Shashank Joshi is Defence Editor at The Economist, where he writes on a wide range of national security, defence and intelligence issues.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss how the war of attrition between the United States, Israel, and Iran is unfolding, whether military successes justify the enormous economic and strategic costs, and why Iran’s nuclear program remains largely untouched despite being a primary justification for the conflict.
Note: This episode was recorded on March 18, 2026.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Whenever there is something going on in the world that I am really confused about, I call you. I thought I would do that since I feel like the longer this war goes on, the less sure I am what to think about it. Part of this is that the war is extraordinary in the extent to which the U.S. administration just has not made a very clear case for what exactly its goals are and what exactly motivates the United States. Going not by what Trump has actually said, but going by what you take to be the smartest justification for starting this conflict now, how is this war going for the United States and for Israel?
Shashank Joshi: I think that it helps to think about this as a war of attrition and each side is trying to attrit something different, and they are each having some success in doing it. For the U.S. side, it is clearest that the aim is to attrit Iran’s military strength, its ability to project power from its base throughout the region. The most obvious metric of that is Iranian missile capability. What you have seen over the course of this conflict is that the United States has had some great success in not just striking, but also suppressing Iran’s launches of ballistic missiles, the stockpiles of those missiles, and the most important bit, I think, for U.S. strategy, the production facilities for making more of those missiles, including all of the supply chains.
Think about the propellant that goes into a missile. If you destroy the factory that makes it, you deny Iran the ability to make these missiles for some period of time. In addition to that, they have also destroyed the Iranian Navy, which of course has implications for the way in which Iran could project power into the Strait of Hormuz in the future, as well as certain types of other military capabilities.
The Israeli war, I think, is a little bit different. I think the Israeli war at the operational level is about political attrition as well as the other things I talked about. It is about attriting the Iranian leadership to the point where the regime is weak, degraded, and ultimately much more susceptible to a popular protest movement that could then topple it at the conclusion of hostilities. That is not what the Israelis say in public; this is my supposition, but I think it is a reasonable supposition based on everything they have said at the beginning of the conflict and a reasonable supposition based on the sorts of things and people they are striking, which includes Ali Larijani, a very senior official in the Iranian regime, as well as individual checkpoints of the besieged paramilitary militia.
If I am right in saying that these are the objectives, the United States has met with great operational success. Iran is going to be in a really rough position with its missile capability for some time to come when the guns fall silent. On the Israeli side, I think there has been mixed success. If the aim is to topple the regime or to leave it effectively incapable of standing on its own two feet, I think that is very much in doubt. I think the regime will be standing at the end of this and I have my doubts it will be toppled by a protest movement.
The big issue, Yascha, is if that really is the aim, then it is not just how much damage you have done; it is how much damage you have done relative to the cost you have paid. That cost includes disruption to global energy markets. It includes things like the closure of Hormuz and the huge impact on the global economy. It also has to factor in how quickly Iran could rebuild these capabilities after a conflict. When I take all that into account, I come up with my view, which is that the United States and Israel have been extremely successful at the military level, but their objectives politically are still confused and shifting. Ultimately, to me, the cost they have paid for achieving those has been extremely high. This war could not have been fought in the way that it has; I think the same things could have been achieved by other means.
Mounk: I want to get more deeply into the costs that the United States, Israel, and the world economy as a whole are paying for this war in a moment. Before we get there, if part of the goal of this war is to dismantle the ability of Iran to threaten its neighbors with rockets and other forms of attacks, if it is to really weaken the ability of Iran to sponsor various terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis that do damage in the region, to what extent has this campaign actually succeeded?
If you are looking at these strategic objectives, have you dismantled their ability to do that in the short run? In the long run, is this going to make a significant difference? Do you think that five, 10, 15 years down the line, we are going to think Iran is a really diminished actor in the region because of the events of the last few weeks?
Joshi: I think that is a great question and a difficult one. I think in 10 years’ time, we will look at an Iran that is fundamentally diminished in terms of its relationship to regional militant Islamist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and so on. Here is the important thing. Most of that diminution was done prior to this conflict. Most of that was achieved in the years prior, after October 7 and the attacks of 2023. We saw the great demolition of Hezbollah by Israel. We saw Hamas significantly weakened. We saw Iran’s ability to connect to those groups greatly weakened by the collapse of the regime in Syria, which was both a physical and a diplomatic pivot point for Iran’s ability to project its influence towards the Mediterranean Sea. It was a greatly diminished actor in my view.
