Graham Allison on the Global Realignment: Iran, China, Israel, Greenland
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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.
Thanks for having me.
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's the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. He's advised every secretary of defense since Kessinger. 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.
I'm going all here.
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Well, thank you again for having me back. I will 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, Clausewitz'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 c
Let me double click on that point. You mentioned there's multiple reasons that the administration has messaged for doing this, multiple views on what success looks like, multiple timelines on ending it, and that this is BB's war. How do you think Trump was motivated to do this? What is the real motivation? And I will ask this in the context of the big delegation and visit to China coming up next month. Is Trump motivated fundamentally to create leverage with China and use this as a tool to try and maximize his negotiating leverage going into the Chinese negotiations?
That's a great question. And I wish that the answer was this was all part of a grand strategy. That would make me feel hugely better. But I tried to do tropology and I was actually having dinner last night with Bill O'Reilly, a former student who I think is one of the better topologists for trying to interpret and we were going back and forth through this. It's easy enough to see why the window, tactically, the window in which this attack occurred was chosen because here you got 40 You got the supreme leader and 40 of the other leaders of Iran out in public. So that's an opportunity as a targe
And you think that this is independent then of the action with Maduro and independent of the big delegation headed to China for big negotiation next month?
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