How Will the Iran War End?

After six months of conflict, panelists discuss the military, diplomatic, and economic variables shaping the endgame of the U.S.-Iran war and the prospects for a durable resolution.

GHATTAS: Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for today’s Council on Foreign Relations virtual meeting. My name is Kim Ghattas. I’m a contributor for The Financial Times and the Atlantic. I’m the author of Black Wave and the forthcoming The Best Kind of American. And I will be presiding over today’s discussion.

We are now six months into this war. And the question we are asking today is: “How Will the Iran War End?”

We are joined by three of the best minds on this topic. They need very little introduction. You have their bios. But I will introduce them very briefly.

Phil Gordon is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar at Brookings Institution. He is a former assistant to the president and national security advisor to the vice president from 2021 to 2025. He was the former White House coordinator for the Middle East in 2013—from 2013 to 2015. And he’s a Council on Foreign Relations member.

Daniella Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s written extensively about the Middle East, including Iran and Syria.

And Ray Takeyh is the Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s the foremost Iran expert and author, among others, most recently of The Last Shah.

And since I’ve mentioned several of our speakers’ books, I should also mention Phil Gordon’s book, The Long Game, arguing about the chimera of regime change in the Middle East.

And so here we are, six months into this war, which has kept all of us busy in the Middle East, in the United States, all the way to Asia, with oil prices, with bombings in Lebanon, with gas prices in the U.S., with concerns about Iran’s network of alliances in the region, but also with Russia. So what I wanted to do to get us started, because there are a lot of moving parts to this war, is get each one of our speakers to give us their perspective about where things stand right now, in a nutshell. Who’s up and who’s down? It may look obvious, but I think it’s important to look beyond, you know, accepted truths, beyond some of the analysis, to really drill down. And so, Phil, if you’d like to get us started and give us your two-minute take on where we are today in this war that the Trump administration started with the strike that killed Ali Khamenei on February 28.

GORDON: Sure, Kim. Thanks. And it’s great to be with you all.

So I would describe it as a deep stalemate, in which each side thinks, or at least hopes, that time is on its side, and is waiting for the other to give in. The United States thinks it has now gotten to a place where the blockade on Iranian oil—having already devastated Iran’s military capacity, Iran is isolated, its proxies have been weakened. While there’s strain on the U.S. economy, it’s sustainable. Oil hasn’t gone up as much as people feared it might. And therefore, time is on our side. We keep the pressure on. And eventually Iran’s going to have to collapse, or at least open the strait or capitulate.

Iran, on the other hand, believes the opposite. That it has showed resilience against U.S. military force, against economic pressure. It would acknowledge that its economy is a mess, but it doesn’t really care about the welfare of the population. It sees the United States, the Trump administration, as waging a very unpopular war, with midterm elections coming up, running out of interceptors, straining its alliances, under pressure from the economy. And it has options to escalate and make all of that worse. So that’s why I think—I mean, frankly, and one could have said the same thing, you know, two or three months ago. This stalemate, based on these perceptions or misperceptions, I think is where we are.

Even worse than that, they both may be wrong. It would be one thing if it were true that one side is just going to have to collapse or compromise and get us out of this. And we almost saw that with the MOU last month. But they may both be wrong, and it turns out Iran is more resilient than the administration hopes or thinks, and then in the other direction the U.S. can manage this longer than Iran thought. Last thought on this, but I think it even deepens the pessimism about any resolution soon, is that it’s not even clear to me that the sides know what they’re trying to achieve with this pressure. This is not some simple negotiation where you just keep the pressure on until one issue gets resolved. I mean, there’s the nuclear issue, which is so multifaceted and, of course, you know, last time it took two years to do a comprehensive nuclear agreement. But then there is also the strait and the terms of opening the strait. And the sides are pushing for something to happen, but I’m not sure they even know what they hope happens.

GHATTAS: And we’ll try to unpack some of that towards the end, because I will want to try to drill down into how does it end, or how can it end. And hopefully, you have some proposals, maybe, even for this administration.

Ray, if I can come to you. You’ve written extensively about Iran also during this conflict. And you write about, you know, fortitude and the Iranian ability to withstand the pressure. What is your take on where things stand? Do you agree with Phil? And do you think that the Islamic Republic anticipated that both the Gulf and the United States would actually last this long in a war before calling it all off?

TAKEYH: I think I largely agree with Phil in his description about the stalemated war. I would add this is a rather unusual war, one might say rather an extraordinary one. One of the things that has happened recently, which happens in all wars that last, both sides are beginning to improvise and develop new tactics and new ways of approaching the conflict. If it is proven to be durable, and that’s a big if, the Omani corridor that the U.S. Navy has carved out in the Gulf, which causes kind of a limited number of tankers to go through, along with sort of an east-west pipeline, along with China’s lack of appetite for—now for petroleum. They have reduced their petroleum intake by some 30 percent since April, I believe. That has sort of stabilized the markets at a fairly high level.

