America’s War of Choice on Iran

25:44You've got your two principal envoys are both outsiders, if you will, who are not bureaucratically based. The one institution that seems to be largely operating fairly normally is the military, but the military doesn't do strategy. It looks at how do you implement the military component of our policy, which is something qualitatively different. So I'd say that. Second of all, this is not an administration I thought that we'd be having this conversation with. A big part of candidate Trump's critique was on everything from regime change to nation building, essentially interventionist, expensive foreign policy.

26:24If you remember, he negotiated the agreement with the Taliban that undercut the government of Afghanistan by an administration that implemented it. But that essentially ended a two decade experiment with nation building and essentially a regime change after 9-11. What was so interesting about Venezuela is it wasn't regime change. It was a leadership change and even then, shall we say, rather limited and focused. The president was ushered out and replaced by the vice president. But other than that, the regime, the system seems entirely attacked. The opposition was, to use the cliche, thrown under the bus.

27:10Despite their electoral accomplishments previously, the one policy change that seems to have resulted from the government is opening up Venezuela to American oil companies. But other than that, Venezuela today looks an awful lot like Venezuela yesterday. And that was to me very much in keeping with the Trump administration, that it was allergic to large military operations that involve stationing afterwards, occupation presence, regime change. Again, this is an administration, if you read the national security strategy that the promotion of democracy human rights and the rest is that's that's not a priority for them not even a low priority for that it just simply doesn't it doesn't figure so that was what's so odd then as we get to iran and here we are in early march or we're not even a week into it is how this is so inconsistent with everything i would have thought about this administration, even though I will say one thing, the rhetoric of regime change is far outpacing the policy of regime change.

28:19This is an administration that from the get-go, even before the intervention began in early January, this administration was talking on behalf of the Iranian opposition, encouraging them, making promises to them, threatening the regime. none of that was implemented. Then when this initiative was launched last Saturday, the president again made a regime change, an explicit goal. What's odd is that the policy has not essentially been totally consistent with that. There's a disconnect. Yes, there's been the killing and assassination, if you prefer, Justin, of leadership, but the Iranian leadership is quite institutionalized, both on the political side and on the security side.

29:03The history of regime change, particularly when it comes to large countries, this is a country of over 90 million people that has institutions and the like, including large security forces. Well, when you look at the history of regime change, by that I mean not just regime ouster, but also regime replacement, but something qualitatively different, better. So when you look at things like Germany and Japan after World War II, you were talking about military defeat, then years of occupation. If you look at the attempted regime change in Afghanistan, it worked, if you will, partially for 20 years.

29:41But again, war, occupation. Iraq, 2003, war, occupation. What's so odd about what's going on in Iran is the scale of the rhetorical ambition. And again, the lack, if you will, of the policy to follow it up. How seriously do you take that ambition, though? It's not even clear to me that it's the main goal. I'm not really sure what the goal is. What's your best guess? Okay. So the fact that you have to ask that question and the fact that I have to think before I answer the question is a really bad sign. It's not a criticism of you or me, I think. I think it's simply a reflection that the administration has been all over the place, sometimes talking about regime change.

30:28And even when they talk about regime change, it's not clear if they mean regime ouster or regime replacement with something, say, democratic. They certainly haven't done the preparation of the ground for that in terms of repairing the opposition. It's not an organized opposition. It's not a capable one. It hasn't put out a serious political statement that would appeal to the members of the security forces of the political establishment to induce defections. And the president talked at one point about if members of the security forces surrendered, well, who are they supposed to surrender to? Other people have talked about other reasons we went into this war.

31:04It's not been a consistent set of, shall we say, messages. is, and my own view is, and we're only a few days into it, and as Yogi Berra would say, it's always dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future. But my own sense is we are going to walk back from that. That's too ambitious. And what the president will do is talk about the accomplishments, what I like to call the re-obliteration of the nuclear capability. Which was supposedly obliterated last year, yeah. So now we've reiterated it. You've got the significant diminishing of ballistic missiles. Israel's weakened Hezbollah yet again.

