William Burns, who served as CIA director until early 2025, has argued that the war launched against Iran five weeks ago was not driven by any imminent threat to the United States. Instead, it rested on two fundamental misreadings of the Iranian regime: an overestimation of how quickly it would collapse and an underestimation of how aggressively it would strike back.

Burns laid out his assessment in an interview with Foreign Affairs on April 1, "Hvylya" reports.

The former CIA chief said the rationale for war was partly about finishing the job after Iran's historic weakening following the 12-day war in June 2025, and partly about the perceived opportunity to push the regime over the edge. He compared the thinking to what he called "the deceptive analogy of the operation to snatch Maduro in Venezuela" - the assumption that someone inside the Iranian leadership would be ready to raise his hand and facilitate regime change.

Burns dismissed this logic. "This is a regime that is inept at many things like managing its economy, but it is designed to preserve itself and designed to repress its own people and designed to withstand even the decapitation of its senior leadership," he said. The regime's response, he argued, was "sadly entirely predictable" - it moved to regionalize and globalize the conflict because "it was animated by the view that it could absorb more military pain than the United States could absorb the economic and political pain."

The disruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and strikes against energy infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states followed exactly the pattern Burns said the intelligence community could have anticipated. "Wars are a lot easier to start than they are to finish, especially when you have only a hazy idea of where you think the finish line is," he said.

Burns described the current negotiating positions as having very wide gaps, with Iran seeking long-term security guarantees and leverage through its continued disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. What remains after the war, he said, is not regime change but "a change of personnel within the regime" that is weaker but also nastier, more radical, and less open to compromise.

"Hvylya" earlier examined why the Middle East's fundamental problems run deeper than Iran and why regime change alone will not solve them.