Now, that doesn’t mean that other important commodities are getting through the Gulf, such as fertilizer, and helium, and all the other things that developing countries need. Nor does it suggest that this privileged corridor will remain unmolested from American attacks. But to some extent were you beginning to see, from the American perspective—and a rather parochial American perspective—that the situation in the Gulf is manageable to some extent for the American economy. Now, that’s not true about India’s economy, Philippines, and others. But that’s not foremost area of consideration. So therefore, you know, perhaps you can get through this, and while the blockade remains on the Iranian oil. So there may be some measure of confidence in the American approach at this point. Although, I think all the gains that I spoke about are rather tentative, and certainly subject to reversal.

On the Iranian side, the rhetoric of the government remains rather strident and flamboyant, but there are—you are beginning to see fissures, at least among the political elite. Namely that perhaps we have to come to terms with some kind of an agreement. And Dr. Pezeshkian’s son, who’s his advisor, suggested, why do we need uranium enrichment? Which caused much backlash from the right. So their economy, of course, is devastated. And the humanitarian toll of that is something that people need to consider, as the economy of the country comes near collapse, whether they can sustain this for as long as they seem to.

All wars, all political decision making, are about miscalculation. And, as Phil said, both sides may be miscalculating. The Iranian regime seems to think it can hold the home front as is, and continue with this conflict, because the Americans and the Gulf allies are unlikely to do so. And the Americans seem to be comfortable to some extent about where they are, although it’s not a—it’s not a pre-war level situation. But they seem to have some confidence. When both sides seemingly are confident, that means somebody’s wrong. And that’s a problem.

GHATTAS: Absolutely. And we’ll bring in the Israeli element as well in a moment, because they have a say here as well.

Danielle, as you unmute your mic, my question to you is the same. Is this your assessment, that it’s sort of we’ve, you know, reached this this balance, this, you know, modus vivendi almost, in in a war? Or do you think there is—there are beginning to be signals of who’s up and who’s down?

PLETKA: Thank you, Kim. So, shockingly enough, or perhaps not, I agree with the way that Phil laid this out. And I think Ray is also right.

I think the problem, frankly, for all of us, is not so much assessing where things are, right? Because there’s no question that—it’s a truism, let’s put it that way, that the Iranians have their own assessment. That their own assessment is built within the Iranian information space, that is informed by Iranian interpretations of Western actions, of Israeli actions. And that that is often not consonant with the reality that we know. But that doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, they are where they are. And similarly, I would say, we are operating in sort of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, which is how the president of the United States thinks about the world. And so what happened three days ago is not necessarily important to what’s happening today or tomorrow.

For me, the much more pressing question about this is not the midterms. It’s not the Israeli elections, which are sort of external players, and which the president, I think—at least, our president—is mildly indifferent. And that’s a whole other—that’s a whole other Council on Foreign Relations event. I think the biggest question here is, what happens? For me, it is like the dog chasing the car. You know, once he’s got it, what does he think he’s going to do with it? And so we’ve got this economic—this economic pressure campaign on. It’s very effective. It’s very serious. The Iranians aren’t exporting oil. Their economy is, without any doubt, in a state of total and complete collapse. We are seeing that inside the country there is increasing restiveness. But we don’t know whether that tips over, as it did in January. And we don’t seem to have a policy on that.

But what do we do on the demands that we’ve made? Has this become a battle about the Strait of Hormuz? If you listen to the president, that may be the answer. In which case, that is a victory for the Iranians, who have defined the terrain on which we’re fighting. Is this about the nuclear program, missiles, et cetera? If it is, are we going to go back to, how should I say this in nice foreign policy terms, that piece of crap memorandum of understanding that apparently was written in Tehran or in Islamabad and presented to us, the twelve-point plan? Is that what we want them to do? And I think that lack of clarity means that it is almost impossible, first of all, for the Iranians to move forward, but, second of all, for any of us on the outside to make any sort of trenchant analytical points, because we don’t actually know what the president wants.

GHATTAS: So—and that that joins up with Phil’s point that he made about, you know, exactly that. What is it that we’re actually trying to achieve? And what is it about? Is it about the Strait of Hormuz? Is it about the nuclear program? You have some who argue, forget about the nuclear program. It has been by now, you know, buried, obliterated. They’re not going to restart for some years. Let’s focus on something else. But if we look at the economic pressure at the moment, which is even tougher than the maximum pressure that we had during the first Trump administration—including because of the context in which Iran is now operating—there was no real purpose back then either. It seemed to be just with a purpose of—or, a strategy of just trying to collapse the regime, or making them capitulate.

But, Phil, we’ve seen that that’s not how this regime responds to economic pressure, at least so far. So can you divine what it is that the administration is trying to achieve with this economic pressure now?

GORDON: So I think we know what it is trying to achieve. And it is true, in a sense, that the economic pressure is unprecedented, at least to this degree. So, yeah, anything can happen. But I have to say, I am skeptical that it will deliver the results that the administration seems to be hoping for. So what is it hoping for? It put the pressure on so much that the regime has no choice but to give into U.S. demands, which is some form of opening strait—opening the strait, and then, like, in an ideal world, a nuclear agreement as well. That was the whole purpose of maximum pressure. Obviously, the strait opening only is postwar, but maximum pressure before that was to get a nuclear agreement. So the strategy is—you know, it never worked before, and in the first few months of the war it didn’t work. But now with the blockade, I think the hope is that it gets so overwhelming that they either capitulate or collapse.

