Seven months in, the Iran War continues to hinge on two critical issues: maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz and the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program. On this episode, host Dan Richards talks with two experts about why these flashpoints dominate the conflict, what they mean for global security and what it might take to set them on paths to long-term stability.

Guests on this episode:

• Reid Pauly is the dean's assistant professor of nuclear security and policy at the Watson School, and author of the 2025 book “The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma.”
• Lyle Goldstein is a visiting professor of International and Public Affairs at Watson, and author of the 2026 book “The New Cold War at Sea: Maritime Implications of the China-Russia Quasi-Alliance.”

Watch these conversations on YouTube

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally, I'm Dan Richards. It's been over six months since the Iran War began. And in this episode, we're going to take a closer look at two of the key issues driving this conflict. Access to the Strait of Hormuz and the future of Iran's nuclear program.

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To do that, I spoke with two scholars at the Watson School. Reid Pauly is a political scientist and expert on nuclear security strategy, and author of the Twenty Twenty-Five book, The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma.

Lyle Goldstein is a senior fellow at the Watson School and an expert in naval strategy, and author of the Twenty Twenty-Six book, The New Cold War at Sea: Maritime Implications of the China-Russia Quasi-Alliance.

Later on in the episode, you'll hear my conversation with Reid about the current state and potential future of Iran's nuclear program. But first, I spoke with Lyle about the strategic stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz, its potential future as a commercial shipping lane, and about what lessons the US military should take from this particular flashpoint. Here is mine and Lyle's conversation.

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Lyle, thanks so much for coming onto the show.

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Thanks, Dan. Glad to be with you again.

DAN RICHARDS: So I actually want to talk with you about a few topics in the time that we have, but I do want to focus on the Strait of Hormuz, since it is clear that any resolution to this war will likely require some of stable agreement about how the Strait is managed and by whom.

And, you've been thinking a lot about this issue and not just the particulars of this conflict, but the lessons as well, that it might have for naval and military strategy more broadly.

So listeners probably at this point that access to the Strait of Hormuz, which is one of the world's most vital commercial waterways, especially for oil and gas, has been severely restricted by Iran since this conflict began.

And in June, there was a memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran that temporarily lifted restrictions in the Strait, though that memorandum was only effective for 60 days. And I think those 60 days just passed as of this recording.

So before we get into the broader ramifications, could you just help listeners get up to speed. What is the status of the Strait of Hormuz right now? Who is in control of it? How does it operate? What is it? What does it look like?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Well, it's a very dicey situation. I think we can conclude just looking at the numbers that ship transits are way down. The good news is, if there is any good news here, it's that the level of combat intensity is at a fairly low level.

But it is indeed a situation for the global economy. And I think generally for the regional security situation, Iran has suffered many losses. So far at least the losses to the US side and various Persian Gulf allies of the United States have been reasonably low.

So we're settling into what seems like another kind of stalemate. And I hate to say, but this is starting to look like another endless war. There is a effort to get ships through.

And the latest news I'm looking at is suggesting that the United States has somewhat successfully fully created, what they're calling an Oman corridor, which at this point seems to allow for maybe the transit of 10 vessels per day or something like that.

DAN RICHARDS: And this has involved the US military chaperoning, shepherding other ships through creating a protected space in the Strait?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Correct. This has been discussed in the New York Times as a extremely labor intensive effort on the military side somewhat paradoxically, may involve more the air force and the army than the navy, because I don't think US navy warships are operating regularly in the Strait. It's just too hot.

DAN RICHARDS: Too hot militarily. Sorry, just too risky and dangerous.

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Too risky. The balance of effort may be falling more on the other services in terms of helicopters and aircraft shooting down drones and radars and intelligence apparatus to keep the drones and missiles, well tracked and intercepted.

And by the way, I want to make sure and flag, as you have in previous podcasts here, but the Watson's Climate Solutions Lab has this running tracker of costs of the war that that's generally tracking the cost to consumers. And I think we're now at $88 billion and counting.

