Hal Brands
Subject: What will Success and Failure be in the Iran War
Bio: Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins and former Special Assistant to the Secretary of War for Strategic Planning
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is What will Success and Failure be in the Iran War?
Our speaker is Hal Brands who is a Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins and former Special Assistant to the Secretary of War for Strategic Planning.
I want to find out from Hal what are our objectives in the war in Iran, how effective American and Israel’s military has been in destroying its adversaries, and what we should expect Iran to do to try to do to improve its negotiating position.
What is the United States trying to achieve in this war?
Hal Brands:
You should pose that question to President Trump because it is unclear what the U.S. is trying to achieve. Trump talked about annihilating Iran’s navy, making sure it can never have a nuclear weapon, eviscerating its missile program. All steps meant to reduce Iran’s capacity to create harm for the United States and its regional allies including Israel. There ambiguity about whether the United States might want the destruction of the Iranian regime. Trump has sometimes implied that this is a U.S. war aim without ever explicitly stating it. And while making clear that the responsibility to topple the regime ultimately lies with the Iranian people, the Israeli government has been more forward leaning in saying that regime change is an explicit war aim, although even there there’s ambiguity. So my sense is that the minimum objectives are essentially the forcible disarmament for a time of the Iranian regime. And the maximal aspirational objective might include regime change.
Larry Bernstein:
Your opening comment was the president has not made it that clear. Some historical examples of other wars where presidents often make some statement, but then it is not what we’re actually fighting for. In the Civil War, Lincoln talked about preserving the Union as the primary reason. But as the war went on, we had new reasons.
World War I, Wilson laid out his reasons related to the destruction of the Lusitania and other objectives, but he later came up with a whole series of points at the end of the war as to what he wanted to achieve.
In World War II, Roosevelt does not get to unconditional surrender to substantially into the war. And then there were meetings with the allies to consider what we wanted to achieve.
Why are you surprised that Trump has not laid out his objectives when the history tells us that the reasons come later?
Hal Brands:
Well, it’s true that war aims often evolve. That was the case in the Civil War. Although Lincoln did that as much for reasons of political expediency and because to make freeing the slaves of war aim in 1861 would have ensured the destruction of the Union rather than its preservation. So, you had a case of nested objectives.
What is unusual about this case is that this is presumably not a war that President Trump believes is going to go for a long time. The most aggressive estimate he gave was eight weeks, which pales in comparison to any of the wars that we just discussed. And so, there is less time for that evolution of war. What is also idiosyncratic is that we are dealing with a president who is a master of giving self-contradictory statements that preserve flexibility.
The president has given every possible version of how it can end. It can end with a ceasefire in two or three days. It can end with the destruction of the Iranian regime. It can go for weeks. It can be long. It can be short. We’re almost done. We’re not nearly done. A critic might say that this indicates a lack of planning within the administration about exactly what the goal is, maybe. It might also represent that President Trump is careful about being pinned down on anything. And so. he lifts an array of objectives and confusion because it maximizes his flexibility.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that Lincoln’s objectives related to political expediency, but it seems like that’s true with every war. Franco Roosevelt after December 7th met with both Houses of Congress to request a Declaration of War. President Trump was meeting with a Joint Session of Congress at a State of a Union Address only a couple of days before. Now, Trump was going in for a surprise attack, and so you do not want to give away the surprise. How does he want to deal with Congress and what maximizes his political interest?
Hal Brands:
You are right that politics always suffuses the conduct of military operations in the United States. That’s been true since 1812. Why did Trump not seek congressional authorization for this? One reason might be that he did not think he was going to get it, that he would face unified opposition of Democrats and might have a few Republican defections like Rand Paul. It would have been uncomfortably close at best. It’s also because President Trump likes to keep his cards close to the vest. In every military operation he has undertaken so far he is engaged in a game of will I, or won’t I, right up until the bombs start falling.
That is just his nature. He thinks it maximizes his leverage to keep everybody guessing about what he’s actually going to do. In part, that is because he likes to delay decisions until the last minute. And he may have had hope that a diplomatic deal was possible, although that was always going to be a challenge. And then the last piece of it pertains essentially to the tactical surprise issue. That was certainly true with the Maduro raid. It was true with Operation Midnight Hammer.
