America’s War of Choice on Iran

JUSTIN VOGT

Nate Swanson, welcome to The Foreign Affairs Interview.

NATE SWANSON

Thank you for having me.

JUSTIN VOGT

I should note for listeners, because events are developing quickly on the ground in Iran and in the region, you and I are speaking on the morning of Wednesday, March 4th.

Nate, before Operation Epic Fury began on February 24th, you wrote this terrific, really insightful piece for Foreign Affairs called “Why Iran Will Escalate.” And what you were doing was sort of trying to envision what might happen if the Trump administration decided to carry out the sort of military operation that they now have, obviously. And you talked about a lot of different scenarios where ways in which the Iranian regime could try to impose costs on the United States and its allies and kind of change the dynamic of the conflict, even in a situation where they were kind of very much outmatched military-to-military.

We’re now a couple days into this. I’m really curious to know what you make of the Iranian response so far. Have they escalated in the ways that you thought they might? And to the extent that they have tried to, have they managed to do so successfully?

NATE SWANSON

Yeah. Well, thanks, Justin, for having me. I mean, the answer to that is mixed. I mean, on the aspects I’ve been right about, I mean, it’s more bitter than sweet to be right about bad things happening. So, I think I should start with that.

But I think I got a few things right. I mean, first is that Khamenei was definitely prepared to die. And I think he was very comfortable with being a martyr and he was prepared for this moment-

JUSTIN VOGT

This is the supreme leader of Iran.

NATE SWANSON

Yeah, exactly. Ali Khamenei, he’s been the supreme leader of Iran for the last 37 years. So he has a huge role and basically all final decisions go through him. So I think he calculated in advance of this war that this war was coming and that Iran needed to be prepared for it and that he was likely going to die. And when that happened, they were going to be prepared to respond no matter who was there or not. And so I think that part of the argument I got right.

What I got wrong is probably the order. I thought they would be trying to impose more costs on Israel than they are. But instead, they kind of went straight to what I thought was the maximalist response, which was going after the Gulf neighbors who have really been trying to deescalate, I would say, the last couple months, but really the last six or seven years. And so, they’ve been in this de-escalatory posture. So I think they were shocked and it seems like the United States was shocked. They were actually basically who Iran went after first. And so they kind of went to the top of their escalation ladder. And so that surprised me and, in some ways, has made this kind of even worse than I thought it could go right away.

JUSTIN VOGT

Why do you think they would have done that?

NATE SWANSON

Well, I mean, I think they recognize that this was existential. And so, whatever previous examples we had, they were kind of out the window. They had not really faced this existential threat since maybe the Iraq war, Iran-Iraq War in 1981. And so, at this point, they know they have to, fundamentally, basically change [U.S. President Donald]Trump’s calculus on how easy he perceived the war to be. And so that meant going for what Iranians perceive as like the soft underbelly. So it’s American service members, of course. It’s economic targets. And it’s really the Gulf targets. Unfortunately, for them, they’re just close. Shorter-range munitions hit them in ways they don’t hit Israel. And so it’s the easiest thing for Iran to target. And they made a very early decision to do this.

JUSTIN VOGT

A skeptic might say, though, that so far, whatever the intention, the effects have not been catastrophic for anyone yet. If this is the maximum amount of punishment that the Iranians can mete out, what does that mean from your point of view? Or is this just still, are we still too early to know that?

NATE SWANSON

That’s a great question. I mean, one, you’re right. I think it’s too early to know. But at least what I perceive to be happening is Iran is very comfortable engaging in a long war. So the United States is trying to put timeframes on this. This is a four-week war, a five-week war, now it’s an eight-week war. I think Iran is comfortable dragging this out as long as needed.

Now, there is definitely a capabilities question here. Can Iran continue to inflict pain? I don’t know the answers to their stockpiles of missiles and [unmanned aerial vehicles]. And this is like a moving target as the United States is actively and Israel’s actively trying to target these things. But I do think psychologically, what you’re seeing is basically a bunker mentality where Iran has decided that they will do this as long as they want. They’ve been in a constant state of suffering in one form or another basically for the entirety of the Islamic Republic. And so this is a continuation of that. And they have calculated that they can go longer.