Look, anything is possible. This is dynamic and unprecedented. But I’m skeptical that that will be achieved. On the collapse part, the regime has shown enormous resilience. It’s weakened, but in some ways it’s harder line. Regimes don’t usually collapse. Eventually, they do, but, you know, sometimes decades later. And a whole other conversation is, like, what does that even look like? I think some have the fantasy that it somehow collapses, and then the good guys take over—the moderates or people we can deal with. I think much more likely would be fragmentation, conflict. You have, you know, thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of armed men associated with this regime. And on the other side, you have a completely incoherent, divided politically, ethnically, and unarmed opposition. So, like, even if that were to happen, and anything’s possible, it’s not clear to me what results from that, or that it’s necessarily a good thing.

GHATTAS: Mmm hmm, anything better.

GORDON: But if it doesn’t happen, the hope is some form of capitulation. And there, too, I think the regime has shown the limits to what it is prepared to accept. It did accept the MOU that, as Danielle suggested, it accepted because, you know, it gave them an enormous amount of economic or at least potential economic benefit. But, you know, last point on why I’m skeptical this will produce what the administration hopes it will produce, is that, you know, Iran gets a vote too. And they have shown a willingness to escalate. I fear that before we got—there’s no question the economic pressure is working. They’re not selling oil. But before we got to the point that they were willing to come to the table and say, fine, you can open the strait, and here’s the access to the highly enriched uranium that’s buried. Instead, they escalate. And we saw just a glimpse of that yesterday. It wasn’t directly Iran, but Houthis attacking Saudi Arabia. If Iran gets the Houthis to close the Red Sea, and then it, Iran, starts striking regional oil facilities again, then the relative economic calm that was referred to goes away and the pressure goes back on the United States. So that’s—

GHATTAS: Well, the Saudis are also—yeah, the Saudis are now also pushing back quite strongly against the Houthis militarily. So I’m interested in expanding the conversation a little bit to the regional outlook. But before I do that, Ray, on the regional outlook—and also, what do you think it looks like—can you even envision what it looks like at the end of this economic pressure? Is there a scenario that this administration is envisaging where the regime collapses, implodes, capitulates? If you can very briefly just tell us what you—if you have to imagine a day after a collapse, what does it even look like? And then I’ll come back to you on the regional situation.

TAKEYH: I would say the larger lesson of this war, and you can apply it to other arenas of conflict, is I think we have exaggerated the impact of economic sanctions in terms of altering the strategic perspective of entrenched adversaries. That was true in Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine and it’s true in this case. Economic sanctions have been a tool of coercion privileged by both parties, but if you look at the track record of it, it is not all that extraordinary or even positive. They do cause depletion of treasury and a humanitarian situation, which I think bears watching.

Can the regime collapse? Honestly, I’m trying to still figure out Iran’s last revolution. And I can’t—I don’t have an obvious explanation why Iran had a revolution in 1978-79, so much less this one. I would say, usually in situations like this, an opposition—and, as Phil said, it lacks coherence and structure—that to some extent can be an advantage in the early stages because it’s difficult to disable. But oppositions succeed when there is some serious fracture within the ruling elite.

GHATTAS: You did mention fissures, but are those serious? Doesn’t look like it.

TAKEYH: You always notice how serious they are after the regime collapses. If the regime collapses, you will say, oh, those fissures were quite extraordinary. If it doesn’t, they’re not—they’re not that materially significant. (Laughs.) This regime has demonstrated its ability to use force against its population in an indiscriminate manner. That’s its formula for staying in power. That’s its formula for durability. That doesn’t mean it cannot be overwhelmed. And as Phil said, anything is possible. I would say at this point, the regime seems confident that it can control the street. And so long as the street is controlled, one has to credit its argument. But this is, again, a very unpredictable situation, and it changes from day to day, from hour to hour.

On the regional issue, I actually think that, given the enormous lack of confidence in the United States that actually predates the Trump administration in the Gulf—and other people can comment on this, including Kim, better than I can—I think a lot of these smaller Gulf states are likely to come to some sort of an accommodation with Iran. But the Iranian list of demands is so extraordinary and invasive that it’s difficult to do, because it tends to be in two different directions. One is charging tolls for international commerce through the Gulf. Two is sort of developing a tributary system, where these countries pay Iran. Which some of them, I think, already are. But UAE and Iran are haggling over the price, not the payment. So I think that’s essentially becoming a tool of economic regeneration for the country, trying to establish its own tributary order. That would be a very difficult thing for United States to countenance, I suspect. But absence of American involvement in a significant degree and stabilization of that subregion of the Middle East—which doesn’t seem to be in the offing—I think you’ll see different people come to different terms with the Iranian regime.

