Lawfare Daily:  Iran War Update—and How We Got Here

[Intro]

Julia Curlee: You have the United States barreling toward war in February of this year, and this, for some reason, the State Department is not planning for the evacuation of a half a million Americans, while our allies and partners who didn’t start this war all managed to have their own evacuation plans for their citizens.

Natalie Orpett: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Natalie Orpett, executive editor of Lawfare, with Ari Tabatabai, Vice President of Research, Security, and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and a contributing editor at Lawfare, and Julia Curlee, a public service fellow at Lawfare.

Ariane Tabatabai: You know, maybe we had a kitchen that needed a remodel, and we decided to just blow it up.

Instead of saying, let’s think about what would make sense, we’re just gonna gut the entire thing.

Natalie Orpett: Today we’re talking about the war in Iran, where things stand today, and how we got here, including how the gutting of the national security apparatus in Washington affected the way the war is being waged by Tehran.

[Main podcast]

Natalie Orpett: Okay, Ari and Julia, I have invited you on to give a bit of an update on the status of the war in Iran and also to explain a little bit of the why of what’s going on and what it all means. You two wrote a piece recently in Foreign Policy magazine that we’re going to dig into analyzing that exact question of how we got here and why and what else we should understand about what it means.

Before we get there, though, let’s just set the scene a little bit by talking about what’s happened lately. It’s actually been a little while since we had a sort of straight check-in on the state of the war in Iran and where things stand. So, Ari, can I come to you first and just give us a, a lay of the land, what’s going on these days?

Ariane Tabatabai: I mean, we can say it very briefly by just noting that it’s where we left it off last time we did a podcast on Iran, which was probably a few weeks ago. But things haven’t changed really significantly. We, you know, Julia and I wrote a piece, I think it was a couple of months ago now, talking about how we had entered this stage of the conflict where the two sides were on and off negotiating while also targeting each other to kind of, you know, continue to raise the costs of the conflict for one another, and that’s essentially where we are.

A few things that have changed a little bit is number one, that we now have a second choke point in the region that has been affected by the conflict that is the Bab el-Mandab and the Red Sea. So, you know, we’ve had obviously disruptions there in addition to the Strait of Hormuz, which was already ongoing.

We have also had, on the U.S. side of things, we have had a DoD IG report that essentially restates some of the things that we’ve known from press reporting which is really the cost of this conflict for the Department of Defense, both in terms of the capabilities and munitions stocks that we’ve been depleting in the course of the conflict.

And then just, I think it was yesterday, we had additional reporting about the DoD might be underestimating, at least publicly, the number of casualties in the conflict among U.S. service members. So, you know, I think domestically in the U.S., what we have seen is obviously the ki— the cost of the war for everyday people, we’re, we all feel it because we all presumably drive places.

We all presumably buy groceries. So, we all feel that cost, but I think there is also a bit of an increased scrutiny on what is going on and what it means for the national defense in a way that maybe a couple of months ago was not as front and center when we were talking about the conflict.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, Ari, it occurs to me that I think one of the things that has been reported out more of late and I think very much since our last podcast on this subject, is just a better sense to the general public of how finite defense resources are.

We have this really incredibly capable military with a lot of resources, but, you know, there was a very prominent story not too long ago about the USS Abraham Lincoln having been at sea for significantly longer than it was supposed to be and getting reports from, from people who are on board and really struggling with the conditions.

Learned a little bit more about why that’s happening, and it’s, turns out that the Iranian strikes on military facilities in the Middle East, that Americans are generally less aware of because they’re not happening in our own backyard, actually do have a very significant impact. There’s sort of been movement of resources from other regions.

And it seems to me that feels to many of us like we are in a different phase of the war. But I wonder if you can give us your sense from more of an expert perspective of whether that’s reflective of a meaningful change or whether it is more the case of reporting bringing it to a more mainstream public.

Ariane Tabatabai: I think it’s a bit of both. You know, I’ve been worried about the readiness issues stemming from this war for a while now. We have talked about this on the podcast. Even before it was really reported, we had started to talk a little bit about it because, you know, my assumption had always been that the longer this conflict went on, m— the more of a hit we would take to our readiness.

Look, as you said, we have a very, you know, strong military with all of its branches that can do a lot of things for a sustained period of time, but it’s not a finite amount of time. And the longer this goes on, the more those readiness issues become you know, come to the fore, and the more they become visible.

And, you know, the fact that we’ve had this kind of sustained attacks for the past few months on our bases, the fact that we’ve had folks who’ve been deployed for a significant amount of time. And, by the way, it’s not just in the context of the Iran war right? We’ve had folks who’ve been deployed from theater to theater, from doing supporting operations in Venezuela and the Caribbean to the Middle East.

And so, all of those things, it takes a while for a military that is as capable and as strong and as large as ours is, but eventually it starts to actually catch up with you, right? So, I think this is naturally the phase of the war we’re at. I think that’s number one. And number two, I think again, the longer this goes on, the more visible it becomes to the general public.

It’s that a few months ago, only those of us who think about and care about these issues on a, from a professional perspective in addition to a personal one, would be like, hey, what are these deployments going to mean for the service members? What are they going to mean for maintenance cycles? What are they gonna mean for training cycles? What are they going to mean for all of these different things that we track?

I think now it’s becoming more obvious as things like, you know, sailors can’t get their their contact lens prescriptions or their prescriptions for drugs that they need. As those things become more apparent, the human stories come to the fore.

