American foreign policy is littered with Middle East interventions that have gone awry in unpredictable ways. Now, President Trump has unleashed a wave of strikes in Iran with no clear objective, almost ensuring a chaotic endgame for the country and region.

To better understand what that might look like, I spoke with someone who thinks a lot about risk: political scientist and author Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group. For almost 30 years, Bremmer’s venerable consultancy group has been helping the corporate and financial worlds understand and integrate political risk into their decisionmaking. A frequent and prominent commentator on global affairs, Bremmer also teaches at Columbia, writes a column for Time, and runs GZERO Media — so named for Bremmer’s concept outlining a world in which the U.S. no longer drives the world’s agenda. I spoke with him about why he thinks Trump started this war and the best-case scenario for how it ends.

The Eurasia Group’s bread and butter is risk analysis, and the war in Iran is something of a risk bonanza. Earlier this week I spoke with Robert Pape, who was particularly worried about enriched uranium that might be even harder to track after all this than it was before. That’s one angle, but I’m wondering how you’re thinking about this question. What’s keeping you up at night the most, if anything is?I’m not a stay up at night kind of guy, which is helpful. I think the fundamental challenge here is that Trump really believed that this could be Venezuela redux, and Venezuela went exceptionally well on a bunch of vectors. First of all, they got the guy they were trying to get. They brought him to justice, and they didn’t kill him. Now he’s going to face a trial. There were no American servicemen and women killed. There were Venezuelan civilians killed, but the numbers were comparatively pretty small, especially compared to the numbers the Venezuelans have killed themselves. And it was popular, not just in the U.S., but across the region. Trump has now gotten a whole bunch of support from the Mexicans, more support on going after their narco-terrorists. And the same thing with Ecuador, which we saw in the last 48 hours. The Americans now have a better regime to work with in Venezuela, with the potential for private sector investment and support from the IMF, and an economy that might actually work for the Venezuelan people. Literally on every front, this went about as well as you could expect. So Trump was like, “Great, let’s do that again.” And this is not going to work that way on any front.

I think he was also extremely confident because of his previous experience with military strikes on Iran. But those were far more contained strikes that were not existential threats to the regime itself. And now he’s going after the regime itself and he’s telling the Iranian people, “Go for it. Take over.” Which means you’ve got a bunch of people inside this government who have very, very few options for saving themselves.

So if you ask me what worries me the most, given everything I just told you as context — because I think it’s important to have the macro context of how the decisions are made before you think about what it is that bothers you — it’s that I think Trump’s general understanding of international relations is that everyone around the world wants power and money. That some of them are in stronger positions, some weaker, but that more or less, even if they’re much more civilized about it, if they’re more dishonest about it, if they present it in softer ways, they’re ultimately not so different from Trump himself. All Trump has to figure out is how capable and strong they are as actors  and how willing to use that power. If they’re like the Chinese, he needs to back down and negotiate. If they’re like the Mexicans, he can force whatever outcome he wants and be much more predatory. That was the case in Venezuela.

But in Iran, you have a significant subset of people who are in positions of power, but who are much weaker and more vulnerable than........

© Daily Intelligencer