By Matt Stoller, Substack, 3/1/26

…But the big story is of course the war in the Middle East launched on Saturday morning. And while war often seems distinct from the question of political economy, in this case the two are intrinsically linked.

Let’s start with the contours of the conflict itself, which is the second attack on Iran since last June. In that first conflict, Israel killed many people in the regime, and weakened the country significantly. But it was a largely choreographed response, with Iran sending a barrage of rockets repelled by defenses across the Middle East, and then the whole thing ended with a cease fire. Oil prices didn’t much move, and neither did stocks.

This time, it could be different. So far, the U.S. and Israeli forces used air power to kill much of Iran’s leadership. The Iranians haven’t hit back with major missile barrage, but are using a “drip attack,” which is to say, firing small barrages of rockets and drones across Middle Eastern nations, from Israel to Bahrain to Iraq to Kuwait to Saudi Arabia to Jordan to the UAE. They have hit some military bases, but are aiming mostly at soft civilian targets and energy infrastructure, and even data centers. Israelis are in bomb shelters, and some U.S. bases have been hit. Three U.S. solders so far are dead.

It’s not clear whether the Iranian approach is a result of weakness, the lack of a military command, or some sort of strategy. It’s possible their regime will falter, since it is domestically unpopular. Or they could be seeking to get their opponents to waste missile defense assets, and scaring Arab allies into pressing Trump for a cease fire.

But Iran’s bad position doesn’t mean the situation is great for the U.S. and its allies. After the first day, which seemed to be a shocking win for the U.S. and Israel, some sort of fear or exhaustion has set in. The U.S. has used up years of production of high-tech weapons and may run out, while also testing cheap drone technology that it ironically copied from Iran. There is now panic across the wealthy cities of the Middle East, as the airports are closed and the luxury hotels are under sporadic siege by drones and rockets.

It’s never clear what happens in war, so this fight could end tomorrow, or it could go on for weeks. Already Trump is indicating he’s open to negotiations, and the Iranians are making tentative noises to that effect as well. Oil seems to be spiking, which didn’t happen the first time, and there are indications that stocks could be affected. The war is also extremely weird, with the Iranian regime using Twitter to call the American regime a group of pedophiles, and potential civil unrest within Western-aligned Arab states.

So that’s the conflict, summarized by a non-military person reading the news and talking to random military sources. I thought an attack on Iran was a bad idea if for no other reason that Iran can shoot back. I guess we’ll see.

But something about the war did surprise me. When the U.S. launched the attack, I assumed that the decision was a result of some sort of combination of Donald Trump’s rashness, domestic hawk pressure and Israeli interests, all going against world opinion. But as it turns out, much of the elite Western and Middle Eastern world was pressing for this conflict or was fine with it once it started. Rachel Maddow, not exactly a dove, pointed fingers at “the Gulf Arab states who want Iran removed as their regional rival.” Unsurprisingly, both the Israelis and the Saudis lobbied for the war. But when Trump went ahead, he got support from Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, as well as Germany and France and much of the Arab world.

And this support isn’t trivial, the French are sending a strike group to the region. The GOP and national security establishment is mostly satisfied, and half of the Democratic Party took the attitude of California Governor Gavin Newsom, which is to say they are happy for the war, but wish they had been given a heads-up first.

In other words, Trump, far from a unilateralist, is operating within an orthodox foreign policy consensus about the need to topple the Iranian regime. And I found that puzzling. Ten years ago, I worked in the Senate, and I used to ask around about the obsession with Iran. And every foreign policy staffer, no matter how lefty, would say the same thing. “You can’t trust the Iranian regime.” And I would always ask why? The answer, repeated, was “You can’t trust the Iranian regime.” There are many regimes you can’t trust, I would observe, the Saudi government was involved in 9/11. So why is this one so bad? The response was just, “You can’t trust the Iranian regime.” And I could never get a real answer.

