According to the New York Times, Iran and it’s allies have damaged at least 17 U.S. sites. They have also attacked neighboring countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Iraq. For all intents and purposes, it seems as though Trump was not prepared for such a full-throated retaliation from Iran.
To help make sense of this conflict, Jen is joined by foreign policy expert Philip H. Gordon of the Brookings Institute. Gordon explains why military-imposed regime change never works and why Iran may not give up the fight, even if both Trump and Netanyahu back down.
Philip H. Gordon is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar in the Foreign Policy program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings. His research covers a wide range of U.S. foreign policy and national security issues, including the role of U.S. power and alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to welcome Phil Gordon, who was, as many of you remember, the foreign policy advisor to former Vice President Kamala Harris. He served in the State Department. He is a long-time veteran negotiator and analyst, author about the Middle East. Phil, it is such a pleasure to welcome you. Great to see you.
Phil Gordon
Great to be with you, Jen. Thank you.
Jen Rubin
I read today in the New York Times that the Iranians have hit approximately 17 American installations, bases, damaged them in one fashion or another. the administration seems to be surprised by the level of retaliation. Are you surprised, and how could it be that they did not anticipate this?
Phil Gordon
No, it’s a great question. I’m only surprised that they’re surprised. And that’s not a secret. Trump himself, he said, the biggest surprise to me was that they lashed out at their neighbors, which is something, you know, we have thought about, anticipated, feared for years or decades.
Like, the main reason we tried to avoid war with Iran for all of this time is because we knew they had the option of striking at their neighbors. And so it seems to me that Iran has learned the lessons of its recent engagements with the U.S. and Israel when it didn’t strike at the neighbors, because that’s, you know, the Big Bang, and then you provoke… an escalation. But I think, Trump saw that, you know, there was an exchange in April 2024, November 2024, and the summer of 25, and it didn’t happen then.
So he seems to have thought. they’re not gonna do it, and this will be quick and easy, and now he’s coping with what, as you suggest, was imminently foreseeable. This is their only option. You know, once you declare full-scale war on Iran and even hint at regime change, their only hope is to drag this out, make it ugly, raise the costs on us, raise the costs on neighbors. That’s what’s different from the exchanges in 24 and 25. They were serious, don’t get me wrong. But they weren’t existential for the Iranian regime, and so they stopped short of doing the one thing that could lead to this big escalation. Eminently foreseeable and really tragic that it wasn’t planned for and anticipated.
Jen Rubin
You understand all too clearly, you’ve written about this, you’ve talked about this, that the notion of regime change is fanciful when it comes to Iran. They’ve been in power for 47 years. We’re not talking about a thin layer of mullahs at the top. We’re talking about, thousands upon thousands of civilian and, of course, hundreds of thousands of the military, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, so that’s not going to happen.
You hear different messages from the administration, because it wasn’t clear why they started this in the first place. What would be an off-ramp for them if they wanted to take it? They look at this and say, okay, we really can’t do this forever, because even after forever, we’re not going to change the regime. What could they do to finally wrap this up?
Phil Gordon
And a couple of things. Let’s just start by acknowledging it is a terrible regime. It represses its people, it threatens its neighbors, it has sponsored terrors in the past, they did have a nuclear program. It would be a good thing if that regime were replaced. So just to be clear, when people like me or you or anyone question a military operation for regime change, we’re not sympathetic to the Iranian regime or, you know, wishing it were there. It would be great if we could replace that regime.
The problem with that as a military mission, as you say, is that it’s just very unlikely to work. It’s never worked in the past, and we’ve tried this repeatedly. And we’ve tried it in different ways, with a full-on, you know, occupation invasion, like in Iraq, or just bombing, like in Libya. or arming the opposition in Syria, or international coalition in Afghanistan, there are all sorts of ways. But the problem is you remove the regime, however bad, and then you just create a political vacuum. And none of those formula we have tried has managed to put something stable in its place, and sometimes, like in Afghanistan, you go 20 years and you get the very guys that you threw out. In Iraq, you get a raging civil war.
So, the problem is the impossibility of the mission, rather than the value of the mission, if we could do it. And Iran’s not going to be different, and that’s a mistake, you know, presidents have made repeatedly, but Trump seems to have made it, thinking, well, he’ll do it differently. Venezuela gave him a fantasy that you could knock out the regime. put in someone who would cooperate with you and everything would be fine. It’s very different, but what’s not different is that, in Iran, you have, as you mentioned, this hardened regime with thousands and thousands of armed men willing to kill and die for their cause, and you have a divided opposition that is unarmed, and so if you create chaos and quote-unquote knock out the regime, what is going to happen? probably not the moderate, friendly, pro-Western types that you’d like to come to power, but either, you know, all-out chaos, or the hard guys with guns.