31:42You have disrupted the leadership. Many people have been killed. But my guess is the administration, particularly if it wants this war to end, and I think it will sooner than later because of the political blowback in this country, because of the economic costs and the rest, I believe we'll have to say something on the order of we have set the stage for regime change. We have weakened the Iranian security forces and the political establishment. But now, Iranian opposition, it's up to you. You, the people of Iran, must take a hold of your own destiny. We have done as much as we can for you, which is another way to say there is zero chance We are going to, if you will, be the agents of regime change in terms of a physical presence of the scale and duration that it would require.

32:34And quite honestly, even with a scale and duration, Middle East doesn't take well in this day and age, as the Israelis learned in Lebanon and Gaza, as we've learned in Iraq. I'm not sure the occupation model of regime change, which worked in Japan and Germany, is viable. in the contemporary Middle East in this age of nationalism. And so I simply don't think we have a regime change option. I mean, it's interesting, in fairness to Trump, in his initial announcement about it, he kind of alluded or gave himself that sort of wiggle room where he said, you know, when we're done, the country will be, you know, yours to take.

33:14The question of what done means, of course, is, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of gray there. Let me sort of float a hypothetical to you that when I look at it, what I wonder is whether there was a sort of sense after Venezuela that maybe what we can do is kind of bludgeon this regime into some kind of concession, for example, giving up on uranium enrichment, and that it might take longer than in Venezuela, but that eventually they'll find, you know, the Iranian equivalent of Adelce Rodriguez. is. It might not be the person right underneath, but eventually they'll get there. And they might not even need regime change.

33:55They might say, well, look, we've got regime compliance. Is that possible? What obstacle would you see to something like that working? It's quite possible that the administration at some point will opt for that, will say that's what they intended all along. In my newsletter the other day, I included a whole critique of my previous newsletter from Amos Yadlam, who used to be the head of military intelligence in Israel. And he specifically spoke to that, the idea that you would have an authoritarian military figure, which if you think about it is, shall we say, the norm in the Middle East, the kind of post-79 clerical veneer or layer over a security apparatus is unique to Iran in many ways.

34:43So the idea that you would end up with a military strongman in Iran for the Israelis, they would see that as a big improvement because they would see that as non-ideological. So I can't tell you that won't happen. Indeed, the power in Iran was already shifting in some ways towards the security forces, if you think about it, away from the clerics. The problem is that a big part of Iran, what motivates it since 79, is both anti-Zionism and against the Great Saint, the United States. So the idea that you could have that, possibly though, I mean, I can imagine you could have, if not immediately, in the wake of these assassinations, the war, I don't think anything like that would happen immediately.

35:27But over time, could you have a series of successions which brought to the fore a pragmatic Iranian leader? however nasty to his own people that basically said uh we want to get economic sanctions lifted we're gonna make certain trades or whatever not inconceivable that would be the it wouldn't be if you will when most people who follow iran talk about regime change what they have in their heads is something far more uh fundamental which is a move away from a clerical repressive regime, something to something democratic. So for them, that would maybe be more 10 % of what they'd like to see, but 90 % of the transition, but it's possible that could come.

36:15I don't think it could happen immediately simply because of the killings and the war, but ultimately that is possible. And that'll, again, that'll be up to the Iranian, the jockeying for leadership and what kind of coalitions have to be found. So I don't rule that out as something that could emerge down the road. And that would be getting back to what you said before, slightly more the Venezuelan, where you have something that essentially it's 90 % or whatever, the continuity, but you have different percentages and maybe here and there some different policies that's possible. But if that was your goal, then one would still have to question how we've gone about it.

37:03What do you make of Iran's response so far? Quite interesting. The scale of their military response, the number of countries they've hit, because you could have argued they'll be wary of doing such things. A lot of the neighboring countries were holding back, not offering us facing or overflight. Well, now they're not going to hold back as much. But I don't know to what extent the Iranian response may have been pre-programmed. I don't know to what extent the Iranian response is decentralized, in some ways anticipating the degree of decapitation that they have experienced. So I don't know, if you will, the timing of some of those decisions.