But the cost to the military, in terms of how many military resources we're spending is also immense. And I'm thinking that's somewhere between $500 million and a $1 billion a day in operational costs. So what I'm trying to say is to get those 10 vessels through per day at this point along that Omani corridor is a massive effort.

DAN RICHARDS: So Iran's ability to really shut down this Strait has clearly proven can be a powerful tool or weapon in its arsenal in this conflict. And as you're describing, it's come at a cost to American consumers and to the US military.

And I'm curious your thoughts about a question that a lot of ink has been spilled over, which is just how much do you think the White House and the Pentagon were accurately assessing this risk of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz when they were planning this conflict?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Well, I worked for the navy for 20 years. And I can say, this was a matter of common sense for people who thought about these things-

DAN RICHARDS: That attacking Iran could lead to this costly outcome--

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Yes, yes. And there are people at Naval War College, not far from Brown, in Newport, Rhode Island, where that spend their entire careers just studying the parameters of security for the Strait of Hormuz. So of course, these risks were well understood.

But it's clear to me that the political leadership, the president and his immediate advisors, did not take this threat seriously. And we can speculate on why that occurred. My leading hypothesis at this point is that it was probably related to the fact of this Operation Midnight Hammer that occurred in June Twenty Twenty-Five when the United States attacked the Iran nuclear sites. And that was viewed by the country and certainly by America's leaders as a great success.

And in that case, you'll recall that Iran responded somewhat tepidly and did not respond very forcefully. So this probably taught our leadership the wrong lesson, that we could infinitely make strikes, make war against Iran without facing major consequences.

But indeed, in Twenty Twenty-Six, we're feeling those consequences very, very acutely. I mean, I do think we should still use caution in applying the word controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, traffic is way down, but in a military sense, say they control Hormuz is probably overstating it because their efforts are being contested. We can call it almost a situation of mutual denial.

That is, we are able to deny Iran the free use of this trade, and we have applied a blockade. But they in turn are also having some success, let's say, in denying the US and its allies access to the Strait. So yeah, the door is not shut, but it is only a one-third third of the way open.

DAN RICHARDS: Many experts agree that no matter the outcome of this war, management of the Strait of Hormuz will look different than it did before the conflict began. And I'm curious, as we think about what it could look like going forward.

Are there certain templates or models for how major international shipping lanes are managed around the world, and are there any that you think could help us think about what this Strait might look like once this conflict is in a more stable place?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Well, as somebody who's made their career in maritime security. And I'm very familiar with the issue of straits and the questions around freedom of navigation. I work a lot on China and East Asian security. And there we're constantly asking questions about the South China Sea, for example, and the Taiwan Strait.

And there the Strait of Malacca is of chief importance as a similarly narrow waterway, probably together with the Strait of Hormuz, the most important maritime choke point in the world, it's at the point where Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia come together there.

And if we want to talk in terms of ideals and in some ways Malacca is that ideal. It's a bunch of countries working together. You have a kind of a supranational organization. The International Maritime organization is kind of really overseeing the safety issues, the vessel separation issues, aids to navigation, and as well as the myriad environmental issues which we should also keep in mind.

So that's the ideal paradigm. However, if you look at the details of other situations that are somewhat similar. Take the Turkish straits, for example, which are regulated by the Nineteen Thirty-Six treaty of Montreal, that there's a lot of fine print and regulation, and there the Turkey is granted a major say and by the way, I think the Panama and Suez Canal are also relevant to some degree.

But I think we have to understand the interests of the international community in this movement of ships. But we also have to consider taking due regard, as I said, for the local states.

DAN RICHARDS: And just to be clear, when you say a resolution could end with the Strait looking or operating more the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal, what are the qualities of those that you mean there?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Well, I mean, OK, because those are canals. They're much more narrow. So of course, they have a very strong argument that the management and upkeep of the canal operations, the safety and so forth that this demands those much higher fees.

