Eliot A. Cohen is the Arleigh Burke chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His latest book is The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eliot Cohen discuss what genuine strategic thinking requires, why America’s war with Iran represents a failure of strategy rather than of military capability, and what Winston Churchill’s wartime memoranda reveal about what good strategy actually looks like.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Why is this term “strategy,” which people throw around in all kinds of contexts, often very loosely, actually very important if you’re trying to understand the world, and if you’re using it rigorously?
Eliot Cohen: Well, I think you have to go back to the origins of the word, which come from the Greek, strategos, general. We live in an age of war. I suppose that’s really my central point. I begin the book by saying you undoubtedly live in a state that may be at war, or whose borders have certainly been shaped by war. That’s true of pretty much all of us. And strategy is at the heart of what war is all about. I think what’s happened is that the word “strategy” has gotten so diluted, and the considerations of it really so bloated, that people have in some ways lost the ability to think about it. So what I wanted to do was to write a book, a relatively brief book, that would not be a massive tome, to try to focus people on the original meaning of the word. Because if there’s one thing particularly Americans have learned, but plenty of others have as well, you can have the most advanced weapons, you can have very professional and skilled soldiers, you can have perfectly sound tactics, and you can still fail. The reasons for the failure are at the level of strategy, usually not at the other levels of tactics and so forth.
Mounk: Perhaps I’ll start with that, and we might be able to come back to it, because I want to get into some of the interesting, meaty theoretical concepts in your book. But what’s striking about the Iran war at the moment is that America continues to be militarily supreme compared to any of its competitors—certainly compared to any of the competitors that have been fighting in the Iranian theater. China may be catching up to the United States on various military metrics, but China’s not directly involved in this war. And yet, despite the fact that very few American soldiers have died, America has superior planes, superior operations, is able to carry out these very impressive, technologically sophisticated operations—this looks like one of the biggest humiliations for the United States in a long time, and it comes after other humiliations, from the Iraq War to the Vietnam War and so on. So, should we lay the fault for all of that at the feet of strategy? Is it Trump’s total lack of strategy going into this war which explains this?
Cohen: The fact that American installations suffered as much damage as they did, that American aircraft suffered as much damage on the ground as they did—that is really more of a kind of military-technical result of people failing to take precautions which, in some ways, you just can’t understand. And there are operational failures here too. But it does seem to me that the big failures have really been at the strategic level, in a whole bunch of ways. Failing, I think, to operate within a real strategic context. The Trump administration goes into this war having alienated almost all of our allies, when actually you really do need their support if you’re going to be in this conflict. It goes in, I think, failing to understand the Iranian regime—I’m not sure even now that it does. I think it’s failing to have thought through what are the means it can really bring to bear to achieve what it wants, and really without having a clear—what I call—a theory of victory, an explanation for how all this is supposed to work. Now, you could have had a much better strategic approach to the war, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you succeed, but you have a much better chance.
I guess I would also just say, on the Iran war specifically, we still don’t know what the final outcome is. I do think a lot of people have been surprised by the way in which Trump has not simply walked away from it, which many friends of mine who share a similar view of the president that I do really expected—that he would, in the now-stock phrase, “chicken out.” He hasn’t quite, which is an interesting thing. So the end of the story has not been written. But yeah, I would say fundamentally, the major missteps that we’ve seen are very much strategic missteps.
Mounk: I wrote an ill-timed article back in January arguing that Trump doesn’t have a doctrine, but he has a playbook. And the playbook is that he goes for these rapid strikes, spectacular actions, that don’t risk many American lives, don’t cost a lot of money, and by the time people wake up, it’s kind of over. Very true for the first round of strikes against Iran, and very true, of course, for the spectacular capture of Nicolás Maduro. It’s very much not true for this. So the question is, why is that? Now, I think I’m going to slightly defend my ill-timed article and say I think they believed it would be similar. They believed they had a plan that’s very similar to Venezuela, where they’re going to go in, use massive force, and decapitate the Iranian regime. They seem to have believed they had some kind of deal with Ahmadinejad, who was going to be able to go in and take over in the same way that Delcy Rodríguez had taken over in Venezuela. Presumably they thought, if it somehow doesn’t work, we just retreat—we’ve destroyed a bunch of Iranian facilities and planes, and that’s the end of it. But they don’t seem to have reckoned with the Iranian ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Now, ironically, Trump is in the same situation that he has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush for, which is to get into a war for which you don’t have an exit plan.
