In today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire is checking in with me in my safe room, in between frequent missile alerts. I speak to her from the reinforced concrete room built into the apartment I’m staying in while the damn phone keeps buzzing with warnings
(You get a few minutes. Close the steel door. Wait. Hear huge booms overhead.)
The last 48 hours have been extraordinary. Hezbollah has entered the war, firing rockets from Lebanon into Israel. Israel retaliated across Lebanon. Inside Iran, much of the Islamic Republic’s top leadership — political and military — has been eliminated in a brazen and historical unprecedented decapitation strike. And the US and Israel are now operating openly together over Iranian skies.
My central point in the episode is this: the military asymmetry right now is so extreme that it creates pressure to attempt something politically radical. When one side has such total control of airspace — there aren’t Iranian jets up there contesting anything, launchers revealing themselves are destroyed — that the question may shift from “Can we hit more targets?” to “How can we shape what comes next?”
Trump may be considering pausing everything to see whether the new guys have learned the lessons that should have been heeded by their mulish predecessors. But there’s little doubt that he is also considering signaling to Iranians that the regime altogether is effectively finished. If the leadership has been decimated and the skies are controlled, is this the moment for protesters to move?
Claire is wary of that line of thinking, and she said so. Encouraging internal upheaval from the outside can easily spiral. If millions of people pour into the streets and factions clash, airpower doesn’t restore order (but perhaps drones might? We discuss). You could end up with chaos and much bloodhed rather than transition.
I don’t dismiss that risk. But I did argue that it must look to those leading the charge like a rare opening. The temptation to tell the long-suffering Iranians, “We’ve cleared the way — now it’s your move,” is real. I have to think there is also much communication with opposition minded men with guns inside the country. People, from the military but maybe even the Revolutionary Guards and paramilitary, who have simply had enough of helping an obviously criminal regime that is now on the losing side as well.
For a reflection of that (which we discussed), consider that after Iran reportedly carried out what Gulf officials described as missile and drone fire directed at targets linked to several Gulf states, the region’s leadership moved quickly to frame the episode as an outrage. The foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council convened and issued a rare joint statement pledging to take “all necessary measures to protect [their] security and stability,” and pointedly added that they are “considering the possibility of responding to Iranian aggression.”
If Iran believed limited strikes would intimidate or divide the Gulf monarchies, the unified declaration suggests the opposite outcome: a consolidation of deterrence and a signal that further aggression may invite retaliation rather than restraint. In threatening Cyprus, Iran has also triggered some European support (especially from the UK) for the attackers.
Claire and I agreed that there was no point taking this to the useless UN Security Council where Russia would have vetoed it. Claire was vehement, though, that the administration should have sought formal congressional authorization. I countered that surprise may have been essential to the operational success. An authorization debate weeks ago might have telegraphed timing or intent. But she’s right that bypassing process carries costs and it might have been framed as very general.
For more, check out my interview on NewsX, where I was asked whether the US had been negotiating in good faith, and I replied with a “sort of”: they were happy to avoid war if the clueless Iranians had surrendered to a diktat, but one that was reasonable and backed by as close as you can get to an international consensus.
