global geopolitics

An independent analysis of the strategic repertoire that produced the 2026 Iran war, the institutional networks that sustained it across seventeen years, and the material contradictions that now threaten its architects

Editorial Analysis | September 2026

Crafting a durable policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran has confounded every American administration since the revolution of 1979, and the intellectual apparatus constructed to address that challenge has itself become an object requiring scrutiny. The Brookings Institution published Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran on 13 July 2009, a volume authored by Kenneth M. Pollack, Daniel L. Byman, Martin S. Indyk, Suzanne Maloney, Michael E. O’Hanlon, and Bruce Riedel, all affiliated with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings [2]. The book’s official description states that the authors “do not argue for one approach over another” and instead “present the details of the policies so that readers can understand the complexity of the challenge and decide for themselves which course the United States should take” [2]. That framing is the conventional posture of policy analysis, and it is not false. But the table of contents reveals a structure that is anything but neutral, proceeding from diplomatic options through military options to regime change and containment, with chapters titled “Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” “The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising,” “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups,” and “The Coup: Supporting a Military Move Against the Regime” [2]. A volume that presents these as discrete options within a single analytical framework is not a neutral survey of possibilities. It is a repertoire of strategies, prepared by individuals with institutional access, for use by policymakers when circumstances permit.

The diplomatic chapter of that repertoire contains language that subsequent events have rendered prophetic. The report describes a strategy in which the United States would strike only when “there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer, one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down” [2]. Under those circumstances, the report continues, the United States or Israel “could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians ‘brought it on themselves’ by refusing a very good deal” [2]. This is not a strategy for reaching a diplomatic settlement. It is a strategy for manufacturing a justification for war by constructing an offer that the adversary cannot accept, then attributing the resulting failure to the adversary’s intransigence. The conditions that the United States demanded of Iran in the negotiations mediated by Oman during 2025 and 2026, the destruction of major nuclear facilities, the transfer of all enriched uranium, the permanent cessation of enrichment, and acceptance of an agreement with no expiration date, correspond precisely to the structure of an offer designed to be refused [2]. Iranian officials could not accept such terms without conceding the foundation of their national security architecture, and American policymakers understood this. The trap was not a malfunction of diplomacy. It was diplomacy functioning as designed.

The institutional continuity of the report’s authors is not incidental to the story of how its repertoire was implemented. Kenneth Pollack, the volume’s lead author, is now Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute and has moderated numerous public discussions of the Iran war throughout 2026, including events titled “Iran: War or Deal?” and “The Iran War: Escalation, Energy, and the Uncertain Endgame” [7]. Suzanne Maloney remains Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and has appeared as a leading expert on Iran across Bloomberg, CNN, PBS, and NPR during the current conflict [2]. Bruce Riedel remains a senior fellow at Brookings and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, following a thirty-year career at the CIA [2]. Martin Indyk, who served twice as United States ambassador to Israel and as Barack Obama’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, died in July 2024 after a career that embodied the revolving door between the policy establishment and government service [2]. These are not marginal figures who happened to write a book. They are the institutional custodians of a strategic framework that has survived multiple administrations and whose prescriptions have been progressively enacted as circumstances permitted.

The public case for the 2026 war rested on the claim that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat requiring immediate military action. The United States intelligence community’s own published assessment contradicted that claim directly and unambiguously. The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on 25 March 2025, stated that “the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has not reauthorised the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003” [5]. The Arms Control Association confirmed that the consensus view among American intelligence agencies before the Israeli attack was that “there was no imminent threat that Iran was weaponizing its nuclear program” [5]. When the President of the United States was asked about his own Director of National Intelligence’s assessment, he stated publicly that he did not care [5]. This is not a case of intelligence failure. It is a case of intelligence being deliberately discarded because it contradicted a predetermined policy. The war was not launched because Iran was building a bomb. It was launched because the policy repertoire required a war, and the intelligence assessment was an obstacle to be ignored rather than evidence to be weighed.