DAN RICHARDS: A toll.

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Yes, now I would think a strong American and, if you will, western diplomatic, play would be to assert that yes, Iran should have a say in this, absolutely, but also the Arab states, the GCC countries, Saudi Arabia, Oman, for example, should have equal say, the movement of ships through that sea lane is in the interests of all these countries.

So it's again, there's a likelihood that an outcome will be favorable to stability and shipping. But there's no question in my mind that Iran is going to have a bigger say in that matter. The Iranians have made it clear that as I understand it, they hope to use some funds collected from this kind of so-called tolling as part of rebuilding their country.

We may not like the precedent, and I have even heard some unserious rumors about other countries. I do believe Turkey, actually in July did raise the fees on the Turkish trade. So, I mean, other countries are looking at this, some rumors that Indonesia is of scratching its head saying, well, how is it we have so many straits that ships regularly go through and we don't charge any fees.

So, I mean, there could be some ramifications for these other areas. But to me, again, this is it's much preferable to pay some fees here than to have continuous warfare that really has the possibility of dangerous escalation.

We're going to have to have skilled and flexible diplomacy here. I haven't seen a lot of that. But I mean, I think they're going to have to take all of these things into account.

And one of the reasons I've been vocal on this point is sometimes these ideal paradigms and these shiny principles that we hold dear, such as freedom of navigation, may get in the way of pragmatic solutions. And I think we are learning the hard way over many years that sometimes our diplomacy should lean more toward the pragmatic and a little less toward those shiny principles.

DAN RICHARDS: What are the major lessons that you think the US military should take from this conflict, or has taken from this conflict, and particularly from this episode in the Strait of Hormuz?

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: I think it is important to emphasize, I think that our military has acted with competence and professionalism, by and large. But we're now in an era of drone warfare. And that clearly has changed the game, including in these very narrow straits. Missile defenses have been shown to be quite weak.

And the larger lesson here about the vulnerability of US bases, not just in the Persian Gulf, but around the world and in the area I work on closely, in Asia-Pacific. This vulnerability is really acute. And we have to ask, why weren't these bases hardened?

Or even a deeper question, why are the bases there at all if they can be struck? I think for years, people have made the argument, well, they play some deterrent role. Well, that may no longer be true given how they've shown themselves to be vulnerable.

And it does seem to me a mistake of planning that we have considered that we would have access to all these bases, when in fact, the record seems to show that these bases were often damaged severely and in some cases destroyed. So there's a lot of operational lessons that need to be learned at a more strategic level. I think we have to ask, have we vastly underestimated our opponent here.

After all, you even six months into this war, Iran continues to fire missiles pretty regularly and with great accuracy. I would add to the point where they have targeted successfully US very expensive aircraft on the ground.

And after all, I don't think we fully understood how deeply buried even their missile fabrication facilities are and so forth. So I would say of across the board underestimating what Iran is capable of and maybe overestimating our ability to damage the Iranian economy and the will of the Iranian people.

And let me just make one more point here is that here we are, 250 years of the American experiment. But reflecting on the vision of the framers, it was to make going to war very difficult.

And somehow in the last 50 years, we've gotten away from that to a situation where the United States is using force on a pretty large scale every year or every other year. I think that's not what the framers intended at all.

And why do I say this? Because it's clear to me that if American leaders mobilized for war in the way that we might consider World War II, for example, or World War I, that is, if the country is mobilized for major war and ready to take major losses in such a war, then the war is likely to be successful.

But we're doing the opposite. We're casually going to war. When you go to war casually, you're not well prepared. The forces are not properly mobilized. The military industry is not working 18 to 24 hours to make sure you have all the munitions.

And I do believe if we wanted to control the Strait of Hormuz fully, we could do so. But the losses would be major, and it's clear the country would not accept that. So obviously, we have a system that is breaking down here under stress. And I think we have to consider that constitutional issue as fundamental.