We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
That was the case before this war began on February 28. If you look at this war itself, what it has achieved is great damage to Iran’s missiles. The Israel Defense Forces say they have destroyed about 70% of Iran’s missile launchers since the beginning of the war. You can see that in the levels of missile launches towards the Gulf States, towards Israel; they have come down significantly. You are not going to see Iran reach the same level that it had pre-war in the next 12 months. In the next five years, I am not so sure about that. If you keep bombing Iran, you could sustainably keep stripping it away of these capabilities. My concern is if each time you do that, if each time you “mow the grass,” to use that rather macabre phrase that has been used by some Israeli analysts and others, if you precipitate a global crisis each time you do it, that to me is not a viable approach for keeping the Iranian regime in check.
Yes, it is weakened. There is a possibility it will stay weakened for years to come, but only with remedial action at great cost. The last thing is that we still have, of course, the Iranian nuclear program. Ostensibly, that was the rationale of the conflict. I do not believe that was the real rationale of the conflict. I think the administration is, I will be quite honest with you, lying when it says this. I think it is being dishonest in its public statements about this question. I was just listening to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, talk about this today. She was of course a known opponent of war with Iran prior to her appointment. She said very clearly that Iran had made no great steps in its enrichment program. Iran had a lot of enriched uranium. It was buried under rubble at various sites that were bombed last year. It was moving no closer to being able to weaponize that.
My big concern is that there is a chance, a small one, but there is a chance that what you are left with is a weakened but aggrieved and wounded regime led by people who are more radical than those who have been killed, who will now double down on the nuclear program even if their path to getting to a bomb is still exceptionally difficult.
Mounk: Tell me a little bit more about the nuclear program, which obviously is one big part of the justification of people who are advocating for this war. Part of the absurdity here is that Donald Trump, of course, claimed that he had completely dismantled the nuclear program with the strikes that he did last June. At the time, there were intelligence assessments that the nuclear program had certainly been damaged by that much briefer bombing campaign, but that it was not fully dismantled.
That led to the absurdity that now he could not really say that he was starting this war because of a nuclear program, since he had claimed seven or eight months earlier that he had completely destroyed the nuclear program. Realistically, where is Iran at with a nuclear program? It used to be said that they were very close to breakout; if they really make a sprint for wanting to produce atomic weapons, they would be able to do that within a very short span of time. Was the ability of the Iranian regime to do that sufficiently damaged last June? Is it being further damaged in the bombing campaign now? Does it not make a difference? How should we think about the threat of this in the future?
Joshi: Regarding Trump’s public comments last year and now, he is not constrained by the need to be particularly consistent across these issues. The truth is that Iran last year suffered grave damage to its enrichment facilities, which are the places where it spins uranium gas, uranium hexafluoride, turns it into the more enriched kind that is comprised of a greater proportion of the most fissile isotope of uranium and that can be used in a nuclear bomb. Its enrichment facilities were damaged very badly. It had them at Natanz and in Fordow inside a mountain. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which was enriched to about 60%, is very close to 90%, which is weapons grade. That was buried under rubble mostly at Esfahan at a place called the uranium conversion facility, but some of it also at Fordow and Natanz.
Iran did have other routes to a bomb. It could have set up new enrichment facilities somewhere else, but it is not clear whether it really had the centrifuges to do that or whether it could have done it without being detected. It would have had to go and get that uranium from under the rubble. Instead, what did it do? It effectively piled dirt over the tunnels of the entrances of those facilities, perhaps in fear of the potential for a U.S. or Israeli ground raid on those facilities. Those were effectively out of bounds. You still have this 400 kilograms of enriched uranium sitting underground inside Iran, capable of being used in a bomb, but it was in no way imminently accessible. There was no indication Iran was setting up enrichment facilities elsewhere.
