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.

The January 3, 2026, U.S. “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela to capture and remove President Nicolás Maduro has raised urgent questions about its repercussions for the U.S.-China competition, Taiwan Strait security, American strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific region, and U.S. allies and partners.

In two new episodes of the APARC Briefing series, Stanford scholars Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and APARC faculty affiliate Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at FSI, join host Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC, to unravel what happened in Venezuela and the implications of the U.S. actions in Latin America for Taiwan, security and alliances in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with stakeholders in the region.

Both scholars agree that the U.S. mission in Venezuela is a precedent that likely emboldens rather than deters China in its Taiwan calculus, warning that the shift it represents in U.S. national security policy might detract from American capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region at a crucial moment. They also provide sobering advice for U.S. allies struggling to adjust to rapidly shifting geopolitical realities under the second Trump administration.

A Shocking Action in World Affairs

There is no dispute that the Maduro government has been deeply authoritarian, deeply corrupt, and deeply illegitimate, says Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Yet the United States “has probably violated international law to intervene forcibly in the internal affairs of Venezuela and remove its political leader," creating enormous implications for the international community. If it does not pursue a strategy of systemic democratic change in Venezuela, “all of this will have been for naught, and it will have paid a tragic price in terms of international precedent and international legitimacy,” Diamond argues.

Beijing is already using the operation as a "discourse power win," depicting the United States as crushing sovereignty and international law, Mastro notes. Moreover, in addition to Venezuela, President Trump continues to make statements about Greenland, reiterating its importance for U.S. national security and his interest in acquiring the territory, which has alarmed European partners and exacerbated strains with NATO.

“For the first time since WWII, some European countries have declared the United States to be a security threat,” Mastro says. “So I am curious to see if the Chinese try to bring along the Venezuela case as well, to convince U.S. allies and partners to distance themselves from the United States, which would have significant repercussions for the global order and for the United States' role in it.”

A Risky Strategic Reorientation

By unilaterally bypassing international norms to wield power in its own "backyard," the United States may have set a precedent that China can now exploit to justify its own ambitions in Taiwan as a legitimate exercise of regional dominance.

Diamond remarks on this line of thought: “If the United States, as a hegemon, can just do what it wants to arrest and remove a leader, in its kind of declared sphere of influence, what's to stop Xi Jinping from doing the same in his sphere of influence, and with a democratic system in Taiwan, whose sovereignty he does not recognize?” 

On the other hand, many commentators have argued that Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a deterrent to Chinese aggression. Granted, there is no doubt that the operation was a remarkably successful military attack showcasing the capabilities of U.S. special forces, notes Mastro, who, alongside her academic career, also serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as deputy director of research for Global China Strategy. Nevertheless, she emphasizes that the United States cannot carry out a similar attack in Asia.

“There is no situation in which we ‘neutralize’ Chinese air defenses and then somehow do some sort of infiltration,” says Mastro, author of Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, therefore, “does not tell us a lot, operationally, about what the United States is capable of in a contingency via China.”

More troubling, Mastro identifies the Venezuela operation as demonstrating a fundamental shift in U.S. strategic priorities, with the raid conducted just weeks after the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Mastro characterizes it as “the one region where U.S. dominance faces no serious challenge.” Thus, Venezuela suggests “the Trump administration means business about the renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, and, unfortunately, that makes me concerned that there might be strategic neglect of the Indo-Pacific moving forward,” she points out.

Diamond stresses that, virtually throughout the entire presidency of Xi Jinping, dating back to 2012, China has been rapidly building up its military capabilities, prioritizing those specifically suited for coercing, isolating, or potentially seizing Taiwan. Against this backdrop, “I am much more fearful about the future of Taiwan in the week following U.S. military action on January 3 in Venezuela than I was before that action.” 

Mastro agrees with this assessment about the ripple effects of the operation in Venezuela. “I would say that it probably emboldens China.”

Frank Advice for U.S. Allies

For U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as allies and partners in Europe, both scholars offer pragmatic counsel for coping with the Trump administration.

Diamond urges U.S. allies to manage Trump diplomatically while staying focused on core interests, namely, prioritizing the preservation of the alliances and strengthening autonomous defense capabilities to demonstrate commitment and hedge against potential U.S. retrenchment.

“It takes constant, energetic, proactive, imaginative, relentless, and in some ways deferential working of the relationship, including the personal relationship between these leaders and Donald Trump [...] The future will be better if the leaders of these countries internalize that fundamental lesson about Trump.”

Mastro is equally direct about the limited alternatives ahead of U.S. allies: "You don't really have an option. That Chinese military – if it gives the United States problems, it definitely gives you problems. There's no hope for a country like Taiwan without the United States. There's no hope for Australia without the United States."

Counterintuitively, U.S. assertiveness may indicate its insecurity about the balance of power with China. “It seems to me that the United States also needs to be reassured that our allies and partners support us [...] And if we had that confidence, maybe the United States would be less aggressive in its use of military force.”

Watch the two APARC Briefing episodes:

🔸 What the U.S. Raid in Venezuela Means for Taiwan and Asia - with Larry Diamond >

🔸 Does Venezuela Provide China a Roadmap for Taiwan? – with Oriana Skylar Mastro >

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. We bring you in-depth expertise on international affairs from Stanford's campus straight to you. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Today I'm joined by Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow here at FSI, an active member of the United States Air Force Reserve, in fact, a recently promoted officer of the Air Force Reserve, and Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy at the Pentagon. Oriana combines all that expertise in her latest book called Upstart, How China Became a Great Power.