37:40But what's interesting to me about it is Iran, even though it's the far weaker party, has surprising resilience here and ability to sustain war and bring pain to the United States through higher energy prices. Some of our servicemen have lost their lives and to the neighbors. And they also may be in a better position to sustain this kind of a conflict because they've proliferated drones. What we are in short supply are defensive systems against them, patriots or other such systems. So as I think forward about where we are, my guess is the administration is going to think about how to scale back its emphasis on regime change.

38:28And as we already discussed, the really interesting question is whether Iran starts raising its demands if it's going to sign on to war termination, which is not a conversation you hear a lot about. But Iran may say, if you don't want us to continue to interfere with shipping or attacking some of your neighbors, what if they say we demand this in the way of relief on sanctions? or what do we do if they say, well, let's reopen those on negotiations on the nuclear file or something like that. I hope someone in the administration is thinking awfully hard about war termination and what we would threaten, but also what we would have to offer in order to change the Iranian calculus from continuing the war to ending.

39:20So we have to decide not simply what our definition of success is. But we also have to really think through what is it we are prepared to put forward to change the Iranian calculus. You said you hope that someone in the administration is thinking about war termination. Whoever that may be would also then need to kind of, their thoughts about it would have to filter up to the president somehow. Which my question in that context is, who do you think Trump is listening to when it comes to Iran policy. And I'm asking this because I'm struggling to see who within his administration and even within his sort of wider orbit was really advocating to start this war now.

40:03I was a little surprised sort of, and I'm just wondering, do you have any idea what centers of kind of power in the administration or in the Trump orbit are the Iran hawks that kind of pushed for this? I don't think so. And quite honestly, I didn't think this war was going to happen now, in part because of what I've thought about about Iran and regime change. And I've looked at the strategic challenges facing the United States. The last thing we need is another large war in the Middle East when we face a Russian challenge in Europe and a Chinese challenge in the Indo-Pacific. I look at Trump, the candidates' comments about nation building and regime change.

40:44where he had bragged about obliterating the Iranian nuclear program. It was the Israelis who were going on about the Iranian ballistic missile challenge. But I didn't think this administration would do, also given their base. I mean, what's the president getting criticized for? It's not that he has too little foreign policy. He has too much foreign policy for his base. And what people are harping on is affordability. So for 100 different reasons, this wasn't logical to me. The Secretary of State's explanation about we had to do it because when Israel was going to attack, the Iranians were going to respond.

41:21That, to me, made no sense at all. If we thought it was a bad idea, we would have told the Israelis not to attack. That wasn't to me. The idea that we would— Yeah, I mean, why not stop the initial attack instead of having to necessitate this? And it also, that opened the door to a lot of criticism about the whole relationship between Israel and the United States, you know, which I doubt that they want to deal with. Exactly. And I worry about some of the knock-on effects of that, if this goes badly. There's no organized center of decision-making. Again, you've got Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner doing the negotiations.

41:56Reportedly, they came back and said Iran wouldn't agree. I had two reactions to that. what was the scale of the demands we were giving Iran? It's one thing to say they wouldn't agree to something reasonable compromise on nuclear or ballistic missile or what have you. But if we were saying zero this and zero that on missiles and nuclear, no support for proxies, that would be a negotiating position designed to fail if it was that far reaching. Second of all, I found it rather remarkable that supposedly they reported back that after two sessions that the Iranians were not serious about compromise, that they've persisted for what, close to a year with Russia on Ukraine.

42:37And if you've had a party that was not serious about negotiations, they've shown, shall we say, infinitely more patience and tolerance and understanding of Mr. Putin than they showed for the Iranian foreign minister. Again, I think the military is the most serious actor here, but the military doesn't decide strategy. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, seems to play a serious role. The DNI, the director, seems to play zero role in national security or foreign policy. I'm much more concerned about proving elections were quote-unquote rigged in 2020. What's unclear is the role of the Secretary of State slash national security advisor.

43:17is his largest emphasis has been the hemisphere, where, by the way, you have another potential place for regime change, which is Cuba. But my own sense is the president is his own de facto national security advisor and secretary of state and everything. It's a very top-down administration. The NSC staff has really been depopulated. State Department is at its lowest end in my lifetime, I would say. No, what I think will influence the president There might be someone like Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and his political people. Because you're already seeing mass. The idea that you'd have massive criticism from the left against war and presidential prerogatives doesn't surprise anybody.

