Graham Allison on the Global Realignment: Iran, China, Israel, Greenland

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to another episode of The All-In Interview. I'm really excited to be joined by back to All-In, Harvard Professor Graham Allison. Professor Allison, welcome back to All-In.

**Graham Allison** (0:10)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:11)
We last had you at the summit in Los Angeles, so it's great to have a conversation. A lot's happened since we last got together. For the audience, Graham Allison is the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. He's advised every Secretary of Defense since Kissinger. He's helped dismantle 12,000 Soviet nuclear weapons, and his book, Destined for War, remains the definitive framework for understanding the US-China relationship. I think it's worth kind of bringing forward some of the things that have happened in the world since we last met.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:44)
I'm going all in!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:51)
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**Graham Allison** (1:30)
Well, thank you again for having me back. You'll have a great podcast. I enjoyed the summit, and I'm sorry we're not there in person to catch up. But I think about Iran, how much to say. So this could be a long lecture. Let me just do four or five quick points. First point, most important point, is that there's more questions than answers. So there's a huge level of uncertainty currently about what's happening, and about what's likely to happen. Part of this is Klaus's famous fog of war. But there's a fog of war that's actually increased because we got two big fog machines adding to the confusion, namely Trump and the administration on the one hand, and Bibi on the other.
And then we got all the chattering class around this. So I would say, why did Trump decide to go to war now? There's six different reasons he and the administration have given, and each one they back around. What's the objective? There's five different objectives backing around. And when is this war going to end? You know, a day, a week, a month, who knows? So, it's very uncomfortable to recognize how uncertain things are. And most of the conversation about it tries to make it more confident. I think the place to start is, there's a huge amount of uncertainty. Having said that, I'll still give you my prejudices about a few of the points. Point two, this has been an extraordinary demonstration of supreme military power and supreme intelligence power. US military and the intelligence community and the Israeli counterparts have been way, way, way off the charts. And I think this should make all Americans proud of what's been built over this decade, two decades of investment, but especially the past decade. Third point, there's no tears to be shed for Khamenei and Islamic Republic regime. It's an evil leader, an evil regime.
It's no bad thing that could happen to them that we shouldn't be cheering out of that. Next point, though, breaking something is a lot easier than building something. And destroying targets is something that our military knows very well how to do. Building a new regime, regime change, is something that we know historically doesn't work very well. At least in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had every word said that's been said in this case. And we then went in All-In and spent more than a billion dollars of many, many thousands of American lives. And when we went to Afghanistan, the Taliban were ruling. When we left Afghanistan, the Taliban were ruling. So I would say, unfortunately, it's against a backdrop that's hard. The next point is slightly more controversial, but I think this is Beebe's war. If your readers or your listeners don't remember Moby Dick, they should go look at it again. Ahab had this fixation, obsession with the White Whale, and tried to find a way to kill the White Whale whenever he could. For the last two decades, that's been Beebe's number one, number two, number three agenda. He's tried to sell that war to Obama, to Trump won, to Biden, and how he succeeded in mesmerizing Trump, whom I thought had his number. I was surprised. So I'm pro-Israel, but anti-Beebe in this respect. And I think that I understand he's brilliant politically, but I don't think this, the arguments that were made that Trump has actually repeated, that Iran was about to attack us, I see no evidence for that. That Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon, I see no evidence for that. That Iran was building an ICBM that was going to attack the US, I see no evidence for that. There's many, many bad things about the Iranian regime, but not most of the claims that were made. So I look at this and I hope it turns out well, but I remember that in wars very frequently, it's easy to get in and it's quite difficult to get out.