Assessing the Next Phase of the U.S.-Iran Conflict

So when we last spoke on March 3rd, the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran had just crossed the threshold from shadow war into overt military confrontation. At that time, Vali and I deliberately avoided predictions. Instead, we tried to frame the situation through incentives, constraints, and escalation dynamics. Our premise at that time was simple. Wars like this aren't decided by single strikes or counterstrikes. They evolve through the interaction of strategic objectives, domestic political pressures, alliance dynamics, and escalation thresholds that each side is willing or unwilling to cross. So looking back over the past 10 days, what is striking to me, Vali, is how much of what we discussed has actually played out along those lines. Despite very confusing messaging, the United States has largely pursued a limited objective, which has been to degrade Iran's capabilities while avoiding actions that would immediately escalate the war towards regime collapse. Israel has been somewhat more aggressive, expanding its targets set beyond strictly military assets, it appears. Iran has responded not with confrontational, conventional response, but more with calibrated asymmetric pressure using missiles, drones, maritime disruption, and economic leverage. And the Gulf states have behaved almost exactly as we anticipated. They've strengthened their defensive coordination with Washington in particular, but have also quietly been pushing for de-escalation. So in many respects, I think the framework we used which was to look at incentives rather than predictions, has proven useful. Having said that, the past 10 days has also introduced a new, or maybe several new dynamics. There's been a leadership transition in Iran. There's been a widening of the economic dimension of the conflict. And there are growing questions about whether escalation can remain contained. So, you know, a different framework that occurred to me that we could use for today's discussion is really every actor is fighting two battles at once, one against its adversaries and another against its own strategic constraints. So what I try to do is for us to discuss several themes: escalation control, state fragmentation or the potential for state fragmentation, and the war's takeaways from different perspectives, including China. But before we get into assessing where the conflict stands and where it may be going, Vali, maybe we can start by discussing what in the past 10 days has surprised us. So for me, three things stand out. First, the speed with which the Iranian regime reconstituted its leadership after the assassination of the Supreme Leader was notable. Many analysts had expected a longer period of succession uncertainty and inter-elite jockeying, but instead, Mohammad Khamenei was elevated rapidly even though he lacked or lacks theoretical or religious legitimacy. And that suggests that the Iranian state is less personalized around a leader in the way, say, that Russia is organized around Putin or Iraq was organized around Saddam Hussein. It functions more like an institutional revolutionized system with multiple power centers, and in this period of wartime, those institutions have clearly prioritized continuity over legitimacy. That's the first surprise to me. The second was what appears like an expansion of Israel's targeting strategy, particularly its willingness to strike urban energy infrastructure, such as Tehran's oil depots, as well as what appears to be attacks or hits on historically significant sites. And that suggests that Israel may be pursuing not just military degradation, but psychological coercion. And to me, that's a very dangerous bet because it risks deeply antagonizing the Iranian population that identifies with its civilizational and historic heritage to a much greater degree than they may despise the regime. And the third surprise for me was the speed with which this conflict acquired a global economic dimension. It's of course well known that 20% of the world's oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz. The surprise was that the price shock propagated more rapidly than markets expected because of logistics risks. So shipping insurance jumped 10 or 20 times within days, and some insurers simply refused to cover voyages, and that has resulted in shipping companies pulling vessels. There was a sudden drop in tanker throughput, even though the strait is at least technically open. So think of it as an airport runway that remains open even though planes refuse to land. And while Western strategic reserves have been opened, that doesn't really help because most of The oil that passes through Hormuz goes through Asia, impacting China, India, and Japan in particular. So what we witnessed is a supply shock that propagated through markets even before the supply actually disappears. So those were the 3 things that surprised me. What surprised you?