The expertise necessary to turn those things into a usable weapons device—to shape it into a sphere, to have explosives around it, a triggering mechanism, a neutron initiator to set off a chain reaction—are all of those other things you need for a bomb. Many of the people and the places involved in that enterprise, which we know Iran was engaged in in the preceding 15 to 20 years, were killed or destroyed or bombed by Israel. Iran was not imminently about to make any substantial steps towards a nuclear weapon and it would have been some time away.
What has happened in the current war? Basically, Iran’s nuclear program has hardly been bombed to our knowledge. Natanz, one of those sites I mentioned, I think the tunnels have been bombed and there has been one other site called the Taleghan 2 complex outside of Tehran, which is where Iran supposedly did some nuclear weapons related work, which has also been struck by Israel. We have seen dramatic satellite pictures of that with holes in the roof. Fordow has not been touched. As far as I am aware, Isfahan has not been touched. A war that is ostensibly about the nuclear program actually has seen very little to do with nuclear forces so far. Perhaps that is yet to come. We are only three weeks in. President Trump has suggested this is a four to five week campaign. Perhaps there is still more to come.
Mounk: It is remarkable that a war, the most compelling rationale for which is to try to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, has so far not done much to further damage Iran’s ability to pursue that program. At least part of the stated rationale is complicated by the fact that Trump claims it had basically been dismantled last June. We have been looking at one side of this war of attrition.
Tell us about the other side of the war of attrition. Tell us about the damage that Iran has been able to do to the world economy because of its attempts to block shipping and increase the price of oil. Tell us about the impact on the reputation and security of various places around the Gulf, including Dubai and many of the Emirates, as well as on Israel.
Joshi: Well, I do not need to tell you the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, which is this critical waterway; about 20% of the world’s oil passes through Hormuz. We know it includes not just oil, but also liquid natural gas, which is absolutely vital to Europe in particular. Not from the Gulf, but the restrictions in the Gulf changed the global gas price. The bit that people tend to forget is that the Strait of Hormuz is also incredibly important for commodities and certain types of critical commodities. The ones I think about here are things like iron ore pellets, aluminum, urea used in fertilizers, and other certain types of other critical minerals. There is this huge knock-on effect on manufacturing and not just on energy, but also on the food supply.
The immediate shock has really come in the energy markets where oil has been pushed to more than $100 a barrel. This is partly a supply shock. It is a limitation in what you can get out if you are producing it. In some senses, that is bad, but it is not the end of the world because you will make up for that lost supply once it reopens. There is also a production shock. You also have loss of production from gas fields and oil fields that have effectively been shut down amid direct attacks. That production will never come back. That is lost production. This has a direct impact on global growth.
For me, the interesting thing is that there is a kind of externality here. The United States and Israel have launched this war for their reasons. They have their own reasons for doing so. But the predominant cost is felt by others. It is felt by Europeans and it is felt by Asians. It is Asians who depend on the majority of energy coming out of the Strait of Hormuz: China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Pakistan. Pakistan is very vulnerable right now. It is Europeans who do not get their gas from Hormuz.
Mounk: One of the very interesting sub-stories here, which Quico Toro has written about in the pages of Persuasion, is that fracking really killed Khamenei. His somewhat provocative thesis is that because of fracking, the United States has become basically energy independent and is much less affected by the global price of oil and gas than it used to be. A lot of the energy sources that the United States now consumes are not really part of the global energy market; they are produced and consumed in the United States. That is one of the reasons why this increase in the price of gas and oil has affected the United States so much less than other countries, and perhaps one of the reasons why the Trump administration was willing to wage this war in the first place.
Joshi: I think you are right. The United States is far less exposed to energy shocks coming out of the Gulf than America would once have been. In the 1970s and 1973 oil price shock, this had a much more profound impact on the United States. Indeed, I think there was energy rationing, speed limit restrictions, and all that kind of stuff. This time around, it is different. That said, just because America is less exposed than the rest of the world does not mean it is not exposed.
You are still seeing an impact on petrol prices and gas prices at the pump in the United States. For this to be done six months before midterm elections is really quite serious for Donald Trump. His polls have worsened; his prospects of losing the House and the Senate have grown. He is not completely immune to the consequences of the war he has unleashed at all.
