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Last week, as much of the world focussed onIran and Israel, the crypto lobby was celebrating a huge victory in Washington. “History is being made,” Jeremy Allaire, the founder and chief executive of Circle, a stablecoin platform,wroteon X, shortly after the Senate voted through theGENIUSAct, a bill designed to facilitate the growth of the digital currency, and to give it, and other crypto assets, the stamp of legitimacy.

Stablecoins, which are designed to retain a constant value of one dollar, making them much less volatile than regular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, currently exist in a regulatory gray area, in which regulators have treated some, but not all, of them as securities subject to the securities laws. Although companies such as Tether and Circle created stablecoins that now have a combined market cap of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars worldwide, major banks and other traditional financial institutions largely stayed away from them, put off by regulatory uncertainty and crypto’s association with illicit transactions. TheGENIUSAct (which stands for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act) may well change all this and bring crypto into the mainstream financial system. It treats stablecoins as a means of payment rather than as securities, and it creates a set of rules for their issuer to follow, under the oversight of state and federal regulators.

During the Biden Administration, a number of crypto exchanges failed, and the creator of one of them,Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. (He had illegally transferred customers’ deposits to his hedge fund.) Over at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, the Biden-appointed chair, said at the time that the crypto industry was “rife with fraud and manipulation,” and his agency sued some of its most prominent firms, including Coinbase, the United States’ top crypto exchange, claiming that they were violating securities laws. Last year, a survey from the Pew Research Center found that more than sixty per cent of Americans had little or no faith in the safety of crypto as an investment.

But, also in 2024, three superPACs financed by the crypto industry spent an estimated two hundred and sixty-five million dollars to elect pro-crypto candidates and defeat crypto skeptics, such as Sherrod Brown, the senior Democratic senator from Ohio. With last week’s vote, the crypto lobby “recouped some of its huge investment,” Bartlett Naylor, a financial-policy analyst at the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen, told me. “The crypto sector’s financial contributions converted some elected politicians to a pro-crypto stance, and it scared the bejeezus out of a lot of others,” he added.

Defenders of theGENIUSAct say that it will protect holders of stablecoins by requiring their issuers to adhere to a set of codified rules, which include keeping the holders’ money in safe reserve assets, such as Treasury bills and bank accounts; publishing the composition of these reserves on a monthly basis; and, in the case of issuers with a market capitalization of more than fifty billion dollars, publishing audited financial statements annually. The bill also stipulates that stablecoin issuers must observe some money-laundering laws, and that, if they enter bankruptcy, the holders of their stablecoins will have first claim on their assets. “The Genius bill will ensure stablecoin reserves will be safe and boring, and that consumers will have a direct legal claim on the underlying assets,” Christian Catalini, a research scientist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, who set up the university’s Cryptoeconomics Lab, wrote to me in an e-mail.

Critics of the bill say that its protections don’t go nearly far enough. “It’s a collection of half measures that will create a regulatory imprimatur for stablecoins without removing the dangers associated with them,” Hays said. “We see in this bill a failure to learn from the regulatory mistakes of the past.” He compared it to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which ostensibly set up a new regulatory framework for derivatives but actually weakened oversight in key areas—a failure that became patent during the global financial crisis of 2007-09. “We’ve seen this show before,” Hays added.

The Senate legislation contains a conflict-of-interest provision that would “prohibit any member of Congress or senior executive branch official from issuing a payment stablecoin product during their time in public service.” However, legal experts say this restriction, like other ethics laws, wouldn’t apply to the President or Vice-President, an exemption that is far from trivial. In March, World Liberty Financial, a crypto startup that is majority-owned by the Trump family, announced that it was issuing a new stablecoin, USD1. Since the Trump family is now a player in stablecoins, it potentially stands to benefit greatly from an expansion in their use. (The market cap of USD1 already stands at about $2.2 billion.) “If this bill passes the full Congress, it is certainly possible that Trump’s stablecoin could become one of the dominant parts of the crypto ecosystem, which would be extremely rewarding to him,” Hays said.

The Trump family’s efforts to enrich itself by issuing a “$Trump” meme coin have alreadyreceiveda great deal of attention. (Earlier this month, theForbesreporter Dan Alexanderestimatedthat Trump’s meme-coin haul could be worth more than three hundred million dollars.) Critics say that the existence of a Trump-owned stablecoin creates new possibilities for interested parties to funnel money to him and his companies. Early last month, one of World Liberty Financial’s co-founders said that its new stablecoin would be used in a two-billion-dollar investment that an entity tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates was making in Binance, the world’s top crypto exchange. The company’s founder, the Chinese billionaire Changpeng Zhao, was sentenced in the U.S. to four months in prison last April, after pleading guilty to money-laundering violations, and he is now reportedly seeking a Presidential pardon. At the end of May this year, the S.E.C. announced that it was dismissing a civil suit against Binance.

Two progressive Democratic senators who opposed theGENIUSAct—Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts—are demanding an inquiry into the U.A.E.-Binance transaction, which they claim could violate federal bribery laws. Merkley and Warren also demanded, and failed to secure, stronger anti-corruption provisions in theGENIUSAct, which, Merkley said, “stamps a congressional seal of approval on President Trump selling access to the government for personal profit.”

The legislation’s sponsors deny this, of course. Its supporters also claim that bringing stablecoins into areas of finance outside crypto would generate broad economic benefits. Catalini, who previously worked with Facebook on its abandoned effort to create a cryptocurrency, told me that one of the most notable benefits would be “faster, lower-cost, global payments.”

Catalini was referring to online payments for everything from Etsy purchases to airline tickets and international money transfers. Traditionally, the payments infrastructure in the United States has been dominated by Visa and Mastercard, which operate their own networks and charge businesses hefty commissions for transferring their customers’ money. In recent decades, new payments services have appeared, such as PayPal and Klarna, but Catalini said that they deliberately limit interoperability, to keep up their profit margins: you can’t send money from a PayPal digital wallet to a Cash App wallet. In a world where online payments were carried out using stablecoins, which are represented on a blockchain—an anonymous and distributed digital ledger that lies at the foundation of crypto transactions—this would change, Catalini insisted. “Wallets, fintechs, and services will be interoperable by default.”

According to recent news reports, some big non-crypto firms, including Amazon, Walmart, and Meta, are considering launching their own stablecoins, while banks such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America are discussing teaming up to create one. All this activity suggests that more is at stake here than trading in crypto assets. “We will see massive entry, both by incumbents and challengers,” Catalini predicted. Critics of crypto say that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. “Essentially, stablecoin, this private form of money, is going to be part of the mainstream financial system,” Corey Frayer, the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told me. “People will be using Bezos bucks, Zuckerberg bucks, Trump bucks for payments. It’s going to be incredibly confusing. And there will be no guarantee that these new forms of dollars will always be worth a dollar.”

During the Biden Administration, Frayer served as an adviser on crypto issues to Gensler at the S.E.C. Several times in recent years, he reminded me, stablecoins have traded well below a dollar—in May, 2022, when the stablecoin Tether fell to ninety-five cents; and again, in March, 2023, during the Silicon Valley Bankcrisis, when the value of Circle’s USDC coin fell below eighty-seven cents. Back then, there were relatively few linkages between crypto and most of the banking system, which limited the fallout from ructions in the crypto world. But, if stablecoins expand greatly and hold much of their cash in bank accounts, or if banks create their own stablecoins, a run on stablecoins—in which their holders try to turn them into actual cash—could conceivably generate a run on the banks. “The stablecoin bill creates a transmission channel from the extremely volatile crypto ecosystem to the traditional financial sector, and that’s incredibly dangerous,” Frayer said.