I was not as surprised with the succession. I was maybe more surprised with the person in the end who they chose. For the reason that it was very clear that after the June war, that there was a lot more preparation was done for decapitation. And obviously, everybody knew that the Iran Supreme Leader was the top target for Israel and that the assumption, particularly in the White House, was that if he was killed, somehow a new leadership would step forward, a kind of a Venezuela scenario. So it was very clear that, you know, the regime was preparing for his assassination. And that they probably had been a list. There had been a process for them to choose a person. They may have delayed even announcing it because they wanted to deny Israel ability to kill the successor as well, as happened in Lebanon. You know, the fact that the Mojtaba and the other main candidate do not have strong religious credentials was not a surprise. Mojtaba actually has more religious credentials than his father when he became Supreme Leader. As a cleric, ironically speaking, not that that may be a low bar, but in a way that Iran has done this already, that already the authority no longer rests in the person, rests in the office. And in this case, also his personal history and his suffering during this war of losing family members, etc., has given him an additional aura. But I think it was a very powerful signal as to what is coming forward in Iran, that it is— he essentially was chosen as a Revolutionary Guards kind of a choice, somebody who can step in right away if indeed he's not injured and is not incapacitated, which remains to be seen, that could actually take the helm of things and actually implement the strategy that is already in place. On the third point, actually perhaps is the more interesting one to me. The way Iran has waged this war And I would say they have followed a certain strategic discipline in the sense that they came into this expecting that they're going to be receiving massive blows. And they have prepared themselves for absorbing those blows and then essentially implementing a counter-strategy that they had. And they have caught both the US and Israel a bit off guard in a sense, even intensification of efforts to break the back of the regime sort of suggests that there's certain frustration in both Tel Aviv and Washington with how long this war has gone, why the regime hasn't collapsed, and also Iran's counterpunches. And I would say they followed first a strategy which was similar to the June war and what they learned, which is Israel and the United States have infinite amount of offensive firepower. Iran just has to find a way to absorb that regardless of the cost. But they have a finite amount of defensive capability in the form of interceptors, Patriot missiles, and, and, you know, THAAD missiles, etc. And Iran's missile barrage at the beginning targeted depletion of those resources. And then along with something new this time, which was attacking US bases and particularly very advanced radar systems that they hit in Jordan, in Qatar, in UAE, that kind of blinded some of the operational theater awareness of US and Israeli military, reduced their ability to detect incoming missiles. I heard often saying that Iranians said that the real missile wars actually could start after the 10th day, not before. And that they were basically baiting the US and Israel to deplete their resources. And then that focused the war essentially on this back and forth of missiles versus bombing. And then they basically, I would say, launched a guerrilla warfare against the global economy, which caught everybody by surprise. They haven't gone only after oil. They've gone after every supply chain that is connected to the Gulf. Fertilizer, petrochemicals, even cooking oil for India is locked up now inside the Gulf. And fully well understanding that it doesn't take much to do that and that the UAE or or US bases are not prepared essentially to deal with very cheap Iranian drones. Every Shahed drone that Iran fires at UAE and US bases approximately costs $7,000 and could be mass-produced, you know, easily. Israel and the US have been bombing missile depots and missile launchers, but they really don't have an answer for a much cheaper way that you can essentially hamper the global economy. And that essentially is the strategy that they think will get them to the end, not the missile bombing. In other words, if they retain their coherence, if they don't collapse, that sooner or later oil can get to $200 a barrel. There's going to be all sorts of other shortages. Simultaneously, the Houthis can start putting pressure back on the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. And that's their way of dealing with what is a military offensive with essentially an asymmetric response at the underbelly, if you would, of the global economy. Now, it is, you know, shock— that's probably the biggest surprise here. Of how unprepared the US was for this, given the fact that the Iranians had been very openly saying that this is exactly what they're going to do. And they'd been saying it to the highest levels in the Gulf, that this is exactly what they're going to do if they are attacked. If they are attacked and their survival is put at risk, all bets are off. They're going to go after the global economy and they're going to go after oil. And the fact that President Trump was surprised and unprepared for this and was still operating on the basis that you kill the Supreme Leader and you're going to have an easy in, easy out, a new regime in Tehran you can work with, and was not prepared for what he's facing. And really, I think the US's only option now is to keep bombing harder and harder, hoping that in this race for endurance, they could break the regime. But As you and I are talking, I think in a way the US can keep escalating bombing and Israel can escalate bombing, but that's not a solution for the Gulf. If Iran can maintain that chokehold, then that gives it some degree of leverage.