The material foundations of American military power have eroded to a point that the architects of the current escalation appear not to have anticipated. During the first months of the war against Iran, the United States expended roughly half of its pre-war inventories of Patriot, THAAD, and Precision Strike Missile munitions, alongside approximately one-third of its JASSM, SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, and Tomahawk stocks [3][12]. Media reports estimated the depletion of nearly eighty per cent of the THAAD inventory and close to half of Patriot interceptors [12]. American forces fired hundreds of cruise missiles in the first four weeks of operations and expended more than five thousand munitions across thirty-five types in the first ninety-six hours [12]. The roots of this depletion lie not in any single campaign but in the structural erosion of the American defence industrial base following the Cold War, when consolidation reduced suppliers and production lines for solid rocket motors, explosives, shell bodies, rare-earth components, and microelectronics were either scaled back or allowed to stagnate [3]. Financial allocations alone cannot rapidly generate the workforce, facilities, and supplier networks necessary for sustained expansion [3]. The United States possesses the most advanced military technology in the world, and it cannot manufacture enough of it to fight the war its policy establishment has chosen to wage.

The naval component of that war has produced operational failures that reveal the human consequences of strategic overstretch. The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group conducted a nine-month deployment during which four separate incidents resulted in the loss of three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets, each worth approximately sixty million dollars, and a collision with a merchant vessel in the Mediterranean Sea [13]. On 22 December 2024, the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg fired two Standard Missile 2s at a pair of Super Hornets approaching the carrier for landing, mistaking them for Houthi missiles [13]. On 18 April 2025, while the Truman was evading an incoming Houthi ballistic missile, an F/A-18E Super Hornet slid from the carrier’s hangar bay because the aircraft had faulty brakes and the crew had not been informed of the impending evasive manoeuvre [13]. On 6 May 2025, another Super Hornet went over the edge of the carrier during a landing attempt [13]. Investigating officers independently concluded that each mishap was preventable [13]. A senior Navy official told reporters that the crew was “beset by missile attacks” and operating under extreme pressure, and that the service felt no obligation to publish the results of its accountability actions [13]. These are not the symptoms of a military at the peak of its readiness. They are the symptoms of a military asked to perform missions for which it is not adequately resourced, trained, or rested.

The civilian cost of the campaign that produced these operational failures has been documented by the American military itself. The Pentagon formally acknowledged that military operations in Yemen killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others during 2025, with all confirmed casualties occurring during three strikes conducted as part of Operation Rough Rider between March and May 2025 [9][11]. The strikes occurred on 6 April near Sanaa, on 17 April near Ras Isa Port where eighty civilians were killed and 171 injured, and on 28 April near Sa’ada where sixty-eight civilians were killed at a migrant detention facility holding Ethiopian migrants [9][11]. Amnesty International concluded that the Sa’ada strike “constituted an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a possible war crime” [1][14]. Independent estimates from the Yemen Data Project put the civilian toll at least 238 killed and 467 injured, while the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated that American airstrikes from late 2023 to mid-2025 killed 213 civilians, with 208 of those deaths occurring during the Trump administration’s second term [9]. The Pentagon’s own figures are the minimum. The actual toll is almost certainly higher, and the discrepancy between official acknowledgment and independent documentation is itself a datum requiring explanation.

The information architecture that sustained the policy of confrontation has undergone a quiet transformation that reduces the possibilities for accountability. The National Endowment for Democracy, founded in 1983 as an overt alternative to clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operations, adopted a new policy in April 2025 that eliminated public disclosure of the individuals and groups it funds [4][8]. The organisation’s 2024 grant report lists over seventeen hundred grants with associated funding amounts and project summaries, but deliberately omits the names of all external recipients [4][8]. The justification offered is a “duty of care” obligation to protect partners operating in hostile environments, a rationale that is not unreasonable on its face [8]. The practical effect, however, is that an organisation created to provide transparent support for civil society abroad now operates with less transparency than the covert agencies it was designed to displace [4]. The NED continues to describe itself as upholding “the transparency and accountability our mission requires” while declining to disclose who receives its money [8]. This is not an isolated development but part of a broader pattern in which the mechanisms of American influence abroad are becoming less visible precisely as the costs of confrontation are rising.

