Annotations for Speakers: Michael Dennis

Thank you for having me.

Yeah. So we are now in day seven of this conflict. And as each day brings new developments, it, on the one hand, becomes clearer to see some of the challenges that all sides are going to face moving forward, but also it sort of reveals some of the strategies. And so, as you know, the campaign had started from the United States and Israel, airstrikes against Iranian air defense and naval systems and nuclear facilities, missile batteries, really degrading Iranian capabilities to achieve what the U.S. military often wants, which is air superiority and sort of superiority across domains. So I'm sure there's a lot happening sort of in the space and cyber domain as well, where domain dominance has not taken place, of course, is within the ground domain. And so as of right now, the U.S. and Israel are still hitting a series of targets across the country. Now, it's not just in Iran. As you know, there have been attacks from both sides outside of the country as well. And so sort of most prominently here, the United States, a naval vessel, a submarine for the first time since World War II, used a torpedo to sink an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka. Again, sort of a very interesting development in this conflict. Iran, for its part, has been sending out a series of missiles and one-layer attack drones to a number of countries in the region, largely hitting sort of economic targets, but also diplomatic posts as well, with the threat of more to come. And then the last sort of two developments that have happened, either yesterday or the day before, the U.S. had admitted to being in talks with some of the Kurdish factions within Iran and within the region, and for us to look to give them sort of not so much covert, but overt support to help weaken the regime. And then the second bit of information that just came out is that the Russians are sharing tactical and operational intelligence with the Iranian, basically giving them info on where U.S. warships and military personnel are stationed so that Iran can target them.

Yeah, one of the big challenges here is that the motivation for this attack and the sort of the trigger, right, the timing. Iran has been a threat of varying degrees for nearly 50 years. And so why now is a real puzzle. And that's something that we have to grapple with. And hopefully in the years ahead, future historians like yourself will grapple with that. But all evidence seems to suggest at this point that in light of the recent U.S. and Israeli attacks over the last couple of years against nuclear facilities, against prominent Iranian proxy forces like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, that essentially Iran as a regime, and then of course with, as you noted, popular, sort of the population here with these massive protests. I mean, there have been protests across the years against the regime in Tehran. None were ever as big as they were this past year. And the response and the slaughter of, I was reading it this morning, anywhere between 3,000 and some estimates put it at 30,000, which of course seems high, but protesters slaughtered. So all of those things in combination, I think, gave from the U.S. side, from the president's side, the perception that Iran was at its weakest, that it was ever going to be, and now was just a target of opportunity, a window of opportunity. And of course, as you noted, Israel has for a very long time pressed the United States to do more. So in some ways, it's kind of this perfect storm, moment.

Yeah, I think there's two parts, and I'll float towards the second one. I think first, it's really interesting that we're doing this out of sequencing, at least as far as we can see. And that's the thing, we don't have all the information and that won't come out. But typically, when it comes to things like covert action or unconventional warfare, this is what the U.S. Special Forces and what the U.S. intelligence community, the CIA can do, it's that you go and you work with local partners, you provide material support or lethal aid or training or funding, and there's all sorts of problems with that. But you basically do that as a way to put pressure on the regime, as a way to shape conditions, and then you sort of have more kinetic action. And now, it's sort of operating in reverse, which again, it's on the one hand, we have to be very careful not to be quick in our judgment. It's the same thing with respect to the larger issues of decapitation and regime change. External regime change has a terrible record. Again, usually the external force is seen as illegitimate and they're working with illegitimate local partners, and it just never really works out. And we saw that to a degree in some of the recent conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in. But in this case, sort of decapitation without ground troops, we have to be attentive to or open to the idea that maybe this would work. And if so, how, why, and under what conditions? Now, to the idea of managing for post-conflict, this too is something that we always want to be attentive to history, right? But of course, he who remembers the past can commit the opposite mistakes. When we look at events in Iraq and Afghanistan and what seems on the face of it, how could we not know some of these dynamics and some of the violence and some of the things that happened in the aftermath, insurgencies and civil wars and proxy wars, that was not for the lack of planning. There was extensive planning across the U.S. government for that, but it just shows how difficult it is, right, to wage wars. Wars, it is far easier to start wars than end them, right? And I was just saying this to someone the other day. It's like all wars end, but they rarely end as expected. And even short, decisive wars like this can often produce post-conflict environments that are bloodier than the war itself. And not only that, the termination of one war often becomes the beginning of another. And then in doing so, the mistake that so many people make is they sort of graft on these a priori grievances and things onto the post-conflict environment. But the post-conflict environment, as we saw in Iraq, as we saw in Afghanistan, that violence unfolds over a range of complex evolving motives that can be even sort of either directly or even indirectly related to the war.

