What happens when two of the West's sharpest foreign policy minds sit down to debate the Iran war - and end up agreeing? Historian Niall Ferguson and former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass both concede the Islamic Republic deserves to fall, but warn that the war to topple it may be doing more damage to American interests than to Tehran's. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is already a bigger energy shock than Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Patriots are being expended in the Gulf while Kyiv begs for air defense. And the longer the war drags on, the stronger Moscow and Beijing's hand becomes. In a conversation with Coleman Hughes, Ferguson and Haass lay out exactly how narrow the path to success really is - and why the odds are stacked against it.
Coleman Hughes: Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guests today are Niall Ferguson and Richard Haass. Niall is a historian, author of many influential history books and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Richard Haass was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations for 20 years, prior to which he was the director of policy planning for the US State Department. In this episode, we talk about whether the war in Iran is in the US national interest, how and when the war should end, we talk about whether China is weakened or strengthened by the war, and we talk about how this war will affect the possibility of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. This was supposed to be a debate, but Niall and Richard ended up agreeing much more than either of them expected to, which was interesting. So without further ado, Niall Ferguson and Richard Haass.
Is this war in the American interest?
Coleman Hughes: Niall Ferguson and Richard Haass, thank you so much for doing my show. This is going to be a short one and I think we should get right to the point. It is what the American people are wondering right now. What do we make of the war with Iran? I think the first and most pressing question, and I will start with you, Niall: is this war in the American interest, and if so, how do you see it specifically as being in America's interest?
Niall Ferguson: There is now a kind of multiple choice quality to that question because the administration has offered multiple rationales, and I am just going to ignore all of those and tell you what I think is in American interests. It has been in American interests for some time that the Islamic Republic should cease to exist and be replaced by a more benign Iranian government. For a variety of reasons: the nuclear program, its ambition to have nuclear weapons, its rapid accumulation of ballistic missiles, its practice of sponsoring terrorist organizations in the region. It has been a recurrent source of pain and anguish for administrations since Jimmy Carter's. So the only argument that makes any sense is that it would be in American interests for there not to be an Islamic Republic but some other kind of government in Iran. That is it.
Coleman Hughes: Same question for you, Richard. Is this war in the American interest, and if so, how?
Richard Haass: One could agree a hundred percent with what Niall just said, and I happen to. I do not think the Islamic Republic has in any way been good for the people of Iran, for the people of the region, or for the world, or for the United States. So let us just posit that - we would all be better off without it. The problem is that foreign policy has to be feasible as well as desirable, and that ends and means and costs and benefits have to be aligned. So to me the question is not whether we would like to see something qualitatively and fundamentally different in power. Of course. The question is: does this war make that more likely? Are the likely costs and benefits of this war - do they make sense from the point of view of the United States? And in a word, I would say no.
Regime change vs. problem management
Coleman Hughes: Let us separate two potential rationales here. One is regime change and one is what I would call problem management. Regime change would be the idea that we are going to get a wholly new regime in Iran, something more friendly to US interests. And the second possibility is just that we are, as some Israeli put it with Hamas, mowing the lawn. We have a problem here that is going to be a long-run problem. Hostile regime seeking nuclear weapons, building out its ballistic missiles, and this is an opportunity to weaken that regime as a kind of problem management that we might have to go back and do again in five years. Niall, what do you make of those competing visions for what is happening here?
Niall Ferguson: I think the problem is that the United States said that it was in the business of regime alteration. I will use that term to distinguish it from regime change, because President Trump has not said he wants Iran to become a parliamentary democracy. He just wants new leadership. And the Venezuelan model was clearly what he had in mind. They got rid of Nicolas Maduro very easily, replaced him with Delcy Rodriguez, his number two, and Venezuela is under new management - the management hasn't really changed, but it reports to Washington. And I think that was President Trump's vision.
Richard is of course right that if this goes wrong, if the war drags on into next month and perhaps even beyond, then the economic costs to the American people will greatly outweigh the benefits of regime alteration. It will only prove to have been in American interests if the war ends within a matter of weeks, this month in March, and secondly, the regime that succeeds the regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is one other than a regime led by his son, Mini Me Khamenei. That won't be in American interests because that regime will be just as toxic and perhaps even more toxic than the one before.