Cohen: I would say I mostly agree with that, but not entirely. Let me spell out—well, first, I would say I agree that he does not have a deep understanding of military affairs, and I do think the Venezuela episode influenced how he thinks about this. There have been other cases like that too—the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in the first administration; he actually has a record there. What are some of the things that are different, though? I think one is his antipathy to the regime is qualitatively different than his attitude to just about any other country on earth. Part of that is for the rather simple reason that they have tried to kill him. Even now they’re threatening not just to kill him but members of his family. People do take that kind of thing personally.
Mounk: Of all the different strange things that Donald Trump takes personally, this seems like a very reasonable one.
Cohen: Yeah, I was going to say—I think even you or I would really take it personally. I think he does take the nuclear dimension quite seriously as well. What’s the reason for that? I suspect that, with Trump, a lot of his basic views of politics were formed in the eighties, roughly the early eighties. He thinks of that regime in particular in that framework, and they were a particularly threatening kind of regime when they were first created. That’s one thing—his view of them is different. I think the second thing, though, that is surprising—if he simply followed that playbook, it would be the “TACO” bet. “Trump Always Chickens Out,” which I tend to modify as “Trump Always Chickens Out Sometimes,” which makes it a little bit less useful.
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What they’ve decided to do instead is to maintain a distant blockade of Iran, which has been successful—a return to a very intense sanctions regime, and doing things quietly which enable a fair amount of oil to get out through the Strait of Hormuz. I was just looking at the news today, and people are saying somewhere between ten and twelve million barrels—it fluctuates down from seventeen million, but that’s not zero. He’s adopted a military course of action which is different from the one that one might have expected. What I think they certainly didn’t expect, though, is that this war would begin to expand in the way that it has, particularly with the Houthi successes in Yemen, and the Iranian connection there. He’s not a strategic thinker, he’s not a geopolitical thinker really, and I think they’re finding themselves surprised on that score. On this one, I think he has departed somewhat from the playbook.
Mounk: I agree with you. I think there’s a way you can make that argument less awfully wrong than it seems on a superficial reading. I think fundamentally it’s true that this goes against a lot of the other things he said. He said in his second inaugural, “I want to be measured by the wars I don’t start.” It’s striking—it’s really a strange irony—that he rose to prominence in good part by beating up on his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, as well as, of course, by his nativist attacks on Barack Obama. Now he is facing a terrible shellacking in his second-term midterms, about to be a huge lame duck, and a big part of the reason for that is an unpopular war of choice. I think those wars have different contexts, and I don’t want to equate them, but it is really a very strange echo of history—and particularly ironic, given how gleefully cruel he was to and about George W. Bush—that he has not emulated any of the better things about George W. Bush, but very much emulated some of the shortcomings of George W. Bush.
Cohen: Yeah, well, he’s not the only one who’s been cruel to George W. Bush. It is striking, and I think it does show—if I can use the word “seriousness” with reference to Donald Trump, which seems like a bit of a stretch—look, if he were really primarily concerned about the midterms above all else, he would have declared victory and gone home. Said, “We destroyed the nuclear program, obliterated it”—or “reobliterated” it, depending on your point of view—and disengaged. That really would have brought diesel prices down, I suspect. The markets would certainly have reacted to that if we’d said, “Okay, no more violence in the Persian Gulf.” He hasn’t done that. On the other hand, I think you’re right that part of his self-conception is that he’s the only guy who can settle wars, and that accounts for two fits of vituperation: one against Volodymyr Zelensky, which is really pernicious and unwarranted, and the other against the hapless Norwegians on the Nobel Prize Committee, who he went after for not giving him the Nobel Prize. I think that is because he’s dealing with that sort of internal, psychic conflict between his ideal self, I suppose, in which he sees himself as the dealmaker, peacemaker, and the real world, in which he’s conducting a war which has expanded and could expand further.
