Three CISAC scientists have joined 26 of the nation’s top nuclear experts to send an open letter to President Obama in support of the Iran deal struck in July.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) the United States and its partners negotiated with Iran will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future non-proliferation agreements,” the group of renowned scientists, academics and former government officials wrote in the letter dated August 8, 2015.

“This is an innovative agreement, with much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated non-proliferation framework.”

CISAC senior fellow and former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker is a signatory to the letter, along with CISAC co-founder Sid Drell, and cybersecurity expert and CISAC affiliate Martin Hellman.

Six Nobel laureates also signed, including FSI senior fellow by courtesy and former Stanford Linear Accelerator director Burton Richter.

The letter arrives at a crucial time for the Obama administration as it rallies public opinion and lobbies Congress to support the Iran agreement.

You can read the full letter along with analysis from the New York Times at this link.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

Today I'm bringing you a discussion I had with an amazing group of FSI scholars during Stanford's 2026 Reunion Homecoming weekend. We surveyed many trends and threats facing the world today, including the development of bioweapons, challenges to democracy around the world, the war between Russia and Ukraine, Chinese ambitions against Taiwan, and the U.S.-Iran conflict.

These are complicated issues and the challenges to addressing them are real, but so are the opportunities for resolving them. We're going to hear from Drew Endy, a world-recognized expert on bioengineering and biosecurity; Didi Kuo, who specializes in comparative politics, democracy, and the role of political parties; Abbas Milani, a leading voice in Iranian studies and one of the most authoritative contemporary scholars on what's happening to Iranian society; Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and expert on European defense; and finally, Oriana Skylar Mastro, a scholar of the Chinese military and Indo-Pacific security.

It was a great conversation, and I hope you find it as informative as I did. Here's the panel.

[BEGIN EVENT RECORDING]

Kahl: All right, so I'm going start and we're going to go down the line, and then I'll ask another round and we'll go down the line.

So, Drew, starting with you: what's one thing that the world should understand — maybe something they currently don't understand, or maybe they think they understand, but they're getting wrong — about biosecurity, biotechnology, and how it's poised to change everything.

Endy: So let's start with what we know. Somebody died in Russia of a plague. We have soldiers coming back from the front lines in Ukraine with resistant bacteria. We have Ebola in DRC; it's going to be the worst we've seen in a while, that outbreak. And I had COVID two weeks ago for the fourth or fifth time, I've lost track. It's so last decade, but it's going to kill 50,000 Americans this year, plus or minus. You know that, right? Everybody knows that.

I'm as you mentioned from bioengineering, bioengineering is the youngest engineering department at Stanford. We're twenty some years old. The second youngest is Computer Science. When I moved here to Stanford, research was being done—you know, Karl Deisseroth, who got the Nobel Prize recently—put one gene from a bacteria into neurons to use light to control neurons. That was work he did twenty years ago in bioengineering.

What do you think we've been doing? We've been getting better at bioengineering. One thing that's changing is how we manufacture. If you can encode a way of manufacturing something in the DNA, you can grow what you want where you can operate the biology.

When you leave this room, take a look at a leaf on a tree and think about it from an engineer's perspective. It's a solar panel that makes itself and recycles itself. It's pulling 120 terawatts of net energy on the surface of the earth. We have a capability in front of us to change how we make most of the things we need. We had an internet over the last fifty years that got built for communication resilience. We're going to have a “bio net”: download and grow — download DNA code, grow what you want, you can get it encoded where you are, for manufacturing resilience.

I was flying back from Washington on Wednesday. I was on seat 20A in United, window seat exit row, and I decided to design a genome. And so I opened up Claude on my laptop and I started feeding it PDF files of different genetic sequences and we started dancing. And before I landed at SFO and before my battery went to zero, I had designed a synthetic genome for a bacteria. 

What people are sleeping on a little bit is we're making biology engineerable for good reasons. I don't wake up in the morning thinking about how am I gonna make a WMD? But it's a domain that's becoming engineerable and it's a domain we haven't secured yet. And so it's like, hmm.

In so many different dimensions, we are on this journey of profound, profound change.

Kahl: Speaking of things that are radioactive, Didi, our politics. What's one thing that the folks in this room should understand that maybe they aren't currently tracking?

Kuo: So I actually think Americans and Stanford alum really do understand what's going on. Well over 70 to 80% of Americans are concerned about the state of democracy, both at home and abroad. They're concerned about levels of corruption, about attacks on freedom of speech, on attacks on election integrity, sometimes for very different reasons. But I guess I would yes and that sentiment.

First, this is not an American story. This is happening globally. We are almost entering our twentieth year of what our colleague Larry Diamond calls the global democratic recession, which means a lot of the democratization and optimism of the 1990s has either become stagnant or even been undone.

And that is a problem because even in places that were once thought immune from problems of democracy, we see leaders pursuing the same strategies: going after their opponents, weaponizing the state, repressing civil society. So you know that people are unhappy with their governments, which is often why they elect radical leaders in the first place.

But the second thing that I would say — in addition to understanding that this is global and that that's something we need to kind of drill down and investigate — is that there are actually signs of hope from around the world.

We know that democratic backsliding can be reversed. And we've seen some of those strategies be very successful abroad. And I think we've seen signs of them start to be successful here.

First, we know that massive collective action, civil resistance, and nonviolent protest can really work to bring attention to the things that Americans care about and to stop the worst kinds of violence and repression.

The second thing is institutional defenses, when people who are suddenly finding their jobs politicized or trying to be eradicated or undone, and they try to safeguard their jobs and their roles in various positions, whether they're bureaucrats or judges, tax officers, people who work at universities, law firms, et cetera. That also has a huge effect on stopping democratic erosion. 

But the number one thing is to vote in elections. The number one antidote to democratic backsliding is baked into our very system, and that is democracy itself.

We know that leaders often try to attack elections, but that you can actually create these pro-democracy coalitions across people with very different ideological and policy values and alignments and say, we're actually going to protect this fundamental process of democracy so that we can live to fight another day in the future and try to get all of our policy issues sorted out then.

And I think that we've seen the signs of that here in Minnesota earlier this year, and certainly a lot of mobilization and excitement about the midterm elections and about elections happening in Israel and Brazil and in other places around the world, France, are going to have democracy on the line. But people, when they are threatened, will work to protect democracy.

Kahl: All right. Abbas. Few people, seriously, in the world understand the dynamics inside Iran and Iran's impact on the region in the world better than you. What is one thing we could better understand about the conflict in the Middle East or Iran more generally?

Milani: One thing you can understand is that according to some in the Iranian regime, World War Three has already started. It is between Iran and Israel and the United States, and that Iran is winning. That's their version of the reality.

What I think the world doesn't get about Iran is that it is indeed a very paradoxical society. She talked about democratic backsliding. Iran has been a democratically forward sliding society in the last twenty five years.

I would seriously say, and I've written about this several places, that Iran at the societal level is right now arguably the most democratic society in the Muslim Middle East. And every day people are more and more fighting for democracy, from women to minorities to men who are siding with women. Iran has had — in spite of having the most misogynist set of laws on the books — I think arguably has the most active, progressive, prudent women's movement. in the last thirty years.

The Life Women Liberty movement is remarkable. So I think only comparable to the African American movement for civil rights in sixties and seventies in terms of its success.

So you have a paradoxical society, a profoundly despotic society, every day becoming more organized in its despotism. Today we have virtually a military dictatorship in Iran, but at the societal level it is a very dynamic society that wants democracy, women who wants equality.

There are two Irans: the Iran of the Iranian people and the Iran of this regime. And the world policy, U.S. policy doesn't seem to get this very important schism that is at the heart of the Iranian society, the paradox that exists.

Kahl: Steve, unfortunately there's also the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. There's been a lot of news on Ukraine. There is always every week, but it seems like the last week has been pretty newsworthy. What should we be understanding more about the current war?

Pifer: Well, I would say Russia is not winning the war on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the campaign now is shifting to target Ukrainian cities and Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine's pretty much stabilized the battlefront.

As they developed over the last two years, drones that can strike more deeply into Russia, they focused on Russian oil refineries. And they've probably . . . I think the IAES estimate was about thirty percent of Russian refining capability now has been taken offline. Now the Russians rebuild it, the Ukrainians attack it again. But that's a legitimate military target.

I mean, those fuels go to power the drones, they go to power the planes, they go to power the Russian tanks. It hasn't yet pushed the Russians to the point where the Russians have begun to negotiate in any more serious way, but it was increasing economic pressure on Russia.

Over the last nine and a half months since January 1st, Russia's gained a net total of about a hundred square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. For perspective, that's less than the size of the city of San Francisco. Ukraine is the size of Texas.

And to do that, the Russians are paying an enormous cost. Thirty to forty thousand Russian soldiers are either killed or severely wounded every single month. And given that failure on the battlefield, what you see is that the Russians are now shifting the campaign to Ukrainian cities. And the hope is that they can weaponize winter, winter's cold against the Ukrainians and break their will. So they target electric power plants, they target large steam facilities that heat the major cities, they target water facilities.

And they do a lot that's simply harassment. So I have on my phone here when I was in Kyiv about two years ago, I downloaded an air raid app. In the last several weeks for Kyiv, they're getting six to ten air raids every single day. And when that goes off at four o'clock in the morning, somebody has to say, do I drag my family down to the bomb shelter for the third time tonight, or do I tell them to sleep and we play the odds?

Now it's going to be a difficult winner for Ukraine. But I think Ukrainians have shown they're resilient. I think the Russian effort's going to fail, and this war unfortunately is going to continue well into 2027.

And the unfortunate thing here is that President Trump has significant leverage that he could use to push the Russians to negotiate a settlement to this war. And he has chosen not to use it. In fact, we've seen even last night by waiving new sanctions on Russia, he's actually gone over to the Russian side. And I think that's going to be a very dark stain on Americans' global reputation.

Kahl: There's conflict of instability in the Middle East, horrible events in Europe. For years, folks in Washington have wanted to pivot to Asia or the Indo-Pacific to focus on the emerging challenges there.

Oriana, what could we better understand about the storm clouds that might be gathering (or not) in the Indo-Pacific, especially across the Taiwan Strait?

Mastro: So I'm gonna cheat a little bit and say everything. I do a lot of research and writing about China, Taiwan, about the Indo-Pacific security, and China is such a complex place. And we have to have nuanced understandings about what is happening there, what is happening across the Taiwan Strait. And in most of the public debate, you either get an extremely dovish view or an extremely hawkish view, and the reality is somewhere in the middle.

For example, it is true that the United States is now distracted with wars in Ukraine and Iran and elsewhere. We have spent 147% of China's full military budget on those conflicts already. So it's very hard to compete with China conventionally in the military sphere when we are being less disciplined about how we're spending our time and effort.

At the same token, it is not the case that because we are distracted today, China has a higher likelihood of taking Taiwan by force. What convinces the Chinese whether to do that or not is not so much whether the United States is distracted in another part of the world, but on their own military competency.