The claim that Iran represents an existential threat to the Jewish people, a claim that has been deployed repeatedly to justify military action, is contradicted by the situation of Iran’s own Jewish community. The Jerusalem Post, an Israeli publication, acknowledges that Iran’s Jewish population “remains the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and, under the Islamic Republic, is often publicly critical of Israel” [6]. After a synagogue in central Tehran was damaged in a missile strike, Homayoun Sameh, the Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, stated that “The Zionist regime showed no mercy towards this community during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues” [6]. Following Israeli air strikes in June 2025, Younes Hamami Lalehzar, a leader of Iran’s Jewish community, wrote that the “murder of civilians, women and children by the criminal Zionist regime and the evil Netanyahu must be met with decisive force” [6]. The Jewish Association and Community of Isfahan released a statement describing “the Zionists’ brutality, which is far from any human morality” as having “hurt all of our hearts” [6]. These are not the voices of a community facing genocide. They are the voices of a community that considers itself Iranian and views the Israeli state as an aggressor. The propaganda claim that the war against Iran is a war for the protection of Jews is a political construction that Iranian Jews themselves reject, and the persistence of that claim in Western discourse requires explanation that has nothing to do with the facts on the ground.

The intellectual infrastructure that produced the policy repertoire and sustained its implementation is embedded within networks of material interest that compromise the independence of the analysis it produces. The Think Tank Funding Tracker, created by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, documents that the top one hundred defence companies contributed more than thirty-four million seven hundred thousand dollars to the top fifty American think tanks between 2019 and 2023 [10]. The Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were the largest recipients of Pentagon contractor funding, receiving ten million two hundred thousand dollars, six million six hundred thousand dollars, and four million one hundred thousand dollars respectively [10]. Foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than one hundred and ten million dollars to the same think tanks over the same period, with the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Qatar the most generous donors [10]. The Brookings Institution, which produced Which Path to Persia?, received seventeen million one hundred thousand dollars from foreign governments and three million nine hundred and ten thousand dollars from Pentagon contractors [10]. Nine of the top fifty think tanks are fully transparent about their funding, twenty-three are partially transparent, and eighteen are entirely opaque [10]. The claim that think tanks produce independent analysis for the public good cannot survive contact with these figures. They produce analysis for the institutions that fund them, and the institutions that fund them have material interests in the perpetuation of conflict.

The class composition of the institutions that produced and sustained this policy repertoire requires explicit identification. The authors of Which Path to Persia? were not representatives of the working class, nor of the small-business class, nor of any constituency that bears the costs of war through taxation and military service. They were members of what may be described as the foreign policy fraction of the professional-managerial class, individuals whose careers circulate between think tanks, government agencies, university departments, and corporate boards [2]. Pollack began his career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA and served twice on the National Security Council [7]. Riedel spent thirty years at the CIA before joining Brookings [2]. Indyk was a two-time ambassador to Israel and a special envoy under Obama [2]. Maloney worked on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff before joining Brookings [2]. Their material interests are tied to the perpetuation of the foreign policy apparatus and the conflicts it manages. Their salaries, their institutional budgets, their access to policymakers, and their professional standing all depend on the continued salience of the national security paradigm they serve. This does not mean they act from conscious corruption. It means their structural position generates a set of assumptions about the world that make confrontation appear natural and diplomacy appear naive.

The defence contractors that fund the think tanks occupy a different position within the same class configuration. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Mitsubishi contributed five million six hundred thousand dollars, two million six hundred thousand dollars, and two million one hundred thousand dollars respectively to the tracked think tanks between 2019 and 2023 [10]. These are not passive donors. They are the principal beneficiaries of the policy repertoire that the think tanks produce. Every Patriot interceptor expended in Yemen or Iran, every THAAD battery deployed, every Tomahawk cruise missile fired, translates into revenue for the companies that manufacture these systems [10][12]. The relationship is not one of corruption in the narrow sense of quid pro quo. It is a structural alignment of interests in which the intellectual producers of policy and the material beneficiaries of that policy occupy overlapping institutional spaces and share a common commitment to the expansion of the national security state. The think tank analysts who write the reports and the defence executives who fund the think tanks and the government officials who implement the recommendations are not three separate groups. They are three fractions of a single ruling class whose interests converge on the perpetuation of American military dominance, regardless of whether that dominance serves the interests of the American people.