Mounk: It is very interesting that Donald Trump’s standing in the polls does not seem to have budged very much over the last 14 days, according to analysts like Nate Silver. While the war is very unpopular, and while any lasting damage to the economy is likely to undermine his chances in the midterms even further, we are not really seeing any negative trend for Donald Trump’s standing in the polls over these last two weeks.
What is the future of these oil flows? This is also part of this game of attrition. The world is paying a very high price for these increased costs, which is damaging to the United States in less direct ways and to many of America’s allies who are going to try to pressure the United States to make sure that the price of gas and oil goes down. Obviously, if this somehow triggers a world recession, that is something from which the United States would suffer as well.
At the same time, my understanding is that a lot of Iran’s income is dependent on some of those same straits that they are currently blocking. How long could this blockade continue? Will it continue basically for as long as rockets are flying and this war is hot? Could Iran continue to block those waters even after the end of a war? What does that mean for the extent to which an end of this war still depends on the United States? If Donald Trump wakes up tomorrow and says that we have accomplished our objectives, can he basically end the war and have it be over a week from now? Or is that no longer in the hands of the United States in the way it might have been before the bombing started or two or three days into this conflict?
Joshi: First of all, we are still seeing escalation on the energy front. As we are speaking, we have just seen an Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field in Iran. That is a gas field that Iran shares with Qatar; I think it is the world’s biggest, if I am not mistaken. That is a big escalation. Israel has struck Iran’s oil storage tanks, but America was unhappy about that. In striking the gas field, Israel has reportedly done so with American approval. I think it is inevitable the Iranians will try to intensify attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab oil and gas production facilities. You are going to see a tightening of this. I think in the coming days, it is inevitable Iran will try to aggressively go after more of the oil facilities.
On Hormuz itself, here is the interesting thing. Iran has constrained the flow for other countries; however, it is not a complete blockade. Between March 1st and March 15th, there were about 89 ships that got through Hormuz. About 20% of those were Iran-affiliated. Many of the others were Chinese or Greek-affiliated, but they were done with deals with Iran. They were basically allowing some through. It did a deal with India to allow a couple of Indian vessels to come out.
Iran is playing a very clever game. Actually, what surprises me is that Donald Trump has not said, I am going to seize Iranian oil coming out of Hormuz myself and sell it, just like his approach to Venezuela. I am surprised he has not done that because that would keep oil flowing and keep prices down, but it would also choke off that revenue to Iran. I am not recommending it, but I am saying I would have expected Trump to do that.
To get to your core point: could Trump stop this now and Hormuz reopens? My feeling is that no, he could not. He can call a halt to this; he can stop this. But it is now in Iran’s interest to exact a heavy price for the rest of this war, if nothing else, to deter future attacks like this—to deter that purpose of periodic, sporadic “mowing of the lawn” that I described. For that to happen, they need to show they control the tempo of escalation. Right now, I think that they have shown that very well. If Trump declared a ceasefire today, I think Iran would keep the strait closed for a certain period and then say, now we are opening it; now it is our choice to reopen the strait. Reopening the strait by force is a very difficult proposition. That is something that takes weeks and compounds the duration of this major energy shock on global markets.
Mounk: Why is it that Iran has not used this weapon in the past? What has changed, which means that Iran now is saying, we have control of this incredibly important waterway for the world economy? Why do we not use that as an incredibly potent bargaining tool? If they are able to do that now, why did they not do that earlier?
Joshi: Well, they have done it to some extent. If you think back to the 1980s, you had the Iran-Iraq War, and as part of that, you had the tanker war in which Iran did go after shipping in the Persian Gulf region to the point where America was eventually drawn in in Operation Ernest Will, escorting tankers. When one of those ships was attacked and destroyed, America then bombed Iran’s navy, destroying about half of it. That was called Operation Praying Mantis.
The core of the point is that in the wars of the last 15 years—whether that is last year’s attack on nuclear sites or the kind of shadowboxing we have seen in other parts of the region—Iran has not felt its back to the wall. Iran has not been desperate. The reason it has gone after Hormuz is because it feels the regime is at risk and anything is worth trying. Of course, Iran is paying a cost for this as well. It has permanently alienated all of its Gulf allies, including those who tried to moderate or have a functioning relationship with Iran, like Saudi Arabia in recent years, and those who mediated on behalf of Iran with the United States, such as the government of Oman.