Mounk: That’s fascinating. His obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize is itself a fascinating psychological case study. I think it’s partially that he has this very strange competition with Barack Obama, and he can’t brook the idea that Obama won the Peace Prize, of course, hugely prematurely and strangely—but Obama did, and he himself is not going to. I want to go into some of the deeper concepts in the book, and then perhaps we can come back to some of those more contemporary questions about strategy and other things. What does it look like to have a good strategy when you go to war? What does that tell us about some of the failures that we’ve seen in recent American military history?
Cohen: In the book, as people always ask, “So what does good look like?”—it’s one thing to be critical—I try to give an example. What I do is I take the memoranda that Winston Churchill wrote as he’s sailing across the Atlantic, immediately after Pearl Harbor, to meet with Franklin Roosevelt. I say, this is as good as it gets. He’s been prime minister for a couple of years, since May of 1940. He has all of his subordinates around him. He has eight days with no distractions. He has been at the top of the British government for a very long time, and he’s a very, very distinguished military historian. What I do is I go through these memoranda and I talk about what they tell us about how good it is possible to be—because he gets some things very right and some things very wrong.
I would say that some of the qualities that made him as effective as he was—and I believe he was effective—was, first, a certain quality of empathy. Empathy not with his allies, because the memoranda are very artfully crafted to try to avoid irritating the Americans while still trying to get them to do what he wanted. Empathy with the enemy, actually—I think he understood Hitler far better than Hitler understood him. There is a kind of intellectual humility in that he fully acknowledges the limits of how far ahead you can see, but in his very characteristic way he says, “Look, we have to have some sort of unifying theme for how the war is going to be brought to an end.” That’s something that crops up actually in a lot of his writings, including a wonderful little book that he wrote about painting, of all things, which he actually compares to waging military campaigns—I suppose that’s typical. The other thing is a profound realism. He’s very clear about what you can and cannot foresee in war, and he understands that you’re going to have to adjust. On the one hand, you have to have a big idea that you’re trying to pursue. On the other hand, you have to be able to adjust.
The very last thing I would say, which doesn’t really figure in the memos per se, although it emerges very quickly thereafter—I think people sometimes have the idea that strategy is about big ideas, that it’s almost an academic discipline. Of course it’s not. It’s overwhelmingly about implementation. Some of the most important things that happen—and I think Churchill wanted to see this happen when he sailed over there—are things which sound very mundane, like setting up the right array of committees, setting up a Combined Chiefs of Staff, which is quite extraordinary, where you have very, very senior British military leaders, beginning with the guy who had been the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, sitting in Washington with the American Chiefs of Staff and doing a vast array of other things. He thought about implementation, and not just about the big ideas. I think that’s really particularly important for those of us who are not in government, or not in positions of responsibility, to remember—it’s an absolutely essential part of strategy.
Mounk: In your answer, you started to hint at the importance of a series of questions that you think we should ask. Perhaps I can go through them with you very quickly. I’ll ask you to be brief in your responses. The first one is: what else is going on? What is the broader context of what’s happening here? Why is that the starting point?
Cohen: Because no war occurs in a vacuum. I mentioned earlier that one of the mistakes I think the Trump administration made was going into the Iran war with allies who were deeply mistrustful, who had resources that we absolutely needed. Frequently, an action that might make sense if you were simply confronting an opponent alone does not make sense if you’re thinking about what some of the larger repercussions might be. I give a number of historical examples of how that happens. First, you have to look big. The problem is, when you’re thinking about war, you tend to look narrow—you tend to look very much at your immediate opponent.
Mounk: Another example might be that the Trump administration underestimated the progress of the Houthis in Yemen, and therefore that there’s going to be a kind of simultaneous blockage on two sides. Lots of examples of that. The other thing you hinted at is that Churchill, going forward, had a much better understanding of Hitler than Hitler had of Churchill. The question of “who are those guys?”—that seems like an obvious thing, but you want to understand the person you’re fighting against.
Cohen: I should explain where that comes from. It’s a movie from the late sixties called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—a wonderful movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It’s a movie about a pair of train robbers at the end of the Wild West. What happens is, they rob a train and they’re relieving everybody of their wallets, and all of a sudden a boxcar opens and half a dozen men on horseback leap out and begin pursuing them. There’s a great chase scene that then ensues—they’re doing all the usual things, jumping over canyons and doubling back and forth through gulches and creeks and so forth, and they can’t throw them off the track. At one point Paul Newman turns to Robert Redford and says, “Who are those guys?” That becomes a motif in the movie.