I think that’s when the general public also starts to kind of become more aware of it and really understand it. Because when you talk about maintenance cy— cycles You know, it’s hard to kind of explain that to someone who doesn’t really think about ships in their day-to-day life, which is most people.

But when you start to talk about, hey, this person was not able to get their, you know, insert whatever drug they need here, I think that becomes much more relatable for people.

Julia Curlee: I was gonna jump in and say since the last time we talked, there have been a few military developments, some of which Ari has already mentioned that have really underscored that time is really not on the U.S.’s side in this conflict now.

So, first we had the Houthi advance down the coast of the Red Sea, really choking the Bab el-Mandab, the other main choke point around Saudi Arabia for the export of oil and gas to Europe now being squeezed. We had a, a— an attack on the East-West pipeline that allows Saudi Arabia to export its oil, avoiding both of those two choke points.

And now we’ve had a Houthi attack on Riyadh itself. Really underscoring that the U.S. security alliance, which many of these countries have relied on for a long time, is not defending them against either the threat of the Iranians or the Houthi proxy groups. And really, it’s underscoring to, to the region that they cannot rely on the U.S., and there’s really no cavalry coming.

There’s no other move the U.S. has to provide. And we had that all underscored just yesterday at the UN General Assembly, where the president ratcheted his rhetoric once again back to 11, threatening to annihilate the Islamic Republic. At the same time, he’s saying that his envoys are meeting with the Iranians, and they’re making unprecedented progress.

And so, everyone kind of rolls their eyes now at the threats of the U.S. president. The president also said in his speech that he predicting a deal now with the Iranians after the midterm elections, and that the Iranians are waiting to see how he does. Obviously, most political observers think the president is going to suffer grievously in the upcoming election, giving the Iranians yet more reason to wait until the president’s further politically weakened or to try to sign a deal while they think they can maximize their leverage out of the president.

Anyway, either way the, the U.S. in being unable to provide security to our allies and partners in the region, seemingly giving away the farm in public as the president seems to negotiate with himself in, in public, it r— it really gives us no confidence that the longer this conflict goes on that the U.S. has any discernible exit strategy.

Ariane Tabatabai: You know, I think another really important implication of the war that we’re kind of watching happen in real time is this shift from this notion that U.S. presence in the region served as a deterrent against Iranian a— aggression to now actually m— putting a target on the back of U.S. partners in the region.

This is not a novel development since a couple of months ago, but I think it’s become a lot more pronounced as the Houthis have been essentially increasing and escalating against Saudi Arabia specifically and as the attacks against bases in the region have continued. So, you know, I think w— we’re, at some point when this war ends, I’m sure we will do an implications and, you know, kind of like a wrap-up episode that talks about all of the things that happened.

But I think this is one that is worth watching in real time and seeing the reactions of U.S. partners, especially during this week, you know, the, where the UN General Assembly is meeting, of course, and where f— folks are, you know, talking about how they see this conflict, which is front and center for essentially the entirety of the international community.

Doesn’t matter what the first item on your agenda was coming into UNGA week. You are probably going to be talking about Iran at some point.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, and I wanna come back to UNGA in a second, but before I do, I’m wondering what may be a more obvious question to the two of you who are experts, but I think is actually not super clear.

Which is, to what extent do we think that the Houthis are actively coordinating with Iran versus we know obviously Iran has for a very long time provided significant support to the Houthis. But is that sort of in the form of, you know, financial and military support and some ideological alignment, but not actual sort of strategic coordination?

Or is it more the, the latter as well?

Julia Curlee: I think it’s all of the above. I mean, they receive material support from the Iranians, they receive intelligence support from the Iranians. I— but they also don’t need much in terms of strategic direction. They know what the assignment is. It’s to cause damage and pain and complication to U.S. allies and partners while their own allies is under threat from the Iranians.

I don’t think they need much strategic direction, and they’re moving out. They have shown themselves to be a much more resilient threat, and now we have Saudi Arabia begging for assistance from the U.S., and, you know, ac— according to press reporting, direct pressure from the crown prince on President Trump to intervene and a s— very strong reluctance for the president to do what the Saudis need us to do, which would be to provide air support to join their conflict with the Houthis.

And he has shown, the president has shown no interest in committing, further committing U.S. forces, given how unpopular he is heading into the midterms.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, the only thing I’ll add to what Julia said is that the Houthis have always been a bit more independent compared to some of Iran’s other proxies.

If you look at the kind of laundry list of proxies, both those that have existed for a long time, like Lebanese Hezbollah or some of the newer creations, some of them are much more dependent on Iran whereas the Houthis have always maintained that independence, which doesn’t mean that they have not received intelligence and military support from Iran.

They certainly have. They’ve received training from both Iran and from Hezbollah. So, you know, they’ve also had a direct channel to Lebanese Hezbollah, which has been really instrumental in helping them kind of establish themselves and build their capabilities out. But they don’t necessarily rely on Iran on a day-to-day basis to get kind of, you know, support for or approval for the attacks that they’re going to be committing and so on and so forth.

So, it’s a bit more of a independent relationship that some of the, you know, the traditional proxies would have had a decade ago, for example, in Iraq.

Natalie Orpett: That’s interesting. So, it sounds like there’s at least a decent possibility here that the recent escalation from the Houthis, which has been notable, I think.

I mean, they, it’s not that they’ve been silent for the duration of the conflict, but it does seem like things have escalated quite a bit lately. It sounds from what you’re saying that it is certainly plausible that was just a sort of independent strategic judgment by the Houthis rather than a, an instruction from Iran to hit the gas.

