Trump’s AI-Powered World Wars

In the last few days, President Donald Trump has said that the U.S-Israel war on Iran will end soon, after oil prices jumped and the growing regional conflict continued to shake markets. After a wave of heavy bombardments throughout Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised another round, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” 

“Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that,” Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and journalist, tells The Intercept Briefing. 

“Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war. This particular campaign Operation Epic Fury is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks,” adds Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept. “The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes.” On Wednesday, Trump told Axios the war would end soon because there’s “practically nothing left to target.”

This week on the The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy talked to Majd and Turse about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and the growing number of conflicts the U.S. is engaged in. Senior technology reporter Sam Biddle also joined to discuss how artificial intelligence is being used in various U.S. conflicts.

“Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying — and AI is great at enabling that — you just increase over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing,” says Biddle. “So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of ‘intelligence’ that these AI companies are really pushing.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.  

Transcript 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Sam Biddle: And I’m Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Sam, this is your first time on The Intercept Briefing, correct? 

SB: It is. I’ve been at the Intercept for 10 years. I finally got the call. I’m excited.

Akela Lacy: Welcome, we’re very glad to have you. 

SB: Thank you so much.

AL: On a serious note, as we speak, the U.S. is engaged in war and acts of aggression on multiple fronts from the Middle East to the Caribbean and Central America. You have been doing some really important reporting on how the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence in wars and surveillance around the world.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Claude, an AI tool from the company Anthropic, was used to capture now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which set off a dispute between the company and the U.S. government, and opened the door for Anthropic’s rival to swoop in. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump has used those same tools in strikes on Iran. Tell us more. 

SB: So what’s been reported is that the Pentagon has made use of a system it has called the Maven Smart System, which is operated by Palantir, the semi-infamous data mining firm. We know based on multiple reports at this point that they’re using the Maven system to essentially accelerate the selection and subsequent destruction of targets on the ground.

This is a way of executing airstrikes at a greater speed potentially, not necessarily more intelligently or with greater accuracy, but I think just faster. And I think people at the Pentagon would probably say, more effectively, more efficiently finding things to destroy and people to kill.

Target selection is a labor-intensive task. If you can have an LLM like Anthropic’s Claude system — we’ve all seen how quickly they can generate a huge wall of text, of questionable accuracy — can bring that same hyper-speed to creating lists of buildings to destroy and people to kill. I think that is proven to be the biggest value — not just to our military, but to militaries abroad as well.

AL: Sam, what do we know about how the Pentagon is using AI tools in the Trump administration’s various wars?

SB: Under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, there has been a huge, very aggressive push to integrate AI really wherever and whenever possible.

I think that you’re seeing the Pentagon under Hegseth mimic a lot of tech industry rhetoric, which is “we don’t totally understand this technology. We don’t totally know where it’s got to be useful, but we need to use it as much as possible anyway.” I think that you’ve seen DOD under Hegseth be extremely aggressive in the cadence of airstrikes.

This is a Pentagon that believes in killing people. I think, at times, it seems to sort of give itself things to tweet about. This is a political movement and an ideology guiding the Pentagon that I think relishes violence. These AI systems, when you want to blow things up and kill people, these tools can provide a very rapid, turnkey means of having a list of people and places to destroy.

So what we know based on a recent Washington Post report that was discussing the use of Anthropic’s Claude system in Iran, was that it was not just used for target selection, but also target prioritization: Here are the most important targets to attack. Also, something that the Post described as sort of simulating battlefield outcomes. It’s a little unclear what exactly that means. One can imagine just asking a chatbot to basically create a story about how an airstrike could play out. That’s essentially what an LLM does, is generate text that’s plausible based on the inputs. How exactly these simulations are playing out of what value they are, how accurate they are in terms of what might actually happen subsequently in real life is unknown.

To me and for the public, the most concerning aspect of what’s been reported about the ongoing use of these LLMs by the Pentagon is the focus on speed. Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying, and AI is great at enabling that, you just increase over and over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing.

