Indo-Pacific nations are racing to adapt to a world in which the United States has become fundamentally unpredictable. The 2026 Oksenberg Conference, hosted by the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), gathered scholars and foreign service veterans at Stanford University to assess how regional stakeholders are confronting what Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney had famously named "a rupture, not a transition" in the post-World War II order. The conference took place as Carney was in the midst of an Indo-Pacific trip, visiting Australia, India, and Japan to forge "middle power" trade alliances, and as the United States joined Israel in a war against Iran.

“For Indo-Pacific countries, the question is no longer just how to balance between Washington and Beijing,” said APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui in his welcome remarks, “but how to understand and respond to the emergence of a multipolar world in which the United States is less predictable, less committed to multilateral frameworks, less invested in alliance maintenance, and more willing to pursue narrowly defined national interests at the expense of broader international stability.”

The panelists agreed that, while the U.S. retreat from the eight-decade-old international order it had previously championed creates multiple opportunities for China, Beijing is not naturally filling the vacuum, and regional powers are not pivoting toward it but instead scrambling to diversify security and economic partnerships. The consensus is that the international system is moving toward multipolarity and the world toward an increasingly unstable period, and no one knows yet what will replace the disintegrating post-WWII order.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our event invitations and highlights > 

China Sees Opportunity in Multipolarity

To commemorate the legacy of the late Michel Oksenberg, a renowned scholar of contemporary China and a pioneer of U.S.-Asia engagement, the Oksenberg Conference, an annual tradition sponsored by APARC and led by the center’s China Program, gathers individuals who have advanced U.S.-Asia dialogue to examine pressing issues affecting China, U.S.-China relations, and broader U.S. Asia policy.

At this year’s convening, the first panel, moderated by Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar, focused on how China perceives, interprets, and responds to the new vulnerabilities and opportunities in the international system.

Speaking via video link from Beijing, Da Wei, a professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University and the director of its Center for International Security and Strategy, said China views the current moment as neither ideal nor catastrophic but better than recent alternatives.

China has experienced three scenarios, Da explained. First, from the 1990s through the Obama era, China benefited greatly from the U.S.-led liberal order, but was increasingly criticized by the West. Second, during Trump's first term and the Biden administration, while facing mounting pressure of decoupling in a bipolar system, China was forced into a camp with Russia, which Da characterized as Beijing’s “worst scenario.” Now, under Trump's second term, the shift toward multipolarity has redirected pressure away from China and onto multilateral institutions and U.S. allies – "the least bad option" from Beijing’s perspective.

Da argued that “culturally, China has a very low appetite for global governance or leadership.” China sees itself primarily as a regional power, he said. Rather than filling the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal from international institutions, "we want to be powerful and respected in the region. I don't think China has a very big appetite for leadership in faraway regions, except for economic interests." He contrasted this “Emperor's perspective,” demonstrated by China’s foreign policy, with the U.S. “boss perspective.”

Susan Shirk, a research professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and director emeritus of its 21st Century China Center, noted that China's response to Trump's trade war has been robust, muscular, but disciplined. "The Xi Jinping administration was operating in a more disciplined manner than it had previously," she said, contrasting this approach with what she called Xi's "rash reactions” to Japan and failure to engage Taiwan diplomatically.

Shirk stated that, while Trump's alienation of U.S. allies through extreme tariffs and military interventions has created clear opportunities for China to expand its influence and further divide Washington from Europe and Asian partners, Beijing has only modestly exploited these openings.

She emphasized that Xi's support for Russia in its war against Ukraine represents "self-defeating overreach" that undermines China's ability to improve relations with Europe. "Russia represents an existential threat to Europe," she said. "Xi Jinping really doesn't grasp how important this is."

Mark Lambert, a recently retired U.S. State Department official who served as China coordinator and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, contrasted the Biden administration's China strategy with the current U.S. policy vacuum.

The Biden approach, he explained, was rooted in U.S. relations with five Asian treaty allies plus NATO and positioned China as the only country with the means and capabilities to reshape the post-World War II order. It required "all hands on deck" to address this challenge through what U.S. officials called a "lattice work of relations": the Quad involving India, AUKUS with Australia, the Camp David summit between South Korea and Japan, and strengthened linkages between NATO allies and East Asian partners. China's support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine unified Europeans in understanding the China challenge in ways never seen before. The administration also successfully reframed Taiwan's importance, emphasizing that Taiwan's chip dominance was vital to global prosperity.

