Collateral Damage

The impact of the war spreads beyond the Middle East

I don’t know what the White House expected when US and Israeli forces began bombarding Iran, but they seem not to have anticipated the global impact of their actions. The Iranian regime did not collapse quickly. Iranian drones and missiles his US bases and consultates, and also damaged civilian targets across the Gulf States, including luxury hotels, airports and energy infrastructure. The result: Hundreds of thousands of tourists and travellers got stuck because of closed airspace. Oil prices skyrocketed upwards. The gas market is in chaos, as the Qatari refinery that produces one-fifth of the world’s supply went offline.

The war also unexpectedly affects another conflict, farther away. One of the most urgent issues in Ukraine is the lack of air defense, and specifically ammunition for Patriot batteries, without which Ukraine cannot block Russian missile attacks. The Russians were aware of this shortage, which is why they targeted Ukraine’s electricity and power supply this winter, knowing they could do terrible damage. In the Middle East, this ammunition is more plentiful. According to President Zelensky, more than 800 Patriot missiles were used in just three days of fighting — more than Ukraine has received since February 2022.

The Russians can see this disparity, and surely understand that the US has made a clear decision: To launch a war of choice in the Middle East and not to defend Ukraine. Ironically, the US and several Gulf leaders have reached out to Ukraine, hoping to acqure the interceptors they learned to use to repel Iran’s Shahed drones, models of which are now made by Russia too. Ukraine has agreed to help, but that still hasn’t made the White House more sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. Several newspapers have reported that the Russians are helping Iran target Americans. Asked about this, Donald Trump has repeatedly brushed the issue aside, refusing, as always, to criticize the Russian president. He told a Fox News reporter not to ask a “stupid question” about Russia and said “it’s not helping much,” to another reporter. This too is a boost to Putin’s morale.

The fighting in the Middle East has already begun to reshape politics in Europe, where the war is unpopular, as is the American president. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, has sought to revive his sagging political fortunes by attacking the invasion as illegal. The French president has backed him. Many others are remaining silent, but a recent comment in the Financial Times expressed how many feel.

The Chinese and the North Koreans are also watching as American air defenses are used up, and as American allies back away, and making calculations accordingly. So are the Japanese, the Taiwanese and the South Koreans. In the coming weeks, the war in Iran will shape decisions made all across Asia, and around the world. Nobody in the US administration seems to have given much thought to mitigating this kind of collateral damage, let alone the deaths and suffering of civilians in Iran. The attitude is rather let’s drop the bombs and then see what happens.

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The Iranian Opposition

On Monday, March 2, I talked about what real Iranian regime change might look like, with my Atlantic colleague Arash Azizi. We agreed that the only way to ensure stability in Iran is to allow the Iranians to create a legitimate, pluralist government, one that reflects the complexities of the country. I am told that the Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic are afraid, more than anything else, that Trump will appoint someone from within the current system and declare victory. Many observers also fear a damaging civil war.

We talked about different scenarios in a conversation moderated by Hanna Rosin. I pointed out that the democratic movement in Iran has been systematically stifled, and that has consequences.

Iran has had coherent opposition movements over the decades that have managed to create nationwide movements and strikes. Almost all of them have been systematically destroyed: people arrested; people killed; people exiled. And on the ground in Iran, there isn’t a single group or person or movement to whom these IRGC or other police or paramilitary could surrender. In fact, it’s almost a very strange thing to be saying. He says, You should surrender, but to whom should they surrender? And why would they feel safe in surrendering?

And it’s the same question about the people should take over. I mean, okay, the people should take over, but what should they do? They’re still facing more than a million people under arms who are defending the regime. There’s still a part of the population—I heard an estimate of about 20 percent; maybe it’s lower—who support the regime, and we saw some of them came out and demonstrated today, as well. So the mechanisms by which this should be done aren’t clear.

There are people outside the country who have plans. There’s the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has described himself as a potential leader and a potential unifier. And that could be true, but he doesn’t have boots on the ground, as we say, in Iran. He doesn’t have a movement ready to take over. And so the question is how all these things would happen in the face of violence, guns, bombardment, is still pretty unclear right now.

I also said that, given the theocratic, fanatical nature of the regime, it was hard to imagine a Gorbachev figure emerging, or some kind of watered-down Islamism. Arash agreed, but made another point about the kind of person who might emerge from within the current elite:

First of all, it’s interesting that Anne brought the comparison to the Soviet Union. The Islamic Republic itself has really looked to the Soviet Union. It makes sure it doesn’t wanna have a Gorbachev because it sort of knows it led to the collapse of that system.

