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- [00:00]
Hal Brand
He doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about second and third order consequences.
- [00:12]
Eric Edelman
Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller center of Public affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, non resident fellow at the Miller Center, Bulwark contributor. My partner in all things strategia, Elliot Cohen, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing writer to the Atlantic, is trekking somewhere in Western Canada right now. We do have a very special guest who I'll get to in a minute, but before we bring him on, I do want to get into the jackassery of the week. It's a very target rich environment. I thought briefly about providing the award to Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant for finding a workaround against the law that prevents any living person from being on US Currency. Apparently the Secretary of Treasury doesn't think that applies to coins. So we will have a dollar coin with Donald Trump's visage on it shortly. I thought about President Trump's own 180 on a 20% toll of shipping coming through the Strait of Hormuz, which of course has now been picked up immediately by the Iranians, who are trying to point out that they will be much more reasonable masters of the strait if allowed to control it and will charge much less than the President who's now reversed himself. But I'm afraid the frequent winner of this award wins again this week, and that is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who in the midst of everything we have going on with Warren in the Middle east and ongoing war in Europe, the Department of Defense not completely funded. The most pressing issue that he had to devote his attention to was the danger of middle aged troops in the United States having low testosterone levels and having everybody tested for testosterone and providing the option for hormone replacement therapy for that. I mean, this is a profoundly unserious person, although he's wreaking serious damage on an important institution. I mean, on the more serious side, he's once again blocked the Navy promotion list, taking off people of color and women from the list. So the damage just continues. That's the Jack Astri for the week. But to turn to more uplifting matters, I have one of our most frequent, actually our most frequent guests over the five years of Shield of the Republic. Professor Hal Brand's the Kissinger professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's been a guest frequently. He's a prolific author, and we have a lot to talk about. Hal, welcome back to Shield of the Republic.
- [03:04]
Hal Brand
Thanks for having me, Eric. It's always a pleasure to chat with you.
- [03:07]
Eric Edelman
So let's start. Both of us are historians by trade, and I'm inductive by nature. So let's start with, if we could, with your recent column in Bloomberg about the ongoing conflict in Iran, which has been flaring up again even since you wrote your piece. It was a terrific piece that made a powerful argument. I thought that mere material appurtenances of power are not necessarily determinative in conflict, and that strategy is crucial. And you indict the administration for essentially having no strategy in Iran. Could you lay out the argument for our listeners and viewers?
- [03:55]
Hal Brand
A few years ago I had the chance to be the editor of a book called the New Makers of Modern Strategy, which is basically the third edition of kind of the Bible of American Strategic Studies. And one of the contributors was Sir Lawrence Friedman, who had written a pretty hefty tome on strategy himself, where he made the point that strategy is most interesting when it produces results that are different than the going in balance of power would suggest. And to me, the US Iran war was a classic example of that. There's no question about the power differential between the US Israeli coalition on the one hand and then Iran and isolated rogue regime on the other. And there's no question that operationally speaking, the US And Israel got the better of the fight with Iran. And it wasn't even close. You know, the US And Israeli air forces basically managed to take control of Iran's skies relatively early in the conflict. They were able to more or less bomb what they wanted. They inflicted severe blows on Iran's military, on its industrial base, on its economy, and so on and so forth. And yet, if you were to judge by the status quo today, July 16, or certainly by the now defunct MOU that was signed last month, the US Lost the war. And the US Lost the war in the sense that it was not able to achieve its most important strategic objectives. It wasn't able to topple the Iranian regime, which was pretty close to a stated war aim, if not explicitly a stated war aim. It degraded Iran's military capabilities. But the war demonstrated that Iran was actually able to cause far more damage in the region than the U.S. and its friends had anticipated. And of course, Iran was able to take and hold control of the Strait of Hormuz, thereby administering a shock to the global economy and essentially forcing the Trump administration to make peace on terms that were quite favorable to Tehran. Now, you Want to add sort of the caveat here, which is that the war isn't over. It has kicked off again over the past week or so, and we don't know what is coming still. But just based on what has happened so far, you have an outcome that's far more favorable to Iran than you would have expected when the bombing started on February 28 and the regime was decapitated. And it very much appeared to be on its back foot. And the argument is that that owed primarily to failures of strategy on the American side and successes of strategy on the Iranian side. Just briefly, the US Bet everything on sort of a short, brilliant war that would produce a rapid Iranian collapse or capitulation. It had very little plan for what would happen after that. It did not consider second order consequences and worst case scenarios, like the idea that Iran would be able to inflict a lot of pain on the neighborhood and close the Strait of Hormuz. Even though that's a scenario that US Planners had worried about for decades, it did not build a political or diplomatic consensus in favor of the war. And that became more costly as the economic price of the war started to mount. And in general, the Trump administration just failed to match the ends that it was seeking to the means that it was willing to commit. The administration embraced wildly maximalist aims, namely the replacement of the regime or the crippling of the regime in Iran, but then was never willing to commit the military or other resources that would have been necessary to bring that about, because that would have been a far bigger, bloodier, costlier military operation than the Trump administration was willing to withstand. On the other side of it, the Iranians did fairly well. They made lots of mistakes, and we can go into that, but basically they accomplished two things. They figured out how to weaponize asymmetric advantages vis a vis the United States geography of the Strait of Hormuz being perhaps the best example of that. And I think they basically understood Trump better than Trump understood them. And they understood that if they could protract their retaliation, if they could continue to inflict costs on the US and global economy, Trump would ultimately lose stomach for a fight that was going to be painful for him economically and politically. And again, as of mid June into early July, that judgment was correct. We'll see where things go from here now that the fighting has kicked off once again.
