Upheaval in Iran Doesn't Work Out Well

Some thoughts and smart analysis about where we are — and what comes next.

Author

Garrett Graff
March 02, 2026 • Reading Time: 11 minutes

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

We’re just about 48 hours into America’s new war-of-choice with Iran and already see signs of it spreading into a larger regional conflict. I wrote for WIRED yesterday about how every drip of history we know says this won’t go well: 

All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

When we approach major geopolitical and political inflection points like this, I always think it’s useful to return to the framework that Donald Rumsfeld loved: Thinking about our “Known Unknowns” — the big foreseeable uncertainties or unanswerable-but-expected developments that lie ahead. I tried to lay out five big “Known Unknowns” about the looming war with Iran — including diving into Trump’s Middle Eastern business ties and how he’s fallen in love with “tactical” military operations while failing to care about the strategic outcomes, as well as trace some of the history between Iran and the US that led us here.

Most of all, there’s this:

5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.

As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.

The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”

It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.

Hour by hour, it seems to become more clear that Donald Trump has no plan — and what we know about how the war is being run doesn’t encourage confidence. First, there were guys bragging about the war schedule in advance in a DC bar, which makes Pete Hegseth’s Signalgate seem downright secure by comparison. Second, the White House released a series of photos of Trump in a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago, the latest in a genre I like to think of as “Thirsty Trump looking to recreate the iconic photo of Obama during the mission to kill bin Laden,” but the photos only underscored how makeshift and unserious it appeared to be — White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in this photo is wearing a smartwatch, for instance, which is a major no-no for any space where you’re supposed to be discussing classified information:

Pro Tip: Real classified discussions don’t take place amid pipe-and-drape at social clubs. (Official White House Photo)

But one of the things the White House Flickr page also inadvertently and troubling revealed was JD Vance “participating” from the Situation Room at the White House along with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as well as Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Leaving aside the oddity that the White House felt it necessary to release a photo of the “foreign policy kiddie table,” it’s worth noting that Vance and — especially — Gabbard have been opposed to striking Iran. It sure looks like the administration left the people who said “no” behind in Washington and only brought to Mar-a-Lago those, like Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who were on board. That’s not an encouraging sign of what advice and counsel Trump is getting.

There’s been a lot of smart writing on Iran over the last 48 hours too, and I wanted to share some interesting other takeaways and analysis:

  • Does the US have enough weapons to fight this war? You might ask: We spend more on our military budget anyone — then basically any groups of anyone combined — how on earth could we run out of munitions? But the truth is that the US military has been long overinvesting in stunningly expensive weapons platforms — think fighter jets or ships — while wildly underinvesting in actually in the industrial capacity to manufacture missiles, bullets, artillery shells, and rockets themselves. The Wall Street Journal is already warning that the war against Iran might last longer than we have missiles to fight it.

    Tim Mak, one of my favorite war writers who runs a vital news organization on Ukraine, has some fresh analysis about just how quickly we will run out of the missiles we’re using so profligately against Iran right now. As Donald Trump discusses a four-to-five-week-long war with Iran, “Air defense interceptors could be depleted quickly at high tempo: Army interceptors in ten days, Navy interceptors in two weeks.” We’re especially using Tomahawk cruise missiles faster than we’re building them — for years, the US has been buying only about 25-50 a year, while using more than that each year, but last year was especially bad: Donald Trump’s raids on Nigeria (you don’t even remember that, do you?), Iran, and Yemen, among other targets, used up hundreds of missiles — and we only bought about 50. Over the weekend, it appears we used hundreds more — perhaps several of hundreds. It takes two years (or longer) to procure a Tomahawk, so we’re depleting rapidly a scarce commodity. And it’s not clear that the US has any plan or strategy for rapidly increasing the number of Tomahawks manufactured over the coming years.

    Why does this matter? China and Taiwan — and Ukraine. You can bet that China is sitting there carefully calculating the US Tomahawk stockpile as it weighs whether it could blockade, seize, or invade Taiwan sometime in 2028 (the generally agreed-upon earliest window its forces would be ready). A 2024 wargame showed that the US would run out of missiles in just weeks in a fight against China — and that was before the last year of, shall we say, living dangerously.

    These small stockpiles — and slow pace of manufacturing — is also a major problem for Ukraine, who has been purchasing every air-defense interceptor it can as fast as it can. It’s entirely possible that very soon there won’t be enough to go around.

  • How did we get there? While a lot of attention has focused on Donald Trump’s choices — this is the ultimate war of choice to “solve” a problem he created when he blew up the Iranian nuclear deal — but it’s worth considering too how the last few years have unfolded from the Iranian side strategically. Ankit Panda has a smart piece about Iran’s choices and how it’s strategy for developing a “threshold” nuclear capability turned out to be the wrong one. The answer and lesson for the next country considering this, though, is a dangerous one: Speed your way to a nuclear weapon before anyone can stop you. One of Panda’s other conclusions is equally unfortunate: Iran was mistaken to think that the Trump administration was bargaining in good faith. That, of course, also has some pretty severe downstream consequences for the next global crisis.

  • Lastly, a look back. Robin Wright is one of the world’s great Middle East observers, and she has a great essay in the New Yorker about the life and legacy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 86-year-old supreme leader of Iran killed in the opening hours of the war (alongside, it appears everyone else that the US had once hoped would lead Iran afterward — oopsie!). Always read Robin Wright.

GMG

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