The military campaign against Iran is effectively won, but the political endgame remains dangerously uncertain. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has identified three possible outcomes for post-war Iran - and conceded that two of them would be disastrous for the region and for US interests.
Speaking on the GoodFellows panel at the Hoover Institution, McMaster shared his analysis with historian Niall Ferguson and economist John Cochrane, as reported by "Hvylya".
The first scenario: "a weakened Islamic Republic, a theocratic dictatorship that stays in power, with the IRGC running for their lives, operating as they are now out of schools and hospitals because all of their headquarters are getting blown up." The regime survives but in a degraded, hunted form.
The second: "there's a fissure, a fracture within the security apparatus, and then somebody emerges and says, 'Okay, enough of this,' contacts the United States and says, 'Hey, I'm your guy.'" McMaster expressed hope that the CIA "is working overtime to identify those people who can use existing security force capacity to transition away from the Islamic Republic into something else."
The third: "a devolution into some form of a civil war." McMaster called the first and third options "bad" and warned specifically against arming the Kurds - a move he said would "create deep anxiety among the Persian population" and undermine their existing enthusiasm for ending the Islamic Republic. "It's tough to do this remotely. You can't control it - you can influence it," he said.
Ferguson reinforced the concern by noting that the Venezuelan model Trump appears to be following does not translate to Iran. "There is a degree of ideological radicalism which is greater," he said, and warned that chaos in Iran "spills over into the Gulf" in ways that Venezuela's instability never could.
Also read: Bombs Don't Build Oppositions: Foreign Affairs Analyst Dismantles Trump's Iran Regime Change Logic