If the president had considered this truly to be a threat to US vital interests, he should have made the case for war. And in that case, a real war. And we would have declared war.

The congress would have rendered a judgment, and the American people would be more accepting of the hardships. But none of that has occurred, and we are in a fiasco of major proportions.

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DAN RICHARDS: Well, I could keep talking with you about this issue for a long, long time, but we have to let you go for now. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking with us about all this.

LYLE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, I appreciate the chance to dialogue with your listeners on these critically important issues.

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DAN RICHARDS: You can watch a longer version of mine and Lyle's conversation on our YouTube channel, which also includes a discussion about Iran's nuclear program. You can find the link to it in our show notes.

Next up, Reid Pauly is a political scientist and expert in nuclear security strategy at Watson and author of the Twenty Twenty-Five book, The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma.

I spoke with him about what this war might mean for the future of Iran's nuclear program, and for the future of a nuclear deal between the US and Iran. Reid, thanks so much for coming back onto the show.

REID PAULY: Thank you for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: So before we get into your research and what it can maybe help us understand about this moment, let's just look at the state of the conflict as it stands. So back over a year ago, in June Twenty Twenty-Five, the US and Israel launched major attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities in what we now call the 12-Day War.

And then over the last six months, the US and Israel have bombed a number of military targets, killed many of Iran's military leaders. So what, in your understanding, is the state of Iran's nuclear program today?

REID PAULY: Probably the best way to describe the state of the nuclear program is buried.

DAN RICHARDS: OK.

REID PAULY: The strikes last year in the 12-Day War were as a matter of brute force destruction of infrastructure quite effective. This was the destruction of almost anything that was above ground. And then we saw a lot of media coverage of the use of special penetrating munitions that were designed, specifically designed to destroy buried Iranian nuclear bunkers.

So the status of program is both as a matter of its infrastructure, buried, but also more opaque now, right? One of the great advantages that we seem to have before this war began and before the 12-Day War in Twenty Twenty-Five as well, was that the Iranian nuclear program, in terms of its intentions and capabilities, seem to be quite heavily penetrated by intelligence.

Things would leak all the time. And that's another consequence of this war, is that things are more opaque now. If you kill the people who were leaking the information to foreign intelligence services, then you're going to have to figure out where are you going to get that information in the future.

And I think when they restart their nuclear program or they aim to rebuild lots of the infrastructure that has been destroyed, I'm a lot less confident we'll be able to track it with precision. And the other thing you can't destroy with bombs is knowledge, right?

You can certainly kill people who you think have the knowledge to advance a nuclear program, but that's been going on for a long time in terms of Israel assassinating Iranian scientists. And it has not hampered much in any observable sense, Iran's progress in its nuclear program.

And so, before the war, right? There were lots of indications that Iran had a clear hedging strategy, that it didn't really want to race to acquire a nuclear weapon as much as it wanted to build all the capabilities to get as close as possible, to preserve the option of racing to the bomb if it ever decided to.

And now the calculus is different. Now the calculus seems to be maybe this more hard line government. Maybe they're actually less convinced that hedging was the right idea, and they think that the problem was that we didn't race for the bomb soon enough. So I don't think it'll be that long before we see more movement in Iran towards more explicitly trying to acquire a nuclear weapon.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and I want to get back maybe at the end to looking ahead some more in this relationship. But this also gets to the importance some of negotiated peace or diplomatic resolution to this conflict generally, and this issue that has driven so much of it.

In June, the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding that launched a 60 day window for talks about some of nuclear agreement. That window closed, as of this taping, it closed about a week ago. What, if anything, was achieved in those first rounds of talks?

REID PAULY: In terms of the nuclear issue, nothing.

DAN RICHARDS: OK.

REID PAULY: At the time when the 60 days was announced and the claim was made that well, within 60 days, we'll have a comprehensive nuclear agreement. I don't anyone that took that seriously. It was possible, of course, that you could begin serious negotiations during that 60-day window, and that by the end of the 60 day window might see an announcement that says, we've made excellent progress.