GHATTAS: Danielle, what do you think the Gulf is envisaging as a way forward? How do they feel about their relationship with the U.S. at the moment? I mean, I see both a doubling-down on their relationship with America, and a hedging—like, simultaneously. They’re buying all these American weapons. They’re keeping the American bases, although, you know, the United States might decide that some of them are no longer necessary. But they’re also, you know, setting up the Mecca Pact and other alliances together. Although, the Saudis and the Emirates are also at each other’s throat. So how does the region look to you in this context? And if you can—I know you said the Israeli elections are somewhat irrelevant, but in this—you know, in this analysis. But they there is a sense that perhaps before October 27, Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. And what might that look like, to give him some boost at the polls?

PLETKA: I can’t pretend to any special knowledge about what Bibi Netanyahu is going to be doing. I think that—but, I do think that he’s a very shrewd analyst. and very experienced in this space. And anything that they choose to do, an October surprise if you will, is fraught with risk, right? It could have lots of upside, but, as Donald Trump would tell him ten times over, it also could have lots of downside. And so I—you know, again, analytically, I can’t—I can’t say what he’s going to do, because I have no idea. And I suspect he doesn’t have any idea. But it’s not going to be something that the Israelis undertake cavalierly. They also have to want to achieve something in particular. And the question of what that something is is not irrelevant, as we discussed before. Sorry. I have horrible allergies this morning.

On the question of the region, I mean, look, the problem of the region is always the same, right? They are tactical, not strategic. Everything they do is tactical, not strategic. This is what I’m talking about in Gulf, much more than anybody else. And so, you know, you see these efforts at rapprochement with the Iranians, but of course then the Iranians come back with, what were correctly described as, outrageous demands. And then they’re unhappy. And then the Iranians strike some target in a neighboring country or in their own country, or they activate the Houthis. You know, again, all of the tools that are available to the Iranians. And the Iranians—you know, the Iranians have a have a tendency that that all of us have been displaying this year, which is a desperate desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And so, you know, we see this.

The Mecca agreement, all of the different alliances, Saudi Arabia’s fluctuations. They embargo Qatar. No, they love Qatar. They hate the Muslim Brotherhood. No, they love Turkey. You know, all of this is enough to give every single person who pays any attention to the region, and that’s all of us, whiplash. But the idea that there’s a strategy behind this seems, to me, to be completely unbolstered by any lesson of history. So I think that, just to end, the bigger question for all of us is not whether there can be a rapprochement, a tactical rapprochement with the Iranians. Sure there can be, until it ends, which could happen at any moment, at any time, of any day. The real question is, is there going to be something that restores a sense of confidence in the United States? Which was lost during the Obama administration and really never returned, and has been behind so many of the bad decisions that our friends in the Gulf have made.

GHATTAS: Mmm hmm. Danielle, I’ll stay with you as we wrap up our conversation. And for our listeners, we’ll be going to questions soon, if you want to prepare your questions. But I’m going to go to each one of you now and ask, so, you know, how does it end? Can it actually end? So, Danielle, since you were speaking to that a little bit now, strategic rapprochement or tactics, if you were advising President Trump, or if you had, you know, policy in your mind—in your hands, what would your next step be and how would you bring this to a conclusion?

PLETKA: Well, my prayer would be not that I was advising President Trump, which so many people do, but that he was listening to me. (Laughs.) Look, if I were telling the administration—and we don’t know. As the recent revelations about the very serious and very effective demining campaign that has been going on in the Gulf showed, you know, we don’t know everything that’s happening in U.S. policy. And, shockingly, the president is able to keep a few secrets. And so I’m hoping that some of them are actually good, rather than bad. (Laughs.)

What I would recommend to him is that we—is that we pursue a strategy of support for the Iranian people. That’s fraught with risk. Both Phil and Ray are going to say, you know, you never know—you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s not easy, and it’s not easy to support them. I think that’s 100 percent true. But whatever iteration we end up with out of this regime is going to be problematic for us, as it has been for forty-seven years. This regime has to go. Not with an invasion, not with an iteration of the Iraq War, but with an undermining strategy that is far more serious than one that we have demonstrated for many years. That would be what I would recommend to him, no surprise to any of my friends here. But—

GHATTAS: But, of course, President Trump—you know, President Trump promised the Iranian people that help was on the way in January, and that it didn’t quite work out that way. And we’re looking now at, you know, even civilian targets.

PLETKA: Right, thanks to—right, thanks to everyone, it didn’t quite work out that way. Which is exactly the outcome he desired.

GHATTAS: Phil, how does this end? Can it end, or are we stuck in this limbo for some time?

GORDON: Probably the latter. I was going to say, you know, this—I think this panel is called, How Will This End? And you could just take away the first word and have the discussion, like, will it end? You know, wars don’t always end quickly. I mean, someone mentioned Ukraine. I mean, go back to 2014, but even, you know, 2022, Putin invaded. And they’re still fighting there. So there’s no guarantee this ends, particularly because all of the options are bad. And you have that dynamic I described before, where each side thinks, or at least hopes, time is on its side. So this could go on for a while. That doesn’t mean it stays stable for a while. You could—you know, the pressure, and then Iran responds to the pressure by lashing out. Oil prices go back up. That pushes Trump to be more accommodating. They start talking again. But it is hard to find the steady state where it is so-called over, like some verified comprehensive deal that both sides are comfortable with. So in that sense, I don’t think it ends anytime soon.