So I think it is a little hard ex ante to know how this war turns out. If it is successful in being short and fundamentally changing the character of the Iranian government, that will be in American interests. If it drags on, you could create a major economic shock, and at that point the American public, which is already somewhat skeptical, is going to be in full revolt against the enterprise.
There is one other dimension that we need to talk about. It would be in American interests to have another emphatic demonstration of American might, even more emphatic than that which we saw in Venezuela, as a signal to the other bigger authoritarian powers that they should not mess with the United States. And I do think that some at least in the administration have thought in this way - a signal to Russia, a signal above all to China. It will not be in American interests if that doesn't work, if the Russians become net beneficiaries of this operation, which they currently look like being, and if the Chinese sit back and say, "Well, now that they've run down their missile stocks blowing up Iran, our strategic position in the Indo-Pacific is better than it was before." So these geopolitical dimensions, I think, are almost as risky as the economic ones.
What does success look like?
Coleman Hughes: Richard, I want to ask you a similar question. It sounds like Niall is saying essentially this war would only be a success if it's short, sweet, and ends in regime alteration, which is something short of regime change. Anything less than that would constitute probably a failure. Richard, what is your bar theoretically for success here? What outcome would lead you to say, okay, that was a success, and how likely do you think we are to achieve that?
Richard Haass: My bar for success is not regime alteration, simply because I get very uncomfortable with goals that I am not confident - if I were advising the president, I could walk into the Oval Office and say, "If you were to do X, Y, and Z, we would have that outcome," be it with diplomatic or economic tools, military tools. So I am working under the assumption that we do not have fundamental regime alteration. Whether it's a different Ayatollah, whether it's the Revolutionary Guards - I have this sense that Iran is going to be all too recognizable when this is done.
Niall's point - and it gets to your question too, Coleman - duration becomes critical here. Every day this goes on is a bad day for the United States, because we are up against diminishing returns militarily. Iran's ballistic missile force is reportedly much diminished. I don't think we can eliminate their drone capabilities. Their navy was never a serious issue. But every day that we are using up US munitions, every day US forces are parked in this part of the world, is a good day for Russia. It's a good day for China. I think it's a dangerous day, potentially a destructive day for the countries of the region. We will probably have more casualties on our side. To the extent the war is seen as going poorly, I worry about a new wave of isolationism and anti-American involvement in the world taking hold in this country.
So let me answer your question a different way. The definition of success can't be to solve the Iran problem. The definition of success is: how can we put a ceiling on it? Can we manage it? And I think we've done certain things usefully militarily, but I think at the end of the day we are still going to have to have a diplomatic dimension. It's great to say we want the war to be short and not to go on beyond a certain point. We can't control that. It takes one to start it; it's going to take three to end it. Let's just argue for a second we can persuade Israel to end it, however reluctant it is. The question is how we get Iran to end it.
And I think the great irony of this is that one way or another we may have to tacitly, implicitly, explicitly return to some of the very issues that Messrs. Kushner and Witkoff were talking to the Iranians about before this started. What, if anything, are they allowed in the nuclear realm? What, if anything, are we prepared to tolerate when it comes to drones or missiles or proxies? What are we prepared to do if we don't like it? What are we prepared to do to incentivize? Are there any circumstances under which we would ease sanctions? Essentially the very same agenda. And again, the good news is their military capabilities are for now much diminished. The bad news is we have had some of the costs of this conflict - strategic costs, economic costs, and human costs.
The case for prolonging the war
Coleman Hughes: Let me play devil's advocate, because it seems like you two largely agree. Is there a case to be made for prolonging the war on the grounds that we should try to weaken Iran as much as possible in this window of opportunity? We know the nature of the regime, we know at some point they have a plan to sprint towards a bomb at an opportune moment, and we don't want to wait for that moment. We want to do it on our terms. We don't want to do it at a moment when there's an imminent threat - that is actually not the moment you want to be doing it. At some level you want to be doing it at a moment it "doesn't make sense," when they're weakened, when we're stronger. And this is that moment. We should seize it, we should squeeze as much juice out of this lemon as we can, because they're weaker than we are.