We're going to extend it for another 60 days. But instead we didn't get any serious negotiation on the nuclear issue, and instead the MOU that created those 60 days basically acknowledged that the new issue is the Strait of Hormuz.

The issue that the war itself created, which is that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic and wreaked havoc on the world's oil markets. That became the new central bargaining issue that needed to be solved in order for this war to end.

And it's almost taken wind out of the sails of the nonproliferation goal, because now Iran has a new tool at its disposal that it might use as a shield behind which to restart its nuclear program, to threaten to close the Strait in the future if anyone were to attack its nuclear facilities again, in which case you could more confidently restart a nuclear program.

A war that was started for nuclear ambitions is now about something else. Right? Which is going to make the nuclear issue so much harder to solve.

DAN RICHARDS: Right, well, and so is your impression then reading between the lines of all this, just that the current administration is just not interested in really addressing the nuclear issue, or they only want to address it with more bombing? How do you think people in power are thinking about this issue at the moment?

REID PAULY: I do still think that the Iran's nuclear intentions are the core issue between the United States, and Israel, and Iran that led to this moment. The United States is telling the truth when it says it will never accept an Iran with nuclear weapons.

But it's now flailing a little bit to try and recover a strategy to achieve that goal. And so the plan, if there is one, if there's a backup plan to replace the coercive bargaining leading to Iranian nuclear concessions strategy, the backup plan is that well, we'll have to go to war every now and then.

The Israelis call this mowing the grass. As a matter of nuclear non-proliferation, that well, we will bomb your facilities. And if you try and rebuild them, we'll bomb them again. It doesn't work very well in practice, because even if you have a mowing the grass strategy, eventually you're not going to mow the grass soon enough.

The people who start the mowing the grass strategy, the people who start mowing the lawn are not going to be the leaders in power forever. And eventually the timing won't be right.

The domestic politics won't sustain it. And that means that eventually the mowing the grass strategy has really done two things. One is that it's created incentive on the part of the target to want a deterrent, to prevent them from being bombed again and again in the future.

So additional motivation, motivation to want to have a deterrent like a nuclear weapon. And in addition, the seeking the right moment to do so, right? When it looks like, the grass mowers are not resolved to strike this year.

So it's not a very sustainable strategy. I would worry that it's not a very sustainable strategy. But yes, it has the effect of destroying things. And yes, Iran has to rebuild things that were destroyed. The question is for how long?

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and this kind of gets into a lot of the issues you explored in your recent book, The Art of Coercion. One of the core of observations driving that research is that you looked at the history of countries that are trying to coerce other countries into doing X, Y, or Z.

And in many cases, getting rid of their nuclear program or scaling it back, and that it so often fails. Why does coercion sticks in the carrot and stick imagery? Why does coercion so often not work, no matter how intense the stick is?

REID PAULY: So we've got a test of this in the recent war that if you have a coercive strategy, you're using threats of punishment to try and change the behavior of a target and in this case, curtail a nuclear program, then you really have to make two things credible.

The first is the threat. And this is intuitive to most people, that the target has to believe that you're not bluffing and that you really will carry out your threat if they don't comply.

And the second is something that researchers like me call an assurance. That the threat is actually contingent upon the behavior of the target, that they can find safety in making concessions. And if instead your threats are highly credible, but their assurances are not, then targets often will think that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

And it's the counterintuitive aspect of it is that we intuit that it matters for threats to be credible and severe, that our punishments will hurt, that we are capable of inflicting massive violence on our adversaries the way that we have just done with Iran, and that that should cow them into making fearful concessions.

'Please don't hurt me. I'll do whatever you want.' And we often forget the other side of it, which is that they might be more resolved to defy our highly credible and severe threats if they think that they're going to have to bear that punishment no matter what they do.

And that's exactly what's happening today. The coercive goals of that type of violence have failed catastrophically, and not because we haven't imposed enough pain, not because the United States and Israel haven't bombed the right targets or dropped enough bombs yet.