And so, you’re right, we haven’t seen mass casualties yet, but it’s like a drip process. Every single day, if they can do one thing that hurts us, it adds up. And then it has real impacts here domestically. I mean, this is not a popular war. And gas prices are up. We have at least six dead Americans, maybe more. We’ve had our embassy hit in Riyadh. We’ve had our consulate in Dubai. These are really big things. I guess there was a run on markets in Asia this morning. So, you’re right, it hasn’t been catastrophic, but it’s destabilizing for the United States, especially as we’re entering an election cycle. So, I think the Iranians are gambling that they can outlast Trump, and it’s a decent chance they’re right.

JUSTIN VOGT

One of the reasons we were really interested in your point of view on this, Nate, is that you have this interesting experience of having worked on Iran policy in both the Biden administration and in the Trump administration. Could you just, in very broad strokes, explain sort of what your role was most recently in the Trump administration and especially in terms of the negotiations with Iran?

NATE SWANSON

Until recently, I was a career civil servant. So I joined the State Department in 2007. And by luck or happenstance or bad luck, I’ve been kind of doing Iran ever since. And so, it’s almost 18 or 19 years at this point. And so, I spent the last two and a half, almost three years as the Iran director at the [National Security Council] under the Biden administration. But I came back to the State Department at the beginning of the administration and the Trump team reached out to me and said, “Would you be willing to join the negotiations, our negotiation team?” So, they had a few experts as well. And so, I mean, I don’t want to overplay my role a ton. I mean, because there was only a few meetings where we took the whole team. There wasn’t a ton of internal dynamics on setting policy. I think that was done at the highest levels. But I was, for a portion, plugged into how we were thinking about this and trying to see if we could get a new deal.

JUSTIN VOGT

How would you explain to listeners sort of, in broad strokes, your understanding of how decision-making on Iran is done in the Trump administration? What are the sources? What’s the information he’s getting? Where is he getting it from? Sort of who is he listening to? I guess I’m just kind of trying to understand, having seen it a little bit, at least from the inside, what’s your sense of how this process works and where some of the ideas and policies are coming from?

NATE SWANSON

Yeah. I mean, Trump administration definitely does decision-making differently. I mean, there’s really from Bush on, you had really a system set up where the National Security Council would basically coordinate amongst different agencies and then kind of bring all these different voices to the president to make decisions. And this administration is definitely different than even the first Trump administration where you still had that process, at least, to do it. And the process is not the same right now. There is not an NSC.

I do think the president relies on a very small group of advisers to make decisions. These are relatively well-known. Secretary [of State] Rubio, [Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff, [White House Chief of Staff] Susie Wiles, the Vice President JD Vance. So, I mean, he relies on these people for advice. So it’s not like he’s doing this all on his own. But I think what is unique is the process is just different. You can see a scenario where maybe he’s not getting all the information he needs.

And I think second, though, is, also unique to the president himself, is he likes to be lobbied and pitched on ideas. So he’s very willing to take information from outside sources as equally valuable. And so, I mean, you can see the role that, like, [Senator] Lindsey Graham has had on decision-making here. You can see the role that maybe, like, the Wall Street [Journal] editorial board has had, and probably others. And I think the president wants to hear different views. I mean, he met with [conservative commentator] Tucker Carlson, who has a completely different view, of course. And so I think he’s lobbied.

But what I think is unique here, and I did put this in the piece I wrote for you guys last week, is I think the president was just really confident in his own decision-making on this. He’s been told time and again by critics that the action he’s going to take is going to backfire. And he’s seen action after action where the critics have been wrong. And I laid this out in the piece for you. It just seemed like this time had the opportunity to be different, because he might not have been getting all the information he needed or just maybe just disregarding it. I mean, I can’t say that for sure. I mean, we have a huge bureaucracy of intel agencies and defense. And I’m sure that that information is part of the decision-making. And you can see it in aspects. A lot of it now is in The New York Times, which is helpful for the rest of us.

But, I mean, the information that is getting to him about regime succession seems like pretty thoughtful analysis. And clearly it’s getting into his decision-making. But I think ultimately what’s driving here is just the president’s confidence that he would be right on this. And so, I think that’s what’s different, ultimately.

