Phil Klay, a National Book Award Winner and former Marine, joins Danielle for an insightful discussion of Iran, Trump, and Klay’s recent piece in The New York Times called “Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran.”
The chat pairs well with Danielle’s recent piece “Operation Epic Fury: A Civilizational Fail.”
You can watch the video above or listen to the audio like an old-school radio show. An edited version of the transcript is available below. Enjoy!
Danielle Allen in Conversation with Phil Klay
The Headstrong Club
Danielle Allen: So today’s episode of the Headstrong Club is going to be sort of old school radio style. You’ve got me on video, but you’ve got Phil here through audio. Phil is on the road, so I’m very grateful that he was willing to join us even in this time of incredible calendar pressure.
Phil is a novelist and short story writer and also an educator. He teaches at Fairfield University. As a writer, he won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014 for a collection of short stories called Redeployment. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was one of the ten best books of the year for the Wall Street Journal. Phil was also deployed as a Marine in Iraq. He served in the US Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, if I’m remembering correctly.
Phil Klay: Yep. Yeah, that’s correct.
Allen: All right. So veteran alongside the categories of writer and educator, essentially. Thank you, Phil. Really, really glad to have you here today. This is such an important set of themes — the question of what’s happening in Iran right now, the question of how this country uses violence to advance the national interest. I want to start actually by inviting you to just share with everybody a bit about the article that you published a few days ago in the New York Times. It was a really fantastic piece called “Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation About Iran.” So if you don’t mind just sharing what you were arguing there, and then we’ll take it from there.
Klay: Sure. Basically, it’s very strange to watch the Iran war as a veteran of the global war on terror. Because it feels as though there’s this set of lessons that you would hope that we would learn as a country. I was joking with a friend — it seems like we did learn lessons, but we learned to do it again, but dumber.
So on the one hand, there’s a kind of set of obvious complaints that you could make about what’s happening now, which go from process things — the administration has not really consulted Congress and gotten the American people on board — to the fact that we don’t even know what the actual objective is. One day it’s a narrow degradation of their ballistic missile capabilities, another day it’s regime change. One day we’re winning, one day we’ve won — I forget how many times we’re winning. We get all this sort of — and also, we’re not at war, we’re in an excursion or an incursion or what have you. So there’s a certain amount of incoherence.
But at a deeper level, there’s something that felt as though it was a coherent through line through the administration, and not just through this particular conflict. It is their clear delight in displays of violence and domination. You can see that in their messaging, where we’ve got the White House putting out this kind of unending stream of juvenile videos where they’ll mash together imagery from video games or action movies along with actual footage of bombings and combat footage. Everyone from the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to the president talks about the war — the president talking about how sometimes you sink a ship just for fun. Hegseth just recently was saying that we negotiate through bombs. It’s this kind of juvenile tough guy braggadocio.
To be frank, as somebody who served in the Marine Corps, the real tough guys that I knew in the Marine Corps did not talk that way. It’s not really a culture like that. The Secretary of Defense tends to sound a lot more like a 13-year-old who just watched Conan the Barbarian for the first time than he does any of the actual hard guys that I knew in the military.
But they’re playing for a domestic audience and advocating this kind of delight in dominance. And along with that is not just a juvenile relationship to violence and delight in it, but there also seems to be this kind of deeper expectation about what you can do by showing how tough you are. From the early stages of the conflict, it’s pretty clear that the Trump administration thought that they were going to show how unbelievably dominant we are as a military, and the Iranians would just kind of capitulate. They sort of admitted they never expected the kind of retaliation that they got — that despite the fact that the military has planned on this, anticipated this for years in wargaming, they hadn’t anticipated the Strait of Hormuz closure, that they wouldn’t be able to frighten them into opening it.
So there’s this idea that violence and domination and showing how tough you are will make people bow down before that. And that’s a real kind of outlier in terms of presidential rhetoric around the use of violence. If you look from the very beginning, the way that George Washington talked about violence — and this was a guy who knew violence well, he knew how charming a bullet could sound — and yet in his addresses to the troops, he’d bring up imagery of war not as a delightful thing where we’d imagine how badass we’re going to be, but as horrors to be endured. He talked about wars as a plague on mankind, and when news of atrocities came before him — oh, the temptation to respond in kind — but he says that our forbearance will actually bring people to our cause. We need to behave uprightly to justly secure the attachments of all good men.