But because this now new, harder line, more resolved Iranian government is pretty sure that unless they change something about the status quo that Israel and the United States are going to come back for more later.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

REID PAULY: And maybe restart the war in the future.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you get any sense that any part of the administration or the Pentagon is taking these ideas to heart and thinking about providing more assurance to Iran? A new round of economic sanctions and penalties was just announced. I think they have - as of this recording, they haven't all yet been enacted, but they've been sent out as a warning. Is that at least an example, in your eyes of a threat, with an assurance that it won't happen if Iran changes its behavior? And more generally, where are you seeing assurance play into all this?

REID PAULY: There's a couple of things going on, to answer a really good question. The first is that I don't think the lessons of needing to make threats that are received as credibly contingent in addition to also severe and not bluffs. I don't think that lesson has been learned at the top.

But yes, of course, there's plenty of people in the US government who, even before the war would have been making arguments of that type. And there's lots of people who want to listen and take it seriously and think hard about how to do it better.

But there's something odd happening. And you should take all this with a grain of salt, because I'm not in the government and I don't truly understand how ideas, and paper are moving around these days.

But something weird has happened in this second Trump administration, which is that in the national security establishment, things are supposed to come from the outside in and then from the bottom up through mostly the National Security Council.

DAN RICHARDS: In the sense of intelligence.

REID PAULY: Intelligence and also just advice from the State Department, the Department of Defense. This is the interagency planning process where there are people at the disposal of the White House to help formulate strategy and policy.

And then those inputs come through the National Security Council, which has the primary job of organizing that information and deciding what it is the president needs to see and understand and take into consideration. What's happening today seems to be that that's broken down.

That's just not how they're running the National Security establishment. They're running it top down. The agencies are just implementers. The ideas, the strategy come from the center. And it's not that the president's not getting advice. Of course he's getting lots of advice all the time. It's just more ad hoc advice. It's like whoever happens to talk to him last, he trusts certain individuals.

People come into his circle who he seems to trust for a time, and then he discards them. In a system like that, the lessons you are asking about are, I think, probably slower to be learned.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and speaking of President Trump's personality and how he brings that into these types of negotiations, part of his appeal to voters has always been that he's a master negotiator and deal-maker from his time in working in real estate and business, and that he was going to bring those skills into government and into diplomacy and put America first in a new way.

And I wonder, how do you think about his sense of what makes for a skilled negotiator? And how is that affecting or shaping what we are seeing now and translating or not, to some of the lessons you've learned in your research?

REID PAULY: This president has clear instincts about how negotiations work that he thinks he has learned from a career in business negotiation, private sector bargaining. And a couple of those things are not translating well to the international system.

One of which is if you bargain domestically or in the private sector under the rule of law, then it's a lot easier to make promises, commitments, because if you violate your contracts can be sued.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

REID PAULY: The right to be sued is the power to make a commitment, and to have it be taken seriously. In the international system, there is no right to be sued. So there is nobody in the international system who's going to force Donald Trump to keep his promises.

The second thing is that he has a strategy in mind. Often he has expressed this logic that we often call the madman theory, that there is strength in being unpredictable.

And you see that a lot in his threats he makes, including in this war with Iran. Maybe I'll attack them tomorrow, maybe I won't, maybe it'll be next week. And that unpredictability, that madman theory logic usually fails in international politics.

Because if you are truly unpredictable, then we cannot trust you to stick to your end of any bargain we make. So it's not like they don't take the threat seriously. They have to plan for that possibility, but they also have to plan for the likelihood that unpredictable person is going to change their mind about the deal that they made last week.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

REID PAULY: And that those two instincts together, there's probably more. But those two together, I think, can help to explain why this president has struggled to make deals of all kinds in international politics, trade negotiations. Look at Canada this week, the prime minister said something almost exactly like this in his press conference after bargaining collapsed to try and strike a new US-Canada trade relationship.