There are many theories about this obsession; the Iranians embarrassed the U.S. in the 1970s, and some hawks in America have always wanted to destroy the regime. Israelis are vying for influence with Iranians, and AIPAC gives a lot of money to U.S. politicians. It’s about oil. Neocons have influence in both parties. True, and true. But the bigger dynamic here is bureaucratic.

I’ve long noticed the endless parade of investors heading over to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, getting investments for everything from banking to artificial intelligence. Elon Musk secured money from the Saudis for his AI venture and his takeover of Twitter, Sam Altman sought billions from Abu Dhabi, Anthropic went after money from UAE and Qatar. And JP Morgan, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Blackrock and Citigroup are competing heavily in the region.

And this trend is not new. In the 1970s, newly wealthy oil princes suddenly found themselves with over four hundred billion dollars, and had to put it somewhere. The deposited it in American banks, who then lent it all over the world, in what was known as “petrodollar recycling.” The corporate, banking, and oil prince worlds have only drawn closer and closer since. In the early 1980s, the merger boom unleashed by the Bork revolution started in the oil patch, and endless waves of mergers have been financed by Arab money. In the 2000s, on a political level, the Bush family linked Texas, the CIA, and the Saudis. In 2013, Al Gore sold his CurrentTV channel to the government of Qatar for $500 million. And in the shale revolution of the 2010s, Texas producers joined Saudi-led OPEC to keep oil prices high.

Today, the Middle East is full of investors in every major venture in the U.S., and most of our think tanks and diplomatic corps are part of that world. Arab elites are also part of the Western establishment. For instance, the giant video game company Electronic Arts was bought with Saudi money, in part because the Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is a gamer. He also brought the top U.S. comedians to his country for the Riyadh Comedy Festival last year.

The cultures are now so close that Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan had a private jet painted with the Dallas Cowboys logo, as he was good friend with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and loved American football. Indeed, while there’s a longstanding pretense of Arab antisemitism and dislike of Israel, it’s notable that both Arab and Israeli elites, including MBS and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, were extensively involved in the network of Jeff Epstein.

Ultimately, Western elites have dropped any pretense they care about human rights, and Arab elites have dropped any pretense they care about nationalism or Islam. It’s now one giant Davos blob. Here’s David Dayen making the point very clearly.

And indeed that’s true.

According to reports, the Paramount deal has been made possible in large part thanks to equity from Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. Middle East money is already flowing freely through global entertainment and media but many are wondering what strings will be attached to this latest and biggest U.S. media investment. These weren’t charity donations.

And that brings us to the collective distrust of Iran throughout all of these networks. Iranians aren’t part of the transnational Davos elite, and are always trying to annoy the people in it by expressing their desire for regional power. So the answer to why you can’t trust the Iranians is that they aren’t part of the club. They don’t paint Cowboys logo on their private jets, nor do they invest in private equity and AI companies, and they aren’t part of investment syndicates for Hollywood studios.

In other words, this attack on Iran isn’t a civilizational conflict, it’s anger from the Epstein class of elites towards a separate group of elites in Iran. Of course, the everyday people who live in these countries want nothing to do with these factional spats. The Americans who have to fight in this war, and the public that must finance it, are unhappy.

The split between elites and the public is vast, and growing. Wars rarely get more popular over time. And this attack may not be one of those conflicts of choice where the cost is mostly invisible to the U.S. It’s possible Iranian missiles and drones could cause meaningful damage to U.S. military assets. It’s possible they actually cause a downdraft or crash in the stock market, and harm the actual investors that called for this war. Or maybe it’s a blip, and Trump decides to declare victory and the Iranians assent to ending it. I don’t know. But the Epstein class, while wealthy and powerful, is greedy and short-sighted. And that means they take all sorts of immensely stupid risks, assuming someone else will always clean up any mess…

***

Missiles are Depleted but Defense Contractors are Cashing In

By Veronica Riccobene, The Lever, 3/5/26

In the weeks before launching strikes in Iran, the Trump administration had a problem: figuring out how to spend the $500 billion in extra Pentagon money the White House plans to request from Congress next year. Just two days later, the administration told Congress that in the next year alone, it plans to burn through $153 billion in additional military funding approved in 2025 — money Congress expected to be spent over five years.