Niall Ferguson: It's funny you mention juice. Sometimes that's a colloquial expression for gasoline. The reason this can't be a long war is that the United States economy and indeed the global economy simply can't cope with the Strait of Hormuz being closed for any significant period of time. The shock has already been quite a significant one to the world's supply of oil, as well as natural gas, not to mention fertilizer. If it's prolonged even for two more weeks, that is going to have a cascading effect through the global economy that will be felt quite swiftly by American consumers when they pull up at a gas station. So there isn't an option to continue this war into April. That of course was more or less admitted by President Trump yesterday in his press conference. He can't end it this week, he knows that. He needs to end it this month, because otherwise quite apart from the economic consequences, the political consequences for Republican candidates in the midterms will be bad.
And I want to stress the magnitude of the problem. This is a much bigger supply shock to the global energy market than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And that was a pretty big supply shock, which landed the Biden administration in deep trouble with 9% consumer price inflation by late summer of 2022. This is a bigger disruption to the global energy supply and it comes at a time when the world is less able to cope with it. In fact, if you can imagine this war being protracted, you start to get into the kind of shocks that we saw in 1973-74 or 1979 when the Iranian revolution occurred. There is no question in my mind that President Trump isn't going there.
And so the question that will have to be addressed - and this is Richard's key point - is: can the Islamic Republic, or any plausible Iranian leader, be induced to negotiate an end to the war? And if the answer to that is no, and so far it appears to be no, then there is going to be continued conflict. If there is continued conflict and the Iranian regime can still fire drones with a chance of hitting tankers, the Strait of Hormuz stays closed even if President Trump declares that the war is over. That's the strategic dilemma he has created for himself.
And the reason no previous president was willing to do this - George W. Bush was advised to do it and declined to do so - is the reasons that we are discussing. It was a monumentally risky thing to do for economic, political, and geopolitical reasons. And President Trump has a very high risk appetite. The reward is only going to be real if the war ends very soon, and I think it won't end unless there is regime alteration, because the current management isn't ready to negotiate.
Two paths to ending the war
Richard Haass: I agree with everything you said with one exception, your last point. There are only two ways I could see it ending soon. One is what you said - regime alteration: you have a leadership in Iran that basically says, "We need to consolidate authority, a longer more destructive war isn't good for Iran, we need to live to fight another day." The other is - and I don't have an answer to this, Niall, I'm just thinking out loud, always a dangerous thing probably to do while you're being recorded - is there a negotiated outcome, or an outcome of signaling? And I could imagine some version where we would signal to the Iranians that we will stop attacking you if you, for example, stop shooting drones at shipping or at your neighbors, some version of that, and we would get the Israelis to stop attacking them. A de facto standdown militarily. Or some negotiation where all those same issues are on the table, that we basically want to have an outcome that both sides can live with. Now I am not sure they are ready for that. And ironically enough, the more we push for it, the more they'll say, "Wow, these Americans want the war to end more than we do." It reminds me a little bit of the Viet Cong - they win by not losing.
Niall Ferguson: I think this is a really key point that you've just made, Richard. The current regime, son of Khamenei, is incentivized to keep the violence going because it maximizes the pain inflicted not only on the US but on its allies and friends in the region and the wider world. So I don't think they will be in any hurry to settle. They know that, for example, the Israeli Air Force can't maintain the recent tempo of sorties - that's just not physically possible. It gets harder and harder for the US over time. So I sense that the real cleft stick is: President Trump has a strong incentive to end the war soon; the Islamic Republic has the exact opposite incentive - to keep it going, maximize the pain, and make sure that if there are going to be negotiations, the position of the US has actually on net been weakened.
Richard Haass: We agree a hundred percent, and that's the irony of this. In a funny way, even though they've been much diminished militarily, they are objectively much weaker, so much about war in this case is going to be resilience and sustainability. Being a repressive system as opposed to a democratic system, their leadership, even though it's been decimated, might have slightly more flexibility or ability to sustain a war than ours. And again, it's part of the reason that I wish we hadn't gone down this path and the lack of thinking this through. When historians are ready to write about this - and it's too soon, we don't know if this is the second act of the play, the first act, the final act - but a lot of this, almost like the Iraq war, is about what were people thinking would happen after this began. And I think there will be a lot of grounds for Niall and other historians to look closely at this.