On the way ahead, I would just say—because you asked, like, if you were advising President Trump what would you tell him? I always, you know, push back against that framing because, you know, if I were advising President Trump hopefully we wouldn’t be here, because all of the options now are terrible. So it’s really a question of, you know, finding the least bad of them. And I suspect that ends up in some form of deal, which I still don’t exclude. I mean, if there’s one thing about President Trump, he can turn on a dime. He’s gone from saying, like, there already was regime change, with the most moderate Iranian leaders ever, to calling the leadership scum and dishonest and you can’t deal with them. And he could pivot back again. So I don’t exclude that at some point, after more—after both sides finally realize that time is not on their side and it is hurting them, that you get to some form of ugly, unfortunate, imperfect, and potentially unstable deal, but one that takes the immediate threat of escalation off the table.

GHATTAS: Ray, what is your take on how this ends? Does it end? Do we stay in this limbo for a while? Is it, as Phil says, looking like a bad deal, an unstable—an unstable deal, or some other form of continued containment, pressure, a la Iraq under Saddam Hussein, for example? I know that ended with an invasion, but let’s stay in the immediate—sort of, you know, the short to midterm, to medium term. If you want to unmute yourself, Ray, then we can—

TAKEYH: Iran assumed it would have strategic leverage over the Middle East because of its nuclear program. Now it believes that it can have strategic leverage over the global economy because of its control of the strait. Iran should not in any way be in control of the strait, which is an international waterway and protected under international law, free commerce, free passage of commerce through that waterway. And I would say, if the Omani corridor is sustained and enlarged, then the Islamic Republic’s only remaining strategic leverage is going to be attenuated to the point of nonexistence.

And I would say one thing about Danielle’s point, which I agree with, that everybody should want the Iranian regime to be undermined. And I do too. I would say, to some extent—the future of the Islamic Republic, to some extent, is going to be decided in the Gulf. If the regime loses the Gulf, after having lost the nuclear program, after summoning all the sacrifices, then both you’re going to see elite division and potentially galvanization of some opposition. That doesn’t mean that the regime will be overthrown, but it certainly will be in the worst position it can be in its forty-seven, forty-eight years of existence.

GHATTAS: You leave us on a very interesting thought. Yes, Phil, I will come to you, and then we’ll go to questions. But just, Ray, just stay with us for a sec. Can you define what it means, losing the Gulf? What does that look like?

TAKEYH: It means it’s no longer in a position to impose tolls on international commerce. Meaning, it’s no longer in a position to coerce and leverage its neighbors, and essentially develop this tributary system, which is against international law and international convention. It means its last strategic attempt to influence events beyond its borders have failed. That’s when the regime is going to be isolated, both within itself, within the corridors of power, and in terms of state-society relationship. Because a lot of sacrifices were summoned in order to gain these triumphs, and they have proven illusory. That’s going to be a real costly thing for the regime to explain.

GHATTAS: OK. Phil, last word for you in this round.

GORDON: Yeah, briefly. You made an aside that I thought was worthy of more than an aside, when you talked about Iraq and sanctions. And you said, of course, that ended with invasion. Like, that’s not a minor point, and something we need to keep in mind. The sanctions on Iraq were comprehensive, and they lasted more than a decade, and they were globally enforced. And they put enormous pressure on the regime. And the regime still didn’t give in. It hurt the Iraqi population. The regime in Iraq didn’t even give in, even though we now know Saddam wasn’t pursuing nuclear weapons. So I just think, like, that—to anyone who thinks that, oh, we got pressure on Iran, now they’re going to collapse or capitulate. Like, sometimes they don’t. In fact, usually they don’t. And that narrows the policy options considerably, unless you’re prepared to invade.

GHATTAS: All right. All right. At this time, I would like to invite members and listeners to join our conversation with their questions. A reminder that this meeting is on the record. And our operator will give you a brief review of how the Q&A will work before he takes your first question.

OPERATOR: Thank you.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

We will now take the first question from Meredith Broadbent. Meredith, please accept the unmute now prompt.

We will now take the next question from Jonathan Paris.

Q: Yeah.

My first question was going to be to Ray, as he changed his view on regime change, but he answered his own question—my question there. I guess I would like to say, Ray, can you tell me what should have happened in February 28? If we hadn’t done February 28, we wouldn’t have put the Gulf at stake. And the nuclear program was still pretty much decimated from the June—twelve-day war in June. So what exactly—where would we be if we hadn’t done February 28? I assume, much better than we are? Or maybe I’m wrong, in retrospect, depending on how this plays out.

TAKEYH: Well, there were two wars, as Jonathan suggested—the June 2025, the twelve-day war, and the February war. The June war, whose results were conclusive and I think, inarguably, a success. The February 28 war was unnecessary and unwise, because its goals were ill defined, its objectives constantly changed, approach improvisational, and contingencies not taken into consideration. And also, by bombing the country twice in a span of six to eight months, essentially it transformed the conflict, from the adversary’s perspective, into an existential one. Because we can’t just get bombed every six months. We can’t be subject of Israeli mowing the lawn campaign.