Ultimately, Frayer went on, the proliferation of stablecoins could turn the U.S. financial system into a twenty-first century version of the pre-Civil War system, in which many private banks issued their own currencies, and businesses and savers had to decide whether to trust them. In this era of “wildcat banking,” the value of money fluctuated widely, and there were frequent runs and bank failures. To address this chaos, and to help fund the war against the Confederacy, Lincoln’s government eventually passed the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, which imposed stricter capital and reserve requirements on banks and helped to create a single national currency.

A version of Frayer’s argument has also been made by Barry Eichengreen, a leading economic historian who teaches at Berkeley. “The problems that bedeviled 19th-century dollars are likely to be equally debilitating to the stablecoin ecosystem,” Eichengreen wrote in aguest essayfor theTimeslast week. Pointing to this historical experience, Frayer said, “It is an ironic situation that we should be on the verge of returning to a system of private monies after everything we have learned.” If the political embrace of crypto continues unchecked—House Republicans are considering broadening theGENIUSAct to deregulate other areas of the industry—“irony” could end up being too weak a word. ♦

Last week, Israel began an extensive bombing campaign on Iran, in what the Israeli Prime Minister,Benjamin Netanyahu, has claimed is an attempt to wipe out the country’s nuclear program. Iran has fired back missiles in response, but Israel’s military superiority has been clear: it has damaged nuclear sites and energy facilities across the country, and has assassinated key figures in Iran’s military leadership. PresidentDonald Trump, who has for months been saying that he would like to sign a nuclear deal with Iran—and who, in 2018, pulled out of the agreement that Barack Obama’s Administration had negotiated—has nevertheless offered significant military and rhetorical support to Israel’s current campaign. Despite what seemed like some initial reluctance to support an Israeli attack, he has now repeatedly threatened Iran, and its Supreme Leader, and called for an evacuation of Tehran. He has indicated that the United States may formally enter the conflict, perhaps in an effort to destroy Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, which is considered reachable only with American weaponry.

To weigh this possibility, and to reflect on the United States’ role in the conflict, I recently spoke by phone with Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously worked at the State Department, and played a role in Middle East peace negotiations for decades, most notably at the end of the Clinton Administration. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump decided to support Israel’s war against Iran, what the Iran conflict reveals about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and why people continue to misunderstand Trump’s approach to foreign policy.

What is your understanding, as of now, of how the Trump Administration became embroiled in the conflict between Israel and Iran?

I think it reflects a President who basically does not want a major conflict, and who didn’t want to involve the United States in a major conflict, but has not tried or figured out a way to get out of the conflict or to make American intervention less likely. That is his dilemma. We’ve got F-35s out there. We’ve got Aegis missile systems. We’ve got Patriots. He’s given the Israelis a tremendous political margin for support. He’s beaten back many of theMAGAenthusiasts who think that supporting Israel is throwing good money after bad. And he has now even provided rhetorical support.

So, if he didn’t want to get the United States involved, why is he doing these things?

To Donald Trump, it’s always a question of, How do I look? Am I being played? Am I being perceived as weak? Did I overcommit or overpromise the possibility of a deal with Iran? I think he’s trying to make a virtue out of necessity. But, whenever Trump was briefed that the Israelis were about to strike, he had the capacity and the personality and the power to tell Netanyahu to wait and, at a minimum, to get time.

TheTimesreported, on Tuesday, that the Administration felt boxed in, essentially, and that Netanyahu was going to conduct a military assault on Iran regardless. And so, to some degree, they had to go along because they couldn’t stop it. You seem to be saying that, in fact, they did have a certain amount of power.

Let me tell you why I think that. It’s not a popular view, and it’s not a view that many people hold. Donald Trump, in the last six weeks, has done things in and around and to Israel that no Republican President and no Democratic President I ever worked for, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, has ever done. He has blown through two of the three basic political laws of gravity that have governed the U.S.-Israeli relationship. One is no daylight. In March, he, without Israel’s permission, authorized his hostage negotiator to open a dialogue with Hamas, a group that had already killed American citizens and had been responsible for the deaths of Israeli-American dual nationals. He cut a deal with the Houthis without the knowledge of the Israeli Prime Minister, which implicitly said that, as long as you don’t attack our naval assets, we have a ceasefire. He didn’t say anything about drones and ballistic missiles against Israel. Then, over the objections of Netanyahu, he removed sanctions on the new President of Syria. And he summoned Netanyahu to Washington from Budapest in April. Presumably, the Prime Minister thought he was coming to negotiate down tariffs. And then Trump announces, with the Prime Minister of Israel standing next to him, that he’s now opened direct negotiations with Iran. No other American President would have done something in this way. So that’s the no-daylight policy being discarded.

Second is the imperviousness to political costs or consequences. Had a Democratic President done the things that I just identified, somebody would have called for their impeachment. Trump’s margin for dealing more independently and more critically with the current Prime Minister of Israel is much larger than any American President has ever had. And this posture dates back to the first Trump term, when he believed that Netanyahu was using him. He doesn’t have the same emotional commitment to the idea of Israel, the people of Israel, the security of Israel that Joe Biden had. Israel to him is a means to an end.

The third political law of gravity that’s governed the relationship is aversion to serious and sustained pressure. Despite violating the first two, he wouldn’t or couldn’t get to No. 3. On an issue of extreme importance to Israel, which involved American equities and interests and potentially American lives, he couldn’t bring himself to say, “Look, you know, I know you have got to do what you have got to do, but I can’t be there for you. I need more time.” He may not have said “Attaboy” and green-lighted this thing, but he clearly didn’t say no.

When I read theTimespiece, I thought, O.K., this is something that we’ve seen before: an American Administration leaking that they were backed into a corner by the Israelis, that they had no choice. And what you seem to be saying is that Trump and his Administration actually had the political leeway that other American Administrations felt like they did not have, and he just didn’t take it. So we’ve ended up in the same situation that we’ve ended up in before, even though this could have been avoided without the same political cost.

Yeah, I’m suggesting to you a counterfactual. And others may say, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Aaron. Trump understood that Iran is a bad actor. There was no doubt in his mind.” I don’t buy that because I don’t think he’s committed to Netanyahu. Certainly he doesn’t care about the humanitarian situation for Iranians or Palestinians.

Let me put it this way. Trump is now managing three U.S.-mediated conflicts: Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran. He has no effective strategy for how to deploy or to even try to deploy U.S. influence or leverage on any of them. He is situational. He is transactional. In the end, he has no strategy. Netanyahu came to him with a plan, and he may have had doubts but he didn’t say no. And once the plan was executed he responded with no broader concerns or worries about what the day after is going to look like. I think he’s moved away from being a guy who had serious doubts, worried that he was backed into a corner, and now he is, I think, reluctantly committed to, well—

He doesn’t seem reluctant in his public comments.

Right, the reluctance is gone, because what’s happened is, I think, he respects success and power. The Israelis have demonstrated success and power against a very bad actor. So, having passed up the opportunity to basically say, “No, give me more time,” he’s now contemplating the use of American military force in conjunction with the Israelis. Not to simply add on to what the Israelis are doing but to bring American power to bear, to do the one thing the Israelis cannot do that Americans can: long-range refuelling and massive-ordnance penetrators delivered by B-2 bombers that can be used to go after Iran’s Fordow reactor. And I would bet in his mind he’s not giving up the idea that getting involved could actually somehow translate itself into leverage.

