Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

He recently wrot…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

I wanted to talk with John about the war with Iran because he is in an absolutely unique position. He’s…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Donald Trump may have created a trap for himself by starting the war with Iran - one that is far harder to exit than it initially appeared. Here’s why.

At this point, the original logic behind the war seems increasingly clear: the expectation likely was that a major strike and the assassination of Ali Khamenei would trigger an almost immediate collapse of the Iranian regime. There clearly wasn’t much consideration for a Plan B or for what the unintended consequences of the strike might be. And even if there was a contingency plan, the underlying assumption was probably simple: if the regime does not collapse, the United States can always just declare victory and walk away anyway.

Clearly, Plan A did not work out and the decision to launch the war miscalculated what effect it would have on the regime or what its reaction might be. But its second assumption - that the U.S. can always just walk away without losing anything - is now looking increasingly shaky as well. Because there are two structural problems that now make that much harder.

The first problem is that even though the U.S. is far more powerful than Iran militarily and economically, and in theory it should easily win, a “victory” for Iran and for the United States now means two very different things.

​​For Iran, victory requires very little. The regime only needs to survive without accepting the unconditional surrender the United States demanded. If it avoids regime change and avoids surrender, Tehran can plausibly claim it endured the assault of a vastly stronger power. For the United States, however, victory was defined in far more maximalist terms. Trump himself publicly framed the war around regime change and unconditional surrender and once such objectives were declared, anything short of them risks looking like failure.

This asymmetry means that simply ending the war produces opposite narratives: Iran can claim survival as victory, while the United States will struggle to present the same outcome as success.

That said, this problem is the minor one and it would not necessarily trap Trump on its own. Political narratives can always be reshaped, and Trump in particular has proven highly capable of redefining reality for his supporters, including what the original goals of the war were. After all, we are already seeing this adjustment happening: administration officials have stopped talking about the maximalist goals of regime change and unconditional surrender and instead the stated objectives have shifted toward degrading Iran’s conventional military capabilities - something far more achievable.

If Donald Trump wanted, he could likely declare victory at almost any moment. Many of his supporters would accept that framing even if Iran’s nuclear capabilities remain intact and its conventional capabilities could be relatively quickly rebuilt. After all, in politics, perceptions of reality and reality are often two very different things.

But this is not the real constraint.

The much bigger problem is that it looks like the war itself has - at least at this point - fundamentally changed Iran’s leverage over the United States.

Before the war, Iran’s leverage over the United States was actually quite limited.

Tehran still had remnants of its proxy network in the region and it retained the ability to launch missiles and drones at Israel. But these capabilities were already heavily degraded and, more importantly, they did not fundamentally alter the regional balance of power - in simple terms, while Iran was able to launch missiles at Tel Aviv or the U.S. bases in the region, that alone had almost no strategic value.

Crucially, Iran did not have effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows. Iran had long threatened to close the strait, but the threat was widely seen as a bluff. Actually attempting to block Hormuz would risk turning the entire region against Tehran, triggering overwhelming military retaliation by the U.S. and inviting global pressure to reopen the route. In other words, it was viewed as a last-resort option - something Iran might attempt only if the regime itself faced existential collapse. That in itself made it less useful as a threat - if no one believes you would dare to do something, it’s not much of a deterrent.

But when the United States attacked Iran directly and placed the regime under exactly that kind of existential pressure, it pushed Tehran across that threshold - and by doing so, completely changed the strategic calculus.

First, once Washington launched a major aerial campaign and killed Iran’s leader, the constraint stopping Iran from blocking the strait largely disappeared. The advantage of being already at war is that you don’t have to worry about starting one - and facing large-scale U.S. strikes already, Tehran had far less to lose by escalating. That’s exactly what they did - and turned a non-credible threat into a credible one by doing something they refrained from doing for the past forty years.

But what really turns this into a headache for Washington is the fact that it’s not really able to stop Iran from doing it.