So over the years, it has looked at the Soviet Union and China. And why I would say there is not really a Gorbachev figure—there are Deng Xiaopings, if you will, to use the Chinese example; i.e., there are figures, the most important of whom is Hassan Rouhani, the former president, who really have given up on the sort of theocratic vision and who are more technocratic. They’re not democrats by any means, but they’re sort of thinking—you know, Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying was: It doesn’t matter if a cat is white or black. What matters is if it can catch a mouse. By which he basically meant, what matters is efficacy, if you’re able to have economic development. So if you give long speeches about Islam, but your entire country is crumbling, that’s no good. People like Rouhani, who was a president for eight years, really believe in that sort of vision.

Now, it just so happens that, in the current constellation of power in Iran as we speak, Rouhani is totally out of the picture, but his ally Ali Larijani, his national security adviser; the speaker of Parliament, who is part of the National Security Council, Bagher Qalibaf, has somewhat of a similar outlook. So I do believe this sort of cast of current characters, some amongst them are in this way technocratic.

As a result, they’re also West facing. They’re very critical of ties with Russia and China. But they’re also content with the fact that the Revolutionary Guard, this militia that controls much of the Iranian economy, is now led by a new hard-line figure, Ahmad Vahidi. You know, they’re also part of this system. So the question of how the relationship between them will work is what better means the next page, I guess.

Of course, we might both be surprised by what eventually emerges.

For the whole conversation, listen here, or read the transcript:

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The War at Home

The war in Iran has profound implications for American politics too. I talked about some of them with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of authoritarianism and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Americans should be profoundly concerned about this administration’s inability to explain why the war began, and what the endgame is supposed to be. I hope it ends with a better government in Iran, but so far, again, there is no evidence that either the White House or the Israelis have thought much about that. Instead, the goals and purpose keep changing. Congressional Republicans refuse to exercise any oversight. The public is kept in the dark about important aspects of the war. The secrecy and the dissembling are features of warfare more common to dictatorships than to democracies, where public support is normally needed before a government conducts a war as broad and expensive as this one.

Here’s a clip from our conversation:

Here’s the whole conversation (just half an hour) recorded on Substack:

Wars and Autocratic Decision-Making: My Conversation with Anne Applebaum

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Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

February 27

• Trump Media & Technology Group is considering spinning off Truth Social, which would then merge with a recently formed, cash-rich special purpose acquisition company, as the firm works to close its merger with fusion company TAE Technologies.

February 28

• After abrogating its deal with Anthropic, the Department of Defense struck an agreement with OpenAI—whose president donated $25 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC in 2025—to provide ChatGPT services to the department.

March 2

• A late ethics filing shows Trump made 170 separate purchases of securities issued by major banks and financial corporations possibly totaling more than $20 million between May and November 2025.

• The inspector general of the Department of Labor is investigating allegations that Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer used department resources for personal trips and that her aides attempted to steer grants to favored political operatives.

• Netflix lost its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount Global—led by David Ellison, a Trump ally—after the president repeatedly put his thumb on the scale.

March 3

• The US attack on Iran was preceded by several unusually large and well-timed bets on Polymarket made days before the strikes from suspicious accounts that netted a combined $330,000.

March 5

• Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, pushed for greater American access to Venezuela’s reserves of critical minerals and gold during a visit to the country.

• The SEC settled a fraud case against Justin Sun—a crypto billionaire who was among the Trump family’s earliest and most important crypto partners—that accused him of orchestrating hundreds of thousands of fraudulent trades to manipulate the price of a cryptocurrency developed on his platform.

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Mount Vernon Presidential Library

I spoke at the Women’s Leadership Summit held at the George Washington Presidential Library, part of the Mount Vernon estate. I was interviewed by Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the library and a notable presidential historian. She runs an extraordinary institution with extensive archives, including some of Washington’s books and papers, as well as research fellowships and many public programs. Like the house, the library sits under the umbrella of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Asssociation, which bought the property in the 1850s and has maintained it ever since.

After the event, I had a look around the library. Below, pictures of the reading room, the vault that contains Washington’s books, Washington’s own book plate and his personal edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (more evidence of something I have written about, the Founding Fathers’ huge interest in Rome, especially the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic…)