I think you framed Iran's angle Well, let me double-click a little bit more on Washington's— how Washington is playing this game, which you've alluded to. What is interesting to me, and this is a topic that perhaps doesn't get enough attention, is that Even though, as you say, the United States has conducted significant strikes, it's avoided a number of actions that would dramatically raise the escalation ceiling. For example, the United States has not seized Park Island. And for those who are unfamiliar with it, Park Island handles 90 to 95% of Iran's oil exports. It's an island about the size of JFK. Militarily, it's a target that is extremely vulnerable. Taking it would literally cripple Iran's oil exports overnight. And by the way, Iran's dependence on Clark Island isn't because its planners have been careless Like most things, geography locked its strategic importance since the '60s, and the island is both Iran's greatest economic assets and its greatest strategic vulnerability. So the obvious question is, why hasn't Washington seized it? And my interpretation, Vali, is that seizing Harkh would fundamentally redefine the war because It's one thing to destroy Iran's military capabilities. That's just standard coercion. Strangling its economy makes it existential. And if I'm right, the paradox here is that Hark Island is powerful leverage precisely because the United States has not yet used it. Because once the conflict becomes existential, then Iran's incentives are going to change. At that point, Tehran may decide it has nothing left to lose and it can escalate much more dramatically, closing the Strait of Hormuz outright, attacking Gulf energy infrastructure, and expanding the war through whatever proxies it has left. So the broader strategic question for Washington, I think, is whether it can maintain escalation control while still demonstrating that Iranian coercion will not succeed. And that leads to another important dimension here, which is one of time. Militarily, the United States is benefiting from time. As you suggested, its industrial capacity and its alliance network grow stronger the longer this conflict persists. Politically, however, time works against Washington. Energy shocks, domestic politics, global commitments all create a variety of pressures to resolve this conflict quickly. And in fact, there's one very important time dimension that many have overlooked, and that is President Trump's pending trip to Beijing, which introduces an important political clock that's scheduled to happen at the end of March. This trip is obviously one of the most consequential diplomatic events in the president's second-term presidency. And it's, I think, meant to signal that US-China relationship remains stable enough to manage major global issues. But if the Middle East conflict escalates dramatically in the days leading up to the trip, that would dominate the political agenda. It would weaken the optics of superpower stability and could potentially force a postponement of the visit. So it seems to me that the United States is operating under a tension between military patience on the one hand, and political and diplomatic urgency on the other. How do you see Washington's calculus in this?

No, I think you raise very good points. The United States can definitely take Kharg Island or try to incapacitate Iran's ability to export altogether by an attack on it. But then Iran is also playing the madman theory here. In other words, and it has said this for many, many years, so you can accept their arguments at face value or dismiss them, that if we don't export oil, nobody else will. And we've already seen that actually the Gulf is enormously vulnerable to Iran's attacks. And part of Iran's strategy in the first phase of the war was to deplete the Gulf's own ability to intercept incoming missiles. And drones. And the US hasn't been actually resupplying them because it doesn't have any. I mean, Iran found that, you know, it's— the West has an enormous amount of offensive capability, but limited amounts of defensive capability against drones and missiles. So Iranians can go, as you mentioned, directly after sources of supply. That then could knock out exports for months going forward. And so the Iranians do have sort of a counter-escalation leverage here because the US was not prepared for all of this. Right? So in the long term, yes, it can fix that. But in the short term, it is bound by the realities of what you can call munitions count, which has actually been caught off guard pretty badly in a way that it cannot actually protect its allies in the region. And I think once this war ends, this is going to become a big problem that the US bases have invited attack on these countries, but the US bases and the United States not able to protect them. It cannot protect Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Doha from direct attack on those cities, on their airports, on their businesses, but it can also not protect against attack on their energy infrastructure, as well as I would say also on their other infrastructure, desalination, et cetera. In other words, in a case of invasion of Iran, then we'll be in a completely different zone than we are right now. And then, you know, the United States also will end up owning the consequences, not only on the global economy, but also on the ground, which is not a problem that Israel has. In a sense. The way I think the Iranians are betting is that not only the United States, but its European allies and its Arab allies and increasingly Asian countries, which are getting badly hurt by this blockade of the Gulf, we're going to say there are two choices here in front of you. You can either escalate, hoping that you will break Iran's will, and force them to surrender and accept the immediate ceasefire with the risks that you and I are just discussing. Or you could find a way to negotiate an out.