43:59But the right is incredibly unhappy with this. This is not what they bargained for. This is not what they want. People will be unhappy when they go fill up their car with gasoline. People, you know, the numbers already in the polls are quite negative. So my hunch is for the president, the whole idea was to get him. He's never been able to decide how to deal with the affordability issue. Because if he admits there's an affordability issue, it suggests his economic policy hasn't been great. If he doesn't admit there's an affordability issue, he doesn't scratch the itch that a lot of Americans are feeling.

44:33So he's caught in a dilemma. He's not the first president when caught in a domestic dilemma who becomes a foreign policy president. I've seen that before. The problem for him is this may have exacerbated his problem. So rather than solved it, it may have exacerbated it. So my own sense is he's going to feel the pressure from his domestic political people. And look, you can criticize this president for lots of reasons. He's very good at reading the room. He's got very good political antenna. So my sense is very quickly he's going to look for a way to cut his losses and declare victory. In our conversation now and also in the piece you talked about on Substack, your home and away, your sub stack, you offered in that post kind of this very long list of reasons kind of why not to do this.

45:21And I guess the question I have for you is, okay, you know, but he has done it, right? I mean, we've started it now. So if Trump were to call you up, as he apparently is wont to do, call people up, you know, sound people out, you know, get all these opinions from people, if he were to call you up and to ask you what he should do now, What would you tell him? What's the best course forward, given what we know right now? I don't like my answer, but I'll tell it to you. I would say essentially a version of what we were just talking about, that we have accomplished most of our war aims on the nuclear side, the ballistic missile side, and so forth.

46:01We have weakened the political establishment. We would say the future of Iran's domestic political orientation is something for the Iranian people to decide. We hope it moves in a more reasonable, open direction. We would be willing to support that process in any way with sanctions, relief or what have you. So I would say to do that, to get the Israelis to sign on, the understanding with the Israelis, they would cease attacks unless Iran continued to attack them. And then we would have to reopen negotiations with Iran. and we'd have to basically say, okay, we are interested in a ceasefire. And you've had Israeli-Iranian ceasefires and so forth, not that long ago.

46:48And we would have to set the table for that and say, here's what our requirements are. And the Iranians would push back. We'd say we want this on the nuclear. And I think that we'd probably have to put on the table some incentives. It just wouldn't be threats. but it would also, you know, one, our ability to continue a war is finite, given our other responsibilities and munitions issues. Iran's ability to inflict pain is considerable on the region. So we may have to think about two very awkward things. One would be in reopening the nuclear conversation, what might we be willing to live or tolerate short of an absolute zero everything outcome?

47:33And second of all, what are we prepared to do to contemplate or offer up in the way of financial incentives, i.e. a degree of sanctions relief? And one idea would be to say something about this amount of enrichment and this kind of inspections and so forth. And then we'd have maybe a sliding scale of sanctions relief. We would say that if you agreed to this, We would do this degree. If, however, you made these political changes or whatever, we might do a little bit more. And that way it doesn't look like we deserted the opposition and so forth. But I think it would probably take something like that, a diplomatic thing and an economic dimension.

48:14And the president, again, he could say, you know, he obviously we killed the Ayatollah. The Israelis did. We weakened Iran's military capability. they will build some of that back. So I would tell them not to use words like obliterate. What you've done is you've set back the Iranians significantly. But so long as you have a regime that has ambitions, and this Iranian regime continues to have ambitions, we have to think that this is, how would I put it, this is a situation that best has been temporarily managed. It's not been permanently solved. I would wish good luck to anyone telling President Trump that he has to kind of, you know, not oversell the achievement, but the point taken, I mean, really what you're describing almost is the Iranians, it sounds like what you're saying, have to come up with a way of presenting something that looks a little bit like the JCPOA, the Obama era nuclear deal, but like a little bit better and allow Trump to say, well, you see, it was only because I took this action that we got a better deal.