He could go to Netanyahu and say, “Look, you see what I just did? We have to think about the day after and you have to stop.” But this is where I think it breaks down. I think the Iranians are going to respond. They have thousands of short-range ballistic missiles. Geography is destiny. They’ve already demonstrated in September, 2019, that they could orchestrate an attack on Saudi oil facilities with cruise missiles and drones. I’m not sure what the Iranians will do given the asymmetry of power, but there’s a very real possibility that they will strike U.S. assets in Iraq, in Syria, and in the Gulf. So that’s the day after.

And I should add that, unless Trump is prepared to move toward regime change, the Americans and Israelis cannot destroy the Iranian nuclear program. There are three models for regime change in the region. No. 1 is Egypt, or Tunisia—millions of Egyptians and Tunisians out in the streets, and security forces refuse to fire. No 2.: You have an organized, cohesive military force that has credibility—in the Syrian case, it was an Al Qaeda affiliate backed by the Turks. They didn’t even know how quickly they could get to Damascus. The hollowness of the regime facilitated this. The third option is Iraq and Afghanistan. None of these regime-change scenarios are appropriate or relevant to the situation that exists in Iran. So the question becomes: even if they destroy Fordow, can they permanently destroy an Iranian nuclear program? What is to stop reconstitution?

Do you think Israel’s goal is really to wipe out the nuclear program or is it broader?

I think Netanyahu has a problem. Can they really cease and desist knowing that they didn’t hit the main nuclear site? If you don’t hit Fordow, you can’t even make a credible claim that you demolished the program or constrained it for more than six months, maybe. No, Netanyahu needs Trump, and Trump may figure he needs to do this in order to get the Israelis to stand down. But he would have to show resolve.

In that case, it is not going to work because Trump does not have the resolve to see something complex through.

Right, so then it’s a military campaign, and what is the end result? What’s the day after an American strike going to look like? What happens? The Americans can maybe set the nuclear program back a year or two. Is the plan to do more strikes every three months? I don’t think that’s sustainable.

In terms of the broader relationships here, the U.S. always claims to have been put into a box by the Israelis. You and I talked about this during the Biden Administration. What does it say about our relationship to Israel that we keep finding ourselves in this place, or at least claiming to?

We are infantilizing the American Presidency. Look, I understand Biden and I am sympathetic to him.

You are the last person in America.

From the moment I saw his speech, after October 7th, about a black hole of loss, there was no way Biden could borrow from the three baskets that were available to him: restrict U.S. military assistance or make it conditional, introduce U.N. Security Council resolutions or vote for someone else’s, or unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood and basically go on a campaign to question the value and the integrity of his Israeli partner.

Trump boxed himself in. He boxed himself in, in my judgment, by setting unrealistic deadlines for negotiations. He boxed himself in because he didn’t focus at all on the looming possibility that this Israeli government was seriously thinking of striking Iran. I also don’t think he drew the lesson from watching Netanyahu for six months in Gaza. Netanyahu wanted “total victory,” not negotiation. Had Trump not proposed these incremental hostage releases, there would have been no negotiation. There would have been no humanitarian assistance into Gaza. He also misread the Iranians in negotiations. And he misread the Israelis in terms of Netanyahu’s capacity to be flexible and to default to the military option. He refused to acknowledge that Netanyahu is no longer the risk-averse Prime Minister he was when I worked on this issue. He is now risk-ready and willing to go beyond his predecessors. Trump boxed himself in, because he’s not paying attention. He’s not focussed. He made the same mistake with Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. The conventional narrative that this is all a result of a crafty, clever Israeli Prime Minister who played Donald Trump? I’m sorry, no. He wasn’t willing to stand up and say no.

I agree with you about this infantilizing narrative that the Israelis play the Americans—there’s something silly about it. I would just say, though, that there’s also something tragic about the fact that, even if Trump is willing to go against the Israelis or to irritate Netanyahu in a way previous American Presidents were not, it still seems like Netanyahu’s managed to get to a place where, on the two issues that he probably cares about most, Iran and the Palestinians, he’s going to get what he wants, even from Trump. And so Trump may butt heads with him or have annoying news conferences with him, but fundamentally he’s going to get close to what he wants from Trump on both those issues.

I think that’s right. And Netanyahu has another ally, which is Hamas, the bad actor. And he’s got the mullahs. And the fact that those two actors helped plead his case—I think that also factors into Trump’s thinking. In terms of Netanyahu, I could argue one con man understands another. But Trump also understands that Netanyahu is dealing with bad actors and, by implication, so is Trump. As bad as Netanyahu may be, Hamas and Iran are worse.

It’s getting tougher to say that as the war in Gaza drags on.

Was the Obama nuclear deal working and did Netanyahu want a new one from Trump, one that I imagine would have looked relatively similar to the first?

The answer to the first question is that the nuclear deal was flawed but functional, because there are no good deals with Iran. There are only transactions. There are no transformations.

And Netanyahu does not believe in negotiations with Iran. He has certain principles. And, more importantly, Netanyahu’s aspiration, ultimately, is the end of this regime. He thinks that, if you want an end to the Iranian nuclear program, you have to change the regime. You don’t moderate their behavior. You change them. He knows that. And that means any negotiation, however credible, however long it delays things—he is not interested. He will only accept it if he has to. ♦

On Saturday, PresidentDonald Trumpbrought the United States into Israel’s war against Iran. American planes and submarinesstruck three sitesin Iran, including two nuclear enrichment facilities—at Natanz and Fordow—and a complex near Isfahan that was believed to contain stores of uranium. The Israeli government had been pushing for Trump to strike, in part because the Fordow site was believed to be reachable only with American aircraft and weaponry. Prior toIsrael’s attack on Iran, which began a little more than a week ago, Trump had repeatedly stated that he wanted to make a nuclear deal with Iran, despite, in his first term, having pulled the U.S. out of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the country.

On Saturday night, in a televised address, Trump claimed that the three sites were “completely and totally obliterated,” and said that Iran must now “make peace,” warning of more attacks if they did not. The actual extent of the damage is not yet known, nor is it clear if and how Iran will retaliate. (Trump had announced on Thursday that the decision on whether to strike would be made “within two weeks” and that there remained a possibility of negotiation.)

Late on Saturday, I spoke by phone with James M. Acton, the chair and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why even a successful strike might do less damage to the Iranian nuclear program than the Trump Administration hopes it will, whether the action could lead to a larger conflict with Iran, and why Trump’s decision to pull out of Obama’s nuclear deal wrecked the best chance to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

What are your first impressions of what happened tonight?

I’m kind of appalled, to be honest, as an American citizen—appalled that the President would start military action without congressional authorization. That’s my immediate reaction. But, as a nuclear-policy analyst, I’m very worried that this is the beginning of a prolonged conflict, not the end of one.

In a lot of the coverage I have been seeing, and in a lot of the advocacy for what President Trump ended up doing tonight, there has been the impression that this would be a one-and-done thing—the President would authorize a strike, Fordow would be destroyed, the Iranian nuclear program would be ended, and it would be a very quick, completely decisive military intervention. There’s two reasons why I think that’s wrong. The first one is immediate Iranian retaliation. Iran has many short-range ballistic missiles that can reach American bases and American assets in the region. Israel has not particularly targeted that infrastructure. It’s been primarily focussed on Iran’s longer-range missiles that can reach Israel. So I’m expecting to see some pretty dramatic attempted retaliation by Iran, and I think that puts enormous pressure on the President to respond again. That is the first pathway to immediate escalation in the short term.

In the slightly longer term, I believe it’s very likely that Iran’s going to reconstitute its nuclear program. I think Iran is likely to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (N.P.T.) and thus kick out inspectors. The N.P.T. prohibits non-nuclear-weapon states, such as Iran, from acquiring nuclear weapons, and requires them to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) safeguards, such as inspections, to verify that commitment. That puts us in the position where an American President or Israel might start striking Iran again and again.