Right?

And I think the pressure is also building on President Trump to find the exit. And I believe that the US has tried. The Iranians are not interested in a ceasefire that looks like June because there's no win for them. They've already, as you said, paid heavily in the bombing, they've lost leadership, the country has suffered. They're not interested in a ceasefire that just basically says, you're under the same sanctions, we could mow the lawn again in 6 months' time. That's beneficial to the US and everybody else, but it's not beneficial to Iran. So the pressure is on President Trump to come up with something bigger to end this war. And And it's not clear what it is. And there is no direct negotiations here. And there's no, at least overt intermediary that we see, although there are some rumors. But I think President Trump has to weigh this. If he accepts negotiating a ceasefire with Iran, in effect, he has to accept a certain degree of defeat, that the United States has fallen short of its war goals. He also has the problem of dealing with Israel and its ambitions in the war. Which are yet to be fulfilled. And then versus a much more messy and potentially dangerous outcome of a much more significant escalation in the Gulf. So I think it's really high-wire time for a president that is not used to this. I mean, so far he's got his way with everybody and didn't feel like he needs to prepare for a plan B. And now he has to do that. And I think thinking about a Plan B would also begin to open a rift between Israel's war aims and US's war aims, which is also pretty tricky for President Trump to navigate.

Yeah, actually, that's a good segue for us to discuss Israel, which we haven't yet touched on. So as we discussed last time, Israel entered this conflict with a fundamentally different threat perception than Washington. For Israel, Iran's missile arsenal and nuclear threshold capability was an existential threat. And over the last 10 days, it's expanded its targeting doctrine, as I mentioned at the outset, striking energy infrastructure as well as urban assets. Which creates or raises an important strategic paradox. If Israel successfully degrades Iran's capability, but the regime survives, the likely result is probably a more security-dominated Iranian state with the Revolutionary Guards wielding even greater influence. In other words, short-term degradation could actually produce long-term hardening. So if Israel views the current conflict as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the strategic balance with Iran, what escalation thresholds is it willing to cross that Washington may not be willing to cross? When Jerusalem's objectives begin to diverge from Washington's objectives, as we've been discussing, we enter a more dangerous phase of the conflict, a higher wire act, as you suggested. And then it becomes a question of whose escalation logic will dominate the battlefield. Where do you come out on that?

I think this is going to be the crux of the issue for President Trump. I think from the very beginning, there was different war objectives. I think President Trump was looking for a shorter war, in and out, clean, in which a friendlier version of the Islamic Republic would come forward. For instance, he kept saying, "I want somebody from the inside to take over." Israel was from the very beginning looking for a much longer campaign, because realistically, Israel also knew that a just decapitation does not deal with Iran's missile capability. And if you leave the Islamic Republic in place, ultimately, that is short of what Israel's aim is, which was to take Iran out of the Middle East equation as a rival, as a regional influence. But this divergence has become more. I think President Trump really doesn't know what his objectives are anymore. He didn't find the sort of easy transition to Dulce Rodriguez in Iran and doesn't know really how this will end. Whereas Israel, I think, is now after not regime change, is after state collapse. I don't think Israel is too concerned about what would follow. I think it's really after degrading the entire structure of the state. And you see them coming up with ideas out of desperation, like we're going to arm separatists to break up Iran, or issues like that, or borders of Iran may change at the end of this war. And it was threatening the country itself, not the regime. I think Israelis sensing that President Trump may be wavering or maybe looking the other way, are actually escalating in order to finish this faster. Right. I don't know if it's going to work because it does have blowback, like hitting oil depots, particularly it was bad luck because they hit it during rain and it created a catastrophic chemical scenario in Iran. Actually, according to reports, displeased the White House. And since then, apparently the White House is asking for that Israel seek permission. Or specific targeting of major infrastructure things, which already tells you they're going in different directions. I think President Trump is still looking for an exit, which may not include the collapse of the Islamic Republic. He may have even come to, you know, he's reconciled himself with Iran is not going to be ruled by hardline Revolutionary Guards and a hardline Supreme Leader. And there's not going to be regime change in the works. So how do I actually arrive at a ceasefire and get the oil flowing out of the Gulf again? And I think that's actually probably what the Gulf is pushing for as well, a peace that could remove the risk on their economies that has been cast there. But I think Israel is not on the same page. Israel is still pushing. It's pushing in Lebanon. It's escalating there as well. And it's also going to escalate with Iran. And so I anticipate that you're going to have this dual dynamic, that the pace of the war is going to become nastier and bigger as Israel tries to knock Iran out. And then President Trump trying to decide, can Israel get it done? And if he can't, if he comes to that conclusion that he can't get it done, and that this, let's say, we're going to have another week, 10 days of oil in the situation that is. And some oil experts say damage to the wells, how quickly they can be brought back on, the sort of knock-on effect of disruptions in global supply chains in global oil is not going to be reversed quickly, even before November. It's going to take months before this can be unwound. So the president, I think, has to make a decision very, very soon if he's going to be in command of his own destiny. Let's put it that way. Because his destiny right now is in the hands of Iran and is in the hands of Israel. He's become increasingly an observer. So either he has to buy into the Israeli strategy at whatever cost, or he has to basically accept that the Iranian strategy is compelling him to come to the table. And then he has to find a way to make that politically palatable and force his way. And I think the deadline you're putting on his trip to China is actually pretty important in that sense.