So, just to say all of that about why that is a goal. doesn’t make sense and can really get us into trouble. And therefore, that just takes me to your question about off-ramps, if it’s not that. Because Plan A, off-ramp A, is that the regime has changed, someone works with us. Iran stabilizes, and that would be wonderful. It would be great, and I think, you know, Trump’s gonna try… keep trying that, and maybe he kills the new Supreme Leader and hopes somebody comes who’s willing to work with the United States. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. And I fear that escalating until that happens just, makes things worse. So, barring that, barring Plan A, The off-ramp is some version, I’ve always thought this is where we’ll end up, of declaring victory and going home. And that would be classic Trump, too. The costs start to rise, and usually what gets his attention is the impact on markets.
You know, that happened after Liberation Day tariffs in the spring, it happened after the Greenland fiasco just a couple of months ago, and Europeans threatened counter tariffs, and, you know, divesting U.S. bonds, U.S. markets hit. He backs down. If oil markets and stock markets and bond markets start to really freak out, and he worries about the impact of that. You could imagine him saying… and this is one advantage of the lack of clarity in the mission, because they’ve, like, been all over the Right? Right. Because you can define that after the fact. Well, my mission was the things that we accomplished, and it wasn’t really the things that we didn’t accomplish.
So, declare victory and go home, you know, X amount more days of bombing, and then he says, I’ve decimated their nuclear program, I’ve wiped out their missiles, I’ve taken care of their air defenses, I hit their military leaders, I got rid of the supreme leader. This was a brilliant and beautiful mission, we don’t have to worry about Iran for 10 years. And, and the war is over.
Jen Rubin
The problem, of course, is that Iran gets a vote, and the problem is also that the Israelis seem not amenable to any off-ramps. They are mounting a huge campaign in Lebanon, the goal of which I’m not quite sure what their endpoint is. What do we do about the Israelis?
Phil Gordon
So he writes a flag two things that raise the question, even if Trump gets to that point, which will be hard enough, because I said, you know, a little bit facetiously, he would declare victory and go home, and there would be things to point to that he accomplished. But he might also be doing it while leaving an angry Iran with 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and the ability to potentially turn it into a nuclear weapon. and a supreme leader called Khamenei, which, you know, wasn’t exactly the type of regime change we had in mind. An angry ideological son of the former supreme leader, you know, whose family was killed, and would presumably be vengeful, and would also want to show that you can’t get away with striking Iran. So that’s why it won’t be completely easy for Trump to do this.
There’s, like, what does Israel do, and what does Iran do? I think, look, you know, all of the options are bad here, we shouldn’t be here in the first place, but I think both of those are potentially manageable in this sense. Yes, Israel wants to carry on until the regime is changed, or even, frankly, until there’s chaos. And that’s one difference with the United States, is On balance, especially given our interests with the neighbors and interest in the region. we would rather not leave this just a, you know, civil war in Iran. Israel is determined to Finally and permanently remove this threat. And if Iran descends into chaos, even if there are refugees or civil unrest. it at least wants to push the war to the point that it can really feel like it dealt with the threat that it’s been dealing with for some time.
So, you could imagine a divergence in war aims there. That said, and, you know, everybody’s talking about this, Bibi might continue the war if Trump doesn’t, I imagine, after all he’s done for Israel. If Donald Trump decides this war is over, the war is over. And we saw that last summer, too, when Israel might have wanted to bomb for more than 12 days, and Trump called it, and he told him he was calling it. And I think Netanyahu would have to go along with that. You know, we will have decimated Iranian military capacities. Israel will always have the option of doing it again, if necessary, if we saw movement on the nuclear program. if the U.S. stopped but Israel continued, it would be the worst of all worlds for us, because you’d still have the instability, you’d still have the oil price rises, you’d still have the neighbors being hit. But the U.S. wouldn’t be advancing the military aim.