JUSTIN VOGT

Let’s talk about the Iranian side for a second. I am a little bit surprised that the Iranian side didn’t figure out some sort of way to give Trump a win that would have forestalled this. You were involved in the negotiations. What do you make of the Iranian negotiating strategy, especially considering that it’s likely that some kind of negotiation will commence again at some point?

NATE SWANSON

Yeah. I mean, that’s a great point. I completely agree. And I think it was either a fundamental misreading of Trump from the Iranian perspective and specifically Khamenei, or maybe they read him correctly and they just decided that they’re just not going to work with him. And ultimately, that’s kind of led us to the place we’ve been, because you’ve seen other adversaries and traditional adversaries who’ve been able to appeal directly to Trump. And that’s effective. And the Iranians throughout both of his administrations refused to meet with him. And so, more than anything else, just the fact they wouldn’t engage with him, I think, doomed this process from ultimately succeeding.

But they also, at the same time, I think, have really hardened their position since last June when they were attacked. The Iranian position here is—and Khamenei, one of his founding principles is—that the United States can’t be trusted. And so, from his perspective, they made, in their mind, grand concessions to do the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] , the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. And then Trump came in and withdrew from it. And then, we didn’t get back in under the Biden administration for a number of reasons.

And so, I do think in the spring of 2025, Iran was coming off this real weakness. I do think they approached this negotiation credibly, seriously. I mean, I don’t know whether they would be able to make the changes they need to make or not. But since June, I think they decided this is going to happen regardless. And so, they did deescalate quickly in June. But ultimately, what I think really changed our calculus was the Bibi meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on December 29th. At this point, it became clear-

JUSTIN VOGT

This is [Benjamin] Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago.

NATE SWANSON

Yeah, sorry. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump, I believe, on December 29th. And for me, it was just foundational because I think Iran was holding off on the hope that the cease-fire that the president announced after the 12-Day War in June would just hold indefinitely. It wasn’t a great spot for Iran to be in, but there was a possibility that they could just wait and reevaluate. But what came out of that meeting was that this was not acceptable to Israelis. And Trump basically gave them the permission to attack when they want, where they want. Rubio has basically said as much in the last few days, that, at this point, it was inevitable Israel was going to attack. And so that’s why we felt the need to apparently preempt the attack.

And I think from Iran, at this point, they saw no real offering right there. And so ultimately, the offer that was put forward at the end was really lacking. And there was no chance that that was going to get through. I think [Wall Street Journal reporter] Laurence Norman did a great piece on this, I believe, on Saturday. And that was not even in the ballpark of what was possible. So-

JUSTIN VOGT

You mean the offer that the Iranians made at that point, it wasn’t close to it yet?

NATE SWANSON

Yeah. I mean, it was significantly weaker than the deal Trump pulled out of in 2018. So there’s just no way Trump was able to sell this to a skeptical base. And so, yeah, I mean, that never came close to meeting the mark. And so, yeah, you’re right. Iran calculated that it wasn’t worth them to meet with Trump. And I think it ultimately cost Khamenei his life.

JUSTIN VOGT

Assuming that the leadership in Iran, the personnel may change, but the incentives and the ideology and the kind of sense of security stays more or less the same as it would have been under Khamenei, can you imagine an offer at this point that the Iranians could make that they could credibly make, sell domestically, maintain legitimacy and power and satisfy whatever Trump’s demands are? Is there something even you can imagine at this point that looks like that?

NATE SWANSON

This is basically what I’ve been trying to spend my last week figuring out. Like, what is the off-ramp to this? And it’s really hard for a lot of reasons. One, who are we even talking to on a new deal? Trump keeps talking about wanting to talk to these future Iranian leaders and saying, “Oh, they’re all dead.” So, who are we talking to? Who is making decisions in Iran? We do not know the answers to these questions. And they’re really big questions.

And then I think from the Iranian perspective, you’re right, this isn’t catastrophic results, but you could see a scenario where the president decides this is not worth it and he wants to exit this conflict. And I think you’re actually left with a really interesting problem where the president wants out of this conflict, the Gulf wants out of this conflict, but Iran and Israel might not want to. Israel is not being hit hard right now. They can very much handle the incoming periodic barrages. And Iran feels like that if Israel is going to keep hitting them, why are they going to back down? So, I think that that is a very real possibility that I think could drag this out longer.