I don’t want to speculate about exactly how successful these strikes were, but, if the strikes did what Trump has claimed, how much of a blow would that be to the Iranian nuclear program?

My answer may be a slightly unsatisfactory one, but it depends on how much else is destroyed. There are two key things that worry me. The issue is not just destroying fixed sites. Iran also had a bunch of highly enriched uranium that was once believed to be stored in tunnels underneath Isfahan. And the Iranians have claimed that they’ve removed that material. And then, secondly, there’s a whole bunch of components for building centrifuges that were being monitored when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) was enforced and are now no longer being monitored.

The J.C.P.O.A. is the 2015 nuclear deal, which was negotiated by the Obama Administration, and which exchanged a lessening of sanctions on Iran for nuclear inspections and limits on enrichment, and which Trump pulled out of in 2018.

Exactly. If the highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge components are small, that means that they’re portable. They can be moved around the country; they can be hidden. So, if what the U.S. has done is destroy the big sites that we know about, the enrichment facilities, but hasn’t destroyed the highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge components, I think Iran can probably reconstitute relatively quickly, perhaps within one or two years. It’s very hard to put an exact time on this. If the operations have managed to destroy some of the highly enriched uranium, or all of the highly enriched uranium, and the centrifuge components, then the reconstitution timeline is likely to be longer. What I would point out is that under any scenario the reconstitution timeline is going to be much shorter than the ten to fifteen years of the J.C.P.O.A. That’s how long the deal was supposed to last for. It is also worth pointing out that people argue that the J.C.P.O.A. was a bad deal because itonlylasted that long. Even that was a bit misleading.

Because some parts of the J.C.P.O.A. lasted twenty years, some lasted twenty-five years, some actually were indefinite. It was actually quite a complicated arrangement, the way the J.C.P.O.A. phased out over time. Limits on enrichment and uranium-stockpile sizes lasted ten or fifteen years. The I.A.E.A.’s right to monitor centrifuge components lasted twenty years. The prohibition against weaponization activities had no time limits. But, even under the ten to fifteen years that was often quoted, we’re now likely dealing with a reconstitution timeline under any scenario that’s substantially shorter than that.

A central point you have made, which I have seen you make in the past, is that the alternative to this strike and the Israeli action was not nothing but was in fact the deal that Trump exited in 2018. Was that deal succeeding?

I think the J.C.P.O.A. was working very well. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was complying with the deal. Iran’s program was heavily limited, and it was heavily inspected. To my mind, it was working very well when Trump pulled out. And I do think there was a slim but real opportunity for diplomacy over the past few days. Obviously, there was no possibility of reconstituting the J.C.P.O.A. But you had this interesting situation where Israel had started an attack; it couldn’t destroy everything in Iran, including but not limited to Fordow, and the American threats gave Trump some leverage. And Trump at times appeared interested in trying to use that leverage to negotiate. I do feel there was some kind of window for diplomacy there. I’m just very sad that that window was never taken, and there wasn’t a good-faith attempt to try and take advantage of it.

The lack of good faith was from Trump, or from the Iranians, too?

We don’t know. But what I would point out is that a serious negotiation can’t be done in forty-eight hours or however long it was since Trump announced that he was going to give the opportunity for diplomacy. He said this week that he would make a decision withintwo weeks. So my feeling is that there was never any real attempt on the part of the U.S. to follow up on that and actually try to negotiate some kind of diplomatic settlement here.

Do you think any negotiated deal would have been similar to the J.C.P.O.A.? Or do you think that the Trump Administration wanted to negotiate a different deal, given that Trump claimed the Obama deal was such a disaster?

It is a tough question to answer, although we had some leaks about negotiations earlier this year. Some of the ideas that were coming out about that really were starting to sound a bit like some of the ideas in the J.C.P.O.A. If I had been advising the Administration over what to do, given the imminence of escalation, given the time urgency once Israel had started to attack, I would have urged them to go for something incredibly simple, something that could be negotiated very quickly but that would give you a high degree of short-term assurance—something like a cap on enrichment levels, which would have been something that could easily be verified. It would be a very clear signal that the Iranians wanted to de-escalate. It really would reduce their proliferation potential, and then you would try and build upon that in time. That’s the kind of diplomatic approach that over the last few days I think would have been feasible. But the J.C.P.O.A. was more than a hundred pages long. You could never negotiate even a modified version of that in two weeks. But you could have done something simple.

One point that opponents of the Obama deal have made is that Iran could have been using hidden sites to enrich uranium beyond what was allowed. But you have argued that that isn’t actually a case for military action. Why?

One of the big challenges with all I.A.E.A. inspections everywhere is, Does the I.A.E.A. know where everything is? And there was always some risk with the J.C.P.O.A. that Iran would have a secret facility or more than one secret facility in which it might be violating the deal. The existence of a secret facility in and of itself would be a violation of its I.A.E.A. obligations, and the J.C.P.O.A. contained a whole bunch of provisions designed to make it easier for inspectors to try to locate a clandestine facility.

One of the big criticisms of the J.C.P.O.A. was that these provisions were inadequate. But my argument is that there’s actually a bigger problem with military action, because if Iran has secret facilities that we don’t know about, then we can’t try to bomb and destroy them. And the effect of bombing and destroying will probably harden Iran’s resolve to make the political decision to build a nuclear weapon, potentially using those clandestine facilities that we don’t know about. Moreover, if Iran kicks out inspectors, as I think is pretty likely now, then one of the key ways we had to try to find clandestine facilities has evaporated. So, if you’re worried about clandestine facilities, my view is that bombing actually has made the problem worse than it would have been under a diplomatic arrangement.

You talked about the “political decision” to make a nuclear weapon. Iran has said that its nuclear program is peaceful. Both the United States and Israel under different governments have seemed very skeptical of that. Are you implying, when you talk about a political decision being made in the future, that that decision hasn’t been made?

I would distinguish between two things here. The first is Iran wanting the ability to build a nuclear weapon on short notice, and the second is Iran having made the political decision to actually go ahead and build the bomb.

So you are saying that you think they want the first one? It’s not simply a peaceful nuclear program, but that doesn’t mean that they were on the verge of taking the final step?

I think they’ve always wanted the capability to build a bomb on short notice. They’ve dialed up and down that program over the years. To build a nuclear bomb, you really need to do two things. Firstly, you need sufficient fissile material, meaning highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And, secondly, you need to know how to turn that material into an actual, usable, deliverable nuclear device. That is called weaponization. And they stopped their weaponization activities, according to U.S. intelligence, in 2003. That’s something the U.S. has said publicly and repeatedly. Tulsi Gabbard said that in testimony back in March. But I do believe that one of the reasons why they were continuing with enrichment was to maintain this capability to build a nuclear weapon on short notice. In that sense, even though they stopped weaponization activities in 2003, I don’t think the Iranian program has ever been purely peaceful.

Now, one of the things that [Benjamin] Netanyahu came out and implied in justifying the Israeli attack just over a week ago now was that Iran had actually started to build a nuclear weapon. But we have had a lot of intelligence leaks from the U.S. that disagree with that conclusion. And part of my concern now is that if the U.S. was right, if Iran hadn’t actually made the political decision to build a bomb, these attacks are going to lead it to make that decision.

Earlier this year, the I.A.E.A. found that Iran had failed to comply with its non-proliferation obligations. What was that I.A.E.A. decision about and what did it suggest to you?