I strongly advise you to buy this book. I don't care if you read it, but I want you to buy it now. In all seriousness, I've read lots of books on China in recent years. This is one of the best. It's one-stop shopping for all you need to know about China. It examines China's climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage.

So Oriana, let's get right to it. Let's talk about Upstart. So, Upstart sounds like a Silicon Valley topic. Tell us about the title and tell us why you decided to write this book.

Mastro: Maybe I'll start with why I decided to write the book because it leads into the title. In my academic work and in my policy work, looking at how China was building power, the conventional wisdom was the same. Academics called it something a little fancier, but it was basically mirror imaging. There were a lot of arguments being made.

McFaul: What was the academic words? I'm curious.

Mastro: Oh, Kenneth Waltz, like, “emulation,” diffusion” . . .

McFaul: Got it, got it, got it, okay.

Mastro: Kenneth Waltz argued that success breeds the same type of competitive tendencies. Meaning, if you want to be a great power, if you're China in the 1990s, the way to do it is to act like the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: You go into the policy world and you see the same exact things. Constant arguments about, Is China going to build overseas bases? Is China going to, you know, have a military the same as ours? that were all basically predicated on the understanding that they wanted to mirror image the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: As a China specialist, I'm a political scientist, I'm also doing this policy work, but I'm also a China specialist. And I speak Chinese, I spend a lot of time in China. And on the surface, it just didn't really make any sense. Like, why would China do exactly what we do? How would that make them competitive?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And it really was an introduction in my life to literature on competition from business and management. Partially being in Silicon Valley inspired that, and partially it's because the rise and fall of great powers is very rare, but the introduction and destruction of companies is actually very frequent.

McFaul: Good point.

Mastro: So I discovered this whole other literature on, how are you competitive in trade and in commerce? And a lot of the arguments about competitive advantage, about being entrepreneurial, innovative, trying to find a different way of doing things, really resonated with how I saw China. And so that's what sparked the original idea. It takes writing a whole book to try to convince people that there is very strong evidence and a logical argument for why we have to look at this situation differently than past historic cases of rising powers.

McFaul: Dig into it a little bit. Give us some examples, especially about military power, which is your strong suit. And then if we have time, we'll talk about economic power. So, give us some examples of the “upstart strategy.”

Mastro: So the upstart strategy has three components: emulation, entrepreneurship, and exploitation. Now the first one is based on the conventional wisdom, right?

China does emulate some aspects of U.S. power, but the book tries to evaluate the conditions under which they do so. When are we most likely to see them take the old strategies, whatever the United States is doing, and apply it in the exact same area? That's my definition of emulation.

McFaul: Okay.

Mastro: And they tend to do this when it's reassuring to the United States. So think of examples like engaging in free trade, joining international institutions. In the military realm, they started to participate in humanitarian aid and disaster relief campaigns. They started to participate in peacekeeping operations, right? They're the number one contributor to PKOs on the Security Council of the United Nations.

And so they did decide to do certain things that they thought, Listen, this will help us build power — mediation diplomacy is a great example, helping to mediate between different countries when they're engaged in conflicts —it helps us build power and it makes us look good and it makes the United States calmer about our rise. Because one of the main reasons why you don't want to act exactly like the United States, is that actually could seem very threatening, right?

If you're trying to build the exact power the United States has, it would be very easy for people in the United States to say, Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Right? And the example I give, if China built overseas bases, like our network of 120 bases, we would have seen that a lot differently than what they ended up doing, which was the Belt and Road Initiative, like economic policies. So those are in the emulation category.

For military power, most of them are about reassurance. And then there's a few times where they have such a competitive advantage and this area of power is so important that even though there's a downside in terms of how the U.S. will perceive it, they go for it anyway.

So, an example in the military realm is building what we call C4ISR network, or Command Control Computers Communication Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance, which in the most simple way...

McFaul: That's what — ISR, you just spelled out the acronym, right?

Mastro: Yeah, right.

McFaul: Thank you.

Mastro: So in the most simple sense, it's building a space architecture.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Having their own navigation systems, having their own precision timing, you know. So, they realized that was really important for the nature of warfare. They needed it. The United States might not like it, but it was just so necessary. And because their engineers are cheaper, because they're actually really advanced in certain missile technologies, they knew they would have an advantage there.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So that's emulation. Exploitation is when they use the U.S. strategy, but in an area where the United States isn't competing. There's disincentives to do it directly. And this largely could be because of competitive advantages. So one area is like arms sales, Chinese arms sales around the world. China really only sells arms to countries that cannot buy them from the United States. Either because they're under some sort of human rights arms embargo, they’re poor countries that are not strategically relevant enough to be gifted arms by the United States, so the Bangladeshes of the world get a lot of their military equipment from China.

McFaul: Because they're too poor? I did not know that.

Mastro: Yeah, well, Chinese stuff is a lot cheaper. Now, there's some countries who are poor that still have U.S. stuff, but that's because we've decided, like . . .

McFaul: They're important.

Mastro: They're important for strategic reasons, so we have gifts and loans and things. And then there's certain technologies that because of treaty obligations, the United States wasn't exporting. And this is how China got sort of a stronghold in the market on unmanned systems, for example. On the diplomatic side, elite visits, right? A Chinese leader like Xi Jinping makes as many overseas visits as a U.S. president, but they go to fundamentally different places, right?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: The U.S. president is mainly going to the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia. Chinese president is visiting Africa.