What it is going to result in is a permanently militarized, very angry set of Gulf neighbors who will then also diversify their oil and gas exports to pipelines overland to the West. This is a very costly decision for Iran. That is why it has not done it. It has basically pissed off a lot of countries, and not just regional countries but also countries like China and India. They are not delighted by the shock to their own economies. But if you are desperate, the regime is at risk, and you are going to fall, why not do it? Why not pull the temple down with you?
Mounk: Speaking of that, what is the situation within Iran? Part of the ostensible purpose of this war originally was regime change. It is clear that the Iranian regime is very unpopular among large sections of the Iranian population. Of course, they also do have pockets of support, particularly among the people who profit from the regime in various ways. We saw this extraordinary wave of protests against the regime, unlike anything else that has happened in the now 50-year history of the regime, which ended in the slaughter of tens of thousands of protesters. The regime is now very weakened. Many of the leading figures in the regime have been killed or seriously wounded. It is unclear to what extent there is a coherent command structure that is capable of actually delivering on a strategy. Yet, the regime for now seems to be relatively firmly in the saddle, perhaps more firmly in the saddle than it was about two months ago. It is clearly able to exact a lot of costs from the other side in this war of attrition that you have described for us so eloquently. How should we think about the extent to which the Iranian regime is itself now in existential danger? Is there any hope of genuine political change in Iran after this conflict ends?
Joshi: Well, here again, we have to keep in mind the baseline—the pre-war baseline—which is that the Iranian regime was weak. It was weak in every sense: economically, politically, and ideologically. It had lost legitimacy at home, as you described, having to kill tens of thousands of its own people to survive. It was despised widely. It was economically destitute and unproductive, having squandered the wealth of its people.
It was in really poor shape. The war has, in some ways, weakened it further. Reports from my colleagues from inside Iran say there are indications that growing numbers of the security services are staying at home, as you would expect them to when bombing is happening. We have seen a sense of decentralized command. Command and control in Iran is weakened because you cannot communicate with different branches of the government. Commanders lower down have to make their own decisions, so it is a more fragmented regime.
The problem is that it is also fundamentally a more hardline regime than it was two weeks ago. That is the nature of decapitation. You often see that—think about Hassan Nasrallah from Hezbollah. He came about because Israeli assassinations of his predecessors led to more coherent, organized, and capable figures rising to the top. Look at the example of someone like Ali Larijani, who was just assassinated. He was a really interesting guy. He was the head of the country’s security council. He was the figurehead of the regime in recent days when Khamenei had been killed and Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, was keeping a low profile. He was probably injured and did not want to show his face. Larijani is a really fascinating guy because he taught philosophy and specialized in the Western Enlightenment.
Mounk: He was a scholar of Immanuel Kant, I think, which confirms all the bad things I always thought about Immanuel Kant. I’m joking.
Joshi: He was also an IRGC veteran. But if you look at his death and what it has done in the day after, just like in other areas, you have hardliners maneuvering to try to put in people like Saeed Jalili, who is a more hardline ideological figure. Are these people going to be more or less likely to negotiate a deal with the United States in terms of handing over nuclear material or abandoning their nuclear commitments? What are they likely to do on these issues?
That is what concerns me. You have a brittle regime, a weak regime, but it is not about to fall apart—although I wish it were. It is full of people who, in some ways, are younger, more radical, and more ideological than the people who have been killed in large numbers in previous days.
Mounk: The last time I had you on the podcast, I asked you to make a prediction about what might happen. You hemmed and hawed a little bit and emphasized the difficulty of doing so. Then, you predicted nearly perfectly what was in fact about to happen. So would you care to repeat that feat?
Joshi: In Iran, I think this regime is still likely to survive. When the bombs fall silent, you will see enormous pent-up anger in Iran over what this regime has invited upon the country. I have no doubt about that. I do not think there is a huge rally-around-the-flag effect in terms of a sudden outpouring of support for the regime. But the population has also gone through profound turmoil.