Ariane Tabatabai: I don’t know specifically, obviously, what kind of approval or communication may have happened around this particular cycle, but there’s definitely precedent for Iran not necessarily knowing what the Houthis were going to do. So is it possible? Yes. In this particular context, is it likely? I’m not sure, right?

There is... A, a lot of these things are kind of intertwined right now, and so I imagine that Iran at least had some sort of knowledge, but this is now me extrapolating, and I don’t know if Julia agrees with this or not.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, I mean, the, the Iranian playbook is horizontal ex— e— you know, escalation using their allies and proxies, and the Houthis require no additional instruction almost certainly, to take advantage of opportunities like this to strain U.S. allies and partners, and it’s had a huge effect.

The Saudis have had a ma— massive drop in their GDP over the last year, and it’s making clear to the allies that there’s, there is a real cost to letting this war continue to drag on. And so, they’re going to be putting pressure on either the U.S. to intervene or to wrap up whatever diplomatic talks and whatever concessions need to be made to the Iranians to allow them to charge a, a toll, almost certainly on vessels coming through the strait.

They’re just recognizing reality that we have very little means of reversing the current state of the war.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, that’s really helpful. I mean, I think it really underscores what both of you have been saying for months now, which is that we need to be paying attention to the broader regional and international implications of this.

And, you know, just because it hasn’t broken out into a full world war doesn’t mean that it is not really impacting on a number of different levels in a sort of ripple effect starting in the region but going well beyond it, and that pressure and those changes are going to continue to build over time.

So, in that vein actually, let’s go back to UNGA. It is, as you said UNGA week in New York, which is in addition to causing constant traffic problems in Manhattan is an annual gathering of all member nations and observers to get together and talk. And it is... Well, there’s always something to pay attention to, even if it is rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric.

But it does seem also that in this case, there has been quite a lot going on that is potentially of substance, including a, a bilateral meeting with high-level officials from Iran and the United States. President Trump, of course, gave comments yesterday. We’re recording on the morning of Wednesday, September 23rd.

So, Trump’s remarks were the 22nd. Later today actually, there will be a speech from President Pezeshkian of Iran. So, Ari, let me come to you first. What are you hearing out of UNGA? To what extent are you seeing the sort of broader discussions having this be a dominant feature of everything that’s happening there?

And what are the actors themselves saying?

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, it is going to be a dominant theme throughout UNGA week. Certainly even among, say, NATO allies meeting together to discuss a whole host of things for example, a deal that may or may not have happened on Greenland. M— and yet I think Iran will definitely be on the agenda, not the least because it is, as we have said, is affecting, you know, the economy, not just here in the United States, but around the globe, right?

P— we, you know, we’ve been seeing oil prices, gas prices go up in Europe, elsewhere. Everybody is essentially affected by what’s going on in the Middle East, some a bit more, some a bit less, but nobody’s really not affected. So, it is going to be a topic of discussion. It’s going to be a prominent topic of discussion.

Yesterday, as you noted, President Trump made some comments. His comments are essentially in the same vein as some of the tweets he has been putting out over the past few months where he’s threatened, you know, to essentially destroy Iranian… the Iranian civilization. His wording was slightly different this time around.

He noted something to the effect of you know, the choice before me is that they will— we will either have a deal or they won’t be able to live in their country for generations to come. Natalie, as our resident lawyer I defer to you as to what that means legally. But, and politically, I think what we’re seeing is just a continuation of what we’ve seen, and we’ll get into this in a second, but, you know, everything is upside down, right?

Typically, what you would want to do is to figure out what your policy is, what your endgame is what you’re trying to accomplish, and then you would build your messaging around it. And then you would refine that messaging for UNGA week, and you would send the president to go and give a speech that advances your interests. In this case, it seems like the president says things, and then everybody scrambles to see whether it can happen and how it should happen.

And I think this is what we saw here. In terms of the negotiations themselves, yeah, it seems like there was a bilateral conversation. I think the president was asked how it went, and he was sort of positive about it, so that’s good. But you know, as always, we should just hold our horses because we’ve seen this movie before a few times.

We saw it in Pakistan, and now we’re seeing it ne— in New York where there is a meeting, it’s a... it goes somewhat well, and everybody comes out and says, I think we might be able to get a deal. And in this case, the president is putting a timeframe around it, right? It would happen after the midterms. That seems awfully convenient.

I’m not sure why it would happen right after the midterms but it would happen right after midterms. So, you know I wouldn’t read too much into that. I don’t know that it is in effect on the ground moving a whole lot right now.

Julia Curlee: The amateur hour nature of all of this you know, is clear and so, yes, very little is likely to happen before the midterms.

I’m happy to be proven wrong. Most of the moves we’ve taken, whether militarily, which we’ve already discussed, which seem to be going nowhere diplomatically, which the Iranians seem to be happy to have t— talks about talks and to, to run Mr. Witkoff and Kushner around the region. Economically we are continuing to uncork, you know, sanctions on the Iranians, but the key tools that that we’ve attempted to use with secondary sanctions on companies and countries that are doing business with the Iranians don’t apparently include their primary trading partners, their primary economic lifelines, including the Chinese, who will be in Washington this week, who have not been as affected by the, the global oil price ri— rises because they prepared for this contingency for years, and they have no intention of going along with us in economically squeezing the Iranians.