Now, less than a week after the strikes, executives representing weapons manufacturers including RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Lockheed Martin are scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump to discuss the nation’s “diminishing” munitions stockpiles. 

While the president insists U.S. munitions reserves have “never been higher or better,” defense-industry funded consultants and lobbyists are warning that in less than a week, the U.S. has “burn[ed]” through its precision-guided long-range missile reserves. They argue that a shrinking industrial base and declining productivity could undermine U.S. military objectives in places like Ukraine and Israel. Of particular concern are the country’s stockpile of precision missile interceptors, a quarter of which were reportedly depleted in just 12 days of fighting between Israel and Iran last summer and are on track to be further drained in the Iran war.

Yet, since the 1990s, U.S. military spending has nearly doubled, exceeding the combined spending of the next nine largest militaries. 

So where has all that money gone? Into the pockets of top shareholders.

The weapons industry has become incredibly concentrated: Since the 1990s, the number of “prime” contractors working with the Defense Department has shrunk from 51 to five. And in recent years, these giants — propped up by trillions in taxpayer spending — have spent more enriching investors than in expanding production.

Between 2020 and 2025, top military contractors spent $110 billion on buybacks and dividends — more than double what they spent on capital expenditures. Those payouts disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. The top 1 percent of earners control roughly half of all wealth invested in the stock market — including executives and board members who approve buybacks and dividends while enjoying lucrative stock-based compensation. 

It may be fortunate that those billions weren’t instead spent on war munitions designed to cause death and destruction. But much of this money ultimately came from American taxpayers, who are likely to end up footing the bill to replenish U.S. arsenals.

The four largest defense firms in the nation all heavily rely on federal contracts, meaning weapons-industry investors are indirectly lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars. According to the government contract tracker TenderAlpha, in 2024, Department of Defense contracts accounted for between 30 and 40 percent of Boeing and RTX’s revenue, 74 percent of Lockheed Martin’s, and a startling 98 percent of Booz Allen Hamilton’s. 

There are already indications that plenty more tax dollars could be flowing their way. The White House is reportedly planning to ask Congress for another $50 billion in military funding as soon as Friday, a proposal more likely to be approved now that Republicans have torpedoed Democrats’ lobbyist-compromised effort to limit the Iran war.

It’s no wonder that on the Monday following the Iran strikes, Pentagon suppliers saw immediate returns. Responsible Statescraft reports that Lockheed Martin (for which annual defense contracts rival the budget of the entire U.S. State Department) experienced a 3.4 percent stock jump; RTX rose 4.7 percent; and Northrop Grumman posted a 6 percent increase.

Morgan Stanley even issued an advisory this week recommending that investors “consider increasing exposure around themes like defense, security, aerospace and industrial resilience, where government spending can drive multiyear demand.”

The industry’s racket has become so extreme that earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring defense contractors from committing cash to buybacks and dividends if they fail to “produce a superior product, on time and on budget.” He even went so far as to threaten to cancel the federal contracts of RTX — which redistributed $57 billion to investors between 2015 and 2025 — until it ended stock buybacks and instead invested in manufacturing. 

“Defense Contractors are currently issuing massive Dividends to their Shareholders and massive Stock Buybacks, at the expense and detriment of investing in Plants and Equipment,” the president wrote on Truth Social in January. “Executive Pay Packages in the Defense Industry are exorbitant and unjustifiable given how slowly these Companies are delivering vital Equipment to our Military, and our Allies.”

In response, firms including Lockheed Martin and L3Harris agreed to increase their capital expenditures by 38 percent from 2025 and pause buybacks — but have no plans to roll back quarterly dividends. And with bombs now falling on Tehran, these concerns seem likely to fall by the wayside.