If these attacks on energy infrastructure continue, the Iranian people are going to suffer a really rough time because they rely upon this gas for domestic electricity and production. I worry that Iranians will turn inwards. They will focus on survival as beleaguered populations often do. While you may see pockets of protest and unrest as the Israelis are calling for—in fact, they are calling up individual IRGC commanders, telling them to stand aside and saying, if you stand aside, you will avoid death; if you stay in service, we will kill you—the Israelis are trying to clear the way for this.
I still, unfortunately, would say protests will be crushed with brutal, overwhelming force. I see a regime that will continue to atrophy and be weak, but will not necessarily crumble and dissipate, not least because there is still the lack of a coherent, organized opposition that could take over. If you are Iranian, what do you fear the most? Is it the regime and its brutality and its tyranny, or is it the prospect of becoming Syria—a state that is coherent and repressive, but functioning, and that then falls apart to result in warlordism, gun smuggling, and ethnic warfare from Baluch, Azeri, and Kurdish minorities? I think that the Iranian population is deeply afraid of that.
Mounk: What about the broader conflict? How long is this conflict going to go on? What is the off-ramp and what is the region going to look like in its wake?
Joshi: Well, this is the really tough one. President Trump suggested four to five weeks, but we know there is no real point in putting too much weight on anything he says. I think he failed to anticipate the scale of Iran’s response rooted in desperation, the intensity of its attacks on the Gulf States, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the level of military response that would be required to reopen it.
He can now do that, but you cannot just put ships in the Strait of Hormuz right now, even military ships. They would be struck by missiles; they would face an onslaught of drones, cruise missiles, and fast attack boats. You need to degrade those Iranian missile launchers on the Persian Gulf coast. You might then be in a position in a week or two to put some destroyers and escorts in—although without European assistance, as they seem very reluctant to do this—and you may begin to get some energy flowing out of Hormuz.
If President Trump wants to avoid a situation in which it looks as though he has terminated the war with the Strait of Hormuz closed on terms favorable to Iran, then he has to do that. That means a conflict that will stretch well into April to achieve those objectives. At the same time, you have to contend with a situation in which Iran will be in extremely bad shape, but it will still be firing missiles at the Gulf States, and they will be running low on the interceptor missiles necessary to shoot them down. You may see more damage in the Gulf States in places like Dubai, Bahrain, and Riyadh than you do today.
My baseline scenario is a war that stretches into April, but I think you have a pretty good prospect of a pause, if not a full-fledged ceasefire, by the end of April. If it gets into May, the shock to global energy markets will be so severe that it would begin to have real, nasty political ramifications for Donald Trump at home. There are implications for his domestic administration, as seen with the departure of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center and a close ally of Tulsi Gabbard from the restrainer camp of American foreign policy. I do not think the president has the stomach for that.
Mounk: We haven’t talked very much about Israel and its campaign in Lebanon and what situation all of this will leave Israel in in the Middle East. It seems that for the last few years, Israel has achieved a lot of its military objectives, but it also is politically weakened and isolated in a way that it hasn’t been in a long time.
Tell us about how you’re seeing the war aims from the perspective of someone like Benjamin Netanyahu and whether Israel is achieving them.
Joshi: I think the Israelis feel pretty happy about their war aims. I think they have done lasting damage to the Iranian regime, but their attempt to try to weaken the regime to the point of collapse is looking unsuccessful at this stage. That does not mean it won’t be successful, although I am skeptical as I have just said. I think they understood that Trump could have pulled the plug on this on day three, so they struck their priority targets in the first few days.
Then they accepted it could end at any time, so they have had a careful hierarchy of targets. I think at the end of this, they will have a weak Iranian regime and they can live with the possibility of having to attack it again, because it is the region that pays the cost of that. I am not saying Israelis do not pay the cost—let’s acknowledge the fact that Israelis have died. Iran has launched cluster munitions over Tel Aviv and other cities. Israel has paid a substantial cost for this in that sense; we should always recognize that civilian cost inside Israel. But it is really the Gulf region and those countries that have borne the brunt of retaliation. From Israel’s perspective, they are also, to a degree, insulated from this. From the Israeli mentality, the goal has always been to buy time; it has never been to solve a problem for good. In that respect, they would see this as a success.