McFaul: A lot.

Mastro: A lot! So Xi Jinping has visited three times more countries than President Obama did, and President Obama visited more African countries than any previous U.S. president. He also goes to the poorest countries in the world, the 70% of the poorest African countries Xi Jinping has been to, that no U.S. president has ever been to. So it's kind of filling in those gaps.

And then the military realm, for those of you out there with military background, the example that's just perfect for this is something we refer to as A2/AD, or the Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy.

What is that? Very simply put, China deliberately evaluated the types of things the United States needs to project power, and then they developed specific capabilities to target those. So things like the aircraft carrier. So China developed a missile designed to hit and sink an aircraft carrier, right? Or a need to refuel because our bases are far away, you know, or blinding satellites because we need satellites more because we don't have the home-court advantage.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So in the military realm, this exploitation strategy is very strong.

And the last category, entrepreneurship, is when they do something completely different. And this, I would say, is the most controversial aspect of the book. I briefed it to a lot of military audiences. Just on Friday I got a note that a four-star wanted my address to send me a letter about the book. And I'm like, Is this– I don't know if it's going to be like I loved your book or it's gonna be like I hate everything you say about the following chapters, because it is a Navy admiral.

So I imagine that they're sensitive about, one, my argument that China is not seeking an overseas basing network despite all the concerns over the past 20 years that they're, you know, they're on the cusp and they're going to build when they're going to build one. One of the reasons China sometimes does things differently from the United States is that they think U.S. strategy is stupid. So, one of the parts of the argument is trying to look at how China might change in the future. And it's important, the rationale.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the book looks at thousands of Chinese . . .

McFaul: Startups are not always startups, right? They get old, and…

Mastro: . . . They evolve. This book relies on thousands of Chinese sources to also evaluate the rationale of why they chose certain strategies. So you could imagine if they chose a strategy because they were weaker or didn't have an advantage, as they get more powerful, they might start emulating.

But this is an aspect when they're like, you know, the war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of ten Belt and Road Initiatives. Why would we be engaged in sort of foreign military intervention, which tends to go hand in hand with these overseas basing networks, when we can achieve our goals better with economic and political means of power? And that's outside of Asia. China does clearly want to dominate Asia militarily, but they don't need bases for that because they have China.

So, that's one of those arguments that says this is not for lack of ambition. Of course, they will have certain military roles in some places. We'll probably see some more intelligence gathering, you know, sensors being put places, but not offensive combat operations.

And the second very controversial one is about China's nuclear forces. And I had a follow-up piece in The Economist last month by invitation to talk about China's nuclear arsenal. China has, basically, since 1964, every aspect of their approach to nuclear weapons has been different than the United States: posture, doctrine, readiness, delivery systems, number of nuclear weapons, structure of the organization for nuclear weapons.

I mean, besides the initial decision to build them for the sake of nuclear deterrence, nothing has been the same. And part of that, again, is about inefficiency arguments, that China never understood why the United States needs thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And from a competitive point of view, up until the mid 2000s, the United States spent more on its nuclear weapons than China spent on its whole military.

McFaul: Wow.

Mastro: So, one of the reasons they've been able to get this conventional power that people like me write very openly about being concerned of, right? I'm not as concerned about their nuclear weapons. But, I'm absolutely concerned about the tipping of conventional power in China's favor. They've been able to do that by not overspending on nuclear weapons.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So there's a lot of debate right now because they're increasing their numbers. They used to just have like 200 and 320. There's a debate right now about whether or not they're going to push up to 1,000 or 1,500 in the next 10 years. But even so, I sort of argue that there's other reasons for that, dealing with advancements in technology and changes in U.S. doctrine that has made them concerned that their deterrent has weakened.

McFaul: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened.

Mastro: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened. And so they still have the same sort of minimal deterrent posture that they've had before. So that hasn't changed. But those are kind of the two most controversial entrepreneurial areas that I discuss in the book on the military side.

McFaul: So, if you had the chance to . . . in fact, I learned this term from military folks when I worked in the government: the BLUF, right? “Bottom line up front”. Really great phrase for all people having to do briefings.

But if you got, say, 45 seconds with President Trump, and he asked you, Lieutenant Colonel - can I call you that now?

Mastro: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

McFaul: Lieutenant Colonel Mastro. He probably wouldn't call you Dr. Mastro, but Lieutenant Colonel Mastro.

Mastro: He'd probably be like, “Hey lady!”  But, yeah. Yeah.

McFaul: Congratulations on being Lieutenant Colonel, by the way. That's a fantastic achievement. But if he just asked, What's the balance of military power between the United States and China today? How could you answer that in 45 to 60 seconds?

Mastro: I would say that we're outgunned in Asia. We have the advantage everywhere else. We're deterring China from a large-scale protracted war.

But the problem is in conflicts close to China, in particular over Taiwan, the United States is outgunned. And we need to put more bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles closer into China, which means we have to be nicer to countries in the region because they have to agree to let us put that stuff there. And we have to reform the defense industrial complex so that we can innovate in those areas, in particular land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, and be able to produce them in mass in a cost-effective way.

McFaul: Fantastic answer. You know how to do this. I can tell.

Mastro: You usually get more than 45 seconds, but sometimes they get right to it.