YouTube link to Danny Haiphong interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson & Larry Johnson (Iran & Hezbollah’s Missiles SLAM Israel, Trump Panics) here.

By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 3/3/26

“Decentralized Mosaic Defense enables us to decide when – and how – war will end.” – Abbas Araghchi, Iranian Foreign Minister1

When Iran’s Foreign Minister framed the country’s doctrine in those terms on March 1, 2026, he was making a claim not about battlefield dominance but about strategic control. The statement reflects a deeper logic in that the outcome of modern war depends less on who strikes first than on who retains organized capacity after the initial shock. Numerous commentators have pointed to Iran’s mosaic defense doctrine as central to understanding this strategic posture. While their analytical perspectives differ, they broadly converge on the same conclusion: Iran’s military architecture is designed to prevent rapid coercion and to impose duration on any adversary contemplating escalation.

When American power goes to war, it prefers speed. From the intervention in Panama in 1989 to the opening air campaign of the 1991 Gulf War and the first weeks of the Iraq invasion of 2003, the operational template has been consistent: rapid air dominance, paralysis of command-and-control, decapitation of leadership and collapse of organized resistance. The assumption underpinning this model is that concentrated force applied against centralized systems produces decisive outcomes before political friction accumulates.

Iran’s defense doctrine is designed specifically to break that model. What Iranian planners describe as “mosaic defense” (دفاع موزاییکی) or “Defā-e Mozāyiki” is not merely a tactical posture. It is a survival architecture built upon the single premise that the United States and Israel must be denied a short war. Why? Because in a prolonged conflict, the balance of advantage shifts. Regional escalation risks expand, economic disruption grows and the political costs of sustained intervention begin to outweigh the benefits of rapid coercion.

This mosaic architecture began taking shape in Iran in the early 2000s in response to the sudden expansion of US military power on its eastern and western flanks following the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Most analyses attribute the conceptual articulation of the doctrine to Major-General Mohammad Ali Jafari in 2005, with its institutionalization occurring after his appointment as IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) commander, when the Guards were reorganized into provincial territorial commands between 2008 and 2009.

The Internal Mosaic: Decentralizing the Center

The IRGC forms the core of this architecture. The provincial command system created during these reforms distributes military authority across Iran’s 31 provinces and the capital district of Tehran (i.e., 32 territorial units), producing a network of semi-autonomous territorial commands capable of operating even under degraded communications. In effect, this structure fragments the state’s military functionality into localized operational nodes, ensuring that the loss or disruption of central command does not produce systemic paralysis.

US and Israeli military planners long assumed that decapitating Iran’s national political and military leadership would generate a decisive power vacuum and paralyze its ability to wage war. Yet, within the mosaic framework, dismantling the system would require neutralizing not only the command structure in Tehran but also the remaining 31 provincial commands and the dense web of subordinate units extending deep into local society.

Beneath this territorial command structure lies an extensive internal security network designed to sustain resistance even under severe disruption. The Basij, a vast volunteer paramilitary force integrated into the IRGC, operates through local cells embedded across provinces, cities and neighborhoods, extending mobilization capacity directly into the social fabric of the state.

In strategic terms, the Basij functions as the societal layer of the mosaic system. Even if national command structures are degraded, local Basij units working alongside IRGC territorial commands can mobilize manpower, maintain internal security and sustain localized resistance. The result is a defensive architecture intended to transform any invasion into a prolonged and fragmented conflict in which control of territory does not easily translate into control of the population.

The Artesh: The Outer Defensive Layer of the Internal Mosaic

Alongside the IRGC and Basij structure, the conventional Iranian military – the Islamic Republic of Iran Army (ارتش جمهوری اسلامی ایران) or “Artesh” plays a complementary role within the mosaic system. While the IRGC focuses on asymmetric warfare, missile forces and territorial defense, the Artesh provides the backbone of conventional military capability, including armored formations, air defense units and naval forces responsible for protecting Iran’s borders and critical infrastructure.