So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of “intelligence” that these AI companies are really pushing. If you blow up a school because Claude told you that it was actually an IED factory or whatever, you could say, “Oh, well, the super-smart computer told me to.”

AL: It was the robot. It wasn’t me.

SB: Exactly. We’ve spent the past several years having the tech industry tell us how ultra-smart, ultra-intelligent these systems are. That’s worrying enough when we’re asking them to write our emails for us and do our homework for us. But again, this is the business of killing people. Mistakes are not just mistakes. I think that is now just the way wars are going to be fought, and that is a very troubling new reality.

AL: Backing up a little bit. There is a fight right now between these companies and the government over how, if at all, their tools should be used. We know that they are being used.

But can you tell us a little bit about what is in dispute here? It also sounds like there’s some talk about guardrails being put in place, but we know that means very little in this context. Can you walk us through that?

SB: So the original controversy here was Anthropic, a leading rival of OpenAI. Some would say they have a better product at this point. They got into a dispute with the Pentagon over selling access to Claude, which is their AI chatbot system, akin to ChatGPT.

AL: But it has a human name.

SB: It does have a human name. Don’t you love that?

The company says that they did not want to permit the Department of Defense to use Claude for domestic surveillance of Americans and for killing people without human oversight. The Pentagon says this is woke nonsense, you’re now banned from doing work with the government —and then OpenAI enters.

AL: I will also note in 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.

SB: And this is where it gets very strange because OpenAI claims to have the same red lines as Anthropic, but somehow was able to seal a deal with the Pentagon.

Both are very muddled when it comes to what they actually refuse to do. They seem to both want to say that, look, we’re not going to do anything illegal and we’re also not going to engage in these acts — autonomous killing and domestic surveillance — which are largely considered legal.

Appealing to the law is no protection against these acts that the companies are saying that they will not facilitate. I wrote in a piece a few days ago, I think, ultimately, without being able to review the actual contract language for ourselves and to have lawyers go through it carefully, it all just comes down to whether or not you trust the corporate leadership of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Pete Hegseth and the White House. It ultimately comes down to what they, what their lawyers decide is legal. We’ve seen White House lawyers say a lot of things are legal: NSA spying, torture, et cetera. So that appeal to the law by these companies is not as reassuring as they want the public to believe it is.

Just one note though: Even though Anthropic’s deal with the Pentagon fell apart, the DOD is still able to use their technology through — it gets a little complicated here — Palantir’s Maven Smart System software, which has Claude in it as a feature, rather than getting it straight from Anthropic.

When you see headlines about Anthropic being banned or being rejected by the military, DOD can still use their software. It’s a pretty nice loophole. So they are still very much in use.

AL: I’ll also mention that the U.S.–Israel war on Iran is also the first example of countries attacking data centers as an act of war, which Sam, you have some reporting coming out on in the future, so everyone look out for that. 

So to recap, the Trump administration appears to be at war with the world. The self-proclaimed “president of peace” has sent U.S. forces jumping from conflict to conflict from Venezuela to Iran to Ecuador and more. As our colleague Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept, tells me on the podcast today, the U.S. has launched attacks in eight countries and killed civilians in two bodies of water — and made threats against five other nations. We also speak with Hooman Majd, an Iranian American journalist and contributor to NBC News, about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, which is ricocheting around the globe. This is our conversation. 

Nick and Hooman, welcome to The Intercept Briefing 

Hooman Majd: Thank you. 

Nick Turse: Thanks for having me on.

AL: Hooman, the Israel–U.S. war on Iran is stretching into another week. A new round of air bombardments hit throughout the country, Al Jazeera reported Monday evening, “We can say this is by far one of the most heavily intense nights in Tehran in terms of air bombardment.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he hoped the Iranian people would oust the regime. The civilian death toll in Iran has reached about 1,300 people. To start, what are the latest developments, particularly over the last few days? 

HM: Last few days, I mean, it’s heavy bombardment. That’s what it is.

Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that. Bombing — whether it was Israel or the United States, I don’t know — but earlier this week, they bombed oil depots in and around Tehran. There was black soot, oily rain falling on people’s heads basically in Tehran.

You’ve got Netanyahu telling people to rise up. Rise up how? Exactly how are they supposed to take control of a government that is so secure right now that it can go through the constitutional process of setting up its three-person council that rules Iran in the absence of a supreme leader, then elects a supreme leader by a majority of ayatollahs in person? Because the actual vote has to be in person and they were not blown up. So they obviously had a secure location to do this. How are the Iranian people supposed to do this? You’ve got the Revolutionary Guards who are very powerful. They haven’t shown any real fracture in their ranks. There’s not been a split. The top leadership is there. The second tier of the leadership is there. The third tier of the leadership is there. How are people supposed to get out and go and take over the government?

It’s insane for someone like the prime minister of another country to say, “We’re bombing the hell out of you, now please rise up and go take over your government.” It defies logic.

But to answer your question, what’s been happening? It’s just been war. It’s an all-out war. They can call it a special operation. They can call it whatever they want. The Iranians recognize it as war. The death toll is rising among Iranians, but also among the American servicemen and women.

The cost of this war is going up daily for everyone. It’s turning into this kind of — oh, I won’t call it a world war, that would be hyperbole — but way more countries are involved in this other than the U.S., Israel, and Iran.

AL: One of the first acts of aggression in this war was this strikes on this elementary school for girls in the southern Iranian town of Minab, which killed 175 people, mostly children, according to Iranian health offices. Trump blamed Iran for the bombing. But Nick, your reporting, and reporting from the New York Times and others, and new video evidence all suggest that the U.S. struck the school. What did your sources tell you?

NT: Even before footage of a Tomahawk missile landing near the school emerged, I was talking to sources that were refuting claims by President Trump about this being an errant Iranian strike. He apparently seized on talking points that emerged in Iranian monarchy circles. They were spread on social media that this attack on the elementary school was an errant Iranian rocket. Or he just made it up. This is standard Trump behavior.

But my sources — current government official, two former Pentagon officials who were experts in civilian harm, who worked on these issues for the Pentagon for years — said that the satellite imagery showed that these weren’t errant strikes, but they were precision attacks. The angle of the weapon, the precise nature of the strike, the fact that the munitions came straight down from above, the fact that all the strikes in the general area looked the same, including those that hit buildings on the nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base — all this made it crystal clear that this was a U.S. or an Israeli attack.

The fact that it was known that the U.S. carried out strikes in the specific area offered more evidence that America was behind this. And then this video emerged a couple days ago showing a Tomahawk missile landing in the area.

Now, only the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands use Tomahawks. Israel doesn’t have them. Despite mis- or disinformation that President Trump peddled during a news conference on Monday, Iran does not have Tomahawks. Any country the U.S. sold Tomahawks to would have to obtain authorization from the State Department before transferring these sophisticated weapons to a third party. The U.K. is not going to sell Iran Tomahawk missiles.

If Iran was somehow able to obtain a black-market Tomahawk — and let me emphasize, there’s no such thing as black-market Tomahawk. There’s no market for these. Iran lacks the technical equipment and the capabilities that are used to program the flight paths of these missiles and to upload the data necessary to the missiles onboard computer. They also need a specialized launcher to fire a Tomahawk.

So Trump’s assertion on Monday that the Tomahawk is some sort of generic munition and that Iran has some Tomahawks — it’s absurd.  The only party to this conflict that’s firing off Tomahawks is the United States.

What’s also notable about this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was standing right next to Trump when the president claimed that it was Iran that hit the school, and Hegseth would not endorse those comments.

He said there was an ongoing investigation, and he issued a classic non-denial, denial taking Iran to task for targeting civilians. But the fact that he wouldn’t back up his boss who was standing right next to him, I thought was very telling.

Then I spoke to U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, oversees this war in Iran. They told me that to comment on any of this was getting ahead of an ongoing military investigation — which is precisely what President Trump did. They said it was just inappropriate to do. You don’t often have a military spokesperson say that what the commander-in-chief has just done was inappropriate, but they did so in this case.