The material basis of that dominance is eroding, and the erosion is accelerating. The depletion of precision munitions during the opening months of the Iran war has produced a situation in which current and former defence officials acknowledge that the United States does not possess sufficient stockpiles to combat a threat in Asia [3][12]. The war with Iran has consumed resources that were intended for the Pacific theatre, the region that American strategists have identified as the decisive theatre of the twenty-first century [12]. The “China first” faction within the policy establishment, represented by figures such as Elbridge Colby, has argued that the Middle East is a distraction from the real challenge of containing Chinese power [2]. The “Middle East first” faction, which includes the authors of the 2009 Brookings report and their institutional successors, has insisted that Iran must be eliminated before the pivot to Asia can proceed [2]. The war against Iran represents a victory for the latter faction, and it has produced a strategic situation in which the United States has expended its arsenal in a secondary theatre while the primary adversary continues to accumulate capabilities [12]. This is not a failure of planning. It is a contradiction inherent in the structure of American power, which is committed to maintaining dominance across multiple theatres simultaneously without possessing the industrial capacity to do so.

The institutional memory that sustained the policy repertoire across seventeen years is itself a material factor in explaining the war. The authors of the 2009 report did not retire from public life after writing it. They remained embedded in the institutions that produce policy analysis and shape public debate [2][7]. When the Obama administration negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran in 2015, the authors of the report were positioned to criticise it as insufficient, and they did [2]. When the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2018, the institutional apparatus that had been built to advocate for confrontation with Iran was positioned to support the withdrawal and to oppose any subsequent return to diplomacy [2]. When the Biden administration attempted to revive the agreement, the same apparatus was positioned to argue that Iran was not a trustworthy partner [2]. The intellectual framework of Which Path to Persia? was not a static document sitting on a shelf. It was an active repertoire, maintained and transmitted through institutions, publications, conferences, and personnel networks, that shaped the parameters of acceptable discourse on Iran policy for nearly two decades. The war that began in February 2026 is the culmination of that transmission process.

The construction of a diplomatic trap that Iran could not accept served multiple functions within this repertoire. It created a public record of American willingness to negotiate, which could be cited when the inevitable failure of those negotiations was used to justify military action [2]. It placed the onus of conflict on Iran, which was portrayed as rejecting a generous offer even though the offer was structured to be unacceptable [2]. It provided diplomatic cover for allies who might otherwise object to an unprovoked attack, allowing them to claim that all peaceful avenues had been exhausted [2]. And it created an information environment in which the intelligence assessment that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon could be dismissed as irrelevant, because the real issue was not Iran’s capabilities but Iran’s rejection of American demands [5]. The diplomatic trap was not a failure of American policy. It was a success of American policy, in the sense that it achieved the objective for which it was designed: the creation of a pretext for war that appeared to be grounded in Iran’s own intransigence rather than in the strategic preferences of the American policy establishment.

The class analysis of this process must extend beyond the think tanks and the defence contractors to encompass the broader structure of American political economy. The war against Iran is not being fought to protect the American people from an Iranian threat that the intelligence community says does not exist [5]. It is being fought to sustain an imperial system whose material foundations are eroding and whose beneficiaries are concentrated in a narrow stratum of the population [10]. The costs of the war are borne by taxpayers, by military personnel and their families, and by the populations of the countries in which the fighting occurs [9][11]. The benefits accrue to defence contractors, to energy companies whose control over global oil flows is enhanced by military dominance, to financial institutions whose centrality to the global economy is reinforced by the dollar’s role in oil transactions, and to the professional-managerial class whose institutional positions depend on the perpetuation of the national security paradigm [10]. The interests of these fractions are not identical, and they compete with one another for influence and resources. But they share a common stake in the maintenance of American hegemony, and they are united in their opposition to any strategic reorientation that would reduce the scope of American military engagement.