Dispersed Missile Architecture

Missile forces follow the same logic. Launch assets are hardened, geographically dispersed and in some cases mobile. The goal is not impenetrability but survivable retaliation. Within hours of the opening attacks by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026, Iran was able to mount retaliatory missile and drone attacks, hitting targets in Israel and US military bases in the region.

Over the subsequent days, Iran has sustained a tempo of strikes across multiple theaters, continuing volleys at Israel while also expanding attacks across Gulf states and US-linked facilities, illustrating the core mosaic premise that retaliation is not a single “answer strike” but a continuing capacity that survives disruption and can be re-applied across targets and geography.

Layered Air Defense: Complication Strategy

Layered air defense systems including the indigenous Bavar-373 and the Russian-origin S-300 serve a different function within the mosaic architecture. Rather than enabling retaliation, they are designed to complicate the attacker’s ability to freely operate in Iranian airspace. Positioned in dispersed and overlapping layers, these systems aim to impose attrition, force suppression missions and protect critical infrastructure such as command centers, air bases and missile facilities.

The objective is not to achieve air superiority over technologically superior adversaries such as the United States or Israel. Instead, the aim is to raise the operational cost of sustained air campaigns, slow the tempo of strikes and deny attackers uncontested access to key regions of Iranian territory. In strategic terms, Iran’s air defense network functions as a defensive denial system, intended to protect critical nodes of the mosaic architecture long enough for the broader decentralized structure to continue operating.

In effect, Iran’s mosaic defense rests on a three-tier structure in which the Artesh guards the frontiers with conventional forces, the IRGC serves as the operational backbone coordinating decentralized territorial defense, and the Basij – embedded within the IRGC command structure – extends mobilization and resistance into society itself.

The External Mosaic: Extending the Battle Space

Iran’s defensive perimeter does not terminate at its borders. Regional actors frequently associated with this architecture include Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Together they form a distributed deterrence ring that complicates geographical containment.

Prior to the outbreak of the current war with Iran, however, this external layer had already come under significant strain. Israel had conducted sustained military operations against Hezbollah, including targeted strikes that eliminated several senior figures within the organization’s leadership structure. At the same time, the collapse of the government of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria represented another strategic setback for what is called the “Axis of Resistance”, depriving Iran of a long-standing regional partner and logistical corridor linking Tehran to Lebanon.

These developments raise an important question about the resilience of the external mosaic: to what extent can these actors continue exerting coordinated pressure on Israel? The answer will likely depend on their ability to regenerate leadership, logistics and political cohesion under wartime conditions.

Pressure on Iran does not yield a single, localized battlefield response. It generates multiple potential vectors comprising northern Israel, US military installations in Iraq and Syria, maritime corridors in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In mosaic terms, these are external ‘tiles’. They are linked through the IRGC’s Quds Force, which serves as the principal liaison and coordination mechanism connecting Tehran to its regional networks while preserving local autonomy. The degradation of one does not collapse the system. Instead, escalation becomes multidirectional and layered. Risk is multiplied across space.

Vulnerabilities of Mosaic Defense in This War

Mosaic defense is not without vulnerabilities. The very features of dispersal, redundancy and decentralized execution that provide resilience can also weaken strategic coherence. When authority devolves across semi-autonomous nodes, coordinating escalation, allocating scarce assets and maintaining disciplined targeting becomes harder, particularly if communications are degraded by cyber or kinetic attacks. A system designed for resilience can therefore drift toward fragmentation, limiting the defender’s ability to convert endurance into coordinated strategic leverage.

Dispersion also exposes mosaic forces to modern intelligence and surveillance capabilities that can gradually map and attrit dispersed networks. The external mosaic faces similar pressures. Iran’s widening of the war across the region risks tightening regional alignment against Tehran, while earlier setbacks within the Axis of Resistance, discussed above, have already strained parts of this network.