- [08:46]
Eric Edelman
Yeah, and you make the point in your piece, which something Elliot and I have talked about as well, that the Iranians are perfectly capable of overplaying their hand. And you also make the point that you know, when the shooting stops, you know, may take a while or maybe kind of delayed reaction inside Iran, which has enormous problems to manage, that could, you know, bring about political or social change in Iran. We just, we just don't know. All very fair. You just made the, you know, point that I wanted to draw you out on. You cite this as a. On the Trump administration's part is a failure of strategic empathy, an inability to really put yourself in the adversary's position, have a sense of what they might do. And my sense is this just compounded all the other deficiencies of strategy that you mentioned. The short war illusion, the failure to think through what could go wrong and what might go wrong, the lack of a process really to even do that. But without being able to think about how it's an iterative process, the enemy gets a vote, as you know. And the administration just seemed incapable, I would argue, either in its conduct of the war or in its conduct of diplomacy. Because one could make the same argument about the MoU, that looking at the language on the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, you and I think looking at that would immediately say this is a capitulation to the Iranians and it allows them to control the strait. So it's not exactly a surprise, I guess, that once this went into effect that the Iranians would think they get to control the Strait, which turns out to be something that Trump finds unacceptable.
- [10:42]
Hal Brand
Just to pick up on your point about strategic empathy, I think this is exactly right. And the example that I mentioned in the piece is all this reporting indicating that Trump and Hegseth and others were just shocked that the Iranians responded in the way that they did by going after energy infrastructure, by really inflicting a lot of pain on the uae, by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Because their reference point was, well, we hit them back in June 2025, and they settled for this performative missile launch at a US Military base in the region, which was easily defended, and so on and so forth. So they expected that that would be the style of the Iranian response once again, apparently not realizing that once the US And Israel began the war by successfully targeting so many high level Iranian leaders, including the Supreme Leader, that that would turn this into an existential crisis for the regime and the regime would lose any incentive not to close the street, any incentive not to do the things that it would only do as sort of last ditch survival strategies. And so again, it's just sort of a story of incoherence with a US Administration that does not seem Particularly capable of relating sort of the tactical moves in the conflict to the larger strategic vision of what it's trying to achieve. And I think a lot of that does flow back to this issue of deficient process, where, again, based on what we know, a lot of decisions about Iran were made in a very close circle of advisors. Trump actually did some sort of. Some theater internally at a certain point to try to disguise the fact that he had already made the decision to attack. But what that means is that there's less opportunity to stress, test assumptions, to vet judgments that may be mistaken. And thus you get an administration that is surprised by things that US Planners in government, in think tanks, pundits, had literally been predicting and worried about for decades.
- [12:56]
Eric Edelman
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, too, I think a combination of, you know, the short war illusion and the strategic empathy is evident in the clear, apparent view that Trump had going into this, which is that this would be just like what he did in Venezuela with Maduro, that sort of a quick in and out in a theater very close to home, where we completely control everything in the Caribbean with a kind of kleptocratic regime that doesn't. Has an ideology, but it's not a religious ideology to begin with, that you could replicate this with Iran, and that it would lead to exactly the same result when it was apples and oranges.