HM: Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting, Nick. For Iranians, it reminds them of the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran air jet killing all passengers — civilian jet — in the Persian Gulf under George Bush Sr. at the time. And denials, denials, denials that it was us. And then, “Well, it looked like an enemy aircraft, so we fired a missile.” George Bush refused to apologize, but the U.S. did finally admit that it was an accidental shooting down of the passenger plane. And did actually end up paying reparations to Iran for that act. 

It just adds to the litany of complaints or accusations that Iran throws at the United States for how the United States is the aggressor against Iran and not the other way around. There is a point to their claims that the U.S. will start aggression against Iran unprovoked. 

In this particular case, there’s very little evidence, if any at all, that Iran, as President Trump has just said, was about to attack the United States and therefore we had to attack them. There’s literally no evidence. And if they do have the evidence, they really should provide it because the American people at this point are not particularly keen on this war and the approval will probably go down from what it is now, the approval ratings for being at war, as we see more and more damage, as we see gas prices go up further, as we see American servicemen and women potentially lose their lives or be injured. And of course, our allies be continually attacked.

Which by the way, I should add, I don’t know why it’s a surprise to anybody. Iran said this after the last Twelve Day War in June. They said, “Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy; we had restraint this time.” It’s that old joke, no more Mr. Nice Guy. They actually said it out loud, no one’s going to be safe if we are attacked again by U.S., Israel, or both. They said it to the Persian Gulf States. They said it to Saudi Arabia, which is probably the reason those countries were so adamant in trying to get President Trump to not attack Iran because they knew that the blowback would be against them. 

AL: A couple of things I want to just pick up on here. Going to your point on provocation and the idea that the U.S. was somehow provoked to attack Iran. They’ve already shown their hand on this. A couple days after the first strikes you had Marco Rubio blaming Israel for dragging the U.S. into the war. Then Trump is walking that back a couple days later. I think anyone who’s paying attention — obviously, there are a lot of questions about what the communication was here, how much the U.S. was actually goaded into this over Israel. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the neocons in the various administrations have been foaming at the mouth to go to war with Iran for a very long time. So I just want to make that point.

You mentioned this regime change thing. I mean we’ve talked about this when you were last on the show, Hooman. There’s been additional reporting in the last few days, hammering home this idea that that is not on the table right now.

HM: There’s been a million different reasons or rationale given by the U.S. administration for starting this war — bounces back and forth from one thing to another. Just this week, Trump now is saying that Kushner and Witkoff and Rubio, and these guys were telling him we have to go to war otherwise — two real estate people were telling you to go to war? Really? Would any president of the United States say that?

Jared Kushner doesn’t have a job. Has no title whatsoever. Steve Witkoff has never talked about Iran his entire professional life and has no knowledge. I’m not dissing him; I’m just saying he has no knowledge of the nuclear issue. None whatsoever. Probably got a briefing from the State Department, one-hour briefing — this is what enrichment means, this is how they can do this, how they can do that — and gets thrown into negotiations while he’s running back and forth from one negotiation to the Ukraine negotiations in Geneva and taking Jared with him. It’s an insane way to negotiate, but they did it. And so they, and this is what Donald Trump said this week, they — along with Marco Rubio and obviously Lindsey Graham, we know that — were pressing very hard for an attack on Iran, “Iran is the weakest that it’s ever been.” 

According, again, to Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff told him that Iran could build a bomb in two weeks. How Steve Witkoff could even think that when there is no access right now to the nuclear material, let alone bomb making ability of Iran? It’s just beyond belief. So it’s insane. 

The regime changed idea was clearly something that was in Donald Trump’s mind. We go in — I’m sure Lindsey Graham, Bibi Netanyahu, various people were telling him: Look, you did it in Venezuela. It’s not that hard. Look at all the protests in January. These people want to overthrow the government. This is what they want to do. They’re shouting “Down with the regime.” And they were brutally murdered. So all you have to do is just take out the supreme leader and bang, people will rise up. 