Lincoln’s wartime rhetoric — it’s sort of fascinating. It is full of clear moral purpose, totally absent from any of the articulations of this war. But it is not braggadocious. It also accepts the war as a trial and tribulation for the evils of both sides. And famously declares malice towards none. So there’s this sense of how we approach war and the moral stakes of war that could not be more radically different throughout the American tradition.
Allen: Thank you for walking us through your argument in the piece. I encourage everybody to read it. It was in the New York Times this past weekend — “President Trump Has Miscalculated on Iran.” And the miscalculation, I think in your argument, is that the through line is this belief that pure displays of domination, braggadocious displays of domination, are enough to bring about good things in the world.
When I read your article, Phil, it was just very helpful for me because I had been struggling to articulate precisely what was bothering me in particular. As you said, one might look at the procedural questions about congressional authorization, but the truth is Congress has made its choices. We actually know what its choices are at this point. They may not be ones that everybody agrees with, but they’ve made their choices. They haven’t developed a public debate about the question. There’s been no conversation coming out of Congress that has clarified the purpose of this. That’s a huge problem for sure.
But at the end of the day, there’s a moving relationship between potential purposes, proportionate violence, and then the question of how any given society actually uses violence when it has to. I think you put your finger on a cluster of issues there that are just really deeply important. And I want to see if I can sort of say this back to you — what issues I think I learned to think about better from your piece, and that we can all think about better.
For starters, the braggadocious domination is actually masking the fact that the purpose is unclear. That’s one of the things you’re pointing out. So it’s becoming its own purpose. And then you have to ask yourself, what does that mean when that’s the purpose of war? I mean, that is deeply degrading at a civilizational level. And that was what I tried to argue in my own Substack piece, building on yours.
So you’re really calling on us all as a society to face the fact that we have functionally embraced braggadocious domination as our purpose. That’s sort of thing one. But thing two that I think is really hard is you’re also kind of inviting us to reconsider how violence should be wielded when it’s necessary to wield violence.
So here I’m hoping you might extend the thinking a little bit. Iran is obviously a very dangerous regime. It’s dangerous to its own people. It’s dangerous to the whole world. I’m going to do something that’s sort of outside of the box — it’s not crazy to intervene. Not crazy at all. There are all kinds of realpolitik reasons that you might think it was important to do. Certainly you wouldn’t want Iran to have gotten more powerful than it is currently. So at some level, there were grounds for intervention. But how, with your way of thinking about principled use of violence, how do you make your decision about what your purpose should be — whether it should just be a kind of mild degradation of capacity, knowing we’ll come back in five years and mildly degrade capacity again, or whether your purpose is some sort of more wholesale redirection for the regime? How do you think about that choice in the first instance? And then how do you think about the deployment of violence for either of those purposes?
Klay: Sure. And I should say — Iran, during the course of the Iraq War, directly or indirectly killed a lot of American service members. I have no love in my heart for that regime, which is a truly wicked regime that has done horrible things around the world, stoked a brutal civil war in Iraq, and obviously has murdered a lot of its own civilians. This is not about any particular sympathy for that regime. I hope it comes to an end as much as anyone.
So there’s a couple different facets of that. One of the things that I talk about in the piece is there’s a thinking that Americans bring in as part of the foundational aspect of our democracy, which is about power. When we declare independence, we do so with an eye towards universal principles — everyone endowed by their creator with equality and certain inalienable rights. And also the notion that democracy derives just power from the consent of the governed.
One of the interesting things argued in the Federalist Papers is not just that that’s a moral claim, but that there’s a practical component of it in terms of how you think about power and how it works out in the world. When they argue that all governments rest on opinion, they’re not just talking about democracies — there aren’t a ton in the world at that time. They’re thinking about monarchies, tyrannies, every type of government. And they had the experience of being under a monarch whose exercise of tyrannical power steadily eroded the support that he had from his own people.