McFaul: You hit it, I saw it. Now we have a little more time to dig into that. Because that was a very profound thing you just said. Take us through the pieces that you think are inadequate. And then let's talk about whether the Trump administration will begin to realize those solutions. But first, just articulate the threat posture that — you had three big buckets there — maybe more, but I heard three. Tell us a little more in detail about what is alarming about that balance of power in Asia to you?

Mastro: So, if you can humor me, right before I do that, I just want to really hammer home a point that I said in that answer, that I feel is clouding some of the debates among policy experts and academics, okay?

McFaul: Please.

Mastro: Which is, we are adequately deterring China from engaging in a large-scale war with the United States. So people are always like, China doesn't want to fight a war with the United States and all of our allies and partners. And, the economic costs will be huge. And it's like, yes, but that is not what people in the defense department are worried about. We're not worried that tomorrow China attacks the United States and we're fighting World War III.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: What we're worried about is that there are certain aspects of contingencies like Taiwan that they can move and gain, in this case, control over Taiwan before the U.S. military can come in mass. Okay? And the coming in mass is just a more diplomatic way of saying, Before we can really start blowing things up. So, let me just start with that because what people say . . .

McFaul: That's very important. I'm glad you did that. Yeah.

Mastro: It's very important because it's not the case that I think, like, China's like, gunning for whatever. Or, I do a lot of media interviews when I'm walking my kids to and from school and once my four year old was like, “Does the United States lose all the wars that we fight?” after they hear me on the phone, I'm like, “Mom did not say that!”

What I'm saying is that there's this particular scenario, and if China initiates conflict, they're going to initiate it when it's most favorable to them.

So the problem is, the United States, we have forces close to Taiwan, right? In Japan, for example. But there are so few of them that if we actually mobilized them after the immediate attack on Taiwan, for example, they're not survivable. Which, again, is the military diplomatic speech of saying everyone is going to die.

And if that were credible, if China thought we were going to do that, then they're in the major war with the United States, right? They’ve just killed thousands of Americans. So, that doesn't become appealing. But the logic is, most U.S. presidents are not going to send in those forces — in this case, it's mainly air power — when they're all going to die. And then we also lose in this sort of exchange about 70% of our most advanced aircraft? Which means then, now we're transitioning to that major war with China. It's like, we're not in a great position.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So we have stuff there, but we don't have enough. The question is like, what does enough mean? Very simply, you gotta keep the ships that are carrying the people across the strait from landing on Taiwan. And so, I'm kind of a broken record on this with the military when people are always like, “Well I'm contributing to deterrence. You know, I'm doing this dance, I'm doing this messaging.” Or even certain weapon systems like, well, you know, “I got this tank . . .”

I'm like, if it does not sink ships, I do not care. Right? Because then you're in this realm of cost in which people say they're trying to deny China the objective of Taiwan, but really it's like, well, I could sink a ship or two. And I'm like, well, when you got thousands of them, you know, one or two is not going to do it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the thing I laid out, basically, are designed to sink a lot of ships quickly. Submarines, the United States has the advantage undersea still. There's an apocryphal story that I talk about in my book that when they devised that strategy to target the key platforms of the United States in the 1990s, the Navy, for some odd reason, was changing their patrolling schedule. So the submarines just weren't patrolling them.

And so when China was like, we got to get the aircraft carriers, we got to get the satellites. We got to hit the fixed bases where the aircraft are taking off. They just didn't think of the submarines, you know? So that's the story. I don't know how true it is, but that's the apocryphal story.

So we have, full reign with submarines. The problem is we just don't have a lot of them.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the munitions they carry, they can only sink a few ships. And then we have no capability to replenish them in the region. So they have to go all the way back to Guam or Hawaii. So I talk about tenders, submarine tenders, a lot of military personnel being like, I need that stuff and I need it in the Philippines and Japan. Like, that's where we need it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the bombers are very controversial because those are an offensive capability that are designed to penetrate into China and bomb mainland targets. Mike, we're just throwing it out there. That's what they do.

McFaul: That’s what they do.

Mastro: That's important because the biggest threat are all the missiles that China is going to be shooting at us.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missile defense on the back end is hard, like missiles coming towards you. It's a lot easier if you just took out the launcher where it's coming from.

And so that's really what that is about. Like, okay, if we're going to stop all these missiles from being shot at Taiwan, from being shot at our carriers, from being shot at our bases that we need to operate, we're going to have to get in there, we're going to have to take care of it, and that's where the strategic bombers come from.

And then the last component was the land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missiles are a lot cheaper than everything else. Because they're land-based, they tend to be more powerful, more precise. There is a deterrent against China, just a little bit more, because they have to attack the country where the missiles are based.

McFaul: Right. Good point.

Mastro: That's an additional thing that imposes caution on them. So yeah, those are the things that I would want more than anything else. And I really believe that if we put those things in place and so China couldn't do this quickly, the two-and-a-half to three weeks that they might consider, that they'll never do it.

And then this problem will just persist forever, but at least we won't fight a hot war over it. So that's why I really focus on some of those issues and focus on just understanding that China sees a lot of things differently than we do. So, that's what really the book… the heart of the book is about convincing people to keep an open mind about how they're understanding and interpreting Chinese actions so that we can be more entrepreneurial ourselves about how to deal with great power competition.

McFaul: That's a great point. Your recommendations are crystal clear. Who is listening in the Trump administration? And I mean that as our last question.

