Name: Phase Two of the Iran War
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T21:56:00Z
Duration: 12 min 40 s
Description: What does victory look like? In conversation with WSJ editorial board member Elliot Kaufman, Behnam Ben Taleblu from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explains the military and political stakes of the Iran war.

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What does victory look like? In conversation with WSJ editorial board member Elliot Kaufman, Behnam Ben Taleblu from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explains the military and political stakes of the Iran war.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260304/c8b1393b-09f6-464e-99f7-44c9cdcc7074/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Phase Two of the Iran War

Behnam Ben Taleblu, thank you so much for being here.

Great to be with you, Elliot. Thank you.

Day one of the Iran War, we know what happened. Senior Iranian regime officials including Ayatollah Khamenei taken out by Israel and the US. At the same time, Iran regionalizes the war, attacks a whole number of countries, inflicts some casualties on the US. My question is, what has happened since then? How has this war developed?

Well, it's an excellent of question because while there are some open questions as to what the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump may want from the conflict, what political success looks like, militarily you can begin to tell what matters based on the targets they're picking and what assets they're bringing to bear. Ultimately, if you had to put a name or a label on the kinds of operations or the kinds of missions that we see going on in Iran today, it's a combination of decapitation and defanging. Decapitation of the political and military elite to get the regime off balance, begin to slowly gut command and control of what's left of that system. And then on the defanging side, really the outsized security rationale, we're so used to looking at the nuclear issue here, but the outsized security rationale was Iran's ballistic missile arsenal and other long-range strike capabilities. And the strikes by Israel and America against the launchers is designed to really put time on the side or back on the side of Israel and America who will have issues with missile math and interceptors the longer this kind of conflict goes on. So, I would say there's a strong military rationale for defanging that we've seen in the past three and a half, four days, bear itself out against the main tool that the Islamic republic has to respond to overt kinetic action against its own territory, which is to engage in these missile launches, drone launches and whatnot. So, you're seeing a lot of concerted activity to suppress missile fire, to defend against missile fire, and when you can to preempt missile fire by going against launchers or better yet moving against basis.

Has Iran strategy shifted or is it more of the same?

Well, Iran really did seem to learn some lessons from the 12-day war, but much of the targeting logic is the same. And at the same time, the regime is actually acting on threats that it made at the end of the protest earlier this year and throughout negotiations, which is that it would treat even limited military action as an on-ramp to a wider or a regional war. This is something called internationalizing the conflict to try to distribute the pain, to try to have the US actors and allies in the region kind of become defacto lobbyists to turn off the fire. Because if the fire remains on, then it can lead to a cycle of violence that the Islamic republic knows it conventionally will come up short against. I think just like in the Iran-Iraq War, when the regime internationalized the conflict in the Persian Gulf with the Tanker War, I hear the regime is actually internationalizing the conflict to the GCC countries. And actually in so doing, I couldn't think of a better advertisement for the Abraham Accords than an Iranian drone hitting a, you know, luxury UAE hotel.

And what damage has it been able to do, Iran, other than hitting, you know, civilian targets here and there.

You know, despite the regime working to improve the precision of its missiles, and different classes of missiles can do different things for the regime, ultimately the cycles of violence that were overt when the shadow war left the shadows after four decades between Israel and Iran and later America and Iran, we got to see some of the shortcomings of Iran's long-range strike capabilities and really see how the regime still treats them as tools of terror despite enabling them to have an option for coercion, an option for punishment, and an option for deterrence. So, whether you are looking at drone strikes at GCC countries, or medium-range ballistic missile attacks against Israel, the strategies roughly the same to instill fear, to instill terror, to create civilian damage, to have civilian casualties to try to play to the adversaries, quote, unquote, "Image of war," as being dangerous, as being protracted, as being costly. And to try to get stronger powers to reign themselves in such that the battlefield pivots from the war battlefield to the negotiating table. Places where in the past Iran has succeeded despite having a weaker hand.

And maybe you can tell me more about Iran's missile program, which you know better than anyone. Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth, have mentioned and really cited Iran's missile program as a primary justification for America's attack. They've said that if Iran was allowed to continue expanding its missile production, it would essentially have immunity, it could do whatever it wanted, including building nuclear weapons. Is that a credible theory, a credible justification for action, do you think?