Trump does believe that provides a military advantage. And he is probably right. The challenge is that it makes it harder to build political consensus before you go in. That’s not a problem if the intervention is short and smashingly successful, as with the case in June 2025 and January 2026. If it’s costly, or more drawn out, you may eventually pay a price for that.
Larry Bernstein:
I took an American foreign policy class at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, and the textbook was Strategies of Containment by John Lewis Gaddis.
Hal Brands:
Great, great book.
Larry Bernstein:
And in it, the author said there was two different types of strategies. There was a symmetric and asymmetric strategy. And the book concludes that the asymmetric strategy is better. And that meant that the behavior of the executive was uncertain. You didn’t know what he was going to do day-to-day. With a symmetric approach, you acted proportionately. If they attacked something at place X, you respond at place X. You didn’t blow up their refineries of place Y.
With Trump, he is the ultimate asymmetric responder. You don’t know what he’s going to do, why he’s going to do it, or if he’s going to change his mind the next minute. He may raise the stakes, he may lower the stakes. It’s chaos. And Gaddis says that’s the way to do it. Do you view asymmetric response to be the way to run foreign policy, and is Trump doing it appropriately?
Hal Brands:
John Gaddis was my dissertation advisor at Yale, and so that book is literally burned into my brain. It is indeed one of the great works, not just of diplomatic history, but of American history. I agree with the characterization that Trump falls in the category of asymmetrical rather than symmetrical response. The advantage of asymmetrical response is just what you said. It keeps everybody guessing, and it allows you to play to your strengths rather than playing to the opponent’s strengths.
If you look at the military interventions that Trump has ordered, they are all oriented around unique American capabilities that nobody has a way of countering: stealth bombers, special operations forces, a global power projection architecture. All of that is keeping with the idea that you fight on your terms rather than on the opponent’s preferred turf.
It works well when Trump uses it against overmatched opponents. Venezuela was totally overmatched by the United States. Iran is militarily overmatched by the United States-Israel coalition, even though they have more ability to strike back. There are remaining questions about how well that strategy has worked in a diplomatic or economic sense dealing with China which has greater capacity to push back. It has asymmetric strengths of its own like rare earth export controls. What you got in the U.S.-China trade war of 2025 was a messy situation because Trump’s preferred weapon tariffs had been stalemated by China’s preferred weapon rare earth export controls.
Larry Bernstein:
What is unusual about this war is that we have an ally working together. Usually, if we do have allies, they are more in the cleanup operation. Talk about fighting with an ally right next to you.
Hal Brands:
I don’t want to understate the contributions of other U.S. allies in the wars that the U.S. has fought over the last 25 years. There were European forces that saw tough combat in Afghanistan. But the basic point is right, which is that Israel is America’s most militarily capable ally by a significant margin. And what this war has revealed is the emergence of a full-blown war fighting alliance between Israel and the United States. We think of Israel and the United States as being exceedingly close, so what I just said might sound unsurprising, but it’s only in recent years that the US and Israel have operated together in public on a sustained basis in the military sphere.
Larry Bernstein:
Just as an example, when Saddam Hussein was firing those scuds at Israel, the American response was stand down, we got this. Stay out.
Hal Brands:
There is not much you can do and you’re going to spoil the coalition, and that’s changed in part because Israel is more politically accepted in the Middle East than it was before. Now they are operating as a war fighting coalition. They are dividing up targets and servicing them together in parallel. Israeli operations are reportedly based on American intelligence and vice versa. There are always strains within alliances like this. And one strain may come back to what we talked about at the beginning, which is how far to take this and what the ultimate objectives are. But this is a new factor in the Middle East and it’s reshaping the region before our eyes.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to just expand on the interactions within the military itself. In the movie Patton (see my podcast on Patton, here), Montgomery and Patton are trying to take Salerno in Sicily, and Patton was told to stand down to let Montgomery take it, but Montgomery faces some resistance and Patton decides to make an end run and gets to the city first and Montgomery’s marching band meets Patton on a pedestal in a defining scene.