Yep. Let's pick up a topic that there's been a fair amount of speculation about, and that is the question of state fracture or state fragmentation. As you know, there's been speculation, particularly among the diaspora, about whether the Iranian state could fracture under pressure. And some invoke Yugoslavia or Syria as analogous situations, and some have suggested that a fractured Iran would be welcomed by Israel and other regional powers because it would eliminate the Islamic State forever as a threat. So the proponents of this thesis have pointed to reports that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurds in western and northwestern Iran as supportive evidence for this thesis. You and I haven't discussed this before, But while state fragmentation can't be ruled out, I personally find the arguments for this outcome unpersuasive and low likelihood. Let me give you kind of how I've been thinking about it. For Iran to fracture territorially, three conditions would need to occur simultaneously. First, the IRGC and the central security apparatus would have to split into competing factions. That's in fact, as you know better than anyone, what happened in Syria when the army splintered, large parts of the security apparatus defected, and the state lost control of major cities and borders. So regardless of what one might think of the Iranian regime, and I personally think of it as wholly illegitimate, The preponderance of evidence suggests that the Islamic Republic, through its coercive forces of the IRGC and Basij, the intelligence services, and the provincial administrative structures, have held. We've seen no large-scale defections, at least to date. Second thing that you need to have in place is separatist movements would need to be armed and territorially entrenched. So whether you're talking about the Kurds in the west, the Iranian Arabs in the southwest, the Balochis in the southeast, or the Azeris in the north, there would have to be a substantial armed movement. And while we've seen occasional small attacks from splinter groups like the Baluchi Ansar al-Burqan group. These are small insurgencies. They're not scaled territorial armies. And the third thing that you need to have is fragmentation rarely happens without external backings for all the separatist actors. If you go back to the case of Iraq, for example, Russia and Iran backed the Assad regime. The US supported the Kurdish forces until it didn't. Turkey supported certain rebel groups. Now, while there have been some reports of American support for Kurdish opposition groups, these are more likely pressure tactics on Iran than evidence of US support for fragmentation. The more important point in this regard for me is that Iranian national identity among ethnic groups, I think, is stronger than many people assumed. Iran, you know, has a, as you know, has a 2,500-year civilizational identity, which is different, for example, than Yugoslavia's relatively recent national construct. The Azeris, for example, which are about 15 to 20% of the population and the largest minority group in Iran, are also deeply integrated into the Iranian political system. And the Kurds, and I come from a Kurdish background, have for centuries been among the largest members of the Iranian army. In terms of Israel's interest, yeah, it's true that a fragmented Iran would lose its ability to coordinate a national nuclear weapons program or project power regionally, but it would also create uncontrolled missile arsenals. It would become a proliferation threat. There would be militias that would be competing for power, and it would create instability across Iraq, the Gulf, and the Caucasus. In other words, fragmentation seems to me more likely to create chaos than strategic stability. And I think Israel, the Gulf states, and the United States would want a weakened but still coherent Iran that can threaten them rather than a fragmented Iran. And finally, as for all these reports that the CIA is trying to arm the Kurds, the most likely explanation to me is that the US may be trying to open a second front beyond its current air campaign. The air campaign will degrade Iran's capability, but it won't create political pressure inside Iran. So providing military support to the Kurds may be a logical next step in Washington's escalation ladder against Iran. But even then, proxy strategies like this carry a lot of risk. Turkey, for example, would strongly oppose Kurdish insurgent movements, especially those linked to the PKK, and any US move perceived as empowering Kurdish militancy would be a major friction, I think, with Ankara. The Kurdish regional government in Iraq has also indicated it doesn't want to be dragged into the conflict. Because they fear Iranian retaliation. And Tehran has historically responded