And then, just as a secondary point to that, I mean, the upside, the good that could come out of this is that after this is all done, whoever takes power in Iran, which—no idea who that’s going to be right now—they’re going to have to ask themselves, “How do we get in this mess? And are we willing to make changes to have a different future?” And they could go either way. They could decide Khamenei made mistakes by not being aggressive enough, where they actually didn’t go all the way pursuing nuclear weapons. Maybe they change their mind. Or, hopefully, they make the opposite decision. They decide that this hostility to the United States., this hostility to Israel, hostility to the Gulf, look where it got us.

I mean, there is a country of 92 million people. Inflation is at, I don’t know I have the exact numbers, but something like 40 percent inflation over the last six years. They can’t deal with their water problems. They’re a resource-rich country that has periodic electricity shutoffs, and they can’t even protect their own people. So, I mean, the Islamic Republic has been a total failure. So someone will have to grapple with that eventually. It just feels like, unfortunately, we’re pushing out the timeline of when they have to grapple with that question.

JUSTIN VOGT

It looks a little bit like what Trump is trying to do, and he said as much, is a sort of Venezuela model here, right? That clearly what he concluded from Venezuela was you can sort of do this thing where you do a decapitation and then you kind of find somebody down the chain who’s willing to play ball, who’s willing to comply. I wonder whether you think that’s a realistic expectation here. Is that impossible to see, or is that a possibility?

NATE SWANSON

I think the answer is yes and no. I mean, I think there are people within their system, and there’s certainly a large segment of the population that would absolutely want to reform or change the system. I think a lot of Iranian people just want the regime gone. But I think even within the regime itself, there are clearly people who would be open to taking a different path. The problem is that when Khamenei was in power, anyone that tried that basically got shut down. So, in theory, a successor could choose differently. And kind of like the [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev model or like the [Sinn Fein leader] Gerry Adams model, making fundamental changes—sorry, using Russia or Northern Ireland as examples—where within the regime, they decided that the foreign policy needed to change to survive. So that is hypothetically plausible. The problem is—

JUSTIN VOGT

Although the domestic policy could stay the same, I guess what I’m saying is, like, is there a universe in which essentially they trade the ability to continue with their system domestically for changes in their national security or foreign policy?

NATE SWANSON

I think it’s possible down the line but right now it’s not, because, one, who would that person be? A lot of them are dead. Trump has said as much. So if you were thinking that [Ali] Shamkhani was a successor or whatever, which is questionable, he was the head of basically their National Security Council equivalent and been around forever. I mean, there was some thought that someone like him could take charge, but he’s dead now. And so whoever Trump had identified as being someone they could work with is either dead, but there wasn’t also an obvious [acting Venezuelan president] Delcy Rodríguez equivalent. And so it was always going to be messy. And the potential targets for that role are largely dead now. So it’s even further complicated. And I think for Iran, you just got to survive. And that’s going to be their priority for at least the foreseeable future. And then, hopefully, they’ll have to ask these questions to themselves in the future.

JUSTIN VOGT

That was Nate Swanson, who served as an advisor on Iran policy in both the Biden and Trump administrations. After the break, we’ll hear from Richard Haass on how the current war on Iran fits into the checkered history of American regime change operations.

Richard Haass, welcome back to The Foreign Affairs Interview.

RICHARD HAASS

Good to be back.

JUSTIN VOGT

I should note that events in Iran are moving quickly. Listeners should know that we are speaking late in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 3rd.

Richard, back in January, after the Trump administration had carried out the raid that removed [former President] Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, and as it was building up what Trump called an armada in the Persian Gulf, it looked like there was preparations for a military strike on Iran at the time. And you wrote this great article for Foreign Affairs that was titled “The Trouble With Regime Change.” And in that piece, you wrote, in part, “In the months ahead, Washington must make a crucial distinction between reacting to a change in regime that is underway and a policy of proactively pursuing regime change.” The latter option, you wrote, “ought to be embraced rarely, and then only after a number of questions are answered. Is it possible? Is Washington in a position to support it given other priorities? Are political alternatives likely to emerge that are preferable and viable? Is the United States prepared to be involved for a long time at considerable cost to itself, and would that involvement be decisive and welcomed by the target country? “These questions,” you wrote, “will rarely be answered in the affirmative.”

