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 they’ve been at any point since the 1979 revolution. And they are not principally motivated by money and power. They’re radicals, they’re ideologues, and many of them are theocrats, and their potential of going down with the ship and blowing things up along with it is pretty high. This is a group that has been one of the leading funders of international terrorism around the world for a really long time. And if Trump thinks he’s going to be able to simply get rid of all of these people without significant consequence because he’s more powerful, or he thinks he’s going to be able to buy them off somehow, I fear he is probably miscalculating greatly.

And then how does that play out? There’s a school of thought that if the regime is going down, they’ll go all out in attacking Israel and the Gulf States.The hope there is that American and Israeli military capabilities are so much greater that they won’t be able to cause enormous amounts of damage. You’ve seen that the number of missiles launched against Israel has been pretty small. And Hezbollah, which is in part controlled directly by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, launched six missiles against Israel, which reopened the front directly with Israel. Before the decapitation of Hezbollah, a typical salvo from Hezbollah would’ve been 40, 50, 100 missiles. So they don’t have the capability they used to.

The fact that the Iranians are going after the Gulf States, including even Oman, when they were the ones who were actually mediating with the Iranians, implies first that the decision-making process has been decentralized, because they don’t have effective command and control. And it also implies that they don’t have the ability to hit hardened targets further afield. They’re going after softer targets that are closer by, which speaks of desperation and weakness.The weakness point reduces risk; the desperation point increases it.

We know they’re weakened, but we don’t know too much more than that. And it’s hard to define “they.” You had a riot in Pakistan that breached the perimeter of a US consulate and the Americans fired and Pakistani civilians were killed. That was inspired, let’s say loosely, by the American attacks on Iran. But it’s not like the Iranians were coordinating or organizing it. So the potential for the “they” to be much more diffuse with a much longer tail is actually really high.

It’s like going back in time 25 years, in a way.Yeah. We’re already looking at an estimated 25,000 members of Al-Qaeda today, which is a lot higher than before 9/11. They have nowhere close to the leadership capacity they had then, but they’re certainly motivated and potentially with access to more dangerous technologies, more disruptive technologies. And again, you see these drones that have allowed comparatively small Ukraine to reach thousands of miles into Russia. Well, the Iranians have drones too, and they’re really cheap and they can cause a lot of asymmetric damage, and the Americans are running short on interceptors. That’s a problem for the Gulf States, and it’s a problem for the American military operating in the region. So what happens if they run out? Those are questions too.

Thinking more about how this might end — it would be in character for Trump to declare victory in a few days. Like, “I know I said this would be four or five weeks, but it’s over in two.” I think that is by far the best-case plausible scenario here.

I agree. But even in that scenario, is the cat out of the bag, so to speak? Is it too late to prevent some broader regional conflict?We’re hearing news already that there are thousands of Kurds from Iraq preparing to stream into Iran, which presages fragmentation, civil war and a rump state, which is a very different environment. The Israelis certainly intend to continue their military strikes against those forces on the ground that have the ability to project power for the Iranian regime. And so I mean, how much of the hitting of the Basij, for example, occurs before you have the potential to tip into a much more destabilizing environment, but without enough support to allow a new opposition led representative government to take over? It is absolutely possible that you could get a representative government for Iran out of this. That’s what we all want to see. But the likelihood of that is still pretty low.

It’s much more likely that by continuing to fight, they actually make it a lot worse. The one thing that we can almost certainly guarantee is that the number of Iranian civilians — who are ostensibly the reason that this war was originally started with Trump saying he was going to rescue them — are going to end up dead as a consequence of all of this, at the hands of the Americans, the Israelis, and most importantly at the hands of the Iranian regime itself. It’s going to be a hell of a lot more than the likely 30,000 that died in three days in January.

Trump did mention that he wanted to protect Iranian civilians, but that was just one of many reasons he and his administration have floated for why they’re doing this. And there’s been this persistent and weird line involving Israel. The other day, Rubio said that the US had to hit Iran because Iran was about to attack Israel, which would have prompted Iran to attack U.S. interests in the region. It was a very convoluted justification. Trump said something similar the other day. This all makes it sound like Netanyahu is playing the administration, and I don’t get why they seem to be playing into that idea.  Well, Rubio backed away completely from that. You asked the question, so you have to recognize that he also said something that was almost completely opposite.