Iran has already blocked the Strait once, in the 1980s - but that episode ended with the U.S. destroying much of Iran’s navy in a single engagement, effectively neutralizing the threat. The implicit lesson Washington drew was that Iran’s ability to close the strait was ultimately a conventional military problem with a conventional military solution. But that logic no longer applies.

Iran has shown that today, “closing the strait” does not require a navy or a physical blockade - all it takes is the ability to threaten commercial shipping. A small number of drones or missiles targeting civilian tankers is enough to make insurers withdraw coverage and shipping companies refuse to transit the route. Once that happens, the strait becomes effectively closed regardless of whether Iranian ships are physically present.

Because Iran doesn’t need ships to close the strait, destroying the Iranian navy - which is what Washington is trying to do at this point - doesn’t take away Iran’s ability to threaten shipping with drones or missiles. And removing that ability entirely will be extraordinarily difficult. Unlike large missile systems or fixed military infrastructure, drones are cheap, widely available, easy to transport and easy to conceal and Iran can disperse them across a large country with significant terrain advantages. No amount of airstrikes is likely to eliminate that capability entirely.

In other words, in the last three weeks, Iran has demonstrated both that it is willing and able to close the strait - and that the U.S. is unable to easily stop it from doing so. That fundamentally changes the strategic balance of power compared to even a month ago and creates a very hard-to-solve dilemma for Trump and his administration.

If Trump declares victory today and ends the conflict while Iran retains the ability to threaten shipping, he effectively leaves Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran wouldn’t even need to permanently close the strait to benefit. Simply demonstrating the ability to disrupt shipping gives it leverage over oil prices, regional stability and global markets - a leverage it could use to extract concessions, charge transit fees or simply keep prices elevated.

This would essentially mean that by launching the war, the U.S. unintentionally elevated Iran into a position of influence it never had before, making any military damage done to Iran’s conventional capabilities largely irrelevant next to that. But if he wants to avoid that outcome, he now only has a few options - and none of them are good.

The first option is to continue the current strategy: maintain the air campaign and hope that Iranian launch capabilities are gradually degraded so much that it’s not able to threaten the shipping - or that eventually, the regime will finally crack and collapse, either via a popular uprising or internal coup. However, both outcomes are increasingly unlikely and choosing to continue the current course of action would be more about following hope rather than a strategy.

The second option is to negotiate with the regime: offering to cease the strikes against it in exchange for Iran opening the strait again. But in those negotiations, the U.S. would likely find itself in a far less advantageous position than before the war began. If Iran has already demonstrated it can withstand weeks of strikes while maintaining leverage over global oil flows, Tehran may see little incentive to make major concessions - unless Trump would be willing to make major concessions himself.

And finally, the U.S. has the option to double down: escalate and pursue some form of ground operation aimed at either eliminating Iran’s remaining launch capabilities or forcing regime collapse.

In theory, this option offers the most potential upside but in reality, it carries by far the most risk. A ground war in Iran would likely involve far higher casualties, significant political backlash at home and the possibility of becoming trapped in another prolonged Middle Eastern conflict - this time in a country far larger and more populous than Iraq ever was.

And that is the trap Trump has now caught himself in. In three weeks, the United States went from holding most of the cards to handing Iran a form of leverage it never previously had - while spending the very military pressure that was supposed to keep Tehran in check. Save for a miraculous stroke of luck, this war leaves Trump with no clear paths to victory - while Iran’s regime might have been saved at the very last moment.

Read more

Read more

Last week, I posted a discussion with Jeremy Schapiro about the Iran war, its consequences and the decision-making behind it. And while I always get interesting feedback, what struck me this time in the reaction to the episode was how differently people interpret the decision to launch the war.

And it’s not just in the comments of my podcast. Instead, an intellectual debate has emerged about why this war actually happened in the first place - and with that an implication of whether the decision to start the war made sense or not.

Basically, since the war began, two very different interpretations of the decision have emerged.