aggressively to any such insurgency. So even though the US messaging in this respect has been inconsistent, as you pointed out, President Trump initially signaled support, for example, for Kurdish actions and then backed away, saying he didn't want Kurdish forces entering the war because the conflict was complicated enough. So I don't really see that as being evidence supporting fragmentation. The last thing I'd say in this regard is that if there were external support to arm ethnic groups, I find it more plausible that they could be organized under a national Iranian umbrella opposition against the Islamic regime rather than separatist movement, but even that requires on-the-ground organizational skills that are not in evidence today. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I concur, but I would say also that this is all, to me, is evidence of strategic desperation in Washington. Because Plan A didn't work, they're trying, you know, anything else. They're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, whether it's to intimidate Tehran, or truly to test it out. You know, both Washington and Israel have invested heavily over a number of years in order to, in a way, weaponize the anger that the Iranian population has towards the regime into uprisings that could bring it down. And the surest way to create support for the country and rally the people behind an effort to suppress separation is to support separatist forces. In fact, President Trump, just thinking aloud about this, landed in Iran like a meteorite and sharpened focus that this is what the United States and Israel are after, not liberating you, but breaking your country. And the Islamic Republic, as as much as all Iranians dislike it, hate it, is probably 1% of Iran's history. And so the idea that, you know, you would break up Iran as a sacrificial lamb for getting rid of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily shared by all Iranians. There may be some who would accept that, but there are plenty of opponents of the Islamic Republic who are not willing to pay that price. So it basically tells you you have two strategies. On the one side, you're trying to get the Iranians to rise up against the regime. They constantly talk about this, you know, hearkening back to what happened in January. On the other hand, by threatening the territorial integrity of Iran, you actually push the population potentially in the opposite direction. But, you know, also having a credible separatist force cannot be done on the fly. I mean, a small militia, as you said, will not cut it. It takes years of investment in creating that. I mean, the Turks spent 10 years building and grooming the militia that ultimately marched into Damascus to topple Bashar al-Assad in the end. So this is not like you can just press a button. Secondly, I think your point is very well taken. There are minorities in Iran, there are grievances, but they are very integrated into the country. I mean, the Kurds are an Iranian people, just in terms of even their origins. They're Indo-European, identify with Iranian culture, celebrate Nowruz. They're not as alienated from the culture of the state the way they are in a nationalist Iraq or a nationalist Syria or a nationalist Turkey. It is more organic relationship. A large number of Iranian Kurds are also Shia, the more you come closer to the heartland. And so the support even for Kurdish separatism is not uniform within Iran. The Azeris, as you mentioned, I mean, Azeris have ruled Iran for the overwhelming majority of its history since 1500. And they have a huge presence at the top of the Islamic Republic and its security forces. They are by no means sort of a suppressed minority. And then, you know, around Iran, there is no support for this. The Turks have gone beyond this. I think the Turks have warned the KRG, the Kurdish Regional Government, very directly that they may intervene. If actually there is a basis from which the Kurds might want to use to attack Iran. And the government in Baghdad also believes that this kind of an idea will break up Iraq, that the territorial integrity of Iraq then will come into question if something like that happens. And so, you know, the United States cannot run an insurgency against Iran where the countries from which the insurgency has to be launched will not support it, not short-term and not long-term. There is a scenario that you would say if the pace of the bombing breaks the state at the center and there is no more like a coherent state anymore, that even, you know, units of IRGC locally could basically become kind of like warlords. We're not there yet, but, you know, that's a very different kind of a scenario. In other words, if the central state in Iran breaks down and different parts of the country basically become