So I think the Israel thing would be a challenge, but it’s a manageable one. And then on the Iranian piece, too, people are asking, well, you know, Iran has a say, what if they don’t want… let the war end? And some of their officials have hinted at that, that this is about vengeance. they can’t let it end with Trump and Beebe declaring victory, because then they would feel they could just do it again. So there is a risk that Iran would say, no, we’re not stopping until we show you that the price is something you’re not going to want to pay. Again, we’ll see, but I imagine after Living through weeks of this bombing, and having their leaders, you know, decapitated. and imposing a cost and showing this wasn’t free. If Iran had a chance to end the war with the regime intact. with the HEU still there, with the IRGC still in place, they’d probably take it. And so that’s the way I see this ending.
Jen Rubin
Do you have a sense of what Israel’s end goal in Lebanon is? They really are decimating the Beirut suburbs, southern Lebanon. Do they want to control more territory? Do they want to destroy the remnants of Hezbollah? Do you have a sense of what their endpoint is there?
Phil Gordon
Yeah, I think it’s that— I mean, it’s similar on the Iran front. They face a threat, which is a real threat. There are, you know, tens of thousands or more missiles and rockets pointed at Israel, which have been used, and which get used whenever there’s a, you know, Israel-Iran conflict. So they want to decimate that as much as possible. That’s what they did last year, and then it led to a ceasefire, which they hoped would hold, and there were some signs, you know, they want to empower a Lebanese government that’s not Hezbollah. There were some signs of Hezbollah disarmament, although not nearly complete. So, you know, while they quote-unquote have the chance, while there are missiles flying around everywhere, and people are barely paying attention to this, it would normally be a massive deal, Israel smashing South Lebanon and Beirut suburbs, but while they quote-unquote have a chance, I think they want to set back Hezbollah’s rocket missile forces as much as possible, try to empower the Lebanese government, and, you know, dealing with these threats that they’ve dealt with and faced for years.
Jen Rubin
I’m going to pull back just a little bit. The war will end eventually. Bibi Netanyahu will be wildly popular, frankly, in Israel, having recovered from October 7. He now is probably the odds-on favorite to win re-election, reassemble his coalition. doesn’t that put us back in this stalemate, both in Gaza, with the Palestinians. And frankly, we’re going to have to figure out some way of continuing to monitor and make sure that the Iranians’ nuclear program doesn’t get out of control. this might be a very dramatic, very violent mowing of the grass, as they say, which is the phrase that Israel has used for controlling Iran, but we come back to the same place. Eventually, you have to have some kind of negotiated settlement with these people.
Phil Gordon
Eventually you do. So, like, two things. First, yes on Bibi. You know, if you’d ask me right after October 7th whether two years later someone would be telling me that he’s, you know, odds-on favorite to win the election, I honestly would have excluded that as a possibility. Arguably the biggest catastrophe in Israel’s existence on his watch. But he seems to have recovered. you know, partly by being the war president and national security president. I’d be a little skeptical of the notion that this will this will give him a big bounce. You know, the 12-day war last summer didn’t. Everyone expected that to be his election time, right? He wins the war, defeats the Iranian threat, which Israelis are united over, been his dream for years. One would have thought that would have given him a political bounce, and he runs for election on that, but it didn’t really. Partly because, again, Israeli… even his opposition is pretty hawkish on Iran.
Like, that’s the choice, and the people who were against him were against him, not even on this issue. Like, they were against him on, you know, judicial reform, corruption, internal things. So… I don’t know how much it’ll shift the Israeli action, but still, point taken. There’s a chance that He’ll be back, and even if he’s not back. the opposition is pretty united on Iran anyway. But you’re right in terms of outcome. Again, if you exclude the rosy scenario of somehow this really works, and you get a different Supreme Leader, or not even a supreme leader at all, someone else takes over, whether it’s you know, moderate opposition, whatever that is, in Iran, or even a hawkish military, but who’s willing to turn down the threat and deal with the West, but, like, it just doesn’t feel like we’re going to be there.
It feels like we’re still going to have an Iran that is even angry at the United States and Israel, angry at its neighbors for facilitating this, and one of the consequences of the strikes on the neighbors that we began with Is the neighbors are now… inevitably and unsurprisingly turning against Iran. Like, they’re getting hit by drones and missiles. There was a significant thaw in relations in the region. You know, 10 years ago, they were at each other’s throats, and arguably the Gulf states wanted us to bomb Iran, and Iran was was infiltrating the whole region. We talked about Iran being in charge of four capitals, you know, with its Shia allies in Baghdad and Beirut and Damascus and Sanaa and Yemen. That all was largely behind us, not completely, obviously, but… The Gulf states didn’t want this war, they wanted stability.