Xi Jinping just did a huge purge of the most senior military leaders there that are currently either missing or at house arrest. So it's not the case that they're waiting for a moment, a window of opportunity.

It's the same thing when you look at China and Russia and what that means for Taiwan. Should we be concerned about China-Russia? Of course we should, but not because these two countries are going to fight a war together. That kind of misses the mark.

Instead, they help each other in peacetime build up their militaries in ways that makes it really hard for us to deter China from using force and if there's a conflict to compel China to stop fighting. I think we see that already in Ukraine; a little bit of Chinese support can go a really long way.

And the last example I will give about this nuanced balance is about the economy. It is true that the Chinese economy is not doing well. But there's no evidence to suggest that that convinces the Communist Party that they have to do some sort of wag-the-dog maneuver to use force in a Taiwan contingency to distract the public. If anything, their strategic culture goes the opposite way; when they have problems at home, they focus inward.

So all of this is to say I'm very vocal about my concerns about the likelihood of conflict over the Taiwan Strait. I think the Chinese have been very clear that they're preparing, they're building their military, they don't want to wait forever to solve this issue. And it's an issue that cannot be solved without force.

But not for all the reasons that potentially we hear in the news for why we should be concerned.

Kahl: Thank you very much. I think one of the things, the common threads across is the urgency around all of these issues. Dynamics in Washington may change a bit, but the reality is whether one loves President Trump or doesn't particularly like what he's doing, he's the president for the next two years. And a lot of really important decisions that impact the world will happen in that two year period.

So, Drew: if you had five minutes with the president on your issue, what would you try to get the president to do that he's maybe not doing enough of, or get him to stop doing what he's doing too much of?

Endy: A couple of things I'd like him to do, but on on this topic today, I'd say, Mr. President, there's never been a better time to secure biology. We could actually know what airborne viruses are in this room right now. We'd need a little machine with a box about the size of that podium and we'd be running it and doing air sampling. Now's the time to secure biology.

I'd pick on his statement from the UNGA over a year ago, where in the middle of a speech he declared that all nations should stand together to end the scourge of bioweapons. I'll take that.

I'd like the president of China and the President of the United States to duet. If I had the magic teleprompter, they should be saying that together, because that by itself will be insufficient. We need to get a duty to notify in place, a hotline for bio threats. If you have the emergence of a pandemic potential outbreak, we talk to each other. Never again do we have the Wuhan ambiguity. And we probably need that biodefense hotline with Moscow as well.

What does that look like operationally? With nuclear security, we've got the NNSA, the National Nuclear Security Agency Administration. $30 billion dollars a year. That, through the weapons lab, gets our nuclear force ready to go.

I'd argue we should have an NBSA: a National Biosecurity Agency. It would be about $10 billion dollars a year. It's not going to run on the high side. We don't put it in the weapons lab, because that'd be really bad. We do it in the public to the greatest extent possible.

So, Mr. President, there's never been a better time to secure biology. We can do it. It can be an enduring legacy. The returns are amazing. I have some other things I need him to do, but like on this topic, we can secure biology.

Kahl: All right. Didi, five minutes with the president.

Kuo: I doubt I would have any impact, but I would make appeals to two things that seem to matter to him. One is money. Okay. So he really likes to make money off of public office. That's called corruption.

But putting that aside, I would probably say something like capitalism is a source of American entrepreneurialism and growth, and that slowing down the rate of democracy, undermining the impartiality and rule of law, and undermining our administrative state, not funding science, stopping immigration of talented PhD students are going to be bad for American capitalism in the long run.

We know that democracy and capitalism flourish and do well when they go together. And I'm not sure that that would have an impact, But I would say that the rise in patrimonialism, transactionalism, and wheeling and dealing that we see around the world is one that's going to make the world inherently less safe. There will be far less inclusive growth and rising inequality is just going to lead to massive instability around the world, as we've already seen.

The second thing I would appeal to, like Drew, is legacy. I would actually say go focus on the arch and on the ballroom because liberal democracy is the single greatest achievement of this American project over the past 250 years. Liberal democracy is historically very hard won and rare. Most people have lived and died under something like empires.

Second of all, it's the result of massive decades, if not centuries, of popular mobilization of the kind we are now seeing in Iran.

And third, it has provided tremendous hope and inspiration to people around the world who want to live in freedom and try to secure it. That is what makes America great.

We have adapted and been flexible about what our democratic values are over time to expand to become a truly multiracial democracy. And he is messing it up a little bit.

And so I would say, sir, please go golf, go enjoy your life. And your legacy can be a positive one if you just stop attacking the thing that makes us the best country in the world.

Kahl: Play more golf and it makes America great again. Abbas, five minutes with the president on Iran.

Milani: I would say that you might think you can solve other problems instinctively with the instincts of a gambler. With Iran you can't. It is an old, complicated problem. Every administration has tried to solve this problem for the last forty-five years and it is not that simple. You can't bomb your way out of Iran's nuclear problem. You cannot bomb your way into a democracy in Iran. Iranian democracy has to be made by the people of Iran.

Don't threaten to destroy the civilization of Iran, which is one of the greatest civilizations in the world. If you destroy Iranian civilization, you are destroying part of the greatest legacy that we have, which is wisdom, which is prudence, which is philosophy. So these kinds of threats work against the people of Iran ridding themselves of this regime.

The only way we are going to have peace in the Middle East is if we understand how powerful that desire for democracy, the desire for amity with the United States is amongst the people of Iran. These kinds of politics, these kind of rhetorics, placing the decisions about this into hands that know nothing about this area, who are financially involved in this area. And they are dealing with people who know all too well how to use financial weaknesses of leaders to get what they want.

Look at what that kind of money has done to soccer.

That same thing is happening to American foreign policy. That is a dead end, Mr. President. Allow the processes that have made this country what this country is, work. Otherwise, that legacy is going to be that you'd fought a regime, you brought a lot of destruction, but you left a regime that is weaker domestically, but regionally has much more power

It controls two of the choke points of the world economy: Bob al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz. You went in there without thinking that they would close the Strait of Hormuz. Every indication was that they would do that if you attacked them. And particularly attack killing the top leadership. They were on record that they were going to close the Strait of Hormuz.

I would have told them, read what other administrations have done. Read what Colin Kahl probably told the president when somebody suggested to Biden that they should attack. I wouldn't be surprised if Colin was in the room and said, “Don't do it.”

I would say that you can truly leave a historic legacy if you can bring about the Abrahamic Accord. But to bring about the Abrahamic Accord, you need to convince the Israelis that Palestinians also have a right to a state. Without that, the Abrahamic Accord won't happen. With Abrahamic Accord, I think you will move the needle historically in the Middle East.

Kahl: I will just say: Abbas and I have talked about this a lot. We as Americans, we are a very powerful country and we are also problem solvers and we like to believe that we can solve world problems. We often cannot. It's also the case that some problems are not solvable in the near term. You have to muddle through and manage, which is super unsatisfying. The historical record is that pretty much everything that has happened was not only predictable, it was predicted, which is I think the most unfortunate aspect around a lot of this stuff.

Steve, two years ago, Trump said if he's elected he would solve the Ukraine war in twenty four hours. So we're twenty four months since the last election. If you had five minutes with the president on the Russia Ukraine conflict, what would your advice be?

Pifer: Well, I've written a lot over the last eighteen months about the Trump policy towards Russia-Ukraine. Polls show like eighty-five percent of Americans do not trust, do not like, do not respect Putin. Polls show that Americans support Ukraine. And I think if you actually took a poll in Congress, you would find most in Congress share those views. And I would tell the president, Mr. President, your policy in terms of buying diesel from Russia, not putting more pressure on Russia, and now turning it against Ukraine by cutting off some of the intelligence sharing: it’s wrong.

It's wrong morally. It's wrong strategically. And it's wrong in terms of your effort, your proclaimed desire to try to mediate it into this war. It's wrong morally because Russia is clearly the aggressor. It was Russia that seized Crimea with military force in 2014 and then went on to get involved in fighting in Donbas. It was Russia that launched the invasion in 2022. Ukraine is the victim.

It's wrong strategically, because if Russia prevails in this war, either they win on the battlefield, or perhaps they benefit from a bad peace deal. That's going to embolden Vladimir Putin. And that means a greater Russian threat to Europe and to vital American national security interests. I don't think Mr. Trump understands that at all.

But it's also wrong in terms of his effort to try to mediate a solution. But if you look over the past year, the Ukrainians have indicated readiness to make some pretty painful concessions to achieve peace, including perhaps accepting the de facto loss of a lot of territory. The Russian position has not budged.

Recently Russian officials have said there's been no change in the Russian position since 2024. And part of the problem is Mr. Trump's failure to use his leverage to push the Russians to negotiate. And this is why the decision to start buying diesel fuel from Russia is so bad. We're now basically sending American dollars that are going to feed part of that Russian military machine by releasing some of the financial pressure on Russia that might force them otherwise to adopt a different course.

And what I worry about that is: of course it's bad implications for Russia-Ukraine, but in other places where they look at this, not only in Moscow, but in Beijing, other capitals where they see us as the adversary, they're looking at this as not a sign of American strength. They're seeing it as a sign of American weakness and they're looking at saying, “Gee, look how well people like Putin can play Trump.” That's not good for our foreign policy.

Kahl: So twice this year already, President Trump has met with Xi Jinping. Once in China, once here in the United States, they're likely to meet again at some point this year. Despite all the competition and rhetoric, there does appear to be an effort between the two leaders to have a detente or a pause, a timeout on some of the rougher edges of the relationship. If you had five minutes with the president on China issues or Taiwan issues or China Taiwan issues, what would your recommendations be?

Mastro: This is one area where I think we oversimplify. We think that China's policies are because of Xi Jinping. And that if we had a different leader in China, everything would just be rosy again. But Xi Jinping is a product of the system. So for me, it's not the case that if Xi Jinping left, the next leader would be like, you know what? I think it's better for China to just do everything the United States demands of it and be number two in the world.

I would tell the president that U.S.-China competition is not about the United States or about China. But that power is actually bestowed upon either country by the rest of the world. Whether or not the United States is a great power, whether or not China is a great power, largely depends on how the rest of the world sees these two countries and sees the benefit, or the costs, of one of them having more power than the other.

Now, the United States as a global superpower, this is largely beneficial for many countries in the system. But first, we have to be honest that it's not the best system for everybody. To Didi's point, there's a lot of autocracies out there that would prefer that it wasn't the United States that is in charge.

But secondly, there's a whole part of the world—the majority of the world, the developing world—that the United States has ignored for decades and decades and decades. And that Trump has gone even a step farther by reducing what I would say the little amount of development aid, soft power that we had in this part of the world.

Now, I can tell you one thing for sure: this is a number one priority in China. Xi Jinping wants to be the leader of the developing world. So, are the Chinese wrong or are the Americans wrong to basically decide the value? But I can say in terms of a business sense, this is the area where you're gonna have the most returns.