That, that would be a major benefit if we had coordinated this in advance and gotten the Chinese’s cooperation in this like we did during maximum pressure campaigns under previous administrations. But because the administration is winging it there’s no chance of delivering their assistance at this hour when we would really need it.

Ariane Tabatabai: The one thing that the comment about the, you know, post-midterm kind of, you know... what is striking to me is that the, it’s almost a tacit acknowledgment by the president that this is not gonna get resolved before the midterms, right? And he’s already, it seems like, trying to kind of build that into his messaging going into November to say, hey, we may still be at this in a couple of weeks, but I guarantee it’ll be done after the midterms.

So, you know, I think on some level there is an acknowledgment here in addition to the sanctions that Julia pointed out. You wouldn’t come out and impose sanctions after you’ve already started striking a country. You typically do that before. If you’re doing it afterwards, if you have this giant rollout of sanctions after you’ve already been in a military conflict with a country for s— over six months, you’re acknowledging that your military that you’re not doing as well as you think you are, or you’re not doing as well as you’re saying you are militarily, and you need an additional tool here to help you kind of close the deal.

So, you know, I think there is, we’re just seeing a lot of tacit kind of acknowledgments by the administration in word and deed that the war is not going as well as the president says it’s going.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, can I just push back on that a little bit just because I heard reporting I believe from the BBC, that an Iranian official following up on some Iranian state media reporting saying, you know, yes, we had this meeting, indicated it was productive as well, but said the point of it was to convey Iranian demands and indicated, this was a unnamed official, indicated that Iran was perhaps prepared to open the Strait of Hormuz within a week if the U.S. would drop its naval blockade and submit to some other conditions.

But they were they had decreased the demands from previous rounds. So, I’m wondering, you know, the, the analysis that you gave of imposing additional sanctions after a military conflict has been underway for quite some time I think makes sense, but it’s one of those things that makes me wonder if this is a different playbook, including because of a different nature of war and sort of an evolution from the conventional wisdom that may have been in place before such that there’s sort of either a different or an additional way of looking at these sanctions as responsive to the most effective thing that the Iranians have been able to leverage when confronting obviously the very asymmetrical power of the U.S. military, and that is, of course, the, the Strait of Hormuz.

So, so what do you make of that angle to it?

Ariane Tabatabai: I think we’re starting to get into the piece, which is that s— so yes, it is a slightly different kind of playbook here, but it’s not one that we didn’t know was going to happen. Or at least it should have been anticipated that the closure would occur. It should have been an— anticipated that the strait closure would lead to e— the economic implications that it has led to, and that should have led the administration to calibrate its policies accordingly.

It did not. It didn’t anticipate it, or it failed to consider the assessments that this was a real course of action, that Iran would do this. And so now they’re doing things backwards, right? So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, look, if you think you’re going to achieve something via sanctions which is a much the, which comes at a much lower cost than by depleting stocks of munitions and you know, diverting key assets to a region, why wouldn’t you do that?

So again, it just to me it’s not, I don’t think this is the administration being clever and adapting to something that was completely unforeseen. I think it’s that they are seeing the implications that we all knew would happen, and are trying to figure out how to kind of, you know, put an end to this, and they’re throwing everything at the wall.

But maybe somebody here has a more generous interpretation than I do.

Julia Curlee: No.

Ariane Tabatabai: I do not …

Julia Curlee: I mean, this war is gonna end at a time and place of the Iranians’ choosing. You know, we started it, but they’re gonna end it. And I think that they’ve pretty, they’ve been pretty clear about the conditions under which they would be willing to at least have another ceasefire which probably would be a good open-ended way of them maintaining strategic leverage.

And the conditions have been stated now several times by the Iranians, including this last week on Iranian state media, which would include the U.S. lifting the naval blockade, releasing frozen assets, ending the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and allowing Iran at least the tacit control over the strait, or at least the, the ability to close it at a time and place of their choosing, and probably to charge some percentage which will just then get priced into, you know, global energy exports.

That’s the deal on the table. The U.S. has really shown no ability to change the fundamentals of that. We will probably continue to look for another option and a way out, but it seems highly unlikely that we’ll be able to find one.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so let’s shift over to the why of all of this, which you’ve both indicated somewhat as you’ve been responding to the previous questions.

And that is captured very well in your piece. I think I can fairly say the thesis of it is effectively that the lack of reliance on experts and on analysts and on those who would have been able to foresee the things that have happened that have really shaped the conflict and have really, really belied the limitations of just pure military might.

That the lack of that consideration, the lack of policy coordination, the lack of coming up with a policy before actually trying to implement it is really what brings us to where we are now and makes this conflict, you know, o— ongoing after six months rather than over in a couple of days, as was promised in the early days.

So, I wanna actually, before we get into your arguments for that, and you did a really helpful deep dive on what exactly that looks like, I wanna start with a little bit of a provocative question to help you lay the foundations for why we should all listen to you, which is to say that both of you were in government.

Ari, you were at DOD. Julia, you were at the CIA. You both have significant experience and expertise in everything you are talking about right now. But I would like to ask you, given that your thesis is that the administration should have listened more to people who have jobs like you used to have, why should we believe you?

Because why are you not just biased and self-important? And why is it that there isn’t a possibility that foreign policy and national security should be run by instinct and that we’re in a brave new world, et cetera, et cetera? And so, the experience and expertise of people like yourself is very quaint and outdated.

Justify yourselves. Why should we believe you?