In some ways, Iran, like, it was in a sweet spot. Its military had been decimated, its proxies had been decimated, but it was stable, the regime was still there, and they could deal with it. But now, after what could be weeks of strikes and deaths and interference in their economy, the Gulf states are inevitably angry with Iran, and might even choose to participate, which makes, like, getting back to something permanent and stable even more difficult. And it doesn’t feel like the Iran that emerges from this is going to be one that is ready to do a deal. It’s just hard to see what that is, which means we are back to this mowing the grass scenario. They will be vengeful, angry, looking to rebuild, looking to to show that there’s a price for invading. And then, yes, at some point, there needs to be some… understanding of how this moves forward without war. Again, Iran is 93 million people, they’re not going away, so when the dust settles, someone’s gonna have to get back to some sort of agreement, which a lot of us thought was preferable before things started blowing up in the first place.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Let me end on a very large, question. There’s an opportunity cost whenever you have a war, obviously, and presidents for decades now have been trying to pivot away from the Middle East. They’ve been trying to focus on China. We, of course, have an aggressive war in Europe perpetrated by Russia. So, we have once again gotten sucked into an area that maybe should not be our primary focus. let’s roll forward a few years, new president comes in, whether Democrat or Republican. how do we re-stabilize, our priorities? How do we get back to the things that really are important, which are not Venezuela, which are not, you know, Iran, but really are the big power issues that we face?
Phil Gordon
Well, I mean, first, you’re right. There are opportunity costs, to this. I was smiling when you said it, because I have been in multiple administrations that allegedly pivoted to Asia, but didn’t, actually. State Department when we pivoted to Asia, but we didn’t, because then there was the Arab Spring, and we got pulled in the Middle East, and then I was doing Middle East at the White House when we were supposed to be pivoting to Asia, but it sure didn’t feel like that, because, like the meetings we had were about the Middle East, and now here, like, Trump was the one really going to do it, right? Like, ruthlessly learned the lessons. He ran on not getting pulled in. That’s one of the, you know, wildest things about this whole episode, was learning lessons of the past, and his hand-picked cabinet, among other reasons, were people who had, like, served in the Middle East, had totally turned against it, his vice president.
So for him to be doing this is really… you know, head spinning, and I think, not to get diverted, but, you know, part of the reason for it is, speaking of head, is Venezuela and the Iran strikes last summer went to his head. And he started to think, like, this is fun and easy, and, like, you bomb stuff, and you accomplish things, and… And he made the mistake of thinking this would be easy again. Look, I think, you know, we do have interests in the Middle East. I’m not one who thinks we can just ignore this region. There’s, you know, there are nuclear weapons potential and nuclear weapons, there are ballistic missiles, there’s terrorism, there are huge economic opportunities, there’s energy, oil. We can’t ignore the Middle East.
We need to put it in a stable place where our interests are insured, and arguably, you know, we were tracking towards that goal. What we can’t do is deploy large amounts of our military force pursuing the fantasy that we’ll, you know, turn Iran into a friendly partner. of the United States by military means, and those opportunity costs are serious. We have diverted missile defense interceptors from Ukraine, which Russia has taken advantage of, and by the way, we’ve also driven up the oil price, which helps Russia. Again, it’s an aside, but it’s an important one. all sorts of reporting that Russia is sharing intelligence with Iranians to target U.S. forces, and the President Doesn’t seem too concerned about that.
The president made so much, rightly so, of past American casualties. So there are real opportunity costs, there are reports of a THAAD missile defense system in South Korea that is being partly cannibalized to support this war, and, you know, the warships and the aircraft carriers themselves, so… We’ve never managed to pivot to those bigger strategic things. I don’t think this means that Xi is going to try to invade Taiwan next week, but ultimately, yes, even with a trillion-dollar military budget, there are finite things you can do, and you can really ask the question whether this is what we want to be doing with those finite capabilities.
Jen Rubin
Well, it has been, as you say, Phil, a head-spinning experience over the last few days. We can only hope that, Trump chooses one of these off-ramps. It sounds like Rubio is trying to offer some of those, suggesting that there’s some limited military achievements that they can point to and say, we’re done, we won, which would be fine with everyone. So, Phil, thank you so much. your knowledge, your background, your experience is so helpful. I’m sure you wish it were not, and that you are not the focus. Of every foreign policy entanglement, but that’s the life you lead. Thank you so much, Phil. We’ll look forward to having you back soon.
Phil Gordon
Thanks for having me on.