Today, Lambert argued, the United States either has no China strategy or “one so classified that neither our allies nor our practitioners know what it is.” On security, trade, technology, and international cooperation, the United States has given China “fantastic opportunities,” he noted.

Allies’ Transactional Coping Strategies

The second panel, moderated by Laura Stone, a retired U.S. ambassador and APARC's inaugural China Policy Fellow, turned to other regional states – South Korea, Japan, Russia, and India – and how they read the geopolitical landscape and devise strategies to shape the regional order.

Victor Cha, the D.S. Song-KF Chair and professor of government at Georgetown University and president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), noted that "every U.S. ally around the world is looking at a Plan B," pointing out that, in the first year of the second Trump administration, allies were not acting on these plans, but that "we’re now at a threshold where many of them are executing their Plan B's."

Cha identified seven types of behavior that U.S. partners have adopted when dealing with the Trump administration. These are drawn from a recent CSIS project on ally and partner responses to the paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy. First is prioritizing face-to-face meetings with Trump himself, "because there's a recognition that the policy process in the United States is broken,” Cha said, “and that policy making is not being informed, as it traditionally has been, by foreign policy professionals. It's all happening at the leader level."

Other strategies include minimizing risk to avoid what Cha called "the Zelensky moment" – the public humiliation Ukraine's president suffered in the Oval Office in February 2025 – and preparing "trophy deliverables," such as South Korea's promise to buy Boeing airplanes and Japan's commitment to purchase Ford trucks.

“The America First policies have effectively put the custodial burden of maintaining the alliance on the partner,” Cha said. “Whether it's Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, or whoever it might be, the burden traditionally has been on the United States, but now it's on the partner. They're the ones who have to try to maintain this relationship. So it's about minimizing risk.” 

South Korea's recent summit with Trump yielded a $350 billion investment package, yet soon after, U.S. immigration authorities raided a Hyundai facility, and Trump threatened 25% tariffs on Korea.

"Why take all this abuse?" Cha asked. His answer: South Korea and Japan see no alternative to the United States on security, and they secured previous concessions in areas such as nuclear submarines, ship building, and enrichment and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which they do not want to renegotiate. 

One positive outcome, Cha pointed out, has been the unexpectedly warm bilateral relationship between Japan and Korea. Despite having leaders who would normally clash – a far-right conservative in Japan and a progressive in South Korea – the uncertain geopolitical environment has brought the two countries together.

He predicted China would eventually use economic coercion against South Korea over the U.S.-Korea nuclear submarine agreement, just as it did during the 2016-17 THAAD dispute and is currently doing to Japan. "It's not happening now because I don't think China wants bad relations with Japan and Korea at the same time, but it's coming," he said, adding that this development will likely push South Korea closer to the United States and Japan.

Japan Reconsiders Alliance Dependence as Its "Too Big to Fail" Status Proves No Shield

Katherine Monahan, a 2025-26 visiting scholar and Japan Program Fellow at APARC and a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State, said Japan's relationship with the United States is "too big to fail," but that has not prevented serious strain between the two allies.

Having served in Tokyo as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Japan until April 2025, Monahan shared that, when Trump's Liberation Day tariffs hit Japan with a 25% rate, the Japanese could not believe that was the figure next to their name, while other allies were at 20% and 15%. They wondered, “Don't we have any special relationship at all?”

Monahan called attention to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Masataka Okano, Japan's former national security advisor, in which he argues that Japan needs to take strategic autonomy more seriously. When made by a former Japanese official, such a statement represents a significant shift in the nation’s mindset, she said. 

Japan is also reconsidering previously used language around "de-risking" from China in favor of diversifying trade with multiple partners, including China, Canada, and Europe. This shift is happening on the backdrop of the current war with Iran, as 90% of Japanese oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. “Japan has to start balancing sources and supply chains,” Monahan argued.

Russia Exploits American Unreliability

Russia expert Kathryn Stoner, the Satre Family Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said America’s unpredictability under Trump represents pure opportunity for Vladimir Putin.