The case for optimism
Niall Ferguson: Where I think I am more optimistic than you, Richard, is that I think there is actually a decent chance that the regime is decapitated again, and that at some point there is in fact a regime alteration. Remember, the regime is hated. It has been hated by its population for some time. The protests that we saw in January, which led to the murder of between 30,000 and 40,000 Iranians, were I think one trigger for US action. We shouldn't forget what lay behind those protests: massive popular disenchantment with the regime, not just on ideological grounds - I think there is a secular tendency in the population - but also on economic grounds, because it has been a miserable time economically in Iran.
So it is not to my mind completely implausible that, A, the Israelis get the new Supreme Leader, and B, that at some point somebody is willing to play the part of Delcy Rodriguez and accept regime alteration. That's the critical thing about which one can't be certain, but I think I am probably slightly more optimistic than you about that.
The other point to remember is that although they will still have some drone launching capacity, I don't think they will have any ballistic missile launching capacity by - I'm going to say Friday. And that means that they'll be down to Shaheds with very disrupted command and control. They probably won't be able to fire real volleys, real swarms of drones. And so two things have been depleted: the number of people willing to continue this regime in its present form - that number is going down - and the number of weapons they have to fire - that also is going down.
Is this war really about China?
Coleman Hughes: Richard, I want to ask you about something Niall touched on about 10 minutes ago. Many analysts have suggested that this war, from the US perspective, is really about China. It's only about Iran insofar as Iran is a client of China, and looking forward to a potential conflict over Taiwan, the Trump administration is trying to defang Iran as a strategic way of weakening China in that future conflict. Do you buy this theory, and does it make sense?
Richard Haass: Just two ways to answer your question. One is: are there people who might be thinking this way? You never know what people are thinking. I would simply say anyone who is thinking this way who has influence over the president ought to be fired. I find this preposterous, for many reasons.
One is this war has been good for China. The idea that the United States is depleting munitions once again - for at least the third time in a major way - US forces are focused on the greater Middle East rather than on Europe or the Indo-Pacific. This entire war is at odds with even this administration's national security strategy. China has been quite disciplined, as it often is, about reducing its vulnerability to oil shutoffs. Its strategic petroleum reserve is quite impressive. The global oil market, particularly if the straits were open again, supply is quite abundant. There are a lot of countries, including the Saudis and others, that could help. So I don't sense that China is feeling the heat, and if I were Xi Jinping, I would be quite comfortable with a United States that was once again strategically preoccupied with this theater of the world.
My guess is, assuming President Trump's visit goes ahead to China later this month at the end of March, the Chinese are going to take his measure to see even apart from this what he is willing to put on the table in terms of the trade and economic relationship, and what they might be able to get geopolitically in exchange. And then this war gives them a little bit of leverage, because we are consumed by it - this war is consuming what we might otherwise have to provide Taiwan or bring to bear ourselves. So again, the idea that somehow this war is strategically bad for China - it's just the contrary.
And I also think, by the way, it's even better for Russia, because of the higher energy prices, the easing of sanctions, and all these weapons systems which Ukraine desperately needs. Every day that Patriots are being used in this conflict - if I were President Zelensky, particularly since he is offering to help us in dealing with drones, reportedly an offer we spurned, and meanwhile Russia is helping our enemy - it is quite remarkable how wrong we have gotten the US-Russia-Ukraine triangle.
Niall Ferguson: To be fair, I don't think anybody in the administration has said that it's about China; in fact, they've explicitly denied that. And I think the administration is actually hoping for a good summit between President Xi and Trump. So this might actually belong in the realm of media speculation rather than strategic reality. Certainly the people who are responsible for the Indo-Pacific don't think that it's advantageous for us to deplete our already relatively small stock of certain categories of precision missiles.