The I.A.E.A. had found evidence of Iranian nuclear activities. It had found traces of uranium at three different sites that had never been declared to the I.A.E.A. And under the rules—under the I.A.E.A.’s agreements with states—states are allowed to do more or less anything short of actually assembling a nuclear weapon, but they have to declare it to the I.A.E.A., and they have to allow it to be inspected. Iran never really explained what had gone on at those sites. It was obfuscating the activities of inspectors. It was probably lying to them. You know, as I’ve tried to make clear throughout this interview, I don’t think the Iranian program was peaceful. The question for me was: Is military action the best way of actually stopping it from getting the bomb?

When did these violations happen?

The undeclared activities all predated the J.C.P.O.A. In fact, they appear to have ended by around 2003, when Iran is believed to have stopped its weaponization program. And material and equipment was stored at a site that Iran tried to sanitize in 2018, after Trump pulled out of the deal. But the I.A.E.A. still detected nuclear material. So the key activities both predate and postdate the J.C.P.O.A., although Iran was technically in non-compliance the entire time for failing to declare the materials.

There has been a lot of speculation that what the Israelis are hoping for in the medium term or just short term is regime change. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, given your answers today, because what you seem to be saying is that you don’t think the Israeli strikes or the American strikes are an even medium-term solutions to the Iranian nuclear program.

I think that’s right. One of the things that surprised me about the Israeli strikes was the extent to which they were going after regime-related targets in a way that suggested their goals were broader than merely destruction of the nuclear program. And Netanyahu has openly said that he believes the death of the Supreme Leader would end the war more rapidly. So I think the Israelis, or at least Netanyahu, genuinely seem to hope that the strikes will precipitate regime change. The question that I would have is: Why do we necessarily think that a new regime would renounce the nuclear program and would give up on a nuclear weapon? One possibility is the current regime gets replaced by something that’s even harder-line, perhaps some kind of military junta of some description. That kind of regime seems pretty unlikely to give up the nuclear program. But even a more pro-Western democratic regime, which I think is quite unlikely to emerge, would not necessarily give up the program just because of how wrapped up it is in Iranian self-image these days. So it’s just not clear to me that even regime change would actually lead to what the Israelis hope it would do on the nuclear front. ♦

On Monday night, forty-eight hours after PresidentDonald Trumpordered a series of strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, he announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Earlier that day, Iran had fired missiles at an American airbase in Qatar, an attack that came with advance warning and resulted in no casualties. The Trump Administration had initially signalled a reluctance to formally get involved in Israel’s campaign to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, but, sincethe strikes on Saturday, Trump had publicly mused about the possibility of regime change. Even after his Monday announcement that he’d helped broker a pause in hostilities, Iran and Israel continued to exchange missile attacks, each side accusing the other of breaking the terms of the ceasefire. On Tuesday morning, Trump told reporters at the White House, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Nicole Grajewski is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program, and the author of the book “Russia and Iran.” (On Monday, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met in Moscow with his country’s most powerful ally, Vladimir Putin, who had criticized the American strike.) Grajewski and I spoke just prior to the ceasefire announcement, and followed up after Trump’s declaration. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we discuss why a ceasefire may be difficult to sustain, what Russia’s relationships with both Iran and Israel may portend for the region, and why a war meant to end Iran’s nuclear program may instead have delivered prolonged uncertainty.

What are your concerns about a ceasefire holding in the short, medium, and long term?

In the short term, I think my primary concern is accidental escalation. Whether that’s Iranian proxy groups in Iraq launching something against Israel and Israel responding, or because of a response to statements from Israel or Iran. In the medium to long term, my concern has to do with the acrimonious relationship between Iran and Israel which would likely continue. This ceasefire is not going to eradicate years of shadow war that Iran and Israel are locked into. And the nuclear issue continues to loom.

On Monday, the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian parliament approved an outline of a bill that would suspend Iran’s coöperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. That would curtail efforts at identifying, or at least accounting for, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and access to these nuclear sites. So there may be momentum within Iran that seems to be pushing against international oversight on its nuclear program.

Netanyahu has also been very aggressive lately—could you see him giving Trump a victory on a short-term ceasefire, as he did with Gaza, and then wanting to re-start the war?

It’s very foreseeable that Israel takes the opportunity again to go in and eliminate certain facilities or leadership. I think a lot of the escalatory dynamics probably hinge on what is left of the Iranian nuclear program and how close they are to reconstituting. Some of the uranium metal facilities have been destroyed, so that’s actually a pretty good stopgap for some of the weaponization work. But we don’t know where the highly enriched uranium that Iran had is. And then Iran has a lot of components of centrifuges, and these haven’t been under I.A.E.A. inspection since 2021. So, on the long-term side of it, you could see Iran developing a covert program. Moreover, because you did see Israel assassinating Iranian scientists in the past, Iran created a pretty robust community of nuclear scientists, nuclear engineers, nuclear physicists, so that continuity of knowledge would be maintained. So it’s not like the knowledge is eradicated either. And I think one thing that’s going to happen as a result of the mass intelligence penetration that really curtailed Iran’s military response and led to this destruction of their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (I.R.G.C.) leadership, is that there’s going to be a higher-surveillance state, a higher clampdown at a societal level, and, I think, a far more secretive program.

What internal and external dynamics do you see within Iran right now?

There is a domestic audience to whom the Iranian leadership wants to convey a semblance of stability and a semblance of strength. But this is also about signalling to the United States that Iran is not weak and that, despite these massive hits when it comes to their military facilities, when it comes to their conventional power they still reserve a right to respond. But it seems that there was some warning or signalling to America and/or Qatar before this Qatar military-base attack. Iran likely doesn’t want to get involved in a war of attrition with the United States, even if they are preparing for one.

So the signalling is just to make clear that a prolonged war is not what Iran wants?

Yeah, and there’s obviously now this concern about regime change and internal stability. And so that’s going to be something, I think, that Iranian strategists are thinking about as well, because the continuation of this war for them also increases their vulnerability when it comes to the kind of control that they have at home. Israel on Monday targeted some of the organs of repression within Iran, such as the so-called Basij force, for example, and other parts of their internal security services.

Can you talk a little bit about how the regime is structured and operates?

The regime functions on repression, and terror to an extent. That’s how it was formed in this revolutionary context and then after the Iran-Iraq War. But it’s heavily bureaucratized and also institutionalized. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is one aspect of this. And one part of that is the Basij, which is their internal clamp on power. But they also have major conglomerates of economic interests that are really predicated on corruption. And it is factionalized. There are certain factions where you have the clergy and that emphasis in just certain parts of the country. So in Qom, for example, that’s a pretty large concentration of power when it comes to the clergy. And so you see that in discussions of the Guardian Council, which oversees elections and approves legislation, or even with succession talk. But then there’s also these hard-liners who are very much entrenched in this ideology of confrontation with the United States and Israel. And this also includes a very strong emphasis on maintaining at least this kind of threshold nuclear status and also projecting its power throughout the region.

So Iran functions as somewhat of a kleptocracy, but also a heavily ideological one. And, of course, this is all driven by an acute sense of vulnerability to any kind of internal or external upheaval that might threaten the very existence of the regime. And, of course, there’s a Supreme Leader, and he is the ultimate arbitrator within Iran, but there’s a cadre of élites around him.

I have seen you warn about the consequences of regime change. What about this regime’s structure that you have just broadly defined makes you concerned specifically?