Now, from my own biases, I am—not here on this stage—but still in the military. I've been in the military for seventeen years. I believe in the effectiveness of the use of force at international politics. Otherwise, I wouldn't dedicate so much of my life to serving uniform.

But that being said, diplomacy, soft power, developmental assistance, all these other things that the United States used to do more of . . . having a U.S. information service . . . these make a huge difference.

And so I would tell him to invest so much more in the other tools of power. China lists twelve types of tools of power, which military power is only one of them. And they're just as serious about the other ones.

And as much as the allies and partners periodically can be annoying about stuff, they are the source of U.S. power. In many respects, the U.S. military cannot project power without them. And so this isn't a favor that the rest of the world is doing for us that over a hundred countries allow U.S. access, bases, and overflight. This is something that the United States needs to maintain its position and to protect its interests abroad.

So don't only meet with Xi Jinping and shake hands and roll out the red carpet and say, “Okay, since I met with him and we have now a comfortably tense relationship, everything is going well.”

Take a look at the rest of the world and figure out how to maintain what has historically been U.S. dominance of the international system, a U.S. led liberal order. How do we go back to being sure that that is something that my kids are going to enjoy afterwards?

Kahl: I want to ask our last lightning questions. Everybody in this room is super committed to Stanford in all sorts of ways. What do you think Stanford could be doing more of, maybe could be doing better to help the world understand or address these issues? Abbas?

Milani: I think we are in one of the most remarkable moments in history. We are in the process of not just gradual incremental change or historic change. We're in the process of what can only be called epochal change. The changes we are about to witness and are witnessing are only, in my view, comparable to Renaissance, where everything about everything changed. We are in the process of experiencing that.

In that first phase of modernity, America, I think, is the most successful example of a democratic secular society. Going into this new phase, that model needs to be saved. American democracy needs to be saved. American democracy can only be saved if it has a more global view, a more inclusive view, and a more tolerant view. We need to begin this at Stanford. We need to teach the culture of tolerance in classes.

It is increasingly difficult to discuss difficult topics in class. I'm not talking about bioengineering. You can get away with anything in bioengineering. But try to have that level of discussion about the Arab Israeli problem, the Iranian problem, American democracy problem, race problem, gender problem. You get into serious difficulties. We need to defend that. Democracy requires defending.

I come from a place that went from an authoritarian regime to a pseudo-totalitarian regime. I came from Iran in 1986, a country that was literally at war with the United States. And twenty-two years, ago I became head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford. That would not be possible anywhere else in the world. I know the value of democracy, and I don't think at Stanford we're doing enough to defend this most valuable cherished gift that we have.

We need to cultivate, strengthen that culture.

Kahl: Didi.

Kuo: Every morning when you wake up and read the news, it can be a bummer. And I will say coming to work makes me feel better. And that's because FSI is a really special place where the approach to these topics is scholarly.

Therefore, we understand, you know, this is a kind of unique historical time, but it's one that we can really try to understand with an interdisciplinary lens and an understanding that our goal is to take academic knowledge and get it out into the world: use it to try to improve outcomes, provide policy recommendations, engage with the media or with thought leaders and people who can actually shape the public understanding of these issues.

And that is something I see creating a lot of purpose among my colleagues and creating special places outside of academic disciplines for those of us who care about engaging with the world to really unite academic knowledge with public understanding.

But the second thing is also focused on students. In California, we are super far from Washington, D.C. So if you go to Georgetown, for example, you have a lot of students who know what government is, they're going to get an internship. Over here, sometimes all the students know is Silicon Valley's over there. They're going to solve the world's problems through the private sector. I don't know, man. We have governments for a reason. AI, climate change, all of these issues are going to need to be tackled through regulation, not just through the moral binds or whatever that the president thinks that we can regulate AI with.

So I think that any way of encouraging public service and engagement with government—whether that's local, national, or international, going to other countries—is super important. And once students get a taste and a flavor of that public service, they get really into it. It's just that it's far for us, geographically, to engage. And I therefore think it's really important to encourage those kinds of opportunities.

Kahl: Amen. Steve?

Pifer: Yeah, well let me start with I some things I think that Stanford does and FSI do well. I think we do a good job on Russia-Ukraine of explaining to students what's going on, why it matters. And it's not just Stanford speakers, but we bring a lot of people in.

So on Wednesday, we had an American and a Ukrainian who are based in Kyiv. They came to talk for an hour and a half on Ukraine's innovative defense culture, where under the pressure of war they're just doing incredible changes in terms of how fast they react to things and get new weapons into the field.

There's a lot of . . . I won't list everybody, but a lot [of us] write, speak, do media on this to try to educate the broader public. We have a law school professor who organized a group of his students to track down and identify American law firms that are helping Russian oligarchs hide their wealth in the United States. And that was part of a broader effort that Stanford was running with the International Working Group on Sanctions, where we did about twenty-six papers advising on how sanctions on Russians could be tightened. So I think there's a lot of things that are being done that are good.

The more difficult challenge I think we have is how do we talk to the U.S. government? When people like Colin were in during the Biden administration, I think we had a lot of access. The administration didn't agree with everything we asked them to do, but there was a dialogue there.

I'm not sure anybody FSI has on the Russia Ukraine thing any kind of contact with people who matter in the Trump administration. So it's difficult to have the kind of conversation where you might suggest here are some ways to move forward. But I think that's going to be one of the real challenges is how can we affect government policy directly?

Kahl: And I think this is a really important point because I think this can be interpreted as basically saying, well, okay, when Democrats are in, people can have access. But it's not actually about partisan politics. It's about this particular administration's approach to outside expertise and which voices they tend to listen to. One can agree with it or disagree with it. It's it just is a thing, which is traditionally places like universities and think tanks and other sources of analysis outside of government are just not prioritized in this

Pifer: After I left the government in 2004, we had lots of access as outsiders to the Bush administration. They welcomed that dialogue. I don't think this administration does.

Kahl: Oriana.

Mastro: That's a perfect segue to what I wanted to say about policy impact about how do we talk to the U.S. government? It's not only the U.S. government. As someone who works on China, the amount of which professors and students are engaging with China is less and less over time because all of these things have become politically difficult.

And to me, Stanford is an environment in which you should be able to take those risks. This is a place where you can have dialogues with the Chinese. This is a place where policy, political officials should feel like they can come and talk and engage with these issues.

And so to try to have that kind of interconnectivity in May, I launched this policy lab on the Indo-Pacific. I call it “policy-guided.” What that means is instead of sort of doing all this research and then writing an op-ed and hoping someone reads it and then maybe it has some impact, I identify the decision makers that have influence on that research area early on in the process, and I engage with them throughout the whole process so that they have a stake in making sure that they're getting the information they need when they need it.

And part of that is educating students not only on the substance on Indo-Pacific, but also skill sets. So part of that is we just launched something called the Commander Series, where I bring combatant commanders—so these are four-star generals who are in charge of every region of the world—to campus every quarter. They give a big public talk, which again, given the political environment, given everything, did come with some convincing. We now have three lined up for this year. But it's possible. It's possible to continue to engage. And then in addition to the public talks, ask them to do private master classes with the students.

Like having that exposure to students to do kind of the real world work and to have that direct policy impact, is it harder? Yes. Is it still possible at a place like Stanford? Absolutely.

Kahl: I want to really foot stomp something because at the intersection of what Oriana and Steve just said: yes, there's a degree to which we're not as plugged into Washington as maybe in previous administrations. But the flip side of that is, actually, Stanford is a safer space for conversations among those parts of Washington that want to have conversations outside of Washington because we are further away.

We are seen as less ideological. We're not seen as particularly partisan. We're seen as a font of technical knowledge because Silicon Valley plays its own role in the current ecosystem for better or worse. So that's also an opportunity, not just a constraint.

Endy: I love this question. We heard that we're in a moment of epochal change not seen since the Renaissance. That's stunning. I'm going to carry that for a long time.

I wonder what Mr. and Mrs. Stanford think of us. If they appeared today and saw what we are now, how would they react? One of the things I go back and read is the purpose they wrote in the charter of the university. And there's a sentence, this really interesting sentence. It says: “to have an influence in behalf of humanity.”

And the first time I read it, I thought it was a typo. I thought it was supposed to be “on” behalf of humanity. But it says “in behalf of,” which really means out there doing stuff. And I think we could do a lot better in that regard.

I think we're pretty good at being Stanford. I think we could do a lot better in behalf of humanity. And FSI and CISAC is very much about that. But what does that look like? And and so I'll check some things out that may seem adjacent, but I think they're important. Number one.

I used to be chair of undergraduate admissions and financial aid for the university. We're not need-blind for international applicants. We are for domestic, but not for international. We could do it, but we always manage to not do it. This would be a good year to do it.

The second thing I think we need to do is we need to bring Stanford out into the United States. I used to teach a version of Introduction to Bioengineering to five hundred high school students in Title I high schools. And they were registered as Stanford students as high school students in low income high schools throughout the country.

I think we could have a service requirement for undergraduates where they're teaching fellows in high schools as upperclassmen helping with this. We could have five thousand extra students a year as high school students. So I think there's some macro moves the university could make that would amplify what FSI and other places are doing, and we need to get on with it.

Kahl: This is such a great place to end because the panel today was global threats and essentially what we can do about them. And I think what you heard, and frankly, where I think FSI is unique, not only at Stanford, but in the world in many respects, is that so many of the things that we read about or that we watch on YouTube are at the cross currents of these huge geopolitical changes, these world changing technological developments, and contentious domestic politics in the future of democracy here and around the world. Like these are the things that all of us care about.

Just as people as Americans, we are deeply invested at FSI. And I think what you've heard is like we can choose to engineer a world of abundance and opportunity, or we can create a lot of dangerous things that make life worse. We can choose to defend freedom in the United States and around the world, or we can choose not to. We can choose to wield American power with wisdom and with a degree of restraint, or unwisely with hubris, like an international wrecking ball. 

These are choices. These are not inevitabilities. These are choices. And I think at FSI, we believe we can help empower the right choices, especially by empowering our students. The thing that keeps me most optimistic when we have conversations like this — I think everybody up here would agree — is how awesome our students are, and how much more incredible they are at, you know, as twenty-year-olds than we were as twenty year olds.

And what I often say is smart and incredible as all these people on stage and all the other people you encounter, all the people in this room are, we're not going to solve the world's problems.

The best we can do is keep the problems solvable and empower our students to solve our problems. And the good news is our students are completely capable of doing that.

So thank you very much, and thanks again to our panelists.

[END EVENT RECORDING]

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world, and why.

The Japanese public is largely opposed to dispatching the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) to the Strait of Hormuz, but framing the issue in terms of Japan’s energy dependence substantially raises support for military involvement in Iran. By contrast, arguments invoking the Japan-U.S. alliance and legal legitimacy for military action have no such effect. These are the findings from a vignette experiment fielded by the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB) in March, one month after Japan’s February 2026 general election.