The first sees the war largely as the result of impulse, emotion and ego. In this view, the decision was driven by a combination of short-term incentives, mainly a political pressure from Israel, and an emotional, instinctive decision-making: mainly by the euphoria of the earlier success of the operation in Venezuela, and the idea that if it was that easy to take out Maduro and replace him with a friendlier alternative, it will be just as easy to do the same in Iran. In other words, that there was not much thought given to why exactly the U.S. should launch the war, what will be its consequences, what can go wrong or what is the plan B - and everything that has been happening since has been a free-wheeling panicked improvisation.

The second interpretation is almost the exact opposite: the war should be understood and has been launched as part of a broader foreign policy strategy. In this interpretation, Iran has long been seen as one of the main sources of instability in the Middle East and a potential rogue nuclear power - both of which have long forced the U.S. to remain engaged in the Middle East and expand its resources on countering and containing the threat. According to this narrative, the Iran war was launched to remove that threat once so that the United States can finally withdraw from the region and focus on its real strategic priority: China. At the same time, weakening Iran would also indirectly hurt China, arguing China has deep economic ties with Tehran and relies on Iranian oil. In other words, this war engages U.S. in the region so that it can disengage from it - and the war is just one step in a far more complex game of geopolitical chess.

What I find fascinating is how different both interpretations are and yet almost all the observers of this conflict fall into one of these two camps. Personally, my interpretation of the war is much closer to the first one but since some people that I respect argue for the latter, I wanted to look at it in good faith - and explain why I disagree with it without immediately discounting it entirely.

In my view, the second interpretation - we can call it “the Trump’s Grand Strategy” - has intuitive appeal. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are real, its support for proxy groups across the region has long destabilized the Middle East and China does buy Iranian oil and aligns with Iran in its anti-U.S. worldview. Viewed from this perspective, the war might appear as a strategic, rational attempt to reshape the regional balance of power while simultaneously advancing broader strategic goals.

But the problem with this interpretation is that once you look more closely, it begins to fall apart.

The First Problem: It Doesn’t Fit How Trump Operates

If you think that the Iran war is not that much about Iran but really about China, you assume the existence of a certain grand strategy - a long-term coherent vision for how you want the world to look and a specific plan for how to get there. And that requires a certain kind of leadership. It requires a decision-maker who thinks in long time horizons, carefully weighs geopolitical consequences, and executes a coherent plan over a number of thoughtfully planned out steps.

But nothing about Donald Trump’s political behavior over the past decade suggests that this is how he approaches major decisions.

Trump’s political style has consistently been driven by short-term incentives and immediate benefits. His priorities have tended to revolve around issues that produce visible, tangible outcomes right now: reducing trade deficits, imposing tariffs, securing economic deals, or pursuing symbolic geopolitical goals such as acquiring Greenland. His rhetoric around military operations has often focused on direct and immediate gains: securing oil, boosting personal prestige, punishing adversaries who have insulted him, expanding U.S. territory and so forth.

Even the Venezuela operation that preceded the Iran war was framed in exactly these terms. Trump described it as a way to secure oil, punish Nicolás Maduro, and demonstrate strength. There weren't really any broader geopolitical aims behind it - or at least Trump himself has never spoken about it in that way.

Believing that the Iran war is part of a carefully constructed grand strategy requires assuming that Trump suddenly began operating in a way he never has before.

The same problem applies to the China argument. If the war were truly part of a broader effort to counter China, we would expect to see consistent policies pointing in that direction.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Trump, just to name a few examples, has both allowed Nvidia to resume selling advanced H200 chips to China, reversing years of export control policy designed specifically to slow China’s technological progress and has also signaled weaker U.S. commitments to Taiwan.. Neither move suggests that confronting China is the overriding strategic priority driving American policy.

Sure, there are people in or around the administration for whom this is the overriding strategic priority - and they are naturally interpreting the decision to go to war with Iran this way. But what’s crucial is that they did not make this decision - Trump did. And his own personal motivation and incentives are likely very different.

Taken together, it is difficult to reconcile the idea of a sophisticated China-containment strategy with the actual pattern of decisions being made.

The Second Problem: The Strategy Itself Doesn’t Make Sense

Read more

We talk about the U.S. war…

Read more

Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about the reasons and context of the attack on Iran. Today I want to follow up and take a closer look at the odds of whether the Iran regime will fall - because the next 48 hours are likely to be critical.