Julia Curlee: Yeah, obviously the answer is if Ari and I were in charge, then everything would have been fine, and the Middle East would be a bastion of peace and freedom for all the world as we all know. I’ll just, you know, take— taking myself out of the picture for a second.

If we were talking about Apple launching an, an iPhone and we fired the, the chief engineer and we, you know, s— eliminated the product testing, you know, and customer fielding team and, you know, the, the marketing branch got, got DOGEd, and then the, the product comes on the market and it doesn’t work, the phone doesn’t connect to the cellphone provider, no one would be wondering what could possibly have gone wrong with the product.

And we’re talking about the most complicated, complex institution on the planet, the U.S. government, preparing to go to war in a region where the United States has lost twice in the last two decades to countries who didn’t have navies, who didn’t have air forces, and yet we struggled. And so, to throw away all of that expertise on the eve of a co— of a conflict, to then eviscerate the planning and coordination elements of our own government, to fire senior generals with great experience for no crime, for no cause, and then to expect otherwise to me it defies logic whether or not Ari and I still, you know, have badges that, that work in federal office buildings.

Ariane Tabatabai: So, maybe I’ll get into some of the insider baseball, and Julia can tell me if I if I should shut up here. But we actually debated whether we should kind of at the forefront of this piece talk about how, you know, we’re part of the people that we’re describing here. And so, we’re a little biased, but I think it’s easy to kind of take that aside and focus on what’s at hand.

Look, I think the past 19 months for anyone who’s been paying attention should once and for all in my mind close this debate about whether government actually does things for the American people or, you know, Reagan’s eight scariest words in the English language is, I’m here from the government and I’m here to help you.

Maybe that was nine words. In any case I think this should really put an end to some of this because we’re seeing it kind of affect us in every aspect of our lives all the way up to and including a war that again is having ripple effects for all of us, right?

We’re having food recalled more than we’ve had in a long time. You have measles outbreaks when, you know, this was a disease that was that just we didn’t grapple with in our generation. We’ve have had plenty of problems with aviation. So, you know, and then you name it and you kind of go down the list. And all of it is essentially the one thing in common is that there is this failure to listen to the federal workforce.

And I would go further and say it’s not just a failure to listen, it’s an active war of attrition against the national security and broader federal workforce that has led us to where we are today. And the, you know, the reason why people should listen to us on this is because all of the things that we are discussing here as the j— the ma— major areas of failure are things that were completely predictable and were completely predicted.

We’ve talked about the Strait of Hormuz, right? We’ve talked about this for months. This is something that had been known, and if only you had a leadership, a political leadership who listened to the folks who do these things for a living, who do it under different administrations, Democratic and Republican, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

This war would not have started. This war would not have lasted almost seven months at this point, and we would not have lost billions and billions of dollars with installations that have been significantly damaged. We wouldn’t have lost, you know, I think it’s up to 19 now, service members, but probably more, as has been reported.

And then let’s talk about the thousands of people who’ve died across the region completely unnecessarily so that we could set back, what, a few, you know, missile sites in Iran and a few drone sites? Like, that’s the... It’s not like we’re having a strategic accomplishment here. It’s just we’re s— we’re setting back some capabilities.

That’s not exactly worth all of these costs and consequences for the people across the region and for all of us here at home. So, you know, I think that alone should be indicative of all of the failures that have occurred that have to do with the fact that we’re just having this war against expertise in the government.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I can testify to the fact that Ari told me and the rest of the Lawfare team that the Strait of Hormuz was going to become a significant point of leverage approximately 30 seconds after Trump announced the beginning of hostilities while no one else was talking about it. Julia only wasn’t talking about it because I didn’t know her yet. She wasn’t with Lawfare.

Okay, so let’s dig into your piece a little bit. The first topic that you really went into in depth to try to give some... put some meat on the bones as to what difference expertise would have made was relating to the currently broken, as you put it, interagency process and dismantling of the National Security Council.

So, tell us a little bit what you meant by that. Julia, why don’t I start with you?

Julia Curlee: Yeah. So, at the very beginning of the administration, this administration, I was in the White House, I was at the National Security Council, I was the acting senior director for intelligence programs on day one. And on day three as, as we wrote the administration eviscerated really the...

This is the wiring that holds together departments and agencies, that coordinates this most complex of institution on the planet, the U.S. government. They did it for political reasons, because in other places, Project 2025, they had said that this was the deep state lying within. But the effect of it was effectively to paralyze the U.S. government.

If it d— if you imagine delivering a, you know, a knife to the cerebral cortex or the spinal nervous system of the U.S. government, that is what happened on day three, with no plan or contingency for replacing 160 career detailees from all of the departments and agencies that make our government work.

It then took weeks to months to rehire most of those people with no turnover, and then the administration turned right around in April and May of 2025 and fired those people all over again. This then led to a greatly reduced National Security Council to below Eisenhower levels of less than 50.

At one point, 36 was the public number, and that’s just simply inadequate for the NSC to perform its two main jobs, which, you know, one is these are the president’s staffers. These are the people who are their eyes and ears in the interagency system to make sure that the president’s policies are being implemented and that planning is being done to, to prepare for inevitable contingencies, because while Donald Trump may think he’s the most p— you know, intelligent man on earth, he is not all omniscient and an expert in all topics under the planet, which is why we have experts who spend their careers becoming true, you know, truly deep on these subject matters to prepare for those contingencies.