The results also reveal that mentioning energy dependence moves opinion in favor of military deployment even among respondents who are told that diplomacy, not deployment, is the right response, suggesting that energy-dependence messaging changes minds regardless of policy recommendation. Alliance- and legal-focused messaging, by contrast, have no measurable effect.

SJB is a large-scale, multi-wave public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. A project of the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), SJB is led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC and the Japan Program, and political scientist Charles Crabtree. The vignette experiment on the Japanese public's attitude toward military deployment in Iran was part of the final, three-wave panel survey SJB fielded around Japan’s February 2026 snap election, which focused on identifying public attitudes toward immigration.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our scholars' research updates >

A Public Wary of War

The SJB experiment finds that, without any contextual framing, Japanese respondents lean against JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz, averaging a score of 2.00 on a four-point scale, where 1 represents "strongly oppose" and 4 represents "strongly support." 

This baseline skepticism reflects the Japanese public’s reluctance to deploy military forces abroad, rooted in Article 9 of the postwar constitution, and a broader wariness of entanglement in the Iran conflict. But the crisis in the Middle East has fueled deep economic fears in Japan, which relies on the region for over 90% of its crude oil imports, making it highly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for energy security.

The SJB team wanted to know: Could this energy security argument shift the public’s baseline opposition to military deployment, and if so, how, compared with other justifications?

The Energy Argument Works Both Directions

The experiment randomly assigned respondents to read one of several short policy statements before answering whether they supported JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz. Some arguments favored deployment; others opposed it. Each invoked a different rationale: energy security, the Japan-U.S. alliance, and constitutional legitimacy.

The most striking change in attitude came from the energy-dependence framing.

Respondents who read a pro-dispatch energy argument – emphasizing that a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would devastate Japan's economy and living standards, making military involvement necessary – showed a statistically significant increase in support for JSDF deployment, rising approximately 0.12 points above the control group.

Notably, respondents who read a con-dispatch energy argument – which presented the same energy-dependence facts but concluded that Japan should pursue diplomacy through its own channels with Iran rather than deploy forces – showed an even larger increase in support, rising approximately 0.28 points above the control group.

That is, simply mentioning Japan's vulnerability to an oil supply disruption raised support for JSDF involvement, even when the message explicitly argued against military action. “This pattern suggests that the energy-dependence information itself, rather than the normative conclusion drawn from it, is what moves opinion,” the researchers write on the SJB website.

Alliance and Legal Arguments Fall Flat

In contrast, two other commonly invoked arguments – obligations related to the Japan-U.S. alliance and constitutional authority – had virtually no effect on the Japanese public’s support of JSDF deployment.

The alliance framing emphasized that contributing to U.S. operations in the Strait of Hormuz is essential, given the centrality of the U.S.-Japan security partnership to Japan's defense. A counter-argument noted that many international observers view U.S. strikes on Iran as violations of international law and that most European allies are declining to participate.

Neither version significantly moved opinion on JSDF dispatch.

Similarly, arguments about whether the conflict legally qualifies for the exercise of collective self-defense – with one version arguing that new legislation could authorize dispatch and another arguing that no existing legal basis permits it – produced near-zero effects.

These null results are particularly striking given how frequently alliance obligations and constitutional legitimacy dominate elite debates over JSDF deployment in Japan. The data suggest that, at least in this scenario, these arguments resonate far more in policy circles than with the general public.

The findings carry important lessons for Japanese policymakers, who are walking a tightrope between the United States and Iran: “Concrete economic stakes are more resonant than foreign-policy abstractions,” note the SJB researchers. Still, the Japanese public’s default position is opposition to JSDF deployment in Iran. “The framing experiments shift opinion at the margins, but do not reverse the underlying skepticism toward JSDF dispatch.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I’m your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a major military campaign against Iran with profound implications for the Middle East and beyond. Given the urgency of this topic and our desire to bring our podcast listeners insights from scholars here at Stanford’s FSI, we’re doing something a little different on today’s episode.

We’re bringing you a panel discussion on the Iran war held at FSI on March 4, moderated by professor Jim Goldgeier. It features a conversation with me, Abbas Milani, and Ori Rabinowitz.

Jim Goldgeier is a research affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation here at FSI and a professor at the School of International Service at American University.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, a visiting professor in the department of political science, and a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Ori Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer at the International Relations Department at the Hebrew University in Israel, and a visiting fellow of Israel studies here at FSI.

So without further ado, here’s our panel discussion.

[BEGIN EVENT AUDIO]

Goldgeier:  Welcome everyone, thanks so much for coming today. Thanks for those who organized this event for moving with lightning speed to put this together. I’m Jim Goldgeier. I’m a research affiliate at CISAC and at CDDRL, and I’m delighted to moderate this panel with these three experts.

Abbas, let's start with you for an understanding of what's going on inside Iran.

Milani: Well, first of all, my understanding is about three hours old. Things are changing so rapidly, and there's so much we don't know,

We don't know, for example, whether Iran has chosen a successor to Mr. Khamenei. We are fairly sure, or some people even doubt that, that Mr. Khamenei is dead. Some people think they have whisked him away. But I think, credibly, they're organizing burials for him.

But we don't know whether there is a successor. We don't know whether the committee, the council, the 86-man council that is supposed to pick the successor has met. We know they haven't met where Israel bombed and thought that they were bombing the meeting. But they are meeting on Zoom and trying to figure out the successor.

We had known for several years that Khamenei had been trying to place his son as the successor. There had been many meetings with high ranking ayatollahs and within that 86 men body to line up his son, Mojtaba, about whom I'll tell you a little bit.

He did not succeed by all accounts. There was resistance to him from the elder clergy. He is clearly a man of no experience outside being his daddy's central chief of staff. As far as I know, there is only one five-minute talk of him that has ever been publicly shown. It's a class that he taught in theology. And they showed that only because they wanted to indicate that he's now at the level that he can be the successor. In order to be a successor, you need to have the equivalent of a PhD. They had him teach a graduate course in theology, and they put that online. As far as I know, that's the only public lecture of him we have.

Yesterday there was news from one of Iran’s satellite TVs claiming that that committee had met and under command of the IRGC essentially named Khamenei's son as the new leader. Today there is less doubt that that is true. There is increasing evidence that that was leaked by intention. I don't know whether it was.

Kahl: Probably by the number two guy. Because the number one guy is probably going to get killed.

Milani: That's one theory. That really is one theory.

Rabinowitz: The HR is already on it.

Milani: That they leaked his name because that would put him as the number one target. The other theory is that they're trying to preempt everyone else's discussion, essentially make him the designated successor. And I think the more credible story is that there is resistance to him.

The meeting hasn't concluded. And it isn't even clear whether they will decide on one successor. So you have essentially a military right now in Iran that is fighting that doesn't have a commander-in-chief.

At the same time, you have a military that claim are winning this war hands down. If you read the Iranian media, you will think that Orwell missed a boat on how you can concoct a reality that is completely irrelevant to intellectual reality, mental reality.

According to Iran's narrative, they have completely weakened the assault. They have defeated the U.S. plan that was to decapitate the regime and have it fall immediately. They are now—again I'm verbatim quoting—that the U.S. is now begging, and Israel is begging, Iran to allow for a negotiated settlement to end this. In other words, they have gone to the same playbook that they did at the end of the 12 Day War. According to the Iranian regime, they won that war as well. And they ended it at the behest of the United States and at the behest of Israel, who deplored Iran to end because they realized Iran is not about to fall and it's stronger than it was.

The economy is, I think, absolutely on the verge of collapse. There are credible reports from international organizations that the banking system is unable to sustain itself for long. If you go to an ATM in Iran today, you can't get more than $10 of your own money. Iranian currency is now increased to 170,000 to $1.00. To give you a contextual point of comparison baseline: in 1979 you had 7 tomans you would get a dollar. You now need 170,000 tomans to get a dollar. And even that you can only get an equivalent of $10.00 per day.

When the news of Khamenei’s death was announced, there was really a remarkable exhibition of joy in the streets. It wasn't a propaganda. It wasn't the diaspora. I have contacts inside Iran. And it was just truly remarkable. It shows the distance between the regime and the people. So you haven't isolated the regime. I think you have a weakened regime. And the only alternative that it sees is to disrupt international trade, increase the price of oil, not even necessarily inflict damage to the U.S. military.

There was a theory they had that said the Americans can't stand casualties. If we kill a few of them, they will have to change. They will end [this]. They are not here to stay. We are planning for the long haul; the U.S. is planning for the short haul, we will win this war. That's their public position. But clearly what they're trying to do, in my view, is increase the economic cost, make everyone else pressure the U.S. and Israel to end.

My sense has been for the last two days that from the second day they were trying to find someone to mediate a negotiated ceasefire. There are some indications today in the New York Times that they did actually almost immediately after the death of Khamenei try to negotiate

My guess is that they're trying to make these encroachments and these rather—in my view—stupid attacks on Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, even Turkey. These were countries that if there is anyone who would be siding with them in this war, they would be these four countries.

China has been rather silent. Russia has been equally rather silent. And they have now managed to put those on the other side.

So,I think people are in a moment of suspended disbelief. Markets are virtually closed. Shops virtually don't open unless they have food stuff that they sell. Everybody thinks holding on to what you have is more secure than selling it, because you won't be able to buy anything to resupply your store.

Goldgeier: Thanks for that opening. Ori, I'll turn to you next, Give us a sense of Israeli objectives, support within Israel for this, how this is playing out within Israel in terms of the objectives that Israel has sought and whether they are thinking that they're achieving what they set out to do.

Rabinowitz: First of all, as opposed to the U.S. and the U.S. public, the Israeli public is predominantly supportive of the war. It's portrayed as a move which will likely remove an existential threat.

The Iranian decision to launch a combined ballistic and drone missile strike in April 2024, an operation that the Iranians titled True Promise One, was the first time that Iran directly attacked Israel, not through its proxies. And it showed the Israelis that Iran is willing to attack Israel face on. It caused the Israelis to upgrade the threat assessment and the perception of threat which Iran emanates.

So, very different to the U.S. prism. Within Israel there's also, of course, the political debate. We're now in an election year. The original date for the election is slated for around September. Could be either September or October.

Usually speaking, not during a war, Israeli governments tend to be toppled in the last year because it's a coalition system and the junior coalition parties have an incentive to topple the government and show their voters that they were willing to stick up for whatever it was that they believed in. This is regardless of the current war and the current political situation. And it's highly likely that we'll see something similar developing now.

It's also increasingly likely that Netanyahu will maneuver to have an election in June, because what we learned following the June war was that the bump that he saw after the June war was actually rather short-lived. The Israeli public have a short memory. If waits until October, he might not reap any political dividend.

The political dividend, of course, will only be on the table if he manages to convince the public that the goals were achieved.

If it's okay, I'm going to talk about the three war scenarios and then maybe we can draw on that. I think that we can generally foresee three different war-ending scenarios. This is true to both the U.S. and Israel and just general observers.