It’s actually a profound question, because if you think about it, they know exactly how many there are, they know what kind of weapons they carry, they probably can even tell the breed of the horses. What they don’t understand is why are these guys so skilled, why are they so persistent, why are they motivated differently than the other people who’ve tried to pursue them. The point I’m making here is that the way intelligence organizations in particular function—but the way all of us do—is we tend to count things. We take out the IISS Military Balance, we count up the number of tanks and planes and so forth. Where we make our biggest misjudgments is in that “who are those guys?” area, where you’re trying to figure out what motivates them, how big are their ambitions, a whole array of problems. People consistently fail at that. Vladimir Putin clearly failed at that in assessing the Ukrainians. Just as people who were interested from the outside—Americans, the American government—profoundly misunderstood who the Ukrainians were, and indeed are the Russians. The Israelis failed, I think, to understand who Yahya Sinwar was, and that’s even though he was in one of their prisons for ten years, interrogated by experts. It’s a very, very difficult question to get at. I think it’s actually one of the most important.
Mounk: Is one of the dangers that people structurally misunderstand democracies? When you look at a dictatorship, you can underestimate how coherent it is, or at least how much willpower the ruling clique has. I think that’s clearly part of what happened in the Iran war—that the United States fought believing that if they could decapitate a couple of the leaders, the country would sort of give in, and clearly the Revolutionary Guards are a much more cohesive ruling force of the country than Trump seems to have believed. Authoritarians tend to radiate strength, right? There’s a strongman at the top, and there’s a lot of propaganda to make that person look very determined and in control, and any splits in the regime are very hard to see from the outside. On the other hand, in democracies, you always have the opposition criticizing the government and citizens voicing their displeasure and their anger. Outsiders might often be tempted to think, “The United States, Ukraine, whatever—they’re not really going to fight, look at all their divisions, look at how weak they are.” In a way, that might be to the benefit of democracies, because they turn out to be stronger than the opponents believe, and that’s a good thing. Of course it also invites aggression, because outside countries might think that they can conquer them and subdue them more easily than is in fact true. Something about this open public sphere that is a feature of democracy might make it harder to deter enemies.
Cohen: I think that’s right. I think the problem is even more extensive. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said. I think, in general, it is very difficult to understand people who are in a profoundly different place culturally, civilizationally, politically. For example, I think modern secularists—we’re the people who populate most Western governments—find it very hard to understand religious motivation for war. It’s one of the reasons why we wrestled throughout everything after 9/11 with “who really is the enemy, and why are they doing the things that they’re doing?” By the way, I think this applies to the Iran war. I think democrats don’t fully understand dictators, and dictators don’t fully understand democrats either. Then there’s another phenomenon, which is: things change, people change, societies change. One of the things I talk about in the book are some of the things you can take away from cognitive psychology. One of them is the phenomenon of anchoring, where if you’ve seen something that’s very dramatic, that really sticks out, even if you kind of acknowledge things have changed a little, you can’t really acknowledge that they’ve changed a lot.
This is a classic mistake. I think of the Germans in World War II, at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union—Hitler and his generals, not just Hitler but his generals very much, who were still a somewhat different group of people—they looked at the Soviet performance in the Winter War and they said, “Okay, maybe they’ll be a little bit better up against us, but not enough to make a real difference.” Similarly, I think with Ukraine, people anchored on 2014. They didn’t understand that, actually, in the eight years between 2014—first, 2014 was a bit different than people thought at the time, but in the interval between the Russian seizure of Crimea and then a large part of Donbas, and eight years later, a lot of things had changed. Then there are the circumstances—the Russian seizure of Crimea was one thing; the Russian attempt to occupy the whole country and massacre lots of people, that was a different thing. I think most of us kind of stumble around in a bit of a fog, almost no matter where we’re from. Just one last thing on that: everybody, of course, has heard of the famous Chinese general who’s also a philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, who put a great deal of emphasis on understanding one’s enemy. The point that always has to be made is that he’s operating from a world in which it’s rival kingdoms within the same civilizational structure who are fighting each other. The barriers to understanding are a lot lower than they are in our world. We’re actually, I would argue, despite the information revolution, a lot higher than they were for Sun Tzu a couple of millennia ago.