Well, that's, again, the thing. The US and Israel have been successful at decapitating many of the senior Iranian leaders, right, from the Ayatollah down to sort of that top tier of leadership. But that is not the regime. And the regime itself, again, going all the way down to sort of sub-national municipal level, the regime is robust. You still have not just the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, you have their conventional military, the Artesh, you have what's called the Basij. These are sort of domestic kind of military forces. I mean, these folks are still ... They still have high capabilities. When it comes to resistance, one of the things that groups face are these typical challenges of coordination and collective action. And so here, thinking about, if the three of us were in Iran and we wanted to do something, how do we coordinate with the broader group of people that might want to do something? Technology is helping with that, but it also creates these vulnerabilities. Once we communicate, we're vulnerable. And of course, this has happened in Iran. But more broadly, the incentive structure is not for us to do something that is risky with an uncertain outcome that if someone else does it, we get to benefit from it. The incentive structure is to not do anything, to sit on the fence. And so when you talk about a resistance in Iran, you have to think about how are these populations going to overcome those central challenges. And there are more. There's something called sort of the GM squared guns, money, manpower. The idea is that in this type of environment, the state apparatus has the monopoly or the asymmetric comparative advantage on guns and money and manpower. And so from an insurgency perspective, you have to sort of secure those things. And it's a very, very difficult thing. And that's why most insurgencies fail right off the bat. Although in the ones that do become successful, conversely, the ones that are able to solve that problem tend to last on average about 10 to 12 years. So there are a lot of upfront sort of challenges that have to be made. The other side of this, of course, is, as I mentioned, the US has doctrine and dedicated forces to working with populations to help them overcome those challenges, to help them get the money and the guns and to give them the training. And that's where, again, we have to think analytically. When we talk about the quote unquote population in Iran, which population are we talking about? Once again, with the regime chain, I just want to say quickly, one of the big factors is you need to get regime defections to work. And we haven't seen that. But the other side is, again, what we saw in the news that I mentioned earlier. US is talking about supporting the Kurds, something that we've done for years and then withdrawn support and kind of left them in a fraught spot. But that's a different dynamic that what we're talking about here, this kind of unconventional warfare support to groups like the Kurds, or maybe even the Baluch, right, which is another ethnicity in Iran that's been fighting for independence for a number of years, and they are very capable militarily.

Yeah, I mean, that there is a great question. I mentioned the Kurds a moment ago. One of the things, despite our support to the Kurds over the years, and the Kurds, right, across whether you're talking about in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, in Syria, again, in all of these places, except for Turkey, we have supported the Kurds. But the Kurds in some places, like Iraq, have actually gotten a better deal not fighting for independence, but agreeing to regional autonomy. And so it's a great question to ask, what do these populations really want? Do they want regime overthrow, or do they want policy changes? And it seems that many of them do want some overthrow of the regime. But one of the other challenges that, again, if we go back to sort of history, it is extremely difficult analytically to gauge and to anticipate the very word that you used, will, right? Not just a word, it's a variable. The will to fight is often not just sort of revealed by conflict, but it's also sort of conditioned by conflict. And this is why during, most recently during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States sort of did not fully estimate the degree to which the government of Afghanistan had the will to persist after the US withdrawal in face of Taliban attacks. And then conversely, if just looking at Ukraine, here too, many in the US sort of, and even in the government structures, right? Not just talking about US public opinion, but many of the people that are tasked with knowing these things were really surprised that the Ukrainians not just sort of have lasted as long as they have, but even lasted outside of those original three days.