Well, they took out the supreme leader, and people didn’t rise up because bombs were falling on their heads. If that’s all they had done, maybe some people would’ve been coming out on the streets celebrating. There were some celebrations, but they stopped pretty quickly because you keep bombing people. They’re going to care about their own lives, especially since there’s no leader to take over to help overthrow the regime. Trump has already ruled out the former Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. He himself has ruled himself out. He has no operations on the ground in Iran. His name is shouted by people when they protest a little bit because that’s the only name they know. It doesn’t mean that they want the monarchy to return.

Then the MEK, as we know, are absolutely despised by 99 percent of the Iranian people. They have some ground operations in Iran, but again, not enough to overthrow the regime. They’ve been trying for 47 years, and they haven’t been successful.

So talking about regime change is meaningless. Most Iranians understand that. Iranians want the regime changed. That doesn’t mean they want it overthrown, but they want it changed. No question about that. I would argue that there’s a majority, but there’s a minority — quite a strong minority, as we saw even from the images a couple of days ago, of crowds gathering to mourn the supreme leader’s death. So if there’s 10 percent, 20 percent of the population that are diehard supporters of the Islamic Republic, that’s a significant number of people, significant enough — and they tend to be the people with the guns.

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[Break]

AL: Nick, in all of this, Iran is not the only country the U.S. is at war with at the moment. Trump also recently launched attacks on Ecuador. What can you tell us about the various countries the U.S. has attacked since Trump came into office this term and other conflicts that U.S. forces are involved in?

NT: Yeah, this is a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, who claims to be a “peacemaker,” who has campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize and founded a so-called Board of Peace but President Trump is conducting wars across the globe at a furious clip. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Trump has conducted more strikes in more countries than any modern president. I’m not sure that’s actually true. It really depends on what you call a strike, what you’re counting. But during his second term, Trump has already launched attacks on Ecuador, two wars in Iran, attacks in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen. He’s attacked civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 drug cartels and criminal gangs, who, I should add, it won’t name. It’s also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland — I think, inadvertently, caught flack from Greenland — and Mexico. The Trump administration is threatening some sort of takeover of Cuba at this very moment.

There have been at least two attacks inside Ecuador, both of them since the second Iran war started. It’s unclear as to the extent of U.S. involvement in this. A lot of outlets initially reported that the U.S. simply provided intelligence to Ecuadorian forces. I specifically did not. A lot is unclear, but it seems to me that U.S. involvement in raids against so-called narco-terrorist targets was more than just passing along intel.

I believe this even more following a very strange war powers report that the Trump administration sent to Congress on Monday regarding the recent partnered U.S. operations in Ecuador. It says specifically, although present for this partnered operation, the United States ground forces did not come in contact with hostile forces. Mere mention of U.S. ground forces in connection with this operation raises red flags for me. And the fact that the administration actually filed this war powers report with Congress suggests to me that U.S. forces themselves took kinetic action, that it wasn’t just Ecuadorian forces. So I think there may have been U.S. forces on the ground and that the U.S. possibly conducted lethal strikes there, much like the boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean that have killed close to 160 civilians since September.

My sources say that these strikes in Ecuador are the opening salvo of a larger campaign in that country and also elsewhere in Latin America. So I’d stay tuned on that.

AL: I’m just got to list these out for people. You mentioned Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, civilians boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the 24 unnamed cartels and criminal gangs and threats, to Columbia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

HM: What about Canada?

AL: We haven’t even talked about Canada.

NT: Yes, our 51st state in the making.

HM: Yeah, by force if necessary. 

NT: If necessary, yes.

AL: Going back to Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.” Can you tell us more about how the U.S. is conducting this war on Iran? What does that actually mean? What does that look like?

NT: Lethal is certainly right, lethal to the Iranian security forces, but also to innocence — men, women, and children. The U.S. has been killing civilians from aircraft for more than 100 years, and lying about it, covering up, trying to explain it away, so that part is par for the course. Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war.