My question for you is, based on what we’ve seen so far, has the Trump administration actually chosen to pursue a policy of regime change like the one you were describing? And if so, have they asked those questions?

RICHARD HAASS

I never know what questions the Trump administration asks. Its process, shall we say, is opaque to me. It seems to be awfully top-down. The fact you’ve got a Secretary of State and a National Security Adviser as the same person, a depopulated NSC staff, a weakened State Department. The whole interagency process seems weak. 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 a 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. If you remember, he negotiated the agreement with the Taliban that undercut the government of Afghanistan. The Biden administration then implemented it, but that essentially ended a two-decade experiment with nation-building and, essentially, regime change after 9/11.

What was so interesting about Venezuela is that 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 intact. The opposition was, to use the cliche, thrown under the bus, despite 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 involved 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, that’s not a priority. It’s not even a low priority for them. It doesn’t figure.

So, 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. This 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 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, or assassination, if you prefer, Justin, of leadership. But the Iranian leadership is quite institutionalized, both on the political side and on the security side.

The 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 with 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. But 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

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?

RICHARD HAASS

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. And 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 preparing 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 or 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. It’s not been a consistent set of, shall we say, messages.

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.

JUSTIN VOGT

Which was supposedly obliterated last year, yeah.

RICHARD HAASS

So now we’ve re-obliterated it. You’ve got the significant diminishing of ballistic missiles. Israel’s weakened Hezbollah yet again. You 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. And quite honestly, even with a scale and duration, the 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 the rest. So I simply don’t think we have a regime change option.

JUSTIN VOGT

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, “When we’re done, the country will be yours to take.” The question of what “done” means, of course, 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 the Iranian equivalent of a Delcy Rodríguez. It might not be the person right underneath, but eventually they’ll get there and they might not even need regime change. They might say, “Well, look, we’ve got regime compliance.” Is that possible? What obstacle would you see to something like that working?

RICHARD HAASS

It’s quite possible that the administration at some point will opt for that. We’ll 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 Yadlin, 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. So 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 toward 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 Satan, 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—but 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, “We want to get economic sanctions lifted. We’re going to make certain trades,” or whatever? Not inconceivable. 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 fundamental, which is a move away from a clerical, repressive regime to something democratic. So, for them, that would maybe be ten percent of what they’d like to see, but 90 percent of the transition. But it’s possible that could come. I don’t think it could happen immediately, simply because of the killings and the war. But ultimately, that is possible. And 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 model, where you have something that essentially, it’s 90 percent or whatever the continuity, but you have different personas 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

What do you make of Iran’s response so far?

RICHARD HAASS

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 basing 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.

But what’s interesting to me about it is Iran, even though it’s the far weaker party, has surprising resilience here, an 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. And 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 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 it. So 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

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. 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. I 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?

RICHARD HAASS

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 candidate’s) comments about nation-building and regime change, where 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 that, 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,” that 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—-

JUSTIN VOGT

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, which I doubt that they want to deal with.

RICHARD HAASS

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. Reportedly, 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 after two sessions that the Iranians were not serious about compromise, yet they’ve persisted for what, close to a year with Russia on Ukraine. And 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 [Russian President Vladimir] 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 [Central Intelligence Agency] Director John Ratcliffe seems to play a serious role. The DNI, the director [of national intelligence], seems to play zero role in national security or foreign policy. Much more concerned about proving elections were rigged in 2020.

What’s unclear is the role of the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor. 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 adviser and secretary of state and everything. It’s a very top-down administration. The NSC staff has really been depopulated. The State Department is at its lowest ebb in my lifetime, I would say. No, what I think will influence the president 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. But 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. 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. So he’s caught in the dilemma. He’s not the first president who, when caught in a domestic dilemma, 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

In our conversation now and also in the piece you talked about on Substack, “Home & Away,” your Substack, you offered in that post kind of this very long list of reasons why not to do this. And I guess the question I have for you is: okay, 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, sound people out, get all these opinions from people, if he were to call you up and ask you what he should do now, what would you tell him? What’s the best course forward given what we know right now?

RICHARD HAASS

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. We 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 cease-fire.” And you’ve had Israeli-Iranian cease-fires and so forth not that long ago. And we would have to set the table for that and say, “Here’s what our requirements are.” And the Iranians would push back, but we would say we want this on the nuclear.

