would be the top half of the G20. But it's not just that. They have global presence. And for a lot of these companies, they have near sovereign control over the environments through which we live our lives.

McFaul: That's a great point.

Kahl: So, think cloud service providers, social media platforms, but also the infrastructure: undersea cables, low earth orbit constellations. And all of these things are under regulated spaces. So, it's not just that the technology is changing the world, but the companies are international actors. And again, where else should we be studying that but here at Stanford?

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: The third thing is there's a broader category of what people might refer to as existential risk. Nuclear weapons and the salience of nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance. For the first time, we're entering a world in which there are not two but three nuclear peers as China quadruples its nuclear arsenal. India and Pakistan are at loggerheads. They both have nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran are at loggerheads over Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. North Korea is expanding its arsenal. And arms control is breaking down.

So we know that the nuclear age is back with a vengeance. Simultaneously, we're facing the climate crisis. We all lived through COVID. It won't be the last pandemic, unfortunately, I think, in our lifetimes. There are other biosecurity risks emanating from emerging technologies. And then there's also the possibility that technologies like AI will produce their own existential externalities in the form of things like rogue super intelligence or other things.

So we should be studying those things. And then lastly, I think we have to be studying the future of global democracy because democracy is under siege around the world from revisionist authoritarian powers like Russia and China. But it's also eroding in many traditional democracies that are becoming increasingly illiberal.

And advanced democracies no longer agree on what democracy is. A big divide between the United States and Europe at the moment is both laying claim to being democratic, but in fundamentally different ways.

And so the point just is, we have 150 researchers at FSI, 50 of them are tenured faculty, many of them were working at the intersection of these issues. I want to support that and I also want them to do more together.

McFaul: That sounds fantastic. That is the agenda for our moment. And I think you're right that we have some people that work on some of those things, but we have holes to fill. And I wish you success in doing that to compliment what we have here, but also to try to get these different scholars that work on these different pieces to understand how they are intertwined, right?

The future of global democracy is also highly impactful on geopolitics and vice versa. I think that is a great agenda for FSI for the future.

I mean, on my own piece: I would just say in terms of what I want to work on, I have a lot of interests, but the main research one is I just did finish this book, as listeners will know, called Autocrats vs. Democrats, China, Russia . . .

Kahl: Available now!

McFaul: Available now! Available while you're listening on your phone. You can get it, and it's highly discounted now. And I'm going to tell you a little story about that actually, Colin. I don't think we've talked about it. The original title was ‘American Renewal.’ That was like two or three years ago. Then it switched the title to ‘Autocrats vs. Democrats.’ But the subtitle, until just a few months ago was ‘China, Russia and the New Global Order.’ The now title is ‘China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder,’ reflecting a year ago what I thought was going to be a pretty tumultuous time. And I think I underestimated how tumultuous it is and your agenda is addressing that.

But I would say two things that I want to do here at FSI. One is, when I was working on this book, I knew a lot about the Cold War, so there's a debate, are we in the Cold War or not? And I addressed that. My answer is yes and no.

But I knew a lot about the Cold War. I know quite a bit about Russia. I know a fair bit about America and America's place in the world, both from teaching and being in the government. But I had to learn a lot about China. And I've been going to China for three decades, but I'm not an expert. It took me a long time. That's why it took me eight years to finish this book

But there were two big gaps that I saw at the end of it. One is we have a lot of great people working on capabilities of these various great powers. We have a really great literature on intentions of America, Russia, and China. And big debates, by the way, on the intentions, especially on the China side. I would say comparing the debate in the Russia field to China field, there's a lot more consensus in the Russia field about intentions of Putin's Russia than there is of Xi's China, and that's a good thing. I think that debate is unsettled and we should keep interrogating our hypotheses.

But what I was really struck by is very little examination. And with some exceptions, I'm looking at my shelf. There's some really great books. But there's not that many books that look at impact of this competition on other countries in the world. And when you do find great books—there's a great one on China and Zambia, for instance—it's just China and its impact on Zambia. There's no Europe in that story. There's no Russia in that story. There's no America in that story. So that's the academic kind of research project that I want to do here with Liz Economy from the Hoover Institution, Jim Goldgeier—he's going to cover the European part. And that'll take many, many years because we want to really get into the nitty gritty of these countries. And we want to find country experts to be the main people that write that.

The second part in my book—you know, my book looks at the debate, examines where we're at, and then has these three prescriptive chapters. And even had Vice President Harris won the election last year, the structural things that you identified would have been still a part of our trying to figure out where we're going and the debate about international order and how to manage the decline of democracy, technology and the global order, that would all been there. But to your other point you made earlier, it's been accelerated by President Trump.