That’s in large portion the place that the Iranian regime was in, where they had a very small percentage of the population that were hardcore supporters, and they had alienated a lot of the populace. But there are implications of this not just for governance but also for warfare. Because we don’t wage war just to show how mighty we are or to conquer. We wage war because we want a set of political ends. And what those political ends are going to be is not just about how many people did we kill, how many bombing videos can we put on Twitter. It’s about what is the long-term impact of what we do going to be on the populations where we wage war.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we proved that we have unbelievably powerful capabilities as a military, but that the long-term consequences of the use of force might be dramatically otherwise than we had thought. In Iraq, toppling Saddam led to civil war, mass refugee flows, genocide, a whole host of evils that were never anticipated. Metastasizing terror groups. So when you’re thinking about the use of military force with a country like Iran, you’re also thinking about how this is going to impact internally in Iran, how it’s going to impact people around the region, and the kind of global order or lack thereof.
This is a long-winded way of saying there’s no quick and easy answer to when it is right, but there are a series of very serious cautions. You wage a war like this and you’re just bombing — people will say, look, bombing campaigns without ground troops have never led to positive regime change. Actually, they tend to fuse the populace and the regime closer together. So when you are looking at how to counter Iran, you want to think of ways that will ultimately undermine the strength of the regime — isolate it, limit its ability to cause mischief around the world. That may include a military component at times, but that’s precisely why you’d want a clear, morally articulated strategy that takes all those factors into account.
Allen: Right, exactly. I think that’s what I’m trying to get to. Your piece is so helpful because you make the point that purpose has to come first, obviously, and then strategy and tactics marshal the resources to deliver on it. But one of the important things you’re adding to that idea is that the moral orientation toward violence is actually a part of what gets shaped as you decide what to deploy in relationship to the purpose.
So let me try and make it more concrete. One of the reasons people want to do this is because they’re afraid of Iran getting a nuclear bomb. They say, look, it would be devastating if Iran got a nuclear bomb. They’re weak right now. So we should act.
Klay: And basically what they’re essentially arguing is we need to roll the dice and see if maybe this works. But what isn’t considered is that you can have exactly the opposite effect. First off, waging a war like this kind of advertises not just to Iran but to a lot of bad actors around the globe that they need a nuclear bomb. The immediate impact has been that a hardliner was elected. The current regime shows no signs of falling. And it’s entirely possible that they’ll be more committed to this than ever before. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you need to factor in that the use of violence does not — when Hegseth says we negotiate with bombs, well, when you do that, sometimes the counteroffer that you get from your negotiating partner is the exact opposite of what you want. And that’s incredibly dangerous.
Allen: Yeah, no, absolutely. That is certainly one conversation that we’ve watched unfold — the wager on let’s see if we can keep them from getting a nuclear bomb. There’s another conversation which is focused on the fact that Iran has been conducting war through proxies continuously over time. Low-grade war.
So let’s say we were thinking through what would a purpose, properly constructed, look like? And then what would the deployment of force, properly constructed, look like? The purpose would be: there is a war underway, people have been living with it in various ways, they’ve sort of just learned to tolerate a baseline level of constant threat and attack. People don’t want to live with it any longer. They want to fundamentally transform that dynamic.
Then the question is, okay, if your purpose is to transform that dynamic, to bring it to an end or reduce it to such a low level that it truly counts just as an irritation, not actually as war, then you have only two options. You have either what people call the “mow the lawn” option — just degrade the military capacity — or if you want to actually redirect things, then that’s where you are in the regime change conversation.
I’m not saying either of these things are things that we should be doing. I’m just trying to understand, at the end of the day, if one were clearly articulating a purpose, what would follow from that with regard to how people would go about deploying violence?
So if you are pursuing the mow-the-lawn strategy, you have very tailored military objectives. It really looked like the first few days of this action — attacking the missile sites, radar, all of those kinds of things, really taking the capacity down. And I suppose the kind of questions around violence there are already contained by the narrow targeting. You’re pretty clear that you’re avoiding civilian harm.
What would be the moral attitude? You still wouldn’t want braggadocious domination as a moral attitude, for exactly the reason you just described — then the violence gets its own kind of dynamic of purpose. It carries us along ahead of ourselves. So it would be that orientation of matter of necessity, definitely not what one wants first. And then the question of — you invoked Roosevelt in the language of avoiding a world of brute force, taking the actions of force that we need in order to reduce the presence of brute force in the world — that clarity of moral purpose to go along with strategic purpose.