This particular campaign — “Operation Epic Fury” — is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks. There was a new investigation by Air Wars, which is a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. And it found that the first days of this Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign.

The moniker “Operation Epic Fury” is ridiculous and bellicose. But there’s some perverse truth to this name because in the first 100 hours of this war the U.S. and Israel said that they struck more targets in Iran than in the first six months of the U.S. led coalition’s bombing campaign of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which was a formidable campaign. 

The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes. It’s going to be a while, I think before the full civilian toll of this war is clear, if we ever really find out. Official Iranian sources say it’s creeping up on 1,500 or more killed, but it may actually be higher. 

While the true rate of civilian harm can’t solely be predicted by the number of targets that are hit, the initial indication suggests it’s been high, and I should add that U.S. targets have been correlated with heavily populated areas. So we have to assume that we’ll come to find out that large number of civilians have been killed and will continue to be killed before this war is over.

HM: The kind of war that is being waged on Iran, generally speaking, the Iranian Red Cross, or Red Crescent in Iran’s case, has been pretty accurate in terms of what they’ve reported. As Nick pointed out, it’s probably under-reporting right now. We do know there’s rubble in parts of the city of Tehran. Tehran, a city of more than 9 million, probably closer to 10 or 11 million people, densely populated, very densely populated.

For anybody who’s been there or even looked at a satellite image, they’ll see you cannot strike a building in Tehran and not kill someone who is unintended, an unintended target. Iran is not making this stuff up. They’re busy trying to protect themselves, trying to fire as many missiles as possible to try to bring an end to this war in a way by causing pain for not just America, but for American allies. 

A lot of people complain and say Iran is breaking international law by attacking countries that have nothing to do with this war. That’s probably true. It is probably against international law what Iran is doing, but so is the war that the United States and Israel started on Iran. That’s also against international law. So it’s a complete break of the so-called international order.

AL: I just want to add some context for our listeners. You’re mentioning these attacks by Iran on U.S. allies. Since the war began, Iran retaliated against the U.S.-Israel attacks by targeting U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and three sites in Kuwait. Israel has also been attacking southern Lebanon where it says it’s targeting Hezbollah and seizing land, displacing at least 80,000 people so far. Lebanon’s government has now asked Israel to talk and blamed Hezbollah for attacks [on Israel].   

Iran’s strategy appears to be also targeting Israel and Gulf energy sites. Iran blocked oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz and attacked several oil tankers. Energy sites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman have also reported damage from Iranian drones. Last week, U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, reported that the U.S. had destroyed Iran’s navy, and that there are no Iranian ships underway in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf. But fighting has continued to slow ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Last week, President Donald Trump said the war could last weeks. On Monday, Trump now says the war could end very soon after oil prices jumped significantly and this conflict spooked the markets. For both of you, do you think that impact on the markets will actually motivate Trump to end U.S. involvement in the war? 

NT: It’s always difficult to gauge where this administration is at and you know what the president is thinking. This is a wildly unpopular war, and I think the longer it goes on, the more we’ll see whatever bare minimum of public support exists continue to drop. So if Americans continue to feel pain at the pump, I think there is a chance that it could hasten an end to this conflict.

The trouble is it’s really difficult to gauge what the goals of this conflict were. I’m also not sure what impact public sentiment has on Trump at this point. It may take billionaire friends of his calling him, telling them that they’re starting to feel pain for him to decide to wrap up this conflict. 

On Monday, we heard that the conflict was almost over while the stock market was in session, and then afterward we heard that the war might go on for a week more, or maybe as long as it takes — unclear what that means. It does, at some points, appear the president’s trying to manipulate the markets with his statements.

HM: Yeah I would agree with that, Nick. I also would say some of his friends in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and places like that. Qatar just gave him a $400 million plane and they’re not particularly interested in this war going on.