One problem with the discussion of Iranian regime change in the United States is that it’s a goal within itself, but there is nothing with what happens after. The experience of Iraq is a good example of this. But with Iran, I think what’s worrisome is that there are such strong and also militarized factions that could potentially mount somewhat of a countercoup. The Iranian people mostly don’t support the current regime, and many Iranian people don’t support a revolutionary theocracy. But there are also the people who are actually in charge of this massive repression apparatus. And so one of my concerns is also that we pursue a policy of regime change, and what actually happens domestically in Iran is far greater repression and far more insecurity to the extent that the civilians are the ones who suffer the most. Regime change is ultimately up to the Iranian people. One would hope that this regime does fall at some point and some democratic government rises. But, you know, that’s not always how international relations play out.

How do you think the weakening or removal of Iran’s allies, whether Hezbollah after the Israeli campaign against it, or Syria after Assad’s fall, has changed Iran’s calculations?

The changing regional dynamics and the loss of Iran’s forward-defense doctrine, which is what they called it, which had provided them with strategic depth, will probably influence the response a lot. For instance, this is why Iran has so far been reliant on its missile force to serve as a deterrent or at least its retaliatory capability toward Israel. But it also, I think, ultimately shows, if you look at the debates within Iran, a failure of what they thought their defense strategy was over the years. They invested so much money in these groups that in some cases eventually turned out to succumb to almost overnight collapse. And then, of course, Assad in Syria as well. Among the so-called reformists, you would hear criticism of all this spending, especially around the time of the Syrian war. You had parliamentarians questioning why Iran is investing so much in these wars abroad when there’s endemic problems at home. But I think Iran’s retaliation shows the failure of that strategy. But if Hezbollah was stronger and Assad was there, they probably would have been able to mount a much more devastating response or a much more damaging response than they were able to.

How did the regime adjust its behavior after the nuclear deal, before Trump pulled out of it?

The nuclear issue was really about Iran’s fissile material, about its work with advanced centrifuges and the ability for Iran to potentially break out with a nuclear weapon. So I wouldn’t say the deal fundamentally changed the regime’s behavior. You saw Iran quite active in Syria at the time. That’s really when they increased a lot of their support for the Assad regime, after the nuclear agreement, and you saw Iranians supporting non-state actors throughout the region with targeted assassinations. So I wouldn’t say that the nuclear deal transformed the regime or even really prompted that much of a shift. Perhaps it pushed things underground. I think there was actually somewhat of an effort by the leadership to portray themselves as behaving on the international stage. But it didn’t shift their calculus about their security and it didn’t really shift the internal dynamics because you saw the same level of repression, you saw the same level of support for these groups. And it didn’t eradicate the discourse about Iran being a perpetual enemy to Israel and a perpetual enemy to the United States. It was really about the nuclear program. Maybe we had illusions about whether that would change the calculus of the regime. But, in reality, I think that the nuclear deal was helpful because at least we had greater transparency about what they were doing. And now this is going to be all shrouded in secrecy.

I want to turn to Iran and Russia now, but, before we do, how would you describe their relationship over the past several decades?

The relationship has never really been an easy one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians came into Iran to secure some arms agreements and civilian nuclear-energy coöperation. But they faced quite a bit of pressure from the United States to cancel some of these agreements. And you’d see the Russians really preferring to coöperate with the United States over Iran. And this also happened during the height of the Iran nuclear issue, prior to the 2015 nuclear deal that Obama made, when there were rounds of sanctions on Iran. Russia supported this. Around 2010 was when the Russia-Iran relationship was at its lowest, though, with Russia voting for probably the most stringent and damaging sanctions on Iran when it came to its economy and also a conventional arms embargo. And this even prompted former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call Russia an enemy of the Iranian people and accuse them of caving to Satan. So their relationship wasn’t this close, tight-knit relationship at the time, though they still coöperated.

It was really the Syrian civil war that transformed this relationship. Both had ties to the Assad regime, but they also saw the spectre of what they viewed as Western-led regime change, akin to Libya. And it prompted them both to bolster Assad and keep him afloat. And eventually this culminated in the Russian intervention in 2015. And that transformed the Russia-Iran relationship because for the first time they had to operate in the same military campaign. They had to create structures and institutions and different channels for coöperation. And there were tensions in Syria. Russia and Iran had competing interests. They would sometimes vie over certain contracts. But what happens as a result of Syria is you see a deepening in the institutionalization of this relationship. And it goes beyond that. There is more coöperation when it comes to their intelligence services, when it comes to their interior ministries, and even on issues like sanction evasion.

What role has Iran played in the war in Ukraine?

When Russia seemed to be faltering in the war in Ukraine, they reached out to the Iranians for drones. And Iran provided drones initially. And, eventually, Russia shifted to local production of these drones. And a lot of the individuals who were involved in the Syrian campaign actually were behind the deals with the Russians. And so you see this relationship transforming into something much deeper, where Russia now was dependent on Iran. That’s changed a bit because of the localization. And Russia doesn’t necessarily need Iran for drone components anymore. But Iran was really crucial in that regard, of establishing these factories and providing Russia with munitions to terrorize Ukrainians every night.

How have the Russians responded to the Israeli attack on Iran and to Trump’s strikes?

Russia has come out with strongly worded statements supporting Iran and calling the aggression illegal. Russia has attempted to mediate and tried to use this as a way of de-escalating, though Russia doesn’t really have much legitimacy as a mediator at the moment because of the downturn in Russian-Israeli relations. At the same time, Russia does have a quite large ethnic-Russian population in Israel. So this hasn’t been a blanket endorsement of Iranian actions. And Russia doesn’t seem to be coming in to provide any formal military assistance to Iran. But Russia is trying to lean a little bit closer to Iran.

I imagine they don’t want to get too involved, in part because they are already stretched thin in Ukraine, no?

Yeah, the question is, what can Russia do? There was a bunch of analysis saying that Russia abandoned Iran, but in reality the question should have been, like, what could Russia have done? Russia’s defense industry is already strapped. It’s not clear if the Iranians have asked the Russians for help. There’s probably some coöperation when it comes to intelligence. At the meeting on Monday in Moscow, the head of Russia’s military intelligence was there. And I think that was an effort to signal that Russia may be helping Iran in terms of intelligence coöperation, but also to maybe assuage some Iranian concerns that Russia is not doing enough.

What about in terms of Russia’s relationship with Israel? Ideologically, it makes a certain amount of sense, and Netanyahu’s closest ally in Europe might be Hungary, which is close to Russia. Why didn’t this relationship develop more?

Putin and Netanyahu had a pretty good personal relationship, and that was even evident during Putin’s second Presidency in the two-thousands. So they’ve had a pretty strong relationship. Obviously, the Soviet Union didn’t have great relations with Israel, but, actually, on a personal level, Putin and Netanyahu had pretty close ties.

It’s nice to see two guys like that come together.

Yeah. In the Syrian civil war, the Russians and the Israelis had a pretty strong relationship. They had a deconfliction hotline. Russia would actually sometimes acquiesce to Israeli strikes on Iranian assets. And so they had a pretty strong working relationship. However, after the invasion of Ukraine and the closer coöperation with Iran, the Israelis mounted their concerns, and the Russians weren’t really open to that. And then, after October 7th, it became far worse because Russia barely even condemned the attack, but hosted Hamas delegations in Russia. And then, all the while, there were actually more aggressive moves in Syria, such as electronic jamming against Israel, that really led this relationship to sour. And I think what was surprising was, when Iran launched strikes in October of 2024 against Israel, Putin didn’t even bother calling Netanyahu. The Kremlin said that it had no intention to speak to the Israelis. However, with this round of strikes, almost immediately Putin tried to de-escalate and called both Netanyahu and the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to try to serve as a mediator. So it perhaps reflects how Russia thinks the situation might be quite grave.

Yeah, it is interesting that it soured, because I remember Netanyahu being basically non-aligned on Ukraine and praising Putin.