"Putin knows Trump. He gets him," Stoner said. "They have a not-completely dissimilar worldview." Trump's red carpet welcome for Putin at last year's Alaska summit, despite the Russian leader's indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, sent a powerful message, Stoner asserted. So did Trump's lack of concern for democratic values and his criticism of U.S. allies.

She reminded the audience that Putin has been in power for 26 years and has watched multiple U.S. presidents come and go, adapting successfully to each. Putin wants multipolarity, she said, and Trump’s actions have emboldened him. Putin’s goal is to “reclaim Imperial Russia as a global power and restore what he views as its proper sphere of influence,” extending through Ukraine and Belarus into Poland, up to German borders in the west and to the south, through Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria, to the Black Sea in the east, all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula. 

According to Stoner, the Russia-China relationship is significantly more durable than many believe. The relationship between the two powers extends beyond oil sales to investment, defense coordination, and sophisticated military exercises. “It kind of doesn't matter whether there's love lost or not. There's an opportunity to be gained on both sides."

"Russia's economy is actually not on the verge of collapse," Stoner added. "It has completely retooled toward the military."

India Feels Betrayed

Emily Tallo, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, who studies how political elites structure foreign policy debates in democratic countries, especially in India, explained that New Delhi felt especially betrayed by Trump's foreign policy pivot.

The first Trump administration had centered India as a key partner against China. In May 2025, however, when an India-Pakistan conflict flared up, Trump claimed credit for brokering peace, but India took issue with his threat of trade measures to bring an end to the conflict. He then hosted Pakistan's army chief at the White House and signed deals with Islamabad. "This was a twist of the knife for India," Tallo said.

Trump also imposed 50% tariffs on India, including a penalty for buying Russian crude oil, which was not applied to China, and backed out of a QUAD summit in New Delhi.

India now views China as its primary security threat, and the recent India-Pakistan crisis, in which China supplied all of Pakistan's weapon systems and possibly intelligence, made New Delhi’s two-front threat fears a reality. "India is really sensitive to any hints of U.S. retreat in the Indo-Pacific, and any acceptance of Chinese Hegemony in the region," according to Tallo.

She concluded that, like other regional powers, India is committed to preserving the U.S. partnership but is diversifying and seeking a “Plan B.” It finalized free trade agreements with the European Union and the United Kingdom, agreed to purchase French Dassault Rafale jets, and conducted a pragmatic reset with China, citing U.S. unreliability as cover to stabilize a difficult bilateral relationship.

“India wants to be a regional power aligned with but not allied with the United States [...] They want to be considered as the United States’ main partner in Asia and a major counterbalance to China.”

Headlines about foreign companies establishing a foothold in China only to fail years later no longer surprise anyone. But why does this keep happening? Kenneth Wilcox, former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from 2001 to 2010 and author of The China Business Conundrum: Ensure that Win-Win Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice, argues that the answer comes down to mental models and preparation.

In a recent lecture hosted by the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, Wilcox explained that we all develop mental models — internal frameworks that help us interpret and navigate the world around us. We carry these models with us wherever we go, applying them instinctively to new situations and environments. The trouble, Wilcox argues, is that a mental model only holds up if the new environment resembles the one it was built for. And American mental models, more often than not, simply don't hold up in China.

Wilcox knows this firsthand. After a decade leading SVB, he and his wife moved to China in 2011 to open a Chinese branch of the bank. Things started smoothly enough — he secured a partnership with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and obtained the necessary license — but it quickly became clear that the rules he'd spent his career following no longer applied. The license, for instance, permitted him to open the bank but barred him from conducting any business in renminbi, China's national currency, for the first three years. For a bank, this created an obvious problem: how do you pay staff, let alone operate, without access to local currency? The government's solution was a subsidy to cover operating costs during that period, along with an invitation to meet regularly with other banks and business leaders to share SVB's model and approach. After many such meetings, Wilcox's Chinese partners told him they had been so impressed with what they'd learned that they planned to open their own bank modeled on SVB's approach.

This, Wilcox explained, is a pattern that plays out with striking regularity in China. Foreign companies are lured in with the promise of a vast new market and eager local partners. They are then entangled in regulations and bureaucracy, kept afloat with subsidies while they wait for permission to operate more freely — all while their technology and intellectual property are quietly absorbed. Eventually, the foreign company is left with little choice but to close up and leave. Some companies see it happening but look the other way. Others don't recognize it until it's too late. Many never fully understand why they failed at all.