He basically said, look, we don't trust that the United States is going to stick to any part of its bargain. We tried in good faith to reach a deal. The fact that they came at the last minute with a series of additional demands that we had not been talking about previously, suggests to us that even if we were to make a deal, a bad deal next month, they're going to try and change it anyway.

So what does it do? It doesn't mean the Canadians aren't vulnerable to American threats to impose tariffs. It's really going to hurt in Canada. But that's not enough to get the Canadians to make concessions. They're actually much more resolved to resist this American government and rally around the flag with each other than they are to make a deal.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you think that the people running the government in Iran right now, do they really think anything could be possible? Or is there you I think there's been a lot of observations that Trump maybe seems interested in moving this war out of the main stage of his presidency, which and not bringing troops into battle, boots on the ground.

I guess it's just a question of how you think Trump's behavior is being interpreted in Iran, and what that might mean for this conflict?

REID PAULY: Let's be clear that I am speculating, and I don't really what Iranian leaders are thinking.

DAN RICHARDS: Absolutely.

REID PAULY: But what we can say with some confidence is that this new Iranian government is harder line, and they are interested in using newfound leverage, especially over the Strait of Hormuz, to try to deter the United States and Israel from ever attacking it again.

I think for a time, they took seriously the possibility that the United States would try and escalate its way out of the problem. So, yes, there was a time when it looked like maybe the United States would see that. Well, air power has been frustrated and we haven't achieved our coercive aims. And so the answer is to send ground troops.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah.

REID PAULY: I think we're past that. And the credibility of the American threat to use ground troops has diminished over the last two or three months. And in part, that's because of I think, the recognition of the reality that has emerged from this war, which is that the Iranians proved much more resilient than the belligerents seem to have thought they were.

And their strategy to close the Strait was a lot more effective than even experts who predicted that it would happen, thought it would be. And the credibility of the American threat to escalate its way out of this war diminished over time, as the president was clearly bluffing.

Week after week, he has often truth social about destroying all the power plants and bridges in Iran. The fact that he made that threat so many times and then never did. It suggests to me that he is deterred from doing so by what Iran has credibly threatened to do in response, which is to target Gulf energy infrastructure.

So there is this equilibrium going on now of mutually assured destruction in the conventional sense of energy infrastructure in the region. So we really want to take this war to the level where sure, we could destroy energy infrastructure in Iran, but they have already shown that Gulf energy infrastructure is just as vulnerable to their short and medium range ballistic missiles.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you expect this new normal, new equilibrium? Do you expect it to potentially just last through all of this Trump administration? Or do you hold out hope for some of bigger breakthrough in the next two years?

REID PAULY: I don't hold out hope for a big breakthrough on this things we've been talking about. I don't expect a comprehensive nuclear deal to come anytime soon to solve the core issues at the core of the war. But the hopeful outcome is one where this new status quo continues as a frozen conflict, where there both sides can claim we're both blockading the Strait.

And so that type of low level tit for tat violence could continue while the basic strategic scenario stays the same, which is that the United States has now gone back to pursuing essentially the same maximum pressure sanctions, economic coercion strategy. The pessimistic view, though, is that Iran will see that as an opportunity to push harder. There are definitely hardliners in Iran today who are saying this is the best opportunity we have had in a generation to change the American relationship with the Middle East.

Let's use the leverage we have now and have discovered, especially over the Strait of Hormuz, to make new and bigger coercive demands of the United States. If this new hard line government in Tehran actually tries to do that, then there is a fear that they could overplay their hand and push too hard in a way that actually brings the belligerents back to the table and makes the United States, and certainly Israel, more resolved to go back to war.

DAN RICHARDS: Reid, thank you so much for coming on and helping us think through all these complex dynamics and how they might unfold and what that all might mean.

REID PAULY: I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me do this work in Brown.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Juliana Merullo, with production assistance from Eroll Danehy and Azurae Cruz. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions.

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