Yeah, I think, and that's a great point too. You know, what has happened over the last 50 years is in some ways, you know, kind of anomalous to much of that history. But I think the broader point that you would want to take away from that fact is just once again, going back to these post-conflict dynamics. And, you know, this is just an ever moving target. Today is again, the president, President Trump had said that, you know, well, yesterday he said that he wanted to determine who the next leader was. And then today he was talking about unconditional surrender. But in both of those instances, you are ignoring this central fact that you just described. Any sort of the greater, like the greater than an external power interferes in the domestic politics of a country, the greater to some degree that it can control those outcomes. But paradoxically, the greater that actor becomes involved, the greater the risk of instability because you are an external actor. And because for the United States, we have this history, right? Going back to 1953 and the election of Mosaddegh overthrown in a CIA coup. You know, so the US does not have a lot of legitimacy here as a particular actor, but more broadly, anytime you have these dynamics, and again, right? Under what conditions do things happen? When you have a highly nationalist population, right? With a long, rich history of proud people, it just makes it exceedingly difficult. And this is why external regime change has a terrible record for success.

Well, so here, that's another great question. And let me just say again, to take that step back, when it comes to long-term stability, that's the key word, long-term. When you look back at Iraq and Afghanistan, despite how long we were there, that was not the intent, right? The US military is optimized for decisive conventional combat. Yes, and some special operations missions, but it's about achieving that technological domain dominance, right? Own the air, own the land. But post-conflict stabilization takes political bargaining, institutional development, long-term legitimacy building. And just from our military to even our political system, right? US electoral cycles, incentivizing quick wins and visible progress and exit timelines. You need that decades-long commitment. You need the tolerance for ambiguity. You need institutional patience. That is why people point to, even though it's not exactly analogous, people point to post-World War II Germany and Japan as the exemplars of what successful post-conflict management could look like. So that being said, what could we do? I have to note that one of the things that we could have done prior to the last year in which the administration is defunded and dismantling things like Voice of America, things like the Radio Free series, which going back to the Cold War would publish the truth, right? Countering regime narratives in local languages. For me, this was a tremendous source of information. And for my own work with the Chechens, a lot of the Chechens, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marshal, Radio Freedom, I mean, this was a really valuable tool. And that's something we're not talking about here, our soft power levers, right? We have just shifted to a world, and people from the administration have said this, right? The iron law, what is it? The iron laws of power for Time Memorial, Stephen Miller said. But that's not really what has worked empirically. So when you ask, what would I do? I would say, you have to get that thing going. You have to get soft power moving. I think with respect to special forces and others, working with locals can bring great reward, right? They know the terrain. They have the local intelligence. But the challenge there is that they don't always share the same objectives beyond the most proximate. Both sides want to get rid of the regime or something like that. And what you see is a lot of times when the US or other actors have backed local groups, you tend to see that that makes conflicts more violent, more lethal. It makes them more protracted. So again, these are the things that in the policy world, it's often not the choice between good policy and bad. It's the least bad option. And when it comes to that least bad option, so things like supporting proxy groups, perhaps like the Kurds or the Baluch, that's going to give the United States some military and political advantage on the ground. But there are some real inherent latent risks. And not just latent, there could be some explicit ones like I described earlier that we should be very, very cautious and aware of.

That, again, is one of the really important questions. Again, by the very nature of our anointing these leaders, we have, by definition, made them in some ways illegitimate. I'm trying to think of what's the best way to get out of this. And it has to be somehow that the US just sets the conditions for the people to choose to select their own leader and to just kind of go with it from there. One of the things that's really sort of important to note too is when we look at these historical examples and think, what can we learn? What are generalizable insights? A lot has been said about how the US prosecuted the war in Afghanistan after 9-11, when they were then suddenly, small footprint, fine local actors you could work with, even though, yes, as you described, Karzai was incredibly problematic. We ignored the sort of tribal dynamics because Afghanistan was very, very heterogeneous. We ignored all of that and we seemed to have some surface level successes. When the US was thinking about the 2003 invasion, there are so many sort of memoirs and other stories that have come out where people had to tell senior leaders, Iraq is not Afghanistan. That was almost like the coffee cup, right? Hey, Iraq is not Afghanistan. And there, again, the ethnic breakdown was very, very different. Now, once again, talking about Iran, Iran is more ethnically homogenous. And on the one hand, you would think you would avoid all of that kind of potential for ethnic factionalization, but there are so many other fissure points, right? There are so many other ways in which society could either coalesce or come apart. And again, my mind automatically goes to beyond the leadership question that you asked that I'm not really giving a great answer for, which I think just in some ways, again, talks to there is no great option here. It's what's the least bad option. But even thinking about that, again, I mentioned this post-conflict sort of dynamic. One of the things that you need too are things like lustration courts and a reckoning for the crimes of the regime. And that's where, again, these cleavages that we see in conflicts, often it's not sort of the population versus the regime. That is one, but it's these very micro-level dynamics. This tribe doesn't like this tribe. This village doesn't like this village. This neighbor doesn't like this neighbor. And that too is part of the complexity, the mosaic of challenges that you find in post-conflict environments.