I can see why the February war made sense from the Israeli perspective because they have a mowing the lawn campaign. They want to continuously address their adversary’s capabilities and erode them. I don’t know if it made sense for the United States. So to answer the Jonathan question, this was a—this was an unwise conflict. And, as all unwise conflicts go, we’re beginning to see some aspect of it beginning to actually have a lot of ramifications that are difficult to contain, or much less deal with. But that that would be my overall picture of the two wars, that are sometimes unnecessarily conflated into one.

OPERATOR: We will now take the next question from Sharon Nazarian.

Q: Thank you, everyone. This is Sharon Nazarian, president of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Family Foundation.

I wonder how much any of you think that vying for the Republican presidential nomination by Secretary Rubio and Vice President Vance—how much has played a role in the Trump administration’s policymaking, as much as we can make of it? Is that really a factor? Has it been a factor? And could it continue to be a factor, given that the two have such different and opposing views on their view of the war with Iran? Thank you.

GHATTAS: Phil, would you like to take that question?

GORDON: I wouldn’t like to, but I will. (Laughter.) This is President Trump’s war. I don’t think vying for the Republican nomination is much of a factor in this war. I think, to sort of build on Ray’s last answer, President Trump, who himself got elected on a no-endless-war, no-intervention promise, I think previous uses of military force went to his head. As Ray said, Midnight Hammer went better than many people, probably including Trump, expected. He did Venezuela. And for all the naysaying, it didn’t, you know, cause casualties or a mess. And I think that led Trump—notwithstanding his whole platform of no forever war, no regime change—to think, like, I can do this. And maybe Netanyahu and others contributed to him thinking that. And he did it. And it turns out to have been a disaster.

So that, going forward, may impact how Republicans play this. And Vice President Vance has tried to position himself even more as part of the—you know, even putting out, probably true, that internally he was the least enthusiastic about this. So going forward, if the war continues to be unpopular and raise costs for Americans, you could see a strain in the Republican Party that wants to get back to those roots. So I think—I don’t think it played a factor going in, but it’ll probably play a factor in the two years ahead.

OPERATOR: We will now take the next question from Daniel Silverberg.

Q: Thank you so much. I appreciate you hosting this. Question for Ray and Danielle.

Ray, would love to hear more your thoughts on the factions within the Iranian regime, how they are reading latest developments? And, Danielle, same question for you on the Trump side, the various factions at play in the White House, anything you’re hearing on the internal fighting on where to go with this current policy? Thanks.

TAKEYH: I would say the sort of black box of the Iranian politics has never been less comprehensible, at least to me. I can’t tell you what factions are vying within the regime itself, because we don’t even know how the decisions are made, and who are the main participants. There are a lot of people that talk casually about how relationships are essentially determining this conflict, I don’t know how they know these things, because this system certainly has lacked transparency—always, and most certainly now because of the scale of the decapitations that has taken place. I would say there are some voices seemingly, Dr. Pezeshkian and others, that are essentially cautioning that this conflict may actually damage the Islamic Republic more so than it thinks. I would say, whatever diversity of views are within the system—and all political systems have such diverse views—it hasn’t stopped the regime from making decisions.

It has made decisions. It has made big decisions. It has made provocative decisions. So however they’re coming to a consensus or an agreement, they are discharging that obligation, both in terms of enforcing domestic laws and also in terms of having a rather provocative foreign policy abroad. The longer the war goes on, and the more costs of the war become pronounced, you’re going to see greater crystallization of factionalism and differences of opinion. Whether those differences will paralyze the regime and prevent it from making decisions, I don’t know. I sort of doubt. But at the very least, this regime will have a narrower, and narrower band of elites, because the way it deals with problems when it lacks a consensus—it did so during Ali Khamenei’s tenure, especially five, ten years—or, five years ago, is purges. This is a system that constantly purges itself. Of course, in the past year, other people have purged it for them. So this is where it’s at. And this is not a satisfactory answer, but I can offer you the sort of a solace of certainty.

PLETKA: Forgive me the perennial unmute problem. So I don’t want to sound like Ray—(laughs)—and say that the black box of the Trump administration is incredibly opaque. But the reality is, and I think this is—I want to be fair to the Trump administration—and say that the reality is that that every White House is—you know, is a bit of a mystery when it comes to the machinations that are going on behind the scenes. People guess at them, but only a few true insiders really know.

Look, there are fights going on inside the Trump administration about how to proceed on Iran. I think we have, for lack of a better expression, a hawkish faction, Daniel, that is—that is arguing for kind of a one-and-done approach. In other words, to go in with a final strike, taking out some of the—some of the sites that we have learned about. We’re doing that on a case-by-case basis. But kind of to go in decisively and then say, you know, finita la commedia, we’re now done, and we’re—and we’re not dealing with this anymore; oh, you can’t use the Strait of Hormuz either, but that’ll be it; no more conflict. And so there’s a side that’s making that argument.