Unfortunately, it's quite credible and it's born out in Iranian national security behavior and the sorts of investments that these guys have made in their missile program over many, many years. And you can tell how people act in a crisis and what they value and what they care about, and especially what they choose to do once that crisis is turned off and the behavior that they go back to. And there's no better, you know, proof of this than after the 12-day war, Iran tested not one, but two SLVs. SLVs are space or Satellite Launch Vehicles that can help put the regimes sensing and remote-sensing satellites into Low Earth Orbit. But the technologies between SLVs, Space Launch Vehicles and ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are essentially one-to-one. There's only two differences here. The trajectory of the projectile is fundamentally different. It goes, flies differently, goes in a different direction. And in terms of, you know, real military technology, it needs a real reentry vehicle. It needs heat shielding to protect the payload that you're trying to deliver to a target from the rigors of reentry. That's fundamentally something you don't have to worry about if you're putting a satellite out there into space, into Low Earth Orbit, for example. But the regime has been working on these for quite a while and it tested two of these systems after the 12-day war. So, this is proof that despite the preexisting missile threat, conventional missile threat, which is against the neck of US partners in the region like the GCC countries, like Israel, like even NATO-allied Turkey, which was just attempted to be attacked by ballistic missile recently, that there is a longer-range threat coming our way, first to Europe and then to the United States of America. So, it was quite prudent to act and I think it would be a mistake. I know there's a whole debate here about the word imminent, but I think it would be a gross strategic mistake to let the threat be imminent. I mean, I ask everyone now, what is it that America can meaningfully do to roll back North Korea's ICBM capabilities, which continue to grow and can already target the US mainly?

That's a great question, not too much-

Not much.

Not too much. And it would be a mistake to let the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism get this fate accompli, and it would be a mistake to make the perfect the enemy of the good when we're looking at how countries bolster their missile programs and create an ICBM pathway. Because India, for example, was able to go from Space Launch Vehicles to ICBMs. Most countries go in the opposite direction. America and the Soviet Union went in the opposite direction. But again, we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good. We should look at all the empirical cases and use that to inform national security and all the picture, all the pieces, the puzzle point to the regime, looking to refine these tools. And I don't think we should give them the time and the space to do it.

Okay, so what are you looking for now from the US and Israel going forward? Are there certain targets that you are watching? Are they gonna hit it? What will that signal, what would you like to see them do in order to accomplish the stated objectives?

Well, in a recent essay, I actually argue that America has to go big or go home. Ultimately, there is a rationale, and there is a strategic logic to limited war. But that logic would actually lose one of the main forcing functions for the crisis, which is the most pro-American and most pro-Israeli population in the heartland of the Muslim Middle East, which is to try to pave the pathway for the Iranian people. So, what I'd like to see is America begin to move from the defanging and decapitation mission and have success there of course, but to begin to move against the rest of the regime to translate a massive military operation into a slower and more protracted low-intensity campaign that arose the will to fight of this regime that incentivizes the desire for self-preservation of lower units of Iran's security surfaces. That gets defections going, that drills down not just against the top of the regime's military brass and political elites, but against level 2, 3, 4, so that the regime knows that there is really no way out but through here. And so you're looking for a translation or a shifting of the mission from decapitation and defanging to taking on Tehran's repressive apparatus. That would help to meaningfully pave the pathway for the Iranian people to get back onto the street. Unless we forget the president drew multiple red lines related exactly to this in the month of January, hitting an Iranian missile base in Bakhtaran, or you know, Yazd does very little for an Iranian protestor in Tehran or Mashhad. But going against local police stations, you know, drone attacks against, you know, swarms of pipe wielding and chain-wielding besieged thugs who are in the country's major urban centers on bicycles on a daily basis, intimidating population would actually go a very long way in stiffening the spine of, again, the most pro-American and most pro-Israel population. Because there's no doubt America and Israel can have a military win in the region. But there is doubt right now if they can nest that military win into a larger political strategy that yields success. The president has said before, his end game is to win. The only way you win is if you flip the script on the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism and you pave the pathway so that the Iranian people can turn Iran from adversary into ally.

It sounds like you think this can't be a one week, even two-week quick operation and then the regime is on the floor, rather America and Israel need a longer strategy. My question is, can it sustain a longer strategy militarily, politically, what do you think?

Well, the Islamic republic is trying to play to the image of a longer and protracted war. But if America is decisive and wins decisively in the earlier missions of defanging the regime, the Islamic republic is not gonna have much military capability or capacity to prevent Washington from pressing ahead. That's really the, you know, the art of the deal here. How do we get past the major hurdle, which is the regime's long-range strike capabilities, without exhausting your own interceptors and air and missile defense stocks? And the way you do that is you go hard on the defanging mission. You destroy missile bunkers and missile bases and storage facilities. That's the approach you take heavy bombers to. But then the transition can, and I would argue should occur to these, you know, lower and slower flying systems, to aircraft that can provide close air supports, and this is the way you can meaningfully pave the pathway because otherwise limited war is an option, but it's an option that'll lose you the street. And really when we look at the Middle East today, we deserve actually a partner in this part of the world. It'd be good to actually have something that can resemble that partner rather than something that can resemble a failed state.

Behnam, always great speaking with you. Thank you.

A pleasure, thanks for having me.

WSJ Opinion: Phase Two of the Iran War

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