We’ve been expecting that these strikes were coming for quite some time, that this was unlike Venezuela, which was being driven primarily by Rubio and Ratcliffe. This was really being driven much more by Trump himself, despite the negotiating process with Witkoff and Jared. Trump never had really any belief that it was going to work out, but he needed to get the military in place and get the military in place so that he had larger numbers of vectors for potential strikes, but also because he was planning a much larger set of strikes than just the 12-day war redux. That means you need to have the capacity to actually defend American bases and Gulf allies in Israel, so you need all that additional air power, the second carrier strike force, all of that. I think the way he’s describing it now is much more like throwing spaghetti at the wall because it hasn’t gone the way they planned. And also because he’s just far too accessible to whatever random journalist happens to call him up. He’s completely undisciplined, but that doesn’t tell you why he actually did the thing.

I think why he did the thing is a combination of the Venezuela hyper confidence — some of which is quite justified — and the experience with Iran, where the Iranians did not respond militarily The first time around when he hit Qasem Soleimani, he was extremely reluctant to get involved in that strike, so much so that he was really alienating American Gulf allies who were facing hits from Iran and its proxies in the region, like the hits on the Saudi, the big Saudi refinery. Even with the 12-day war last summer, the Israelis went first. Trump didn’t want to, and he only joined when it became obvious that okay, this is going well, and so I should be a part of it. So I think those are the reasons that were motivating him, plus the fact that he was getting constrained on the economic front. He thought first-year tariffs were his driving international tool to get his outcomes, but then the combination of affordability problems, the Chinese hitting him back, the Supreme Court ruling — all of this stuff really made it much harder for him. But on the military side, he didn’t have any such constraints. So I think those were the things that were motivating him. And none of those things are going to be articulated by him with the journalist. But I do think that if you want to understand why he took the decision, you’d focus a lot more on those things than you would on Bibi’s playing him.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I also read the New York Times’s big chronicle of how Trump went to war, which led with Bibi marching into the Oval Office and basically saying, “I want to keep you guys on track with this war.” So it’s just been a persistent throughline the last few days, which I’ve just found odd. I also think Trump has shown that he is much more capable of actually pushing Bibi than Biden was. He’s got much more credibility with the Israeli people. He had the Knesset giving him a standing ovation. He’s much more popular than Bibi is. And his bonafides in supporting Israel historically, with the Jerusalem embassy move, with the Golan Heights recognition, and other things is very, very high.

At the end of the day, Trump certainly doesn’t love Bibi, nor does he particularly trust him. I would say here’s kind of a wary respect that Bibi understands how this game is played and does a pretty good job, given his much smaller status in terms of power projection than the United States. But I have a hard time believing that Bibi is capable of driving Trump into a war that he doesn’t want to get into.

Yeah, I think that reasoning just speaks to the flailing around from the Trump administration on why any of this is happening.Because it’s not going the way they wanted it to.

The Eurasia Group published its list of the top geopolitical risks for 2026 in January. Number one on that list was “U.S. political revolution” caused by Trump’s power grab domestically. But bombing Iran is, in a way, a classic American thing to do; it’s certainly not as out of character as some of the illiberal trends Trump has been responsible for at home. How does this all affect your view of what the U.S. is becoming?I think what we’re seeing is Trump’s efforts to try to ensure that the presidency, or at least President Trump sits above the rule of law and sits above the checks and balances because he believes that the institutions were weaponized against him by Biden and the Democrats. So now he’s going to weaponize them against them in his favor. And that has led him to make a series of decisions that have not gone so well for him, and that are leading to more constraint. We saw that with Greenland, where he had to back down and got nothing for it. We saw that with Minneapolis and ICE where he had to back down and it ended up quite unpopular for him with the American people. We saw that with the tariffs, where he’s now much more constrained and has to retool with more limited leverage. And I think we are seeing that with Iran. His intention of bringing about a political revolution continues undiminished, but his ability to execute on that intention is becoming more constrained. And I expect that he will continue to double down in the face of that, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be successful.

It’s striking parallel to the Iranian regime, that mix of weakness and desperation. Not that Trump is as weak as them, but the more cornered he becomes, the more he wants to lash out. That’s his personality. That’s his personality. And he’s never going to say, “I failed at something.” He is never going to say “I got that wrong.” That is a part of his political strength, being undaunted and undiminished when the facts aren’t going his way. And that does give him an opportunity to have a mission accomplished moment and not actually get involved in the quagmire simply by saying “I won. That’s it. It’s all done.” And a lot of his supporters will be right there with him. So you have to hope that he’s prepared to accept a rather significantly more constrained set of wins, and then move on to things that are more constructive than the path that they are presently set upon with the Islamic Republic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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