There’s a side that the Qataris are constantly importuning, along with the—along with the, you know, Pakistanis as the sideshow, and the Egyptians as the sideshow, and the Turks as the sideshow. And that is the little cabal of Tom Barrack and Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, who are all making an argument that, no, we can go back to the table, it’ll all be great. Look how productive it was. And they hear from people, obviously, inside the Iranian regime, as does the president, which I can’t believe nobody has actually written about at length. Because the president talks to people inside Iran as well, which is weird and crazy. And so there’s this fight that’s going on inside the Trump administration.

The problem is not—again, and I’ve said this already, and everybody knows this—the problem is not that there is a fight going on, which is a natural thing. The problem is that the president decides A on one day, B on another day, C on another day, depending on who the last person is that he talked to. The only final point I would make is that I take issue a little bit with the characterization of the war as a disaster. You can’t—you can’t characterize the complete annihilation of Iran’s defensive capabilities as a disaster. I think we could certainly turn this into a disaster, if we allow them to set the terms as we did in the MOU, if we allow them to start charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. But, you know, I think that that is still a question that remains and that will require a lot more analysis than we’re able to do in ten minutes.

GHATTAS: Thanks, Danielle.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from David Merkel.

Q: Thank you. David Merkel from the College of Charleston.

My question is to Danielle about Iran escalation. Would they need Russia or China’s assistance to be successful? And can more be done to try and cleave Chinese support from the Iranians?

PLETKA: That’s a great question. Look, I think, you know, Russian support is important, but the Russians are obviously distracted as well. The Chinese really have been permitted to play both sides. And this is a very interesting reversal. But then again, we see this on trade as well as on every other story. The Chinese have been permitted—as they were not in Trump’s first term—been permitted to rearm, refuel, support the Iranians in ways that should absolutely bring repercussions. And they have brought some, but not sufficient for the Iranians to actually change their minds.

For the Iranians to begin a concentrated program of rearmament, at the very moment that they are financially crushed, right, is going to be—is going to be very difficult. And the one thing we can say about our friends in both Moscow and in Beijing is they’re cheap as hell and they don’t give gifts. And frankly, they don’t even take layaway, right? So they are not willing—(laughs)—to give now and accept payment later. And if the Iranians are not able to export the oil that the Chinese have been buying hand over fist, then I think there’s going to be a diminution in their willingness to support them. And that is something that is an opportunity for the administration, and I’m afraid not one that is being taken up aggressively enough. But then again, I might not know.

TAKEYH: Can I just add one thing to this? There is this alliance of Russia, China, and Iran. And as Danielle said, it’s a problematic alliance. In a situation like this the way you fractured alliance, you put pressure on the junior partner to make appeals to the senior partners that are not going to be delivered. And that’s what’s happening here. The Chinese may return to buying Middle Eastern oil, but they’re already doing it from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and not necessarily disturbing the American embargo. That is how you essentially break that alliance that has done its share of damage in Central Europe and elsewhere.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Barbara Slavin.

Q: Hi, everybody! Thanks for doing this. Couple questions.

For Danielle, who is Trump talking to in Iran? That’s fascinating. And for the others, what about the proxies? The Houthis seem to be very energized. It’s a little more ambiguous in Iraq. Hezbollah is not defeated. How would you categorize their ability to keep up the fight throughout all of this? Thank you.

PLETKA: Barbara, I don’t know. You’re better positioned than I am to find that out.

GHATTAS: If I may, as a moderator’s prerogative, I would love Ray to pitch in maybe on this—on this answer. And I’ll add in my two cents from Beirut, which is where I am. And the assessment in Lebanon is that Hezbollah is pretty much finished as a fighting force. It’s not finished as a political party, but as a fighting force it has not much to fight with anymore. The south has been—the south of Lebanon has been obliterated. Hezbollah has not been able to defend it or put up any resistance. And they’ve been besieged in this hilltop in southern Lebanon, quite far deep into south Lebanon, for some weeks now. And Israel has claimed that they have conquered the underground bunkers and tunnels that are under this—under this hilltop. So the read in Lebanon is that Hezbollah, as a fighting force, is finished. There’s a lot of anger in the Shia community for two reasons. Why did you allow this to happen to us? Or, why did you—why are you not fighting back more and defending us? And across the country, that is also a read.

But, Ray, if you can add your two cents on Iran’s sort of regional network and where it stands today.

TAKEYH: I would say one thing to Barbara’s question, and the Iranians will always privately reach out. And the messages that they send privately are going to be very different from their public posture. You always believe their public posture. I have no doubt that General Ghalibaf is trying to reach out to his American interlocutor, Steve Witkoff, and others. And maybe they’re having conversations. That is part of their practice.

In terms of the proxies, one of the things that—Ali Khamenei’s two great projects, the thirty-five year project, was to bring Iran to the threshold of the nuclear program and to kind of—to kind of have proxies all over the region as an auxiliary force that would do Islamic biddings, imperial reach on the cheap. Both of have been damaged to the point of essentially being significantly retarded. The proxies are obviously—as you mentioned, Hezbollah was always the main one, but you begin to see that elsewhere. And I’m not sure if Houthis are reliable proxies for the Islamic Republic, given the fact that they have their own agenda.