And there are two very specific variables, both of which will play out in the coming hours and days, that will shape the answer to this question.

1) Protests

The first key variable is whether we will see a restart of mass, popular protest - basically a continuation of the mass protests that were suppressed in January 2026. And the instinctive expectation is that they are likely to restart.

There are already reports of people celebrating Khamenei’s death, at least in Tehran and for many Iranians who despise the regime, this feels like a historic opening - perhaps the biggest one in years. If there was ever a reason to return to the streets, this would be it and even after the mass crackdowns, there are almost certainly still hundreds of thousands of people willing to take to the streets.

But the thing about protest dynamics is they are not always “mechanical” and logical - they don’t usually go from 0 to 100 overnight. They are organic in how they form and they typically gather momentum over days and weeks, as we saw in January. Especially if - as is the case in Iran - there is no single organizer and no unified opposition leader who can simply “call” the protests back into existence at scale and when the regime has taken down internet, cell connection and landlines across the country. That makes organizing or even just finding out what other people are doing even more difficult.

And speed matters - if there is a window of opportunity, it may remain open only briefly, only as long as the regime is shaken. A protest movement that needs time to build may miss the moment when the regime is at its weakest.

Which brings us to the second variable.

2) Regime Capability

The second key question is how deep is the shock inside the system: how much of its capacity to act and respond has been taken away - and how long before it will recover this ability?

In the opening salvo, U.S./Israeli forces have successfully eliminated both Ali Khamenei and around 40 other senior leaders within the regime which would deal an enormous shock to any government structure. Decapitation is, by definition, destabilizing - it creates chaos, possible issues over succession in a number of roles and in the very least, slows down a reaction time of the regime to any unpredictable developments on the ground - hence opening a window for a successful uprising.

But the question is how functional the regime remains and there are two broad possibilities, based on how well Iran has prepared for this eventuality.

Option one: there were no serious contingency plans for succession in the event of assassination. That would mean a complete chaos at the top and infighting within elite circles over who gets to be in charge resulting in a paralysis - precisely at the moment the regime needs to be united and able to coordinate its actions. In that scenario, the state apparatus becomes temporarily incapacitated.

Option two: there were plans for temporary succession mechanisms and they will be followed. In such a case, it will be immediately clear who now has the authority, at least temporarily, which will prevent infighting and reduce chaos - meaning that the security apparatus and the regime absorb the shock and remain operational.

The difference between those two outcomes will play an enormous role.

Three Scenarios

If you combine these two variables - protests and regime capability - you get three plausible pathways for what happens in the coming days:

1) Regime incapable + protests restart at scale
This is the most dangerous combination for the system. A paralyzed elite facing mass mobilization dramatically increases the probability of regime change. In this scenario, the days of ayatollahs are likely over.

2) Regime capable + protests do not restart en masse
In this case, the regime likely survives. The shock becomes a contained event, repression remains effective and the system stabilizes.

3) Regime capable + protests restart
This is the most volatile scenario. A functional but threatened regime will almost certainly respond with overwhelming force likely resulting in a major bloodshed. In this scenario, basically anything can happen - the regime may fall, survive, the country may completely destabilize - options are wide open.

The next two days are now absolutely critical because they will tell us which path we are most likely on.

But there is another additional layer to this dynamic as well - because what happens over the next two days will likely shape the next course of action for Donald Trump and the U.S. military.

If it starts to look like the regime will hold - there won’t be mass protests and the regime will not completely disintegrate, my guess is that Trump will instinctively seek to de-escalate. As Axios reported yesterday, Trump has already floated the idea of taking an off-ramp:

“I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear & missile programs].”

But if it looks like the regime is cracked and it could fall, we might see the opposite. If mass protests re-emerge and the regime is incapable to immediately crack down in force, Trump might continue and double down to help the regime fall - and in such case, we might see an escalation.

In other words, the domestic trajectory inside Iran and the external trajectory from the United States are intertwined.

In any case, the next 24-48 hours are crucial - and these are the things to watch.