Right. You know, that to me, the first thing that comes to mind, as I said earlier, we should be open to the possibility that this ostensibly new way of fighting war, get away with the old pottery barn, right, from Colin Powell during the first and second Gulf Wars. When you break it, you own it, that you have a responsibility to manage post-conflict. Now people are saying that is gone, very publicly saying, you know, that is gone. And we have this new way of warfare. If that is the case, then what you've just described and what is potentially happening with the Ayatollah's son being possibly put forward and the president, not President Trump, being dismissive of that, that type of outcome, the outcome where we have encouraged the Iranian people to rise up, but given the still robust capabilities of the regime, if 30,000 are slaughtered this time, those types of conditions really put this strategy,the viability of this strategy to the test. Because to your very question, Jeremi, what do we do then? And from all indicators, I don't think, I don't see, I don't see that we have a very good plan for that. And even, you know, again, I think it was the, one of the German official, I think came to the White House the other day and came out saying exactly that. I don't see any sort of day after planning. So that puts us really, puts again, this strategy, this ostensibly new strategy to the test. To the question itself, if a leader were to come to power that we're not sort of hopeful with, you know, not happy with, here too, I think we're kind of at a crossroad moment. And I think there's a question of what should we do? And then there's a question of what is the most likely thing that would happen? Again, if that were to happen, the administration would be faced with either having to sort of escalate or to use that as an off ramp. And to basically say what I just said, yeah, it's not our preferred candidate, but it's better than before. And it just allows you to exit. So that's that side of it. But at the end of the day, I think again, if you take a long view, right, a crooked line from a distance looks straight. I think as long as local leaders are not sort of, right, acting and plotting in ways that threaten the sovereignty of your nation, like, you know, we're, we're a democracy. So you let the people have their, have their preferred leader.

Yeah, another great question. You know, in, so some of the classes I teach are, are, are on post-conflict. And I just taught this course in the fall, and we were talking about, like, you know, there's so many people in Washington at that point, we're not, you know, we're never going to do nation building again. We're never going to do these, these things again. And there was even a talk at UT with a very, with a former, I'm not going to name them, but a very senior US official. And now they're doing some consulting. And in response to a question, they said, you know, I'm going to tell you where we're telling, my company now is telling people to invest. It's the Middle East, because despite the October 7th attacks, in this person's estimation, the Middle East, because of some of the partnerships between Israel and the Gulf States, because of some of these other stabilization equilibrium that were sort of emerging, that it seemed like this was the place to invest. Liberalization was happening in Saudi Arabia, like all of these things. And it's just remarkable that we are in, you know, seven days later, we are in such a different world. You know, Iran is attacking from Azerbaijan, you know, to these Gulf states, economic targets. And, you know, for their part, I just want to say too, like the Gulf states, Qatar and the Emiratis and others, they are ready, you know, they are ready to kind of like end this right now. So there is some momentum to kind of off-ramp among some of these actors. But at this point, it just starts to go wider and wider and wider, right? The ripple effects, the kinetic ripple effects, have gone from the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka to Azerbaijan. And what I would hope is, one of the things that I teach my students is, right, like, if you're proposing policies like this, you have to think about the unintended consequences. If you do this, what might happen? How? Why? Under what conditions? And this is very time and labor-intensive, but you need to kind of go around the map. So if the US and Israel are to start this, how does this matter for Iran, for India, for Sri Lanka, right? For Iran, you have to go through that. All of this to say, we are at a really fraught moment, and you know, things can settle down quickly. But that's not what appears to be happening right now, and not in the near term, to be sure. Again, there are sort of some ways in which this could sort of, you know, the US and Israel with respect to military operations, and we didn't even talk about that, Israel sort of expanding strikes into southern Lebanon, which has been going on for decades. You know, we can off-ramp, but then what? You know, then what? I just mentioned Lebanon, Lebanon is still feeling the effects of the civil war in the 1980s. I mean, we have destroyed so much infrastructure, and you know, it's the social rebuilding, the psychological rebuilding. You know, again, I work with the Chechens, those wars are 20 years old now, and those people still feel the scars of war.

Thank you for having me.