So that seems like one kind of picture. The other picture, the regime change picture, is obviously a bazillion years harder. And again, not making the argument here that we should be doing this, just trying to think about what would a kind of reasonable case on that front actually look like?
And in that regard, I think the really challenging thing that we’ve also been wrestling with in Middle Eastern politics for many years is: how does the fact of guerrilla warfare change the tactical realities and change what it means to deploy violence to achieve military objectives? What I’m trying to say is it’s very easy to understand the kind of moral stance in a moment when the tactics are narrowly tailored and violence is clearly kept apart from civilians. But if you are engaged in some more wholesale endeavor in a context where guerrilla warfare is the norm, the laws of war, the rules of war, just war theory and the like, get much harder to maintain intact. And so when it’s harder to maintain intact, then what are the right steps to attach a moral purpose appropriately to the use of violence in that more wholesale kind of engagement?
Klay: So you’d be looking at something like, on the one hand, there are the initial strikes we made against the Iranian nuclear sites, which were narrowly targeted. And then there’s: how do you deal with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq? And that’s a much more wicked problem because the Iranian-backed militias and pro-Iranian sentiment range from straightforward political expression — the sort that we might not like but is valid political expression of Iraqis — to really awful armed groups, which, by the way, have killed plenty of Iraqi citizens. This has always been one of the Iranian regime’s assets.
It’s a particularly hard problem to deal with because what you ultimately need in that instance is a level of security. If Iranian militias can, with impunity, fire on Iraqi protesters wanting less government corruption — which is something that happened in 2019 — then that limits the ability of the people to express their will. And ultimately, what you want is for the people to reject that. After Iranian-backed militias did that, Iraqis burned down Iranian consulates. It was not a popular move. In a certain sense, Iran falls victim to the same type of thinking.
But nonetheless, dealing with that is not — though there’s a military component of it, it’s more a long-term thing that, frankly, we don’t have control over because it’s about the attitudes of the population that’s not ours. One of the things that I think bedevils Americans when they think about these issues is you can point out that there’s a real problem, and it’s a serious problem, and I agree that it’s a serious problem. But it can be dangerous to think that there’s a solution that is within our control. Because in warfare, nothing is ever totally in your control. And certainly that there’s an easy solution with special force raids or military strikes.
So part of the complexity of the issue is there’s a cultural, diplomatic, and political situation aspect of this as well as a military one. And increasingly, we have steadily relied less and less on our diplomats and more and more on our military, even as our military has failed to deliver the world that our wars once promised. I think that’s a mistake. Not thinking about these issues purely in military terms, even though there may be a military component at times, is probably the first and most crucial step.
Allen: Yeah. I mean, I point out that World War Two — it ended with a military victory and an atom bomb. But the peace was secured with the Marshall Plan and the decades-long deployment of troops and commitment to developing democracies in the Axis powers.
Klay: Right. That phrase, “winning the peace,” is so important. And actually having a view already about how to win the peace so that the military component is a part of the instrumentation — it’s not the purpose.
Allen: I think at the end of the day, as I’m reflecting on this conversation, Phil, and thinking about your piece, I think your point really boils down to something pretty simple. And I should warn everybody, this is a short conversation today. We’re going to wrap up in just a couple of minutes — I’ve got to get to class, I’ve got to teach.
But I think the simple point you’ve been making is that they have mistaken violence for the purpose, but it should only be a tool. When you remember that violence is a tool, then you also remember that there are other tools. And you also remember that your job is to clarify your purpose well enough that you know which tools you need and how to deploy them in concert. That whole process of reasoning appears to be absent. We’re not seeing any evidence of that reasoning from purpose to the full set of tools you might use.
Klay: Yeah.
Allen: So that is what gives us, I think, the sense of really being unmoored in this action. And as you say, it’s a radical break from, for the most part, the history of modes of warfare that American presidents have established over time. So it’s very powerful, sobering analysis, Phil, that you provide.
Klay: Well, thank you very much. I don’t think we made much progress really on solving anything about where we should all be going next, but you’ve helped my understanding. And I’m very thankful to you for that. So thank you for your time, Phil.
Allen: Thank you. Alrighty. Take good care. Travel safe.
Klay: Bye.
Allen: Bye.