And I think that we would probably have to put on the table some incentives. It just wouldn’t be threats, but it would also—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 with or tolerate short of an absolute zero-everything outcome? And 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 sanction 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’ve deserted the opposition and so forth.

But I think it would probably take something like that, a diplomatic thing and an economic dimension. And the president, again, he could say, 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 him 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, at best, has been temporarily managed. It’s not been permanently solved.

JUSTIN VOGT

I would wish good luck to anyone telling President Trump that he has to kind of 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 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.”

RICHARD HAASS

100 percent. I always thought the biggest weakness of the JCPOA, and I think the administration made a mistake in its negotiations beforehand, was 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, 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 emphasis probably on duration and inspections. And then certain limits about both amount of enriched material and level of enrichment.

But essentially, you’re right. We open a nuclear agreement with the Iranians. And again, I’m not persuaded, and I don’t think we know enough yet, Justin, that we couldn’t have had that before this. I’ve not seen a persuasive post-mortem, whatever phrase you want to use, tick-tock of the history of the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations. And the Omani foreign minister was basically on a plane coming here saying, “Hey, what the Iranians are putting on the table is 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

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. You served in the George W. Bush administration during the regime change war that it launched in Afghanistan after 9/11 and also in 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, accept a Taliban surrender that allowed them to kind of continue as a political faction, install new leaders, and then leave. In Iraq, do a decapitation strike and just kind of keep decapitating until there’s some Baathist 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?

RICHARD HAASS

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 Baathist 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? 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 conceived as a way station. I 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 might simply be the machinations of internal jockeying for power. There have always been different perspectives in Iran among the army, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the militia, the clerics. Iranian 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

Right. It’s not quite as monolithic as, say, Saddam’s regime was. Yeah.

RICHARD HAASS

No. And so the idea that you could try to, through overt and covert means, try to influence the power struggle or the policy trajectories, that, to me, would be probably a smart, long-term policy, 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

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 in Venezuela and Iran as sort of inverting Colin Powell’s belief that 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. Now, 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?

RICHARD HAASS

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 and all that, then we fail. And we could take that to other places. So, you always got to ask yourself a couple things. One is, what is your definition of success? Two, what’s feasible and at what cost? And third, what’s desirable? And you always have to weigh the desirability against the feasibility. I mean, my favorite was that foreign 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 like 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. So 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 to act, 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. And when we finally used 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 and 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.

JUSTIN VOGT

It was remarkable how little effort went into any kind of effort to make the case to the public in support of this.

RICHARD HAASS

It 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, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] 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 why we went.

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. It’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 [U.S. President Harry] Truman, [U.S. General Douglas] MacArthur, and the rest paid a price. [George W. Bush] paid a real price for the war of choice that was Iraq. 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, wow. Seemed to me it reflected a real misreading of the situation in Iran.

And the other thing 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. I think, indeed, think about it, when President Trump in early January, if I have my dates right, 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. Well, guess what? They did dare stand up to us.

JUSTIN VOGT

You wrote in your Substack 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?

RICHARD HAASS

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. Guess 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 damage. 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,” plus also demonstrating the “right” of a great power to intervene in nearby places or what have you, I 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 “chutzpah” in Russian, but whatever it is, it applies. But my hunch is he took more than a little pleasure sticking it to us now.

JUSTIN VOGT

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. I 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?

RICHARD HAASS

Fair enough, though Russia will like the higher gas prices, higher energy prices. They love it. 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. But that’s not happening. 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 here, and we had simply gone in and said, “We’re here to deal with the nuclear issue, which has arisen again. We thought we had 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. Because 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 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. I would have said, “Keep an eye on it, but play the long game. Try to bring about regime change through some kind of—strengthen the opposition, try to organize them, get them to put out a statement of policies that might induce defections from the 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 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. Strategy is the relationship of means and ends. And they got it exactly wrong when it came to the means and ends of policy.

JUSTIN VOGT

I think that’s probably a good place to end it. Very, very sharp point there at the end. Richard, thank you so much for all your insight and for your time.

RICHARD HAASS

Justin, thank you. And thank you, Dan, and others for continuing to put out the best magazine in the world about the world.