First of all, the worst outcome—at least in Israel's perspective, but probably also for the U.S.—is that the regime somehow survives either with the Mujtaba or any other kind of more radically aligned regime. It could be one leader, it could be a triumvirate of leaders. We don't know the exact formalities of that. But the biggest challenge here is the following: what happens if the radical version of the regime ends up staying in power, and they decide to go nuclear because they decide that just having a nuclear latent capacity isn't enough?

So, just to underline and stress: Khamenei, the supreme leader, was an awful person and I think personally that the world is better off without him. And he did bring Iran to the threshold of nuclear capabilities. But he was also adamant. He never gave, as far as we know, the political directive to go nuclear and to cross the threshold.

What happens if the calculus changes? If we inherit a more radical, or just a regime that's just as radical? So that would be the worst outcome and a complete failure.

The second scenario is that the regime undergoes some sort of an internal change. Other internal factions, probably within the guards and not necessarily from the clerical establishment, they seize power.

And under such a scenario, can foresee a situation where that specific faction is a faction that the U.S. and perhaps Israel can live with because it's not a faction that's as radical, that's as determined to spread violence in the Middle East.

Just as a form of comparison: there are regimes—radical to a degree, but not as radical—there are regimes in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. If you think about the al-Sharaa regime in Syria. Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Jolani, is a former jihadist. He took control of the government. He implemented certain policies. And he's someone that the U.S. can live with. To a different degree, the same goes to General el-Sisi in Egypt. There are leaders that are not democratic leaders in the Middle East that the U.S. can live with. So will we see the ascension of someone like that in the Iranian context?

I'll give you one interesting quote from a reporter called Nadav Eyal. He's an important Israeli political analyst. He interviewed Israeli sources on that. And this is what they told him: “The chances of finding a George Washington who will liberate Iran and lead it to democracy are small. The more plausible scenario is a Gorbachev scenario. Someone who attempts to reform the system and ends up bringing it down.”

As to what we mentioned here before, that Israel reportedly struck the building where the assembly of experts were meeting to vote—either vote or not vote on Mojtaba. He was either elected or not elected. They also went on the record giving the following quote that the site was targeted purposefully, but they weren't attempting to kill the people that were there. Assuming this is correct—I'm not telling you it's correct. I'm quoting a source. I can't verify it independently.

Maybe they bombed the parking lot, maybe they dropped the bomb next to them. They wanted to signal that these people were vulnerable, not necessarily to take them out. And again, this plays into a scenario where you want to increase factionalism within the regime. Again, I don't have a way to confirm this.

And lastly, of course, there's the idea that the regime would completely collapse. I don't know how likely this is. But I think what's important to understand here is that the comparison to 20th century-style aerial bombing campaigns is wrong. We're not talking about a 20th century-style aerial bombing campaign where you just bombed them from the air and you hope that the regime collapses. We already know that it's highly likely that there are covert ground-based operations  coming along. We don't have verifiable sources, but there are certain indications if you're an intelligence analyst and you follow reports from the ground, there are certain flags which basically tell you that it's likely that covert ground-based operations are taking place.

There are also reported operations. We already know, and there are reports and leaks that Israel has been bombing the border between Iran and Iraq. And there has been a phone conversation that Trump held with leaders of Kurdish factions that are willing to go into Iran and some reports maintain that they will go into Iran in the coming two days.

So this isn't going to be a 20th century style-aerial bombing campaign that's purely an aerial bombing campaign. So it could have unforeseen consequences like the collapse of the regime.

So, I'll end here.

Goldgeier: All right, Colin.

Kahl: So first of all, thanks to all of you for coming together on short notice. And as FSI director, I'm just humbled by the degree of expertise we can marshal on short notice to bring scholarly rigor to contemporary policy issues. And I think that's actually one of the things that makes FSI so special.

How many of you have heard of the term the fog of war? The fog of war is real. And I think we all have to be humble that none of us have complete understanding about what's going on. And I think that's an important caveat to say right at the beginning.

But I think in the fog of the Iran War, two things are actually kind of unquestionably true.

The first thing that no one can question is the prowess of the American and Israeli militaries. They are doing things that no militaries in the history of the world have been capable of doing. They are engaged in a stunning series of strikes to degrade the IRGC command and control and capabilities, to go after Iran's missile arsenal, to go after their missile launchers, to go after their weapons stockpiles, to go after their military production locations, to sink their navy. From a kind of tactical and operational sense, it is extraordinarily impressive.

Okay, so no one can question that. It is objectively true and apparent. That's thing one.

Thing two is no one can question the nature of the Iranian regime. This is an Iranian regime that has killed  hundreds of  Americans. It's an Iranian regime that has terrorized its neighbors for decades. It's an Iranian regime that has brutalized its domestic opposition. It's an Iranian regime that has sought nuclear capabilities that could destabilize the region and threaten American interests. These are objectively true facts.

But none of that means that there aren't huge questions about this war. And they're actually, frankly, questions that neither the American or the Israeli leadership have been forthright in answering. So that's what I really want to focus most of my remarks around.

I think there are huge questions, especially about how this war will end and ultimately what the strategic implications of that end state will be, particularly for American national interests.

So the question of how long the war goes on, I think, will fundamentally be determined by two dynamics. The first dynamic is military.

Iran's strategy, such as it is, is to expand the war horizontally and temporally. That is to cause as much pain to as many countries as possible for as long as possible to militarily and politically exhaust the countries fighting them.

So they are targeting U.S. bases throughout the region. They're attacking American diplomatic outposts. They're attacking commercial centers throughout the region, energy infrastructure, shipping across the region. They're hitting targets in the Gulf and in the Levant. They've hit targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. That is a very horizontal campaign. The goal ultimately, in my belief, is to exhaust the U.S. military and regional states, ultimately having the regime survive on war termination terms that allow them to fight another day.

Here, Iran's strategy depends in part on their ability to continue widening the conflict, for example, through the use of proxies: Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shia militia. But most importantly, it depends on this hide-and-seek between Iran's ability to launch especially short-range ballistic missiles and drones, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to target those drones and missiles before they get off the ground.

I think actually the campaign has made dramatic success integrating the medium-range ballistic missiles, especially the launchers that can attack Israel. Good news. But those are not the same missiles and launchers that can rain down on  countries in the Gulf and U.S. bases and facilities in the Gulf. Those are different launchers. There's much more plentiful ballistic missiles and they basically have an inexhaustible supply of short-range one-way attack drones.

These Shahed drones, they only cost about $35,000 apiece. We are shooting them down with $2 million missiles. That is an exchange that Iran will take any part of the day. So there is now a game of hide-and-seek. I don't mean “a game” to be a flip way. Literally the war is being paced to the ability of Iran to continue to move its forces around and deal damage to the region, especially in the Gulf, and the ability of the U.S. military and the Israeli military to go after those targets. That's the military dynamic, and that will determine which side is essentially exhausted first.

The second though is a political dynamic, namely the degree to which political pressure grows on President Trump to declare victory.

If he wanted to declare victory today, he could do it. If the goal is simply to massively degrade the Iranian regime's power projection capabilities, which is what the Pentagon has asserted, we're probably pretty close to that  already. We know that there are debates in Congress about war powers. That is putting some pressure. We know that there's grumbling in the MAGA base that an “America First” president keeps intervening in these foreign wars.

MAGA originated in part out of a sense of forever wars in the Middle East and exhaustion with that. That's become a political problem for the president's base. And we know that the one thing the president has actually responded to are signals from the market. And oil prices, gas prices, and the stock market are extraordinarily turbulent at this point. So political pressure is going to grow at home to wrap this thing up.

The cross current of that is actually international pressure, where I think this issue is complicated. First, the Israeli position is not going to be complicated. They were going to want the United States to fight as long as it takes to destroy this regime. That is the goal of the Israeli political leadership. It is supported by the Israeli people, to Ori's point.

The more complicated international political equation is probably in the Gulf, where in the near term they're outraged, right? The Emiratis have suffered hundreds of ballistic missile attacks and hundreds of drone attacks. Other Gulf countries have been hit. Iran might have believed that that was going to cow them into submission right away. It has not had that effect.

There's actually a chance that the UAE and Saudi could engage in defensive strikes inside Iran. But right now they are exhausting their supply of air defense interceptors. That is especially true, I think, in the UAE. But it will be true across the region. And that is exactly Iran's goal. And there will be a point at which the countries in the Gulf do not want their ports and their infrastructure and their airports and their hotels bombed. And they will call for a timeout.

So, I think political pressure in the near term is not so high, but in the medium term, meaning in weeks, will grow as the Gulf gets tired. And I think the military exhaustion on the U.S. side will also play into this dynamic as the Pentagon warns that our own interceptor arsenals will be depleted. I'll come back to that.

So that's the dynamics I'm looking for in terms of how long the war lasts.

But I think there are even bigger strategic questions here. It's a lot easier to start wars than end them. It's a lot easier to achieve tactical victories than strategic ones. And so I think we should all be on the lookout as analysts on a few things.

First of all, what is the political end state that the Trump administration is seeking in Iran? Is it regime change? They've suggested that it is at times, and at other times that it's not. Is it behavior change? Is it simply to leave whatever regime in place so badly degraded so that it can't threaten its neighbors for some interval of time? That's certainly how the Pentagon has described its objectives.

To say the least, the Trump administration has been highly inconsistent and they have not been forthright with the American people. And separate it apart from whether you think Congress should get involved or not, it is the obligation of the President of United States to explain to the American people why he has authorized our men and women being put in harm's way at the scale that's happening in Iran. And it is crazy that that has not happened.

The second and related question: is how much divergence ultimately is there between the US end state and the Israeli end state? So Israel clearly favors regime change, but I also think basically that Plan B for Israel is simply Iranian domestic chaos. That is that Iran is so internally divided and consumed that it doesn't threaten Israel. By the way, this was basically Israel's posture for most of the Syrian civil war, which is to contain the direct threats to Israel, but basically let everybody else inside Syria kill each other. The jihadists, Hezbollah, the regime, the Russians, everybody. They could all kill each other, Israel would deal with the weapons that threaten them from Syria, and other than that, it was fine for Syria to be in a civil war.

I think they could have a similar perspective towards Iran if you don't get a kind of managed transition or regime change. As we said, the Trump administration has been all over the place on regime change. They've also been all over the place on whether they actually support Israel's Plan B, which is just domestic chaos. To Ori's point, there are credible reports that not only is Israel bombing the guard posts on the border between Northern Iraq and Iran, but the United States is working covertly and maybe overtly to agitate Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to infiltrate Iran and threaten the regime.

Now, maybe that is being done largely for coercive reasons, or maybe it's to stir up a civil war inside of Iran. And I'm old enough to have been a U.S. official during the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya to suggest that once a country starts down that road, all hell can break loose. And Iran is not a small country, okay? Geographically, it is the size of Iraq and Afghanistan put together, and it's 90 million people. It's the heart of Eurasia. An Iran that collapses into a violent civil war will convulse the world.  So we should just keep that in mind. So that's the second question I have.

The third is, will the Iranian people rise up? You know, Trump basically says the cavalry is on the way, but he said, stay in your home so you don't get killed, but the second the bombing happens, come out on the streets. Will they? And if they do, and the regime brutally cracks down again, what will the United States do?