Mounk: That’s a great gloss on that famous line by Sun Tzu, that the most important thing is to understand your enemy. The third question you ask is: what is your objective? That seems obvious—you want to win a war. Why is that an important question, and what are examples of people getting that question wrong?
Cohen: Sure. I’m a good Clausewitzian, and I believe that the strategic approach to war is thinking about war as the use of military means to serve the ends of policy.
Mounk: That’s a very famous phrase, and I feel like people throw it around, but probably few people who listen to this actually read Clausewitz. Even though I know I have a particularly erudite listenership, I feel like Clausewitz is a constant reference, but unless you’re a military historian or a military strategist, I don’t know how many people have actually read Clausewitz. What’s the alternative to that point of view? When you say that war is politics through other means—how does that distinguish itself from other ways people have thought of warfare, or other ways we might pose that question?
Cohen: I think it is a very famous phrase. The first thing that everybody should think, before they quote that phrase, whether they’ve read On War or not, is that this is not how we normally think about war. We think about it as tragedy, we think about it as divine punishment, we think about it as a hideous accident. Some people think of it as just kind of a bloody sport. There’s a wide range of ways in which we think about war, and most of the time we do not think about war as an instrument of policy. The second thing I would say about that—first you have to just step back and say, “Wow, that’s a different way of thinking about war than I’m used to.” The central point, which it seems to me is often lost on people, is: if war is indeed the use of military means to serve the ends of policy, well, the ends of policy are, by definition, political, and politics always changes.
I taught for a number of years at the Naval War College, and I know the officers would always be frustrated that the civilians just didn’t give you a bunch of clear-cut objectives and then get out of the way and let you go off and win the war. That’s not the way it works. If you take the example which people frequently cite as the classic case of somebody who did it right, it would be George H. W. Bush in the first Gulf War, who very famously set four objectives for the U.S. military. When people have brought that up, I’ve always asked, “Can you name those four objectives?” Of course they can’t. They just know that he had four objectives, which were one sentence each. Here’s the problem. The first objective was to ensure the safety and security of American citizens in the Gulf—an objective articulated when Saddam Hussein was still holding American hostages. They were released before we began hostilities. By going to war, all you were doing was endangering those American citizens—in the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—who were about to go into combat. The second objective was to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. That was a very concrete objective, which ended up being achieved. The third objective was to restore the legitimate government of Kuwait, which is an interesting concept, given that it’s a hereditary monarchy and represents maybe a quarter of the people who live there. The fourth objective was to ensure the safety and security of the Persian Gulf—that speaks for itself as a fuzzy objective. In fact, there were unstated objectives: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the elimination of the nuclear program. Then there were follow-on objectives which nobody anticipated, which is: at the end of the war, protecting Shia Muslim Arabs in the south from annihilation by a rather vengeful Saddam Hussein. You begin to have air patrols over southern Iraq and over northern Iraq, to protect the Kurds and so on. Objectives change.
Or to take another World War II example: Britain goes to war in September 1939, at least nominally, to defend Poland. By 1945, despite the fact that Polish soldiers had fought valiantly in Italy and in France, as well as in the Royal Air Force and alongside the Royal Navy, Polish contingents were prohibited from marching in the victory parade in London. That’s because, basically, Poland had been consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. The point is, objectives will change. The challenge for strategists, with all these questions—what I try to say is the questions are very simple, the answers are much more complicated and more difficult than anybody can imagine. The problem is that even in the course of a war, you have to be periodically reconsidering what your objectives really are, including those objectives that you may not be able to publicly disclose, but are nonetheless quite real.
Mounk: Once you’ve figured out what the situation is, you have an understanding of your enemy, and you’ve actually defined what it is that you’re trying to do—even if you might have to update your understanding of that as the war goes on—you obviously have to think about how on earth you achieve those goals. What are the means of doing that?
Cohen: That question, what are the means—again, it may seem quite straightforward, but it usually isn’t, for a bunch of reasons. One, when you look at the technical kinds of considerations, almost everybody goes to war with things that they’ve never really used before, or on a scale or in a way that they’ve never used before. It’s not nearly as clear as you might think.