Don't talk about the specifics, but at the end of the Trump administration, as you know better than I, they focused pretty heavily on diagnosing the China threat. And they put out all sorts of speeches. And Secretary Pompeo did this big long paper about the threat.

It's a little curious to me, and it's only a few weeks, of course, so let's give them time, but it's a little curious to me how we're focused on a lot of other things besides what you just described so far.

Is that unfair or is it too early? And what do you expect in the coming weeks and months in terms of the Trump administration doing some of the things that you just outlined?

Mastro: Well, I think the fact that it's been quiet, I'm very hopeful.

McFaul: Mmm. Explain that, that's good!

Mastro: Because generally speaking, you want the experts to have the space to do the things they need to do. And I see a lot of those policies being driven by some of the domestic political stuff. Like we know tariffs is not going to help anyone get their jobs back, but the people who voted for President Trump believe that.

And so when you say, Who is listening? I mean, this is one of the main reasons that 15 years ago I enlisted in the military, when I was doing my PhD at Princeton, is because people explained to me the pathways that academics could be influential.

And I thought, Okay, so I could write an op-ed and hope someone read it and hope they did this. Or I could go into government, which is a great pathway, but as a woman who, I knew I wanted to have children, the in and out of government thing could be disruptive to the move, and I didn't want to wait 10 to 15 years before I got to do anything interesting.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So, for me, there are people listening. I feel like I do have the ear of some pretty important people. And then, as someone who works in the system, I make changes directly.

So I get to see, here's the national defense strategy. It's done. Here's our war plan. It's done. Here's our force posture, our force modernization. I get to physically just go in there and change it and then hope no one notices and changes it back.

But that's how I tend to focus on my influence. And as long as the Trump administration, the more they stay out of that space, the easier it will be, I think, for us to devise good effective strategies.

So if you have that top level of support, and respect for the expertise of the people in the building, which I think we've seen some signs that maybe that's going to be a problem, you know, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They respect their military advisors and that expertise. Then we can really make some advancements.

My biggest concern is that we're going to upset a lot of other countries in the region. And Biden made a lot of improvements in our force posture by getting countries to agree to certain things, in particular, Japan and the Philippines and Australia and some second island, you know, Pacific Islands, that if that's reversed, it's going to make it harder for us to deter China.

So I just hope that . . . the way I articulate it to people who have some of those more isolationist views, or unilateralist views, is like, this isn't about your love for this other country or even about multilateralism or legitimacy. If you want the United States to be powerful and that you want to do whatever you want, you need to have these countries willing to host you.

Hopefully they won't disrupt those relationships too much. But on the other hand, they're not as worried about provoking China, which a lot of my recommendations, like with the bombers or something, previous administrations might be like, Oh, I don't know, that might be a little touchy.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: But maybe with the Trump administration, they're like, yeah, get in there, what you need to get in there. So there could be some pros and there could be some cons, but I think it takes this type of academic research is important because then we can really stand from a position of knowledge and authority and confidence, when you're making arguments that are controversial that people might push back on, that, at least I believe they better inform policy.

So, I stick to them even when people try to push back in more emotional ways about stuff. I think that is really the role of the academic practitioner, and I hope this book serves that purpose.

McFaul: Well, that's one of the most optimistic things I've heard in the first weeks of the Trump administration. As long as they're not talking about the issue, that's a good sign, not a bad sign.

And we can't see what you write for the Pentagon and inside the Pentagon and who you brief, but we can read your book, and everybody should. It's called Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. Thanks for talking with us about some of the ideas here. And I encourage everybody to go out and get this book.

Mastro: Thank you, Mike.

McFaul: Thanks for being here.

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.

Ambassador McFaul also views robust security guarantees for Ukraine as a foundational piece of a successful peace deal. In an article for Foreign Affairs, he used a recent history lesson as evidence against conceding too much while offering too little.

“The lessons from U.S. negotiations with the Taliban during Trump’s first term should inform the president-elect’s thinking about dealing with Putin. The Taliban and the Trump administration negotiated a deal that was highly favorable to the militant group but that the Biden administration nevertheless honored. Its terms included a cease-fire, a timeline for the departure of American forces, and the promise of a future political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. The Taliban, however, did not commit to the agreement; instead, they used that peace plan as a way-station on their path to total victory. Appeasement of the Taliban did not create peace. Appeasement of Putin won’t either. Instead of just giving Putin everything he wants—hardly an example of the president-elect’s much-vaunted prowess in dealmaking—Trump should devise a more sophisticated plan, encouraging Ukraine to nominally relinquish some territory to Russia in exchange for the security that would come with joining NATO. Only such a compromise will produce a permanent peace.”

Comments by U.S. officials at the Munich Security Conference and in the days since has left McFaul deeply concerned about Ukraine's influence on the negotiations. Speaking on WBUR’s Here and Now program, he said:

"Zelenskyy is in the fight of his life right now. He is trying to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty, and he's willing to negotiate. But he is very worried he's going to be sold out by the Americans."

Negotiating with Russia

While Ukraine may be feeling sidelined, the groundwork for peace talks with Russia is already being laid in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

As former diplomats, McFaul and Pifer both have direct experience negotiating with the Russian Federation, and both agree that the Kremlin is an extremely shrewd and difficult negotiating partner that requires careful, strategic handling.

As the U.S. delegation continues to meet with their Russian counterparts, McFaul offered his advice on the basics of successful diplomacy via X.