That showed that although they were allies, that there was real tension between US and UK forces. What we are hearing in the public press is there is none of that nonsense, that it is an alliance that is working together to achieve its objectives. How would you describe ally tension versus something that appears to be integrated and effective?
Hal Brands:
There were reports over the weekend that the U.S. was surprised by the ferocity of Israeli airstrikes against the fuel storage tanks around Tehran. The U.S. critique was we do not need any more pressure on energy markets than we have right now. And two, let’s try not to make things miserable for the Iranian people because they should be our allies in trying to take down this regime. So that is one source of tension.
I would not be shocked if there is some tension in these phone calls that are happening between Trump and Bibi every day. These guys have not always had a placid relationship in the past, but that is totally normal.
Allies come into wars with slightly different understandings as what they want to achieve. It’s normal that there is friction in trying to operate together. It is normal that even close friends don’t agree on everything. For me, the big story is how closely, efficiently, and effectively these two countries have worked at an operational level over the past couple of weeks. And then there’s the larger question of how strategically successful the war will be.
Larry Bernstein:
Learning by doing. Militaries on both sides are learning about how these weapon systems work, communication and command structure, where their weaknesses are, what succeeds, what fails. The United States is constantly in battle globally and that allows it to ramp up its learning process.
Other nations, to their benefit, do not engage in war, but they do lose this learning process. The Chinese have not been in battle since their interactions with Vietnam years ago, and there is no one in their leadership who fought a battle.
Hal Brands:
It is important. It is something that Chinese military and political leaders worry about. The Chinese military has not seen serious combat since the war with Vietnam in the late 70s and early 1980s. It did not go particularly well for Beijing back then. When we talk about China invading or blockading Taiwan, we are talking about a military that has not played in prime time in quite some time.
There’s nervousness about how well the PLA will perform under wartime conditions. There are caveats. One, what we are seeing every day, literally, is that the PLA is doing realistic exercises of what these types of operations would look like. So, they are not going to be making it up as they go along.
Two, the US military has not done anything like a Western Pacific fight in decades. And taking apart Iran’s military is impressive. It indicates the gap between the best and rogue states that have been under sanctions for decades, but you have got to assume that China’s going to be more capable than Iran. The scenario is more demanding in the Western Pacific than it is in the Middle East. The geography is less favorable to the United States. It’s an advantage that the U.S. military has done complicated operations. I’m sure the US military has learned a lot of useful stuff over the course of the past couple of weeks. But if there is a war against China, it is not going to look anything like this.
Larry Bernstein:
Some of Iran’s weapons were Chinese made or copies of Chinese weapons. In a previous podcast with Brigadier General Eran Ortal of the IDF, he said that this shows to the Chinese that these weapons aren’t putting up much of a fight against the American weapon systems. How do you think the Chinese will respond to that as they witness this?
Hal Brands:
There have been a couple of these incidents over the past year. You saw Russian air defenses taken down easily by the Israelis in 2024 and 2025, although those were not the most advanced Russian air defenses, they are a generation behind. We saw Russian and Chinese made weapons rendered essentially ineffective when the US went into Venezuela, although there are questions about whether the Venezuelans had even deployed those air defenses and radars. And then we’ve seen similar things just in terms of the outperformance of Western weapons vis-a-vis Russian and Chinese weapons, as well as some indigenous stuff in the course of this conflict.
But we have only seen a Russian and Chinese kit used by substandard militaries. We should not assume that the folks who make these things will use them in equally inept fashion.
And we are also dealing with a different ballgame quantitatively. If you are thinking about a U.S.-China war, the problem is not simply one of quality, it is one of quantity. China has huge numbers of the air defenses, ballistic missiles, and other weapons it would use to try to make it difficult for the U.S. to operate in the Western Pacific. And so there’s that old saying that’s attributed to Stalin that quantity has equality all its own. And that may be the problem the U.S. would run into in a great power war.
Larry Bernstein:
We had war games related to a war in Iran and the United States did quite poorly. Ironically, Iran was able in the war games to effectively use decentralized command and control structure to its benefit.
Hal Brands:
The Millennium Challenge war games a couple of decades ago back.