As a result, mosaic defense may succeed in preventing rapid collapse and sustaining retaliation, yet may still struggle to translate survivability into favorable war termination if its regional network and internal coordination erode faster than the attacker’s political will.

Historical Echoes: Vietnam and Afghanistan

Iranian officials themselves have acknowledged that the doctrine draws heavily on historical study. Foreign Minister Araghchi and other Iranian military leaders have stated publicly that Iranian planners have closely examined the lessons of past American wars, particularly conflicts in which technologically superior forces struggled to impose decisive outcomes. These historical experiences have informed the evolution of Iran’s mosaic defense doctrine.

To understand the strategic logic behind this doctrine, it is thus useful to compare it with two insurgent precedents: the Viet Minh against the United States in Vietnam and the Taliban against NATO forces in Afghanistan. The comparison is not rhetorical but structural. Iran has absorbed insurgent logic and embedded it within a sovereign state.

The Viet Minh Model: The Logic of Diffusion

The structural parallel with Vietnam begins not with ideology but with organization. The Viet Minh, and later the Viet Cong, constructed a decentralized political-military network embedded within terrain and society. Regional commands operated with autonomy. Logistics flowed along diffuse corridors such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Tunnel systems enabled forces to survive sustained bombardment.

American planners recognized the difficulty. In an October 14, 1966 memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara warned:

“We have not succeeded in stopping infiltration… Nor have we been able to destroy the enemy’s will to fight.”2

The Pentagon Papers repeatedly acknowledged the structural difficulty of defeating decentralized adversaries. One internal assessment concluded:

“The struggle in Vietnam is essentially political…Military pressure alone cannot assure success.” 3

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap articulated the strategic premise clearly:

“The enemy must fight a long war; we must avoid decisive battle and preserve our forces.”4

American tonnage dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia exceeded that during the Second World War. Yet, the distributed political-military structure survived. The Tet Offensive of 1968, though costly for the Viet Cong, demonstrated continued operational capacity despite years of attrition.

The key lesson is that if the enemy’s center of gravity is diffused into society and geography, overwhelming firepower loses decisiveness. Iran has studied this history carefully.

The Taliban Model: Exhausting the Superpower

In Afghanistan, the Taliban adopted comparable structural logic. After the collapse of their rule in late 2001, they fragmented into localized insurgent cells. Leadership dispersed across borders. Shadow governance networks were rebuilt in rural provinces. The Taliban’s structure comprised decentralized field commanders, flexible tribal alliances, shadow governance networks and cross-border sanctuary. Despite US technological dominance, the Taliban preserved continuity by avoiding decisive battle, reconstituting after losses and exploiting terrain and time.

A 2009 assessment by General Stanley McChrystal observed that

“The insurgency is resilient… It retains the initiative and has grown in strength.”5

The United States controlled the skies, cities and major roads. The Taliban controlled time. By avoiding decisive engagements and reconstituting after losses, they transformed conventional defeat into prolonged political struggle. The US withdrawal in August 2021 did not follow battlefield collapse but strategic exhaustion.

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, decentralization converted survival into leverage. Iran’s mosaic defense seeks to institutionalize that conversion from the outset.

Iran’s Adaptation: Insurgency at State Scale

The distinction, however, remains critical. The Viet Cong and Taliban were insurgent movements resisting occupation. Iran is a sovereign state confronting strike campaigns. Yet, the structural convergence is evident. Decentralized cells find parallel in provincial IRGC commands. Distributed logistics find parallel in hardened missile dispersal. Terrain exploitation finds parallel in Iran’s mountainous interior. External sanctuary finds parallel in a regional proxy network. Long-war strategy becomes attrition-based deterrence.

While Iran may be prepared for guerrilla war against a potential deployment of US ground forces, it is currently focused on surviving high-intensity precision warfare. Instead of light weapons and tunnels, it relies on dispersed missile forces and layered air defense. Instead of tribal networks alone, it integrates structured paramilitary institutions and formalized regional partnerships. However, the governing principle remains unchanged: deny rapid collapse.