In a post-Munich article for The National Interest, Pifer expands on that basic diplomatic framework with specific suggestions for the U.S. team:

• If Washington seeks to play an honest broker, senior American officials should not concede points to the Kremlin at the outset.
   
• Dismissive treatment of European allies on issues directly affecting their security will hardly increase prospects that they will assist U.S. efforts.
   
• Trump’s first call on ending the war should have gone to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, and the second set of calls should have gone to senior European leaders. Eagerness to engage with the Kremlin weakens their hand with their Russian counterparts. 
   

• Steps to build leverage with Russia by asking Congress to approve new military assistance for Ukraine, working with the G7 to transfer frozen Central Russian Bank assets to a fund for Ukraine, and tightening sanctions on Russia should be taken before engaging directly with Russia.

   

Assessing America on the Global Stage

Both Pifer and McFaul share concerns about how negotiations for the end to the war might impact the standing of the United States as a global leader.

Reacting to Vice President’s J.D. Vance’s keynote address at the Munich Security Conference, McFaul was unconvinced that the administration has accurately assessed the threats to America’s national security.

“For someone to come to Europe and say the biggest threat is censorship and a lack of democracy is just analytically incorrect. The data does not support that hypothesis. The greatest threat to Europe is Russia.” 

Ambassador Pifer echoed similar concerns about the United States’ national security priorities. In a discussion with Ian Masters on the Background Briefing podcast, he said:

“Over the past ten years, Putin has made Russia a major adversary to the United States. And it’s not just about the war in Ukraine; they’re moving across the board to try and challenge American interests. They want to weaken and diminish American influence and power.”

If left unchecked, Pifer warns that a sloppy performance negotiating in Ukraine could have far-reaching consequences for American national security.

“Vladimir Putin wants to have a U.S.-Russia negotiation to divide up spheres of influence in Europe. It would be a horrible mistake for the United States to fall into that trap.”

Taking a broad view of current trends in international security and the ripples flowing from the Munich conference, McFaul cautions against an over-reliance on coercive power, or the ability to influence nations to act vis-à-vis the threat of pain or disruption.

Coercive power, McFaul explains on Substack, tends to produce zero-sum outcomes—the powerful get more, and the weak get less.

In contrast, says McFaul, cooperative power typically produces win-win outcomes.

“Like market transactions in which the buyer and seller both benefit from the exchange, everyone is better off from international cooperation, both the weak and the strong.”

Looking to the coming weeks and months of potential negotiations and what it may signal about American leadership more broadly, McFaul urges policymakers to revisit the long-term, tried and tested benefits of cooperation, outreach, and allyship.

“It’s not too late to rethink this singular focus on coercive foreign policy tactics. The United States is not a monarchy or a country run by gangsters. Hopefully, our democratic institutions and norms will allow the American people to engage in a substantive discussion on the wisdom of only relying on coercive power for our security and prosperity.”

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Follow the link for a full transcript of "Global Threats Today: The 2024 Edition."

Illiberal Actors Are on the Move  |  Amichai Magen

Around the world, we are seeing a new axis of influence coalescing. Some have called it the "axis of misery" or the "axis of resistance." It is composed of Russia and Iran and North Korea, with a lot of Chinese involvement as well. It is transforming our international system in unbelievable ways. It is united by the desire to dismantle the liberal international order, and we're starting to see the nature and the interconnectivity of this new axis of chaos much more clearly. 

You see North Korean soldiers fighting for Putin in Ukraine. You see Putin helping the Houthis attack international Western shipping in Yemen. We see North Korean tunnel technology turn up in Lebanon with Hezbollah and then with Hamas in Gaza. The interconnectivity is something that we really need to know much more about.

Historically, emperors, kings, dukes, used to spend 50% of their resources on preparing for war or waging war. But in the post-Second World War era, we built a critical norm that we've called the liberal international order. And the miracle of the liberal international order is that we've managed to take global averages of defense spending from about 50% to a global average of about 7%. And the resulting surplus wealth has allowed us to invest in education, health, and scientific discovery.

What is at stake now is the possibility of a return of a norm where states are destroyed and disappear. And we have currently three states in the international system, at the very least — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — that are at risk of annihilation. To that end, we must articulate a positive strategic vision for the Middle East that will strive towards a two state solution, that would give the Palestinian people the dignity and the freedom that they deserve alongside a safe and secure Israel, and that will leverage the new spirit of cooperation that exists in the Middle East.

If we allow the norm of the non-disappearance of state to erode and collapse, we will go back to the law of the jungle, where we will have to spend so much more money on the wrong things. That is what is at stake in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and with Taiwan.
 

Challenges to Democracy Come From Within |  Didi Kuo

Many people think that the threat to democracy comes from outside our borders, particularly from countries like Russia and China that are asserting themselves in new and aggressive ways.

But the real threat to democracies that we're seeing across the globe is coming from within. Leaders come to power through democratic means, but then they begin to erode power from within. They attack the electoral system and the process of democratic elections, and they take power from other branches of government and aggregate it to themselves within the office of the executive. 

The good news is there are examples of countries like France, Brazil, and Poland where illiberal leaders have been stopped by pro-democracy coalitions of people who came together. These coalitions don't necessarily agree with each other politically, but they've come together and adapted in order to foreclose on these anti-democratic forces. 