49:15100%. And one of the, I always thought the biggest weakness of the JCPOA, And I think the administration made a mistake in its negotiations beforehand. What the so-called sunset provisions. What I would have argued for is get constraints that never, ever expire. The idea of an Iranian nuclear weapon doesn't, it's not an idea that ripens in 20 years and it sounds a lot better in 10 or 20 years. It ought to be permanent. We do not want the Iranians or anyone else now to bring nuclear weapons into the Middle East. So you have different components. You have the limits. you have the duration you have inspections and i would put the the emphasis probably on duration and inspections and then certain limits about both amount of enriched material and level of enrichment and but essentially you're right reopen uh a nuclear agreement with the irons and again i'm not persuaded i don't think we know enough yet justin that we couldn't have had that before this It is not I've not seen a persuasive what's postmodern, whatever phrase you want to use, tick tock of the history of the Whitcoff Kushner negotiations.

50:26And the Omani foreign minister was basically on a plane coming here saying, hey, what the Iranians are putting off the tables pretty good. It would be nice to get the authoritative readout of the back and forth between the United States and Iran. And by the way, not just for historical reasons, we may need to revisit it if we're going to have war termination now. Right. Yeah, let's hope that some intrepid reporters at some of our news organizations are trying to tease that out now. I would like to read that as well. I want to kind of do a little sort of historical tangent here and see your reaction to this.

51:00You served in the George W. Bush administration during the regime change war that it launched in Afghanistan after 9-11, and also on the run-up to the one that it ultimately launched in Iraq, which you've described sort of famously as a war of choice as opposed to a war of necessity. And one that I should say you opposed from within the administration. Looking back, in both cases, do you think there's any argument that it might have been better to do something akin to what Trump is doing now in Iran? I mean, in Afghanistan, for example, you know, accept a Taliban surrender that allowed them to kind of continue as a political faction, install new leaders, and then leave.

51:45In Iraq, you know, do a decapitation strike and just kind of keep decapitating until there's some Ba 'athist who relents and allows for all the inspections you want and anything like that. I'm trying to imagine a kind of approach to those conflicts that would have looked like that. What do you think? It's always the Venezuelan model. What you're basically talking is a degree of leadership change without systemic change. We used to actually look at that in Iraq. the shorthand for it in the government was Saddamism without Saddam. Could you find a Ba 'athist leader, more of a technocrat than a sociopath, to put it bluntly, that you could work with, that wouldn't butcher his own people, and that might be willing to work with other neighbors, and so forth.

52:36So that was something we, that was one of the ideas, and easier to describe than bring about, is what I would say. So the goal, if you will, often was not democracy that was seen, at least as a first step, as a bridge too far. It was simply removal of Saddam. The problem is he had the country so wired with his secret police and the rest that any time, any sort of a plot and all that wouldn't work. A lot of these top-heavy systems through purges and the rest make it very tough to... But no, that idea occurred to us. It would have been, if you will, a low cost, not solution, but a preferable outcome, either as a new plateau or conceivable as a way station.

53:23I thought in Afghanistan, though, that wasn't a real option. But I also thought we had an answer, which was regime change. The idea of a Venezuelan option, it's a little bit what you suggested for Iran, if something like that were conceivable. And again, we may find ourselves there less because of what we do, though maybe. I mean, that's where covert action comes in and political signaling and so forth. It might simply be the machinations of internal jockeying for power. There have always been different perspectives in Iran between the or among the army, the Revolutionary Guards, the besieged militia, the clerics.

54:00Iranian politics are not, shall we say, fixed. So the idea that you could have a different political balance inside Iran is not a crazy idea. Right. It's not quite as monolithic as, say, Saddam's regime was, yeah. And so the idea that you could try to, through overt and covert means, try to influence the power struggle or the policy trajectories better, that to me would be probably a smart, long-term policy to no guarantees it would work. and you could do things, again, to incentivize certain behaviors and penalize others. But I would think that if we do end up, let me go this way, if we end up with a situation where after this war ends, things kind of look like they did before inside Iran, then I would think that would be a smart policy, which is not regime change, again, in the ambitious sense of the word, but might be a little bit of regime evolution, might be a more realistic and possible path.