- [13:46]
Hal Brand
I think we are likely to look back on January 3, 2026, as the turning point in Trump's foreign policy, and perhaps not in a good way. Venezuela was a big achievement in strategic terms. It was, you know, this dramatic military raid that succeeded, perhaps narrowly succeeded, but still succeeded without any US Combat casualties, managed to pluck Maduro basically out of his bed in the middle of the night and bring him to Manhattan for. For trial. And also succeeded strategically in a way that I'm not sure is fully appreciated now in essentially turning Venezuela into a vassal state run by Marco Rubio from. From Washington. And people can debate whether they think that is sort of morally or legally a good thing, but just in terms of reorienting that country strategically, it was quite an achievement, but I think it created a little bit of a strategic sugar high in Washington, and it actually, it convinced Trump that there were very few things that American power and his own daring could not achieve. And it led in quick succession to the two biggest errors of Trump's presidency. The first was going into high gear on Greenland, which happened just a few days after the Maduro raid and ultimately ended in a US Climb down. But not after. Not until it had left really deep scars on the NATO alliance to a degree that I think most Americans don't actually appreciate. And then second, informed Trump's decision to start talking very tough toward the Iranian regime when they were murdering protesters in early January 2026 in a way that set in motion the chain of events that ultimately led to the war that began on February 28th. And so you have these two misfires in Trump's foreign policy that I think trace back to the confidence he felt coming out of a clear success story. I do want to. I've been being very critical of the administration here, and the administration deserves it. But I do want to flag one thing that I think is important to keep in mind, which you mentioned earlier, which is that in the Iran case in particular, the Iranians can still screw this up, and they may be in the process of screwing this up. And in my view, the MOU was so favorable to Iran that if Iran had just sort of kept that bargain intact and played for time, the US Was going to get tired of having a super heavy naval and military presence in and around the Persian Gulf indefinitely. You would have to rebalance other theaters at some point, and then Iran would have had all of the leverage. And it could have periodically taken shots at ships and gotten a lot of the benefits from control of Hormuz. But the Iranians reacted very strongly when the US Tried to open the Omani channel through the Strait of Hormuz, I think fearing that they would lose some of their leverage if they did not. And they pushed it so hard that now we're back in a pretty significant shooting war. It is not at all predetermined how that's going to come out. I think it's still a pretty tough scenario for the United States, to be candid, in part because energy stockpiles are so much lower now than they were when the first war began back at the end of February. And that puts a clock on the conflict that may not play to Trump's advantage. But if the Iranians were to overplay their hand, as in some ways they may have, it would not be the first time that success in one context has led to overconfidence or hubris. Even. That does you in the next time around.
- [17:46]
Eric Edelman
Yeah, I would argue that in both cases, it's kind of a strategic moral hazard. Right. You know, a success somewhere leads you to think success is inevitable, you know, down the road and leads to greater acceptance of risk when maybe it's not warranted. I want to tie this section up before we move on to another terrific essay that you and Michael Beckley have written. You talk about the president being not just a strategic but anti strategic, which I think is a very good description here. Could you talk just a little bit about that before we turn ourselves to larger geopolitical issues?
- [18:27]
Hal Brand
Trump is not a leader who engages systematically in what we would think of as the classic tasks of strategy. He does not like long term planning. He doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about second and third order consequences of actions. He doesn't systematically assess trade offs between particular issues. He's a gut player. He operates on instinct. He'll do something and then sort of see if it works and if it works great, and if it doesn't, then he will reverse course. And he relies a lot on just superior US Powers to help him get his way. And he had a number of successes with that in his first year in office. And that approach can work fairly well when you're dealing with a totally outmatched adversary like the Maduro government in Venezuela or dependent actors like US Allies and you can kind of shove them around a little bit, but it doesn't work so well when you're dealing with a more dug in tenacious adversary that is capable of putting together an effective strategy of its own. And that's exactly what Trump ran into in the second Iran war of his presidency. And so for a long time, Trump's freewheeling style hadn't really cost him because he was mostly punching down against weaker adversaries because he was working in context where the price wasn't that high. But I think this was the case that really exposed the limitations of that approach.
- [20:16]
Eric Edelman
Couldn't agree more. Let's turn to your recent article in the current issue of Foreign affairs with Michael Beckley, which is called Heartland vs. Rimland. We had you on when your book Eurasian Century came out, which was an effort to resuscitate a lot of geopolitical thinking, a lot of which originates at the turn of the 20th century and the middle of the 20th century. Could you talk a little bit for our audience about the origins of some of these concepts of heartland and rimland and how you see it playing out now in this new post unipolar period that we've entered the heartland.
- [21:06]
Hal Brand
Remlin dichotomy comes mainly out of the writings of two early 20th century geopolitical thinkers, Halford Mackinder, a Brit, and Nicholas Spykman, a Dutch American sociologist by training who got into geopolitics in the run up of to World War II and essentially just to kind of condense the story a little bit, when we talk about the heartland, we're basically talking about Russia, Central Asia, and then some of the areas immediately contiguous to that. And then the Rimland is basically the eastern and western flanks of Eurasia, and then the island nations that are located off the coasts. And Mackinder and Spikeman argued with each other, and occasionally in Mackinder's case, with himself, over whether the primary danger to global order came from a heartland power or heartland coalition sort of pushing out to Eurasia's margins and beyond. Think of that as the Cold War scenario, or aggressive Rimland powers like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, who could strike in both directions. They could push into the Eurasian interior while also.