Yeah, and there is also the Jewish Russian diaspora, and the Jewish population within Russia. Putin kept the lid on antisemitism in Russia for a while. But, after October 7th, it changed.

Going forward, if this conflict is going to be contained, what are you looking at in terms of alliances and regional dynamics?

It is really an issue between the U.S. and Iran and Israel right now. However, that could widen, and you could see Russia trying to exploit the situation as a form of horizontal escalation with the United States. The question is what form would that be? But Russia could be there as a spoiler. At the moment, they seem to be less willing to do that, because I do think that the Russians are concerned about the survival of the Iranian regime, but that could change. The Russians have shown quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to certain policies.

At the same time, I think that the regional dynamics are quite dire. There are still non-state actors that are aligned with Iran in Iraq, which could be activated and open up another front targeting U.S. bases, and there are the Houthis in Yemen. And then, of course, there’s always the Gulf countries that are in the middle of this, and Iran has thus far been clear in signalling to them and keeping communications open, but that could also deteriorate. One thing that I am also quite concerned about is Iran’s thinking on the nuclear issue. We now know that Iran has moved or diverted some of its highly enriched uranium or perhaps some of its centrifuge components from the Fordow site that was bombed by America. It is all quite murky, but the situation doesn’t look incredible at the moment. ♦

Eliot Cohen, a contributing writer atThe Atlantic, is a military historian and the founder of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Cohen has written numerous books on military history and strategy, but is perhaps best known for his passionate support of the American invasion of Iraq, which he argued in favor of extensively, both in the late nineteen-nineties, when he was a member of the Project for the New American Century think tank, along with Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz, and after the 9/11 attacks. In the later years of the George W. Bush Administration, Cohen served in the State Department under Condoleezza Rice. Since then, he has become a so-called Never Trump conservative, regularly attacking the President while continuing to argue for a hawkish foreign policy.

Before President Donald Trump’s order to strike Iran last weekend, Cohen published apieceinThe Atlanticpushing for American involvement, and applauding the fact that Trump seemed to be moving toward a military attack. “Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp,” Cohen wrote. Cohen followed this piece with another article, which ran inThe Atlanticon Sunday, after the strike, titled “Trump Got This One Right.” He explained, “Trump got this one right, doing what his predecessors lacked the intestinal fortitude (or, to be fair, the promising opportunity) to do. He spoke with the brutal clarity needed in dealing with a cruel and dangerous regime.”

I recently spoke by phone with Cohen about his case for American military action, and his history of support for a proactive American role in the Middle East. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed his skepticism about an American intelligence assessment saying that Trump’s strike only set the Iranian nuclear program back by a matter of months, his post-October 7th trip to the Gaza Strip, and the lessons he did and didn’t take from the war in Iraq.

What have you made of how Trump has handled Iran over the past week, from the strike to the push for a ceasefire?

I was in favor of the strike, and I give him credit. As you know, I’ve been about as ferocious a critic of him as one can be. I think I may have been the original Never Trumper, but I think on this one he did the right thing, because this has been a problem brewing for a very long time, and no Administration, including the one I was part of, was really able to deal with it. He seized an opportunity. In terms of damage assessments, my feeling about that, for a whole bunch of reasons, is that it is way too early to tell. But the strike was actually done remarkably well. Trump being Trump, he immediately claimed credit for obliterating the nuclear program. We don’t know that. And he has claimed credit for bringing peace, which I very much doubt. But many of us, including close friends, loathe the guy, and it’s made it impossible for them to recognize a good decision and a desirable outcome.

You said that other Administrations hadn’t been able to “deal with” this problem. Do you feel like Trump has dealt with the problem?

I think he’s done much more than other Administrations. We don’t know how much damage has been done by the American strikes, but there was damage done by the Israelis in their covert action, their air strikes, and the American strikes. What I think people have missed is that he has really set a precedent for the use of American military power to go after the Iranian nuclear program. It’s really important. We have tried sanctions and negotiations, and they may have, to some extent, slowed the program, but I think it’s very clear that the Iranians were pressing on.

What did you make ofTulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, saying in March that the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had not authorized going forward with producing a bomb, and that American spy agencies agreed with that conclusion?

What I make of it is the same thing that I made of her statements that Bashar al-Assad was not such a bad guy. She’s a nut case who has no particular grasp on the realities of the situation. She is one of a number of people who never should have been appointed to that position. If [C.I.A. director] John Ratcliffe had said that, I would have taken it more seriously, because he’s not a nut case.

We don’t have any reason to believe that she was lying about what the American intelligence community broadly believed, correct?

We don’t have any reason to believe that she was [telling the truth]. And, by the way, the American intelligence community has a pretty mixed track record on this. Intelligence is always difficult. Secondly, on this one, they have an uneven record. Thirdly, the Israelis have had a much better record than we have and they’re motivated because the Iranians want to exterminate them. So between the weirdness and unreliability of Tulsi Gabbard on the one hand and our intelligence community’s record on the other, I don’t take anything she says seriously.

I was only saying that we don’t have any reason to think that the intelligence community had reached a different conclusion.

We don’t know whether she was accurately rendering what people were saying. We don’t know that it was actually a consensus position. [On June 19th, the Timesreportedthat it remains the consensus position of the intelligence community that Iran has not yet decided whether to pursue the manufacture of nuclear bombs; senior officials also told the newspaper that Iran was likely to move toward it if the United States attacked.] It would be a big mistake to think that the top-level judgments are not made with an eye to what you think the political leadership may do that you like or dislike. That was the experience I had in government. So, you know, the intelligence world is murky. It’s a murky world. There’s some outstanding people there and there are other people who have political views and act on them.

You just said that you weren’t sure how much damage was done by the American strikes on Saturday. Youalso wrote, on Sunday, “For some period—five years, maybe 10—Iran will not have a nuclear option.” Did you have a reason to use those numbers, or were you just speculating? TheTimesand other outlets recentlyreported, based on a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report, that the strike seems to have only set the program back by a “few months.”

That was a preliminary D.I.A. assessment which is not shared by the Israelis. If you look at the Israeli press, you’ll see that is not the Israeli view. [After Trump began an extraordinary attack on the media for reporting on the D.I.A. assessment, and defended his claim that the Iranian nuclear sites had been “obliterated,” Ratcliffe released an assessment saying that the American strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program. The Times also reported, on Wednesday, that, according to U.S. government officials, “should Iran decide to move quickly to get a bomb, it is unlikely to use the facilities struck in the American attack but probably has much of the raw materials and know-how needed to continue.”]

I ran the Air Force’s study of the first Gulf War. And even like six months or a year later, we were still arguing about the bomb-damage assessments. It’s a very difficult task. So it is too soon to know exactly what the result of the Fordo strikes in particular were.

That’s why I was surprised by the “five years, maybe 10” thing.

My judgment on that is based on the fact that the issue is not the American strikes; it’s the Israeliandthe American strikes.

I wasn’t sure if the five or ten years was from an intelligence assessment or—

It’s good to have the best-informed speculation.

You recentlywrote, “[Trump] understands that a different kind of Iran—if not a democratic one, then a tamed dictatorship—would be open for deals, and he would gladly make them. He has engaged more with the Persian Gulf in recent years than with any other part of the world, and sees opportunities there. He believes that the price would be low, and although the Israelis have done the heavy lifting, he will get the credit from them and others for the finishing touches.” What did you mean?

He clearly likes going to the Middle East. He likes the Persian Gulf. I think it’s partly because he likes the deference, the vast quantities of things like gold all over the place, huge business deals, jetliners. Parts of it are grotesque. But, in any case, I think he does feel comfortable doing business with those people.