55:02You know, the Secretary of State who you worked for in the George W. Bush administration was Colin Powell. And we ran an article earlier this week by Richard Fontaine, who's a veteran Republican foreign policy hand. And he argued in this piece that Trump's approach to U.S. military power is what he called the anti-Powell doctrine. He sees what Trump has done and done as well in Iran as sort of inverting Colin Powell's belief that, you know, force should be employed only as a last resort. You have to have a clear objective, clear exit strategy. You try to build public support and then you use overwhelming force to achieve victory.

55:40Now, Fontaine doesn't endorse Trump's actions at all, but he does write, and I'm quoting here, in some ways, the Trump response to the Powell Doctrine has served recent history better than a dogmatic application of the original. What do you make of that? It all depends upon what your definitions of success are. If your definition as in Venezuela was quite specific, we get rid of one person and we open up oil fields for a degree of development, then yes we succeeded if your definition of success was something more ambitious and more far-reaching about the nature of venezuelan society democracy all that then we fail so and you know we could take that to other places so you always kind of ask yourself and farm a couple things one is what is your definition of success two what's feasible and at what cost And third, what's desirable?

56:36And you always have to weigh the desirability against the feasibility. My favorite was that fire policy must be doable as well as desirable. So it's hard for me to give you a hard and fast answer to what Richard was saying. And I thought his piece was a good piece. I liked the way he juxtaposed Powell's rules against Trump's. I had some issues with Powell's rules. I never thought that force necessarily should only be a last resort. because, yes, that was politically popular, but what if there was an opportunity? Well, interestingly enough, that's what the Trump administration did here. They thought there was an opportunity to go after the leadership.

57:10So force wasn't a last resort. The problem was, again, they misread the nature of Iranian political leadership. They thought decapitation was a real option when it wasn't. And more broadly, if you're going to do wars of choice, and particularly preventive wars of choice, all of which reinforced the fact that you didn't have that, it really helps to build yourself a political base and a little bit of cushion. And that's where going to the public, showing that diplomacy couldn't give you an acceptable outcome. I mean, when we had the last particular war of necessity, which I was heavily involved with, which was the Gulf War, we spent over six months doing diplomacy and sanctions.

57:55And when we finally use force on behalf of what I thought were vital interests, it was only after the other tools were shown to have failed. So the idea that you go to a war of choice that you didn't have to fight, certainly not now, without having demonstrated that other instruments came up short, you couldn't live with the outcome. That just seems to me politically incredibly risky. And that's why I think, again, if I were a betting man, I think this president's going to have to find a way to cut his losses politically. It was remarkable how little effort went into any kind of effort to make the case to the public in support of this.

58:32It is remarkable. And one of the few rules of wars of choice, if you are going to conduct them, is you've got to go to great lengths because it's a little bit like being out there on a high wire without a net. If you're fighting a war of necessity, like, say, Zelensky's fighting in Ukraine, you're forgiven a lot because you got no choice. There is zero choice if you want to survive. Or if one side invades another, like happened to us in Korea in 1950, people understand what we're going. Where we got in trouble in Korea is when the war of necessity morphed into a war of choice when we went north of the 38th parallel and tried to unify the peninsula by force.

59:17It's not just that we failed and it was a costly failure, but we hadn't made the case for why that was necessary. And Truman and MacArthur and the rest paid a price. W paid a real price for the war of choice that was Barack. We paid something of a price in Afghanistan when we got ambitious. It was one thing to get rid of the Taliban. And it comes back to your point before. Was there an alternative to the Taliban that didn't involve nation building? Didn't seem so at the time, just to make clear. I was heavily involved in that. But again, I think you've got to ask yourself those questions. But this administration here to sort of have an ambitious policy using words like regime change without any political preparation.

1:00:04Wow. That is a. It seemed to me it reflected a real misreading of the situation in Iran and a kind of nothing we haven't talked about. I think after Venezuela, I can't prove it, but I sensed it, Justin, there was a degree of confidence, hubris, that we were masters of the universe. The military could accomplish anything. The United States could accomplish anything. Think about it. When President Trump in early January, if I had my date, told the Iranian leadership, don't kill people or else. And they essentially blew us off. I think that showed kind of the post-Venezuelan arrogance that we were riding high and no one in the world would dare stand up to us.