Because, of course, this entire thing got started because Trump said you can't slaughter your own people and that's what they did by the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. It took us several weeks for the U.S. military to show up en masse. They then launched. So if the Iranian people come out and they start getting gunned down, does that drag the U.S. military back in? Is there a mission creep dynamic here? If it does, then the campaign's going go on. If it doesn't, and that's what happened during the Arab Spring?

Or, do we abandon the protesters in the streets and let them be slaughtered, which is essentially what happened to the Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War, right? Which is a blow to U.S. credibility. So one pathway to mission creep is if the people do come out into the streets and then it does become an effort to back whatever they're doing to change the regime or abandon them and face the credibility consequences from that. So that's the third question.

The fourth question is what is the implication for nuclear proliferation? Jim, to your point about like first they said it was obliterated and then they said it's two weeks. Both are true in the following respect. What wasn't obliterated are the 400 kilograms of 60 percent highly enriched uranium that were probably in tunnels under Isfahan or somewhere else that weren't destroyed last summer.

400 kilograms of 60 percent HEU is enough for 10 or 11 nuclear bombs—not the bombs themselves but the fissile material, the explosive material for the bombs, if further enriched to 90 percent. They could do that in a couple of weeks, hence the two weeks. Were they about to do that? I have no idea. I'm not privy to the intelligence, but there's no indication from reporting that they were. And believe me, if there were indications, both the Americans and the Israelis would be putting it out there.

But the question then becomes, well, if you don't get a hold of that material and the regime survives, what are the implications for nuclear proliferation in Iran? Because 400 kilograms of HEU doesn't take that many IR-6 centrifuges in a warehouse somewhere to spin up the explosive material for a nuclear weapon. And if I'm the regime, my missiles weren't enough to deter, my drones weren't enough to deter, my threshold nuclear capability wasn't enough to deter, I might draw the conclusion that only a nuclear bomb could deter this from happening again. So will that be the future?

The next question I would ask—and I'm sorry for going on so long, but I'm almost done—will a dramatically weakened Iran, which I think is inevitable . . . Iran will emerge from this dramatically weakened under every set of circumstances. Will a dramatically weakened Iran liberate the United States from the Middle East or pin us down in the Middle East? Proponents of the war, especially the America Firsters, are saying, look, we never get to be out of the Middle East as long as this regime is there. We have to swat the regime back because that liberates us to focus on, take your pick: the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, whatever the Trump administration says they care about the most.

The challenge with that is that's historically never the way it's worked in the Middle East. In the aftermath of this, there will be enormous pressure from our own military command to keep forces in the region to contain the aftermath. There could be mission creep, which pins us down. And all of the Gulf states who now have seen Americans flow in and seen their own defenses degraded by this war, will be begging us to stay and will be telling us if we pull a single American out of the Middle East, we're abandoning them.

So the pressure to keep the United States trapped in the Middle East after we spent so much time un-entrapping ourselves from the Middle East will be profound, and that will have consequences on our ability to do anything else.

There was a reason why it took a few weeks for the U.S. military to show up in the Middle East. Not because we don't have the most powerful military in the world, but because they were busy in the Caribbean. So they had to be relocated across the world to do what they've done. And if they're pinned down in the Middle East, it means they're not available for contingencies in Europe or in Northeast Asia or in Southeast Asia or in the hemisphere.

A related question is: what does this mean for post-war U.S. strategic exhaustion? We're going to win this tactically and operationally. That's not even a close fight. It will be highly imbalanced. But I was at the Pentagon overseeing our war planning for all of these things. We basically get to fight one protracted war. And once we do, it's going to be a couple of years before you are ready to fight another one.

And that's why they are so desperate to recapitalize the munitions, because we are expending a lot of long range precision munitions and a lot of air interceptors. And a lot of these weapon systems are exactly the weapon systems you need for a contingency in North Korea, across the Taiwan Strait, in the Baltics.

And so as a consequence, the paradox is that this war is likely to be operationally a demonstration of amazing American military power. And maybe weaker countries around the world will be like, “Woah, woah, we don't want that to happen to us. Like, wow, what they did to Iran, what they did to Maduro, like no way do we want any piece of this.”

But if you're in Moscow and Beijing, you count things. And you know that for the next two or three years, the United States' cupboard is going to be bare. And so what does that mean for our ability to deter what they do in the Baltics? Across the Taiwan Strait?

And my own intuition is that the Trump administration has basically been punching down at weak actors and not punching up at major powers, and that Trump is keen to accommodate Putin and Xi. And that actually this will encourage him to do that for the next two or three years because frankly, a more confrontational posture will not be viable.

And the last point I will just make is what are the implications for the international order? Whatever one thinks of the war, it does not fit traditional understandings of international law. That's true in Iran. It's true in Venezuela. Basically what the United States says, we can do things unilaterally. We didn't even try to build a broad coalition. Even George W. Bush built a coalition of the willing before the invasion of Iraq. We didn't do any of that. We didn't appeal to international norms. We didn't appeal to international law. We didn't build an international coalition. We said that the United States can unilaterally decide to decapitate foreign regimes. We did it in Venezuela. We did it again in Iran.

And if you're in Moscow or Beijing, you will draw the conclusion that the United States has no moral, legal, or ethical leg to stand on in opposing you from doing the same thing. Will that change Putin or Xi Jinping's inclination to do something in the Baltics or in Taiwan? No, it won't. But will it make it harder for a future American administration to rally the world to deter or defeat that aggression? 100%. And so from an international order perspective, that's a problem.

I don't want to pretend any of these things are easy. They're not. Nobody should believe that Iran is a good actor. They're not. But these are the strategic questions that our leaders owe us answers to. And I have not heard an answer to a single one of them.

Goldgeier: Colin, I want to follow up on two issues, one you mentioned and one you didn't but that have been in the news a lot recently.

So one is the stockpile question, how much we actually have in order to fight a war. And people have made all sorts of accusations that we've sent too much to Ukraine and that leaves us short, or we need more in the Indo-Pacific that we don't have. And here we are fighting this major war against Iran.

You mentioned the challenge it poses for other contingencies elsewhere in the next two to three years. But what about how long we can sustain this war with what we have? That's one question.

And then the second is, there's been a lot in the news recently about Anthropic and Claude. And before the war started, it was about how the U.S. government was going to go after Anthropic because they didn't want Claude used in certain ways, especially regarding mass surveillance of Americans.

But the stories in the paper the last couple of days have been about the use of Claude for targeting and the ways in which this has really enabled the United States to fight this war in a way that it wouldn't have been able to previously. And just get your thoughts on the role of Claude.

Kahl: Okay, big questions. On the stockpile  and the “How long?” question. Thirty seconds of background: so there was a lot of underinvestment in the defense industrial base in the post-Cold War period. And to the degree that we were investing, we were investing in platforms, not munitions. And so when the Ukraine war burst out and we started to send stockpiles to Ukraine, it became increasingly evident that if we sent too much of anything, it would start to imperil our ability to defend our own interests in the context of certain contingencies.

This was a critique, in fact, as you mentioned, Jim, of those who said we provided Ukraine too much, including many who currently sit in the administration. Of course, there are also people in the administration that claim we didn't provide enough.

The Biden administration invested billions in recapitalizing the defense industrial base. The Trump administration wisely is doing the same. The challenge is that it just it's not about money. It's not how much money you spend. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't build factories, you can't hire the workers, you have subcontractor issues.

And just as an example of the scale: we currently, by shot doctrine, shoot two to three Patriot interceptors at every Iranian missile. The Iranians have shot hundreds of missiles. Do the math. We only produce 600 Patriot interceptors a year. So you're gonna burn through that stuff pretty fast.

CENTCOM has made a big deal of the fact that the Army is now using this new long-range precision strike missile called the PRISM. That was designed for contingencies in places like the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. So everything we are shooting off in the Middle East is something that's not available in the near term for any other contingency.

How long can it go? Well, it depends on how much risk the president is willing to take on our ability to do anything else. So could it go for weeks? Certainly. Could it go for months? Probably. The longer it goes, does it cause trade-offs with our ability to do anything else anywhere else? Yeah.

And I'll tell you that the Russians and the Chinese are really good at counting things. And they will know exactly how long we can fight them. And the one thing is for sure, we can fight them less ably after this war than when the war started. It's not an argument for why the war is a bad idea, but it is an argument that that strategic trade-off is real, that you get to fight the one big war and was this war in the context of this regime at this moment what you wanted to expand American power on, separate and apart from everything else?

One thing I'm confident of is the lesson they are not drawing in Moscow and Beijing is, “This could happen to you.”

What they are drawing is because this is happening to Iran, it's actually less likely it's going to happen to you anytime soon. And then the question is, what do they do about that? I don't think it means that either one of those countries is likely to start a new war, actually. I think what it means is they're going to pursue their current objectives more aggressively with less fear that the United States will put pressure on them, and more sense that they will be accommodated.

So in Ukraine, it will mean they're more confident the United States will not send a bunch of weapons to Ukraine. In Taiwan, it could mean the same thing, or I think Xi Jinping basically wants to achieve his preferred outcome in Taiwan peacefully but coercively. And I think this will strengthen his hand in negotiations with Trump this year, especially as they meet in Beijing in April for their first summit and probably a few more times this year to try to reach some “Big, Beautiful Trade Bill.” I've always believed that Trump was likely to go soft on some combination of technology and Taiwan. And I think Beijing will calculate this gives them a stronger hand to play. So I don't think it's new aggression. I think it's their current path, but they'll see it as easier to pursue. We'll see.

Okay, Claude. As you've probably read in the news, Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude, is one of the two or three best frontier AI models in the world, alongside the offerings from OpenAI and Gemini and Google DeepMind. But the thing that separates Claude is that Anthropic was the first company to actually put its models into classified computing clusters, and Claude is also integrated, reportedly, into the Maven Smart System.

For those of you who follow Silicon Valley soap opera around national security issues, you'll recall back in 2018, Google had a Maven, the Maven contract—this was about using AI for targeting, a target identification on drones and things. There was a revolt by Google engineers, Google dropped the contract, Palantir picked it up. Anthropic is a partner with Palantir. Now Palantir integrates Anthropic's models into the Maven Smart System.

The Maven Smart System is being used in Iran. It was previously used to help the Ukrainians. All of this has been publicly reported. This is not autonomous killer robots. These are AI decision support tools. Basically, it means fusing all classified intelligence: think signals intelligence, emissions from radios, radar, satellite imagery, full motion video, social media that's geo-located, fusing all of that data at a scale and speed that human analysts would not be able to do to generate points of interest that are turned into targets.

And so basically, it speeds up the targeting process. By the way, Israel uses similar systems called Gospel and Lavender to accelerate targeting in places like Gaza and Lebanon. Maybe Ori can talk more about that.