autonomous, then that's a different idea of a fragmentation. It's not necessarily supporting it from the outside, but it's supporting it from the inside. I think one of the issues that is here, that these kinds of solutions, in other words, the people, be they ethnic or Iranians, being a solution to the Islamic Republic is not a wartime strategy because people are not likely to rise up in rebellion while they're being bombed or are afraid of what happens next day. I mean, we saw the protests in Iran happen 6 months after the ceasefire in June, not during that that war. So, again, these are ideas they're throwing out, but they're not going to solve the very short-term problem that President Trump is dealing with. And I think the more Washington talks about these things, the more to me it means they really don't know what is the solution to this, I think, the strategic impasse that they find themselves in. They're sort of, as I said, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But in the end, I think the Iranian calculation is President Trump will arrive at a point, or that's, let's say, they're hoping President Trump arrives at a point where he realizes the only solution to salvage the economy, to address the pressure that he's going to face, is to find a way to end the war. And that's actually where the Iranians want him, at the table, with a very different balance of power between him and the Iranians that was the case in Geneva before the war. That the calculation is that when that moment comes, Iran's hand at the table will be stronger because it's not negotiating over its nuclear program. It's negotiating over the global economy. And the president's hand will be a lot weaker.

That's absolutely right. Let me pick up another topic that hasn't received much attention, Vali, and that is the role of artificial intelligence. When the conflict started, the United States used an AI-enabled mission control system called MAVEN to attack 1,000 targets in the war's first 24 hours. And to give you a sense of that, that's about twice the scale of the Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq in 2003. Within 5 days, it had hit 5,000 targets according to CENTCOM. So Project Maven is effectively fusing satellite drone signal intelligence to dramatically accelerate targeting cycles. The question that interests me is not whether AI is replacing commanders. It clearly isn't. But whether AI is fundamentally changing the tempo of the war in an uncontrolled manner, even before we get to the more transformative question of autonomous weapons. So if decision cycles are compressed from weeks to hours, does that make conflicts like this easier to control or potentially more dangerous because escalation can happen faster than political leaders can process it? Do you have a view on this?

I think you raise very interesting points. I'm not a specialist on this, but I would sort of make three observations based on what you said. I mean, first of all, it raises the possibility of catastrophic mistake, which is the opening act of the United States in this war was to kill 170 girls between ages 7 and 14, which probably you could explain it better. The fact that whatever maps were fed into the AI were outdated and then there was no sufficient human intervention control double-checking. And so multiple Tomahawk missiles hit a school. So then it puts a lot more emphasis on the actual quality of the information that goes into creating waves of attacks that then potentially cannot be called back because of the pace that it happens. Secondly, you know, it gave Iran, for instance, an interest in knocking out some of these early radars that help create what they call battlescape, if you would. And so then in the second push, you know, the quality of the information can decline significantly. If you're not seeing, if you don't have those radars, for instance, input to complement your satellite and signal intelligence as well. So the battle will be fought very differently. And thirdly, I would say, if the initial shock of launching thousands and thousands of missiles does not achieve the goal, which is to collapse the regime, And then it becomes much more difficult to sustain the same kind of attacks. In other words, the regime goes to ground, you don't have the same kind of intelligence. And then, you know, so there becomes a finite marginal utility, if you will say, a declining marginal utility to using AI. I mean, what we're seeing is that you're correct that the pace of this, of the initial attack was was huge, but, and it did kill significant targets, et cetera. But since then, it hasn't been able to control the direction of this war because the Iranians have changed, have gone to the ground, and the intelligence that has to feed the AI has become more difficult.