The one thing that the regime has managed to maintain is this intrusive penetration of Iraq, which they use for a variety of purposes including contraband and essentially taking their oil to that market. But the imperial reach of the Islamic Republic has been profoundly truncated as a result of what has happened. And its nuclear program has been, I wouldn’t say obliterated, but certainly disabled in a manner that would be difficult to reconstitute. And if the strategic leverage of the Gulf is also taken away from it, then I think there is really little that the regime can show itself and its people in terms of its accomplishments after five decades in power.

GHATTAS: Thanks.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Sherif Lotfi.

Q: Hello. This is Sherif Lotfi from Mizuho.

A quick question about how bad is the situation in Iran? You know, you read a couple different things about what they’ve done with domestic oil prices and sort of the issues internally about the economic duress. At the same time you also read that they find ways to get a little bit of money and maybe enough money to keep them—to keep them, sort of, enough for the patronage to survive, for lack of a better word. And would love sort of that perspective, because the way you see this developing is that if that really does break down, that is a gamechanger. And as Ray said, obviously the leverage on the Gulf. Does that make them go even further into hitting sort of the other Gulf countries and trying to make it a bigger conflict than it is right now? Thank you.

GORDON: I’ll defer to Ray on the internal situation in Iran, but I’ll say one thing about it. Which is, it’s really important not to confuse pain on Iran, which is undoubted, and a path to resolution of the issues that we’re talking about. There’s no question that Operation Economic Outcast and everything that came before it has been devastating for the Iranian economy. You can track the rial, reports of gasoline shortages, whatever. There’s no question that the pain is high. The question is what that leads to. Does it lead to, you know, unrest and getting rid of the regime? Or does it lead the regime to compromise on the strait or on nuclear issues? And those two things don’t necessarily go together. The caller referred to patronage. I don’t think it’s patronage that keeps the Iranian regime in power. It’s guns and the willingness to kill thousands of people. And that, they seem to still have.

So just underscore, when people question whether maximum pressure is going to lead to success in the war, opening the strait, or a nuclear file, it’s not because anyone doubts that we can impose tremendous pain on the Iranian economy. It’s because we doubt that that’s going to lead the regime either to collapse or to capitulate—the reference you made, Kim, to Iraq before. The economic sanctions on Iraq were devastating, but when the regime doesn’t care at all about the welfare of its people, and it’s willing to proactively kill them, let alone just let them die from sanctions, you know sometimes—and obviously oil is a huge part of the Iranian economy. And we’re cutting off their exports, so that has a major impact. But even if oil is, like, 25-35 percent of the Iranian economy, that still leaves a chunk left. And so that’s my caution about overly believing in sanctions leading to those things, because there’s a gap between the two.

TAKEYH: I would just add, a dysfunctional regime with a depleted treasury can still maintain power and can still engage in mischief. So a point about sanctions as devastating an economy, but not necessarily producing a change of behavior, is an important one. And I think one that deserves serious consideration, not only in Iran but in other areas where economic sanctions are casually used.

You know, the Islamic Republic is a very peculiar regime because it actually issues statistics that undermine its own claims. The Iranian Statistical Center continues to issue statistics about the misery index being worse than it has ever been—inflation, prices, unemployment, and so on being the worst that they have ever been. The regime’s argument for persisting will be sacrifice. And it’s a peculiar psychological phenomenon, not limited to Iran. You have to continue to sacrifice because of the accumulated sacrifices of the past. That if you were going to negotiate a deal and give in, why’d you wait this long? Why didn’t you do it six months ago? Why didn’t you do it seven months ago? So the argument essentially for continuing to move forward on a belligerent course is because all the price that we have paid. By the way, that’s not unique to the Iranian regime. It’s the story of the Vietnam War and other wars. And that becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon that is very corrosive for the regime.

One of the things I would caution, as the war stalemates there’ll be a temptation to expand the targets, to find different ways of putting pressure on the government. And one of the things that we may actually consider, and the Trump administration as I read in the papers has considered, is targeting power plants, water treatment plants. I would say that would be a very bad idea, to essentially—to impose a devastating humanitarian cost on the Iranian people, that are suffering so much. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t tell you if it’s international law and that sort of a thing. I just think it’s a bad idea.

GHATTAS: Ray, thank you very much for these comments. I think, as you mentioned at the beginning when we mentioned your book, The Last Shah, you’re still trying to decipher what happened in the last revolution.

TAKEYH: Well, that’s why I need a new book, which is coming out soon.

GHATTAS: Excellent. What is it going to be titled?

TAKEYH: Again, it’s about the Iranian revolution. As my father always tells me, you keep writing about the Iranian revolution hoping the outcome is different.

GHATTAS: Yes. And we’ll see what is in store for the Iranian people this time. But I do think that the one thing we know for sure is that the difference between the Islamic Republic and the shah is the willingness to deploy brutal force to stay in power, and not get on a plane and let the people make a choice about their future.

I want to thank you all for joining us for today’s meeting, titled “How Does the Iran War End?” I hope we’ve given you some food for thought and put forward some ideas. Sadly, not very positive, but I have faith still in the Iranian people. Thank you to Phil, Danielle, and Ray for their time this morning. And thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations. And thank you all for joining us.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.