There’s another dimension of understanding the means that you bring to bear, and that’s the organizations themselves. I talk in the book a bit about my own experiences, and this is actually one area where I think I fell short. I didn’t understand how reluctant and, in some ways, unable we would be to successfully wage counterinsurgent campaigns in Iraq from 2003 onwards. The United States military is a very adaptive military, so I think by the end it actually got to be quite effective. That is one aspect of thinking about the means that you bring to bear.
Mounk: The idea being here that at the beginning the thinking was, well, the means is just: we go in, we push back the Iraqi forces, we enter Baghdad, and that’s the end of it. It turned out that in order to achieve your objectives you needed means that go well beyond that.
Cohen: One was actually a sort of nonviolent means, which was military government—something the United States has done in a number of wars, which we were not prepared for. When it became clear that we were up against an insurgency, it also became clear that this is something the U.S. military had not been thinking about. I actually conducted a study for the Defense Policy Board on our counterinsurgency doctrine and was pretty appalled to realize that the manuals all dated back to Vietnam. Whatever was going on in Iraq, it wasn’t like fighting the Viet Cong.
Mounk: In a way, each of the steps you’ve described so far involves setting priorities, but you have, as a separate kind of question, what is the priority? How do you sharpen that point?
Cohen: It’s an issue that Americans have tended not to think about as much, particularly in the Cold War period, because we’ve been so wealthy and have had such a surplus of power. One of the most difficult things I think politicians find as they lead a country into war is saying, we’re going to say that some things are much more important than others. They’ll usually try to find somewhat evasive ways of putting it.
Going into World War II, actually, I think the British in particular—but we also—did a much better job of that. In terms of what kind of forces we were going to develop, one of the biggest strategic decisions ended up being the United States’ deciding to build an army of ninety divisions, which is still a pretty huge army. The original plan was well over two hundred, which would have been unsustainable, and would have prevented us from developing the air forces that we did, which were in many ways decisive. Another priority decision, which was in retrospect the right one, came about a year into the war in Korea—1951, early ‘52—when the Joint Chiefs of Staff said we’re going to cap the troop levels in Korea because the Cold War is now really on, and we have to build up in Europe. They made those kinds of choices.
To go back to Donald Trump, I’m not sure he fully understands that. I think he doesn’t fully accept that you really do have to assign different priorities, and that that will be extremely difficult. The administration comes in thinking, “We’ll just focus on China,” and then they realize they can’t quite do that. They’re not able to do that as well as they should.
The related question, which is the next question, is about sequencing. What do you do first and what do you do second? A number of different issues there. The one I would just highlight is what social scientists like to call path dependence—that once you’ve made one choice, you’ve actually foreclosed others. Politicians in particular, I think, really don’t like that idea. The example, again a World War II example: President Roosevelt understood it was very important to have American forces in action in Europe within the year of Pearl Harbor, to keep the American people committed to a Germany-first strategy, given that for us the war began in the Pacific. He didn’t fully understand that by doing that, he was foreclosing the possibility of invading France in 1943. So we did it in 1944 instead.
The very last question that I talk about is the theory of victory, which I mentioned a little bit earlier—why do we think what we’re doing is going to get us what we want? Again, these all seem like very simple-minded questions. Just drawing on some personal experience: when I was the counselor of the State Department, I would spend a lot of time representing the State at meetings in the Situation Room about Afghanistan and Iraq. There were a lot of very important, consequential decisions—do we send an additional brigade combat team, or another $400 million worth of aid, or build out some provincial reconstruction teams. Almost never did anybody ask—this ended up being partly my job—why do we think doing those things will get us to the place that we want to be. It’s certainly a disturbing question to ask, because the future is murky. It’s a question that you do periodically have to ask. I think you have to ask it right now about Iran. What is the theory of victory? I think it’s either regime collapse, or that there is just so much societal pain that the Iranian government pulls back. I think that second possibility is actually rather limited, because I think the people in charge don’t particularly care about how much suffering the society goes through. We may be stuck with a theory of victory that is not particularly promising.
