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A
This is a bonus episode of history as it happens. It's March 18, 2026, nearly three weeks into a war now escalating out of control. It is obvious that things are not going how President Trump and his national security team believed they would. Regime change or regime collapse or transition to a more accommodating leader in Tehran. None of it has happened, although Israel continues to assassinate high ranking officials, including Iran's de facto leader and just today its intelligence minister. Yesterday, President Trump admitted, although he did not use these words, that he was clueless about potential consequences.
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B
I heard they were sending missiles to uae. I said, that's strange. You know, UAE is like the banker for Iran. They're like the banker. Qatar, their neighbors, they got along okay. Saudi Arabia, all of a sudden, Kuwait. Kuwait is getting hit. Bahrain is getting. All these countries are getting hit. There was no expert that would say that was going to happen.
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A
So there is a deeper problem here. Neither the president nor his most important advisors really understood how the Iranian regime works, how it functions day to day. The layers of decision making, the nodes of power that have enabled it to survive three weeks of incessant bombing and assassination. Unintended consequences were therefore inevitable. And an even more hardline, uncompromising, belligerent regime could now be calling the shots in Tehran. Vali Nasser is a professor of international affairs and Middle east studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and he is the author of Iran's Grand A Political History. Vali Nasser, welcome to the podcast.
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C
It's great to be with you. Thank you.
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A
So let's begin with errors in judgment, misperceptions, mistakes on the Trump administration's part. In your view, what were its most significant oversights or errors there?
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C
I think the Trump administration overestimated how weakened the Iranian state was, particularly after the June 2025 war, and assume that if the Supreme Leader was removed, that the system either would quickly change direction or it would collapse very quickly. And so it was surprised by the fact that the system neither changed direction nor did it fall very quickly and in fact was able to mount its counter attack by targeting global energy supplies, targeting American bases in the Gulf, that it was able to sustain itself for third week into the war.
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A
It doesn't seem like anyone in the administration truly understood just how the regime functions. Would you agree with that?
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C
Yes, and I think it goes more than that, because I think when the President says that he was taken by surprise that Iran attacked the Gulf countries,
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B
there was no expert that would say that was going to happen. It's Not a question of like, gee, should you have known? And if we did know, big deal. I mean, we have to do what we have to do.
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C
When Iran had been very explicitly saying that it would do exactly that, and in plenty of private meetings with Gulf leaders, it had said that it would do exactly that. It begged the question that whether even the President was getting briefed with the right intelligence and information.
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A
Another factor here that makes it hard to discern truth from lies is all the bluster that comes from the administration. Iran was about to attack us. Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon. They're about to do this, they're about to do that. Death to America. So my question here is, was Iran strong or was Iran weak? It's hard to say. Yes, Iran had all these missiles, but at the same time, as soon as the war starts, it loses control of its airspace and the number of missiles it's firing each day has dwindled down to the dozens instead of in the hundreds.
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C
The shifting reasons for the war was largely because I think the President thought the war would be very quick and clean, that he didn't really need to dwell on explaining a reason why Iran was an imminent threat to go through the whole process of building consensus around the war. And then when the war ended up being messier than he anticipated, very quickly that they had to come up with reasons as to why in February 2026, the United States embarked on a war that could be so costly and so unpredictable and risky. And so they shifted from the fact that it was imminently trying to build nuclear weapons or its ballistic missiles were going to hit the United States, or in fact, it's a payback for 47 years of Iranian misdeeds and what they did in Iraq and all of that. It's a war that was started for other reasons. And then when the war demanded justification, they had to come up with justifications on the go. Iran was greatly weakened as a consequence of what happened during the Gaza war. The collapse of Hezbollah, the loss of Syria, those were Iran's real deterrences, more than air defense systems. And Israel, of course, saw an opportunity in what it saw in a weekend Iran to finish Iran off. And perhaps President Trump also saw an opportunity to score something big here. In other words, he's the president who solved a 47 year old Iran problem that all the other presidents had failed. And he brought Iran in from the cold in a way. So I think for President Trump, the objective was much more personal than national security, although then they tried to couch it in national security terms, Iran was weakened. But the weakness is not black and white. It's not that you're either absolutely strong, you're absolutely weak. Iran is clearly stronger than either Israel or the United States anticipated. Otherwise, we would not be in a third week of war with the United States threatening escalation like we need to now put Marines in play in capturing Kharg island or for them to capture Iran's nuclear material. All of which suggests to you that Iran clearly has been much stronger than they anticipated. As we're speaking, Iran yet has not surrendered, has not collapsed, has not broken up. It keeps shooting missiles at Israel, drones and missiles at U.S. bases. And it is capable for now, to put a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz and restrict the supply of oil and other material that goes through the Gulf onto the international markets.
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A
Well, I would agree that the initial aim here, at least on the part of the Trump administration, was regime change. Maybe the Israelis had a different aim. It's hard to know where the interests of the two countries converge or diverge. But obviously regime change is not happening. So now it looks like the goal is just to wreak as much destruction and devastation as possible until, well, you know, that doesn't create a political outcome.
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C
The goal of Israel may have been regime change or state collapse, depending on that spectrum. The goal of President Trump, particularly the fact that he thought it would be a short war, was more regime transition, something like Venezuela. You know, it's the same regime.
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A
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