Graham Allison on the Global Realignment: Iran, China, Israel, Greenland

The interview opens by welcoming Harvard Professor Graham Allison back to All In, noting that the last conversation took place at the summit in Los Angeles and that a lot has happened since. The introduction describes Allison as the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, an adviser to every Secretary of Defense since Kissinger (rendered "Kessinger" in the transcript), someone who helped dismantle 12,000 Soviet nuclear weapons, and the author of Destined for War, which the introduction calls the definitive framework for understanding the U.S.-China relationship.

The first question sets the premise: the U.S. and Israel are in the middle of an attack on Iran, the Supreme Leader is dead, but the regime is still holding power. The questions put on the table are where the conflict leads and whether the world is "sleepwalking into World War III."

The response is organized as four or five quick points, and the first is called the most important: there are more questions than answers. The answer invokes Clausewitz's fog of war, but argues that this fog has thickened because of "two big fog machines": Trump and his administration on one side and Netanyahu ("BB" or "Bibi" in the transcript) on the other, plus the surrounding commentary. According to the response, the administration has given six different reasons for going to war now and five different objectives, has moved back and forth on each, and has given no clear end point: "a day, a week, a month, who knows?"

So it's very uncomfortable to recognize how uncertain things are. And most of the conversation about it tries to make it more confident.

With that caveat in place, the response offers what it calls its "prejudices." The second point is that the campaign has been an extraordinary demonstration of military and intelligence power. U.S. forces, the U.S. intelligence community and their Israeli counterparts are described as "way, way, way off the charts," the product of two decades of investment and especially the past decade. The third point is that no tears should be shed for the Islamic Republic, which is called an evil leader and an evil regime.

breaking something's a lot easier than building something

The fourth point contrasts destroying targets, which the military knows how to do, with building a new regime, which history suggests rarely works. Iraq and Afghanistan are the examples given. The transcript says the U.S. spent "more than a billion dollars" and many thousands of American lives, and it notes that the Taliban were ruling when the U.S. entered Afghanistan and were ruling when it left.

The next point is introduced as "slightly more controversial": this is Netanyahu's war. The response compares him to Ahab in Moby Dick, fixated on a white whale, and says that defeating Iran has been his top agenda for two decades. It says he tried to sell the war to Obama, to Trump in his first term and to Biden, and expresses surprise that he succeeded this time with Trump. The stance is summarized as pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu in this respect.

The response disputes the main justifications that it says Trump has repeated, saying of each: "I see no evidence for that." The claims rejected are: - that Iran was about to attack the U.S.; - that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon; - that Iran was building an ICBM to attack the U.S. It grants that there are "many, many bad things about the Iranian regime" but says most of the claims made do not hold up.

it's easy to get in, and it's quite difficult to get out.

A follow-up asks what really motivated Trump and whether the war might be a way to build leverage before a large U.S. delegation's visit to China the following month. The response says it wishes the war were part of a grand strategy, because that would be reassuring. It describes the analysis that follows as "trompology," and mentions a dinner the previous night with a former student, transcribed as Bill O'Reilly, where the two went back and forth on the question.

The tactical timing is described as easy to explain: the Supreme Leader and other Iranian leaders were out in public, which created a target opportunity. The harder question is why to attack at all, given Trump's campaign and earlier views against repeating the mistakes that led to "endless" wars. Netanyahu is called a "magician" whose single-mindedness and skill at building arguments are impressive. The response says it does not know how he persuaded Trump and that the reasons offered by Trump and his closest advisers are not persuasive. It also points to Trump's erratic style and his tendency to act on instinct.