I think what we don't know, and this is one of the great imponderables, is what President Xi is thinking at this point. Does he want to go down the detente path that President Trump signals that he's interested in? Or is there anybody in Beijing saying there's no better time than now to make a move against Taiwan? What would the United States do under those circumstances?
So the lesson for historians is that there are many unintended consequences in events such as this. The second, third, and fourth order consequences of a military action that disrupts a major trade artery, a choke point like the Strait of Hormuz, are almost incalculable. And it's a recurrent feature of history that strategic decisions get taken and then you find out that there was something you hadn't thought of. Nick Lambert's terrific book The Warlords, which I've been rereading, shows how it was the Black Sea straits, the Dardanelles, that the British government failed to see were crucial to the economic system in 1914. And so this is a quite familiar sequence of events, illustrating that it's the unintended consequences that often get you.
This is the Third Gulf War. They're always supposed to be short. The first one was - Desert Storm was short. Still had significant knock-on effects for the oil market and the economy. The second Gulf War lasted eight years; it certainly wasn't supposed to. But that was the unintended consequence of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think every president going all the way back to the 1970s who embarks on military action, and I think Richard will confirm this from his own experience, knows or should know that it's the unintended consequences that get you. And the duration of a war - well, it's always supposed to be short. It was supposed to be short in 1914. It was supposed to be short in 2003. President Putin thought his war in Ukraine was going to be short. It's now in its fifth year. Wars are remarkably easy to start, much harder to stop.
The Abraham Accords and the future of the Middle East
Coleman Hughes: Let me ask you both one question, and I'll go to you, Niall, first since you have to leave in a minute. The great hope for peace in the Middle East since Trump's first term has been Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and in general Arab nations joining the Abraham Accords. Recently we've been seeing a lot of reporting about Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis at odds over Yemen and Saudi pulling back from a potential warming of its relationship with Israel. How do you think this conflict will affect that game-theoretic challenge, Niall?
Niall Ferguson: One thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Middle East has been united as never before against Iran, because the Iranian strategy of attacking just about everybody means that more than a dozen countries have been affected by this war. What they are not likely to do, I think, is take military action against Iran, because that would mean taking military action alongside Israel, and I don't think that the Emiratis or the Saudis are ready to go there. But they've certainly lost friends and alienated people, the Iranians, in the last two weeks. And that is another reason not to be too deeply pessimistic.
Whatever tentative detente there was between the Saudi and Iranian regime isn't going to be revived anytime in the near future unless there is a radical regime change in Tehran. I think the Abraham Accords are not dead. But I think it will take a long time after this to resume the conversations that were happening between the Saudis and the Israelis back before October 7th, 2023. It's not dead, but it's going to be resting for quite some time after this.
Richard Haass: It's certainly going to be resting. For this Israeli government, this is basically good, because Israel is much more united politically in its opposition to Iran than it is on anything to do with Palestinians. And I simply don't see this Israeli government, certainly not in the run-up to the elections, making any significant moves in Gaza or the West Bank.
And unless the politics domestically in Saudi Arabia change fundamentally, my own sense is that this Saudi government - the Crown Prince just doesn't have the running room, doesn't have the popular political support. We like to think that authoritarians have a free hand. The answer is they don't. They still have to take into account certain types of public attitudes.
So my sense is this will stay on the back burner for the foreseeable future and possibly longer, because unless there's a real transformation in Israeli politics, I simply don't see the prerequisites for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front. I certainly don't see the prerequisites on the Palestinian side either in Gaza or the West Bank. It's not that this idea is going to die, but as Niall said, it's going to be resting. It's going to sit there for an awfully long time, and both sides will talk about circumstances having to evolve, but I simply don't see them evolving.
And if anything, the issue of Iran is going to take center stage. I think that's going to be the preoccupation of governments - assuming at some point we get to a post-war situation, what does it look like, and what is the nature of security in the region?
The other country I think it's going to be complicated for is the United States. A lot of the Gulf countries are none too pleased that we took this action without deep consultation with them. And I think it's going to be a very complicated situation depending upon what happens with Iran, and also what we do to try to repair some of these relationships. So my guess is this is not going to be a time where issues like the Abraham Accords are going to move to center stage.
Coleman Hughes: Thank you, Niall. Thank you, Richard.