Wilcox traced all of this back to the limitations of mental models. American businesses tend to arrive in China assuming the environment will function more or less like home: keep your head down, stay out of politics, focus on the business, and you'll be fine. But that assumption doesn't hold in China, where the government and the Communist Party exert control over virtually every aspect of commercial life. The most powerful players routinely hold simultaneous roles — party member, bank executive, government official — all at once. It is precisely these unexamined assumptions, Wilcox concluded, that set so many Western ventures up to fail before they've even begun.

What’s the most exciting finding from your research, and why does it matter for democracy and development?

In the mid-1990s, I worked in the U.S. government at the State Department and the National Security Council, focusing on Russia and European security. One of the major issues at the time was whether NATO should expand to include countries in Central and Eastern Europe. I later wrote a book on that decision, which was published in 1999.

One of the most important things I found was that NATO enlargement didn’t come from a single formal decision by the president and his cabinet. Instead, it developed gradually, driven by individuals who believed strongly in the policy and worked to move it forward over time. It was a much more incremental and contested process than people often assumed.

What was especially significant was that policymakers saw NATO enlargement as a way to promote democracy and strengthen the rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe. By offering countries the prospect of membership, they hoped to encourage democratic reforms and political stability. I think NATO enlargement had a profound impact on democratic development in the region, and my research helped explain how and why that policy came about.

What have been some of the most challenging aspects of conducting research in this field, and how did you overcome them?

Much of my work sits at the intersection of political science and history, and one of the biggest challenges is studying relatively recent events, where records are often incomplete. When you study earlier historical periods, you have access to archives and official records, but when you study more recent foreign policy decisions, much of that material is still classified.

Because of that, I’ve relied heavily on interviews with policymakers and officials. Interviews are incredibly valuable, but they also have limitations. People remember events differently, and often present events in a light that best reflects their own role or perspective, which is why it’s important to interview multiple people and compare their accounts to develop a more accurate understanding of what happened.

I’ve also used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain declassified documents, although that process can take many years. Some requests I filed for my 1999 book didn’t produce results until I was working on later books in 2003 and even 2008. But over time, those documents helped confirm and strengthen my understanding of how key decisions were made. Doing this kind of research requires patience, but it’s essential if you want to understand how foreign policy actually develops.

How has the field changed since you started, and what gives you hope?

The field has changed quite a bit since I finished my PhD in 1990. One major shift was that after the Cold War ended, there was less emphasis on area studies and regional expertise. When I was trained, people were expected to combine theoretical work with deep knowledge of particular regions, which is now less common. 

What gives me hope is the current generation of students. Many students today are highly capable of integrating knowledge of politics and history with technological expertise. Especially at places like Stanford, students have the opportunity to combine social science knowledge with new technologies. I think that combination will shape the future of the field.

What gaps still exist in your research, and what projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a project with Michael McFaul and Elizabeth Economy on great power competition, focusing on how major powers try to influence the foreign policy orientation of smaller states. It’s an important issue, especially given the current international environment.

I’ve also continued working on NATO enlargement and its long-term consequences. When I published my book on NATO expansion in 1999, I didn’t expect that these issues would still be so central decades later. But NATO enlargement continues to shape relations between Russia, Europe, and the United States, particularly in light of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Hence, understanding how those earlier decisions connect to current events remains a major focus of my work.

What advice would you give to students interested in this field?

Students should focus on topics that genuinely interest them. You can’t predict what will be important five or ten years from now. Choosing a topic solely because you think it will be important in the future isn’t a good strategy if you’re not truly interested in it. Instead, study subjects that motivate you and that you feel compelled to understand. Unexpected events can suddenly make your area of interest highly relevant. Passion and curiosity are essential for meaningful research.

What book would you recommend to students interested in international relations?

I recommend Robert Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics, published in 1976. Jervis was one of the most brilliant scholars in international relations and had a major influence on the field.

His book explores how leaders interpret and misinterpret the world, and how those perceptions shape international relations. It combines insights from politics, psychology, and history, and helps explain why cooperation between states is often difficult. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to understand the role of leadership and perception in international politics.

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.

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.”
 

For more commentary from our scholars and to stay informed about new analysis and upcoming events, subscribe to our newsletters.