Week signals: Bunk and bunkers
Plus: watch points for the tariffs, the Big Beautiful Bill, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, and Cameroon.
This week:
IN REVIEW. Missing centrifuges, damaging assessments, and asking the right questions.
UP AHEAD. Crunch times for tariffs and the budget, Trump turns to Gaza, Putin bends the knee, and Biya gets an ultimatum.
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Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: Too intelligent by half
The week began with US strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. It ended with a ceasefire and little agreement on whether the strikes had worked.
At a cost of several billion dollars and 70% of the US’s disclosed stocks of GBU-57 massive ordinance penetrators, the public will feel they ought to know – particularly as the strikes could come to dominate US policy should chaotic regime change, or something worse, resultantly emerge. But as with so many things in geopolitics, governments operate on a need-to-know basis.
Being ex-government ourselves, this is understandable. But the quid pro quo of government secrecy is a government’s respect for the value of secrets, the methods by which they’re obtained, and the veracity of the assessments derived. Continuing a long tradition, the Trump White House has shown little of this.
At one point in the fortnight just past, the White House claimed Iran had no nuclear weapons plan (an established assessment). Soon after – as Israel looked like it was “winning” in a series of tactically brilliant but strategically questionable attacks – the administration flipped to claim Iran did have a weapons of mass destruction program, which must be destroyed (memories of Iraq circa 2003 were revived). Today, in the wake of Fordow’s “obliteration” we’re told those almost-WMDs, or stocks of highly enriched uranium, are gone. Mission accomplished.
With Iran now having suspended its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, we may never know, until it’s too late. A smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud, as Condoleezza Rice once put it. The Central Intelligence Agency, publicly at least, has backed the White House. The Defense Intelligence Agency and European partners allegedly think otherwise, if the leaks of their initial battle damage assessments are to be believed. Tehran, of course, has sent mixed messages. It says its centrifuges are intact, yet still maintains they’re only for peaceful purposes (or at least the purposes of symbolic deterrence, rather than atomic weaponisation). Any Ayatollah Strangelove, working in the bowels of a new Fordow-like bunker, will be hoping the West soon forgets all about it while they prepare to Make Iran Great Again.
As we wrote a fortnight ago, this is (or was) a war that was clever, but not very wise. Confounding the mullahs and their Potemkin regime was satisfying. And building upon his tactical elimination of Hezbollah and the collapse of the Assad regime, it seemed Benjamin Netanyahu had proven once again why he was the right man to lead Israel out of its strategic dilemma.
But a fortnight on, while it seems that Iran’s nuclear capabilities are certainly degraded, its nuclear intent has only been encouraged. And while the regime has been embarrassed at home and isolated abroad, it has also likely been delivered to the hardliners, rather than the freedom-seeking democrats, or the secularist Artesh. And all this just as there was a small chance, via diplomacy, for Iran’s moderates to be empowered at the point when Ayatollah Khamenei was preparing his succession.
Defenders of Donald Trump’s decision can point to the need to remove any Israeli excuse to continue bombing Iran. The war, while brief, was entering a dangerous phase as missile and interceptor stocks got low and planners became more desperate to ascend the escalation ladder. There were also reasonable grounds to signal deterrence to China and Russia lest they decide to weigh in (though the involvement of this axis of convenience was probably overstated).
But assuming we’re left with the status quo ante, albeit with fewer bunker-busters and a more motivated Iran, this looks like strategic failure. An unnecessary war with a messy conclusion. And an Iran that’s humbled but not beaten.
With the strategic outlook thus still uncertain, what other lessons can readers draw from this episode? We’ve already written about the motivations and the idiosyncrasies of the chief protagonists, as well as how public interests often don’t map personal desires (i.e., “Putin’s razor”) so let’s look at the lessons for intelligence and how businesses and investors should look anew at third-hand information, whether in geopolitics or something else.