That flexibility and adaptability is the reason democracies succeed. We see this over and over again in the the United States. When our institutions have become out of date, we've changed them. We extended suffrage, first to Black Americans who were formerly enslaved, then to women, then to Native Americans. We eliminating poll taxes and rethought what it means to have a multiracial democracy. We have a long track record of making changes.

Today in 2024, some of our democratic institutions are antiquated and don't reflect our contemporary values. This is a moment where we should lean into that flexible strength of democracy and think about institutional reforms that will both strengthen our system against illiberal creep and help us better achieve the ideals that we aspiring to as a people.
 

Ukraine Is Not Fated to Lose |  Steven Pifer

There's a narrative that's taking place that Russia is winning the war, Ukraine is losing, and it's only a matter of time. And it is true that Russia has captured a bit more territory than they occupied at the start of the year. But they've only achieved that at enormous cost.

As of September, the Pentagon says Russia had lost 600,000 dead and wounded soldiers. To put that in context, in February of 2022 when this major invasion began, the total Russian military — not just the army, but the total Russian military — was 1.1 million people. And the British Ministry of Defense earlier this week assessed that Russia now is losing 1,200 soldiers killed or severely wounded per day. You have to ask how long that's sustainable.

When I talk to Ukrainians, they still regard this war as existential. They're very determined to win, and we need to do a better job of supporting that. A stable and secure Europe is vital to America's national security interests, and you're not going to have a stable and secure Europe unless there's a stable and secure Ukraine. So we need to both provide them the weapons they need and relieve some of the restrictions we currently have and allow the Ukrainians to use those weapons to strike military targets in Russia.

Because we have to ask ourselves: what does an emboldened Vladimir Putin do if he wins in Ukraine? I don't think his ambitions end with Ukraine, perhaps not even with the post-Soviet space. There's going to be a much darker Russian threat hovering over Europe if Putin wins. So let's not count the Ukrainians out.
 

China Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon  |  Oriana Skylar Mastro

There is a lot of discussion right now about the fact that the economy in China is slowing down and its demography is undergoing significant changes. What I'm here to tell you is that the challenge of China is not over, and is not going to be over any time soon. China has built power in a different way than the United States, and we have to reassess how we understand that power if we want to effectively deter, blunt, and block them from acting out in ways that threaten our partners and allies.

Since the 1990s, China has developed a significant amount of political, economic, and military power. They've gone from having an economy smaller than France’s  to the second largest in the world. They've gone from not being involved in international institutions to a great degree, not even having diplomatic relations with major countries like South Korea, to now having stronger and greater diplomatic networks, especially in Asia, than the United States.

What we really need to understand is that the U.S.-China competition is not about the United States or about China; it's about the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees us and how China interacts with us. The balance of power is shifting, and we have to be a lot smarter and a lot faster if we want to make sure it shifts in favor of our interests.

The United States hasn't had a comprehensive strategy towards the developing world in a long time. And we are running out of time to get that balance right in Asia. We don't have the right stuff. We don't have it in the right numbers, and it's not in the right place. Some of this is about deterring war over Taiwan, but it's also about generally maintaining peace and stability in Asia.
 

We're Doing Better (But Not Enough) on Climate Change |  Marshall Burke

Many people don't recognize how much progress we're actually making on climate issues. Emissions have fallen by 20% since 2005. We're actually speeding up the amount of substantial progress being made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dealing with the core climate change problem, which is the human emission of greenhouse gasses.

In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsequent implementation of various rules the Biden administration has championed has given a huge boost in transitioning our economy to greener energy technologies, transportation technologies, and other kinds of infrastructure. We're moving a lot of cash to get that done, and the president is trying to get as much of it out the door as he can before his term ends.

Globally, the progress has been less rapid. Emissions are roughly flat. But overall, we're still making progress. I co-teach an undergraduate class on climate change, and we've had to update our slides on how much warming we're expecting over the next century. We thought it was going to be four degrees Celsius. Now we think it's going to be something between two and three degrees Celsius.

But the flip side of that is that we're still going to get warming of two to three degrees Celsius. We're already experiencing warming of about a degree Celsius, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit, and it's projected that we're going to get another three to five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is a lot of warming, and we are not prepared to deal with it. We need to do much more on mitigation and much more on adaptation if we're going to meet the realities of living in a changing climate.

So we've had progress on the one hand, but there's still a lot of work left to do in the coming decades.
 

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Kahl’s research focuses on the resurgence of geopolitical competition, American grand strategy, and the international security implications of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Prior to joining the Freeman Spogli Institute, Kahl was Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In that position, he served as a senior advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. 

Kahl is the co-author of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021) and States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and he has published widely on international security and U.S. foreign and defense policy, including in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, War on the Rocks, and the Washington Post, among others. 

At CISAC, he will return his focus to research and teaching CISAC undergraduate courses and graduate courses in FSI's Master's in International Policy program.

 “The world is more complex and dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and the scholars and students at FSI have much to contribute to addressing this rapidly evolving security environment,” said Professor Kahl. “I’m thrilled to return to FSI to contribute to this vital work.”

Impacts on Russia, Ukraine, and Beyond

Michael McFaul

The implications of the 72-hour mutiny will last much longer and extend much further beyond Rostov and Moscow, says FSI Director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Speaking with Madeline Brand of KRCW, McFaul outlined the difficult situation Putin now finds himself in.