In Lebanon, they have had a situation where Hezbollah is very badly weakened, but it did join the war on behalf of Iran. By the way, the Houthis in Yemen did not, which is very interesting, because they could have caused real disruption to the Red Sea, and that would have made life even worse for oil shipments. But they didn’t; Hezbollah did. Israel basically sees an opportunity to say to the Lebanese state, look, either you control Hezbollah and disarm this parastatal group, or we go in and we do it. That is why you have seen these really destructive strikes in the heart of Lebanon in Beirut.
There is a debate in Israel about the extent to which they can do this, because it requires going in on the ground in southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, occupying some of that territory, and going into many Lebanese Shia villages to find and destroy Hezbollah arms caches and strongholds. That carries a huge cost to those northern communities in Israel who live under rocket fire and to the reservists who are called up to conduct those missions. Southern Lebanon is Israel’s Vietnam. They recall that decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon and the enormous cost that was paid by the IDF and by Israelis. There are many people in Israel saying, look, call it quits. Let’s draw a line under this. We’ve had a lot of success. If you get sucked into southern Lebanon in the pursuit of trying to destroy Hezbollah for good, this will be disastrous for Israel’s long-term security and it will bog us down.
That debate is underway in Israel. But the final thing to say is Bibi hasn’t really paid a price politically. His support is slightly up, I think. He is still unpopular, of course, but the war is broadly supported in Israel. Indeed, on the first day, we had Yair Lapid, who is leader of an opposition party, write an op-ed for my colleagues at The Economist in support of the campaign.
Mounk: You have been following this campaign very closely for The Economist. You wrote a really interesting article about how the way in which people now follow campaigns generally relies on a lot of open-source intelligence. Some of that open-source intelligence has disappeared over the course of the last weeks under pressure from the U.S. administration. How have you been trying to keep up with all of these developments? How has the United States tried to roll back some of the publicly available information to make it harder for its enemies, among others, to use that information?
Joshi: First of all, let’s begin with the fact that the internet has been shut down in Iran. That’s a huge problem for those of us who want to get news out of Iran. You can still get some of it. There are Starlink terminals too—and by the way, that’s one of the great things that Elon Musk and the United States government have done, which is try to get Starlink terminals inside Iran. It is a great commitment to openness and freedom of communication that I think is one of the few steps I really applaud the administration for in this process.
But that is not enough. We rely on commercial satellite images to see a lot of what is happening. To see when there was an American strike on a girls’ school in Minhab in Iran, which was a catastrophic error of targeting, I relied on satellite images to see the damage that was done. What has happened is satellite companies in the United States, like Planet Labs and Vantor, formerly called Maxar, have realized the risk is that by publishing these things—in the past, that was not a big deal because you had single, one-off Iranian missile strikes, like against Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq in 2020 after the Soleimani assassination, or last year after Operation Midnight Hammer, an attack on Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar. Publishing an image of the strike wasn’t a huge problem because Iran was doing the strike in a very symbolic way and wasn’t doing follow-on strikes.
Now, in a campaign that is lasting weeks and weeks, when you publish that image, the risk is that Iran can use it to refine its targeting. It can say, look, I know I hit that building right to the left of the American radar. I am now going to aim slightly differently next time. Satellite companies have worried about this and are trying to be responsible, so they have shut down the flow of images. They have put a two-week delay on this in the case of Planet, and other companies will not even release any images, including of Iran itself.
That is a huge problem at the same time because it makes it much less amenable to scrutinizing the conduct of all sides in this conflict, including the Iranians, but also the Americans and the Israelis when they conduct targeting inside Iran. It shuts off our ability to see that conflict. The Trump administration has been putting pressure on satellite companies to say, stop doing this, stop publishing these things, we don’t want you to do it. Of course, they have enormous regulatory control. I think the interesting question in the longer run, is to what degree Chinese and Russian companies step into the breach. Right now they do not have an awful lot of imagery, but we are beginning to see them publish some quite interesting stuff.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shashank discuss how the rise in oil prices is benefitting Russia, what this means for the Ukraine War, and why a ceasefire remains unlikely. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