1:00:47Well, guess what? They did dare stand up to us. You wrote in your sub-stack piece that you suspect that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are probably enjoying this or sort of happy to see Trump take this step. Why do you think that? For several reasons. One is it's a great strategic distraction. To the extent we're worried about the Middle East, we're not focusing on Europe or Asia. Second of all, we're going through munitions like there's no tomorrow. And for Putin, that's a tremendous advantage. I mean, what does Ukraine need more than anything else? Things like patriots.

1:01:28Guess what's not going to be on the shelf? Things like patriots. And if you're China and you're looking at Taiwan, again, this is good news. They might be a little bit uneasy with this. This reminds them of Trump's unpredictability. And neither Putin nor Xi Jinping are comfortable with unpredictability. They're both very methodical people, shall we say. But all things being equal, the United States that's bogged down in the Middle East, divided at home, using up munitions, fanning the flames of let's come home, kind of come home America, I would think, plus also demonstrating the right, quote unquote, of a great power to intervene in nearby places or what have you.

1:02:14I would think all of these are being, shall we say, welcomed. I saw the other day Putin gave some comment about criticizing us for violating international norms. Now, I don't know the word for footspot in Russian, but whatever it is, it applies. But to my hunch is he took more than a little pleasure sticking it to us now. I mean, I can see that. On the other hand, I think it presumes that we're not successful here in some way, because I can imagine an argument that a somewhat successful move against Iran could disadvantage both China and Russia in various ways, whether it's oil and gas supplies to China or arms with Russia.

1:03:02I mean, in a sense, they may be happy because they think it's unlikely that we're going to succeed. But if it did work, then I would think they would see it as a cost, no? Fair enough, though Russia will like the higher gas prices, higher energy prices. China has insulated itself pretty well. China's been very systematic through their own equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve and the like to reduce their vulnerability to supply disruption. But you're right. If this were a stunning success that showed the willingness and ability of America to intervene effectively to bring about outcomes to some extent like Venezuela on a larger scale, yeah, I think it would unnerve them a little bit.

1:03:43But that's not happen, where this is not being done cheaply. And it's not clear that, shall we say, the results will measure up to the standards of success that we set for ourselves. It's an ironic thing, if you think about it. If we had never talked about regime change, and we had simply gone in and said, we're here to deal with the nuclear issue, which has arisen again, we thought we'd taken care of it, but we hadn't. Obviously, the ballistic missile issue, maybe support for proxies and terrorism. We're going to deal with that. And just left it at that. Think about how much better this would be.

1:04:24Because then we wouldn't have to explain why we fell short. We wouldn't have encouraged Iranians to come out in the street. Part of me thinks, or if our goal was regime change, then I would have said, don't use military force. There was no need to do it. Don't bring the Armada in. Instead, focus on economic pressure. That was the Achilles heel of this regime. What was bringing the Iranians out into the streets in late December? It was the economy. The currency was in free fall. So I would have said, play the long game. There was nothing that Iran was doing with ballistic missiles or nuclear that was an imminent threat.

1:05:03I would have said, keep an eye on it, but play the long game, try to bring out regime change through some kind of, you know, strengthen the opposition, try to organize them, get them to put out a statement of policies that might induce defections from security establishment and double wherever you could, go after tankers, maybe put economic pressure on the regime. That would have been an interesting policy. What didn't make sense was to marry the use of an imminent military force, military force now with regime change. So I thought the administration had options to either focus on the military and never mention regime change or focus on economic and behind the scenes political health and focus on regime change, but not use the military.

1:05:47Your strategy is the relationship of means and ends. And they got it exactly wrong when it came to the means and ends of policy. I think that's probably a good place to end it. A very, very sharp point there at the end. Richard, thank you so much for all your insight and for your time. Justin, thank you. And thank you and Dan and others for continuing to put out the best magazine in the world about the world.

1:06:29Mary-Kate Godfrey, and Connish Therruer. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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