But the point being that AI's role in warfare is already here. It is here in the Middle East. It is here in Ukraine. My suspicion is you're seeing reports about Claude’s use in Iran because people at Anthropic are trying to remind people of the costs of trying to disentangle Anthropic's tools in terms of the costs on ongoing operations. And I would be doing the same thing.

But it is a reminder that a paradox of Secretary Hegseth's approach on AI is that he released a memo in January saying we need to go at warp speed on AI. There are even posters in the Pentagon that are AI-generated of him pointing at people saying, “Use AI.” And yet in the feud with Anthropic, they're going to spend the next 6 to 18 months taking steps backwards to rip Anthropic out of their operational architectures to replace it with something else, which is not a step forward. It strikes me as a step backwards, or at least sideways.

Goldgeier: Thank you. Abbas, the issue came up, this question about regime change versus behavior change. What are your expectations regarding either of those two things? And if you could also say a little bit about the Kurds in this whole unfolding within Iran, that would be very helpful. I'm going to ask Ori to also comment on the Kurds as well. But this regime change versus behavior change first.

Milani: I think what can in the short term or midterm be expected is more  change of behavior rather than a regime change. There isn't the kind of boots on the ground, whether in terms of the opposition  or in terms of Israel or the U.S., to dislodge this regime.

But the regime, in my view, is desperate enough that it realizes that unless they make these kinds of changes of behavior, they won't survive. I believe that even if Mojtaba comes, Mojtaba —even with the IRGC—have no choice but to recalibrate with the people, recalibrate with the international community.

That's why when they were pitching Mojtaba, there's two pitches about him. One is that he's intimately connected with the IRGC. He is the central founder of the IRGC intelligence, that he is very deep into the economic shenanigans. But they also dropped hints that he is Iran's MBS, that the only person that can do for Iran what MBS did in Saudi Arabia is him, because he has the clout, he has the connection, he has the IRGC. So they have created both of these, and this is before this crisis.

To me, the fact that they launched this PR campaign for him indicates they know themselves that the status quo is untenable, that they need to restructure, rethink, recalibrate with the people.

And to me the idea that arming the Kurds was a very foolish thing to say and a very foolish thing to do. I think it will convince some Iranian people that what the regime has been saying is all along is true. Because what the regime has been saying is that this is not about the nuclear program, this is not about our behavior. Israel and the United States and primarily Israel want to destroy Iran, they want to dismantle Iran.

They point to some article twenty years ago that said Iran needs to be weakened. That this is part of some master plan. To me, it was was a very foolhardy.

There are people within the regime that have clearly, unambiguously, to different degrees, been saying for the last 10 years—if anybody was paying attention—that the status quo can't work. Some of them are in prison right now. Tajzadeh, example. Qadianii, for example. These people have been calling out Khamenei by name, saying you are the source of the problem, and unless you change, unless we remove you, we can’t save our own.

And in recent months, Rouhani joined them. Zarif joined. These are people who are part of the regime. Rouhani, in all but name, systematically pointed to Khamenei in saying that you have been wrong on every strategic decision. In one conversation, Rouhani said, we were in a meeting with Khamenei, and we said, Israel and the United States might attack us.

And commanders of the IRGC said, absolutely not. They won't dare. We have 200,000 missiles. We will destroy Israel the first week. And said to Khamenei, that these are stupid imaginations. They can hit us. And Khamenei sided with those. So there is that tendency. There is that desire within the regime to recalibrate, whether there will be anything left of them to do this.

One last point about the bomb, your question about the bomb and the strength of FSI. Sig Hecker, one of the most eminent scholars of  nuclear science, the head of Los Alamos, he and I wrote two articles about Iran's enrichment program, one twelve years ago and one about five months ago.

And in that one, we said, the only thing that is left of your enrichment capacity, virtually, is this 460. With this, you can make a few dirty bombs. Give it up and make a compromise with the international community that will allow Iran and you, the regime, to survive.

Absolutely, they did the opposite and began to threaten that they're going to use this and that they have the capacity to withstand all of these pressures, that there will not be another war. Khamenei famously said, there will not be war, there will not be negotiation. There has been war, there has been negotiations. And many people within the regime are basically saying that maybe a change of behavior.

Again, I can't believe that the regime change can come from outside. I was very much opposed to the idea of trying to bring regime change through attack. I thought the U.S. should help the Iranian people, not kinetically, not attacking Iran, [but by] making the battle between the Iranians and this brutal regime more equitable by giving them satellite connection, by the kinds of non-interventionist things that I think would have enabled a very viable democratic movement to bring about the change that hopefully brings peace to the Middle East.

Goldgeier: Thank you. And for Ori, what should we be looking for as we think about the Israeli objectives versus the U.S. objectives? The convergence, the divergence? How are you looking at this? And also, if you have anything you want to add on the Kurds,

Rabinowitz: I'll string together a few thoughts. So, with the Kurds, I think that there are two primary objectives. I'm not convinced that just starting a civil war is a defined objective. I think that it's more likely that the Israelis want to see a non-hostile faction take cover, but I'm basing this based on the statements. And again, fog of war, maybe these statements are just not being made. I can only use what's out there.

I think that the idea is to first of all stretch Iranian security forces and weaken them, to pave the way for those unnamed opposition forces or the factions that are more amenable to collaborate with the U.S. and Israel, and to encourage other ethnic minorities like the Baluchis and the Azeris and maybe therefore encourage the Iranians to rise up.

They haven't really given indications, the Israelis or the Americans, that they think it's now time to go tomorrow because we're still in the air. I think this is just day four, right? I mean, it looks like a hundred years from my perspective, but I think they're still kind of preparing the ground. But it's likely that we'll start seeing more . . .

Kahl: It's day five. We're like, 20% further ahead than what you . . .

Rabinowitz: Wow, yeah. Sleep deprivation will do that to a person. So just to follow up, to give you some numbers to elaborate on what Colin said. We have relatively good numbers with the UAE. I haven't been able to compile the assessments on Israel. Everything is based on open source and different analytical reports. And there's an analyst called Fabian Hoffman. He does a terrific job, and he compiled the numbers for the UAE.

In the first two days, we saw 165 ballistic missiles that were launched from Iran to the UAE, and in the following days we saw 9, 12, and 3. So these are five days, not four days. So I lost a day. So, day five of the war.

So, we saw a decline in the launches. We also saw a decline with the drones. And exactly like Colin said, if you run the numbers of how many Patriots you need to intercept these missiles, the analysts think that about 410 interceptors were probably required, which roughly amounts to anywhere between 20 to 40% of what the UAE will assess that they have in their stockpile. So you can imagine that if you're a UAE decision maker, this is going to make you rather stressed about how many interceptors you're going to need in the coming days.

So everything really depends on the success of the hunting missions that we now see in Iran.

The numbers are declining. Are they declining fast enough? We'll know in the coming days. I should mention that it looks like the numbers with Israel are probably somewhere aligned with this thing, but I don't have the actual numbers. But we did see a decrease, and we also saw a decrease in the intensity of the salvo. So when I say salvo, I don't mean a single machine that's firing repeatedly. We're talking about a bunch of launchers kind of shooting together as a pack. Think about the wolfpack submarine style from World War II. They're coming together and they each have one missile and they launch it together.

During the 12 Day War, saw the salvos shooting 40, 50 missiles together. Now we see them increasingly in lower numbers. This indicates a lot of disruption to Iranian capability to coordinate the launchers shooting together. But they're still launching, but again, in smaller numbers.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the Israeli-U.S. possible divergence. So just to frame this, because the hunt for the launchers is now the primary objective, it's definitely what the U.S. and Israel are most interested in. We didn't see a lot of Iranian nuclear facilities being hit. We saw some, and again, fog of war. I'm relying on open source reports.

There are reports that Natanz was hit. There are reports that Isfahan was hit, [but] we don't know which facilities inside Isfahan. Are we talking about the tunnels with more than 400 kilos of enriched uranium, the entrance to the tunnels? We don't know yet.

But—and here's a very interesting nugget from yesterday evening—the IDF reported that one of the sites that they hit was a secret site, not previously reported, where the Iranian weapons group was working on a trigger mechanism for the nuclear bomb.

Again, I can't verify this independently. This is something that was stated and it ties on to recent reports, again, just from an hour before we convened here, that the Israelis have intelligence that the Iranian rebuilding effort was much more intense following the 12 Day War. That specific report mentioned the missile program. I'm assuming it also touches on the nuclear issue.

The U.S.-Iranian talks about the nuclear program were held last week. It looks like a millennia ago. They were held last week. Witkoff and Kushner gave for the record briefing and off the record briefing as administration officials. And apparently they were a bit shocked because what they said in all these briefings is that the Iranians basically were taunting the fact that they still have their 460 kilos of enriched uranium and they can do whatever they want with it.

And another thing that they were stressing is their ability to produce advanced centrifuges. These advanced centrifuges are called IR-6. The number itself doesn't matter. The idea is that they were insisting on their ability to produce these machines. And I think this is something that really was significant in the decision-making process.

And here we come to the divergence. I think that the biggest possibility of divergence between Israeli and U.S. perception of the war would be if we do end up seeing a Mojtaba or another faction from within the guards taking over the regime and being convenient or malleable enough for Trump and the U.S. to work with foregoing any nuclear thing, perhaps foregoing most or all of the nuclear program, but not forgoing the ideology, the anti-Israel rhetoric, the support for destabilizing Israeli-Arab normalization, etc.

So imagine something that is somewhat similar to a Qatar actor, right? Qatar is an actor that the Trump administration is very at home with, but Qatar is an anti-Israel actor. So what do you get when you have an actor like that that the U.S. can live with but Israel isn't happy with? That's where you'll see the divergence.

Goldgeier: Okay, great. Thank you.

Milani: Let me give you a little history. Iran was the first Muslim country next to Turkey to de facto recognize the state of Israel. Iran had very close relations with Israel from 1950 to 1979.

Israel was a supporter of Iran's nuclear program, and there is evidence that Israel worked with South Africa to help Iran develop a bomb in 1975. But Iran was also systematically under the Shah, the defender of a two-state solution, demanding that Israel must give up the territories, and a democratic Iran that recognizes, contrary to what this regime has done for 47 years, that does not believe that the destruction of the state of Israel is Iran's top, or one of the top, strategic goals. That can bring peace in the Middle East, can help bring peace in the Middle East. It can't guarantee it.

You cannot, in my view, have peace in the Middle East without the recognition of the rights of Palestinians to a state. You're not going to have long-term peace. And the Abrahamic Accord, in my view, is de facto a reality on the ground. The Shah was the outlier with Turkey having diplomatic relations with Israel. Everybody in the Muslim Middle East is now craving to have that relationship. The problem is Palestine.

Rabinowitz: In opinion, Israel needs to work towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians. This is a minority opinion. I'm not representing the Israeli public here. I'm representing my own opinion as an Israeli and as a scholar of security studies in the Middle East. The only way to translate wartime achievement into sustainable political goals is to do something political with them.