Larry Bernstein:
They got their wish, they got forced into some decentralized command and control structure, and so far, it has not really been working out for them.
Hal Brands:
It is going terribly in the sense that by any military metric, they are getting their clock cleaned. They’re losing a lot of their missile launchers. Their Navy is essentially sunk. Their key weapon systems and defense industrial assets have been wiped out. This is not a close ballgame in military terms, and yet Iran has been able to sustain strikes against regional partners of the U.S., particularly the UAE, which is the most vulnerable place because of geography. It has been able to close the Strait of Hormuz, even though it’s only firing off a small number of drones at ships that come through each day.
It has been able to achieve economic pain for countries in the region which cannot export their energy products. As of March 11th, when we are recording this, gas prices are up 12% since the beginning of the war, but the markets are okay. The Iranian calculation is that pain is going to build. Once the markets start reckoning with the prospect of a prolonged conflict, you are going to have a different economic and political reaction in the United States and in other countries.
Larry Bernstein:
Yesterday’s news cycle was that the Iranians were going to try to lay some mines, and the mine layers were sunk. I would not want to be that ship captain. The drones are working okay.
Ballistic missiles are causing a little bit of trouble, but they are not firing that many anymore.
What is next?
Hal Brands:
If you are the Iranian regime, the question is not how many boats were sunk. The question is, how many mines did you manage to get in the water? It doesn’t take a whole lot to scare off shippers. And were you able to create the fear that Iran might make the Strait of Hormuz more impassable? The strategic fact that matters is not the number of drones that Iran launches per day. It is the number of non-Iranian ships that get through Hormuz.
This is the Iranian game. You try to maximize pain and hope that it forces Trump to look for an exit ramp short of the destruction of the regime. Iran is paying a terrible price for this strategy. And it is embittering countries throughout the region because it has struck many of its closest neighbors, even ones that did not have anything to do with the initial U.S. and Israeli strike.
But out of the set of terrible options that Iran has, this strategy may be the best of the bunch.
Larry Bernstein:
What’s unusual is this idea that the attacking power is looking for the people of the country to come to its aid. We did not seek that with the German population in World War II. We weren’t hoping that these guys would take out the Nazi regime. Instead, we burned the cities and everything else for that matter. How does that change the calculus when you want the local population to rise up? How do you do it effectively? When will they get the memo that this is the time? How should we think about that as a strategy?
Hal Brands:
There was a line of thinking in World War II that bombing the German population was meant to demoralize them and make them ultimately demand an end to the war. Did not quite work out that way, although the bombing campaign had other positive effects from a strategic perspective. In this case, the operations were colored by what we saw in January when you had mass protests in the street, a political uprising against the regime. And so there may well have been still be a hope that if the regime is embarrassed, weakened, crippled militarily, then you’ll get those protestors back in the streets at a time when the regime is less able to respond. And that was what President Trump seemed to be gesturing at in his initial comments on the war and he occasionally comes back to it.
There is another theory which is that the way to cripple the regime is to support an insurgency by ethnic minorities, particularly by the Kurds, and hope that that essentially overstretches the IRGC and other Iranian repressive capabilities. But there is no scenario where the Kurds can take power in Tehran. And the risk is that if you turn anti-regime Persian nationalists against the war, because now they see the war as a threat to the territorial integrity of the state, as opposed to a war against a regime that they may loathe.
Larry Bernstein:
The betting markets think that land forces is a possibility. When you talk to military folks, they say it’s not. We’ve talked about special forces, but that’s limited like taking out nuclear sites or specific places that air bombing may be insufficient. Can you imagine any use of forces around Tehran to allow the population to feel comfortable to rise up?
Hal Brands:
The entire U.S. army is not big enough to occupy Iran in the way that the U.S. occupied Iraq. Even the more limited scenario where you are putting 10 or 20,000 troops in place around the capital in hopes of toppling regime or encouraging an uprising. This is not Caracas where you fly in with helicopters because the capital is 30 miles from the coast. Tehran is hundreds of miles inland. This is a big country. Putting those troops in a very exposed situation sustaining them logistically is difficult, let alone defending them. There are a couple of lesser scenarios that are possible, although still difficult. A commando raid to go after the highly enriched uranium that is apparently buried under one or more of the nuclear sites. It’s still hard because you’ve got to have perimeter security, which means probably several thousand forces deployed to keep the Iranians away from the site.