They prevented the assistant secretary level and deputies level interagency committee meetings from reta— from taking place without the personal permission of the deputy chief of staff at the White House, who was Stephen Miller. That effectively shut down the normal senior level expert coordination that would have happened in any contingency in a previous administration.

And just the clearest example of the planning breakdown, you have the United States barreling toward war in February of this year, and the, for some reason, the State Department is not planning for the evacuation of a half a million Americans from the region. And so, in a war that we started, we did not have plans to evacuate the Americans, the dependents of U.S. diplomats in the region, and it’s a giant cluster when the war kicks off, while our allies and partners who didn’t start this war all managed to have their own evacuation plans for their citizens.

And just sort of this one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing is a classic example of the breakdown of coordination where the NSC exists to provide that. And so, then the, all the other things that you could talk about where in any decision-making process, even in a bad decision like, like we made going into Iraq early in my career, you still had the apparatus to plan for failure and to mitigate the worst of it and then to provide the president with options to pull ourselves out of it.

And all of that broke, and the inevitable consequences of the war are all around us. We didn’t plan for the Strait of Hormuz to be closed. We didn’t plan for what happens when you kill the supreme leader, and he’s replaced by another. We didn’t plan for our bases in the region to be targeted to the point of not being able to be used.

We didn’t plan for the global economic consequences of $5, now probably $6 a gallon gas by the end of the year. All of those things across the d— diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic spheres would have been planned for in a normal interagency process that every other administration had.

But the self-inflicted wound of this administration, from almost day one, has left us in this situation, and we see little sign that they’ve learned that critical lesson.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, thank you for bringing up that example because I think the, the term interagency process doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to people who don’t have sort of contact with the government.

But it is in addition to the question of whether you’re listening to experts people who actually study the region and know the language and things like that, which is also very important, just the sort of self-inflicted wound of limiting the ability of people who focus on different aspects of what the United States is doing at any given time, limiting structurally their ability to interact with each other so that they can coordinate and make plans for things like evacuating Americans from the region is exactly what interagency is for and what that means.

So, thanks for giving that some specifics. Ari, I wanted to come to you on this as well.

Ariane Tabatabai: Yeah, I think that’s a really great rundown of things. A, a few maybe additions to what Julia said. One, the reason to have these interagency processes at every level, right, starting kind of low and going all the way up, is so that by the time decisions get to the president and to the principals, that you’ve kind of been able to go through all of the gaps in your knowledge and all of the gaps in capabilities and be able to kind of give them a very full picture of what they should know before they make those decisions, right?

And this evidently was not happening. Now, I want to be clear that there have been plenty of critiques of the National Security Council over the years, over the decades. You know, in some instances, including in the previous administration in which both Julia and I served in different capacities, you know, the, the fundamental kind of criticism with the National Security Council was that it was too big, it was too micromanaging, there were too many meetings, sometimes the meetings were not actually advancing the ball for the things that we should be doing.

There wasn’t a good appreciation for what, from the DOD perspective, what the Department of Defense did, all of those things. So, we can, you know, reasonable minds can disagree on what the National Security Council should look like, how big it should be, how many meetings they should be running, how it should be running processes. I think those would be valid.

What is not valid is that we had, you know, maybe we had a kitchen that needed a remodel, and we decided to just blow it up. Instead of saying, let’s actually just remodel it, right? Let’s think about what would make sense, we’re just gonna gut the entire thing. So, I think this is where we’ve been left off, where not only did the interagency fail to think about, you know, Natalie, you just mentioned language knowledge and regional knowledge and expertise and all of those things.

Those are important, but we didn’t even understand our own capabilities, and that is a really significant gap that would have been filled if we had an adequate process that was running where different decision-makers from the State Department to the White House could hear from the Department of Defense, here’s the things we can do, here’s how long we can do it for, and here is where we start to have problems.

And then the other piece of this is that all of this, and we’ll get into this in a second, all of these decisions should also bring in the intelligence community, and again, as Julia noted, that was just not the case. And so, you have all these agencies and departments that are running off doing their own thing without the coordination, without kind of level-setting on what we actually know about the situation, and without understanding our own capabilities.

Julia Curlee: To put a concrete example on this, just we’ve run this experiment before. We had a Trump administration, and in that Trump administration we had senior officials, you know, who were four-stars, three-star generals working in the White House. We had, you know, a Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense. We had serious professionals who had, you know, who had led the country at war, and they imposed upon that system, you know, a process to look around the corner and see what we might not be anticipating, consider these you know, problems, and then elevating them up in this pyramidal structure that every complex institution on the planet follows.

It shouldn’t be a, you know, a, a mystery that, you know, you have lower-level people that surface things above their level to the next level for decision-making, and you try to resolve things at the lowest possible level. But, you know, we have experts for a reason and there was a deliberate decision to not follow them, and in its place, you’ve created this vertical.

And there was an, there was a, you know, articles in the paper just yesterday talking about senior directors at the NSC effectively being turned into, you know, you know, the waiter at a dinner party rather than this, the senior advisor to the president, where their job is instead of to tee up options that might be uncomfortable, that might imply that things aren’t really going great in Iran, sir, they are simply to implement down the great man’s directives from above.