I think one of the negative things that this specific current government has done in Israel was to squander away the opportunity to reach normalization with Saudi Arabia. Colin can talk more about this, but specifically in May 2024—this is still during the Biden administration—there was a relatively concrete offer on the table, but Netanyahu, due to various political considerations— they will tell you that they're altruistic and me, myself personally, as someone who doubts his motivations—I think they were politically motivated to maintain the integrity of the Israeli government. He insisted on maintaining a very right-wing political component of the government and that precluded any kind of progress in the Palestinian-Israeli path.

So that's a very simple answer, but I don't have an answer of how we get there, because again, I'm a minority. How do I convince more Israelis to agree with me? When the government calls for a snap election, which we now think will be in June, will they vote in political parties that share this? I don't know how to do this.

Kahl: First of all, I think we should acknowledge that there's no agreement on what peace even means in this context and what peace would be durable, sustainable. There's not agreement inside the United States administration. There's not an agreement between the United States and Israel on this question. So it's hard, right? So all I can speak to is what would I think winning the peace, like from my perspective, which is only as valuable as you value my opinion.

I think first it would be a peace that is an outcome where Iran is so weakened that it either changes its intention to threaten its neighbors, or for a meaningful period of time does not have the capability of doing that. I think in some ways that's the easiest objective here to achieve. Not easy, but the easiest objective to achieve because of the asymmetry and the military capabilities that are on display at the moment.

I think a second condition though, is a more integrated region that shares a sense of collective security and that is integrated across the Arab-Israeli divide. So think of it as an expansion of the Abraham Accords: more integration between Israel and moderate Arab states, looking after their defense and cooperating more with each other, not just on military issues, but intelligence and economic and energy and environment.

But a third is that it is a peace that doesn't require tens of thousands of Americans to be trapped in the desert for forever. That's not something the American people want. That's not something that is militarily wise or sustainable from the United States. And in a world of intense geopolitical competition, is strategic malpractice to keep Americans at scale trapped in the Middle East. So from a narrow U.S. interest standpoint, a stable peace is a peace that is sustainable without the United States having to do everything.

Goldgeier:  Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you all so much for your insights. We really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming. Please join me in thanking the panel.

[END EVENT AUDIO]

Kahl: You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening around the world, and why.

2. U.S. Security Partnerships Can Make Arab States Targets

Yom highlighted a paradox shaping the strategic environment of Arab states: the closer their security ties with the United States, the more vulnerable they may become in a regional confrontation.

“For the most part,” Yom explained, “the intensity of Iranian counterstrikes and retaliation on Arab states covaries with the degree of their relationship with the United States.”

States hosting American military bases or deeply integrated into U.S. security strategy are more likely to find themselves on the frontlines of Iranian retaliation.

“The more of a client state they are, the more troops they host, the deeper their foreign policies are tied to the demands of American grand strategy — then the more likely they are going to be struck.”

This dynamic creates a fundamental strategic dilemma.

For decades, small and medium-sized states in the region have relied on alliances with Washington to enhance their security. The current conflict illustrates how those same alliances can also increase their exposure to regional escalation.

3. Arab Governments Are Trying to Avoid Being Seen as Participants in the War

Arab governments today face a difficult balancing act: responding to Iranian attacks while avoiding the perception that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel. Many Arab governments must navigate public opinion that is deeply skeptical of Israel and wary of Western military intervention in the region.

As Sallam put it, these governments are trying to avoid creating “the impression that they are fighting alongside the United States and Israel in this war.”

The result is a diplomatic tightrope: condemning attacks on their territory without being drawn into the broader conflict.

4. A Regional War Threatens the Gulf’s Economic Transformation Projects

A fourth major takeaway concerns the economic stakes of regional stability.

Blaydes emphasized that wars can have far-reaching political economy consequences. Major conflicts reshape investment patterns, redirect state resources toward security priorities, and increase global perceptions of risk.

When governments must divert resources toward defense spending and crisis management, economic diversification plans can quickly lose momentum.

For Gulf regimes that have tied their political projects to visions of economic modernization, prolonged regional instability therefore represents a serious political challenge.

“Suddenly, when you have a conflict that disrupts the flow of investments, tourism, and even trading routes in places like the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea,” Sallam observed, “this shakes the foundations of these projects.”

5. The War Is Occurring Amid Deep Divisions Among Regional Powers

The discussion highlighted that the war with Iran is unfolding against the backdrop of a significant regional rift.

According to Sallam, one emerging divide involves different visions for managing instability in fragile states. Some regional actors — including the UAE and Israel — have tacitly or directly promoted fragmentation of political authority in places like Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza.

Others, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, have tended to favor more traditional models of centralized authoritarian stability.

These competing strategic preferences have already clashed in multiple regional conflicts, most recently in Sudan and Yemen.

Thus, Iran’s potential neutralization as a regional power player as a result of the war, Sallam noted, will not necessarily result in regional stability. It will simply intensify these rivalries among the remaining powers.

6. War Strengthens Authoritarian Politics and Weakens the Prospect for Reform and Development

The panel highlighted the negative ramifications of regional conflict for reform and development.

“The constant violence is not productive for the promotion of democracy, development, or the rule of law,” Blaydes noted. “Having a constant stream of weapons, conflict, violence, post-conflict reconciliation, [and] regional rivalries…undermines all three.”

“Anytime a regional conflict breaks out,” Yom argued, “it’s always bad for democratic struggle on the home front.”

The war, according to Sallam, could result in outcomes that would be “catastrophic not only for the people and society of Iran, but also the people and societies of the region at large.”

A full recording of the March 3 panel can be viewed below:

Iran’s Revolution and Economy Are Intertwined

Taking a broad view of Iran’s revolution, Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies, says that understanding the country’s future requires understanding its past.

“The 1979 Iranian revolution was no revolution at all. It was a cunning bait-and-switch game cleverly played by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who put himself at the head of the movement,” Milani writes in the New York Times.

For decades, this regime, first led by Khomeini and until recently his successor, Khamenei, has successfully kept its population under repressive control through a combination of fear, violence, and brutality, says Milani. But that stronghold has shown cracks, and fear of the regime had begun waning prior to the U.S.-Israel attacks. Coupled with frustrations with a failing economy, skyrocketing inflation, and plummeting currency, Milani sees opportunity for real change within Iran.

“The economy is a clear source of constant threat to the regime, and the new secular women and men of Iran are unwilling to accept anything less than what they were initially promised before being deceived nearly half a century ago. The machinery of the regime may survive today. But the counterrevolution of yesteryear is begetting the revolution of tomorrow.”
 

America’s Firepower Is Superior, but Not Infinite

Speaking at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), FSI Director Colin Kahl, a former under secretary of defense for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, acknowledged the magnitude and deft execution of the unfolding military operation.

“The U.S. and Israeli militaries are doing things that no militaries in the history of the world have been capable of doing. From a kind of tactical and operational sense, it is extraordinarily impressive,” he said.

But Kahl also warns that an extended military campaign could spell trouble for the United States both in the current conflict and for future readiness.

“Iran has what is basically an inexhaustible supply of short-range, one-way attack drones that only cost about $35,000 apiece. We are shooting them down with $2 million missiles. That is an exchange rate Iran will take any day of the week.”

China and Russia are also watching this conflict and America’s artillery usage, says Kahl:

“We are expending a lot of long range precision munitions and a lot of air interceptors. And a lot of these weapons are exactly the systems you need for a contingency in North Korea, across the Taiwan Strait, or in the Baltics,” he says. “If you're in Moscow and Beijing, you’re counting those, and you know that for the next two or three years, the United States' cupboard is going to be bare and a more confrontational posture will not be viable.”

U.S.-Israel Interests are Aligned but Not Identical

Unlike in previous conflicts when the U.S. was joined in combat with NATO allies or other partners, the strikes on Iran were conducted in tandem with only one other nation, Israel.

Amichai Magen, the director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, believes some of the impetus for the strikes is to send a message to anti-American and anti-Israel actors.

“If you can take out Maduro or undermine the regime in Iran, you are signaling to Russia and China that America is repositioning and re-establishing deterrence against its peer competitors,” Magen told NBC Bay Area.

Or Rabinowitz, a visiting scholar of Israel studies, also points to Iran’s insistence in recent negotiations on keeping its ability to produce advanced centrifuges as being particularly significant in the decision to execute military action.

But there is the possibility of divergence in the United States and Israel’s overarching goals as well, Rabinowitz says, especially when it comes to questions of nuclear capabilities. 

“Take Qatar as an example,” she told the CISAC panel. “Qatar is an actor that the Trump administration is very at home with, even though they are an anti-Israel actor. Something similar could emerge in Iran that feels malleable enough for the U.S. to work with on the nuclear issue, but they don’t forgo their ideology, their anti-Israel rhetoric, or their support for destabilizing Israeli-Arab normalization. The U.S. may choose to live with that even if Israel isn’t happy about it. That’s where you’ll see divergence.”

China Is Likely to Sit This One Out

When it comes to Iran’s partnerships and allies, experts believe Tehran is unlikely to see much help from Moscow or Beijing. Writing for Foreign Affairs, Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani track how Russia’s focus on Ukraine has diverted its ability to engage with players in the Middle East, citing its meager response to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and limited engagement with Iran in the aftermath of the airstrikes in June 2025 targeting nuclear facilities.

Lisa Blaydes, an FSI senior fellow, thinks China—Iran’s major trading partner—will take a similar backseat approach to the current conflict. 

“We think that China might have some leverage over Iran. But it's not clear how much will there is in China to get involved in this,” she explained at an event hosted by the The Program on Arab Reform and Development. “We know one of the only planes to land in Tehran recently was a Chinese plane that was bringing weapons to support the Iranian regime. Will this continue? Is it a one-off? Is it a pattern? I don't think we know yet.”

While a majority of Iran’s oil does end up in Chinese markets, China also has important economic and trade interests in the Gulf, says Blaydes, where all six Gulf Cooperation Council nations have been hit by retaliatory Iranian missile strikes.

“The Gulf is an important part of the Belt and Road Initiative. And there's a lot of money at stake. Disturbances in a place like the Strait of Hormuz would cause major disruptions to global supply chains. So I don't know if the Chinese want to weigh in strongly on either side.”
 

The Risk of Global Destabilization Is Real

The question on most people’s minds in regards to the war is, “What happens next?” Hesham Sallam, a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, acknowledges the complexity and gravity of the situation.

“This is a very unpredictable situation. And it is concerning that multiple U.S. officials don’t seem to have a consistent answer about a situation that is so consequential and that puts so many people in harm's way,” says Sallam.

If not handled carefully, Sallam warns that the threat of escalation is very real. Faced with a potentially existential risk, leaders in what remains of the regime may seek broad global destabilization. 

“There’s a logic here for the regime that if you don’t exact more costs and prolong the conflict and make this as inconvenient as possible for everyone, Iran will not be dealt with on equal footing,” he says. “So they may be looking to exact huge costs not just on the U.S. and Israel and countries in the region, but to disrupt global energy markets and the flow of trade as a means of ensuring something like this never happens again.”
 

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