The Jewish community in Iran and its public criticism of Israeli policy represents a challenge to the ideological architecture of the war that the architects of the conflict have been unable to address. The claim that Israel acts on behalf of Jews worldwide, and that opposition to Israeli policy is therefore a form of antisemitism, requires the erasure of Jewish communities that reject this equation [6]. Iranian Jews who describe the Israeli state as a “criminal Zionist regime” and who pledge allegiance to Iranian leadership are living refutations of the claim that Israeli and Jewish interests are identical [6]. Their existence does not fit the narrative, and the narrative responds by ignoring them. The same erasure operates with respect to the American Jewish community, which is treated as a monolithic supporter of Israeli policy despite substantial evidence of dissent [6]. The construction of a monolithic Jewish interest that aligns perfectly with Israeli state interests is a political project, and its maintenance requires the systematic marginalisation of Jewish voices that challenge it. The Iranian Jewish community is one such voice, and its testimony is available in Israeli publications for anyone who wishes to read it [6].

The operational failures of the USS Harry S. Truman strike group and the depletion of American munitions stockpiles point to a deeper contradiction in the structure of American military power. The United States has built an empire of bases, alliances, and commitments that requires continuous military engagement to sustain [13]. The maintenance of this empire depends on the credibility of American military superiority, which in turn depends on the possession of sufficient stockpiles of advanced munitions to fight and win wars [12]. The industrial base that produces these munitions has been hollowed out by decades of financialisation and consolidation [3]. The workforce that operates the production lines has been reduced and aged [3]. The supply chains that provide critical components have been offshored and fragmented [3]. The result is a military that can destroy targets with extraordinary precision but cannot sustain the campaign required to achieve political objectives [12]. The gap between the rhetoric of American military dominance and the material reality of American military capacity is widening, and the war against Iran has exposed that gap for all to see.

The question that the policy establishment has been unable to answer is what happens when the repertoire of strategies for maintaining hegemony encounters material constraints that make those strategies unsustainable. The 2009 Brookings report presented regime change, military strikes, and diplomatic traps as options available to policymakers [2]. It did not consider what would happen if the military lacked the munitions to sustain a prolonged campaign, if the navy lacked the crews to operate its warships safely, if the intelligence community refused to endorse the premises of the war, and if the costs of conflict exceeded the benefits [2][12]. The report assumed a level of material capacity that no longer exists [3]. The policy repertoire has been implemented, and the result is not the restoration of American dominance but the acceleration of its decline. The war that was supposed to demonstrate American resolve has instead demonstrated American vulnerability. The trap that was supposed to ensnare Iran has instead ensnared its architects.

The final assessment must remain analytical rather than definitive, because the outcome of the current conflict remains uncertain and the evidence available is incomplete. Several trajectories are possible. The United States could escalate further, accepting higher costs and greater risks in an attempt to achieve a decisive outcome before the depletion of its munitions forces a cessation of hostilities [12]. Iran could collapse under the pressure of sustained bombardment, creating a power vacuum that the United States and its allies would struggle to fill [2]. The conflict could expand to encompass additional theatres, drawing in Russia, China, and other regional actors in ways that transform the character of the war [2]. Or the exhaustion of American military capacity could force a negotiated settlement that falls short of the stated objectives, leaving Iran intact and the American position in the Middle East diminished [12]. The indicators that would confirm or undermine each scenario are observable, the pace of munitions replenishment, the deployment of additional carrier strike groups, the decisions of European allies regarding participation in the conflict, the diplomatic manoeuvres of Russia and China, and the willingness of the American public to bear the costs of prolonged war [3][12]. What is clear from the evidence assembled here is that the war against Iran was not a response to any imminent threat, but the implementation of a strategic repertoire that has been maintained and transmitted by institutional networks for nearly two decades [2]. The question that remains is whether those networks possess the capacity to recognise that their repertoire has outlived the material conditions that once made it viable.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

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