And that’s not how a complex institution works. It might be how, you know, a, a media company or a website works, but it’s not how a complex institution like the United States government functions that’s responsible for things happening in the real world and should have a feedback cycle where when things aren’t working, people below can tee up options for the president in order to make a different course to make a different decision, and that is clearly broken at this point.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. I b— I want to give you the chance to talk specifically about the, the second theme that you mentioned though you’ve touched on it a bit, which is the hollowing out of the broader national security workforce. So, you’ve already referenced a lot of firings intentional, some real gutting, not only of, you know, firing individuals and billets, but of actually changing the number of billets in— given structures that had been in place before.

So, tell us more about this piece of the puzzle. Ari, can I come to you first on that?

Ariane Tabatabai: Sure. Yeah, I mean, you know, this has been a challenge across a whole host of issue sets. This is not just a national security problem obviously, but it is also, and very importantly, a national security issue, which is that as a result of a number of different initiatives over the past 18, 19 months, we have a workforce that is both, that has shrunk and is also slightly traumatized.

So, you know, we’ve had the DOGE efforts early on in the administration. Just as a reminder fo— for folks, you had, you know, DOGE under Elon Musk composed of a bunch of folks, relatively young, who didn’t really understand government, who’d never worked in government, who were showing up to different buildings with a new badge and a mandate to cut to cut the workforce and to kind of cut costs, quote unquote.

The reality, as we now know, is that cu— costs were not cut, but expertise was, and they didn’t really understand what they were cutting. In some cases, they would fire people and then they would try to ask questions about, if they asked questions, they would ask questions about what these folks did. And in some cases, in a really humiliating way so that, you know, everybody else who was watching would take note, right?

There were reports about certain agencies where people would show up and their badges just didn’t work, and that’s how they would find out that they were cut. And that was just the first round of things. The second and third rounds were specific RIFs, reductions in force, that happened across different departments, the State Department being one where you had really significant reductions in force, I think twice to the Foreign Service.

And the way they essentially identified folks they were going to fire were people who were working on issues that were deemed that were seen as political in this administration. If you touched anything related to DEI, if you worked on climate, for example, you would probably find yourself without a job.

And so, with that, you cut, you know, folks who were trained on our collective dime for years and years, in some cases learning languages, learning regions. And so, we’ve lost decades and decades of expertise that we paid for, that we have trained people for without really understanding what some of these folks did.

And again, as was the case in DOGE, s— the State Department did all these RIFs, and then they came back and said, wait, we maybe need some of these folks, so let’s hire them back. In some agencies folks were fired from their day jobs as civilians in government, only to be hired back as contractors.

So again, this just shows the ad hoc nature of all of these actions, the fact that no one was really paying attention big picture to what we needed to maintain in government. And kind of, you know, more on a more micro level, they didn’t understand what individuals did, what their portfolios were, whether they were needed.

So, this again goes back to my metaphor of maybe the kitchen needed a little bit of a, a refresh, and what we did is we just decided to blow it up and not ask any questions. Obviously, the most prominent example that we can point to is USAID, the gutting of that whole agency, and the catastrophic consequences it, it has had, you know, for m— millions of people around the world.

But bringing it back to our issue of Iran, again, we’ve talked about this traumatized workforce. You’ve also had things like specific influencers who have, you know, named specific individuals and really tried to kind of pr— bring this chilling effect in the workforce that if you go against the president, if you dare to advise the president that, you know, what he is thinking is maybe not the right course of action, that you’re going to get... You’re gonna lose your job and you’re gonna get targeted, and that is really chilling, right?

And the, the point of the workforce is not to just tell you, yes, sir, you’re correct, every step of the way. The job of the workforce is tell— to tell you what are the trade-offs you need to be making, what are the gaps in your analysis, and then sure, the president gets to make the decision, and everybody salutes and moves forward.

But you need to have those debates, and if you don’t have those debates, you end up with a case like we have in Iran where no one asked the questions that needed to be asked. And yes, as Julia noted, seemingly the State Department figures out that, by the way, we need to evacuate Americans from the region after we’ve started a war.

Julia Curlee: I put a finer point on some of this. I mean, because, like, the Iran case is really the best example of how the administration’s dual assault on the process and the people has resulted in a debacle. So just a few examples of this. So first, you see the firing of CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an officer with decades of experience, in public for no reason whatsoever, seemingly doubts about his political loyalties, and replacement with someone else who doesn’t have nearly as much experience, sending a message to all of our general officers the price of being perceived as on the other side of the president’s team.

And, like, if that was gonna send a chilling message in advance of a war and the need for the military to send a, you know, difficult messages to the president, this was a pretty good one. Then we see after the first round of strikes in Iran, the firing of the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for delivering unwelcome battle damage assessments that the Iranians still had a work...

You know, a nuclear program, in public, for disagreeing with the president, which the president then would call virtual treason in the aftermath. Never mind that then becomes the reason for the United States to go to war in six months, that there’s still an Iranian nuclear program that needs to be disarmed.

So, if there needed to be a message sent to people working on Iran that you’ll be fired for delivering unwelcome messages, those were there. And then in the bigger picture, this administration, through its attempt to reduce the force of the federal government through ham-fisted efforts through DOGE or through just buyouts and for looking at people, encouraging people to retire early, have targeted people in about the 20 to 25-year marks of their career.

Now this might sound weedy, but if you just do the math, the generation of people that came into our security agencies or intelligence defense 20 to 25 years ago is the post-9/11 generation of officers. And so you’ve encouraged the very people who earned this experience in this region through blood, sweat, and tears and at very least learned what not to do in a Middle East war, you’ve encouraged them to walk out the door right in advance of a conflict. I think historians are gonna look at all of these moves and see the United States having con— inflicted enormous self-inflicted wounds in advance of a conflict, and they’re not going to be confused why the United States lost this war.