But what I want to add to this is that Trump may be looking for an off ramp right now. Obviously the war’s not going the way he expected. So looking for an off-ramp means the Iranians have to be willing to offer one. They’re very adamant in every interview the foreign minister has given, every X post that one of the other leaders — Larijani, Ghalibaf — make is we’re not interested even talking to you and let alone a ceasefire. We’re not interested in a ceasefire. If you look at that carefully, and if you know the Iranians, you understand where they’re coming from since the 12 day war back in June, is that this one is really existential. That one wasn’t existential. That one they could show some restraint and then maybe talk to Trump and figure out how to make this nuclear deal. As we know they did, they started talking about it. 

Now it’s like this is going to happen every six months if we stop the war. If we go to a ceasefire, six months from now it’s going to be the same thing. Our new supreme leader will be assassinated, and then we have to start all over again. So this time we’re not going to give him that opportunity.

What it appears they are doing is bringing as much pain as possible so that when Trump without begging looks for an off ramp, Iran then says, sure, but I want these sanctions removed. I’ll give you that off ramp, but you’ve got to give me a non-aggression pact and you’ve got to give me some of these sanctions because I need to fix my country and I can’t do it with the sanctions you’ve got.

Then it’s a question of whether the U.S. and how Israel factors into this. Trump we know is fine with dictators. He’s totally fine with it. He’ll be totally fine with Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader. The question is really what will Trump do at a point where it appears that the U.S. wants to get out of this war he wants to get out, even if Hegseth doesn’t, and Lindsey Graham doesn’t, but he wants out? Gas is at $6 a gallon in California at that point, $7 a gallon in some places. And people are crying saying, wait a sec, this is not what we counted on. Then Iran is in the driver’s seat at that point. Did he ever think that could ever happen?

I’m not trying to advocate for Iran’s position. I’m saying they’re playing it well, if you think about it, they are playing it well. It’s like yeah, we’re just got to keep going. It’s fine. We can handle it. Foreign Minister of Iran on NBC News on Meet the Press [saying] ground troops, bring ’em on. We’re ready. We’re ready for them. They probably are prepared for ground troops.

Turkey doesn’t want this war right on their border. Iraq doesn’t want this war right on their border. Kuwait doesn’t want it, we know. And all the other Persian Gulf countries don’t want it. And I think they’re, all the Persian Gulf countries, in all the other countries are very worried that this is not regime change. And the regime will be in power and the regime can threaten them again. Everyone will, in my mind, will want an end to this war that includes a strong sense that this won’t happen every six months. And then the question really becomes, what are the Israelis going to do? What’s Netanyahu, how is he got to sell the end to the war?

AL: We know that on the question of ground troops, Trump has sent conflicting messages saying he hasn’t ruled out sending ground troops into Iran. We also know that seven U.S. soldiers have already been killed in the war, and as we’re recording, news broke that about 140 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war, including eight severely according to the Pentagon.

Hooman to your earlier point on the Trump administration’s expectations. As you mentioned over the weekend in Iran, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba was named his successor. Trump told reporters at a press conference he was disappointed. Briefly, what can you tell us about the new supreme leader? 

HM: He was the second oldest son of the supreme leader who had a few other sons and daughters. Very little is known about him personally because he’s been behind the scenes, but known to be very close to the supreme leader, his closest advisor actually, and very close to the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are the most powerful military force in Iran; and the Basij, who are the paramilitaries force under the IRGC. He is known among Iranians to have basically created that connection between the supreme leader’s office — that very close connection between the supreme leader’s office and the revolutionary guards. 

One thing we have to remember is that when Ayatollah Khamenei, his father took over, he was considered a weak supreme leader. He didn’t have the same authority either — political or religious authority — that Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic had. It’s also good to remember that the supreme leader is not the supreme leader of Iran. His title is the Supreme Leader of the Revolution — the Islamic Revolution. And it’s also good to remember that the military force, the IRGC, are not the Islamic revolutionary guards of Iran. They’re the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of the Revolution. They’re the guardians of the revolution. So those two, that connection, that tight connection has meant that it’s always been something that any future supreme leader would try to maintain. Since Mojtaba already had that connection, one of his closest people inside the guards is the former intelligence chief for the IRGC.