And in my public policy life, I want to keep engaging that debate because yes, the old order is broken. We're not going to go back to it. But the idea that we have to just go back to some Hobbesian jungle that Trump seems to want to fight in, I don't accept that as an inevitable consequence. And even if it is analytically, and I'm wrong about that, I want to do everything I can to avoid it, even if it's going to be in failure. In a way, Trump has moved us in a different direction and I want to be part of that debate.

And one of the things I would add to that is part of the reason liberal internationalists like myself have lost that debate is because we lost the American people on it. And we didn't focus enough on trying to explain why being a NATO is in our interest or explain why it's better off to have a foot in even something like the United Nations than to pull out. Why we're better off to support ideas of democracy and freedom rather than just think that it's just all about power.

And so I'm going to be spending a lot of time speaking, not just in Silicon Valley—I'm still doing that—and not just Washington and New York or Brussels and Beijing, but my next stop for my book tour is Boise, Idaho. And I've done this for a while and not everybody agrees with me. I even had a few people walk out before I even said a word because they saw that I'd worked for Barack Obama.

But what I can tell you and report is people are curious. All my talks are sold out. And the agenda you just outlined, Colin, is an agenda I think that when we have things to say with our scholars, we should bring those ideas through things like World Class. I think there's a demand and a thirst for trying to figure out this new world order/disorder that we're in, and FSI has a great role to play in that.

Kahl: Hard agree. And also I'm thrilled that this is going to  be so much of your focus.

I would just say on the alliance piece: my view is that as the distribution of power changes, it's clearer than ever that foreign policy is a team sport.

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: I used to make this reference: Michael Jordan, probably the best basketball player who ever lived. Although I'm sure there are people who claim it's LeBron or Kobe or somebody else. But if you believe that Michael Jordan was the best basketball player who ever lived, he still needed four other Bulls to win championships.

And as we go around, and address every problem that I've ever encountered as a policymaker, whether it's the rise of the Islamic state or the invasion of Ukraine, we need our team.

McFaul: Exactly.

Kahl: And our allies and partners are our team. So I think we have to tell that story. We also, as we enter this new world, have to figure out a way to re-anchor our alliances in a way that are politically sustainable on all sides, and that actually deliver benefits for the American people.

So it's not just telling a better story. There's an interesting example of this. Recently the Trump administration agreed to help South Korea with their submarine program. But South Korea in exchange is making tens of billions of dollars of investments in American shipyards . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . to build up our capacity. And I do think these ideas about joint industrial capacity across the free world might be a way to generate jobs, to generate political incentives on all sides to keep those alliances intact and give some people confidence on both sides of our alliances that we're not going to have these violent swings every four to eight years.

McFaul: I could not agree more. And that example you gave is a great example. And we have to be more creative about re-anchoring and win-win for everybody. I think that's a great idea.

Colin, I'm going to hand this over to you. We've already gone longer than we should have because you're so interesting. Tell us a few of the guests you have coming up on World Class.

Kahl: First of all, not only big shoes to fill on the FSI director position, but big shoes to fill as the host of World Class. We're going to try to start off with a bang in the near future. So stay tuned. We hope to have a great conversation involving H.R. McMaster, who is at Hoover, but as many of your listeners will know, was President Trump's national security adviser at the beginning of the first Trump administration.

And we're going to pair H.R. with Jake Sullivan, who was Joe Biden's national security advisor.

McFaul: Wow! Both on the same show?

Kahl: On the same show!

McFaul: Oh my God, that's fantastic!

Kahl: And the idea is to ask two of the smartest minds on different parts of the political spectrum to help get us smarter about the state of the world and where things are going for the rest of 2026. I have to say for the rest of 2026, because like we're not even a month in and we had Venezuela and Greenland and Iran, and Iran could come back and like, we're three weeks in.

But people should stay tuned because that's going to be an awesome conversation.

And then without naming names, I'm very hopeful to bring on leaders from the tech community here in Silicon Valley to interface with our scholars about some of these technology trends we talked about earlier.

McFaul: Great, excellent.

Kahl: So it's gonna be great. If you're a geopolitical nerd, you're going to love it. If you're into technology, you're going love it. And we're gonna find ways I think to both highlight the extraordinary work being done here at Stanford, but also Stanford's role in the broader ecosystem. It’s going to be fun.

McFaul: Sounds exciting, Colin. Well, first of all, thank you for taking on the role of leading FSI. We need you because of all the things you just described. Second, thanks for taking on World Class. And third, just with that teaser, I know that World Class is going to get a lot more interesting in the weeks and months to come. So congratulations.

Kahl: Thanks, Mike.

McFaul: 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 review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay tuned, to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

And for the last time, this is Michael McFaul signing off as your host of World Class. Stay tuned for the next episode hosted by Colin Kahl.