In the time that we have, let me turn to China because I know that the audience for this webcast is very interested in that. So obviously China is not a belligerent in the conflict, but it's watching it extremely closely because it is giving China something quite rare, which is a live demonstration of how the United States would conduct a high-tempo military campaign. So Questions like how quickly can it mobilize forces, how well it can integrate intelligence and targeting as we just discussed, how it manages logistics and munitions consumption, which you alluded to earlier, and whether it can sustain operations in one theater without weakening deterrence in another. So let's discuss what China may be taking away from the first 10 days. If I put myself in a Chinese analyst's shoes, I come away with 6 takeaways. The first is that U.S. military integration is incredibly efficient. Not only, uh, can the United States integrate air, naval, intelligence, cyber, and now AI-assisted targeting into a coherent strike campaign very quickly. The speed at which it's been able to locate and target assets shows just how lethal its skills are. The second takeaway for me is political. The United States moved quickly from a shadow conflict, as we discussed, to overt military operation. And from Beijing's perspective, that signals that Washington is still willing to employ military power decisively when core interests or red lines are perceived to be at stake. I think China would be particularly sensitive to this question because one of its core strategic assumptions has been that the United States might hesitate to enter a conflict with a major power, and I think this war suggests that assumption may at least need to be recalibrated. Third, I think that Chinese analysts will be paying close attention to munitions expenditure and interceptor usage, something you mentioned earlier. So if the war becomes extended, I think Beijing will study whether U.S. industrial capacity can sustain that tempo, and that directly informs China's calculus about how long the United States could sustain operations in the Western Pacific. Another lesson would be around strategic bandwidth. I think China will study whether the United States military can sustain this level of global engagement without degrading deterrence elsewhere. I think China is also observing how quickly military escalation in the Gulf translates into global economic disruption. You know, shipping disruption and energy market volatility shows, you know, how even relatively limited military actions can produce significant economic shock. And this is highly relevant for China because any Taiwan conflict would involve economic coercion and supply chain disruption. And finally, I think China will be studying the use of AI-assisted targeting and intelligence fusion. Things like MAVEN that we just discussed shows how, at least today, the United States can process large volumes of data and identify targets quickly. And I think for Chinese planners, this war highlights how central information dominance has become, which is something that isn't quite discussed as much. What are your views?

I agree with everything you said. I would just add that I'm very curious. I mean, I think the Chinese would be looking at what sort of a United States comes out of this war, that whether this is a humbling moment for President Trump and whether in this sort of game that the Chinese are playing with America back and forth, whether that changes things in China's advantage. The second issue I think they're looking at very carefully is what sort of a Gulf and what sort of an Arab-American relationship comes out of this war. I mean, the future of US presence in the region, the nature of relationships between the Gulf and the US, even the future of the Gulf economies for a certain period of time are all are all up for grabs. I think the Chinese, what's to me is very interesting, I don't see any evidence of them putting any pressure on Iran not to do what it's doing to the Gulf. Which suggests to me that they see what's happening as a greater loss for the US in the Gulf than it is for them, despite the short-term difficulties that it may create economically, although apparently Iran has already given China about 11 million barrels of oil from its tanker reserves, etc., to cushion the disruptions. And also whether this war ends up at some level being a massive strategic mistake by the United States. I mean, starting with President Obama, the US said it wants to pivot to Asia. That large wars or large entanglements in the Middle East were a mistake. And this may end up looking to the Chinese as having been a major strategic mistake by President Trump of actually re-immersing the United States in the Middle East in ways that might be more than 2, 3 weeks to deal with. Let's say if there's a state collapse and And the US will own the mess that that might mean. A country the size of Iran being in, you know, in chaos for the entire region. Definitely the mood in the region is that the fire that has started in Iran can engulf the whole region. There's a great deal of nervousness. And so the United States may end up becoming much more focused there, which all would be to China's advantage. You know, China under pressure is also at the moment where its greatest rival is, to use the sort of allegory, is actually scoring own goals on itself. And so that to add it to the practical sort of set of things that they are learning here is very important to observe.

Yeah. So let me see if I can synthesize the discussion that we have in the following way. I think perhaps the most important takeaway from the past 10 days is that this conflict is not about missiles and airstrikes, which is what everyone likes to talk about on cable news. I think this conflict is about escalation control. It's about how far each side is willing to go and how far they believe the others are willing to go. And what is interesting to me is that escalation control is fundamentally a political problem, not a military one. Each actor believes it's operating within limits, but the paradox of limited wars is that those limits become harder to maintain as the conflict continues. So the real question in the next phase of this war, Vali, is not who wins the next exchange of missiles. It's whether the political ceilings that have thus far kept the conflict limited continue to hold, or will they eventually break. And I think that's what we should focus on for the next phase. Thank you again for a thoughtful conversation, and thank you all for listening in.