Where the Comparison Breaks

Yet, Iran is neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan. It possesses long-range missile forces capable of striking regional targets, integrated air defense systems, a formal military-industrial base and a state economy capable – under strain – of sustaining mobilization. Its deterrence is therefore more technologically layered than insurgent models. At the same time, it is more vulnerable to economic pressure and cyber disruption than rural insurgencies embedded in subsistence societies. A mosaic state must preserve cohesion under sanction and political strain.

The Strategic Implication

If Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrated anything, it is this: the side that survives the initial shock shapes the political trajectory of the war. In Vietnam, survival turned into political leverage. In Afghanistan, endurance turned into eventual restoration of power.

Iran’s doctrine seeks to ensure that any conflict shifts from decisive to protracted, from military to political, from surgical to attritional. For the United States and Israel, whose strategic culture emphasizes rapid, high-intensity campaigns, this creates a structural dilemma. The longer the war lasts, the more variables enter – global markets, regional escalation, domestic politics and alliance cohesion. These are now starting to play out in this conflict.

Iran’s mosaic defense architecture is not designed to conquer. It is designed to complicate and endure.

The Ultimate Question

The historical comparison suggests a deeper inquiry: can technologically advanced militaries achieve decisive outcomes against an adversary that refuses concentration and centralization? Vietnam and Afghanistan suggested no. Iran is betting that the answer remains no.

Whether that bet holds depends on variables that neither Tehran, Washington or Tel Aviv fully control: escalation dynamics, regional alliances, economic resilience and political will. But structurally, Iran has internalized the key lesson of 20th and 21st century American wars: the most dangerous adversary is not the one that wins the first battle. It is the one that survives it.

YouTube link here.

By Freddy Brewster, The Lever, 2/28/26

As President Donald Trump draws the country into hostilities with Iran, shadowy conservative groups working to gut consumer protections, slash climate policy, roll back abortion rights, and push America to the far right have also been pouring millions into influential think tanks advocating for regime change in the country.

While overthrowing Iran’s government could risk prolonged instability and bloodshed in the region, the efforts could please the neoconservative billionaires and benefit the fossil fuel interests funneling dark money to the think tanks.

Donors Trust, a dark money group with deep ties to Supreme Court mastermind Leonard Leo, has donated more than $2.7 million to the far-right, anti-Muslim Center for Security Policy from 2020 to 2023. A significant portion of Leo’s dark money came from a record-breaking $1.6 billion donation from Barre Seid, a conservative, pro-Israel billionaire who reportedly helped fund the anti-Iran film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West. 

During that same timeframe, the anti-Iran think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies received more than $1.6 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the country’s most powerful conservative groups. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, a major donor to the authors of Project 2025 blueprint for remaking the government, is financed by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

A more internationally engaged Iranian government free of U.S. sanctions could lead to increased development of the country’s vast oil reserves, but experts say an attempted regime change could lead to extensive violence and upheaval in the region.

That hasn’t stopped these dark money-funded think tanks from rattling their sabers. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — which employs former Trump and George W. Bush Iran hawks and worked with Trump’s 2018 State Department on an “Iran disinformation” project — has advocated for the Iranian populace to “seize this moment” and overthrow the current government. 

And the Center for Security Policy — backed by weapons manufacturers including the maker of the “bunker buster” bombs Trump dropped on Iran’s nuclear facilities and founded by a Ronald Reagan staffer who pushed for a McCarthy-style investigation into supposed jihadi infiltration of the U.S. government — is also cheering on the hostilities. In recent news broadcasts and essays, think tank staffers have alleged that Iran has coordinated with Mexican cartels to “conduct attacks on U.S. soil” and has ballistic missiles that “can reach America.”

“Fortunately,” wrote one of the staffers, “we can trust President Trump to take the correct course of action at the appropriate time to protect America.” 

YouTube link here.