Mounk: Let me stick with that for a moment and then go to the broader questions. If you’re saying the only really realistic theory of victory is still effective regime change in Iran, and it doesn’t look like we’re about to get regime change in Iran—I certainly would be very happy to see the theocratic regime of Iran collapse, or now I guess it’s some weird mixture between a theocratic regime and just a kind of military junta of the Revolutionary Guard—but if we’re saying that is unlikely to happen, don’t we need to have some other theory of victory, or at least some other theory of ceasefire, some way of securing the Strait of Hormuz with a lasting agreement, or some other way of bringing this war to a close? It sounds to me like you’re advocating for a kind of indefinite war in which we don’t actually have a very clear strategy about how to achieve victory, or really answer the other questions that you’ve just outlined so clearly.
Cohen: Unfortunately, I think that is where we are. One thing I should have said at the very outset—it makes a big difference in terms of how you think about strategy—if you ask the question, when did the war begin? Because that helps you understand the nature of the war. You can think of this as a war that began with the beginning of Operation Rising Lion, in the spring, or you can think of it as having begun before that, with Operation Midnight Hammer.
Or—and unfortunately I think this is closer to the truth—say that fundamentally we’re in the middle of a war that began around 1979, with a regime that is deep in its DNA hostile to the United States, determined to drive us out of the region and to destroy the state of Israel. That sounds very bleak, but unfortunately I think that’s the correct way to see it.
The way to think about this war is: what we’re doing is waging one campaign. There will be truces from time to time, but the opposition of interests, the intensity of the animosity on both sides, and the nature of the opposing objectives is such that it’s probably going to be a protracted war.
I would add one further thing to that—and the book, I have to say, does end on a somewhat bleak note. We’re entering a period, it seems to me, of rather long wars, which we haven’t known for a while. We like our wars—I think the German phrase is frisch und fröhlich—short and sharp. Who wants a long war? But I think unfortunately the world that we’re in is increasingly one of longer wars, in which societal endurance becomes the key, and partly as a result of that, societies again become targets of attack.
This was a phenomenon that I think we began to really see in the American Civil War. If you look at the evolution of the objectives of the North and the strategy of the North, it eventually becomes to break the will of the people of the South to continue to fight. I think you can argue it’s sort of the story of the World Wars, but if you look at the evolution of the Russia-Ukraine war—Russia’s clearly trying to break Ukrainian society in the most brutal possible way. The Ukrainians are trying to do something similar in a much less brutal way—blow up all the data centers and oil refineries, plus Wildberries, the equivalent of Amazon. It’s still going after societal resolve. I think that’s actually, in some ways, the true battleground that we’re going to be looking at.
Mounk: That’s an interesting, scary observation, especially given that there’s been this strange transformation of the war in Ukraine, in which the ground troops seem mired in a kind of World War One impasse. The Ukraine war has now lasted longer than World War One. The defensive capabilities on the ground seem to have a huge advantage over the offensive capabilities, and as a result very little territory changes hands. At the same time, the ability to inflict damage deep behind enemy lines has expanded. There’s a huge advantage to offensive capabilities in the air now because of drones and other technological innovations. It’s the case at the moment that neither Ukraine nor Russia is succeeding in making much progress on the ground. Yet Russia can obviously strike Kyiv and many other Ukrainian cities and inflict terrible suffering. But quite remarkably, Ukraine can also strike the outskirts of Moscow and attack those data centers and so on.
If you play that out, it does suggest huge vulnerability for civilian populations in these protracted conflicts. I want to go for one more beat and stay with your point about Iran, because I obviously agree that there has been deep hostility between Iran and the United States since 1979, and that that is largely the result of Iranian actions—the taking of American hostages, the deep hostility to the United States as well as Israel, the arming of all kinds of proxies and terrorist groups. But of course, for most of that time the war has not been a hot war. It has in some way been managed below the level of a hot war, and I worry that losing that distinction altogether potentially makes it harder for us to understand the choices we face, and the stakes of those decisions.
Certainly I think it’s very hard to imagine that, no matter who’s the next American president or what kind of change of mind Donald Trump might have, Americans and Iranians are going to come together around a table and figure out the terms on which they can be allies, let alone just mutually indifferent, coexisting nations, and the problem is solved. I think that would be very naive to believe. But surely there is still a difference between whether we’re going to continue being in a state of war for the next ten or five or two years, or whether we are able to find an exit from the war we are currently in—even if we will have to continue to deal with a deeply hostile Iran and a serious threat to the security of the region in those years.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Eliot discuss how the war in Iran is going and the causes of American military successes and failures. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…