He’s a businessman of a certain type and a certain rather unsavory type. But, yeah, he is a businessman. He also probably sees this as his opportunity to get a Nobel Peace Prize, which he clearly thinks he deserves and desperately wants. But also, he has a feral instinct for weakness. And I think he understood much better than a lot of the commentators have understood that this is a weak state and it’s a weak regime. And he proved to be right. All this stuff about how these guys are going to unleash terror against Americans all over the Middle East and elsewhere—no, they shot one salvo of missiles at an empty base, after they forewarned us.

Yes, you recentlywrote, “The bottom line is that Iran’s leaders do not relish the idea of tackling the United States directly, and that is because they are not fools.” You alsowrote, “Israel’s current campaign is built around two realities often missed by so-called realists: first, that the Iranian government is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and cannot be deterred, bought off, or persuaded to do otherwise, and second, that Israel reasonably believes itself to be facing an existential threat.” Is there a contradiction here? At one level, you seem to say that the Iranians are scared and acting rationally, but also that they would risk extinction and death by trying to destroy Israel.

I wouldn’t accept your characterization of it. I think there are two things at play. One, as former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said, Israel’s a one-bomb country, which is very different from the United States. They could reasonably believe that with a couple of nuclear weapons they could basically destroy the state of Israel.

I have been over to Israel several times since October 7th, including getting a tour of the Gaza Strip.

Just Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. [The corridor is a strip of land near the Egyptian border.] One of the things that really struck me was some of the Hamas hardware that they picked up, a lot of it Iranian. One of the things the Israelis say is, “This isn’t just about us and the Palestinians. This is us and Iran.” The Iranians have talked about destroying the state of Israel. So I think the Israelis have every reason in the world to think it’s existential. And the Iranians could reasonably believe if they have nuclear weapons that that would give them some kind of umbrella under which they could do a lot of things, particularly to their neighbors.

Iran has done a lot of terrible things in the neighborhood. And having nuclear weapons might unleash their ability to do much more. I was focussed on whether they are a rational regime or one that is willing to risk extinction of their entire leadership just to destroy Israel. That was the tension.

I don’t think until this point they thought that they would be risking the extermination of their entire senior leadership.

Well, Israel does have nuclear weapons.

Hezbollah was able to fire loads and loads of rockets at Israel without getting a nuke in response. But I think we've got to remember the Iranians talk about Israel as the lesser Satan. We are the greater Satan and they are much more afraid of us.

You are someone who warned about Trump’s lawbreaking and his disrespect for the law. Is there no concern about someone like Trump just deciding that he can use the military whenever he wants, even without congressional authorization?

I’ve been saying he’s a terrible guy for a long time. But I am somebody who very much believes that you don’t let those kinds of sentiments, which I absolutely have and I still have, get in the way of your analytic judgments. The “evil” George W. Bush regime, of which I was part, actually twice got authorizations for the use of military force. They didn’t get a whole lot of credit for it, I might say.

And the sainted Barack Obama Administration, which launched an extended bombing campaign in Libya, did not get congressional authorization. And I don’t remember any of the columnists or journalists, let’s say, from the center to the left part of the spectrum, complaining about that. So I think that’s really an important point that people might want to think about to get to Trump. I think he genuinely does not like war, and I don’t know what, exactly, the reason is for that. I think he’s willing to use force up to a point. He really doesn’t like war. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a builder and he hates to see buildings get blown up.

You wrote apiecea couple of years ago called “Beware the False Prophets of War.” In it, you say, “Prognosticating about war is always a chancy business . . . But making all allowances for that, it is striking just how bad Western governments, commentators, and leaders have been over the past few decades at gauging not only what course wars might take but how they have gone as they have unfolded.” In the context of our conversation today, what did you mean here?

I will say what’s striking to me is how wrong journalists, pundits, experts have been here. And, you know, a complete lack of humility. If I were to look at the misjudgments that people have made about Iran, it has been about the nature of the regime that you’re dealing with and about its objectives and about what it’s trying to achieve. Those have been the biggest misjudgments.

In late 2001, less than two months after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, you praised what you called “the Afghan achievement” as “remarkable . . . to have radically altered the balance of power there, to have effectively destroyed the Taliban state.” You were also a famous supporter of the Iraq War, which didn’t turn out so well, but which you predicted would be easy to win. What do you think you got wrong, and what lessons have you learned in thinking about Iran today?

So, a couple of things. One is, if you read my book, “The Big Stick,” I have a whole chapter on that.

I read that chapter. I didn’t read the whole book, but after finishing the chapter I still wasn’t sure what the answer to my question was.

So the answer is this: I think in both cases the part I was right about was that the conventional campaign would be quite straightforward, as it was. I think where we failed in both parts, where I failed in both parts, was in overestimating what our institutions would be capable of in terms of actually waging those wars. The biggest issue was the Iraqi and Afghan National Security Forces. And there was the way we rotated forces in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, rotating entire divisions, which meant that basically you had no consistency in kind of the overall conduct of the campaign. If you look in Afghanistan, say, the divided chain of command, again, made no sense.

But, more broadly, these failures didn’t change your very hawkish outlook on foreign policy in the Middle East and just the whole way America conducts foreign policy, right?

I don’t know that it’s particularly hawkish.

The AfghanistanpieceI just quoted from was titled “World War IV.”

Honestly, do I still think that there is a huge problem with radical Islam? Yeah. They still do want to kill us. I mean, it’s—I don’t know if you follow the stuff that’s going on in Africa, for example, right now. You can’t tell me that that conflict is over. You have Islamic extremist groups in the Horn of Africa. And actually in Pakistan and Afghanistan and other places as well, and sometimes even within Europe and even the United States. What I try to do is describe the realities as they are. People don’t particularly like to hear them, but those are the realities. Part of the problem that you have here is everybody wants to scratch at the scab that is the Iraq War.

And, O.K., you can say Cohen’s a complete idiot.

I remember last year you wrote apiececalled “The Awfulness of War Can’t Be Avoided.” It does seem like one thing that you have tried to point out in your writing and just pointed out now is that, broadly speaking, people think that we can avoid these entanglements and we actually can’t.

That piece was about Israel continuing its war in Gaza, to be specific. But you were talking more broadly, too.

Unfortunately, that’s the world that we’re in, and people do want to avoid that.

You said earlier that you went to Gaza. What was your sense of the humanitarian situation there? It seems quite terrible.

So, honestly, the parts that I was in were just along the Philadelphi Corridor. The main impression is that the level of destruction is enormous. Actually, we saw columns of aid trucks going in. And you understand the problem. As long as you have Hamas gunmen around, they’re going to take charge of the food distribution and use it to control the population, but also to support their efforts.

I guess the Israelis have stopped that by cutting off the aid going in.

Well, the Israelis have not cut off all the food and aid. I mean, that’s not true.

If somebody has a good solution, I would love to hear it. I don’t know what a good solution is.

Well, you also have people in the Israeli government essentially implying that Palestinians deserve to starve and so on.

That’s appalling. My sentiments are more closely with those who think that you probably should have brought this thing to a conclusion a lot quicker. But having said that, I think what I would also recognize is there are no good solutions to this one. What the Israelis have tried to do, and you might say it’s a terrible solution, is create a new organization to distribute food. Is that a good idea or not? I honestly don’t know. [In the past month, since Israel helped set up anentitycalled the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, more than four hundred Palestinians have beenkilledat or near food and aid distribution sites.] I simply just don’t have enough information to be able to tell.

Yeah, you probably don’t want to just speculate on it.

I don’t want to speculate on it. ♦