Mojtaba was known — at least whether it’s true or not, because we don’t know, we can’t tell — [to be] behind the manipulation of votes or whatever you want to call it, to have the second term of Ahmadinejad to be president for a second term. On a personal level, people don’t really know him. Everybody in Iran knows who he is because he’s been talked about for years and years as being the closest person to the supreme leader.

He hasn’t shown up yet. There were rumors that he was killed in the first strike on his father. There were rumors that he’s injured, and if he was injured, I can imagine why he wouldn’t want to be seen as the new supreme leader in a hospital bed, for example, if that’s the case. 

How will he command as the supreme leader, if you want to call it that? It’s hard to say, but Netanyahu and Donald Trump killed his dad, killed his mom, killed his wife, killed his sister, killed his niece in one strike, and potentially injured him. He’s not got to be keen on Donald Trump and on the United States, and he’s definitely not going to be keen on Israel either.

He’s also probably quite pragmatic. He’s 56 years old. I don’t think he wants to be assassinated. I don’t think he wants war for the long term. I’m sure he wants to continue this war, as we were talking earlier about Iran’s strategy to go as long as they can to put pressure on Trump and on all the allies, but I don’t think in the long term he wants to commit suicide of any kind and or anything like that.

But he’s going to be a hardliner. He’s considered to be hard line, in some cases, more hard line than his father. One thing that opens up for him is the fatwa that his father supposedly people talk about as prohibiting the building or use of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. He could arguably reverse that. He could arguably have his own fatwa. 

So I think we’re in a very dangerous place right now in terms of what could happen in the future. Iran could certainly look at North Korea and say nobody’s threatening North Korea and they have missiles — nuclear missiles that can hit California. I think there’s a lot of things we don’t know what can happen in the future, what can Mojtaba do. 

Israel has already threatened to assassinate him or actually said they’re going to assassinate him. Trump has already said he should be careful. He’s not going to last long, meaning the U.S. is also potentially looking to assassinate him. Clearly he’s not got to be running around the streets of Tehran.

He’s only ever been seen in a few photographs, and he only ever comes out in the past publicly for the rallies which celebrate the birth of the Islamic Republic. He’s never given a speech to my knowledge, he will have to as supreme leader, but he has not done so yet. So we don’t really know the answer to that — the long answer to that. We really don’t know.

AL: Yeah. I know you have a forthcoming piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books. I want to ask you, as we’re wrapping here, for your personal hopes for the future and thoughts on where this all goes, speaking as an Iranian exile.

HM: My hopes are always for Iran to be a democratic country, rule of law, have the people—  I know, it sounds cliche, but people have freedom and freedom to choose their own leaders, not to be imposed from outside, not to be bombed, and not to be at war with anyone, and also to not suffer from economic sanctions that make the lives of the people miserable, hardly make the lives of whatever regime is in power miserable. That’s been proven. Regimes don’t change because of sanctions. All it does is immiserate the people. So that’s what I want for Iran. Whether that’s possible or not, I don’t know, but in terms of hope. 

There’s so many different things that can happen. War upends a lot of other kinds of predictions that we may have had in the past. The Iranians certainly thought at the last meeting they had in Geneva between the Iranian Foreign Minister and Witkoff and Kushner, that they thought things were moving ahead and they were going to have a deal.

They were sending their technical team to Vienna for the following week to go through the technical aspects of how this deal was going to work. What we do know, and this is not me, this has been printed and reported on that what Iran was willing to offer the United States was better — far better — than the deal that President Obama was able to make with Iran in 2015, 2016. Trump, we now know, could have taken that and said, I did better than Obama, but chose not to. 

The hope for some Iranians was that with a nuclear deal out of the way, sanctions perhaps being lifted, that the regime would change a little bit, if not completely into something different, but at least loosen up, meet the demands of the people, but that wasn’t to be as we know now.

AL: We’re going to leave it there.

Thank you, Nick and Hooman for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

HM: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

NT: Thanks so much.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

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