The losing of this war w— it was lost in Washington long before it was lost in the Strait of Hormuz.

Ariane Tabatabai: So, in addition to what Julia brought up with the firing of CQ Brown and a number of you know, senior general and flag officers over the course of the first few months of the administration, including the Chief of N— Naval Operations, a really important job when you have a situation in the Strait of Hormuz.

There’s also been a number of other issues, I think, that have really stymied decision-making at the Department of Defense. One is that you have a less qualified frankly, civilian leadership in place, starting with the Secretary of Defense, but not limited to him. Just across the board, if you look at some of the positions and who’s occupying them in the Department of Defense today and you compare them with their predecessors the, there, there is a significant gap.

There is a significant gap in age often. M— but importantly, there’s a very significant gap in the qualifications and the experience that they bring to the table. That’s number one. Number two, you have also had a sidelining of the civilian sort of side of the house in the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the policy side.

That should really be an integral part of planning operations and a conflict like this. And the reason that’s important is that is the arm of the Department of Defense that really focuses on asking questions about trade-offs which, you know, I have gone on about. For example, if you commit to, you know, if you have operations in this place, and this is what it takes, here is the gap that you’re going to be leaving elsewhere.

They would have help with things like off-ramps, with making sure that your political objectives are aligned with and attainable with the military capabilities that you have. And all of these questions were not answered ahead of this conflict. And the fact that policy has been missing in action is really leaving us with the situation we have today.

And the last piece I’ll say is that, you know, part of the job of the Secretary of Defense is to adjudicate between the different command commanders, all of whom always want all of the things, right? Every command commander comes to the table and says, I need all of the assets. I need all of the forces.

And it is the job of the Secretary of Defense alongside policy, the policy team, to make that determination Or, with support w— from the policy team. There was a failure to do that here. And again, we’re seeing that in real time play out as we have to divert assets into the Middle East, and potentially leaving significant gaps in the Indo-Pacific.

And don’t take that from me, take that from you know, current general and flag officers who have said this on the record about the gaps that they’re seeing in the area of responsibility that is the Indo-Pacific. So, if you take this argument and peel it back and kind of apply it to every agency and department that has been relevant here, I think the pic— the picture becomes extremely clear as to what the specific actions this administration has taken against the federal workforce over the past 18 months, what those implications have been in this conflict.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, I think last piece that you hit on in your article that I do just wanna mention quickly before we wrap is the role of Congress in all of this, or more specifically, the lack thereof. So, Julia, how does that play into everything here?

Julia Curlee: Right. I mean, Congress has abrogated its most basic responsibilities here, whether it’s just blowing through deadlines of War Powers Acts and allowing the administration to claim every 90 days or so that the war is over.

Oh wait, no, the war started again, so we don’t have to comply. The, the president’s party behaving in the most s— unexplainable manner, where w— a war is clearly going badly, it is hurting the president’s political chances in the upcoming midterms. They, in Congress, will bear the price of it, and yet no oversight hearings, no, no meaningful check on the executive losing a war.

A, a Congress seemingly passing on its own basic responsibilities. It’s really un— unexplainable to me that they won’t even act in their own self-interest.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, I think to wrap up, I wanna just ask you both what you’re looking for in the next couple of weeks and months. I mean, I think we’ve sort of established through all of this that the failure to engage with policy as a general matter to make sure that there’s coordination across the government, and certainly to make sure that people with deep expertise in the area are being consulted on all of the permutations of what might happen.

The fact that they’re not in the mix makes it perhaps really hard to predict, but as you’ve been observing over the last six, seven months, what are you looking for in particular in, just in the, the weeks and months to come? Ari, I’ll start with you, and then Julia close us out.

Ariane Tabatabai: As pertains to this ongoing war with the midterms, I am looking for Congress.

Let’s see if, you know, they actually find their way back into fulfilling their the, the job that they’re supposed to be doing. In the longer term, over the next few months what I will be interested in seeing is any concrete plans for rebuilding the federal workforce whether, for a future administration.

And I think that is a really crucial work that needs to start happening now. It should have started happening yesterday. And I think that if, you know, folks think that we’re just gonna kind of turn the switch back on, we’re kidding ourselves. It’s not going to happen. We need to really think deeply and heartily about this really challenging issue of how do we rebuild these agencies and departments and how do we bring back talents in a way that is sustainable.

Julia Curlee: In, in the absence of real expertise and real process, one wonders, like, what will be the sequence of events that actually ends this war? And not to be flippant, but it’s almost like the president’s just waiting for the vibes to be right so that he can walk away with whatever deal he can get. I think the more interesting thing will be if, assuming that there is no deal in the offing in the next few weeks, when the new Congress is seated, when Democrats are in control, if they are in control of the power of the purse, when they can hold real oversight hearings and demand answers from the leadership, from Congress, fr— from the White House or from you know, the secretary of defense, like, what are they willing to do to bring an extremely unpopular, ruinous war to completion?

And we have not seen a Congress in our lifetimes really use the powers of the purse, of oversight, to constrain an executive like this. And we could have a real showdown over this war, assuming it continues into the, the new year, which it could very well.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. Well, we’re gonna have to leave it there for now, but I suspect and very much hope that we will speak to you again in a couple of weeks for another update on the unpredictable next couple of weeks. So, Ari and Julia, thank you so much for joining us.

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