You could do an occupation of Kharg Island. This is the Iranian oil export terminal. About 90% of Iran’s oil flows through there. If you are trying to strangle the regime economically, make it quit, maybe you try to grab that island as a means of coercive leverage, but that is still a big operation. You’re putting some significant number of U.S. boots on the ground in a potentially hostile setting. You’re going to need a lot of air power and naval power to back it up. It’s not a formula for a quick and clean resolution of the conflict. So, it is possible that President Trump would choose one of those escalatory options if he was committed to something that looked like a decisive victory and worried, he was not going to get there through what is happening militarily so far, but there’s a lot of risk around all these options.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you think this is going to play out?
Hal Brands:
I think you’re going to end up with an Iranian regime that is badly battered. It’s much weaker than it was a month ago, let alone three years ago when Iran appeared to be at the peak of its regional strength, but it’s probably still going to be a problematic regime. It’s probably still going to be run by the IRGC or other relative hardliners. Even if there’s a ceasefire, it will be hostile to the United States and Israel, and a source of insecurity in the region, even though its capabilities will be much reduced for a time.
You’ll have the question of how do you prevent Iran from trying to rebuild the air defenses and the missile capabilities? And that’s one of the reasons why this war is being fought because the fear was that the effects of the June 2025 war would eventually wear off. You got to go back and mow the grass again. I do not foresee a clean ending of this war where the threat is removed. We’re going to be preoccupied with this for a while to come.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think there is a chance that as part of the negotiation will leave American forces on the ground there to observe to make sure they do not violate this?
Hal Brands:
No. I could imagine a version of what the US did with Iraq after 1991 where you had a no-fly zone. But no, I don’t see us leaving a division of troops in Iran.
Larry Bernstein:
Stepping way back, we’re looking at a battle, but we have a globe to enforce. How do we think about Iran in the context of the axis of evil that are opposed to the U.S.?
Hal Brands:
There’s a couple of benefits from this war. If you smack around one bad actor, then maybe it causes other bad actors to think twice before they do bad things. If you show that the U.S. military is capable, maybe it makes Xi Jinping think one more time before he tries to take on Taiwan.
Larry Bernstein:
We kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and we decapitated the Iranian leadership in a surprise attack. This is unusual for a great power to act like this. Is this the future?
Hal Brands:
This is a tool that President Trump likes. He feels that it gives him a lot of leverage because you can kill or apprehend the bad guy and hopefully that example will have a disciplining effect on the successor. It has worked so far in Venezuela. It has not worked so far in Iran. Trump has been grappling with that disappointment in public over the past few days. Probably a lot more dangerous to carry out if you’re dealing with rival great powers like Russia and China, it may be the wave of the future in US foreign policy for dealing with rogue actors. Look out Cuba.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism as it relates to the war in Iran.
Hal Brands:
Think back two and a half years to the period immediately after October 7th. Iran and its proxies were at the peak of their power. They had embroiled Israel and to some degree the United States in a multi-front war. Today, Iran’s power has been dramatically reduced. Hezbollah has been eviscerated. Hamas is a shadow of its former self. The Houthis, interestingly, have been sitting this one out contrary to many expectations, and the Iranian Empire is much weaker.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Hal for joining us.
If you missed it, I previously did four podcasts on various issues on the war in Iran.
The last podcast was on the Opening the Strait of Hormuz with James Holmes who is a Professor of Maritime Strategy at the US Naval War College where we discussed ways the US Navy could open the Strait of Hormuz including the use of convoys, area defense, tactical offense, and arming the tankers to beat back the influx of drones.
Earlier last week another topic was Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran with Brig. Gen. (Res.) Eran Ortal where he explained how the American and Israeli military have moved their command center to the battlefield so that the target can be destroyed before the Iranians have time to react.
Another podcast was with former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton where we discussed how to best win the war in Iran.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Opening the Strait of Hormuz, here.