“This whole series of events has made Putin look a lot weaker than he looked three or four days ago. The very fact that the Wagner group exists is a sign of weakness. Putin needs them because he couldn’t rely on his armed forces.”

Elaborating further on Putin’s dilemma, McFaul says:

“As those mercenaries were getting closer to Moscow, Putin went on TV and sounded very macho, calling Prigozhin’s men traitors and promising to crush them, but then four hours later, he capitulates and starts to negotiate. And now he’s given another speech where it sounds like he’s pleading with these mercenaries to lay down their weapons and join the Russian forces. That clearly shows he hasn’t resolved this Wagner crisis yet.”

McFaul predicts that Putin’s remaining partners are also taking note of his fumbled reaction to the rebellion.

“​​If you’re Xi Jinping watching this, the big bet you made on Putin as a partner in opposing the West is looking really problematic right now.”

What Chinese officials fear most, McFaul explained to MSNBC’s Jonathn Capehart, is instability and dissolution, both internally and amongst their neighbors. Historically, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophic event for Chinese Communist Party officials, and a lesson the current leadership is loath to repeat.

McFaul asserts that, “The longer Putin’s war in Ukraine goes, the more probable it becomes that Russia becomes more unstable. The longer this war goes on, the more likely it is we could see something like this play out over and over again. So I would hope that Xi Jinping understands that putting pressure on Putin to end the war in Ukraine is the best way to prevent chaos on China's borders.”

There are also important lessons the United States and its allies need to consider when evaluating the kind of support they are willing to give Ukraine as the war wears on.

“Putin capitulated very fast, and I think that says a lot about how he’s going to fight in Ukraine and whether he needs an ‘off ramp’ like we’ve been saying. We’ve heard all of these arguments that if he’s backed into a corner he’ll never negotiate. Well, this weekend Putin was in a corner, and he didn't double down. He didn't escalate. He negotiated,” McFaul observes.

Continuing this thought on his Substack, McFaul emphasized that, “The lesson for the war in Ukraine is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield, not when there is a stalemate. Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation must now reevaluate that hypothesis. The sooner Putin fears he is losing the war, the faster he will negotiate.”

Or, as McFaul writes in Journal on Democracy, “Anything that weakens Putin is good for Ukraine. It is as simple as that.”  

Fallout on Nuclear Security and Norms

Rose Gottemoeller

Throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been concerns about nuclear sabre rattling by Putin and Kremlin-backed propagandists. Writing in the Financial Times, Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at CISAC and former Deputy Secretary of NATO offered this insight:

“The fixation with nuclear apocalypse seems to be the symptom of a wider anxiety that the west is bent on Russian dismemberment because of its aspirations in Ukraine. The Kremlin argues that it only wanted to resume its ancestral right to a Slavic heartland, but that the U.S. and NATO are seeking as punishment Russia’s full and complete destruction as a nation state.”

Gottemoeller has been quick to condemn Putin’s casual threats of nuclear use and clear in her recommendations to the U.S. administration and its allies to find constructive ways to keep nuclear arms talks open despite the war in Ukraine and setbacks like Russia’s suspension of its participation in the New START Treaty.

The Wagner takeover of Rostov-on-Don adds a new layer to the security concerns surrounding Russia’s nuclear posture. Looking at the evolution of Putin’s nuclear rhetoric over the last 18 months, Gottemoeller writes:

“Putin embraced nuclear weapons to keep the United States and its NATO allies off his back and out of his way as he pursued his adventure in Ukraine. It did not work out that way. The United States and NATO were not ready to fight inside Ukraine, but they were willing to do everything else to support Kyiv’s cause — economic, political, security and military assistance to ensure Russia’s defeat. Nuclear weapons failed Putin as a guarantee against external meddling.”

Turning to the events of the last week, Gottemoeller continues:

“We learned on June 24 that they are no help to him internally, either. He could not brandish nuclear weapons in the face of the Wagner Group uprising . . . Nuclear weapons are not the authoritarian’s silver bullet when his power is strained to the breaking point — far from it. In fact, they represent a consummate threat to national and global security if they should fall into the wrong hands in the course of domestic unrest.”

In light of Prigozhin’s mutiny, she urges global leaders to “focus on the problem, stop loose nuclear talk, and put new measures in place to protect, control and account for nuclear weapons and the fissile material that go into them.” 

The Unknown Unknowns of the Settlement

Steven Pifer

Major questions remain about the deal struck between Putin, Prigozhin, and Lukashenko. While Lukashenko has confirmed that the Wagner boss is now in Belarusian territory, it is unclear — and many feel, unlikely — that he will stay there in quiet retirement. 

Weighing in on Twitter, Steven Pifer, an affiliate at the Center for International Cooperation and Security and The Europe Center, and a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, acknowledged, “We likely do not know all carrots and/or sticks that were in play to lead to Prigozhin’s decision to end his mutiny . . . Something does not add up.”

Following up in Politico, Pifer added:

“The ‘settlement’ supposedly brokered by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus leaves Putin, who was invisible during the day except for a short morning TV broadcast, as damaged goods. It provided the impression that all was forgiven, likely because the Russian president feared the prospect of Prigozhin’s troops parading in Moscow — even if they lacked the numbers to take control of the capital. It is harder to understand Prigozhin. His demands went unmet, yet he ordered his troops back to garrison, accepted that they might join the Russian army that he detests, and meekly set off for Belarus. There clearly is more behind this ‘settlement’ than we understand.”